Executive Summary

This paper is a direct output of the Livelihood Support Programme (LSP).^[1]

The primary focus of the work is the people-centred or livelihood-type approaches^[2] actually used within FAO and development approaches used in different cultural-linguistic regions.

The objective of this work is to draw some lessons on the implementation of people-centred approaches in FAO and, to some extent, different development contexts (cultural, linguistic, etc).

The work on people-centred or sustainable livelihood-type approaches should assist us in answering the following questions:

Is there anything really “new” about these “livelihoods approaches”, and, if so, what are the practical implications of this for working practice in FAO?

In what way do the institutional and cultural contexts of development interact with the approaches themselves in influencing project and programme performance?

How can development approaches, emerging from different cultural contexts, learn from each other?

Is there, in fact, an insurmountable divide between principle and practice in the development approaches of the 1990s?

In what way can we draw on the experience of the development approaches under review in order to overcome this divide?

The question then arises as to whether development approaches become redundant once the ideas that they embody have been mainstreamed? Is there any value-added to the everyday work of FAO officers from the use of these so-called ‘development approaches’?

The development approaches that were used as basis for our work are:

Sustainable Livelihoods (SL);
Farming Systems (FS);
Integrated Rural Development (IRD);
Gestion de terroirs (GT); and
Latin American approaches.^[3]

The broad cultural and linguistic divisions chosen were Anglophone, Francophone and Latin American.

Five methods were followed in order to elicit information on the ways in which these approaches have been used within FAO and the different contexts in which the Organization operates. These are:

• A brief literature review;

• Some 70 interviews at headquarters level;

• Three seminars; and

• A series of informal default meetings.

This methodology implies that this paper is essentially a review of FAO experience in applying people-centred approaches. While we have carried out a review of existing literature on the subject, and drawn on some of its findings, the main focus of this paper remains on the practical experiences of FAO staff members.

The paper offers an initial summary of findings which, with the further participation of FAO staff and a few external resource people, can be used to create the means to access and apply development approaches that are relevant and pragmatic, as well as being mindful of time and institutional constraints.

During the interviews, FAO staff told us that, for the most part, when they were designing and implementing projects they used a mixture of principles, methods and driving-elements which corresponded to their ‘best practice’ experience. We soon realised that people in FAO had very similar milestones, references and toolboxes, which could be considered the dominant practice in the Organization’s informal culture. The designation of ‘no-name’ for this broadly defined approach emerged from one of the interview.

The main approach that we use, you could call it the no-name approach: One that is not systematic but draws on general experience, broad participatory principles and sector-specific methods. Missions are too short for anything else to work.

Another interesting finding relates to the institutional culture of FAO headquarters, in which two main trends can be observed:

Pluralism, whereby a number of different approaches co-exist within FAO headquarters. The choice of approach used is dependant upon the specific mandates and technical specialisation of the various departments and services in FAO, as well as on the regional operation scenarios and the individual interests and preferences of FAO officers.

The second trend is what anthropologists would call syncretism, which notes the endogenous and “evolutionary” creation of a “mixed” idiosyncratic approach. Such an approach captures the various elements of different approaches and pragmatically combines them in an ad hoc manner. This phenomenon roughly corresponds to the “no name” approach; which is discussed in Section 4.3.

Both of these trends can be regarded as responses to “imported” development approaches, and, therefore, reflect some of the basic characteristics of FAO’s institutional culture, including:

Its capacity to contain the hegemonic projects of the most powerful donors in order to maintain the basic identity of a United Nations organization in which all countries and national cultures must have a voice;

The multiple scopes and objectives of the institutional mission, each potentially requiring different analytical frameworks and methodologies;

The Organization’s global coverage, which requires a continued regional, national and local adaptation of theories and practices;

The multi-cultural and multi-lingual nature of the FAO facilitates a (relatively) comfortable cohabitation (and some cross fertilisation) of approaches rooted in a variety of geo-political and cultural contexts; and, last but not least,

The sceptical attitude of many professionals in FAO headquarters in regards to the claims of most “new” development approaches, that often consist solely of a “sexy re-wording” of concepts and methods which are already well known and practiced.

The interviews revealed the main stumbling block concerning people-centred approaches to be related to the difficulties associated with their implementation. For instance, while the principle of participation is common to all the approaches analysed (with the exception of IRD), there is not generally sufficient time for genuinely participatory work, and there are not enough experts with adequate knowledge to undertake such participatory work. Participation, even where it is clearly stated as either a principle or a goal, is often hard to adequately put into practice. In other words, it tends to refer simply to information gathering and/or consultation