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Forests, people and data: Participatory monitoring for REDD+ put to the test


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A villager paddles back to shore in Papua. Photo by Manuel Boissière for CIRAD and CIFOR
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Landscape features, land use and land cover can be identified using participatory mapping through focus group discussion such as this one in Papua, Indonesia. Photo by Manuel Boissière/CIFOR

Growing up in a village in Indonesia’s Central Java in the 1980s, Dian Ekowati went to the local Posyandu health services post every month.

At the community primary healthcare center, her height and weight were recorded and reported to the government by local healthcare volunteers called kaders. One of those kaders was Ekowati’s mother, who volunteered there for years, receiving only a tiny stipend in exchange for her labor — just enough to pay her bus fare.

The Posyandu program was established in 1984 by then Indonesian president Suharto to promote immunization and nutrition, and to address the high child mortality rate — and it was extraordinarily successful. By 1990, there were 250,000 posts in communities throughout the archipelago, and many still operate today.

Years later, as part of a team of researchers at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) under the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, Ekowati realized the Posyandu system could provide useful lessons for REDD+. The UN-backed scheme aims to motivate tropical countries like Indonesia to reduce deforestation and forest degradation, as a way to combat climate change.

Protecting forests and child health? The connection may not be obvious. But before communities can be compensated for emissions reductions, it’s necessary to measure, report and verify their activities, a process known as MRV.

With most REDD+ initiatives taking place in remote areas, and limited funding available, it’s been proposed that forest communities themselves participate in this monitoring. It’s likely to be cheaper than sending in outside experts, could increase transparency, and could make communities feel more empowered and engaged in REDD+.

But it is feasible? What are the challenges? What still needs to be worked out?

Those are some of the questions addressed by a series of 12 papers that form a new special collection in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. Together, the authors assess the feasibility of participatory monitoring (PMRV) for REDD+ from a broad range of perspectives, from social science to governance to remote sensing.

From the technical side, PMRV is definitely doable, says Martin Herold, a CIFOR associate from the University of Wageningen, and a guest editor of the collection. He says new technologies have made it possible for communities to easily access satellite data on forest change on their mobile phones, check out what’s driving that change on the ground, and feed the information back to authorities.

The studies in the collection suggest adopting PMRV can indeed support the implementation of REDD+, and communities can contribute to monitoring both forest changes and other elements like safeguards and benefit sharing, Herold says. “There is no excuse now not to do it.”

It’s the social aspect of PMRV that still needs more work, says Manuel Boissière, a scientist from CIFOR and CIRAD who coordinated the collection. As a whole, the studies reveal many important considerations that must be taken into account when setting up a PMRV system.

“This kind of research can help provide information about the conditions that need to be addressed in order to conduct PMRV,” Boissière says.

Read also: What’s causing the holdup in REDD+ results-based finance?

A mother carries a child through a field in Papua. Photo by Manuel Boissiere/CIFOR

MOTIVATE ME

One key question is how to motivate individuals to do the work in the first place.

“Why should a community participate in MRV for REDD+?” asks Boissière. “Do they have time? Do they have the capacity, the resources, the willingness and the interest to do so? If they participate, will it threaten their daily livelihoods if their own activities are causing forest degradation?”

“Motivation is key. You cannot expect communities to participate if they don’t clearly see the interest in it for themselves.”

That’s where the Posyandu study comes in. It formed part of a broader project Boissière and his team carried out in three Indonesian provinces — West Kalimantan, Central Java and Papua.

“One of the interesting things about the Posyandu reporting system is that it’s happening despite very diverse access to networks,” Boissière says. “In Java, people can SMS the data, and they have 3G networks in the villages so they can send it by email.”

“In Papua, they have to take a small canoe to the capital of the district to provide the information. It’s very diverse – but it works.”

Dian Ekowati and Carola Hofstee focused on what motivated the Posyandu kaders to volunteer.

“It might seem really different, participating in health monitoring compared with environmental monitoring, but going deeper, we can see there are a lot of similarities,” she says. “Even with the Posyandu, the community didn’t get on board straight away.”

Read also: Motivation Matters: Lessons for REDD+ Participatory Measurement, Reporting and Verification from Three Decades of Child Health Participatory Monitoring in Indonesia

They discovered communities were very skeptical about the health centers when they were first introduced. Villagers relied on traditional healers, and didn’t believe that regularly measuring children’s height and weight was important.

It took a major promotional campaign by the government to convince people to value the centers and to volunteer. Ekowati remembers being asked to sing a jingle at school about the Posyandu: Aku Anak Sehat (‘I’m a healthy child’).

“It was all over the radio during my childhood,” she says. “The song was so massive that we even had a parody version.”

The researchers found that kaders volunteered because they felt a responsibility to their community and were convinced they were making a contribution. Some had a personal interest in childcare, or joined because they were asked to by a respected person.

In Central Java, people were motivated by religious values, and in West Kalimantan, some volunteered out of village pride — because they would be ashamed if a neighboring village had a Posyandu and they did not.

Many of those motivations could also be encouraged under a REDD+ PMRV system, Ekowati believes.

“We’re not necessarily sure that PMRV for REDD+ will work in Indonesia — it’s such a diverse country, with different levels of literacy, access to communication and transportation — but the Posyandu success gives us hope. It was just as hard in the 1980s to ask people to measure children as it is now to ask them to measure trees — so it shows that this is not impossible.”

A villager paddles back to shore in Papua. Photo by Manuel Boissière for CIRAD and CIFOR

LOCALS AND LIVELIHOODS

In another paper featured in the collection, CIFOR scientist Indah Waty Bong and colleagues set out to analyze local drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, and their relationships to community members’ livelihoods.

Remote sensing technologies can show where deforestation is occurring, and how quickly — but local people can give important insights into the reasons why it’s happening.

However, in some cases, the deforestation may be driven by the everyday livelihood activities of those same people — such as harvesting timber, or clearing trees for swidden agriculture.

That means proponents of REDD+ initiatives need to investigate and understand those connections if they are going to ask local people to participate in monitoring, Bong says.

“If you want to address a particular driver of deforestation and the majority of households in that village have it as their main livelihood, then you are talking about something that will have a big opportunity cost – and they may be less willing to be involved in monitoring.”

There is also the potential for conflict, if one group of people are asked to monitor and report on activities carried out by other members of the community. “From a project perspective that’s an ethical issue you need to think about,” Bong says.

A key finding was that the local processes behind forest cover change are dynamic, and vary both between and within communities. A driver — such as logging — might be responsible for a relatively large area of forest degradation, but only provide income for a small proportion of the community.

That means interventions and incentives can be targeted directly at those people, ensuring greater fairness and efficiency, Bong says.

Read also: FTA project update: Understanding REDD+ across the globe

WHO IS ‘THE COMMUNITY?’

Participatory MRV is in part motivated by the need to ensure the interests of local people are fairly represented in REDD+. To ask a community to participate, you need to be clear about who exactly you are talking about, Boissière says.

In another paper in the collection, CIFOR scientist Stibniati Atmadja investigated how researchers have assessed ‘community perceptions’ of REDD+.

“You can’t be everywhere at the same time — you have to sample, and then generalize to a bigger area,” she says. “So research on community perceptions involves fundamental choices about how to represent heterogeneous communities.”

That’s fine, Atmadja says, as long as authors explain what those choices were and why they made them.

“Most academic papers we looked at did not really give readers enough information to answer the simple questions: Who did you sample? What does your sample represent?

Fish are grilled on a woodfire in Kay village, Papua. Photo by Manuel Boissière for CIRAD and CIFOR

The study did not analyze websites, newsletters and advocacy material — which are disseminated more widely than academic research — but these sources are even less likely to provide information about their sampling methods, Atmadja says.

“They say, ‘we went to the field, we met with local people’ — well, which part? The easiest part to get to? Which people — those who were already disenchanted? How much can you really generalize based on those people’s perceptions?”

Both researchers and non-researchers can and should do better, she says. This matters because REDD+ initiatives tend to happen in remote areas, in forests that can be hard to reach.

“The few voices that do come out carry a lot of weight — so it’s important to be mindful of that,” Atmadja says.

NO ONE RECIPE

As a whole, the collection shows the need for embracing diversity when it comes to designing PMRV systems for REDD+.

“Even in one country, there is not one recipe for engaging local communities,” Boissière says. “People don’t have the same activities, they don’t depend in the same way on forest products, or have the same access to roads or infrastructure. You really need to develop something which is adaptive.”

It seems PMRV can work at the local level, he says, but to be successful, the next step is figuring out how to scale it up into a system that works at multiple levels of governance.

“You need to have a consistency in the kind of data that communities collect, and then come up with a way to merge it into a national system.”

Practitioners also need to acknowledge that it may not work everywhere.

“Any project or government program that wants to increase local participation in REDD+ or MRV should conduct a preliminary study looking at why they should engage this community in that place,” Boissière says.

“From there, they can understand whether it’s worth pursuing, and design something to engage with them – or whether it’s better to send a team of experts instead.”

There are many hurdles to overcome — but this comprehensive new body of detailed research lays the foundations for putting participatory MRV into practice.

By Kate Evans, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News.


This work forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry. We would like to thank all donors who supported this work through their contributions to the CGIAR Fund.


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FTA event coverage: Gaining traction on climate goals


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Deforestation in Jambi, Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo: Asep Ayat for 2014 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition
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Deforestation in Jambi, Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo: Asep Ayat for 2014 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition
Deforestation in Jambi, Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo: Asep Ayat for 2014 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition

By Catriona Croft-Cusworth, originally posted at CIFOR’s Forests News

An increasing number of states are embracing commitments made under the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global temperature rise. But how do these grand ambitions play out in reality?

In practice, climate action gains traction at the ground level — ‘where the rubber hits the road’, so to speak — and that requires collaboration among a whole range of different stakeholders.

Besides national governments, subnational governments are increasingly involved in action on climate change in the land use and forestry sectors. Non-state actors, including indigenous groups (which sometimes own and manage important territories), non-governmental organizations and the private sector, are also playing a growing role.

So how can the efforts of these various groups be best coordinated to meet national and international pledges, bringing real action on climate change?

A political world

Anne Larson, a Principal Scientist with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), has led research on this issue in five countries as part of the Global Comparative Study on REDD+ under the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, including two national studies on systems of monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV).

Planting Mangroves. Photo: Putu Budhiadnya for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition
Planting Mangroves. Photo: Putu Budhiadnya for 2016 Global Landscapes Forum Photo Competition

She says that even with apparently technical issues like MRV, political tensions tend to emerge both horizontally and vertically among stakeholder groups when trying to turn ideas into reality. This shouldn’t discourage efforts to take action but suggests that we need to take a different approach.

“We can’t ignore political realities,” she says. “We have many great ideas, but no matter how great they might sound technically, we always bump into reality when we hit the ground and try to start implementing.”


Also read: FTA project update: Understanding REDD+ across the globe


“Politics is not necessarily good or bad, it just is. We need to embrace this and learn to work in this reality.”

Pham Thu Thuy, another CIFOR scientist involved in the study, says her research in Vietnam found that politics not only influenced coordination, but also shaped perceptions of goals and challenges among different levels of governance.

“Different levels perceive different problems. But also how they actually define the problem is based on their own perception and their political interest,” Thuy says.

The answer to coordinating those differences, she says, is to take a landscape approach.

Click to read: Exploring the agency of Africa in climate change negotiations: the case of REDD+
Click to read: Exploring the agency of Africa in climate change negotiations: the case of REDD+

You have to be aware of these politics and think about how you can bring together every piece of information and every active group to make a policy work,” she says.

“And I think that for the land-use system, if you want something to work, basically it has to be at the landscape level.”

A landscape view

At the Global Landscapes Forum in Marrakesh, subnational and non-state actors were invited to share their perspectives on the matter of catalyzing action on the ground.

The term ‘non-state actors’ includes researchers, civil society and other community-level groups, but via global climate negotiations in recent years has become shorthand for the private sector.


Also read: COP22 Special: REDD+ monitoring is a technical and political balancing act


Bruce Cabarle, Team Leader of Partnerships for Forests, an initiative for investment in sustainable use of land and forests, said in discussion at GLF that public-private-people partnerships were key to applying lessons learned into the future.

“The more interesting question is: How do we get synergies and complementarity between voluntary certification schemes and government regulations so that they are mutually reinforcing?” he asked.

Christoph Thies, a forest campaigner for Greenpeace, welcomed cooperative efforts among sectors, but maintained that states should take the lead.

“The private sector should never replace the roles and responsibilities of governments,” he said.

For Thies, the answer lies in understanding political factors as both challenges and opportunities for change.

“Technical barriers can be overcome,” he said. “To really address the landscape requires political will.”

On the ground

Fernando Sampaio, Executive Director of the PCI (Produce, Conserve and Include) Strategy State Committee in Mato Grosso, Brazil, acknowledged the importance of both private-sector and civil society involvement in ground-level efforts, from a subnational government perspective.

“The private sector is an important part of the process, but we also need to include other stakeholders who are excluded from the process,” he said.

Excluded groups often include indigenous peoples, whose land rights are not always recognized. Norvin Goff, President of MASTA, an indigenous federation that represents the Miskitus of the Honduran Mosquitia, said that blueprint approaches to land and forest use rarely work at the ground level for indigenous communities.

“We don’t need a set formula that has been used in the past, we need to create an approach together,” Goff said.

He urged closer partnerships between government and indigenous groups.

“Instead of an enemy, they should consider us as part of the solution,” he said.


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