Participatory mapping and drawing of “rich pictures”
What: Different people have very different understanding of the concept of a landscape and often have trouble articulating their differences. This exercise involves participants drawing maps of their landscape, including all of the elements that are important to them, such as special forest areas or marketplaces. Getting stakeholders to draw the landscape on a large sheet of paper or white board as a facilitated group exercise helps to generate a valuable discussion of what people value in the landscape. This enables everyone to participate in planning and assessing conservation and development and is a valuable way of tapping into local knowledge.
When: This approach can be valuable at the initiation of a project of during implementation. It is especially valuable in situations where there are upstream and downstream linkages that need to be made explicit or where connectivity of habitats is an issue.
What’s the time investment?: Useful progress can be made in less than a day with a small group of stakeholders.
An example of participatory mapping
The Figure (below) shows the result of a participatory mapping exercise. Making
a map of the village and its surrounding landscape helps ICDP workers and local
residents and other interested groups to see what is important for them and
forms a basis for discussion on how the people would like to see their landscape
in the future. This exercise makes it easier to visualise the preferred
scenarios for the landscape. For example, this map shows us how important
infrastructure (e.g. roads) is for local development. From further discussion it
also became clear that the agricultural fields located nearer to the national
park were more often invaded and destroyed by gorillas and elephants.
