This study has been commissioned by FAO to look at sustainable livelihoods approaches to access to natural resources in mountain areas. We concentrate on access by poorer and marginalized groups to policy processes whereby long-term sustainable access to resources is achieved. We have opted to concentrate on one country, Nepal and to focus on access to forest resources. This was done because the main thrust of our analysis concerns the importance of the time and country/specific nature of all understandings of policy and development practice. We hope that the reader will be convinced by our analysis and our conclusions. At its simplest level we are saying that to understand policy processes in any country at a certain time in history, one has to look at the role of the various actors involved and at the culture of the relationships between these actors. By implication, any attempt to draw lessons for planning and policy purposes from one situation to another requires analysing the culture of the policy process in both situations.
There is a considerable literature on the significance of the diversity of mountain agro-climate conditions, and on the diversity of local socio-economic and ethnic dimensions.[1] There is comparatively little, however, written on the significance of the diversity of actors that influence policy processes and development practice in different political contexts. One of our suggestions, at the end of the report, is that this type of development actor analysis needs to be done on a country-by-country basis and needs to focus on the relevant policy processes at that time.
We have concentrated on the forestry sector for a number of reasons. First, it is the most important sector as regards access to natural resources in Nepal. Second, there is more written and analysed on this sector than on virtually any other. Third, in many ways and for reasons we shall explain in the report, the forestry sector is the most significant as regards ‘access’ issues in the contemporary democratic political context in Nepal. The community forestry programme has laid the ground for the government’s formal and legal recognition of forest user groups (FUGs). To some extent, it is partly due to this early government endorsement that most government, NGO and donor development interventions are now ‘implemented’ using a group-oriented approach. As FUGs have been legitimised throughout the country, the presence of these groups means that the FUGs in one way or another influence all other groups. An additional reason for choosing the forestry sector is that the growth of FECOFUN, a federation of forest user groups that represents the nearly 11,000 member groups, is a very significant institutional innovation that substantially influences forest policy processes and development practice. A final reason for concentrating on the forestry sector is because it illustrates so well the growing markets for timber and other forest resources and forest products, a situation that is, in turn, revolutionising the underlying assumptions and rationale for changes in policy processes.
This study investigates the political and contentious nature of access to mountain natural resources by poor, disadvantaged and marginalized people, including women and youth, and the policy processes associated with access and development over time.
Access to natural resources is all about one’s rights (both traditional and legal) and ability to enter resource domains (forests, pastures, water sources, etc.), to utilise the resources to make useful products and/or to consume or sell them in the market. Even more broadly, it also involves rules about how and when (i.e., seasonality) certain resources may be harvested, treated, used, modified or marketed. Such rules are important, for although the poor may be given physical ‘access’ to a forest, for example, if they are not allowed to harvest certain resources, or have equitable access to markets for forest products, or have an equitable share of the ‘value added’ from forest resources products, then the whole notion of reasonable or equitable access to resources becomes meaningless. These concerns are at the heart of our examination of the culture of access to mountain natural resources.
Our analysis, however, goes beyond looking at sustainable access to mountain natural resources at the village and regional levels. In addition to that, we shift the focus of the discussion of access by poorer groups to policy processes and development practices at all levels.[2]
Policy is ostensibly about how a government manages public and private affairs, including access to resources. Policy dialogue and change involves altering, and hopefully improving and making more equitable, the rules and regulations about who contributes to and who benefits from ongoing economic and social affairs, including the processes of governance itself. It often involves trade-offs between contending options, noting that policy ‘improvement’ from one point of view may be considered regressive from another. Policy related to the conservation and utilization of natural resources is all about access - who has it, who does not, and how it may be utilized, for what purposes, and under what conditions (i.e., the rules and traditions).
Consequently policy-making about access is political and virtually always contentious. In this paper, our concern is with policy-in-practice; i.e., policy in a given country at a given point in time, on the ground, as contrasted with ‘paper policy’ (i.e., policy-in-words, or policy-in-theory) as stated in policy documents (which may, or may not be what is actually practiced).[3]
Whether ‘paper policy’ is implemented or not depends on, amongst other things, the actual behaviour of government, aid donors, civil society and private sector actors. At different points in time different coalitions of actors come together, formally and informally, to promote different agendas and different goals. Optimal national policies are never ‘formulated’ and then ‘implemented’; rather, policy is a messy ongoing process amongst contending coalitions of actors.[4] The case studies illustrate this well.
Our analysis uses an actor innovation systems framework. Key features in this framework are:
all major actors in an innovations system are defined;
the culture of the relationships between them is investigated;
emphasis is placed on the actual agency role of actors (as opposed to their ‘theoretical’ role);
it can be used, as we have done here, to analyse which actors have influenced policy processes over a recent historical period;
it can be used to conduct institutional analyses of contemporary situations; and
it can be used in planning situations to help think through the implications of different types of actions.
The actor innovations framework places emphasis on technological and institutional innovations that are always taking place in society. The framework is broader than the conventional ‘pipeline’, ‘linear framework’ or ‘policy cycle framework’ that typically underpins much of the mainstream approach to policy and planning. In the policy cycle approach, for example, there is a notion that problems are identified and policies and development projects are drawn up that are then implemented by government agencies, NGOs, etc. Once the outcomes are monitored and evaluated the process starts again, often addressing ‘second generation’ issues. This framework results in a very policy- and planner-oriented view of the world. Growth takes place because of policy changes and plans, and technical innovations take place because researchers in formal scientific institutions have invented the technology and policies, and development projects have ‘scaled them up’. New institutional innovations have spread because action research projects have developed and tested new institutional innovations that policy and development projects have ‘scaled up’. New policies drawn up by ‘think tanks’ are ‘adopted’ by senior bureaucrats for implementation. As a result of this planner-centric view of the world, policy and both technical and institutional innovations come about mainly due to the activities of policy makers and development planners.
The innovations systems approach enables us to break out of this narrow view of the world that promotes the idea that planners, policy makers, projects, programmes etc., are the main sources of policy and of technical and institutional innovations. The framework we use recognises that innovations come from multiple sources and are driven by actors who may well not be in planning commissions, or in powerful donor agencies, or in social science or technical research centres. An example of an institutional innovation that was not led by any policy or project is the FECOFUN, a federation of forest user groups in Nepal that now plays a significant role in influencing the direction and content of government forestry policy practice and donor projects (described in Case Study 3). Another example of a non-project, non-donor innovation system is the socially-responsible entrepreneurship that has arisen within the handmade paper industry of Nepal, an industry based solidly on an important alternative forest resource (See Case Study 4).
One of our recommendations at the end of this report is that many policy and development actors need to break out of their self imposed ‘planners’ black boxes and begin monitoring and learning from the positive innovative behaviour that is already achieving some of the goals that their policies and development projects are trying to achieve.[5]
This study is mainly a small desk study.[6] It also draws heavily, however, on ‘reflective participation’ research methods, because several of the authors have been deeply involved for many years in the policy and development processes surrounding access to natural resources in Nepal and also in Bhutan. The report is also informed by the consultancy observations and findings by one of the authors who was recently part of a major review of the one of the largest and longest running community and livelihoods forestry development programmes in Nepal.
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[1] For examples of recent
analysis that looks across countries of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region see
Rhoades 1997, Blaikie and Sadeque 2000 and Jodha and S. Shrestha 1994. [2] For further discussion of access, see Baumann 2002. [3] This paper is not yet another guideline or manual on how policy-makers should behave, or how policy planning should be done. There is no end to such normative documents. Rather, this paper is about analysing actual policy processes and development practices by the various actors involved, and from this analysis drawing out lessons for the future. [4] For analysis of policy as process see Clay and Schaffer (1984), Ferguson (1990), Apthorpe and Gasper (1996), and Wuyts, Mackintosh and Hewitt (1992). For two recent case studies that document how changing donor agendas influence what is seen as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ policy, and as ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in the practice of development, see Rossi (2003) and Mosse (2003). For a recent annotated bibliography of models of policy and development processes, and a discussion of policy processes, see de Vibe, Hovland and Young 2002, and Crew and Young 2002. [5] For a critical review of the planners' policy cycle and project cycle approaches to development practice, see Clay and Schaffer 1984, Biggs and Smith 2003 and Gasper 2000. For further details on the actor innovation systems approach as applied to natural resources management, see Biggs 1988 and 2003, Biggs and Matsaert 1999 and 2003, Biggs and Messerschmidt n.d., and Clark et al 2003. Bromley has analysed the processes by which new institutions are created and spread and has called this subject ‘institutional transactions’. In Nepal there is a literature that looks at the culture of development actors for example; see Justice 1986 for the health sector and Bista’s classic study of the government bureaucracy. [6] This was a project with a small budget. It is therefore a type of exploratory and scoping study, which makes the best of the data we have available. In our review of the literature we could not find other studies that had taken this actor approach to understanding policy processes and development practice. This means to some extent that there are inevitable gaps in some of our case studies, due to a lack of data. |
