CDRI research team works together with national universities, governmental institutions and NGO/CSOs in both Cambodia and Lao PDR to develop a research proposal applying for EXPLORE Research grant on forest landscape governance.​ The proposed research title is “Co-adaptive forest management through climate-smart technology and communal social capital”. The research will benefit CFs, community protected areas, community-based ecotourism, and community of indigenous people within target forestry communities of Cambodia and Lao PDR by providing 1) room to innovate local knowledge into better monitoring and enforcement institutions, 2) access to sufficient monitoring technology, and 3) capacity building in management and leadership. At the community level, research activities will be carried out and owned by local people, who contribute ideas, time, and efforts from the beginning to attend the meeting, identify forest issues, and formulate research action plans to address the issues of the communities as a whole. A gender-sensitive and responsive approach will be applied to facilitate the active engagement of local and marginalized women and other vulnerable groups within the project. We will analyze to what degree governance outcomes depend on the level of social capital, leadership capacity, managerial capacity, access to monitoring tools, and cooperation through regression models and other relevant models. The training will include general leadership and management skills, stakeholder engagement, how to use the smart technology for monitoring, and the co-adaptive management practices based on lessons learnt from these two case studies in Cambodia and Lao PDR.

• Propose smart technology as a tool to decentralize forest governance, in particular for collaborative forest monitoring
• Provide capacity building training and technical support as a means to enhance cooperation and collaboration among stakeholders (Community, FA, PDoE)