0986-A4
Krister Andersson and Marilyn Hoskins 1
Information can be used to either stimulate or stifle human efforts for cooperation and creativity. Since community forestry often involves a very diverse set of actors, with different interests and with varying kinds of knowledge and skills, the way information is handled can make a huge difference for supporting cooperation. In situations of open communication, the diversity of actors can be a strength in finding solutions to complex problems. Unless actors are able to develop effective communication, so that essential information can be incorporated into their decision-making, community forestry is not likely to achieve its main objectives. The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss different strategies of finding, processing and incorporating important information into community forestry decision-making. The main idea presented here is that traditional, top-down project decision-making often induces information-for-control rather than information-for-learning. We suggest that an institutional approach to community forestry planning can prevent some of the common problems encountered in traditional community forestry projects.
We all know that information is power. We also know that those with information use it and misuse it to get their points across, to make themselves look good, to reach their goals. Community forestry is especially vulnerable to situations where the right information might be lacking or flows of information are not symmetrical. Look at the range of possible community forestry goals and activities and just imagine all the different interests local people, project managers, donors, industry, and governments have to know or to let others know more or less about local situations or projects. Community forestry involves local people with their own power relationships, outsiders from various sectors and individuals from within institutions that have different power over project funding and the use of forest resources.
Community Forestry Goals
(2) Support local people to preserve and improve their production systems. This might involve planting trees and bushes in hedgerows to serve as windbreaks or promoting the growth of trees in fields or pasture areas in order to fertilize the soil, protect against wind and water erosion, and provide forage and shade. (3) Strengthen local people's efforts to produce goods that will be sold or traded. This includes such diverse activities as producing tools and furniture, making rope and weaving mats, harvesting timber, collecting wood and preparing certain foods and oils for the market.2 |
Sometimes it seems chaotic to try to understand all the factors that play into success or failure of community forestry. Sometimes the participatory methods that must be used to reach community forestry goals may seem awkward and time consuming, but when managers take short cuts they often find the final results disappointing. We believe that the right information to the right place at the right time, and in the right atmosphere for sharing, can create an environment for creativity, mutual rewards and success.
There is a tool that can clarify problems that arise in community forestry and may be useful in avoiding some of them, the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, developed by colleagues at Indiana University. IAD provides a structure to the challenging task of analyzing community forestry contexts.3 This framework can help identify some potential barriers to effective outcomes.
The first part of the paper, "What Information for Whose Goals?" gives examples of links between the goals or incentives of different actors and the need for information. The second part of the paper, "Information for Successful Interactions, Outcomes and Evaluations" deals with group processes under different information flows and completeness, the outcomes, and their relations to the possibility of effective learning.
Figure: The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework
Long term goals reflecting the philosophy of community forestry, will be similar in all community forestry programs. They will address livelihood, environmental quality and institutional arrangements. It is essential those are clear and that both the mid-term and more immediate goals imbedded within them reflect local realities and needs of the different actors. Information in planning and modifying field activities will be different in each site and may be different for the different actors. When goals of key actors are not compatible, or cannot be negotiated to be so with transparent information, there is little possibility of successful community forestry. So we will not even consider situations where this is the case. But there are many cases where clear analysis of different goals and sharing information can help identify compatibility.
This section includes three illustrations of common situations where: (1) Goals different but compatible and explicit; (2) Goals of the less powerful not made explicit; and (3) Goals confused with targets so information is incomplete.
Goals of all Actors Made Explicit; Example from Bolivia In Bolivia, a research group, the government and an indigenous community found that they had several compatible goals and were able to forge a lasting and productive collaboration. The local research group wanted to learn more about indigenous forest management and the impacts of use. They had a tool that integrated biophysical, historical, socio-economic and institutional information, could follow forest and community changes over time, identifying some of the causes for change, and could compare forests.4 The government had passed legislation that offered indigenous communities the chance to obtain land titles if they could document their territorial history. The government's forest service objective to ensure sustainable forest use was pursued by supporting forest users to develop forest management plans. Local residents were interested in being able to sustain control over their historical territory. All of these goals were clearly recognized at the outset of the joint effort. The legitimacy of each actor's goal was recognized. After four years of collaboration the community not only has an official title to their ancestral land but they also have a government-approved forest management plan. |
Goals of Local Groups not Explicit: Example from Certification In the process of FSC certification of wood, the usual goals written in the plan are that certification will help keep the forest or plantation sustainable and that the certification itself will bring higher prices for the wood. A number of small holders and community forest managers recognize that they have little or no market advantage from certification, but are willing to participate if they believe it will support their effort to obtain tenure rights or more weight in the national discussion of land use. Although some organizers recognize land tenure as a goal of local groups, it fails to become recognized in the document. The agreements and plans of certification often focus on production and tree management and sometimes marketing. To reach the additional goals of land tenure or recognition as partners in national forestry and land use discussions would require specific information, activities and monitoring. Local actors would need information on what the government requires, communications would need to be opened between the groups and monitoring would follow this process. The motivation for local people to participate would be vastly increased if their goals were explicit and the process of reaching them openly discussed and incorporated into the plans and activities. |
Confusing Targets for Goals: Information for Monitoring When physical targets become the center of focus and overwhelm the goals, information necessary to understand if one is reaching the goals may not be collected. This usually happens when the goals are social or are less easily measured than the physical targets. The goals for the World Bank-WWF Alliance are to slow deforestation and degradation of bio-diversity and to improve the livelihoods of forest-dependent people. Targets relate to hectares of forest that are in managed parks and reserves and hectares of FSC certified plantations or forests. The reporting deals with the targets, but not the goals. In reality, the targets could both be reached without addressing either of the goals. Little or no baseline information has been collected on the livelihoods of forest dependent people or about the trees and biodiversity, especially on land just outside the reserves. Obviously, where there is no baseline, change cannot be measured. |
Some forestry projects produce large quantities of information and deliver it to the right people at the right time, but even so, it is not used to make decisions and appropriate changes. Some actors are not sufficiently motivated to act on information; some have more to lose than to gain from doing so. When actors are able to hide information about project activities, results and their own performance, the temptation to pursue their personal goals rather than those of the project is likely to be particularly strong. But if the involved actors can get information about the other participants' behavior at a low cost and they are allowed to use this information to hold each other accountable, actors may be more motivated to contribute to the goals of the project. Such accountability mechanisms not only require a transparent information flow between stakeholders, but also that project participants at all levels have the authority to participate in project decision-making.
This section deals with the group processes under different degrees of information transparency and completeness. The institutional analysis, which focuses on the second and third part of the framework in Figure 1, shows how information in combination with power can be used to either support or stifle the collective efforts of community forestry. We further show how information can be used to hold community forestry actors accountable to one another, thereby increasing the motivation to work together towards compatible goals. Finally, the efforts of the actors to achieve successful outcomes can be enhanced by using evaluations as a tool for learning rather than as a control mechanism.
No single actor in the community forestry setting is likely to be able produce lasting results on his or her own. In that sense, community forestry is a collective effort, not only because it requires groups of people at the local level to work effectively together, but also because actors external to the community - such as the project staff, government agency representatives, non-governmental organizations - need to learn how to cooperate effectively with each other and with local people. Only when the perceived benefits exceed the perceived costs of organization will an actor be motivated to invest.
If activities purposely exclude some community members from participation, and consequently the information flowing from activities and between participants, this can provoke conflicts and mistrust, not only between outside facilitators and community member, but also between community members themselves. Without an inclusive and transparent management of information, it is difficult for the community forestry facilitators to create an environment that is conducive for cooperation.
Information Flows that Block Stakeholder Participation A leading international conservation NGO's manual for organizing "participatory community-based activities" to conserve local biodiversity instructs field personnel to select individuals most positive to their project for planning activities and avoid those who disagree. Yet, excluding them from information flows and the planning activities will only deepen their suspicion towards the project activities and might even lead them to work against the local conservation effort. Excluding a major stakeholder may make the initial work easier but the potential to reach sustainable biodiversity is much more doubtful. |
However, even if information flows are managed in an intelligent and conscious way, motivation problems must also be addressed. If they are detected and understood early it may be that they can be mitigated. Institutional analysis can help practitioners recognize different goals and address the potential threats to successful community forestry outcomes.
To illustrate the usefulness of carrying out an institutional analysis in project design and planning, we apply the analytical tools to a hypothetical community forestry project paying particular attention to problems related to asymmetries of information and power. Using findings from the analysis, a new, more effective project can be designed in which information problems are addressed explicitly from the start.
Information Problems in Traditional Projects A donor government contracts a consultancy firm to design and implement a community forestry project in a recipient country. Periodic progress reports are prepared by the consultants and sent off both to the ministry and the donor. The local forest users, who are considered the project beneficiaries, may be consulted, but generally the consultant compiles the information and sends it off. The consultants find that leaving the "beneficiaries" out of the information flow makes their job easier to handle. Controlling the information flow is convenient as they do not risk exposing their errors and underperformance. The donor suspects that there are likely to be such omissions in the project but lets the consultant do the project "his own way", which is also less troublesome for the donor official. Both donor and consultant feel that the more control they have of the project's information flow, the less complicated their work becomes. |
One of the problems in the traditional project described above are the weak incentives to involve beneficiaries in the decision making. None of the actors that possess control over both information and resource flows - donors, consultants or government representatives - are motivated to let go of this control. Even if the consultants' manual states that they are supposed to work in a participatory way, in practice they are often not motivated to do so because nobody holds them accountable to such a standard. When decision makers have the power to hide information about project activities and results and their own performance, the temptation to pursue personal goals rather than those of the project is likely to be particularly strong.
However, a more transparent and symmetrical flow of information seems unlikely unless local forest users are given a more prominent role in the decision-making. Symmetries of information are not likely to be achieved unless the asymmetries of power are addressed. Local actors with access to essential project information and who are empowered to hold involved actors accountable play a crucial role in achieving the objectives of community forestry.
Another important aspect of information in community forestry is, how evaluations may (or may not) influence the future directions of a project. The dashed feedback-loop in the IAD framework, representing the third link in our analysis, illustrates how information from evaluation is filtered back through the community forestry context. That means that whether the lessons learned in evaluations are to lead to any future modified actions, depends on the social and institutional context. In a context characterized by actors who do not know each other, do not trust each other, and are punished for committing mistakes; information about failures is not likely to be freely available to involved parties. Fortunately, there are new approaches that can help practitioners promote sound and transparent information flows in community forestry.
Because life is full of surprises, answers cannot all be known ahead. Different steps need to be tried; mistakes will be made. To succeed in the complex field of community forestry, learning from past mistakes is crucial. An ongoing exchange of information can help community forestry actors devise new and more effective strategies. This is a different approach to information management than is used in the traditional project setting described above. While the traditional way of doing projects often bred an environment in which a few selected actors were able to both control information and use information to control the behavior of others, the new approach replaces the closed information-for-control environment with open information-for-learning. The new approach allows for flexibility in relation to external factors and rewards human creativity to respond to such factors.
Obviously, it is important to know what activities have taken place and how the funds were spent, but this is not enough. The rewards for project participants should be for creatively reaching the goals rather than dutifully carrying out plans made months, sometimes years before. No successful business runs that way. We would do well to be a bit more business-like in the way we try to encourage learning and creativity in community forestry.
A New Monitoring Tool Facilitators in FAO's Forests Trees and People Program (FTPP) wanted to report on their community forestry activities in a more meaningful way. For this purpose they developed an event flow-format. The idea was to depict how activities evolved over time, what role the FTPP personnel had in this and who else participated. For instance, one FTPP facilitator identified an opportunity to influence the policies related to community forestry. His proposed activities included doing case studies and holding a workshop where the case materials were presented to policy makers. He carried out the case studies and another international organization with similar plans agreed to fund the workshop. The workshop used the case studies the FTPP facilitator had developed as the basic material for discussion and the policies were modified to be more open to community forestry. A traditional evaluation would have concluded the facilitator had been a failure as he only carried out one activity. It would have been counter-productive to withhold the case studies, hold a competitive workshop or fight for who would get the credit. The event flow format depicts more accurately what factors combine to move towards the program goals. |
Giving local users a voice in the formal monitoring and evaluation of project activities can be an effective way to introduce more transparency in the project cycle. If donors and government officials give weight to the information produced by users, the information may be used for both learning and for holding other actors accountable for playing their part. Within a community, more transparent accounting procedures can address the issue of "money gone missing" and can build trust.
Transparency within a Community Can Build Trust A community group in West Africa had an agreement that a portion of their income from their commercial community enterprise should go towards a community investment fund. To collect the proceeds, a weekly, open meeting was held where individual contributions were counted together and put on the books. After the meeting, everyone had a drink and chatted and then accompanied the treasurer to the bank to deposit the money. Everyone saw the counting and the depositing and heard how much was there. |
Internal evaluations and progress reviews can be useful tools for learning in projects, but only if the right learning environment exists. Otherwise, evaluations are most likely to be used to find who to blame for sub-optimal outcomes. The FTP program used annual meetings to review progress and to learn how the program could be more effective.
FTPP Steering Committee Meetings In FAO's Forests, Trees and People Program (FTPP), the program's key actors gathered annually to review progress reports, discuss longer term strategies, and agree on future work plans. Representatives from the donor governments, FAO staff, and the national facilitators participated in the recurrent meetings. Several factors combined to make these meetings a forum for learning and internal evaluation: The recurrent nature of the meetings and the continuity of participants allowed people to know each other professionally and personally. For facilitators, the encounters with donors and FAO headquarter staff, became progressively less threatening and thus more conducive for learning. The donors played a key role in disarming their own image as controllers. They encouraged the learning, rather than the controlling mode, and challenged the facilitators and FAO staff to be experimental and analytical in their activities. The facilitators took increasing leadership in planning, budgeting and management of the regional and national level activities. |
1 Research Fellow, Indiana University, Bloomington IN, USA. [email protected]
2 Thomson and Freudenberger, 1997
3 See IAD descriptions in Ostrom, 1999 and Ostrom et al, 2002.
4 The tool for the systematic information collection is part of the set of participatory research instruments used in the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) Research Program.
5 For more details on institutional analysis following the IAD framework, see Thomson and Freudenberger, 1997, Ostrom et al 2002, and Ostrom, 1999.