Page - 336 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

336 15.2.2.3 What Worked Well There was a focus on ensuring a friendly and integrative attitude in the Network, with adaptive leadership. By bringing together researchers, practitioners, decision- makers and other stakeholders from different fields with an interest in One Health and evaluation, and offering opportunities for knowledge, exchange and sharing with a clear task and purpose, NEOH managed to create a dynamic learning organization. By engaging a wide range of people with similar interests, but different (disciplinary) backgrounds, expertise, levels of seniority and professional roles, many different perspectives and skill-sets came together in an enabling environment. This contributed substantially to the innovation of methods and integration of existing knowledge, and resulted in enthusiastic participation and a good range of outputs and products. 15.2.2.4 Main Challenges Given the large membership of the Network, which was spread across a number of countries, and the many opportunities to get involved, there was a risk that participants did not feel ownership of NEOH.  Consequently, strong communication and pro-active engagement of participants was critical to ensure that the work was integrative and effective, and not just an assembly of individual tasks. Another major challenge was the risk of collaborating mainly with existing contacts who already buy into the One Health concept instead of recruiting people who have not yet engaged with One Health. Because of this, there was a dominance of animal health professionals in the Network. To mitigate this imbalance, NEOH interacted with other integrated health networks globally to promote wider engagement, conceptual and practical advances, and shaping of a joint agenda. As part of these activities, it formed closer ties with the EcoHealth community. ‘EcoHealth’ encompasses an “ecosystem approach to health”: the biological, physical, social and economic environments and their relation to human health (Keune and Assmuth 2018). EcoHealth can be characterized by interdisciplinarity (e.g. health science, veterinary science, ecology, social science) and transdisciplinarity (collaboration with non-academic practice experts and stakeholders). Apart from the collaborative angle, the equity perspective was essential in EcoHealth (Lebel 2003). Later a more sophisticated set of EcoHealth principles was developed (Charron 2012). As a follow-up of the NEOH COST-Action, as well as an answer to the need for a European network, as was expressed during the 2016 European OneHealth/ EcoHealth workshop in Brussels (see Sect. 15.2.3), NEOH  has become  the European Chapter of the Ecohealth International Trust and is now called Network for Ecohealth and One Health. Contact information: http://neoh.onehealthglobal.net/ and http://www.cost.eu/ COST_Actions/tdp/TD1404 and https://www.ecohealthinternational.org/regional- chapters/europe/ H. Keune et al.