The Dolphin Foundation is in the final stages of implementation of its "Integrated Approach to Enhance Protection of Manas Tiger Reserve, a Priority Site Outcome in the Indian part of the Bhutan Biological Conservation Complex" project, with funding from CEPF.
Sujit P. Bairagi, Conservation Biologist and Chairman of the Dolphin Foundation, shares somes of the lessons he and his colleagues have learned throughout implementation.
What were the most important lessons learned?
- The targeted forest fringe villages (project area) are in remote locations and they are not socially well organized; thus, the presence of well-organized community organizations (especially working on conservation) in such areas was very limited.
- Motivating the community organizations and making them understand the correlation between adoption of alternative sustainable livelihoods and forest conservation is a very delicate issue and a time-consuming task to accomplish.
- Convincing the stakeholders to recognize that they have a very important stake in the process of conservation is a challenge.
- Bringing in different stakeholders (different technical departments, financial agencies, marketing agencies, communities) for the promotion of alternative livelihoods to a common platform and getting their consensus to adopt a strategy was even more difficult.
- Compensating the loss of earnings from illegal forest extractions by any of these alternative livelihoods is difficult and requires research and application of other innovative approaches.
- The women of the targeted families could be a very important resource in motivating their husbands/brothers to give up the risky profession of illegal forest extraction.
- Disagreement among the communities concerning the sharing of resources developed at the public level is very common; this is a commonly observed behavior, which has to be addressed by adopting effective means.
- Planning projects with season-dependent components (agriculture-based livelihoods) that do not correspond with the funding cycle of the project, should be done with sufficient room for future adjustments.
- Unpredictable changes in the order of law and the socio-political situation in the project area can considerably affect the smooth implementation of the project.
Describe how you learned these lessons and whether / how you have adapted your approach or specific project elements as a result.
1. The idea of the project was to build the capacity of the local Community Based Organizations (CBO) for promotion of alternative sustainable livelihoods for the forest dependents living on the fringe of the Manas Tiger Reserve. We could not identify, however, alike CBOs working on conservation in the project area. There are some groups in some areas, but they work / have aim to work on other social areas viz. – village road development, temple development, health camps, cultural programs, village library development, etc. On the other hand, the most positive thing they have is the keenness to work for biodiversity conservation as they have some level of understanding (especially the youth) about the importance of the patch of forest to which they are living in close proximity. We had to undertake the big task of motivating, structuring, educating and giving the necessary training as well as other infrastructural support to them. In the areas where no groups existed, we had to initiate the formation of new CBOs in the community. Making them understand the correlation between adoption of alternative livelihoods and forest conservation had to be carried out in a very strategic way; by developing and executing a community-based awareness-building system.
2. - 4. Promotion of alternative livelihoods generally involves many stakeholders, i.e different technical departments, financial agencies and marketing agencies. It was a great challenge bringing them together to a common platform, developing a strategy they could adopt and getting their consensus. We had taken this up in a different way by undertaking a livelihood feasibility study by ourselves and presented the findings to their joint forum for further analysis and scrutiny, prioritization and to finally get their consensus.
5. - 6. The target communities were more than 90 percent dependent on the forest and some of them were also involved in illegal tree felling and poaching. Thus, the project had to address this tricky "easy-money-culture." It is practically impossible to compensate the members of these communities for their illegal earnings by any of these alternative livelihoods. We had taken an innovative approach by emotionally motivating the womenfolk of the community through educating them on the amount of risk involved for their family members involved in illegal activities. We have been empowering the community women in order to enable them to contribute to the family income and thereby assisting them to motivate their husbands/brothers to give up the illegal activities in the park.
7. Disagreement among the communities concerning the sharing of resources (Sericulture Food Plant Gardens) developed by the project was an issue during the first year of the project. We corrected it by facilitating the households to develop their own gardens.
8. Some of the project components (agriculture-based livelihoods) were totally season-dependent and did not correspond with the funding cycle of the project. We repeated some of these activities to achieve the target.
9. The implementation of government-sponsored welfare schemes are very confusing as they are often used by the local politicians for their own benefits. We had to bring in the governance at the block-level to avoid such complications.
Unpredictable changes in the order of law and the socio-political situation surrounding the project created some problems and we had to increase our field days to compensate for the loss of our field efforts.
- June 23, 2010