Rhondda Forest co-design with communities shaping their forest’s future
The challenge
Natural Resources Wales (NRW) wanted to develop a Forest Resource Plan for the Upper Rhondda that would guide forest use and activities for the next 50 to 100 years. Rather than planning for the community, they wanted to plan with the community, giving local people a genuine voice in defining the vision for their surrounding forest.
This was a complex situation with forest management involving technical knowledge that communities might not have, yet communities hold irreplaceable knowledge about local context, needs, and values. How do you create informed co-design when there’s a significant knowledge gap? And how do you ensure diverse community voices are heard, not just the usual engaged stakeholders?
The approach
Between September 2021 and April 2022, Co-production Lab Wales team facilitated the co-design process on behalf of project host Welcome to our Woods, working in partnership with NRW’s Forest Resource Planners:
- Building community knowledge: We brought in NRW teams (Forestry, Operations, Healthy Hillsides) and expert speakers from environmental organisations to educate the community on forest management, nature and climate change, landscape as a social resource, and forest as a commercial resource.
- Diverse recruitment: We supported the recruitment of a wide range of community members and stakeholders, ensuring the co-design group reflected the Upper Rhondda’s diversity rather than just familiar voices.
- Flexible, accessible facilitation: We designed and facilitated sessions using a combination of in-person and online formats, led by what worked best for the group’s comfort and engagement. Sessions were engaging and ensured everyone was heard.
- Multi-format storytelling: We captured the co-design process and outcomes through film, a multi-media digital story platform, and physical exhibits – making the Future Forest Vision accessible to the wider Upper Rhondda community, policymakers, and other communities learning from this project.
The outcome
The Upper Rhondda community created a comprehensive Future Forest Vision that fed directly into NRW’s Forest Resource Plan for the area. The community gained knowledge about forest management that will inform their engagement with environmental issues beyond this project. NRW demonstrated that meaningful co-design on technical topics is possible when organizations invest in education and accessible facilitation.
The multi-format outputs (film, digital platform, physical exhibits) ensured the community’s vision reached diverse audiences and created a replicable model for other communities facing similar planning processes.Watch the film: futureforestvision.co.uk/the-people
The Learning
- Education and co-design work together, not against each other. Investing time in building community knowledge made recommendations stronger because they balanced community values with technical realities.
- Long-term planning requires long-term thinking. A 50 to 100 year vision can’t be rushed. The September to April timeline gave relationships and ideas time to develop properly.
- How you capture and share matters. Creating film, digital stories, and physical exhibits made the vision tangible and inspiring to wider audiences, extending the project’s impact beyond the immediate planning process.
- Flexibility shows respect. Adapting between in-person and online formats based on the group’s needs demonstrated that the process genuinely centered community comfort and accessibility, not organizational convenience.
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