rural development experience in Third World Countries. HARRY ... in them. The third focus is on applying some of these lessons to the forestry sector, using as.
New Forests 2:41--64 (1988) © Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht -- Printed in the Netherlands
Review paper
Planning for appropriate forestry enterprises: lessons from rural development experience in Third World Countries HARRY W. BLAIR 1 & PORUS
D. OLPADWALA 2
i Dept. of Political Science, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA; 2 Dept. of Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA Received 14 November 1986; accepted 9 October 1987
Key words: forestry policy, forestry planning, social forestry, rural institutions, participation
Applications. Forestry planners in Third World situations, especially those working in the social forestry area, can draw upon the rich experience of recent decades in the more general area of rural development. Lessons from both successes and failures in rural development are useful to forestry planning.
Abstract. Over the last decade, forestry has become increasingly more involved with and integrated into the more general rural development (RD) process in the Third World. In doing so, forestry joins an activity that has itself been developing and maturing for some three decades and more, in the course of which a good deal of useful experience has been accumulated. This paper attempts to distill from that experience lessons that will be helpful in forestry development planning. This focus is first on the constraints that have affected RD, sometimes quite severely, in terms of resources, organization, policy, and the socio-political sphere. Second, the paper evaluates the experience with rural institutions as vehicles for promoting and nurturing RD, with particular emphasis on local organizations and popular participation in them. The third focus is on applying some of these lessons to the forestry sector, using as examples the issues of employment creation, regional growth, women's participation and distributional equity of development benefits.
Introduction Forestry and the international forestry profession have come to be viewed in recent years as integral parts of the more general rural development (RD) process. RD and forestry share a common policy environment which includes many similar socio-economic and management factors in addition to the geophysical features of the rural countryside. Many of the major constraints upon RD are observed to be paralleled and replicated in the forest sector, for example, the generally biased distribution of assets and income, and the tendency for development specialists to work with those already better-off. There is, moreover, a growing awareness among development professionals
42 concerned with both sets of activities that a clear mutual need exists for each other's help and support in the common fight against rural poverty. RD could gain from such an association through forestry's ability to develop new rural assets that have not been part of the RD spectrum. Forestry's benefit would come from tapping into RD's long experience of working with farmers. Both would be benefited by closer and more efficient planning, and the avoidance of duplication and waste. This paper attempts to outline some of the clearer and more useful links between the two sectors. It derives principles and lessons from the general RD experience, and then applies them in an exploratory way to forestry in an effort to ascertain their applicability and use for forestry professionals in their capacities as RD practitioners. It begins with a discussion of the many and varied constraints upon RD (Section II). This is followed by an analysis of important lessons learned from the RD experience (Section III) and subsequently an attempt to apply these tenets to the forestry sector in a tentative way (Section IV). Special attention is given throughout to the role of rural institutions (RI) in the development of forestry enterprises. Perhaps one of the most important lessons of RD has been the key role of such institutions in bringing concrete benefits to the rural poor; RI merit a central place in development strategy, for it seems that there is no other way which is as effective to ensure the participation of lower income groups. We need to clarify some definitional issues before we begin. The term institution is used in its broadest sense to include both organizations and larger social arrangements, and/or systems which surround organizations. Similarly, forest enterprise is also broadly defined as any production activity which involves forestry, particularly those activities that have been recently the focus of interest in the international development community, such as agroforestry, social forestry, etc. Appropriate enterprises are those which generate maximum employment and income, in the most direct fashion possible, for the widest number of people at the local level and in particular the rural poor, in keeping with principles of sustained yield and environmental soundness. And finally, by rural development we refer to the efforts made by the international development community (both donors and recipients of aid) in recent decades to promote economic growth, improve living standards and enhance distributional equity in rural areas of the Third World. It is only within the last decade or so that forestry has come to be a part of RD, and the process of integration is still far from complete. The major purpose of this paper is to facilitate that long overdue integration by distilling and analyzing some of the major lessons of RD experience.
43
Constraints to development: limits to change RD processes can be limited or thwarted by a large number of physical and social constraints. These constraints are dynamic and always in a state of flux, but for our purposes can be grouped into four basic categories. Resource constraints reflect shortages in natural and/or human resources. Organizational constraints affect RD efforts through their presence both within and between organizations. Policy constraints are principally the unintended negative results of well-meaning policy interventions. Such interventions may take place within or outside the RD sphere and result in retrogressive effects for rural and agricultural development. Part of the reason for such reverses lies in structural constraints, which are found in the very way the socioeconomic system is put together. Resource constraints and the unique case of time as a special resource
The concept of natural resource constraints is probably the simplest to grasp and is basically self-explanatory. Societies are historically bound by their stocks of physical and human resources assets. The non-availability of land, of water, or unsuitable climatic conditions are obvious examples. These distributions have to be factored into development efforts very carefully if serious results are intended. Augmenting such resources, or developing them, is an expensive and lengthy yet integral part of the development process. Somewhat less obvious as a resource is time. Everyone involved in the business of economic development wants quick results, whether for an economic recovery program in an industrialized Western economy, or an agricultural credit-fertilizer project or community woodlot-fodder scheme in a developing area. Politicians and civil service officials are invariably under pressure to show relatively quick results. However, when success comes to RD programs, it rarely if ever does so in two, three, or even five years. Even when it materializes in a comparatively short period, there are often deeper and historically longer-term explanations. For example, although the Green Revolution in Indian wheat would seem at first glance to have occurred in a seven-year period in the 1960s (Brown 1974), a deeper look shows that the conditions for this achievement had in fact been laid down over the previous 70 years, beginning with the "canal colonies" that were started in the Punjab around the turn of the century (e.g. Raulet 1976). Longer time horizons, then, are important and necessary in RD, though perhaps not always the 60-plus years experienced by the Punjab or the 40 and more taken by a country like Taiwan, where modern agricultural infrastructure dates from the 1920s. This is also the case for forestry, as illustrated in such successful experiences as the Village Forestry Associations
44 in South Korea and the Community Forestry Wing in the state of Gujarat, India (Eckholm 1979). To look beyond individual development projects such as these toward any enduring socio-economic change affecting rural society generally would mean longer periods, perhaps 20 years and beyond (Blair 1982). However, even a "mere" 15 years or so is still a lot more than most politicians and administrators are willing to think of (or, for that matter, officials in the international development community, who have their own careers to get on with and their own funding constituencies to satisfy). Fortunately, though, foresters are accustomed to thinking in terms of longer cycles and so should find this time constraint instinctively less burdensome than their colleagues in the agricultural sector, for whom a 150-day crop can be a very long one indeed.
Organizational constraints Four common types of constraints may be identified within organizations implementing RD programs. They relate to problems of scaling up pilot projects to full-fledged efforts, concern with centralization vs. decentralization, the question of past success inhibiting further (future) changes, and the organizational contradictions between regulation and promotion. Pilot projects are envisioned as forerunners of large-scale activities. They are intended to introduce and test ideas until the model in question is prefected and replicated. Because of special circumstances surrounding them, they receive greater and/or more qualitatively advanced levels of leadership, personnel and funding. In addition, they benefit from direct communication between the project in the field and higher authority, sometimes reaching cabinet or the chief-of-state level, without going through intervening layers of bureaucracy. For instance, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru took direct personal interest in the Community Development scheme in India in its early phases, as did President Julius Nyerere in the beginning stages of the Ujamaa movement in Tanzania (Mayer 1958; Fortmann 1980). These special links reduce bottlenecks and slippages, and mean that intermediate government officials, aware of the high-level patronage, are less likely to interfere. Once the pilot becomes a full-scale program, however, the artificial conditions disappear, and it becomes just another branch of government, subject to all the bureaucratic constraints of red tape, inertia, corruption, etc., that beset government enterprises generally. Centralization is needed in any organization to enhance accountability, control, and uniformity in decision making. At the same time, decentralization is needed to encourage innovation and initiative. The obvious problem is that it is necessary for organizations to move in both directions at once, but
45 any significant movement in either direction creates further problems from the direction not chosen. A program emphasizing centralized control, for instance, tends to eliminate scope for local initiative because the overriding concern is for everything to be done in the same way and no account can be taken of local variation. Decentralization on the other hand runs the risk of making field officials too dependent upon (and sometimes too involved with) their local publics. Thus RD efforts must focus on devising an appropriate balance, for neither highly centralized nor decentralized arrangements are likely to lead to favorable results. (For an overview of the large literature on decentralization and development, see Conyers 1986). Past success can also be an organizational constraint. Civilian organizations (like generals) are given to reenacting past successes (wars) and often have trouble in changing to meet new conditions. Irrigation engineering offers examples of this in the RD field. Large scale surface water projects such as the Aswan Dam in Egypt, the Gezira scheme in the Sudan, or the Punjab canal project in British India were all hailed as great successes in their time, and became models of irrigation engineering. Unfortunately, however, the professional tradition that goes with big dams and large command areas now stands in the way of working with small tubewells and small command areas, even though the latter may well give more irrigated hectarage for the money and be better suited for particular crops or environments. Convincing irrigation engineers to "think small" after they have done well at "thinking big" can be a very hard thing to do. Finally, the tussle between regulation and promotion is a longstanding organizational constraint in RD which is also familiar to forestry. It resembles the centralization vs. decentralization dilemma in that the development process needs both concurrently. Transforming forestry services from regulatory agencies to RD extension organizations is often depicted as a matter of turning forest guards into extension agents, or changing policemen into salesmen, and is considered a difficult though potentially very valuable thing to achieve. The roots of the matter go far deeper than forestry, though, and extend way beyond the forest sector. Rural people have long distrusted government, mostly for good reason, as historically its relation to the rural citizenry has been substantially one of overseer, rule-enforcer, extortionist and bribe-taker. Accordingly, the history of RD in the last 30 years has in many ways been an attempt to graft a public relations and promotional role to such a traditional police mission (see, e.g. LaPalombara 1963). This is the context in which forestry finds itself commencing its own RD efforts. Not only is there its own past experience of relating to the citizenry to be dealt with, but also that of the overall RD sector. Thus it is not surprising that villagers find it difficult to believe that village woodlots will ever really belong to them, forestry department protestations notwithstanding, or that official
46 support for recommended innovative practices will not suddenly disappear or be withdrawn.
Policy and structural constraints Many RD policies appear almost inevitably to have detrimental side-effects. Whether these are caused by miscalculation or incompetence, or are the results of the operation of the larger political economy, their effects can be quite severe on welfare and development. Four kinds of policy constraints are considered here. They are those which: -- favor urban over rural interests; concentrate rather than distribute income; -- systematically displace labor; and finally, -- promote cash crops to the detriment of food crops.
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There are a number of factors and influences that lead to urban interests being better served than rural ones. Moving resources out of agriculture and into industry is a common pattern, for a number of theoretical, ideological, and practical reasons (Johnstone and Kilby 1979; Mellor 1966, 1976). In terms of development strategy, agriculture is seen as both slower growing and less efficient than industry, requiring a transfer of resources from the former to the latter to maximize growth. On a more practical level, the simple reality that it is much easier to organize compact urban masses than thinly spread rural populations for support or protest leads very directly to policies favoring urban interests. For these and other reasons, we find a great imbalance between city and country as we look around most of the world -with the former epitomizing comparative well-being and the latter poverty. The effects of "urban bias" would seem a priori to be less obvious in the forestry sector, but nonetheless may be very real. One example might be governmental encouragement, either direct or indirect, of charcoal consumption in the cities without any concomitant effort to promote greater or more efficient production. This could result in wasteful amounts of fuelwood resources being used for making charcoal, as well as rural consumers losing out to their more privileged urban counterparts (who can afford to pay more) in the heightened competition for fuel. The history of rural development is littered with examples of failed policies which had been originally designed to benefit all sectors of rural society, or even to focus upon lower income strata in particular, but which in practice resulted in concentrating income gains towards the rich. At least three policy types can be identified here. First, policies which were socially neutral in theory have often favored groups already established, for the policy "neu-
47 trality" by definition did not contain any special features to countervail the existing strengths of the privileged. Other policies, especially in the "trickledown" period of growth-first/distribution-later economic development plans of the 1960s, were designed to aid the rich first as the best means of getting down to the poor. And third, even those policies specifically designed to assist the poorest were in many cases co-opted by the more privileged classes. Much of the community development strategy of the 1950s and early 1960s was premised on the idea of an economically homogeneous, or classless, countryside. Projects were based upon the expressed "felt needs" of a community's "natural leaders" (to use the terminology then in vogue). In a classless environment it was assumed that the privileged would speak for all equally and would use their advantages and position to advance in a rational and balanced way the overall community interest. As became apparent throughout the community development movement in ensuing years, however, "natural leaders" tended to be concerned much more with their own welfare than with that of the overall community and tended to take the lion's share of program benefit for themselves (see Myrdal 1968, for an extensive analysis). Fortunately, not all RD schemes have been so relatively unsophisticated. Other programs have been more discriminating in concept and design, taking into account rural differentiation and the separation of people into classes or strata. However, many of these still aim to benefit the "progressive," marketoriented landowning classes initially, hoping for an eventual "trickle-down." The problem, of course, is that "progressive" farmers are also generally the rich ones. They have more education to apply, more land to experiment with, and, most important, more surplus income to provide a cushion against the risks of a new technology. Then if the innovations work, the entrepreneurial "risk-takers" get a head start on their less fortunate competitors and improve their relative position even further (e.g. Saint and Coward 1977). This dilemma should be remembered as forestry planners contemplate their own extension schemes. One of the cautionary tales that emerged from the Gujarat community forestry experience mentioned earlier, for example, is that there appears to have been a definite big farmer bias at the beginning of the program. Over the first four years, about 57% of the seedlings distributed for farm forestry went to farmers holding more than two hectares of land (about 28% of the households participating in the project). As one study done within the state Forestry Department observed: There is no denying the fact that initially big farmers were in the fore-front to grab the advantage of free distribution of seedlings, but this could be explained by the fact that for adoption of the innovative ideas of a change
48 from traditional practices, it is always the big and well-to-do farmers, who could afford to take financial risks, and active interest in innovations and changes (Java 1985). Efforts can be made to steer more project activities toward the rural poor, but such efforts tend to be futile for the most part against overwhelming bureaucratic pressure from the top to meet and exceed numerical targets. Extension foresters are constantly urged to distribute more seedlings and to assist the recipients in making sure they will survive. Clearly these targets are best achieved by giving large numbers of seedings to a few farmers, who subsequently could be relatively easily assisted to achieve a high survival rate. Furthermore, since the larger and/or richer farmers are much more likely to be literate, less suspicious of outsiders and more willing (and able) to offer legal and extra-legal compensations, they are far more pleasant to deal with. From the extension forester's point of view, giving a few seedlings each to great numbers of marginal farmers is not the best way to meet targets, get good personnel evaluation reports, and/or further a career. This is of course a familiar RD story and could be told about countless efforts at crop innovation, fertilizer promotion, credit distribution, and so on. It should come as no surprise to find the tale repeated in social forestry. Perversion of project goals to favor the rural rich also stems from the nature of the rural political economy itself. Landowning is still the principal source of power in the countryside and, since landowning is highly unequal in most less developed countries, an unequal power structure results. This inequality is reinforced by other status-determining factors such as ancestry, ethnicity, education and access to non-land assets or income. The result is a social, political and economic pyramid with a few relatively powerful and wealthy people at the top and increasing deprivation lower down the scale. Given this reality, it is hardly surprising that new resources tend to follow the lines of distribution already well in place. Rural development programs at local levels have a propensity to follow the patterns of power and wealth already extant, and what is worse, usually reinforce and exacerbate them. A very large portion of international development efforts in the 1970s was concerned with employment creation. Providing an adequate number of jobs in the economy became a keystone of most if not all national development plans. A wide variety of short- and long-term policies were devised to ensure that end, yet experience shows that many of these plans not only failed to generate much employment but often actually displaced labor as well. There are many reasons for such failure, as might be expected in any complex situation, but one in particular stands out for both the micro- and
49 macro-environments. O n the micro-side, employment generation is clearly not a concern of the private sector, and so does not figure in industrial planning at the firm level. On the contrary, it might be argued that employment reduction if anything, is a goal of business at the micro level (Olpadwala 1985). Wages are a major and often principal cost factor for many businesses, which consequently try to minimize them. There are also indirect (non-wage) benefits to smaller labor forces such as reduced personnel problems, disruptions, strikes, etc., which are taken into account when making staffing decisions. All these factors conduce towards labor-displacement through mechanization and other means. In RD this is evidenced by a secular movement towards mechanization and a tendency (as in the case of some Green Revolution areas of India and Pakistan) to replace hired labor by family labor. Production switches between commodities are also known to have been made primarily to lower labor costs, for instance from crops to beef cattle in Central America (Dorner and Quiros 1973). On the macro-side, the imperative of employment, no matter how much attention it receives, is almost invariably superseded by one goal with an even higher priority: production. Unfortunately this ranking by itself is often enough to negate potential employment gains from new technologies. In Pakistan, for instance, the government wanted to capitalize on the use of the new Green Revolution grain varieties to vastly increase production, and so offered substantial subsidies for the import of tractors, thereby encouraging landowners to substitute machinery for labor power (Gotsch 1973). Other well-intentioned policies have had similar negative results. When governments have increased food (procurement) prices, for instance, in order to encourage farmers to grow more food, they have in some cases in effect enouraged them to evict their tenants and sharecroppers on once-marginal lands, so that they themselves could resume production. On the other hand, there are cases like Mexico where the government has held down the procurement price of the main staple crop (maize), with the result that farmers have switched in large numbers over to sorghum, which is not controlled but which is not eaten by humans either. It goes to feed an expanding livestock industry, while many poor people who earlier had enough maize to eat now go on short rations (Walsh 1985). The problem of labor displacement should also be of concern for forestry, particularly in farm forestry and/or agroforestry enterprises. For example, governments many wish to encourage farmers to grow fuelwood, pulpwood or fodder on their land, even at the cost of some crop displacement. But if, as is likely judging from experience, a principal motivation of farmers switching to such farm forestry is a reduction in their labor bill, workers are going to be thrown out of jobs. A government may finally decide that even such a trade-off is worthwhile, but at the very least such a decision should be the
50 result of a careful weighing of costs and benefits rather than an unanticipated consequence. If, as may well be the case, the costs are mostly borne by the poor and gains reaped by the rich, there would be a strong case for modifying or dropping the project. A frequent problem in RD has been the tendency for successful cash crops and other agricultural export activities to displace staple food crops and the people who grow them. The common pattern is for an export activity to buy out or evict peasant farmers from the best land, and set up large scale operations which are generally much more mechanized. Some of the "more privileged" displaced peasants are hired as wage laborers, and resettled on more marginal lands so that they can eke out some subsistence food production, but the new work force becomes subject to the vagaries of the international commodities market and finds itself under- or unemployed as world commodity prices fluctuate. In such circumstances, marginal lands are far from adequate to provide full subsistence, and much suffering ensues. From the RD point of view, the whole process is a retrogression, and, in some cases such as the Sahel (e.g. Franke and Chasin 1980), a very severe one as overall rural poverty increases rather than decreases. National planners justify this sort of development by pointing out the pressing need for foreign exchange in most LDCs. Given a strong demand for hard currency and in most cases a very limited export base, governments are forced to turn to the only products they have in a realistic bid to earn exchange. In the forestry context, efforts to spur wood production for industrial/commercial use may well fall into this category. The issue here goes beyond just replacing subsistence crops by export commodities. It also includes all such replacements, even if they are purely for domestic purposes, such as fast growing wood for thermal power plants or pulp mills as in south India (Bandopadhyay et al. 1981).
Rural institutions and local organizations It is one of the sorry enigmas of recent RD experience that, despite massive amounts of first-rate human and material resources that have been committed to this endeavor, the overall results so far are what can only be described as disappointing, even at best. If nothing else, this bears powerful testimony to the strength of the constraints just discussed. Despite this bleak general condition, however, there do exist particular instances of demonstrable success. I', this section we attempt to distill recent RD experience to identify salient features associated with such successes, and to relate these to the forestry sector. In so doing we stress the essential place of participation
51 in the RD process, and the key roles of all forms of rural institutions (RIs), especially local organization (LO), in furthering participation.
Ingredients of rural development success Analysis of successful efforts in RD experience over the last twenty-five years indicates at least seven common factors. First, there have been elements of strong leadership, very often that of a gifted, visionary, technically proficient and hard-driving individual. But there are limits to the effectiveness of any individual, no matter how exceptional, which points to the importance, second, of group leadership, and the presence of a dedicated and adequate supply of professional and semiprofessional cadre. Third, most successful RD programs have had the benefit of shielding from bureaucratic and political interference. This has enabled them to concentrate on their goals in a focused way and to avoid non-programmatic distractions. Fourth, and somewhat paradoxically, this insulation has been brought about not so much by a severance as by a cementing of bureaucratic and political links at the highest levels, thus bypassing obstructive middle echelons on both the bureaucratic (e.g. officials protecting departmental flanks against new programmatic incursions) and the political (e.g. regional party chieftains intervening to bolster local patronage) sides. In other words, support from the highest national level has helped maintain a steady flow of resources and cleared numerous obstacles. Fifth, most successful projects laid great stress on rigorous monitoring and oversight. For example, all records, including especially accounting records, were scrupulously maintained and checked, and care taken to bolster both the image and reality of administrative honesty. Sixth, a "learning-process" approach (Korten 1980) was employed in most such RD activity. There was continued insistence on self-examination and self-criticism, coupled with a willingness (or even eagerness) to change things for the better. The emphasis was on admitting mistakes and learning from experience, including an openness to learn from the intended project beneficiaries -- a novel attitude in any governmental setting. The seventh and in a very real sense crucial factor, which has been an essential ingredient in every long-term RD success, has been people's participation, primarily in the context of rural institutions (RIs) and local organizations (LOs). The latter in particular have come to be regarded in the RD field as an exceptionally potent force, and the next section takes up their characteristics, functions and contributions. All seven elements have not been present in very RD success, but one combination or another of them has attended v{rtually every RD enterprise that has worked. Two excellent examples of RD success incorporating these
52 seven ingredients are the early years of the Comilla Project in Bangladesh and the Anand Milk Producers' Union in India (both discussed in detail in Blair and Olpadwala, forthcoming). Not surprisingly, they are also present in cases of forestry success, e.g. local organizations were the centerpiece of the village forestry effort in South Korea, and high-quality professional staff played a very important role in both the South Korean experience and that of the Gujarat community forestry project in India. In addition, both these projects consciously used their own experiences -- particularly their failures as learning processes over the years, continually redesigning and refocusing their efforts until success could be attained. -
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The universe of rural institutions and the central role of local organizations RIs are perhaps best thought of as channels through which rural people govern local activities, organize themselves economically and articulate their problems and needs to "higher level" political and administrative systems. These institutional channels have been identified in several studies 1 of rural institutions and participation in rural development, and can be separated into seven major categories along a (very rough) public-to-private-sector continuum: central/federal government agencies parastatal bodies local governments local organizations political associations -- local (small scale) private enterprise -- large-scale private enterprise -
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The LO category falls approximately in the center of the array, thereby representing its ability to blend in one body the best qualities of the public and private sectors -- the accountability of the former with the incentiveproviding capability of the latter. A second distinguishing feature of the LO is its basis in its membership. L O s may be sponsored by governments (though often they are not) and they may be set up to make profits (though this is rarely their central purpose and may not be a priority at all). But they are all institutions based on and accountable to a local membership, organized around local activities of interest to that membership. A number of tasks may be identified for LOs. Planning and goal-setting is an important contributor to overall performance. Locally-initiated, consultative, and/or shared approaches to gathering information and identifying what can be done within local constraints and opportunities can be decisive in ensuring that goals and objectives are set realistically. Thus there should be
53 widespread applicability for Korten's (1980) "learning process" approach, which focuses on participation-induced change in the planning, implementation and evaluation of projects. As Korten points out, success tends to be elusive when project implementation is carried out strictly according to blueprints imposed from a higher level, or when planning and goal-setting are not conducted in a participatory environment. Conflict management is another internal task which is important, particularly where sensitive issues of land allocation and/or distribution of rewards from resource management are at stake. Up to a point, it is useful to view conflict as desirable, for an apparently complete absence of conflict usually is a good indication of monolithic and exploitative control from above, whereas its presence in some limited measure indicates involvement and concern on the part of rural people regarding the performance of the institutions that serve them. The important thing, accordingly, is not to suppress conflict but rather to resolve it. The ability of an organization to manage and channel conflict between members in productive ways is a function of leadership, and the strength of participatory norms inculcated in the membership. An example would be the ability of a local government institution to manage conflict between one village faction (say, one that wished to use a village woodlot for fuelwood production) and another (one that wanted the woodlot for fodder). Another example would be its ability to deal with a conflict between a small, wealthy group wishing to divert the benefits from a community woodlot to itself and a larger, poorer group wanting a more even division of benefits. Resource-using tasks require a subtle balance between external support and internal reliance to secure adequate and sustainable results. Resource mobilization at the outset and throughout the execution of project activity is affected by the quality of leadership and the extent to which members develop a sense of proprietorship over the results of their efforts. If the primary investment of financial, physical and human resources originates outside the group expected to benefit from them, a pattern of dependency may be fostered from which it is difficult to break away without weakening institutional performance (e.g. Blustain 1982). Often considerable managerial effort will be required from project managers to avoid such dependence. Fortunately, forestry enterprises are by tradition better situated than most in this regard, because of the long-standing emphasis on production forestry as a revenue-producing rather than revenue-consuming activity. A tradition of viability, in other words, is already present and should be transferable to the more RD-oriented social forestry sector. Managing resources once mobilized demands both skill and honesty of those who become responsible for coordinating their management. Institutions can play a helpful role in this process, through providing training,
54 instilling protective attitudes toward the resources, conducting periodic monitoring to assess progress and constraints, and suggesting possible avenues for improvement in management practices. Here forestry has the advantage of its long record of resource protection, but at the same time is burdened with the debility of an equally long record of corruption and consequent mismanagement of the protected resource in many cases. The provision and integration of services is the essence of most RIs -- if they don't perform well on this score, there is little incentive for local people to continue to support them. Rural institutions may provide services either autonomously or in collaboration with external institutional support. Thus far the potential gains derived from using LOs as service providers have so far not been widely appreciated, although these benefits include mobilization of local resources and participation in service distribution to assume broad benefit (see, e.g. Field 1980 on the service, delivery and performance potential of the Kottar Social Service Society in India). The last task concerns control over the bureaucracy and on claim-making by rural institutions. This is the extent to which RIs can hold government officials accountable (e.g. by putting pressure on higher levels of an agency to enforce performance standards for its field officers) and can deploy their organizational resources to ask for the provision of new government services (for instance, demanding advice on combatting a crop pest epidemic). LOs can play a crucial role here, because while people who are eligible for services or funds are generally aware of bureaucratic failures to deliver and recognize the need for new services, they have difficulty in making themselves heard as individuals. The collective channels that LOs can very effectively provide can give them the voice required to make higher levels listen and take them seriously.
The importance of participation It should be clear by this stage that people's direct participation is a crucial element in RD success, but it is worth pointing out that this was not so clear until quite recently. Previously, the idea of broad masses of rural people having an important -- let alone crucial -- say in their own development was comparatively rare. So was the notion that common people had the potential to take charge of their own lives. On the contrary, most development efforts relied on the relatively privileged few to provide the needed impetus through an essentially top-down management. Today, however, people's participation has come to be accepted as vitally important. Though it has proven a difficult concept to define and measure, theoretical and empirical works have exhibited a growing competence and sophistication in studying the idea. This is particularly true of the area of
55 participation in the design and decision-making phases of development, where there has been significant work, much of it substantiating earlier theoretical constructs (see, e.g. Goldsmith and Blustain 1980; Fortmann and Roe 1981; Chambers 1983). LOs foster participation in a number of ways. By providing a grassrootsbased intermediary body between government and individuals, they help both in receiving and equitably disbursing resources from government and in making claims upon it. Governments are increasingly realizing that they do not have adequate resources to provide the desired level of services to individual households. They can, however, deal adequately with larger population groups which are aggregated at higher levels and thus can benefit from the group-based nature of LOs. On the demand or claim-making side, LOs can ensure the participation of local-level people in administration by serving as their organized voice. In both capacities, therefore, LOs promote grassroots participation, and serve to combine the efforts of otherwise comparatively powerless individual people into a purposeful force for RD. In a reciprocal fashion, participation helps LOs succeed. LOs are prone to a large number of pathologies or "vulnerabilities" as Esman and Uphoff (1984: 181--202) term them, including resistance from the outside, internal dissensions and fissures, elite domination, ineffectiveness of action, malpractices (including corruption), and subordination to external factors, including (and especially) government. Participation is a necessary factor in the control or elimination of all these problems. Greater involvement by the people in contributing (additional) resources, sharing responsibilities, resolving divisions, and holding leadership accountable improves the health and functioning of LOs, and in the process increases the chances for RD success.
Rural institutions and enterprises in forestry
From what has been covered so far, it appears that the RD experience has much to offer the forestry field. In this section we explore this contribution more concretely in four areas: - - employment creation
-- balanced growth between regions -- the role of women in agricultural production -- equity
Employment creation After attaining sufficient food production to feed a country's citizens, the
56 next priority for any nation has to be creating enough employment to enable those citizens to have access to that food, whether by producing it themselves or by purchasing it. Forestry and forest-related activities should have potential for employment generation if technological aspects are appropriately handled, particularly if some flexibility exists in determining the capital/labor mix to be used (or example, in charcoal operations or production of fiber and particle boards). Many forestry activities also offer a potential to vary the scale of operation, thereby allowing more labor-intensive methods in smallerscale activity. In addition, even with capital-intensive manufacturing processes, there exists the potential for using labor-intensive methods both before and after the production process itself (e.g. handling of raw material, packaging, transportation, etc.). All these options should be especially attractive in areas where wages are relatively low to begin with. Finally, technological ability to broaden the raw material base for forest-related products, and to more fully utilize forest crops, also appears to be promising. If these opportunities were acted upon in a socially sensitive way (and if private enterprise can be induced to think in such a way -- see Olpadwala 1985, for an analysis of this issue), the employment created as a result could be substantial. Cottage-level and intermediate forest enterprises should be encouraged for a number of reasons. First, small-scale rural enterprises are usually more labor intensive than their larger counterparts. -- Second, average income of rural non-farm households is somewhat higher than that of households with very small farms (though both of course are still substantially below large farm household or urban incomes). -- Third, strong backward and forward linkages connect rural non-farm activities with other sectors of the economy, particularly agriculture (that is, each sector both buys from and sells to the others). -- Fourth, rural small-scale enterprises generally use capital more productively than large-scale ones. Fifth, evidence exists that rural handicrafts and cottage industries provide a training ground for future skilled labor. Finally, savings and investment ratios in the rural non-farm industrial sector are at least as high as for their urban counterparts (Chuta and Liedholm 1979). -
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At the same time, there are at least two major problems that forestry enterprises face, in common with all rural off-farm endeavors. The first concerns the acceptable and established rural social behavior patterns which are oriented to the rhythms of the agricultural cycle, with its peak and slack work periods, seasonal festivals, etc., and thus are incongruous with the time, discipline and productivity demands of profit-motivated industries
57 (Thompson 1967). The transition from the one mode to the other, which has caused so much anxiety and distress throughout the world in the past, is at best a very uneasy one, and great care and sensitivity must be taken in its management. The second, and related, concern is about balancing industrial-employment with farm-related production activities, subsistence or otherwise. Since forest industries are often rural-based, it is likely that many workers would continue some farming activity along with their forestry jobs. For the enterprise this is beneficial, because some portion of the workers' sustenance comes from outside the enterprise itself (subsidy to the firm), yet it is also problematic because seasonal agricultural demands might well conflict with periods of peak forest product output. From the workers' point of view, acquiescing with management's desire to put obligation to the firm first might bring gains in the form of full-time, year-round employment. On the other hand, because of the very low wages, farm-linked supplementary income is all too often essential in ensuring a minimally tolerable existence. In addition, it serves as an insurance against market-determined layoffs and dismissals, a necessity given the volatile nature of many forest product markets. And certainly in the case of industries based on long-gestation forestry products, short-gestation subsistence crops as a backup can reduce risk considerably for the work force. Obviously these opposing concerns are neither immobile nor irreconcilable. By the same token, however, neither are they trivial. The potential for off-farm industrial enterprises in the forestry sector to contribute to rural employment generation is very large, but great care must be taken lest the private objectives of enterprises in seeking dependable and low-cost labor turn out to contradict these larger social goals of increasing incomes.
Regional growth and regional control Forestry as a discipline has for many years been concerned with regional analysis and promoting regional balance. Dealing with upstream deforestation and downstream environmental impact has long been a core focus in watershed management, for instance, and here the forestry experience would be most instructive to the general RD community. One aspect of regional analysis in the RD field that would be useful to forestry is the question of spatial allocation of activity and control. Often there is the surface hum of activity and progress in a region, but actual development is not taking place because the real benefits are going elsewhere. This pattern is especially common with extractive industries like lr0ning and forestry, in which local labor payrolls (generally at very low wages) for resource removal are the only real benefit going to the region of origin, with the processing, end use and
58 profits all going elsewhere. The many available examples of this, in the advanced countries (e.g. Caudill 1962, on the American Appalachian region) as well as in developing ones (e.g. Barkin 1972/73, on Mexico), all seem to point to the paramount importance of the element of control in determining regional success or failure. Where resources are located or invested is often less important than where they are controlled, for it is the latter that determines who are to be the ultimate beneficiaries. RIs could pay particular attention to two factors to advance the chances of developing regionally balanced forestry enterprises. First, insofar as possible, investment should be locally raised, owned and controlled. Among other things, this would ensure that both wages and profit are captured by the region, not just the former. Second, care should be taken to maximize value-added at the local/regional level. As much processing as possible should be done locally, and priority should be given to increasing the number of additional or successively more sophisticated levels of manufacture which might be undertaken in the region. Doing so guarantees the local retention of progressively larger manufacturing-related benefits, mainly in the form of greater wages payable to area residents, and thereby encourages development.
Women in rural development A significant initiative in the recent RD past has been related to the growing concern about the role of women in the development/growth process. Previously women's contribution in the countryside was largely overlooked, minimized, or ignored. Even though in most low-income rural settings it is women who provide a substantial amount of production labor (this in addition to their other household and family-rearing activities), they have historically been given little place in development plans, let alone a role commensurate with their past contribution and future potential (e.g. Boserup 1970; Fraser 1977; Buvinic and Youssef 1978). A number of RD authors stress the extremely crowded and overworked nature of women's workdays as perhaps the single most oppressive problem they face (Boserup and Lijencrantz 1975; Palmer 1979; Acharya and Bennett 1983). The issue of time is clearly also very germane to the forestry sector. For example, the gathering and storage of fuelwood is largely a woman's task worldwide. Consequently, development activities geared towards improving the fuelwood situation would have a considerable impact on women and their allocation of time. If woodlot projects to grow fuelwood are successful, then women would be benefited. If, however, they do not come to fruition, or their produce is diverted to other uses such as poles or pulpwood, then women will suffer. It is important to note in this context that there is a difference between the last two outcomes. If a woodlot project fails totally,
59 the damage to women is apparent. If, however, the woodlot succeeds but the output is diverted to non-fuelwood uses, then the negative impact on women is probably still as harsh and is compounded by the fact that the overall aura of success of the woodlot would obscure their plight (for a case study, see Blair 1986). Then there are cases where projects succeed in improving conditions for the general population, but at the same time have detrimental effects on rural women. The labor-saving effects of many development efforts is an example. Since landless agricultural laborers on many areas are women as well as men, they are as adversely affected by farm mechanization. Off-farm food processing is another example. This is a comparatively skilled occupation which benefits many rural women who by social mandate are required to stay indoors, as in Muslim Bangladesh, where rice husking traditionally provided home income. When innovations there substituted other more efficient forms of rice milling, rural women lost drastically, even though overall production and efficiency improved (Greeley 1982). Similar situations in forestry and forestry products are easy to envisage here, for example, the effects of successful woodlot projects on women who earn a living by gathering and selling firewood. One potentially very positive RD experience to be noted is the number of efforts that have been underway for several years to establish women's cooperatives, often with some success. Kneerim (1980) documents the fruitful efforts of the Mraru Women's Association in Kenya organizing bus co-ops to gain access to male dominated markets, and then expanding into other ventures. Similarly, the positive experiences of the La Libertad Women's Co-op in Bolivia (Wasserstrom 1982) and others (e.g. Hartfield 1982) would also be relevant and useful when considering the adoption of cooperatives for forestry development. Women's co-ops seem to have avoided some of the worst dangers and pitfalls of this form of activity in many cases and could be emulated to advantage.
Forestry and rural equity In a world built around the notion of private property in which the only true route to economic participation lies in the ownership and use of some productive asset, any expansion of equity must necessarily involve property. Two basic choices are theoretically possible here: either redistribute existing assets to include the deprived or provide new assets for distribution to the assetless. In the rural agricultural sector, where .the principal asset is land, the first alternative would entail land reform. This type of change has historically been still-born, except under extremely unusual and volatile situations, such as those pertaining in China after its revolution or in Japan after World War
60 II (King 1977). Given the inequitable social situation in most countries, genuine land reforms are understandably rare. With land ownership so important, those who have it, whether in small or large quantities, are not going to give it up easily. The second remedial alternative, devising or creating new assets to distribute, is not greatly useful here either, if we consider only land. Today most of the world's usable land is either already under cultivation, or definitely privatized even if not in current use. Of the few sizeable tracts remaining, such as in Amazonian Brazil, the effort required to bring them under cultivation (aside from all the well-known ecological questions involved) would be immense in terms of financial, administrative and human costs, and in any case for the vast majority of the world's rural poor there is no such possibility. The only remaining possibility, therefore, is to create new assets in the countryside which are not associated with or dependent upon land, and which could be owned by and kept under the productive control of the currently assetless poor. These new assets are arguably easier to allocate or distribute to new owners than are existing resources, at least at the beginning. Such assets will be subject to pressure, attention and even seizure by locally vested interests, most likely, but they can provide a start toward a more equitable dispensation. Forestry seems to offer considerable scope in this context, as it represents in one sense what amounts to a new resource in the rural community (e.g. the usufruct of government reserve land that has become degraded wasteland). As new resources, these need not necessarily be allocated according to the old distributional patterns, especially those of privately held land. 2 Several possibilities exist for development of activities that could mean new patterns of benefit distribution. Community woodlots which are planted on public lands bring a new resource to the village, particularly if the land in question is not useful for other purposes. Although at harvest time there will be pressures to distribute benefits largely to the richer members of the community (in view of what is known about village power structures), it is still possible to include the underprivileged. It may not be easy to allocate an equal number of poles or logs to every household, but to do so will definitely be less difficult than to reallocate land, or even other newer inputs like fertilizer that have already built up distribution patterns biased toward the local rich. A second possibility toward equity is through fuelwood or charcoal marketing cooperatives. As is well known, a great deal of wood and charcoal is sold in urban areas, primarily for cooking purposes. There are many intermediaries between the rural gatherer or poacher who collects the wood in the forest and the hawker who peddles it in the city, and it is a safe bet
61 that neither of these gets more than a pittance from the arrangement. In such circumstances marketing cooperatives would have the potential to provide an additional income to those at both ends of the system. Charcoal also offers the scope for processing cooperatives. These could use more energy-efficient (but not necessarily more labor-efficient, given our remarks above) technologies to reduce the huge energy losses presently incurred in the production process. They would also improve incomes by increasing value added. Since there is already an industry in place, it is to be expected that the beneficiary middlemen will fight hard to retain their privileges. The power of this group is nevertheless smaller than that of larger landowners, or the bureaucracy, and while they cannot be ignored with impunity, they can with effort be neutralized (as was done for example in a similar situation in the Amul dairy scheme in India; see Blair and Olpadwala, forthcoming). A third possibility exists on a more individual basis. A large number of poor rural people have a reasonable amount of land, though of poor quality. This degraded, eroded or arid land might have the potential for growing trees. Not the eucalyptus that will reach telephone pole size in five years, to be sure, but such land can support the growth, if slow, of some trees that will hold soil, fix nitrogen, supply humus, and in general provide not only an eventual harvest, but also an improvement of the land resource.
Summary and conclusion This paper has dealt with a wide range of RD and forestry issues. It focused upon some of the major obstacles to rural progress, and emphasized the place and role of various types of rural institutions in overcoming these barriers. The obstacles identified were imposed by resources, by organization and by development policy itself, with the latter being the most subtle and complex of the constraints. Despite the many problems in its way, though, RD has enjoyed some significant successes. Key to those successes have been strong rural institutions, expecially local organizations, which have in a number of cases proved themselves able to offer planning expertise, resource mobilization and management, service provision, and even real influence over the central bureaucracy in promoting the interests of their constituencies. And while doing so, these rural institutions have evidenced a significant ability to bring at least some equity in the development process. Much of this experience is transferrable to the forestry sector, particularly in the areas of employment generation, regional planning, the role of women and general equity. In sum, while forestry as a part of the larger RD process faces many of the
62 same obstacles, it also holds similar promise of success. There is much that can be done to promote both development and equity in the forestry sector, and we hope that this essay has pointed out some ways in which the RD experience of recent decades might be drawn upon for this purpose.
Acknowledgements This paper is a condensation of a considerably larger work (Blair and Olpadwala, forthcoming), originally written as part of a project sponsored by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. The authors would like to thank the FAO for its support and also to thank Peter May and Jerry Finin for their help with earlier drafts. Of course, neither the FAO nor our colleagues bear any responsibility for what has finally emerged here.
Notes 1. Much of the discussion in this section follows the path charted in earlier Rural Development Committee studies at Cornell University. See in particular Cohen and Uphoff (1977); Uphoff, Cohen and Goldsmith (1978); Esman and Uphoff (1984); and Uphoff (1987). 2. Much care must be exercised in developing "wastelands" for forestry, especially if privatization schemes are to be used (e.g. allowing individuals or groups to grow trees on previously common land), for those who had been using the common resource would then be deprived. See Shiva (1986) for a discussion of this issue.
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