Managing Natural Resources for Sustainable Livelihoods

This 250-page book presents a collection of resources on participatory research in natural resource management (NRM). The purpose of the book is to present a variety of innovative approaches for collective participation and decision-making at various stages of NRM research, to identify principles of good practice for research on NRM, to identify common problems and weaknesses in participatory NRM (PNRM) research, and to identify priority issues and challenges for future research and institutional change.


"The case studies and summary chapters provide a comprehensive overview, with an emphasis on... best practice and on-going innovations to mix scientific rigour with effective and equitable participation....The future lies in a continuation of the best work already in progress, as well as careful and concerted efforts to address five key points: better understanding of people’s own short- and long-term goals and their visions of the future; data sets and techniques for use in negotiations and planning processes to define and choose among possible futures; development of practices that allow scientists to work with people to incorporate multiple perspectives into design of production and resource management policy and practice; analytical and process innovations to allow for democratic negotiations and collaboration across scales, from individual to international contexts; and finally, the most neglected as well as the most critical point, to work creatively at the interface between rural land use and livelihood changes and processes of urbanization and industrialization."


The initial chapters lay the groundwork for case studies and lessons learned by defining aspects of participatory research (PR), particularly PNRM; adaptive, participatory natural resource management; participatory learning; and research for participatory resource management.


According to the document, "Participatory research adds value to NRM in several ways:


* "By introducing new information and feedback into participatory learning and adaptive management.
* By increasing the capacity to cope with complexity and diversity.
* By the inclusion of lay knowledge in the identification of problems and monitoring of change.
* By enabling diverse stakeholders to challenge accepted wisdom, whether lay or expert.
* By potentially levelling the playing field and breaking down the monopoly of ‘one version of the truth’, which is often that of the dominant elites, and which can short-circuit collective action.
* By helping to establish agreement about what information stakeholders need and can use to make collective decisions.
* By building social capital which ‘spills over’ into collective action.
* By increasing the capacity for innovation."

Some communication-related aspects of this wide-ranging discussion of PNRM include:


*On local intervention: "Any intervention in local resource management requires an understanding of politics. Politics can be about the struggle for change, or about the pursuit and exertion of power, but it can also be about understanding ways to get things done."
*On stakeholder interfaces: "Stakeholder interactions change in space and time"; products and practices can have "complex significance underpinned by complex social networks"; "building groups is an evolutionary process".
* On PR to improve inclusion and access to resources: "Let resource users define the stresses of their life worlds"; "Let farmers shape learning: farmer field schools"; have small land users form water associations, for example, "rather than landowners, as embodying a new way to social justice"; consider separate meetings, based on the dynamics of gender and caste, so that everyone can have a say - "it is difficult to reach women, and any commitment to do so requires alternative thinking on methods of communication to reach into women’s often constrained lives."
*On groups and social network capacity: "The collective dimension of natural resource management requires conscious reflection of the power of groups and networks to pursue and steer change"; working with groups allows for "learning with local eyes".

The following are a list of good practice indicators of PNRM included in the book:


1. “Stimulation of participation by ‘forgotten’ groups (eg, women, landless, lower caste).
2. Shared agenda setting.
3. Realistic objectives and a related, coherent participatory methodology.
4. A clear strategy for action and change.
5. Realistic expectations for empowerment through research.
6. Partnerships created or strengthened through dialogue and joint actions.
7. An eye for incentives and benefits for all parties involved.
8. Use of multiple tools.
9. An eye for the dynamics of change in natural and human-made systems.
10. The best of the various knowledge worlds linked together.
11. Use of multiple sources and triangulation.
12. A built-in exit or sustainability strategy.
13. Possibilities for extrapolation or scaling up of the methodology and results.
14. Good documentation of the use of tools, the participatory process and the results.
15. Horizontal communication.
16. New professional roles accepted and put into practice.
17. Respect for the commitment made with research partners.
18. Shared authorship of results and publications."