The cases captured in this booklet show the steps taken in many of these projects and organisations to support and ensure the adoption of an experience capitalization approach. Working together with their colleagues, those who joined the CTA workshops have become active “champions”: organising their own training sessions, they shared information in different ways, and have shown how others can benefit from the capitalization process. They have helped to create the conditions for experience capitalization to be more widely adopted by their organisations. As a result, there are many new capitalization processes going on, and many more will be taking place in the future – effectively underpinning more accountable and efficient projects in the future and greater progress in rural development.

Since April 2016, CTA implemented the “Capitalizing on Experiences for Greater Impact in Rural Development” project – working together with FAO and IICA, and with the financial support of IFAD. During these three years, this project worked with many organizations in different parts of the world. Its purpose was to empower these organizations with the tools and the skills needed to identify practices which can be brought to scale, to describe and analyze them in detail, and to share the lessons they teach. More specifically, this project aimed to facilitate the adoption of an experience capitalization process in rural development initiatives. This guidebook is meant to help facilitators. It builds on the many interesting resources which are already available, but it builds more specifically on the experience accumulated by the project, and on the lessons and insights drawn by all those who were involved in it – both as facilitators and as participants. It is their work which has shown what works and what can be presented as a recommendation that others can follow and adapt.

One of the project’s last activities was to organise a meeting with those who took an active role as facilitators, and who helped guide the series of capitalization processes which the project supported in different parts of the world. This was planned to complement the online discussions that had been going on between them – and together discuss the conditions, requirements or the factors underpinning an effective facilitation process. The meeting helpedvalidate many of the issues identified during the preparation, implementation and evaluation of the different capitalization processes in which manypersons were involved. It also helped identify what is needed now to support the processes already initiated and to be completed, or to start new initiatives. The narratives included in this publication served as inputs for the discussions at the meeting. Written by those who were actively and directly involved in the different steps of the project, they show the main issues they faced during the training workshops and also in the field, and the main lessons they drew as participants, facilitators or as experience capitalization “champions”. Although based on concrete cases, the fears, observations or ideas included in each one of these articles will be easily recognised by those playing a similar role. They are therefore a good complement to the facilitator’s guidebook recently published by CTA.

Experience capitalization can be useful for anyone. The diverse group of West Africans who gathered to practice with this approach demonstrated exactly this. Starting in March 2017, a group of around 35 participants from Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria engaged in a process where they selected, described, analyzed and wrote about one of their many experiences in rural development.

Recurrent droughts in Ethiopia have been contributing to chronic food insecurity, deterioration of livelihoods and weakening capacity of communities to withstand future shocks. Following the 2011 food crisis in the Horn of Africa, ‘building resilience’ became a priority agenda for the international community to move from the division of emergency and development programming to a more holistic and complementary approach for addressing the root cause of disaster risk and vulnerability factors of recurrent drought. The project, implemented by FAO between 2015 and 2019, aimed to support and reinforce existing coordination mechanisms at the regional states and zonal administration levels and enhance linkages between short-term humanitarian interventions and long term development initiatives. The evaluation found that the project was highly relevant to the current context in Ethiopia, where preparedness and longer-term resilience have become priority areas of focus for all actors in humanitarian and development initiatives. Resilience coordination mechanisms have been strengthened at regional levels. However, the sustainability of these efforts will depend on the commitment of Government and partners to continue strengthening the existing coordination mechanisms and their ability to convene development partners.

Better urban transport systems and the need for a healthier environment are continuous requirements that create a fertile atmosphere for original ideas, innovative approaches and applications of advanced technologies, their tests and evaluations in practice. Moreover, there is a growing need for integration with IT systems and applications to improve safety and efficiency. Meanwhile, the substantial growth of maritime shipping has resulted in large transported quantities around the world, creating a demand for innovative solutions for ports and fleets. The apparently parallel topics of Urban Transport and Maritime Transport meet in the transport and environmental management of coastal cities, both being affected positively and negatively by landslide and seaside traffic. Maritime Transport is highly interconnected with rail, road and air services, as well as inland waterways. Each of these must therefore operate complimentary of one another to maximise efficiency and respond rapidly to variable economic and political contingencies. The variety of topics covered in this volume reflects the complex interaction of transport systems with their environment and the need to establish integrated strategies. The goal is to arrive at optimal socio-economic solutions while reducing the negative environmental impacts of transportation systems typically by interdisciplinary approaches.

"The twelve essays in Modernity and Mass Culture provide a broad and captivating overview of what has come to be known as culture studies." --Texas Journal This is a wide-ranging analysis of the relationship among industrialization, democracy, and art in the 20th century. U.S. and British scholars discuss the interaction of "high," "popular," and "mass" art, showing how Western culture as a whole is affected by the transition from the modern to the postmodern era.