The Wyss Academy Dialogues with Purpose (WADs) were initiated to foster participatory engagement that would lead to concrete action and long-term solutions for equitable forest governance. Interviews across four regions reveal that the Dialogues enabled co-learning, empowerment, and new collaborations, with participants reporting increased agency and trust. While some cross-sector initiatives and ongoing relationships emerged, the translation of dialogue into sustained action varied, often limited by institutional barriers and lack of follow-up. Overall, the WADs moved beyond tokenistic participation, but lasting impact depended on adaptive facilitation and continued support. 

Overall, the WADs moved beyond tokenistic participation, but lasting impact depended on adaptive facilitation and continued support. These insights align with the Wyss Academy Strategy’s focus on co-creating grounded solutions, strengthening governance, and embedding monitoring and learning. 

This synthesis draws on qualitative interviews from four regional dialogues (South America (SAM), East Africa (EAF), South East Asia (SEA) and Europe (EUR)) and applies a relational analytical lens to evaluate how engagement practices reconfigured power, nurtured agency, and produced relational outcomes. 

Dialogues enabled co-learning and knowledge sharing through facilitated interactions, peer exchange, and iterative reflection. Collaborative mapping, collective sense-making, and knowledge hybridization were recurrent practices. However, tensions emerged where scientific framings dominated, leading to epistemic translation rather than genuine integration. 

Collective agency emerged through joint decision-making and narrative ownership. In some regions, participants described newfound confidence to advocate for forest governance reforms. Constraints included entrenched institutional hierarchies and lack of post-dialogue continuity. 

Dialogues partially reconfigured power through deliberate inclusion, agenda co-design, and equitable facilitation. Yet, subtle dynamics persisted: who spoke first, who framed problems, and how time was allocated often reflected pre-existing hierarchies. Participants noted progress in representation but cautioned that inclusion did not always translate to influence. 

Participants frequently described being influenced by hearing situated experiences of others. Dialogues catalyzed shifts in perception, empathy, and interdependence, particularly when storytelling and grounded examples were used. This influence was strongest when power differentials were acknowledged rather than neutralized. 

Emerging outcomes included trust-building, initiation of cross-sector collaborations, and continuity of engagement beyond the event. However, relational durability varied: in some cases, connections dissolved due to institutional inertia or project-based timeframes. Where follow-up mechanisms existed, relational gains were sustained. 

There is strong evidence that the WADs moved beyond tokenistic engagement. Participants articulated relational values, such as responsibility, care, and reciprocity, not as abstract ideals but as lived, emergent properties of the process. Nevertheless, the risk of extractivism lingered when institutional follow-up was unclear or when participants’ contributions were not meaningfully acknowledged in outcomes. The dialogues surfaced multiple ontologies of forests and value, from instrumental and ecological to spiritual and kincentric. Rather than dissolving these differences, productive frictions often generated new solidarities and insights. Yet, some knowledge systems remained marginal, especially where the language or format of the dialogue failed to accommodate embodied or affective expression. 

Svitlana Lavrenciuc, Dr. Armando Valdés-Velásquez, Tatjana Von Steiger, Caterina Cosmopolis, Rebecca Andrianarisandy