Marilyn Hoskins
These examples were provided by Marilyn Hoskins, who is Director of the Participatory Development Programme, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, and were part of a paper she presented at the FAO/SIDA Consultation.
In Nepal, the Government has started a programme to return control of classified land areas to neighbouring communities. The new policy follows a period of nationalization of former locally managed forest lands. It was found that when land was put under public control, local residents lost interest in managing for sustained use and trees, despite national regulations, were quickly cleared. Now the Government will return land-ownership to any communities that prepare a management plan acceptable to the Government. A plan may involve such elements as fodder production or the harvesting of minor forest products for sale or for local production. More typically, it would advocate protecting the majority of trees or harvesting them, with forest service advice, on a sustainable basis.
One donor-sponsored project has taken advantage of this opportunity. Its activities focus on local development of management plans incorporating any relevant local traditions and on planning for maximizing local forest benefits. Project managers are helping local communities to elect conservation committees - which must each contain at least one woman. Agriculture, forestry and other technical field agents in a community arc automatically made members. Together they are experimenting with a collaborative planning method called gaun sallah (village discussion).
A team of specialists from the relevant local ministries, as well as district and local political figures and leaders and representatives of the local community, including the conservation committee, take several days to visit the region and discuss planning options and local constraints. Community members' from the very beginning, have a chance to participate both formally and informally and to learn about the planning process and resource options.
An extension worker with Nepalese villagers
In Haiti, an international non-governmental organization (NGO), working through local NGOs, has established a project to encourage individual farmers to plant fuelwood trees as a cash crop. The programme director, an anthropologist, was in Haiti for a number of years before designing this particular project. He discovered that communal activities were not as well received as family-level activities and that while most rural families had access to land, much of it was almost useless for agriculture. He also perceived that families needed cash badly and that the scarcity of fuelwood gave it an "almost unlimited market".
Most previous tree-planting efforts had focused on planting for conservation with restrictions on harvesting. Villagers had no access to trees as a cash crop. This project, however, makes available small container seedlings of fast-growing species - which are easy to transport and plant - to participants who plant them on land under their control. Participants have to plant a minimum of 500 trees. A field agent helps select sites and gives advice in such areas as spacing and agroforestry. The trees are owned 100 percent by the farmers, although agents give harvesting advice when needed.
The project started only in 1981, but farmers have already collected 1.6 million seedlings for planting, and the demand is more than double for next season. International NGO project coordinators are concerned about the fact that there is no supportive local forestry infrastructure. They believe it may be desirable to establish local nurseries run on a commercial basis by local NGOs or private residents. Coordinators believe the demand for trees will be such that farmers will be able to pay for seedlings once they have generated their first income from wood or charcoal sales.
Building a barrier against soil erosion in Haiti
The Senegalese Government has passed an administrative reform for decentralization. Collaborative planning is used to identify and manage local development activities.
Delimited rural communities elect community councils, which not only collect taxes from the community but also keep most of the money to solve problems identified locally. These community groups have access to local field agents from various ministries. When a particular council, for example, identifies a problem to be solved through forestry skills, a forestry agent will be available and, ideally, responsive.
The community council also controls land distribution, the protection of plantings and local distribution of benefits. Because planning is done locally, it is more likely to be integrated and flexible. Moreover, locally conceived activities tend to be more realistic because those involved arc more aware of physical, social, economic and political constraints. This organizational format has the possibility of eliminating some of the problems present under centralized planning.
