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Chapter 5: Using the information from the tenure study
Participation and expectations
The situation suggests the need to adapt project activities
Participatory planning and the loss of control
Villagers engaged in creative but illegal activities
The paralysis of dealing with complexity
In a good RA, information is gathered to be used in a way that will improve the wellbeing of the local community. This is most likely to happen if the community itself participates maximally in the collection and analysis of information. The more that it is involved in the whole process and has access to the information that is generated, the more likely that it will find ways to use the information for the benefit of the members of the community.
This is why the feedback stage of the RA is so important. Ideally, this feedback is more than a simple verification of the facts with the informants. More usefully, it is an opportunity to launch a planning process with the village, using the information that has already been gathered as a point of departure. What are the key problems that have been identified? What resources are available locally to confront these problems? What problems are beyond the scope of local solutions and require some form of outside intervention? What is the time frame for working on the problems? Who will be involved and with what responsibilities?
One of the reasons that RA has become such a popular methodology is that, when used well, it provides useful information quickly. Development agencies and others can begin to get at least preliminary answers needed to plan and implement their activities in a matter of weeks, rather than waiting years as was sometimes necessary to get the results of conventional surveys. And yet, looking at the record, it is clear that even though better and faster information is now available, in many cases it is not being used to its full potential. There are undoubtedly an infinite number of explanations for the gap between information collection and use. The discussion here will he limited to a few of the most commonly encountered problems, since some of them can be avoided with a certain amount of advance planning.
Participation and expectations
The participation of the local population in the research process is one of the greatest advantages of RA methods. Yet the more people participate, the higher their expectations concerning the outcome. This can he a very good thing if village expectations and donor possibilities coincide, since the process itself will build a momentum for change. However, it can cause problems when the villagers' expectations cannot be met by the activities of the donor who is conducting the study.
For example, an RA may be done on tenure and natural resource management such as the one that has been described in this manual. While the villagers may be interested in these issues and participate with great enthusiasm, their priority concern may turn out to be a school for local children. They may, for many reasons, feel that this is a more important issue than any of the natural resource concerns that the project expects to address.
In such a case, the project may find itself in the difficult position of facilitating a process in which the villagers express and prioritize their concerns. At the end, however, the project ignores the principal issues raised by the village and addresses those that appear first on its agenda. From the villagers perspective, the most important results of the study are being neglected
If an outside agency is unable to meet local expectations, as in this case of the school, this issue should be addressed frankly with the population and other solutions should be sought. This might involve collaborating with another agency that can respond to local concerns or passing on the request to the appropriate government agency.
The situation suggests the need to adapt project activities
It will often happen that the results of a village RA suggest that the project should retune its activities. Perhaps the study reveals a critical need to focus on pasture improvement, while activities of the project are oriented around trees. It may be found that the village has important reciprocal arrangements with other villages for using resources, while the project planned to promote policies excluding strangers from forest commons as part of a strategy for regenerating the resource.
Unfortunately the record in such cases is not very good: the most common outcome is that agencies simply ignore the information from the RA and proceed according to their own pre-established plan. Such projects are doomed to failure in the long run but, regrettably, that is often not a pressing consideration in the short and medium term. Projects that take the trouble to use methods like RA should be prepared to listen to what they learn in the field and to the extent possible to readjust their programme accordingly. Often, this puts the project staff who actually participate in the RA in the difficult position of trying to persuade others in the agency to change the programme to make it more responsive to local situations. Depending on the attitudes of co-workers and the flexibility of the agency, this may be a contentious issue or it may lead to an exciting process of adaptation through increased communications with the beneficiary population.
Participatory planning and the loss of control
The best kind of RA leads to a process of participatory planning in which the local population takes the lead in identifying the causes and the solutions for their problems. Outsiders may have a role in providing technical analysis and complementing the resources of the community with investments of knowledge or financial inputs that are not available locally, but they are not in charge of the process. The advantage of deferring to local leadership is, of course that the process is far more likely to be sustainable and to outlive the life of the project.
In many cases, donors have been reluctant to relinquish control over project activities so that the planning process can be locally based. If the donor agency has promised their funders three woodlots and twenty fields equipped with stone bunds by the end of three rainy seasons, they may be unwilling to let an open ended planning process proceed. There might in fact be nothing tangible to show by the end of three years, or it might be a compost pile instead of the bunds.
Projects which want to become more participatory but are constrained by donor expectations will have to engage in a process of education of their funders. It may be necessary to start with a small pilot in which RA and participatory planning activities so that they understand the importance of the process that is being undertaken. The next time they may agree to fund a more open-ended activity.
Villagers engaged in creative but illegal activities
It is not uncommon for RA studies to come upon highly creative and effective local resource management strategies that are against national laws. For example, villagers may borrow or even sell land in contravention of national land laws. They may carefully prune trees as they see fit when, according to forest rules, any cutting requires a permit. This creates a problem for the project that might like to write about these strategies, and perhaps even encourage their wider adoption. The options in this case depend very much on the responsiveness of the government in question. Certainly, information from an RA should not be used in any way that might result in serious sanctions on the village that provided the information. If the government is somewhat responsive to local concerns, however, the information may provide an opportunity to open a dialogue on the merits of the law, possible alternatives, and their impact on rural communities. Here again, RA can be used to inform and educate people who may have little knowledge of local realities.
The paralysis of dealing with complexity
After researching an area carefully, projects often gain a rather sobering appreciation of the complexity of the tenure situation in which they are planning to intervene. Good RA research almost invariably exposes issues of power and powerlessness as it tries to understand who makes the rules - and in whose interests the rules are made. While it may be informative on these issues, it does not, and cannot be expected to, provide easy answers on how to deal with these fundamental and persistently perplexing questions.
In deciding how to orient their natural resource activities, projects may be stymied by information suggesting that local tenure arrangements are in contravention of national policies. This puts them in the difficult position of having to decide which framework to use in implementing their activities, a tortuous choice given most projects' multiple constituencies. In most cases they work, at a minimum, with the local community, with local elites, and with government officials at different levels, each of whom will have its own expectations and interests. In addition, project activities are frequently subject to close scrutinization by outsiders who are eager to tap into the benefits of any intervention.
Once again, uncovering the information does not necessarily lead to unambiguous solutions. While local tenure arrangements may have clear advantages in terms of their appropriateness to the community's problems, they may not have broad enough authority to protect those resource users if they are challenged by outsiders. The government may or may not tolerate projects promoting local tenure systems. In some places government structures cast a blind eye on local tenure arrangements (or may even support the decentralization of such decisions), while in others there is active hostility and the authorities seek to force local rules to conform to national norms.
It is impossible to offer generalizable recommendations concerning these complex issues. Little more can be given than a word of warning. Projects that undertake research on these issues should be aware that the process of gathering information does not necessarily mean that clear answers will present themselves. In fact, the information collected may prove quite troubling when its full implications are thought through. An inability to deal with the complexity that characterizes local realities is a common cause of paralysis.
For the most part, good quality information can be used in a productive way, though it may require researchers and projects to review their prior assumptions and rethink their approaches. Good RA will highlight differences between insider and outsider approaches. It will expose issues of power and powerlessness. This may result in some rather perplexing dilemmas, but it is better to confront the issues frankly and search for solutions than to proceed as if the differences didn't exist.
Confronting the issues raised by participatory research is not likely to be an easy process, given the short-term imperatives of donors and governments. For participatory research to work, outsiders will have to become more humble in acknowledging that they do not have all the answers to complex development problems. They will have to become more willing to relinquish a certain amount of authority in the planning process and to leave a space so that local people can take greater leadership. And they will need to be more open to unpredictable outcomes that result from such a process. Information neglect occurs because it is much easier to ignore differences than to address the institutional issues needed to confront and reconcile them. In the end, getting good information is only the first hurdle. The information must also be used to increase our effectiveness in working with rural people. Otherwise, the emphasis on participation that is so central to RA will do little more than add yet another burden on the poor. This is the ultimate challenge to all of those who use and promote these techniques.