03.15.06
An Analysis of Bias in Participatory Methods
Here is another guide on participatory methods, or rather what to avoid when implementing them.
Bias was assessed on three levels:
* practitioner
* community
PDF-document: Poverty and participation: an analysis of bias in participatory methods. Livestock Participation Group / Livestock Development Group , 2003
Create a Village Phone programme
Guide on creating sustainable access to affordable telecommunications for the rural poor.
It draws on Grameen’s experience in both Bangladesh and Uganda and establishes a template for creating sustainable initiatives that simultaneously bring telecommunications to the rural poor, create viable new businesses for microentrepreneurs, and expand the customer base of telecommunications companies. The authors point out that no two implementations of the Village Phone programme will be exactly alike. Each country will have unique variables, participants, and environments. However, it is expected that there will be common structures, applications, and processes.
03.14.06
The 4th World Water Forum
Sampsa Daily has couple of thorough posts about water privatisation debate and the problems of financing the water sector. Good reading before The 4th World Water Forum beginning on 16th of march in Mexico.
03.05.06
FAO: World progresses towards sustainable forestry
The new Global forest resources assessment 2005 by Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) shows positive global progress towards socially and environmentally sustainable forest management. The progress has been espcially strong in forest policies and legistlation.
According to the report, there are more positive than negative trends at the global level, including a move in forest management towards multiple-use, including social and environmental benefits. Forests dedicated for conservation of biological diversity have increased by 6.4 million hectares per year to include 11 percent of all forests.
Forests for protection of soil and water and for recreation have also increased significantly. Planted forests are expanding and provide an increasing proportion of the world’s wood supply.
However, negative trends are still alarming in some regions. Forests are rapidly being lost to agriculture in Africa, Central America, South America and in Southeast Asia, accounting for almost 90 percent of the world’s deforestation of 13 million hectares per year.
Primary forests, crucial for maintaining biological diversity, are converted to agriculture or degraded through logging at a rate of 6 million hectares per year, mainly in South America and Southeast Asia.
Here is the full report Global forest resources assessment 2005
02.21.06
Tools for policy influence in natural resource management
Power tools offers an excellent collection of policy tools for people and organisations working with natural resources management. The tools are especially directed to marginalised groups or those working with them. The tools they offer are transferable, not static, meaning that they are a set of ideas that can be taken from one place or a context to another. These tools try to avoid the usual problem with participatory methods; guiding too much and making the methods and tools unflexible. So when you use the tools be creative and don’t take them as the only way to do things.
The tools are divided into (1) tools for understanding, (2) tools for organising, (3) tools for engaging and (4) tools for ensuring. They include such power tools as: Community tradeoffs assessment, Mechanisms for organisation, Connecting communities to markets and People’s law.
All tool documents are available for free download in pdf -format in four languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese).
Power tools: for policy influence in natural resource management
02.15.06
Help to predict climate change
BBC and several universities have joined forces to predict climate change, and they need your help. Dowload a small program on your computer and you will give your small share to this effort.
By combining the processing power of thousands of home computers it’ll hopefully be possible to make more accurate climate change predictions (to make people act). You don’t have to do anything else than download and open the program. Whenever you have your computer on the program will calculate the chosen climate prediction in the background.
Every contributor has his individual variable changes for the prediction, which is calculated from the year 1920. If your model ends up with a climate unsimilar to current year 2006, your experiment will stop. However, if the model is close enough it will continue to calculate untill it reaches 2080. This will give researchers multiple models to compare climate changes happening in the coming years.
TAKE PART IN THE BIGGEST CLIMATE CHANGE EXPERINENT EVER UNDERTAKEN: climateprediction.net
01.24.06
WTO Hong Kong Meeting Analysed by Oxfam
“The final ministerial declaration contained some minor gains on agriculture, such as setting a 2013 end date for export subsidies, and providing developing countries with extra flexibility to protect their small farmers. There was some progress on preventing the abuse of food aid as a disguised form of dumping, but on cotton, the steps agreed fell short even of those required by the cotton panel ruling against the USA.
Developing countries successfully fended off some of the attempts to force open their markets to Northern industrial and service sectors. However, even the toned-down text on non-agricultural market access (NAMA) and services is inimical to development. The offer of duty-free, quota-free market access to the poorest countries contains sufficient loopholes to rob the agreement of almost all value. An ‘aid for trade’ deal was agreed consisting largely of recycled money, and there was no progress on other ‘development issues’.
When talks recommence in early 2006, rich-country negotiators cannot simply turn up and carry on where they left off in Hong Kong. They need to go away, examine their consciences, and make a New Year’s resolution to turn this into a development round for the world’s poor.”
Oxfam Briefing Paper 85: What happened in Hong Kong?, Oxfam Briefing Paper, December 2005 (pdf-document)
01.17.06
Visualising the World with Maps
I ran into even better maps than before. Maplecroft a specialist research and advisory company for large multinationals, offers flash maps which portrait environmental, social and political information of overs 200 states around the World. Maplecroft’s aim with the maps is:
“This innovative tool is designed to raise awareness amongst corporations, government and non governmental organisations, academics and students of how an organisation’s operations interact with wider society, and how the risks and opportunities generated can be responsibly managed through stakeholder engagement and partnership.”
You can choose the issue you want to know more about from the drop down menus above the map. The topics include global pandemic risk in 2006, climate change (actually, who is responsible of it), digital inclusion, aid depth ratio, military expenditure, human rights and many more. By clicking the maps you can find more information on specific countries or cases.
01.08.06
The Taungya System
The traditional forest plantation system, Taungya or Shamba has been critisised in kenya. The critics claim that it leads to destruction of water catchments and loss of biodiversity.In taungya, plantation forest is established on a government owned land by the local farmers. The government provides seedlings and tools as well as instructions and training. In return for their work local people have an opportunity to cultivate the plantation area until the canopy closes, usually this takes from 2 to 4 years.
As the system is only used in plantation areas, I think the argument about loss of biodiversity is out of place. The main objective of plantation management being a high yield of raw material for forest industry. Of course there are several methods to attain this goal, with monoculture plantation or multiple species plantation. The rule of thumb is that the more you have species the more complex and difficult it’ll be to achive a high output of desired wood. With multiple species the biodiversity might be a bit higher for a decade or two before clear cutting.
The destruction of water catchments by plantation forestry depends mostly on species selection and in some degree on carefull planning of logging (where to place roads etc.) not on plantation forestry itself. With site matching tree species possible negative effects can be reversed so that the site’s water holding capacities actually increase (if that’s the aim).
The protection of biodiversity, in my view, should not alter the livelyhood of local people. Sufficient amount of protected areas and nature reserves are the places where this protection should take place. Of course, one can argue that Taungya could be brought up to date by taking the government off the equation with a land reform that would decentralise the land rights. This would minimise the need of local people to destroy the seedlings in order to prolong the cultivation period, as they would get even higher revenues from the wood crop. But this is a decision that should be made by politicians not by foresters. Today, community or private ownership with appropriate extension work is found to be the most efficient way to manage and protect forests at the same time.
People simply take better care of their own property.
Farmers ‘eat away’ Kenyan mountain forests – article in People and the Planet
Banning shamba system will not replenish forests – open letter in The Standard
Shooting government in the head – Article in The East African Standard
01.04.06
Maps with a Difference
Mapping Worlds (via Sampsa Daily) provides maps that make it easier to understand the state of the World.
