Resources

This report (based largely on the discussions held at the 5th Asia Forest Network meeting held at Surajkund, India in 1996), synthesises the experiences of community forestry management in the region.
The report begins by outlining the main trends in forest policy in each country.
The elements considered necessary for transition of forest management to local communities are examined, including enabling policies, the need for reorientation of Forestry Agencies and ways of enhancing development support agency programs.
The political and economic factors which undermine community involvement in forest management are considered, including inequities in resource flows whereby national goverenments tend to regard forest regions as resource banks to be used according to state requirements and also problems of delegating authority to the administrative village level which may not reflect interest user groups.
Finally, the strategies and activities planned to be taken in the future are outlined for each participating country.

Amidst the rhetoric of participation, evidence from some contexts suggests that the very projects and processes that appear inclusive and transformative may support a status quo that is highly inequitable for women. This paper attempts to address some of the questions and challenges surrounding participatory development, in terms of who participates, in what and on what basis, who benefits and who loses out. Highlighting some of the tensions that run through 'gender-aware' participatory development, it draws on empirical material from Africa and Asia to explore the gender dimensions of participation in projects, planning and policy processes. In doing so, it reflects on strategies and tactics that have been used in efforts to make participatory development more gender sensitive. Much depends, the paper suggests, on how 'gender' is interpreted and deployed in development settings. The pervasive slippage between 'involving women' and 'addressing gender' may be tactically expedient, but it provokes a series of questions about the extent to which current understandings of 'gender' in development mask other inequalities and forms of exclusion. Making a difference, the paper suggests, requires rethinking 'gender' and addressing more directly the issues of power and powerlessness that lie at the heart of both Gender and Development (GAD) and participatory development.

This paper documents the Philippines' National Irrigation approaches in organizing farmers to undertake management in the operation and maintenance of irrigation systems. The experience of turnover in this country is particularly unique in that the approach involved employment of farmers, as opposed to professional community organizers, in organizing co-farmers into irrigator associations. The farmers employed were well trained, and positive results were achieved in the following areas: active irrigators' associations at field and distributary levels; reduced operation and maintenance costs; increased fee collection rates; greater equity in water distribution. This case highlights that organizing farmer activities in this way shorten the turnover process, make it less expensive and, most importantly, be effective.

The article describes the experiences of Sri Lanka's North Western Province Dry Zone Participatory Development Project (DZP) in transferring participatory approaches from one institutional culture to another. It summarises some of the difficulties which have been encountered while facilitating participatory planning processes in 40 villages. These included raising the expectations of villagers; difficulties encountered by government officers in sticking to their promises; changing the behaviour and attitudes of government officers; and the temptation to make up results of 'participatory planning exercises'. It argues that to understand the constraints the principal differences between the institutional culture of NGOs and GOs have to be taken into account. The paper concludes that the changes required to realise true participation in large-scale government development projects are so fundamental that due time and resources must be provided if the approach is to succeed.