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  • Restoring Forests, Restoring Communities: Lessons from Shinyanga

Restoring Forests, Restoring Communities: Lessons from Shinyanga


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A restored Ngitili system in the Shinyanga Region, Tanzania. Photo credit: Lalisa A. Duguma / ICRAF
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How secure resource rights help communities in Africa restore forests and build local economies

“Landscape restoration is not new,” said Steven Lawry, former director of CIFOR’s Forests and Governance Research portfolio. “But global and national commitments such as the Bonn Challenge and AFR100 and the urgency of addressing climate change mean that a qualitatively different approach is needed if we’re going to achieve the kind of success that we aspire to.”

Lawry used these words last October, during the interactive “Restoring Forests, Restoring Communities” session at the Global Landscapes Forum in Accra, Ghana. Supported by a panel of conservation experts with experience across the continent, Lawry put communities – and the question of secure land tenure rights – at the heart of that “qualitatively different approach”. [Full session can be replayed entirely here]

Shinyanga: Restoring communities in Tanzania

The story begins in Shinyanga, northern Tanzania, with a landscape restoration project that is – or perhaps was – held up as a bright example of successful collaboration between government, conservation scientists and local communities.

Priscilla Wainaina, agricultural economist at World Agroforestry (ICRAF), led a research team to investigate what made the Shinyanga restoration so successful.

The region suffered from severe landscape degradation as early as the 1930s when British colonial authorities encouraged the clearing of woodlands for various reasons, including the eradication of disease-carrying tsetse flies and increased demand for wood. But this was only the beginning. “In the 1960s and 70s, cash crops – mainly cotton and tobacco – intensified this degradation,” Wainaina said.

The degradation was so severe that, by the 1980s, Shinyanga had become known as the “desert of Tanzania”. “That’s when the government of Tanzania, together with ICRAF, came up with the HASHI restoration project,” Wainaina explained.

Building on the existing local practice of Ngitili fodder reserves, the HASHI restoration project encouraged cattle farmers to plant trees on their grazing land. As they matured, these trees supplied the farmers with fodder for livestock, as well as wood they could use or sell for fuel and construction.

When the HASHI project started in 1986, there were only around 600 hectares of land managed under the Ngitili system. By the time the project ended in 2004, over 250,000 hectares of Ngitili had been restored and were being managed by local communities.

In 2004, management of the restored landscapes were taken over by local communities under the leadership of the village councils, supported by a government body dedicated to community empowerment.

The project was hailed as a triumph by conservation scientists across the globe. But recently there have been troubling signs for the future of Shinyanga, and the problem centres around land tenure rights.

“This goes beyond just troubling”

“When it comes to land tenure rights in Tanzania,” Wainaina said, “land is owned by the state, but it’s managed by local households and communities. This gave communities an incentive to restore their landscapes so as to strengthen these property rights.”

And, for the last 30 years, this is exactly what happened: the customary rights of local communities to the communal restoration areas had, in the words of Priscilla Wainaina, “grown stronger”.

“But in 2018,” Wainaina continued, “a new ministerial directive to shift some of these communally-owned restoration areas to the state was issued, so they can be state managed.”

Wainaina was quick to add that the state had good intentions for this decision. Naturally, the Tanzanian government has access to much greater resources, both human and financial, to better manage the restoration in Shinyanga than the local communities do.

But Wainaina also reported that, “the local communities feel like [the decision] was not well communicated: it was top-down as opposed to participatory”.

“Now communities are not sure about the future ownership of the communal restoration areas,” Wainaina said. Because it is the local communities who are responsible for the majority of the landscape restoration, this new insecurity is, according to Wainaina, “really clouding the restoration efforts”.

Although her concerns were stated in the straight-forward language of an agricultural economist, Lawry was quick to pick up on the significance of Wainaina’s comment. “It’s a bit troubling to hear that there are now questions in the air about the ability of the communities to retain the tenure rights that have contributed to the success of the project,” he said.

Chris Buss, Director of the Forest Programme at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), went further: “We use Shinyanga as one of the great examples of restoration,” he said. “If the land and trees are being taken away under different ownership systems, then this goes beyond just troubling. It goes to the heart of what we’re trying to achieve.”

Secure land tenure: “The heart of what we’re trying to achieve”

Secure land tenure is the foundation of successful landscape restoration, as Steven Lawry explained: “Research – considerable research, in fact – identifies secure tenure as a necessary condition for successful community forestry, including for forest landscape restoration adoption.”

Landscape restoration goes far beyond simply planting trees. It takes a much broader view of degraded sites, restoring the whole mosaic of land uses that draw from and contribute to the landscape. Without the involvement of the local communities who live and work on the land, such a holistic approach is impossibly difficult. But without secure tenure, what motivation do local communities have to invest in the landscape?

Tangu Tumero, Principal Forestry Officer at the Department of Forestry in Malawi, tells a story that illustrates the same motivations, but on an individual scale.

“In Malawi, we have a tradition in some cultures where, when a man marries a woman, the man moves to live in the woman’s community. But, if the marriage ends, he must go back to his village,” Tumero said. “As long as he feels like he doesn’t belong with this community, he is not going to plant a tree from which he would benefit [in the future]. ”

This thinking plays out on a larger scale when the whole community does not feel like they have rights to the land they work. “Secure tenure motivates investments in land, including community investments in forest landscape restoration,” Lawry explained.

Unfortunately, as Wainaina showed with her research on Shinyanga, secure land tenure is far from the norm.

Interview with Priscilla Wainina during GLF

“Indigenous peoples and local communities occupy some 50 percent of the total land area in the tropics,” Lawry said, “but only have legal rights to a very small portion of those resources and governments still struggle with how to understand and secure customary rights.”

Restoration management is already a very complex task, but it is made even more complex when, as Wainaina discovered in Shinyanga, projects fail to take account of who exactly owns the land and to accord statutory protection to existing customary land tenure arrangements.

Chris Buss learned this lesson the hard way when he was working in Malawi. “There was a fuel wood project that planted millions of trees,” he said. “It was very successful for three years, until the trees got to a decent size and all the local chiefs said ‘These are our trees and we’re going to harvest them now.’”

“Over three or four years, the project looked very successful,” Chris said, “but we hadn’t addressed the critical tenure issues and the trees were cut down.”

Tumero agreed that understanding the local context is paramount. “When we’re developing our programs,” she said, “we make sure that they are locally driven as much as possible. Otherwise, we can overlook some of these things that look minor but are going to be very crucial in terms of how we make progress.”

Customary land rights are typically not written into law but are rather rights that are recognised by the local community. Importantly, customary tenure principles grant all bona fide members of the local community land as a social right.  However, the introduction of individual, statutorily recognized rights, can have the effect of dissolving long-standing customary rights, making poorer community members particularly vulnerable; hence, the importance of extending statutory recognition to existing customary rights, at a legal status equal to private land and state land.

The absence of statutory recognition of customary tenure creates what Patrick Ranjatson, professor in Forestry and Environment at the University of Antananarivo, calls “invisible communities”. “Community is always there, but people have a tendency to overlook them,” Ranjatson said. “Government agencies, NGO projects and even sometimes the community’s own members are not aware of the importance of their community.”

“Simply put,” Steven Lawry concluded, “the future of forest landscape restoration is limited if we do not solve the tenure problem where the problem exists.”

Return to Shinyanga: Choosing Intrinsic over Extrinsic Incentives

For solutions to the problems of land tenure rights and invisible communities, we return to Shinyanga, and Priscilla Wainaina.

“Restoration in Shinyanga has been going on for 30-plus years,” Wainaina said. “When the HASHI project ended in 2004, the communities, with support from the government, were able to continue the restoration efforts. So, what made restoration so successful in this landscape?”

Wainaina’s research (awaiting publication) found the answer to be, not one incentive in particular, but a pattern of incentives and disincentives that complemented each other.

“The incentives that stood out particularly were conservation benefits,” Wainaina explained, “the ecological, economic or even cultural benefits communities derive from restoration.”

These conservation benefits were predominantly what Wainaina described as intrinsic motivators. “These are motivators that rely on self-desire more than external factors,” Wainaina explained, “and these intrinsic motivators were the key drivers of restoration in Shinyanga.”

“Restoration in this area focussed more on local people and local knowledge and that focus really got the communities involved, in addition to the other actors,” Wainaina said. “The communities, together with their village governments, owned the projects and that was a really key motivator.”

Patrick Ranjatson issued a final note of caution. “Strengthening communities doesn’t mean that we strengthen communities to the detriment of the state,” he said. “If there are people doing slash-and-burn agriculture, then the forest will be finished very rapidly. We need to find this balance, so if it’s not local community who bring this idea of sustainability, then it has to be either the government or partners such as NGOs.”

Wainaina’s research also found that extrinsic motivators – such as top-down cash incentives – were not as important for restoration in Shinyanga as policy-makers might imagine. “External motivators, although they supported the restoration, they were not as strong as the intrinsic ones,” she explained.

Wainaina gave the example of the United Nations REDD+ programme, which uses cash incentives to encourage the reduction of net emissions of greenhouse gases by improving forest management and restoration in developing countries.

“REDD+, although it’s usually a motivator in most of the restoration projects in most countries, didn’t actually achieve the benefits they intended in Tanzania because it was a pilot project,” Wainaina said. “It only ran for four years and then it was gone. The discontinuation was a disappointment for the farmers and the local community.”

Extrinsic incentives like REDD+ need careful deployment, otherwise they can back-fire and discourage communities from supporting landscape restoration.

A surer bet for successful restoration, according to Wainaina’s research, is to empower local communities with intrinsic motivators like education and land rights that will secure for them the ecological, economic and cultural benefits from conservation.

“We hope that, with participation through the village government and the national government, they will reach a consensus on the way forward in regards to land tenure rights,” Wainaina said.

As for Steven Lawry’s “qualitatively different approach”, these researchers believe that approach must include land rights for local communities.

“Most of these communities are advocating for registration of their land rights,” Wainaina said. They feel as if this is the only way they can secure the benefits that they get from this restoration. They started the restoration areas, they managed them successfully for the past years and they feel like they still have the capacity to do it.”

 

References

 

Further read/blogs

 

By David Charles, Communication Specialist

This article is based on a discussion that took place at an interactive session held at the Global Landscapes Forum on Restoring Africa’s Landscapes: Catalyzing Action from Above and Below, Accra, Ghana, 29-30 October, 2019.

Participants:  Chris Buss (IUCN); Patrick Ranjatson (ESSA-Foret, Madagascar); Priscilla Wainaina (ICRAF-Nairobi); Tangu Tumero (Forestry Dept—Malawi); and Steven Lawry, Moderator (CIFOR).

Funding from the CGIAR Collaborative Research Programs on Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM) and Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) supported the event. FTA is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with Bioversity International, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR, ICRAF and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.

 

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  • Institutionalization of REDD+ MRV in Indonesia, Peru, and Tanzania: progress and implications

Institutionalization of REDD+ MRV in Indonesia, Peru, and Tanzania: progress and implications

30 April, 2018

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Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+) has opened up a new global discussion on forest monitoring and carbon accounting in developing countries. We analyze and compare the extent to which the concept of measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) for REDD+ has become institutionalized in terms of new policy discourses, actors, resources, and rules in Indonesia, Peru, and Tanzania. To do so, we draw on discursive institutionalism and the policy arrangement approach. A qualitative scale that distinguishes between “shallow” institutionalization on the one end, and “deep” institutionalization on the other, is developed to structure the analysis and comparison. Results show that in all countries MRV has become institutionalized in new or revised aims, scope, and strategies for forest monitoring, and development of new agencies and mobilization of new actors and resources. New legislations to anchor forest monitoring in law and procedures to institutionalize the roles of the various agencies are being developed. Nevertheless, the extent to which MRV has been institutionalized varies across countries, with Indonesia experiencing “deep” institutionalization, Peru “shallow-intermediate” institutionalization, and Tanzania “intermediate-deep” institutionalization. We explore possible reasons for and consequences of differences in extent of institutionalization of MRV across countries.

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  • Creating an appropriate tenure foundation for REDD+: The record to date and prospects for the future

Creating an appropriate tenure foundation for REDD+: The record to date and prospects for the future

23 March, 2018

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Attention to tenure is a fundamental step in preparation for REDD+ implementation. Unclear and conflicting tenure has been the main challenge faced by the proponents of subnational REDD+ initiatives, and accordingly, they have expended much effort to remedy the problem. This article assesses how well REDD+ has performed in laying an appropriate tenure foundation. Field research was carried out in two phases (2010-2012 and 2013-2014) in five countries (Brazil, Peru, Cameroon, Tanzania, Indonesia) at 21 subnational initiatives, 141 villages (half targeted for REDD+ interventions), and 3,754 households. Three questions are posed: 1) What was the effect of REDD+ on perceived tenure insecurity of village residents?; 2) What are the main reasons for change in the level of tenure insecurity and security from Phase 1 to Phase 2 perceived by village residents in control and intervention villages?; and 3) How do intervention village residents evaluate the impact of tenure-related interventions on community well-being? Among the notable findings are that: 1) tenure insecurity decreases slightly across the whole sample of villages, but we only find that REDD+ significantly reduces tenure insecurity in Cameroon, while actually increasing insecurity of smallholder agricultural land tenure in Brazil at the household level; 2) among the main reported reasons for increasing tenure insecurity (where it occurs) are problems with outside companies, lack of title, and competition from neighboring villagers; and 3) views on the effect of REDD+ tenure-related interventions on community well-being lean towards the positive, including for interventions that restrain access to forest. Thus, while there is little evidence that REDD+ interventions have worsened smallholder tenure insecurity (as feared by critics), there is also little evidence that the proponents’ efforts to address tenure insecurity have produced results. Work on tenure remains an urgent priority for safeguarding local livelihoods as well as for reducing deforestation. This will require increased attention to participatory engagement, improved reward systems, tenure policy reform, integration of national and local efforts, and “business-as-usual” interests.

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  • REDD+ findings from Tanzania, Indonesia and Peru show gender divide

REDD+ findings from Tanzania, Indonesia and Peru show gender divide


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A woman picks tea leaves in Tanzania. Photo by Nkumi Mtimgwa/CIFOR
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A woman picks tea leaves in Tanzania. Photo by Nkumi Mtimgwa/CIFOR

Men and women differ in their preferences when it comes to REDD+ benefits. Men prefer cash incentives while women lean toward non-cash benefits, according to the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry’s (FTA) Esther Mwangi, a Principal Scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

Mwangi and an international team of researchers conducted in-depth intra-household interviews in Tanzania, Indonesia and Peru as part of a work package comprising a larger project on REDD+ and tenure.

Across all three countries, in addition to the benefit preference of men and women, researchers found a correlation between increased women’s participation and more equitable distribution of benefits. But they also found male dominance in different decision-making stages, and that people (mostly men) involved in decisions regarding REDD+ were more likely to be satisfied with the distribution of benefits.

More than benefit preferences, there was a bigger gender difference when it came to having REDD+ information and being involved in the decision-making process on which benefits would be distributed and how, with men much more active. Mwangi presented some of her findings late last year at the IUFRO 125th World Congress. Here she talks about her work and findings in detail.

Read more: Are there differences between men and women in REDD+ benefit sharing schemes?

When you talk about non-cash benefits, what does that include?

Non-cash benefits are material awards other than direct monetary payments. These include construction of classrooms for primary school children, provisions of farming implements, provision of potable water, or even capacity-building in conservation farming.

In Peru, it was interesting to find that even these non-monetary benefits were differentiated by gender. Men preferred construction materials, technical assistance and training, legal assistance and seedlings of non-timber species. Women, on the other hand, preferred objects or utensils for the home, organic gardens, animals to raise, timber tree saplings, textiles and handicrafts. Therefore, even the preferred types of non-cash benefits are differentiated according to gender.

During a community feedback workshop in Tanzania, we asked men and women to tell us what they would want to see done differently if the REDD+ project were to resume in their village. While women wanted non-cash benefits prioritized, they also indicated that these non-cash benefits “touch women’s problems”.

What are some factors keeping women out of REDD+ decision-making?

Children play in the indigenous community of Callería in Peru. Photo by Juan Carlos Huayllapuma/CIFOR

We found that twice as many men as women were involved in REDD+ decision-making in Tanzania, four times as many men as women in Peru, and about equal proportions of men and women were involved in Indonesia.

Our definition of REDD+ decision-making covered issues such as whether they were involved in the initial decision on whether or not REDD+ should be implemented in their village, and whether they were involved in the design and implementation of REDD+ activities. Most women indicated that they did not know about these matters. For those who did know, they said they were not invited to meetings when those decisions were made.

The asymmetry between men’s and women’s participation in forestry decision-making is often rooted in two inter-related issues. First, forestry institutions and forest resources are generally male-dominated and second, village-level decision-making takes place in the public sphere. Women are traditionally associated with the private sphere of home and family life.

Was it surprising to find that when there was increased women’s participation, there was a more equitable distribution of benefits?

I personally wasn’t surprised, but still I thought it was an interesting result that probably jibes well with other results.

Work in India and Nepal shows that an increased number of women in decision-making roles has good outcomes for forest conditions. Even in the corporate world, research is starting to show that increasing the presence of women in boardrooms is correlated with greater corporate social responsibility and concern for equitable outcomes of investments.

Read more: ACM levels the playing field for women and men in forest-adjacent communities

Regardless of gender, there were pretty low rates of knowledge of REDD+ and involvement in related decisions. Can you tell us more about that?

Women prepare for a local culinary course in Kapuas Hulu, Indonesia. Photo by Icaro Cooke Vieira/CIFOR

This is an interesting observation and speaks to the entry point chosen by NGOs, which, in most of the cases, happened to be village leaders. Village leaders are crucial and should always be approached when setting up projects and interventions in rural areas. However, more effort should be made to ensure greater inclusion, especially if women and others (including men) are frequently marginalized in decision-making. This extra effort should be made even if village leadership is widely respected and legitimate.

When asked what should happen differently if the REDD+ pilots were to be repeated, both men and women in Tanzania made clear that REDD+ education should be provided on a door-to-door basis. This would help raise awareness and widely disseminate information.

This is a reasonable demand and probably good for interventions, because if people don’t know what exactly REDD+ is and why it’s being implemented, (that is, make the connection between REDD+ benefits and forest conservation) it’s unlikely that these schemes will achieve their goals. Moreover, lack of involvement in decision-making weakens the legitimacy and sustainability of the schemes.

What are the next steps for work on this topic? 

Benefit-sharing arrangements should be designed with gendered differences in mind. This cannot be overemphasized, because these benefits constitute an important incentive for sustainable management and even conservation.

In previous work, we demonstrated that greater gender equity is possible in the forestry sector both in participation in decision-making and in the distribution of forestry benefits. Lessons from this work would be invaluable in informing the design and implementation of benefit-sharing arrangements.

Read more: Strengthening women’s tenure and rights to forests and trees and their participation in decision making

By Christi Hang, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News. 

This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

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  • Upgrading Tanzania’s artisanal and small-scale mining through investor partnerships: Opportunities and challenges

Upgrading Tanzania’s artisanal and small-scale mining through investor partnerships: Opportunities and challenges

22 December, 2017

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  • Foreign investors are increasingly partnering with ASM operators to access mineral rights and reserves, in a high risk and high cost environment.
  • This has led to an upgrading of ASM operations and indirect technology diffusion across mining areas through ‘demonstration effects’, but this upgrading may disrupt existing benefit sharing arrangements between ASM laborers and pit-owners/license holders.
  • Upgrading of ASM, through capital infusion and technology advancement, is also accompanied by high environmental and occupational health and safety risks.
  • The constrained capacity of sub-national institutions and lack of cross-institutional coordination are hampering governmental efforts to monitor and improve environmental and occupational health and safety practices of partnerships.
  • Policy discussion is needed on the ASM-investor partnership model’s benefits and risks, and how best to harness its potential to upgrade the sector, as well as support the sustainable development of rural mining communities.
  • Effective institutional coordination among key government institutions, particularly at sub-national level, is urgently needed to reduce the high environmental and labor safety risks posed by mechanized small-scale mines.

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  • Why gender matters for restoration

Why gender matters for restoration

19 December, 2017

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A woman carries firewood in Kenya, East Africa. Photo by Sande Murunga/CIFOR
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A woman carries firewood in Kenya, East Africa. Photo by Sande Murunga/CIFOR

Nairobi dialogue cultivates answers on how to bring everyone to the restoration table.

Four East Africa country representatives, a handful of restoration implementers, half a dozen scientists and a collection of gender specialists walked into a room. They emerged hours later with points of action and vows to work together, after a day of discussions that focused on national-level forest restoration work, women’s rights to land and the gendered use of resources.

The dialogue on Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) and gender equality in Nairobi, the second in a series of events on the topic hosted by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), together with the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) and partners, delved into the East Africa experience with the aim to create integrated solutions.

Read more: Policy Dialogue on Forest Landscape Restoration and Gender Equality

“The discussion examined what restoration is on the ground and how different countries are implementing it, and about the challenges in terms of gender equality. FLR takes place in a context where inequalities exist and so the question is the way in which FLR is done – you can either reproduce or even exacerbate those inequalities if you’re not taking gender into account,” FTA and CIFOR research officer Markus Ihalainen said in an interview after the event.

With examples from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania presented along with the benefits of grounding gender equality in FLR — and the risks of not doing so — participants brainstormed and workshopped ways forward as restoration commitments around the world surge.

At the event, FTA and CIFOR’s Esther Mwangi said of equity guarantees, “It’s important to have things on paper, but we should not overestimate that […] It is not just about adding gender, but understanding gender across the different actors involved.”

Read more: FTA at Global Landscapes Forum Bonn

LET’S GET PRACTICAL

Rice farmers work on Indonesian peatlands. Photo by Mokhamad Edliadi/CIFOR

Daniel Nkondola from the Tanzania Vice President’s Office discussed the differing ways men and women use the country’s forests, with women’s roles restricted although they are considered the managers of resources, and men harvesting forest products for commercial activities.

“But female-headed households plant more trees than men,” he said, adding as a sort of call to action. “We know that women can be agents of change.”

In Ethiopia, mapping was front and center as Ashebir Wondimu from the Ministry of Environment talked restoration in the country, with work on the ground including agroforestry, reforestation and the establishment of enclosures.

When gender is thrown in the FLR mix, Wondimu said, “Existing policies, strategies, initiatives and targets encourage gender equality. The problem is the practice and the capacity to monitor its implementation.”

As the discussion moved toward strategically addressing gender issues, Janet Macharia of UN Environment said, “If you look at FLR you must look at a wider spectrum: you’re looking at sustainable livelihoods, you’re looking at water, you’re looking at energy, political issues, education […] so gender mainstreaming is exciting.”

And along with that wider perspective, one must also drill down to specificities, as many emphasized throughout the day.

Ihalainen said: “These issues need to be approached contextually. But it’s not only a national issue, as these things look differently even within a country depending on which area or region you’re in, or the cultural context. What is clear is that a lot of the challenges in terms of FLR are quite similar in these countries but the approaches are different.”

Read more: Focus on gender research and mainstreaming

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Along with the different approaches to FLR — which can vary by climate, region, nation or village – are the many different roles men and women play. In combination, this makes for heady layers of considerations.

Macharia said of indigenous knowledge, “The trees that women are allowed to cut, the trees that men are allowed to cut, the trees no one is allowed to cut that are used for medicine — these practices need to be brought into policy and the policy taken down to the ground.

“You can’t go places and talk gender and gender equality because people have no clue what that is, because you can’t translate that into their language. It is up to us to translate what it is we want to do and understand where they’re coming from and work for change. We have to put ourselves in their shoes.”

A native seed in Mau Forest, Kenya. Photo by Patrick Shepherd/CIFOR

This need to translate gender and restoration with the people impacted most — through understanding, informing and doing — was a common thread in the day’s discussions.

“It’s a good exercise to think about how FLR could be done in a more holistic way and how gender features in that. But in the short term we need to look at what’s happening on the ground, what are the issues that are emerging, what are the risks and what’s the support that’s needed,” Ihalainen said.

“That’s what I’m hoping to bring to our upcoming discussion at the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) in Bonn — a perspective that’s more than just talking about gender responsiveness as part of a theoretical concept that’s not necessarily being implemented in that way.”

This topic will be discussed at a session titled Enhancing tenure security and gender equality in the context of forest landscape restoration, which FTA is coorganizing, at the GLF.

GROUND UP

But what are the risks if restoration efforts continue without consideration of structural inequalities, or gendered labor, or property rights and women?

Mwangi said, “If we do not take into account gender in a meaningful way then there won’t be incentives for women to participate in restoration. There is the issue of tenure and rights in East Africa; in these countries women can be neglected. Ask who owns that tree, who owns this land — you are unlikely to hear that it’s a woman.

“Without women having tenure to trees or land or both it becomes really difficult for them to participate in tree planting. In Tanzania, for example, women plant trees but don’t have rights to land. Because of such issues we may not be able to realize the full potential of restoration.”

In a just-published brief on the topic, the authors wrote, “Lessons from past restoration efforts have shown that although women are mobilized to provide labor and skills for restoration initiatives, they usually have less ability to benefit than men.”

Read more: Gender matters in Forest Landscape Restoration: A framework for design and evaluation

One of the workshop participants, Komaza’s Janet Chihanga, provided a concrete example. Komaza is a forestry company that supports local women to plant trees on unused, degraded land in the coastal region of Kenya.

“When we planted the trees eight years ago, no one had any interest in this land. But now when it’s not even time for harvesting but just thinning, the men show up and assert their claims on the land,”, she said.

So solving the restoration riddle of gender-responsiveness means solving the ongoing issue of rights and tenure, as well as that of uneven duties of men and women, among many others.

“There’s a need for more innovative thinking, more innovative partnerships and more learning from good practices and things that have worked in certain contexts and trying to figure out if and how they would work in other contexts or tweaked somewhere else,” Ihalainen said.

This learning and working through innovations has just begun, and discussions of these key, intersecting issues will continue, with resolutions now that much closer.

Read more: Gender matters in forest landscape restoration infographic

By Deanna Ramsay, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News. 

For more information on this topic, please contact Markus Ihalainen at m.ihalainen@cgiar.org.

This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

This research was supported by UK aid from the UK government.

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Why gender matters for restoration


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A woman carries firewood in Kenya, East Africa. Photo by Sande Murunga/CIFOR
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A woman carries firewood in Kenya, East Africa. Photo by Sande Murunga/CIFOR

Nairobi dialogue cultivates answers on how to bring everyone to the restoration table.

Four East Africa country representatives, a handful of restoration implementers, half a dozen scientists and a collection of gender specialists walked into a room. They emerged hours later with points of action and vows to work together, after a day of discussions that focused on national-level forest restoration work, women’s rights to land and the gendered use of resources.

The dialogue on Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) and gender equality in Nairobi, the second in a series of events on the topic hosted by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), together with the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) and partners, delved into the East Africa experience with the aim to create integrated solutions.

Read more: Policy Dialogue on Forest Landscape Restoration and Gender Equality

“The discussion examined what restoration is on the ground and how different countries are implementing it, and about the challenges in terms of gender equality. FLR takes place in a context where inequalities exist and so the question is the way in which FLR is done – you can either reproduce or even exacerbate those inequalities if you’re not taking gender into account,” FTA and CIFOR research officer Markus Ihalainen said in an interview after the event.

With examples from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania presented along with the benefits of grounding gender equality in FLR — and the risks of not doing so — participants brainstormed and workshopped ways forward as restoration commitments around the world surge.

At the event, FTA and CIFOR’s Esther Mwangi said of equity guarantees, “It’s important to have things on paper, but we should not overestimate that […] It is not just about adding gender, but understanding gender across the different actors involved.”

Read more: FTA at Global Landscapes Forum Bonn

LET’S GET PRACTICAL

Rice farmers work on Indonesian peatlands. Photo by Mokhamad Edliadi/CIFOR

Daniel Nkondola from the Tanzania Vice President’s Office discussed the differing ways men and women use the country’s forests, with women’s roles restricted although they are considered the managers of resources, and men harvesting forest products for commercial activities.

“But female-headed households plant more trees than men,” he said, adding as a sort of call to action. “We know that women can be agents of change.”

In Ethiopia, mapping was front and center as Ashebir Wondimu from the Ministry of Environment talked restoration in the country, with work on the ground including agroforestry, reforestation and the establishment of enclosures.

When gender is thrown in the FLR mix, Wondimu said, “Existing policies, strategies, initiatives and targets encourage gender equality. The problem is the practice and the capacity to monitor its implementation.”

As the discussion moved toward strategically addressing gender issues, Janet Macharia of UN Environment said, “If you look at FLR you must look at a wider spectrum: you’re looking at sustainable livelihoods, you’re looking at water, you’re looking at energy, political issues, education […] so gender mainstreaming is exciting.”

And along with that wider perspective, one must also drill down to specificities, as many emphasized throughout the day.

Ihalainen said: “These issues need to be approached contextually. But it’s not only a national issue, as these things look differently even within a country depending on which area or region you’re in, or the cultural context. What is clear is that a lot of the challenges in terms of FLR are quite similar in these countries but the approaches are different.”

Read more: Focus on gender research and mainstreaming

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Along with the different approaches to FLR — which can vary by climate, region, nation or village – are the many different roles men and women play. In combination, this makes for heady layers of considerations.

Macharia said of indigenous knowledge, “The trees that women are allowed to cut, the trees that men are allowed to cut, the trees no one is allowed to cut that are used for medicine — these practices need to be brought into policy and the policy taken down to the ground.

“You can’t go places and talk gender and gender equality because people have no clue what that is, because you can’t translate that into their language. It is up to us to translate what it is we want to do and understand where they’re coming from and work for change. We have to put ourselves in their shoes.”

A native seed in Mau Forest, Kenya. Photo by Patrick Shepherd/CIFOR

This need to translate gender and restoration with the people impacted most — through understanding, informing and doing — was a common thread in the day’s discussions.

“It’s a good exercise to think about how FLR could be done in a more holistic way and how gender features in that. But in the short term we need to look at what’s happening on the ground, what are the issues that are emerging, what are the risks and what’s the support that’s needed,” Ihalainen said.

“That’s what I’m hoping to bring to our upcoming discussion at the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) in Bonn — a perspective that’s more than just talking about gender responsiveness as part of a theoretical concept that’s not necessarily being implemented in that way.”

This topic will be discussed at a session titled Enhancing tenure security and gender equality in the context of forest landscape restoration, which FTA is coorganizing, at the GLF.

GROUND UP

But what are the risks if restoration efforts continue without consideration of structural inequalities, or gendered labor, or property rights and women?

Mwangi said, “If we do not take into account gender in a meaningful way then there won’t be incentives for women to participate in restoration. There is the issue of tenure and rights in East Africa; in these countries women can be neglected. Ask who owns that tree, who owns this land — you are unlikely to hear that it’s a woman.

“Without women having tenure to trees or land or both it becomes really difficult for them to participate in tree planting. In Tanzania, for example, women plant trees but don’t have rights to land. Because of such issues we may not be able to realize the full potential of restoration.”

In a just-published brief on the topic, the authors wrote, “Lessons from past restoration efforts have shown that although women are mobilized to provide labor and skills for restoration initiatives, they usually have less ability to benefit than men.”

Read more: Gender matters in Forest Landscape Restoration: A framework for design and evaluation

One of the workshop participants, Komaza’s Janet Chihanga, provided a concrete example. Komaza is a forestry company that supports local women to plant trees on unused, degraded land in the coastal region of Kenya.

“When we planted the trees eight years ago, no one had any interest in this land. But now when it’s not even time for harvesting but just thinning, the men show up and assert their claims on the land,”, she said.

So solving the restoration riddle of gender-responsiveness means solving the ongoing issue of rights and tenure, as well as that of uneven duties of men and women, among many others.

“There’s a need for more innovative thinking, more innovative partnerships and more learning from good practices and things that have worked in certain contexts and trying to figure out if and how they would work in other contexts or tweaked somewhere else,” Ihalainen said.

This learning and working through innovations has just begun, and discussions of these key, intersecting issues will continue, with resolutions now that much closer.

Read more: Gender matters in forest landscape restoration infographic

By Deanna Ramsay, originally published at CIFOR’s Forests News. 

For more information on this topic, please contact Markus Ihalainen at m.ihalainen@cgiar.org.

This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

This research was supported by UK aid from the UK government.

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Filling gaps in the narratives of Tanzanian farmers

20 November, 2017

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Rice farmers in Mbarali District, Tanzania. Photo by Nkumi Mtingwa/CIFOR
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Rice farmers in Mbarali District, Tanzania. Photo by Nkumi Mtingwa/CIFOR

To go beyond socially appropriate responses and understand what is really going on in their project sites, researchers created a medium for participants to narrate the stories behind the data.

Following a recent overview of a Tanzanian research project that uses visual communication to enable farmers to speak up, this article looks at the developments that have been taking place since. Principal Investigator Emily Gallagher explains what has happened with her filmmaking project now that the sugarcane and tea outgrower communities at the center of the research have been visited, interviewed and filmed, and community screenings organized.

As outlined previously, the project uses the methodology of collaborative documentary, from the visual anthropology field, enabling community members take on the role of active collaborators. However, it is not a documentary in which researchers are trying to look through the research subjects’ eyes.

Communities have control over the script and storyboard through an iterative research process that includes surveys and semistructured questionnaires followed by in-depth interviews that took the researchers back to the field with a Tanzanian filmmaker to document the oral histories and daily lives of sugarcane, rice and tea farmers.

“We are using filmmaking as a collaborative method to spark dialogue and fill in the conversational gaps in the narrative. We know what the quantitative data say. We want to create a medium for the research participants to narrate the stories behind the data using  participatory activities to get beyond the socially appropriate response to understand what is really going on,” said Gallagher, of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

The final step of this process is to take the documentary to a national-level workshop. “The fact that the communities knew that the final film was going to be shown at national level and that we came back to the village three different times meant a lot for the process and the communities. This was crucial. Communities need to feel that there is a benefit for them to dedicate so much of their time,” she added.

Read more: Visualizing gender in Tanzanian sugarcane production: The use of community screening and documentary filming

Emily Gallagher works with a cultural interpreter in Kilosa District, Tanzania. Photo by Nkumi Mtingwa/CIFOR

Using specific gender-inclusive angles 

The methodology also aimed to understand more about the role of gender and social inclusion in the daily lives of male and female sugarcane, rice and tea outgrowers.

“In the beginning we thought that tackling gender issues would be difficult for we mostly saw gender issues pop up during the process and the narrations, for example when we were talking about environmental history, the current landscape narrative, transitions from an existing crop to commodity crop, and the land availability in the community and who gets land, why and how. However, in the end, the film turned out to be a tool to help figure out the gaps in these ‘socially desired’ narratives,” Gallagher explained.

Taking Tanzania, a country with a socialist history, as an example, she suggested that some people might have a cultural mindset in which everything must be or was already equally divided. “In our group interviews, people would respond that  all land is divided equally between families, men, women and youth. However, the intra-household data about land access and ownership contradict this egalitarian narrative. Or, for example, during a workshop, we asked a group of men and women whether the land gets divided equally between men and women. And while the men were loudly saying ‘yes’, the women on the other side were dramatically rolling their eyes and responding ‘not at all’. So we can see there is a gap in this narrative, and I try to use the film narratives to fill these gaps.”

Read more: Gender equality and social inclusion

Gender role play

To understand more about these gaps Gallagher decided to use a gender role play methodology to view the current situation of women’s lack of access to land, the fact that women historically do not inherit land, and the general land scarcity for youth. This methodology has been developed by the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) and works with different scenarios.

The community members were asked to play out what would happen, with one change: the men would play the women’s roles, and the women would play the men’s roles. According to Gallagher, this gives women a new kind of power, as they can show from their own perspectives how they feel women and men are treated in the community.

The gender role play methodology was used to understand current situations relating to land. Photo by Nkumi Mtingwa/CIFOR

She used two specific scenarios. The first one was about a young man who was ready to marry. However, both his parents were still healthy and not yet ready to give up their land. The second scenario was of a young widow who had been farming the land of her deceased husband, but his family wanted to take back the land to give to their other son.

In both examples, all kinds of follow-up scenarios came up, such as the healthy parents giving their son the land piece by piece, while he had to share his income with them, and the widowed woman having to marry her brother-in-law to continue having access to the land, or refusing to marry and being asked to leave the land.

These scenarios showed the general understanding among both men and women that it makes more sense to give land to a son than to a daughter, as giving it to a son will ensure the land stays in the family. Giving it to a daughter could lead to her new husband or his family deciding to sell it, or he could pass away and the family of the deceased husband might keep it. And with the current land scarcity, families do not want to run these risks. Furthermore, there is the case of divorce.

“Often in Tanzania people marry only in the traditional way and not through court, so in the case of divorce, the official court rules of equal division of assets do not apply,” said Gallagher. “This is a tense topic, but above all, this is beyond a land issue; it is about a cultural practice and thus extremely hard to change.”

Women left out of supply and value chains

Another moment when it became clear that women, due to a lack of land, had fewer livelihood choices was in value chain exercises. Again, Gallagher made use of different scenarios, in which she talked about the current and past situations, agricultural futures and the changing price of sugarcane.

Gallagher discusses a daily calendar with a sugarcane grower for the documentary in Kilosa District, Tanzania. Photo by Nkumi Mtingwa/CIFOR

During the participatory supply chain exercises she asked participants to act out in which part of the supply chain men, women and youth fit. Through this it became clear that women are restricted to activities inside the farmgate and have little influence in decisions beyond the household. Using this information she initiated a discussion about what kind of change needs to happen at every step of the supply chain to make it socially inclusive.

One conclusion was that in general women require access to land, more inclusion in different roles across the supply chains, and more representation in organizations.

Those who tend to be most vulnerable are the women who marry young, and those whose husband passes away before their children are old enough to inherit, as underage children are legally not allowed to inherit land.

Gallagher mentioned that even though there are very few women landowners and it is hard to find female association members, there are some women in powerful positions. Those women appeared to have been put there based on their leadership qualities, which might not be the case for men.

Read more: Gender-responsive methodology for value chain development

Next steps, uptake to the national level

“In general, it was hard for us to cut all that great footage back into something that we could actually share and show and to capture all the issues they thought were important. However, we also noticed that our first target group, the communities, have a lot of patience watching longer videos, especially when it shows familiar faces and voices from their own communities,” said Gallagher.

The next step is for the film to be shown at the national workshop level. This final step has been mentioned throughout the process, so community members know their voices will be heard at national level. Twelve community members will be present at the national level workshop so that they can see how the documentary is received, and what kind of discussion it might provoke.

By Manon Koningstein, FTA Gender Integration Team. 

This project is led by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) under a cross-CGIAR Research Program collaboration with the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) and the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE).

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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Filling gaps in the narratives of Tanzanian farmers


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Rice farmers in Mbarali District, Tanzania. Photo by Nkumi Mtingwa/CIFOR
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FTA COMMUNICATIONS TEAM
Rice farmers in Mbarali District, Tanzania. Photo by Nkumi Mtingwa/CIFOR

To go beyond socially appropriate responses and understand what is really going on in their project sites, researchers created a medium for participants to narrate the stories behind the data.

Following a recent overview of a Tanzanian research project that uses visual communication to enable farmers to speak up, this article looks at the developments that have been taking place since. Principal Investigator Emily Gallagher explains what has happened with her filmmaking project now that the sugarcane and tea outgrower communities at the center of the research have been visited, interviewed and filmed, and community screenings organized.

As outlined previously, the project uses the methodology of collaborative documentary, from the visual anthropology field, enabling community members take on the role of active collaborators. However, it is not a documentary in which researchers are trying to look through the research subjects’ eyes.

Communities have control over the script and storyboard through an iterative research process that includes surveys and semistructured questionnaires followed by in-depth interviews that took the researchers back to the field with a Tanzanian filmmaker to document the oral histories and daily lives of sugarcane, rice and tea farmers.

“We are using filmmaking as a collaborative method to spark dialogue and fill in the conversational gaps in the narrative. We know what the quantitative data say. We want to create a medium for the research participants to narrate the stories behind the data using  participatory activities to get beyond the socially appropriate response to understand what is really going on,” said Gallagher, of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

The final step of this process is to take the documentary to a national-level workshop. “The fact that the communities knew that the final film was going to be shown at national level and that we came back to the village three different times meant a lot for the process and the communities. This was crucial. Communities need to feel that there is a benefit for them to dedicate so much of their time,” she added.

Read more: Visualizing gender in Tanzanian sugarcane production: The use of community screening and documentary filming

Emily Gallagher works with a cultural interpreter in Kilosa District, Tanzania. Photo by Nkumi Mtingwa/CIFOR

Using specific gender-inclusive angles 

The methodology also aimed to understand more about the role of gender and social inclusion in the daily lives of male and female sugarcane, rice and tea outgrowers.

“In the beginning we thought that tackling gender issues would be difficult for we mostly saw gender issues pop up during the process and the narrations, for example when we were talking about environmental history, the current landscape narrative, transitions from an existing crop to commodity crop, and the land availability in the community and who gets land, why and how. However, in the end, the film turned out to be a tool to help figure out the gaps in these ‘socially desired’ narratives,” Gallagher explained.

Taking Tanzania, a country with a socialist history, as an example, she suggested that some people might have a cultural mindset in which everything must be or was already equally divided. “In our group interviews, people would respond that  all land is divided equally between families, men, women and youth. However, the intra-household data about land access and ownership contradict this egalitarian narrative. Or, for example, during a workshop, we asked a group of men and women whether the land gets divided equally between men and women. And while the men were loudly saying ‘yes’, the women on the other side were dramatically rolling their eyes and responding ‘not at all’. So we can see there is a gap in this narrative, and I try to use the film narratives to fill these gaps.”

Read more: Gender equality and social inclusion

Gender role play

To understand more about these gaps Gallagher decided to use a gender role play methodology to view the current situation of women’s lack of access to land, the fact that women historically do not inherit land, and the general land scarcity for youth. This methodology has been developed by the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) and works with different scenarios.

The community members were asked to play out what would happen, with one change: the men would play the women’s roles, and the women would play the men’s roles. According to Gallagher, this gives women a new kind of power, as they can show from their own perspectives how they feel women and men are treated in the community.

The gender role play methodology was used to understand current situations relating to land. Photo by Nkumi Mtingwa/CIFOR

She used two specific scenarios. The first one was about a young man who was ready to marry. However, both his parents were still healthy and not yet ready to give up their land. The second scenario was of a young widow who had been farming the land of her deceased husband, but his family wanted to take back the land to give to their other son.

In both examples, all kinds of follow-up scenarios came up, such as the healthy parents giving their son the land piece by piece, while he had to share his income with them, and the widowed woman having to marry her brother-in-law to continue having access to the land, or refusing to marry and being asked to leave the land.

These scenarios showed the general understanding among both men and women that it makes more sense to give land to a son than to a daughter, as giving it to a son will ensure the land stays in the family. Giving it to a daughter could lead to her new husband or his family deciding to sell it, or he could pass away and the family of the deceased husband might keep it. And with the current land scarcity, families do not want to run these risks. Furthermore, there is the case of divorce.

“Often in Tanzania people marry only in the traditional way and not through court, so in the case of divorce, the official court rules of equal division of assets do not apply,” said Gallagher. “This is a tense topic, but above all, this is beyond a land issue; it is about a cultural practice and thus extremely hard to change.”

Women left out of supply and value chains

Another moment when it became clear that women, due to a lack of land, had fewer livelihood choices was in value chain exercises. Again, Gallagher made use of different scenarios, in which she talked about the current and past situations, agricultural futures and the changing price of sugarcane.

Gallagher discusses a daily calendar with a sugarcane grower for the documentary in Kilosa District, Tanzania. Photo by Nkumi Mtingwa/CIFOR

During the participatory supply chain exercises she asked participants to act out in which part of the supply chain men, women and youth fit. Through this it became clear that women are restricted to activities inside the farmgate and have little influence in decisions beyond the household. Using this information she initiated a discussion about what kind of change needs to happen at every step of the supply chain to make it socially inclusive.

One conclusion was that in general women require access to land, more inclusion in different roles across the supply chains, and more representation in organizations.

Those who tend to be most vulnerable are the women who marry young, and those whose husband passes away before their children are old enough to inherit, as underage children are legally not allowed to inherit land.

Gallagher mentioned that even though there are very few women landowners and it is hard to find female association members, there are some women in powerful positions. Those women appeared to have been put there based on their leadership qualities, which might not be the case for men.

Read more: Gender-responsive methodology for value chain development

Next steps, uptake to the national level

“In general, it was hard for us to cut all that great footage back into something that we could actually share and show and to capture all the issues they thought were important. However, we also noticed that our first target group, the communities, have a lot of patience watching longer videos, especially when it shows familiar faces and voices from their own communities,” said Gallagher.

The next step is for the film to be shown at the national workshop level. This final step has been mentioned throughout the process, so community members know their voices will be heard at national level. Twelve community members will be present at the national level workshop so that they can see how the documentary is received, and what kind of discussion it might provoke.

By Manon Koningstein, FTA Gender Integration Team. 

This project is led by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) under a cross-CGIAR Research Program collaboration with the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) and the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE).

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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Governing mangroves: From Tanzania to Indonesia


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The sun sets behind mangrove trees on Osi Island, Indonesia. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/CIFOR
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The sun sets behind mangrove trees on Osi Island, Indonesia. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/CIFOR

Mangroves constitute only 0.5 percent of forest area worldwide, but millions of people depend on them for food, income and protection of coastlines against erosion.

Since 1980, about one-fifth of the world’s mangroves have disappeared. Although human pressures are a major threat, little is known about the governance conditions that facilitate long-term conservation and restoration of these coastal forests — questions that will become all the more relevant as countries develop frameworks for action on climate change.

“Research to date has typically focused on the biophysical dimensions of mangroves, since a lack of knowledge in this area was considered a major obstacle to managing them,” explains Nining Liswanti, as Indonesia Coordinator of the Global Comparative Study on Forest Tenure Reform (GCS-Tenure), adding that mangrove governance remains relatively unexplored territory.

To fill this critical gap, scientists from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), coordinated by Principal Scientist Esther Mwangi, set out to explore tenure and governance arrangements of mangroves through a global review.

They have so far conducted case studies in the Rufiji delta of Tanzania, which has one of the two most extensive mangrove areas in East Africa, and in Lampung province in Indonesia, the country with the largest mangrove forest cover in the world, accounting for up to 22 percent of the world’s mangroves.

At these sites, scientists analyzed national-level legal and policy frameworks, coordination across government agencies, and institutional arrangements at the local level — looking at “how decisions are made and the ability to implement them, both in terms of resources and capacity,” says the Coordinator of the Tanzania study, Baruani Mshale.

Watch: Protecting North Sumatran mangroves, supporting biodiversity, people and the world

INVOLVING COMMUNITIES

In Tanzania, the main dangers to mangroves are clearing for paddy rice farming and salt evaporation pans, unregulated harvesting for charcoal and timber, and growing competition between various foreign and local land-users.

Mangrove trees grow in Indonesia. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/CIFOR

“Mangrove forests in Indonesia continue to face enormous threats from economic activities like aquaculture and timber logging,” and half of them were destroyed between 1970 and 2001, the study notes.

Over the past 20 years, the Government of Indonesia has made interventions to curb mangrove deforestation, while in Tanzania, all mangrove forests are owned by the state and managed under strict protection, with restricted use by local communities. Yet threats to mangrove systems remain unabated. So what can be done?

“Expanding and strengthening the tenure rights of local communities to mangroves should be a central component of their sustainable management and conservation,” concludes the Tanzania case study. The key, the researchers find, is to strike a balance between forest use and conservation, and to involve communities in mangrove management by devolving rights to tenure.

This participatory approach is backed by evidence in terrestrial forests around the world, Mshale says. “When rights are granted to locals, they can derive livelihood benefits from natural resources, so they become active conservation agents and forests can be sustainably managed.”

Devolving rights over mangrove tenure and management comes with further benefits: it incentivizes communities to take ownership of mangrove conservation, and it reduces the distrust between locals and state conservation agencies — institutions historically tasked with keeping locals from settling in forests and using their resources.

Community-based approaches are also cost-effective.

“Strict protection approaches have generally failed for managing natural resources that people rely on for their livelihoods,” says Mshale. As populations grow and the pressure on resources increases, restricting access and use becomes more expensive and ineffective, he notes.

In Liswanti’s words, “it is impossible for authorities to enforce the rehabilitation of mangroves without the participation of communities.”

Read more: Protecting Tanzania’s mangroves

PRIORITIES FOR ACTION

Community-based management of mangrove forests is progressively gaining momentum. In Tanzania, the government has recently introduced regulated use in the Rufiji delta through various pilots, and Lampung province in Indonesia has seen community rehabilitation initiatives emerge in the past 10 to 20 years.

For sustainable management to flourish, however, a number of steps in policy, practice and research need to be taken. According to the analyses, a first priority is “better coordinating national and sub-national laws and policies,” as well as strengthening collaboration between the forestry, fisheries and agriculture sectors.

Tanzania has no specific policy tailored to the unique needs of mangrove systems, and in Indonesia, “no single national authority and policy on mangrove forest management operates in practice,” though mangrove-specific regulations at the local level fill up the void in some ways.

Birds perch among mangroves in North Sumatra, Indonesia. SWAMP Project
Photo by Mokhamad Edliadi/CIFOR

In Lampung, for instance, community leaders play a central role in mobilizing local action and liasing with external actors for mangrove protection, but “these links need to be regularized to sustain local effort over the longer term,” the study finds.

While emphasizing this need for mangrove-specific frameworks, the researchers found that at the local level, mangrove-specific regulations temper or substitute the array of national regulations.

Ensuring adequate financial and technical capacity for management by both the government and local communities is also key, as is expanding possibilities for income generation by locals, including access to markets for regulated mangrove products.

Women are particularly engaged in mangrove use, but they are often left out of decision-making and benefit-sharing. “Sociocultural and religious norms prevent women from participating in discussions that take place in public spaces,” says Mshale. Beyond legal and institutional provisions, alternative participatory processes should be considered to ensure that women’s voices are heard.

DRIVING CHANGE

Other priorities are supporting participatory management across all tenure arrangements, addressing political influence at the national and local levels, and embracing a landscape approach that takes into account all activities affecting mangroves, including farming, herding and the activities of foreign land-based investors.

Indonesian villages outside of state forest zones, for example, have been engaged in mangrove rehabilitation since 1995 to control erosion. However, they do not have regular access to government resources. “I admire their patience,” says Liswanti, “but it will be hard for communities to keep it up indefinitely without financial support.”

In Tanzania, politicians encourage mangrove clearance for paddy rice farming to gain support during election times. “Politicians are key to changing people’s behavior, so we must find ways to work with them in favor of management strategies that achieve both environmental and livelihood outcomes,” stresses Mshale.

CIFOR’s case studies have been presented to stakeholders in both Tanzania and Indonesia, spurring dialogue between authorities, communities, non-governmental organizations, academics and donors.

Additionally, scientists are looking into mangrove governance in Kenya (2017) and Vietnam (2018).

Further research into governance and tenure aspects is crucial, says Mshale, but the initial path has been blazed. “Each actor has its share of responsibility, so maintaining this dialogue is a vital first step to bringing about positive change.”

By Gloria Pallares, originally published at CIFOR’s Forest News. 

For more information on this topic, please contact Esther Mwangi at E.Mwangi@cgiar.org or Baruani Mshale at B.Mshale@cgiar.org or Nining Liswanti at N.Liswanti@cgiar.org.

This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

This research was supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

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Governing mangroves: From Tanzania to Indonesia

01 November, 2017

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The sun sets behind mangrove trees on Osi Island, Indonesia. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/CIFOR
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The sun sets behind mangrove trees on Osi Island, Indonesia. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/CIFOR

Mangroves constitute only 0.5 percent of forest area worldwide, but millions of people depend on them for food, income and protection of coastlines against erosion.

Since 1980, about one-fifth of the world’s mangroves have disappeared. Although human pressures are a major threat, little is known about the governance conditions that facilitate long-term conservation and restoration of these coastal forests — questions that will become all the more relevant as countries develop frameworks for action on climate change.

“Research to date has typically focused on the biophysical dimensions of mangroves, since a lack of knowledge in this area was considered a major obstacle to managing them,” explains Nining Liswanti, as Indonesia Coordinator of the Global Comparative Study on Forest Tenure Reform (GCS-Tenure), adding that mangrove governance remains relatively unexplored territory.

To fill this critical gap, scientists from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), coordinated by Principal Scientist Esther Mwangi, set out to explore tenure and governance arrangements of mangroves through a global review.

They have so far conducted case studies in the Rufiji delta of Tanzania, which has one of the two most extensive mangrove areas in East Africa, and in Lampung province in Indonesia, the country with the largest mangrove forest cover in the world, accounting for up to 22 percent of the world’s mangroves.

At these sites, scientists analyzed national-level legal and policy frameworks, coordination across government agencies, and institutional arrangements at the local level — looking at “how decisions are made and the ability to implement them, both in terms of resources and capacity,” says the Coordinator of the Tanzania study, Baruani Mshale.

Watch: Protecting North Sumatran mangroves, supporting biodiversity, people and the world

INVOLVING COMMUNITIES

In Tanzania, the main dangers to mangroves are clearing for paddy rice farming and salt evaporation pans, unregulated harvesting for charcoal and timber, and growing competition between various foreign and local land-users.

Mangrove trees grow in Indonesia. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/CIFOR

“Mangrove forests in Indonesia continue to face enormous threats from economic activities like aquaculture and timber logging,” and half of them were destroyed between 1970 and 2001, the study notes.

Over the past 20 years, the Government of Indonesia has made interventions to curb mangrove deforestation, while in Tanzania, all mangrove forests are owned by the state and managed under strict protection, with restricted use by local communities. Yet threats to mangrove systems remain unabated. So what can be done?

“Expanding and strengthening the tenure rights of local communities to mangroves should be a central component of their sustainable management and conservation,” concludes the Tanzania case study. The key, the researchers find, is to strike a balance between forest use and conservation, and to involve communities in mangrove management by devolving rights to tenure.

This participatory approach is backed by evidence in terrestrial forests around the world, Mshale says. “When rights are granted to locals, they can derive livelihood benefits from natural resources, so they become active conservation agents and forests can be sustainably managed.”

Devolving rights over mangrove tenure and management comes with further benefits: it incentivizes communities to take ownership of mangrove conservation, and it reduces the distrust between locals and state conservation agencies — institutions historically tasked with keeping locals from settling in forests and using their resources.

Community-based approaches are also cost-effective.

“Strict protection approaches have generally failed for managing natural resources that people rely on for their livelihoods,” says Mshale. As populations grow and the pressure on resources increases, restricting access and use becomes more expensive and ineffective, he notes.

In Liswanti’s words, “it is impossible for authorities to enforce the rehabilitation of mangroves without the participation of communities.”

Read more: Protecting Tanzania’s mangroves

PRIORITIES FOR ACTION

Community-based management of mangrove forests is progressively gaining momentum. In Tanzania, the government has recently introduced regulated use in the Rufiji delta through various pilots, and Lampung province in Indonesia has seen community rehabilitation initiatives emerge in the past 10 to 20 years.

For sustainable management to flourish, however, a number of steps in policy, practice and research need to be taken. According to the analyses, a first priority is “better coordinating national and sub-national laws and policies,” as well as strengthening collaboration between the forestry, fisheries and agriculture sectors.

Tanzania has no specific policy tailored to the unique needs of mangrove systems, and in Indonesia, “no single national authority and policy on mangrove forest management operates in practice,” though mangrove-specific regulations at the local level fill up the void in some ways.

Birds perch among mangroves in North Sumatra, Indonesia. SWAMP Project
Photo by Mokhamad Edliadi/CIFOR

In Lampung, for instance, community leaders play a central role in mobilizing local action and liasing with external actors for mangrove protection, but “these links need to be regularized to sustain local effort over the longer term,” the study finds.

While emphasizing this need for mangrove-specific frameworks, the researchers found that at the local level, mangrove-specific regulations temper or substitute the array of national regulations.

Ensuring adequate financial and technical capacity for management by both the government and local communities is also key, as is expanding possibilities for income generation by locals, including access to markets for regulated mangrove products.

Women are particularly engaged in mangrove use, but they are often left out of decision-making and benefit-sharing. “Sociocultural and religious norms prevent women from participating in discussions that take place in public spaces,” says Mshale. Beyond legal and institutional provisions, alternative participatory processes should be considered to ensure that women’s voices are heard.

DRIVING CHANGE

Other priorities are supporting participatory management across all tenure arrangements, addressing political influence at the national and local levels, and embracing a landscape approach that takes into account all activities affecting mangroves, including farming, herding and the activities of foreign land-based investors.

Indonesian villages outside of state forest zones, for example, have been engaged in mangrove rehabilitation since 1995 to control erosion. However, they do not have regular access to government resources. “I admire their patience,” says Liswanti, “but it will be hard for communities to keep it up indefinitely without financial support.”

In Tanzania, politicians encourage mangrove clearance for paddy rice farming to gain support during election times. “Politicians are key to changing people’s behavior, so we must find ways to work with them in favor of management strategies that achieve both environmental and livelihood outcomes,” stresses Mshale.

CIFOR’s case studies have been presented to stakeholders in both Tanzania and Indonesia, spurring dialogue between authorities, communities, non-governmental organizations, academics and donors.

Additionally, scientists are looking into mangrove governance in Kenya (2017) and Vietnam (2018).

Further research into governance and tenure aspects is crucial, says Mshale, but the initial path has been blazed. “Each actor has its share of responsibility, so maintaining this dialogue is a vital first step to bringing about positive change.”

By Gloria Pallares, originally published at CIFOR’s Forest News. 

For more information on this topic, please contact Esther Mwangi at E.Mwangi@cgiar.org or Baruani Mshale at B.Mshale@cgiar.org or Nining Liswanti at N.Liswanti@cgiar.org.

This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

This research was supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

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Visualizing gender in Tanzanian sugarcane production: The use of community screening and documentary filming


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A Tanzanian family stands together for a photograph. Photo by Carol J. Pierce Colfer/CIFOR
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A child plays beside her mother in Tanzania. Photo by M. Koningstein/CIAT

Including the voices of both male and female farmers in the larger decision-making process at a national level sounds logical, but how can it be done in practice? 

“Usually these farmers don’t have a chance to talk directly to the large companies,” said Principal Investigator Emily Gallagher of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). “It is for this reason that we have decided to include documentary filming and community screening as an essential part of the research process, to give these farmers a voice.”

A project led by CIFOR, under a cross-CGIAR Research Program collaboration with the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) and the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE), uses an innovative methodology including documentary filming, community screening and local and national level workshops to do just that.

Visualization of research

Gallagher and her team are currently undertaking field visits, with a focus on sugarcane farmers, done in collaboration with enumerators and partners from the University of Dar es Salaam.

“What I am really interested in is the visual communication aspect and the visualization of the research. This is what we are trying to reach through the use of the documentary film. For now, we have interviewed and filmed three people per community [six in total for the sugarcane farmers]. Two of them are outgrowers and one of them is a non-outgrower. Then, I want to use the issues that come out of the filming workshop as a guide to structure the dialogue and capture the communities, using a dialogical process with a strong facilitation, together with the investors,” she explained.

This involved exercises with various communities, including both men and women, and outgrowers and non-outgrowers, to understand what guided their decisions to say yes or no to becoming members of sugarcane associations.

Men collect water in Tanzania. Photo by Tim Cronin/CIFOR

“Another approach we take is using scenarios. We try to understand what, for example, an increase or decrease of the sugar price would mean for them: Would they leave or join associations? What would this mean for the adjoining forest? What would it mean for water scarcity or water quality?” Gallagher added.

The project then went a step further, by filming the interviews and creating a documentary, along with other footage. This film was screened at the beginning of September to two communities. The screenings were open to the whole community, and were also attended by the researchers and an invited district officer. The following day a workshop was held with village representatives. Furthermore, the movie was shared in the same week with the investor.

“We engage them all together in a local workshop, in which the video will serve as a means of facilitation. Here we will film their feedback, their reactions, their ideas and any other topics that might surge,” she said.

After this, the team will make a second version of the movie, which will be shown during a national workshop, to which national decision-makers will be invited.

“This way, again, the video will serve as a way to show the voices from the field, as a guide in the facilitation of the national workshop and as a tool to gain empathy and understanding of national decision-makers [about] what it is like to be a smallholder sugarcane farmer.”

Find out more: Gendered dimensions of large-scale and smallholder-inclusive agricultural investments in Tanzania

Gendered or generational restricted access?

In regards to the gender approach in the project, the results have been interesting thus far: In the community of Kitete, farmers tend to have very little land and therefore the whole household works together on the same plot. Therefore, the division between food crops and cash crops is not so clear, nor is the gender division of tasks.

A Tanzanian family stands together for a photograph. Photo by Carol J. Pierce Colfer/CIFOR

Female farmers who were not part of the association were asked whether they felt there was gender-restricted access. However, they said there was more of a youth restriction: Most young farmers do not have land because they have not inherited any. This land scarcity is also the cause of a lot of internal household conflicts in which various children fight for a very small piece of land, and why only very few farmers can buy land, because no one is selling it.

The only valid reason, as the interviewed farmers mentioned, for moving away from sugarcane production would be if prices dropped and thus the return on investment did not make production worth it anymore.

Field visits to suspicious sugarcane farmers

But it has not been as easy as it sounds, according to Gallagher. As always, field visits begin with traditional village introductions, done together with government officials based in the village, the village chairperson and subvillage leaders, partners from the University of Dar es Salaam, and later with a professional filmmaker. Reactions to their presence and the documentary filmmaking proposal have been quite diverse.

In the first village, a longer follow-up explanation was needed to clarify that CIFOR’s intention was not to convince farmers to join big cooperatives, as they had seen done in the past, but purely to understand the context and reasons for day-to-day decisions that the sugarcane farmers make.

“Basically, the context in which we are working here in Tanzania is one of quite some suspicion and mistrust. Farmers have no means to talk directly to large agribusiness and a lot of misinformation is going around. I think if companies had more open communication pathways about their management practices and market strategies, much of the distrust would dissipate,” said Gallagher.

It can be said that the sugarcane market works through associations. “Overall, outside of the associations, there is no market for sugarcane. So unless it is a food crop, farmers need to somehow become a member of an association to sell their product. However, it seems that farmers are trusting the associations more than the government-backed cooperatives, which they have called corrupt and misguiding,” Gallagher added.

Gallagher will be in the field in coming months, shifting her focus toward rice and tea farmers in Tanzania. Gender dimensions in these communities are expected to bring different outcomes.

By Manon Koningstein, FTA Gender Integration Team.  

This project is part of a larger study to examine the local impacts of commercialization across the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT). The initiative aims to improve national food security, reduce poverty and support climate-resilient livelihoods through sustainable agricultural growth. In practice, SAGCOT will grow through public-private partnerships to finance agricultural infrastructure, value chain development and various smallholder outgrower schemes in Tanzania. 

The government of Tanzania, private investors and civil society organizations have outlined a commitment to social inclusion and climate-smart development through the SAGCOT Investment Blueprint (2011) and the Green Growth Investment Framework (2013).

However, some consider that these instrumental investment frameworks have overlooked the ways in which they could also serve as an example of the pathways that safeguard women’s access and household food security, while at the same time promoting gender-inclusive green growth. 

Thus the next new phase was entered the research process. This phase, led by Emily Gallagher, aims to contribute to the dialogue by analyzing the social, economic and institutional factors that affect gendered access to these agro-investments and to propose pathways for the government of Tanzania’s socially inclusive vision for SAGCOT. 

It does so through a set of methods and communication instruments for documenting the gender baseline in the initial stages of SAGCOT development. The gender baseline measures the relative level of women’s participation in SACGOT outgrower schemes and how this impacts household food security and gendered distribution of benefits. Furthermore, it aims to provide an opportunity to operationalize the government of Tanzania’s gender inclusive policies through innovative practice.

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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Protecting Tanzania’s mangroves


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Photo: Jean-Marc Liotier/CIFOR
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Photo: Jean-Marc Liotier/CIFOR
Photo: Jean-Marc Liotier/CIFOR

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

Lush mangrove forests line the meandering channels of the Rufiji River Delta, south of the commercial capital Dar es Salaam on the east coast of Tanzania.

It’s one of the largest mangrove areas in Africa, and like mangroves everywhere, they’re under threat. Mangrove trunks are being cut for timber, poles and burned for charcoal; meanwhile, trees are being cleared to make way for rice paddies.

Tanzanian law strictly protects mangroves given that they are the property of the State. Though the government initially encouraged people to settle in the Delta in the early 1970s, strict protection means local women aren’t supposed to collect firewood from the forest (though they often do) and every December through January since the 1990s, agents from the Tanzanian Forest Service (TFS) have burned farmers’ temporary stilt huts (madungu) and new rice farms, in an attempt to discourage further deforestation.

But this conservation model isn’t optimal, say scientists from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR.)

Rufiji’s population is growing. Locals increasingly rely on mangrove products for their livelihoods, and allow outsiders to come in and illegally harvest timber and charcoal to sell in the capital. Massive flooding in the 1990s changed the river’s course, expanding the area suitable for rice farming – while immigration into the delta has simultaneously increased demand for agricultural land.

“The threats are increasing and the government alone cannot deal with all these threats,” says CIFOR’s Baruani Mshale. Even if the enforcement budget was vastly improved, it would still be a battle, he says.

“People will always come up with creative ways on how they can access and use the mangroves, regardless of how much protection the government imposes.”

Read also: The Sustainable Wetlands Adaptation and Mitigation Program (SWAMP)

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

But that doesn’t mean the mangroves are doomed.

The solution, says Mshale, is to give locals a reason to defend them from outsiders and manage them sustainably. This can be done by granting communities more rights and responsibilities, and involving them in the protection and rehabilitation of the forests while ensuring that they generate livelihood benefits from doing so.

The Tanzanian government has begun to acknowledge that strict protection doesn’t work, and experiments are currently unfolding in the Rufiji River Delta.

Three different models of community engagement are being trialled – with varying degrees of success. Mshale is the lead author of a new report for USAID conducted by researchers from CIFOR and the University of Dar es Salaam that compares and analyses these approaches.

MODEL 1: INDIVIDUAL FARMING PERMITS

The first is a system of individual farming permits between villagers and TFS.

Farmers apply for renewable one-year licenses allowing them to continue farming rice in exchange for facilitating the natural regeneration of mangrove trees on their plots. Once the trees reach a certain height, their shade renders rice paddies less productive, and farmers must move elsewhere to repeat the process.

This scheme has not been a success, says Mshale. It is one-sided – imposing a lot of conservation responsibility on farmers in exchange for few rewards. It also creates insecurity.

“People know that once the mangroves regrow, they’ll be kicked out,” he says – so there is a perverse incentive for farmers to intentionally prevent mangrove recovery.

The written contracts have also been problematic.

“Many people in the delta are illiterate, and they fear anything that is signed. They felt like they are getting tricked – perhaps there is something written there that they do not understand, and they’ll be made to pay fines later.”

After so many years of harsh policies, the people don’t always trust the government’s intentions. Unsurprisingly, many communities refused to sign these contracts.

MODEL 2: GROUP REHABILITATION

Group rehabilitation of mangroves is another approach that is being pioneered in the Rufiji River Delta, with the support of the UNDP and UNEP.

Local collectives of 15-30 men and women are assigned areas of mangrove forest to restore, and are paid for each day they spend replanting or weeding.

Communities initially embraced the project, but Mshale says some villagers complained to his team about favouritism, saying they felt excluded from the scheme – even though TFS says it would be expanded to ensure benefits are shared.

More importantly, the program doesn’t give people a sense of ownership over the forest.

“These people are providing casual labour, but they don’t have any other rights over the areas that they are replanting. So the moment you stop paying them, they won’t be able to come and work for you.”

What’s more, its future is uncertain because the program relies heavily upon financial support from UNEP and UNDP. Once the funds dry up, it won’t be able to be sustained, says Mshale.

MODEL 3: JOINT FOREST MANAGEMENT

The most promising approach, according to CIFOR research, is the Joint Forest Management scheme currently being trialled in the delta as part of the Tanzanian participatory forest management program.

In four Rufiji villages, TFS has negotiated with individual communities to draw up plans for sharing the costs and benefits of managing the mangrove forest. Though the state retains ultimate ownership of the mangroves, this is the only scheme that transfers some decision-making power to local people – and that means it’s the one most likely to succeed compared to the others, says Mshale.

So far, the communities have embraced it.

“It’s in its infancy, so they have not seen any benefits yet – but they are very hopeful” – and TFS is committed to making it work, says Mshale.

“They’re not old-school forestry technocrats who view local people as a threat to conservation – they see that they can work with the communities and achieve conservation goals. They realise that strict protection alone is not going to work.”

EMPOWERING LOCAL WOMEN

“What’s needed now is proper management and making sure that the benefits and costs are equitably and fairly distributed among community members.”

In particular, that means ensuring women’s meaningful participation in decision-making in a culture where women traditionally are meant to defer to men and tend to stay silent during group meetings.

That could mean providing a space for women to meet alone to debate ideas among themselves, before bringing their concerns to the broader community.

Women often spend more time in the mangroves than men, and have detailed knowledge about their biology and uses, says Mshale.

“Women need to benefit from the schemes that are being implemented, and have their voices and concerns taken into account – without being dominated and bullied by men.”

For more information on this topic, please contact Baruani Mshale at b.mshale@cgiar.org or Esther Mwangi at e.mwangi@cgiar.org.
This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry.

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  • Can conservation funding be left to carbon finance? Evidence from participatory future land use scenarios in Peru, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Mexico

Can conservation funding be left to carbon finance? Evidence from participatory future land use scenarios in Peru, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Mexico

19 January, 2017

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Authors: Ravikumar, A.; Larjavaara, M.; Larson, A.M.; Kanninen, M.

Revenues derived from carbon have been seen as an important tool for supporting forest conservation over the past decade. At the same time, there is high uncertainty about how much revenue can reasonably be expected from land use emissions reductions initiatives. Despite this uncertainty, REDD+ projects and conservation initiatives that aim to take advantage of available or, more commonly, future funding from carbon markets have proliferated. This study used participatory multi-stakeholder workshops to develop divergent future scenarios of land use in eight landscapes in four countries around the world: Peru, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Mexico. The results of these future scenario building exercises were analyzed using a new tool, CarboScen, for calculating the landscape carbon storage implications of different future land use scenarios. The findings suggest that potential revenues from carbon storage or emissions reductions are significant in some landscapes (most notably the peat forests of Indonesia), and much less significant in others (such as the low-carbon forests of Zanzibar and the interior of Tanzania). The findings call into question the practicality of many conservation programs that hinge on expectations of future revenue from carbon finance. The future scenarios-based approach is useful to policy-makers and conservation program developers in distinguishing between landscapes where carbon finance can substantially support conservation, and landscapes where other strategies for conservation and land use should be prioritized.

Publication Year: 2017

ISSN: 1748-9326

Source: Environmental Research Letters 12: 014015

DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aa5509

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Update on gender research projects


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Focus group discussion in Forish Forestry Enterprise, Jizzakh Province, Uzbekistan. Photo: N. Muhsimov/Uzbek Republican Scientific and Production Centre of Ornamental Gardening and Forestry
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ICRAF | Bioversity International | CIAT | CIFOR

Climate change is severely affecting Yunnan Province. Photo: Louis Putzel/CIFOR
Climate change is severely affecting Yunnan Province. Photo: Louis Putzel/CIFOR

ICRAF

Gender and climate change in China’s Yunnan Province

In 2016, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) East and Central Asia office (ECA) has made significant progress on gender and climate change research to inform policy makers in China’s Yunnan Province.

First, ICRAF-ECA has recently been investigating how gender affects climate change adaptation throughout Yunnan. This Poverty and Vulnerability Analysis China Gender Report will be published as a working paper before the end of this year.

It is a part of a wider initiative investigating how gender has influenced climate change adaptation throughout the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region, conducted by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which includes Nepal, Pakistan and India. All research teams involved in this initiative used the Livelihood Vulnerability Index, developed by Hahn in 2009.

Preliminary results show that climate change has severely affected Yunnan Province and that few interventions have tried to better prepare local communities for future changes in livelihoods, water availability and natural disasters. It seems that most households are extremely vulnerable and have few resources to support short or long-term mitigation efforts in response to climate change. In this context, gender is one of the factors in predicting adaptation and vulnerability.

Additionally a paper on gender-specific responses to drought in Yunnan Province is currently being revised in line with comments received from journal reviewers. This paper reveals that during the period of record-breaking drought from 2009-2012, women’s changing role in agriculture and household resource management had important consequences for individual and community responses to water resource stresses.

Perceptions of drought impacts and of responses to the drought differed significantly according to gender. However, government policies and practices which aim to support adaptation and adaptive capacity have so far failed to take this gender differentiation into account, and as a result may be out of step with local drought responses, and may even serve to further marginalize mountain women in water resource management.

Finally two Chinese language book chapters about gender and climate change adaptation will be included in the book “Gender analysis of climate change impacts and adaptation” (in Chinese), also to be published this year.

A workshop is planned before the end of the year in Yunnan to disseminate the book among government officers and discuss relevant research findings and policy options.

For more information please contact Yufang Su at y.su@cgiar.org

Focus group discussion in Forish Forestry Enterprise, Jizzakh Province, Uzbekistan. Photo: N. Muhsimov/Uzbek Republican Scientific and Production Centre of Ornamental Gardening and Forestry
Focus group discussion in Forish Forestry Enterprise, Jizzakh Province, Uzbekistan. Photo: N. Muhsimov/Uzbek Republican Scientific and Production Centre of Ornamental Gardening and Forestry

Bioversity International

Project: Conservation for diversified and sustainable use of fruit tree genetic resources in Central Asia

The project ‘Conservation for diversified and sustainable use of fruit tree genetic resources in Central Asia’ aims to improve the prospects for long-term food security and livelihoods of farmers in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Its focus is on generating and disseminating knowledge about fruit and nut tree species, including traits that are important for adaptation and nutrition, their patterns of genetic diversity and how to effectively conserve them.

As primary users and custodians of fruit trees, both women and men play a key role in the management, conservation and transfer of fruit tree resources to future generations. Understanding gender-specific practices, knowledge and perceptions related to forests and trees as well as associated gender-based constraints in their management is essential to co-develop, with local forest managers, equitable innovations in the management of fruit tree genetic resources.

In September, national research partners in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan havecompleted a set of participatory research activities and interviews in project sites to explore gender-specific forest and fruit-tree-related knowledge, practices and interests.

Semi-structured interviews focused on the state’s role in forest management have been conducted with staff from 20 Forestry Enterprises (national forest management units). In parallel, 390 semi-structured interviews have been held with local men and women who manage fruit trees in their home gardens to understand resource management decisions and sourcing of planting material. The focus was on varieties of apple (Malus spp.), apricot (Prunus armeniaca) and walnut (Juglans regia) grown. Finally, 26 focus group discussions on local fruit tree management practices have been held with forest dwellers in separate women’s and men’s groups. Data are currently being cleaned and translated into English.

Results will provide guidance on how to foster the equitable participation of men and women in the management of fruit tree genetic resources in home gardens and forests. They will also help identify strategies for promoting the use of ‘wild’ (forest-based) fruit and nut tree genetic resources in home gardens; for addressing threats to wild populations of fruit and nut species; and for capturing opportunities for sustainable use and conservation of wild fruit and nut tree populations.

National research partners are :

  • Uzbek Republican Scientific and Production Center of Ornamental Gardening and Forestry
  • Kyrgyz National Agrarian University
  • Institute of Horticulture of Tajik Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

The project is coordinated by Bioversity International with financing from the Government of Luxembourg and with co-funding from the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry.

For more information please contact Marlene Elias at marlene.elias@cgiar.org

Photo: CIAT
Photo: CIAT

CIAT

Looking at gender in coffee agroforestry in Nicaragua

The research on gender, tree uses, and decision-making patterns among shade coffee producers in Tuma la Dalia, Nicaragua has made some progress.

Research suggests that coffee agroforestry producers in Latin American countries derive significant commercial and subsistence value from the non-coffee products of the agroforestry system, for example, timber, fuelwood, and fruits. However, there is a lack of consideration of gender aspects within the research, for example, how uses derived from the agroforestry system may vary between men and women producers.

The objectives are:

  • Analyze how men and women value and use trees on farms.
  • Understand the role of men and women in the decision-making process on the use and management of trees.

The research results shall support the development of gender-sensitive climate change interventions focused on high value tree crops. CIAT partners with the Fundación para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Agropecuario y Forestal de Nicaragua (FUNICA).

Findings suggest that women perceive more household uses of farm trees than men. Furthermore, women may be more prone to giving more importance than men to fruit trees than those used for timber. Results also demonstrate that although men tend to dominate decision-making processes, women and men both participate in decision-making on harvest sales and how to use income.

For more information please contact Tatiana Gumucio at T.Gumucio@cgiar.org

CIFOR

Photo: Carol J. Pierce Colfer
Photo: Carol J. Pierce Colfer

Gendered dimensions of agricultural land investments

The social and environmental effects of large-scale agricultural investments in forested landscapes have been extensively documented and debated in public and scholarly spheres, compelling a reassessment of investment policies and rural development plans, agrarian reforms, and regulatory safeguards on the part of host governments and the donor community.

While land deals come with promises of economic prosperity, studies suggest that their negative externalities have disproportionately impacted resource-poor groups, including women and landless farmers.

Within the vast literature on large-scale land acquisitions, or “land grabs”, there has been relatively little research systematically documenting mediating factors that affect rural women and men in the process of agribusiness investments or how different outcomes might be realized under more smallholder-inclusive investment models.

This research contributes to CIFOR’s gendered research agenda by examining the ways in which women and men are differently affected by agribusiness expansion into forested landscapes of Tanzania.

How do factors such as tenure regimes, institutional context and norms, market conditions, financial and other types of capital, intra-household relations, or other social practices mediate the ways in which women and men are differentially integrated into investor supply chains?

How are feminine and masculine domains reinforced, restructured, or renegotiated as a result of inclusion or exclusion into different investment modalities?

For more Information please contact Emily Gallagher at E.Gallagher@cgiar.org

Gender Café at previous Global Landscapes Forum. Photo: Neil Palmer/CIAT
Gender Café at previous Global Landscapes Forum. Photo: Neil Palmer/CIAT

Upcoming events: Panel discussion and side events at GLF and COP

Concerns over gender equality and women’s empowerment are increasingly considered in climate change policy at the global level.

There are currently over 50 UNFCCC decisions that support gender integration in climate policy, including the two-year Lima Work Programme on Gender (LWPG). The LWPG was initated at COP20 in Lima 2014 with a two-fold objective: enhancing the gender balance of the UNFCCC negotiations; and achieving gender-responsive climate policy.

However, while there now is a clear global mandate to develop and implement gender-responsive climate policy and action, these commitments are often not evident in national climate policies. For instance, only 40% of the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) submitted to the secretariat before COP21 in Paris made any references to women or gender. In the instances such references were made, they often served to paint a rather generalized picture of women as ‘vulnerable populations’.

The focus of COP22 will be on the implementation of the Paris Agreement: How are the Parties to the Agreement going to deliver on the promises made in Paris? This year’s COP also marks the end of the two-year LWPG. Parties and observer organizations have thus been urged by the UNFCCC Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) to share experiences and views to guide the possible continuation and enhancement of the program.

Given the gap between the global commitments to gender-responsive climate policy and their systematic implementation on a national level, it is of crucial importance to highlight and assess some of the existing attempts to address gender issues in climate policies.

Towards this end, the gender integration team is partnering with a wide range of organizations to bring together a high-level panel at the Global Landscapes Forum 2016 in Marrakesh on Wednesday November 16th. The focus will be on translating these global commitments into national and local actions. Partners are UN Women, UNDP–UNEP Poverty Environment Initiative, Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Global Gender Climate Alliance (GGCA), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO), African Women’s Network for Community Management of Forests (REFACOF).

Together with the same partners, we are also convening a skills share session at the GGCA Innovation Forum on Saturday November 12th, as well as a side-event at the UNFCCC COP22 (green zone) on Monday November 14th.

The above sessions will delve into the national processes of drafting and implementing gender-responsive climate policy. Particularly, the panelists will explore the role of multiple stakeholders – ranging from advocates and practitioners to researchers and donors – in supporting such processes.

The sessions will further investigate if, how and when ‘gender-responsive policies’ actually enhance gender equality and women’s empowerment on the ground. Participants will be invited to share achievements and challenges of drafting and implementing gender-responsive climate policy and action thus far, thereby fostering South–South learning of good practices.

The sessions will also provide an opportunity to deliberate over a minimum set of standards that countries could follow to ensure that commitment towards addressing gender equality are firmly rooted in national climate policy and action and that mechanisms for accountability, monitoring and continuous learning are in place.

 

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