Projects

The challenge

How can we fuse the aims for better environmental care, farming, tourism and heritage? Like other candidates for the new status as National Park, Bosland wanted to do just that, even if they knew it wouldn’t be easy. We helped them with their candidacy dossier, and they got selected as one of the five future National Parks.

The process & results

For 15 years, Lommel, Hechel-Eksel, Pelt, and more recently Peer have been working on the development of Bosland, the largestcontiguous forest area in Flanders. The municipalities have joined forces withTourism Limburg, Regional Landscape Lage Kempen, and numerous local partners tofocus on both nature conservation and management, as well as the tourismdevelopment of the region. From the start, collaboration has been an importantway of working.
 
In 2021, a call was launched for natural areas to further develop into a National Park. IDEA Consult supported Bosland’s candidacy as a National Park, which required collaborative mapping of the current potential in terms of nature, heritage, tourism experience, and co-creative collaboration (AS IS), as well as defining the ambition level and feasibility of the ambitions to elevate Bosland to a National Park (TO BE).IDEA Consult facilitated a SWOT workshop, integrated the SWOT analysis into the dossier, and was responsible for the overall editing and final editing of the application dossier.