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Introduction
The hardships of poverty are well known to people living in natural forest areas in developing countries. Most of these people are used to the difficulties of living in remote places, far from adequate healthcare, education or cash earning opportunities. In the past, major development efforts have had difficulty reaching people who live in forested areas, and have considered the families that live there too marginal to serve. This may be changing. Many countries have shifted their budgets and decision making responsibility to local levels of government that are located physically closer to the people and forests, such as districts, municipalities, counties or panchayats (village councils). In most decentralised countries, local governments now have a mandate to reduce poverty. Local governments are well positioned to reduce the poverty of people in forests. Local governments can better understand the specific nature of poverty in their own locations and the relevant possibilities for reducing it. They have more opportunities for directly listening to and working with the poor. Local governments are often the local authority responsible for coordinating other development activities in their territory. But local governments in forest areas face huge challenges in efforts to reduce poverty. First, they must overcome the difficulties associated with dispersed, distant populations and poor infrastructure. Second, they need to carefully balance economic development, poverty reduction and natural resources management. Third, many are still newly formed and lack the capacity, authority or means to reduce poverty effectively. Fourth, many lack adequate communication channels that would help them better understand the problems and priorities that different groups of the poor may be facing. And last, but not least, local governments need to overcome corruption and elite capture, which often come at the expense of the poor. Local governments could better improve wellbeing if they had reliable tools and strategies to:
This source book offers four tools that local governments can use to better understand local poverty conditions and to plan and monitor actions for reducing poverty. While many tools exist at the national and international levels, local governments need approaches that they can adapt to their own circumstances. The tools in this source book draw on broad experiences in community planning and poverty monitoring in rural areas. They have been adapted to the forest context of our sites and should help to improve communication between local communities and local government to enable decision makers to adjust interventions to local needs, preferences and conditions. The tools are:
The tools are designed to be used by local governments, but local communities, NGOs or other user groups may also find them useful. Some tools may be better suited than others for a given place. Users will want to adapt the tools to their own contexts. The source book is organised in two parts. Part 1 provides background information on the locations where work was carried out leading to this source book, and on the methodologies used. It also introduces concepts related to poverty and wellbeing, and it briefly discusses the role of local government and forests in local people’s wellbeing. Part 2 describes the four tools and shows how to use them. The source book makes use of examples from sites in Indonesia and Bolivia, where the tools were developed and tested. Indonesia and Bolivia were selected to represent very different types of local governments in forest areas that were under differing degrees of pressure from development. We hope that local governments, development practitioners and civil society organisations will find the tools compiled here useful for their own work.
© 2007 Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) |
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