Disentangling Governance for Nature-Based Restoration Projects

After Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, the city of Tacloban in the Philippines was left decimated. Recovery funding streamed in from across the globe, but governmental agencies and intermediaries with overlapping responsibilities experienced difficulty implementing longer-term recovery and climate-adaptation strategies. In 2016, a team led by One Architecture was awarded a seed grant by the Global Resilience Partnership to implement a series of pilot projects for mangrove and beach-forest restoration throughout the coastal area surrounding Tacloban. The team encountered larger bureaucratic and data-based hurdles to implementing similar projects across the region and thus expanded the project’s scope to more thoroughly document regulatory hurdles. It also proposed a more streamlined, science-based methodology and explored opportunities for hyper-local partnerships to better ensure the success of similar, future projects. Although several external factors further complicated the process along the way, 35,000 seedlings were ultimately planted under the initial, aptly named, seed grant. The project was a remarkable success—achieving survival rates of over 90%—largely due to focused efforts to train, employ, and partner with local residents as key agents and future stewards of restoration projects, creating a framework to measure and better ensure value capture within the target beneficiaries.