Cynthia McDougall

Managing natural resources for sustainable livelihoods: uniting science and participation.

Foreword by Joachim Voss, Director General, International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) * Preface * Acknowledgements * Introduction: Uniting Science and Participation in the Process of Innovation - Research for Development * Navigating Complexity, Diversity and Dynamism: Reflections on Research for Natural Resource Management * Whose Research, Whose Agenda? * Scaling Up and Out * Transforming Institutions to Achieve Innovation in Research and Development * Principles for Good Practice in Participatory Research: Reflecting on Lessons from the Field * Participatory Research, Natural resource Management and Rural Transformation: More Lessons from the Field * Participation in Context: Whats Past, Whats Present, and Whats Next * Annexe1: Summaries of Case Studies * Index

The Deliberative Scientist: Integrating Science and Politics in Forest Resource Governance in Nepal

Viewing resource management essentially through a biophysical lens has provided too restricted a perspective for understanding complex political processes surrounding forest management. The case of community forestry in Nepal demonstrates a range of experiences of complex political processes, including conflicts and collaboration, especially between technical forest officials and local forest dependent people. Despite innovative legislative and institutional frameworks already in place, community forestry in Nepal still experiences the effects of techno-bureaucratic control. Such control is manifested in the entire range of processes related to planning, management, and monitoring of forestry activities. To understand this situation, we apply the conceptual lens of deliberative governance, that is, governance whose arrangements have been devised from both scientific and local knowledge. This chapter provides practical examples to offer insights into the application of deliberative governance in forestry practices. We identify how different aspects of managerialist, techno-bureaucratic domination (legitimated by principles of positivist science) are deliberatively challenged by local people, civil society activists, and action researchers to improve governance practices. We also identify situations and deliberative processes through which forest managers themselves begin to realize the limits of an antideliberative scientific approach, and apply more reflexive and deliberative approaches to knowledge and decision-making in forest management. In doing so, we eschew taking an absolute position for or against indigenous knowledge or scientific enterprise, but seek to demonstrate that neither technocratic prescription nor reliance on local knowledge alone is adequate for sustainable management of forests. What is needed, as Fischer (1998) argues, is a deliberative engagement between the claims to knowledge by both scientists and citizens. In our experience, this deliberative process provided a foundation for less constrained dialogue, greater collaboration, and mutual learning in the direction of more evidence-based decision-making. This approach is however not free from challenges related to power and techno-bureaucratic control.

Social capital, conflict, and adaptive collaborative governance: exploring the dialectic

Previously lineal and centralized natural resource management and development paradigms have shifted toward the recognition of complexity and dynamism of social-ecological systems, and toward more adaptive, decentralized, and collaborative models. However, certain messy and surprising dynamics remain under-recognized, including the inherent interplay between conflict, social capital, and governance. In this study we consider the dynamic intersections of these three often (seemingly) disparate phenomena. In particular, we consider the changes in social capital and conflict that accompanied a transition by local groups toward adaptive collaborative governance. The findings are drawn from multiyear research into community forestry in Nepal using comparative case studies. The study illustrates the complex, surprising, and dialectical relations among these three phenomena. Findings include: a demonstration of the pervasive nature of conflict and “dark side” of social capital; that collaborative efforts changed social capital, rather than simply enhancing it; and that conflict at varying scales ultimately had some constructive influences.

Postharvest fish losses and unequal gender relations: drivers of the social-ecological trap in the Barotse Floodplain fishery, Zambia

The Barotse Floodplain fishery is an important source of livelihood for economically poor women and men in western Zambia. Current efforts by the Department of Fisheries and the traditional authority to manage the fishery can be characterized as weak. The use of unsustainable fishing practices and overfishing are pervasive. Drawing on resilience thinking, we examine the extent to which the existing fishery-dependent livelihood context represents a social-ecological trap, i.e., a process in which rigid and persistent behavioral responses are applied because of a lack of capacity to adapt, leading to overdependence on the fishery, and ultimately, unsustainable outcomes. We use a gender lens and look beyond the primary sector (fishing) to include considerations of a secondary sector (postharvest fish processing) as an important dimension in the social-ecological trap paradigm. We present findings from an empirical research project that tested improved fish processing technologies and a communication for social change innovation as an alternate way to view a possible escape pathway from the trap not commonly recognized in the literature. The results suggest that there is value in adapting the social-ecological trap thinking to include postharvest fish losses and unequal gender relations as drivers of the trap in the floodplain fishery, and that approaches that combine technical innovation to reduce losses with social innovation to improve gender relations may hold promise for enabling fishery-dependent people to shift pathways out of social-ecological traps.