Reducing the Guesswork in Forest Product Development

An innovative analytic approach now being tested and refined by CIFOR’s Forest Products and People Programme should help take some of the guesswork out of whether certain forest products are good candidates for development. The results were highly encouraging when partner scientists applied the technique in 1999 to a study of 12 cases of forest product development in several regions of Indonesia. More extensive trials of the approach are underway in this project, which is supported by the develop-ment agencies of Switzerland, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Many development agencies, NGOs and "green marketing" proponents advocate non-timber forest product commercialisation as a way to boost income for indigenous people while minimising lasting damage to the forest. Yet commercial success, and even environmentally friendly results, is far from guaranteed. Decisions are usually made based on information from individual case studies, which may not be widely relevant.

The new method, developed by Manuel Ruiz-Perez and Neil Byron, offers a more systematic way to determine what forest products are most promising for development interventions – and which may not be good investments. After selecting a diverse set of cases, researchers use a variety of analytic techniques to detect common patterns and identify key variables that correlate with the outcome of development efforts.

In the Indonesian case study analysis, the researchers found that success or failure was influenced by, among other things, whether the development occurred in remote or developed areas and whether the products were gathered in the wild or domesticated. The case of sandalwood (cendana) development in West Timor demonstrated dramatically how restrictive government regulations can backfire. The Government of Indonesia had imposed policies to encourage sustainable management of the resource; instead, they led to a virtual exhaustion of sandalwood in the region.

Information like this is needed to guide policies and management decisions on forest product development. Once fully developed, the approach should be applicable in other settings. In the next step, researchers are set to analyse 45 diverse case studies from Latin America, Africa and Asia.

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Adaptive Co-Management and Devolution: Lessons From the Field

A focus of research for the Adaptive Co-Management (ACM) Programme in 1999 was a process known as "shared learning". CIFOR scientists who are working to develop methods and models for joint local management of forests think shared learning could be a powerful ingredient.

Shared learning means that diverse groups working to solve a problem benefit from exposure to the collective experience and alternative viewpoints that different participants bring to the task. This is highly relevant to the process of negotiating strategies for forest use and conservation, which often entails reconciling competing interests among different groups of users.

Hosted by the East-West Centre in Honolulu, Hawaii, CIFOR researchers and veterans of community forestry programmes in several countries met to discuss what conditions are needed for collaboration and shared learning to occur. The case studies of joint forest management in Cameroon, Canada, China, Nepal, Pakistan, Tanzania and Zimbabwe offered practical lessons that will be useful in devising effective ACM tools.

Experience from the different sites indicated, for example, that who takes on the role of facilitation can significantly affect the outcome. Another key factor is whether the groups involved in the process are viewed as legitimate. In Yunnan, China, field practitioners found that because group harmony is such a strong cultural trait in their country, informal, behind-the-scenes consensus-building made a difference in achieving collaboration. A book on the findings this work, which is being done by Louise Buck, Lini Wollenberg and David Edmunds, will be published in 2000.

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"Forest people often have declining access to resources that are vital to their and their children’s well-being."
Adaptive Co-Management Programme

At the same time, similar lessons for ACM development come from a newly completed review that looks at what is happening on the ground in six countries – China, India, Mexico, Nepal, Nicaragua and the Philippines – where the management of community forests has been decentralised. Among the findings, the CIFOR researchers found that devolution works best when strong civil society organisations already exist.

CIFOR interacts closely with forest communities to test the soundness of various techniques that may be incorporated into ACM approaches. In November, for example, dozens of people from 26 villages in and around Bulungan Research Forest were introduced to a social science technique known as participatory mapping. It offers a way to help people reach agree-ment on how they believe the surrounding forest and landscape should be used and managed to meet their long-term needs. The villagers named protected forests and clean water as top priorities, and expressed interest in working together to achieve that. Based on the response, further training in this area is planned.

Funding for this CIFOR programme comes from donors that include the International Agency for Agricultural Development, the Asian Development Bank, the develop-ment agencies of Canada and the United Kingdom, the International Tropical Timber Organisation and a CGIAR partner institution, the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture.

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Guarded Optimism About Common Resource Management

As a growing number of countries around the world shift control of forests and other natural resources to the local level, there is a pressing need for new management systems that can make that happen on the ground. A widely favoured approach is common property resource management. After taking a closer look, however, CIFOR scientists concluded that this concept has fallen far short of expectations and merits a more critical analysis if it is to be successful.

Bruce Campbell, Wil de Jong and their colleagues studied Communal Areas in Zimbabwe. These are made up of woodlands, grazing areas and other "pooled" resources that that are jointly used by the residents of a single village and, for some resources, by residents of neighbouring villages. But although rules exist that provide for collective management of these areas, the researchers found few instances where it worked in practice.

They identified a number of factors that have contributed to the failure of this approach to live up to the optimism surrounding it. The biggest problem is that most of the institutions charged with controlling woodland resources are weak. The researchers believe this situation exists because management schemes put in place to provide for community resource sharing and joint management are built on formal ideas about institutions; they fail to recognise the traditional methods of governance that predominate in African communities, which are based on informal rules and social norms.

Conflicting and non-supportive state policies compound the problem. The research in Zimbabwe revealed, for example, that although the government granted authority for collective control of resources at the local level, it subverted the system at the same time by reserving the right to give outsiders permits allowing access to the commons.

In this and similar work in other African countries, which has been funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the U.K. Department for International Development, CIFOR scientists said they found few instances in which actual community management of joint resources was in effect. As such, they warn against over-selling the idea of common property resource management, and say a set of conditions (economic, social and ecological) needs to be in place if such management is to succeed. In addition, projects seeking to implement this approach will require an in-depth understanding of social processes within communities.

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Building Stronger Partners for Forestry Research

Capacity building is a two-way process that benefits both CIFOR and its research partners. CIFOR acquires important local insight and stronger collaborators; local scientists strengthen their ability to do forestry research that benefits their own countries and communities.

In 1999, CIFOR scientists specialising in non-timber forest product research embarked on joint research with researchers from the Centre for Social Forestry at the University of Mulawarman in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, and from a third institutional partner in Canada, the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS). The scientists are using a variety of research approaches to determine how rapid social and political change and economic development in the region are altering people’s use of the surrounding forests, as the basis for possible policy interventions.

A young institution, Mulawarman’s Centre for Social Forestry was established to design ways of improving community forest management in the region. Its mandate includes research and policy analysis, curriculum development and training, and extension and outreach. Research capability is the keystone on which to build these elements. "We feel that the best way to improve research capacity is to learn by doing research," says Brian Belcher, the team leader of CIFOR’s Forest Products and People Programme.

The CEOS scientists, who are sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency, have guided the local researchers in the use of technologies such as remote sensing, GIS and spatial analysis that make it possible to "scale up" the findings from household and village surveys to the regional scale. In November, training organised by CIFOR helped the participants improve their ability to write effective scientific papers that meet the standards of international scientific journals. CIFOR is compiling the training materials for possible use in other settings.

Training like this is especially needed in Indonesia today. New forestry laws and a decentralisation of power requires skilled people who can produce authoritative information that local communities and government policy makers require to make sound decisions. The Mulawarman researchers are being sought out by a growing number of organisations working to address the interests of forest-based communities in Indonesia.

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