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WHAT CONTRIBUTION DOES PARTICIPATORY FOREST MANAGEMENT MAKE TO THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE MDGS?
By Kathrin Schreckenberg and Cecilia Luttrell
Background: Participatory forest management and poverty reduction
The Forest Policy and Environment Programme of the Overseas Development Institute is leading a two-year action research project (‘ARPIP') to investigate the impact of participatory forest management (PFM) on poverty reduction. Funded by the Ford Foundation and Care International, the ARPIP project is being carried out with partner organisations in Germany , Nepal , Tanzania , Kenya and Vietnam .
The background to this project is the widespread promotion around the world of varying forms of community participation in the management and use of natural forests and woodlands. While early support for PFM was principally motivated by donors' interests in improving the conservation status of forests, current interest is motivated by the assumed potential of PFM to reduce poverty. This shift in emphasis took place within the context of a global focus on poverty reduction (as illustrated by the Millennium Development Goals and the promotion of national poverty reduction strategies), and the recognition that the very location of many of the world's poorest people in and around forests implies an important role for forests in poverty alleviation. Because of PFM's direct engagement with local communities, this management approach appears to be an obvious way to achieve poverty reduction through the use of forest resources.
There is a growing recognition, however, that for the past two decades PFM has been increasingly promoted on the basis of unsubstantiated assumptions about the likely benefits and virtues of this approach. The lack of solid evidence for the impacts of PFM is in part due to the difficulty of measuring the range of costs and benefits for different groups of people. The lack of methods to assess the impacts of PFM on the rural poor, and the resulting lack of data linking these impacts to national policies and institutions, prevents PFM featuring as a component of national poverty reduction strategies. There is little guidance for donors and governments on how to design and encourage pro-poor forest institutions, or on how different types of PFM can fit in with government decentralisation initiatives and contribute to a wider pro-poor rural development strategy.
The ultimate aim of the ARPIP project is to increase the poverty-reducing impact of PFM initiatives by answering the following key questions:
Progress so far
The project began in April 2005 by (a) preparing a literature review outlining existing evidence of the poverty reduction impacts of different types of PFM, and (b) developing a methodology for investigating the benefit (and cost) streams resulting from the implementation of PFM, and their distribution within and between communities. Fieldwork is now ongoing in Nepal , Kenya and Tanzania and is planned for Vietnam .
The two Millennium Development Goals for which PFM has clear relevance are Goal 1 ‘to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger' and Goal 7 ‘to ensure environmental sustainability'. Multiplier effects associated with both the process and the outcomes of PFM have the potential to contribute to other MDGs such as those relating to health and education. We hope to be able to comment on all of these by taking a sustainable livelihoods approach to examine the impacts of PFM not just in relation to financial benefits, but also with respect to natural, physical, human, social and political capital.
Very preliminary findings relating to the achievement of the MDGs 1 and 7 include the following:
MDG 1. Can PFM help to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger?
There is a clear difference between newly established and more mature PFM programmes in terms of the returns they provide to local people. In some Nepali communities, for instance, communityforests have become very valuable community-based enterprises, with new members having to buy a share and people getting paid out if they leave the area. User groups have identified specific ‘pro-poor' activities designed to help the poorest people in their communities. This contrasts strongly with some new PFM communities in Kenya and Tanzania , where communities are expected to invest a great deal of unpaid labour in ‘their' PFM forests, e.g. in protection and cutting paths, for which they might previously have been paid by forest departments. Income from permits for collection of fuelwood or posts is, however, still being managed by forest departments.
Where they exist, new forest-related, incomegenerating activities are available for only a few people in the community with no preference given to the poorest.
MDG 7. Can PFM help to ensure environmental sustainability?
Definitions of what constitutes PFM are extremely variable both between and within countries. Some of the communities in which we are working (particularly those in Kenya and some in Tanzania ) are participating in the management of protected areas. In these cases, PFM is often taken to include many ‘substitution' activities that occur outside the forest and reduce people's dependence on the forest itself (e.g. fuelwood plantations, agroforestry activities). While these so-called ‘PFM' activities are clearly bringing benefits to some people, the long-term link to the forest (and hence justification for its conservation) is not clear.
In almost all cases, the first ‘PFM' activity consists of increased (often complete) protection of the forest, sometimes accompanied by active regeneration efforts, usually leading to a fairly rapid improvement of the forest condition. In some areas of Nepal , where PFM is very widespread, all local forests are under the management by one or other user group. However, in countries where PFM is still at an early stage, there is a concern that the introduction of PFM could displace some forest uses to other nearby forest areas. This could occur, for example, where stricter enforcement of permits in the PFM forest means that people begin to collect fuelwood and poles in an unregulated way from open access forest areas. In the longer term therefore, such a piecemeal approach to PFM is unlikely to ensure wider environmental benefits.
Final outputs of the project will include briefing papers in each country and a crosscountry analysis by mid 2007. In the meantime, more details can be obtained from the project's website at http://www.odifpeg.org.uk/activities/environmental_governance/SO137/index.html
Further information:
Kathrin Schreckenberg and Cecilia Luttrell
Overseas Development Institute
Email: k.schreckenberg@odi.org.uk and c.luttrell@odi.org.uk