Sandra Velarde

In this article, we trace the evolution of the Erosion Control Funding Programme (ECFP) on the East Coast of Aotearoa New Zealand to illustrate the importance of indigenous co-development of forest systems for more adaptive governance. The ECFP was originally created to address severe erosion on the East Coast, but uptake of the programme has been slower than planned. We employ an adaptive governance lens to track the progress of the ECFP over time, paying particular attention to its implications for Aotearoa New Zealand’s indigenous Māori people. We argue that a key aspect of the programme’s underperformance relates to the local and indigenous context that remained largely unaccounted for in the ECFP’s design and implementation. Our resulting analysis addresses a critical oversight in adaptive governance theory and practice relating to its treatment of power, history, and context, with important lessons for environmental governance in the East Coast and beyond.

Forests and forestry in many forms are instrumental in contributing positively to environmental, social and economic outcomes in New Zealand. However, simply increasing production or efficiency has not always realised positive benefits for communities. In a current programme on the East Coast of New Zealand, we are undertaking action research to develop culturally appropriate adaptive governance capacity in forest-dependent and rural communities. These communities do not necessarily want more intense or increased forest or agricultural production. They must manage the tensions inherent in an increase in forest and agricultural production, while dealing with severe erosion and a range of social, environmental, economic and cultural aspirations. The processes we are experimenting with are designed to understand land-use actors, their interests, networks and perceived challenges. Using this information, we apply adaptive governance and Kaupapa Māori principles to encourage collaboration and innovative thinking and decision-making. This work is innovative in that it has not been done before in New Zealand, can be scaled up and across contexts, and shift thinking away from traditional forest approaches (i.e. exotic monocultures) that have not worked. This paper will present the conceptual framework for this study and some preliminary results around empirical tools.

Lead author: Thomas P. Tomich, Principal Economist, World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), and Global Coordinator, Alternatives to Slash and Burn (ASB) Systemwide Programme of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) PO Box 30677, Nairobi, Kenya ...

We list the scientific outputs from ICRAF-SEA staff. Books, research reports, proceedings, journal articles, etc. can be obtained as long as the stock lasts, otherwise photocopies can be made available. You may also download the PDF file for free. This lists below are listed per type and per current year.

Poverty alleviation requires both 'goods' and 'services' from the environment. Economic growth tends to be based on the 'goods' at the cost of the 'services'. Achieving the triple goal of poverty alleviation, sustainable economic development and environmental protection requires careful management of tradeoffs. The concept of 'payments for environmental services' and the use of market-based institutions for such is one way to balance 'goods' and 'services'. This can also link downstream effects (negative or positive) to the decisions ...

ABSTRACT ASB’s assessment, ‘Forest and Agroecosystem Tradeoffs in the Humid Tropics’ (known as ‘Tropical Forest Margins'), is the only crosscutting sub-global assessment approved by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). Focusing on ecoregions nested within the humid tropical broadleaf forest biome, the aim is to conduct an assessment covering the ecoregions containing ASB benchmark sites in the Peruvian Amazon, the western Amazon of Brazil, an associated site in the eastern Amazon of Brazil, the Congo Basin of Cameroon, northern Thailand, and the islands of Sumatra in Indonesia and Mindanao in the Philippines. This ‘Tropical Forest Margins’ assessment will synthesize estimates of various indicators of environmental and developmental objectives for ASB benchmark sites spanning the humid tropics, and will endeavor to place these results within the broader context of relevant scientific evidence. These indicators have been used successfully to assess the degree of tradeoffs (and complementarities) between global environmental objectives (served by rainforest conservation) and national and local objectives (often involving conversion of natural forest to other uses), and also to assess the scope for policy to effectively, efficiently, and equitably manage these tradeoffs. ASB brings to the MA proven methods and existing data bases for plot-level indicators, on-going development of methods for landscape and watershed scale assessment, a pantropic analysis of the nexus among tropical hydrology, biodiversity, and poverty that is nearing completion, strong institutional links and long-term presence at benchmark sites in the humid tropics, experience in capacity building, and an established track record in multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, and multi-scale collaboration on integrated natural resource management. ASB results show that striking an equitable balance between the legitimate interests of development and equally legitimate global concerns over the environmental consequences of tropical deforestation is difficult. Poverty reduction in most of the tropics depends on finding ways to raise productivity of labor and land through intensification of smallholder production systems. Although there may be opportunities to alleviate poverty while conserving tropical rainforests, it is naïve to expect that productivity increases necessarily slow forest conversion or improves the environment. Deforestation has no single cause but is the outcome of a complex web of factors whose mix varies greatly in time and space. Understanding the factors at work in a given situation is a crucial first step if policymakers are to introduce effective measures to curb deforestation, and to do so in ways that reduce poverty. A series of stakeholder consultations to identify user needs provide the basis for development of the questions that will guide assessment teams for specific topics. Outputs planned later in 2006 and through 2007 are structured around these policy-relevant questions. The plan is to organize each team to produce one (or more) ASB Policybriefs on their topic as intermediate outputs that later will be combined into a comprehensive assessment product.

Scenarios are powerful tools for stimulating creative thinking about the future. Scenarios are especially valuable for planning and decision-making in complex and uncertain circumstances. This paper presents how Scenarios and Visioning are useful tools for environmental education, in particularly for changing environments (social and biophysical). We first outline the Scenarios methodology. We then present lessons learnt from applying Scenarios to environmental education with children and youth in Peru. We conclude with an analysis of the benefits and challenges of using scenarios for environmental education to accomplish environmental awareness objectives.

ASB, the Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins, is a decade-old, complex, multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary, multi-site research and development consortium. It has been recognized for its success in producing scientific outputs and real world impacts and as a pioneer in integrated natural resource management (iNRM). Until now, there has been little understanding of the reasons for its success in integrating different perspectives and ways of working. To fill this gap, an on-line consultation involving ASB researchers was structured following an analytical framework developed by the Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability. The structure of the presentation of major results presented in this article also follows that framework, which includes four dimensions of integration (disciplinary, functional, spatial/temporal, and knowledge) and linked challenges of institutional learning and adaptation, fostering appropriate participation, and managing resource and capacity constraints. To lay the foundations for interpreting these insights and to motivate the study, introductory sections present qualitative evidence regarding organizational learning within the consortium (using research hypotheses as indicators) and success in producing integrated results (using a selection of research results as evidence).This report on ASB's experience in integrative science and organizational learning is intended to advance understanding of the scope and limits of a complex international consortium to integrate activities across disciplines, organizations, scales and knowledge systems in order to produce knowledge and policy relevant outputs. ASB's processes and structures have weaknesses as well as strengths. And while there almost certainly are a range of effective alternative approaches to integrative science, the insights from ASB's experience documented in these online discussions could be of interest to other geographically dispersed teams, especially those working on environment and development issues. Moreover, from a methodological perspective, the use of information technology reported in this article proved to be an effective means of triangulating the perceptions of geographically dispersed researchers. In doing so, this web-based consultation provided a medium for reflection by a large ‘virtual team’ on whether words about integration are translated into practice, at least as perceived and self-reported by the scientists who participated. These techniques could be employed for process documentation by other dispersed teams, thereby adding to the stock of information on what works (and what does not) in efforts to put integrative science into practice on a significant scale.