0576-A2

Trade-offs between conservation and development in forestry - setting the stage and some guiding principles

Olivier Dubois ¹

Abstract

There is a general agreement that for land and natural resource management (NRM) to succeed, they must combine sustainablility, the accommodation of different values and values, and, thus, participatory decision-making processes. This in turn requires that policy and strategies acknowledge uncertainties, the need for adaptiveness and the political dimension of land and NRM.

Three general principles are proposed to achieve this, i.e.

• A stepwise process is recommended, i.e. co-viability (or reduced unsustainability) in the short term, aiming at sustainability in the long term
• "Control and command/Fines and fences" strategies seldom work on the ground because they are not cost-effective and are difficult to enforce. Collaborative strategies to achieve Principle A are more likely to achieve sustainable outcomes but they involve significant transaction costs in the short and medium term.
• Collaborative approaches require that issues related to stakeholders' relationships and power be addressed.

Based on the above, while sustainable forest management and poverty alleviation should remain the ultimate goals of collaborative forest management, as an interim stage, we propose more workable objectives, i.e.

Setting the Stage

Over the last two decades or so land use and natural resource management (NRM) have witnessed the emergence of a new spirit, characterised by three main features:

• Sustainability - The need to move beyond commodity management (economic goal) towards the production of goods and services (ecological and social goal);
• From the above, need to accommodate different values and often divergent interests;
• The foregoing also means that decision-making needs to be shared by stakeholders via different means of participation.

Developers are often faced with a diversity of land uses, as illustrated in Figure 1. Conventional management methods are efficient in differentiating these land uses according to physical criteria. However, actual use of land does not depend only on physical factors because claims change as demands from society and stakeholders' entitlements evolve. For instance, community groups may very well wish to continue practising their traditional shifting cultivation systems. But outside groups such as agribusiness companies or environmental groups may very well oppose this, the former because it competes for land, the latter because it wishes to leave forest untouched. This leads often to conflicting situations, and often turns natural resource management into the management of a confusing `battlefield', as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The land and natural resources "battlefield"

(Source: Dubois: 1999)

The "battlefield" scenario has led to a gradual consensus that "modern" policies and planning strategies regarding land use and NRM should account for:

• "Unpredictibles" and "unknowns", hence uncertainty as inherent to land use and NRM. This uncertainty concerns not only ecological factors - the notion of ecological equilibrium stages has been increasingly questioned - but also socio-economic circumstances keep changing. This leads to different forms of vulnerability in rural areas. The aim of sustainable development (SD) should therefore be to manage, in time and space, interactions between ecological, economic and social factors rather than trying to reach an "idealised" optimum/equilibrium level for natural resources.
• Adaptiveness, i.e. initiatives aimed at managing land and natural resources should not attempt to achieve a pre-determined stage through fixed plans. Rather they should be adaptive, following a learning process, including the continuous monitoring of the dynamics of environmental and socio-economic changes.
• The political dimension of land use and NRM (i.e. power relationships) in strategies and develop approaches to deal with it.

This is further discussed below.

2. Some General Principles

General Principle A: A stepwise process is recommended, i.e. co-viability (or reduced unsustainability) in the short-term, aiming at sustainability in the long-term

• Conservation and development should not be seen as mutually exclusive. In particular, successful intensification of agriculture depends on protecting and harnessing biodiversity;
• Rather, environmental concerns should be built into productive uses of land and NRM. Biodiversity conservation can be considered a by-product of farming systems with a natural resource focus (see below). For instance, according to recent ICRAF experiments, agroforestry systems can conserve up to 60% of the biodiversity found in pristine forests. In short, ecosystems and the livelihoods they support can and should live side by side ( i.e. the co-viability principle);
• While in absolute terms, knowledge about what levels of resource use will be sustainable is usually insufficient, there is usually enough local knowledge (both technical and indigenous) to make best bet decisions about what is not sustainable.
• The above is a good starting point and also justifies participatory decision-making.

One illustration of the above lies in the differences in focus between different types of farming systems, i.e. (Lightfoot et al, 1993)

Farmers often combine these different focuses in time and space according to circumstances, and in particular threats to their means of existence. Examples include seasonal migration in the Sahel, and combination of intensive systems in home gardens (including recycling of waste) and extensive systems in slash-and-burn fields in South-East Asia or Central Africa. Policies and strategies to assist farmers must acknowledge the co-existence of these strategies, and thus be flexible and adaptive.

Biodiversity protection is seldom the main objective of development initiatives. Rather it is built in projects that aim at the conservation of natural habitats. It has been realised that this objective is more achievable when combined with development activities. Projects that follow this strategy are known as Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDP). Approaches to develop them are discussed in turn.

General Principle B: "Control and command/Fines and fences" strategies seldom work on the ground because they not cost-effective and difficult to enforce. Collaborative strategies to achieve Principle A are more bound to achieve sustainable outcomes but they involve significant transaction costs in the short and medium term.

In the face of widespread failure of government-led attempts to manage forests in a sustained fashion and for the public benefit, community involvement in forest management has become a major topic of donor-funded initiatives in tropical forestry over the last 10-15 years. More recently community forestry has tended to broaden its partnership scope, i.e., from community-project staff towards collaboration with other local stakeholder groups, i.e., mainly government and private sector.

Partnerships are not set in stone. They keep evolving according to changes in local conditions and stakeholders' interests and power. Therefore collaborative forest management should be seen as forms of dynamic partnerships along a continuum, as illustrated in Figure 3.

Several practitioners advocate collaboration on the grounds that:

• It improves the commitment of stakeholders, through joint involvement in problem-solving;
• Collaborative strategies are likely to improve the overall quality of decisions, not least through exploration of new options, with the potential for win-win settlements;
• In case they do not achieve a settlement, collaborative strategies can nevertheless improve the quality of the failure, because they foster discussion between stakeholders, hence improving knowledge of each other's interests and perceptions.
• It allows for a freer flow of information between stakeholders. Information flows are vital. Conflict frequently emerges because adequate information was not freely available to key stakeholders early on in the planning process (or at all).

However, collaborative strategies also have their limitations:

• Negotiation is a voluntary and non-binding process and stakeholders can pull out at any time, with a risk of jeopardising the process and/or the agreement. Yet, the temptation to withdraw is often balanced by the risk of marginalisation, in particular if relationships and mutual trust have improved during the negotiation process;
• They incur high transaction costs - mainly the time and efforts of all parties involved in interactive participation;
• Outcomes from collaborative approaches depend significantly on the local power situation between potential "collaborators". This leads to the third principle of collaborative of people's involvement in conservation through resources use and local development.

Figure 3: Continuum of forms of collaborative management, with an emphasis on community-government partnerships

General Principle C: Collaborative approaches require that issues related to stakeholders' relationships and power be addressed

There is increasing evidence that situations where significant disparity in power allows power to be exercised usually results in outcomes being potentially more unstable than in situations where parity in power favours constructive negotiation, and this even if active participation has been achieved (Sidaway, 1997) - see Figure 4.

Figure 4: Linking participation and power to the quality of outcome in negotiations over NRM

Stakeholders' relationships are important in collaborative management of natural resources. More particularly, their interactions with power exert significant influence on the outcome of negotiations. These interactions are complex. For example:

• In Senegal, charcoal traders have a monopoly of supply to Dakar, the capital city. They give priority to maintaining their overwhelming power even if this affects their relationships with both villagers and the State. Hence, they often threaten to strike, for instance, when the government wishes to increase the tax on charcoal products. This is a situation of competition or even domination.
• Despite having financial and political power over local villagers, a foreign logging company operating in Central Africa might give priority to maintaining good relationships with them, especially if it fears social unrest that could lead to the sabotaging of its equipment or the blocking of roads. It would, therefore, favour collaborative strategies.

Figure 5 attempts to picture the influence of such interactions on negotiating strategies.

Figure 5: Interactions between power and relationships in negotiation strategies

Figure 5 shows collaboration is usually not achievable if building or maintaining good relationships is less important than the stakes or keeping power. Under such circumstances, negotiation should not be used to manage conflicts before bargaining powers are levelled off, as it might result in competition. Time must therefore be given to address power differences. Van Keulen and Walraven (1996) suggest some ways to deal with power differences, i.e.

• Use a facilitator/mediator when power differences are too important. The facilitator/mediator must be strong in their own right and command respect.
• The powerless position should not be perceived as inherently powerless, but limited by the specific circumstances.
• Start with an aspect everyone agrees upon.
• Present alternatives.
• Weaker groups should seek coalition with similarly weak parties.
• Turn objections into conditions.
• Mildly threaten. This is particularly useful when the powerful parties fear losing reputation or market shares.
• Do not allow the powerful party to lower itself.

Despite their importance in reaching consensus in land use and NRM, information on how to address issues of power relations is scant. Nevertheless, there seems to be a convergence in opinions that the usual way of measuring power, i.e. ex post through the outcome of negotiations, should be replaced by indirect means. These include assessing stakeholders' mutual dependence and respective roles as regards use and management of forest resources.

The `4Rs' framework might help in this type of assessment. According to this framework, local stakeholders' roles are defined by their respective `4Rs', i.e. the balance of their Rights, Responsibilities, Returns/ Revenues, and the status of their Relationships (Dubois, 1998).

3. Conclusions and Recommendations

The involvement of local communities in forest management is now an important principle of forest policy and practice, and a major component of international forestry aid programmes. The initial enthusiasm for this development is beginning to be tempered by experience and giving way to realism as to the challenges it faces. In particular there is a realisation that:

• The issues underlying co-management of forest resources are often political and institutional, and that participatory principles alone do not address these adequately;
• Context is all-important in the determination of the right mix of ingredients that has more chances to result in successful and robust co-management initiatives. No one recipe can be applied indiscriminately regardless of the context;
• However, specificity cannot be reduced to the community level because:
  * rural populations are often composed of a blend of groups, making the border between "outsiders" and "insider" vis-à-vis the so-called "community" often artificial:
  * within a small homogeneous community different people use forests in different ways e.g. men want access for grazing cattle whilst women want to collect thatch grass, poorer members collect and sell firewood, the richer members buy it.
  * actors external to rural people's groups play a significant role on the local rules of forest use and management.
• Natural resource management is undergoing institutional transition, somewhere between (often) weakened traditional rules, increasing privatisation and non-enforceable formal rules.

A multiple strategy is therefore required, combining:

• National guidelines which clearly recognise the key role of forest-related people in achieving better forest management and rural livelihoods;
• Continuous possibility for negotiations of the terms and conditions of the collaborative forest management agreement
• Experimentation and monitoring of performance in initiatives involving rural people in forest management, as a key factor for progress along the learning curve of collaborative forest management;
• By implication, development of mechanisms that allow lessons from experimentation to feed into the process of policy making;
• Long-term and demand-driven donor support to help in financing the transaction costs of this learning process;
• A flexible and iterative approach, following guidelines not blueprints

But also decision makers and practitioners should not forget that there are other ways of managing natural resources - collaborative management will not be the answer in every case.

The principles to achieve this revolve around some key words, including:

• Realism/pragmatism, embracing the complexity, uncertainty and political dimension of collaborative forest management;
• Patience/time as collaborative forest management often require attitudes and local power balance to evolve, i.e., almost societal changes, and this takes time and a lot of "trial and error";
• Flexibility, because the right mix for success and sustainability of co-management changes according to variations of local circumstances.

Based on the above, we suggest a stepwise process in the achievement of collaborative forest management objectives. While sustainable forest management and poverty alleviation should remain the ultimate goals of collaborative forest management, as an interim stage, we propose more workable objectives, i.e.

References

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¹ Forestry Policy and Institutions Branch, FAO, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy. [email protected]