Forests Sourcebook - HCV Resource Network

Box 4.4
Importance of Challenging Existing Institutional Arrangements that Discriminate Against
Vulnerable Groups
The Turkey Eastern Anatolia Watershed Rehabilitation
Project aimed to “help to restore sustainable range, forest
and farming activities in the upper watersheds of
the three project provinces, reducing soil degradation,
erosion and sedimentation in reservoirs as well as
increasing productivity and incomes in this impoverished
region of Turkey” (World Bank 2004: 1). The
project exceeded its target on forestlands and the institutional
sustainability of the project was substantial;
however, the extent to which local institutions really
changed is less evident.
A review of the project stated that the project could
have “challenged the system” more in the areas of
women’s and poorer households’ involvement. As part
of the effort to improve community involvement, the
project used the existing system with the village muktar
as the leader. While elected by the village and supported
by elected (unpaid) elders, the muktar is paid a salary as
a government servant. There are, therefore, inevitable
loyalty tensions. He (it is invariably a man, although
there have been a few women muktars) is very much a
local politician. Many vote for him because he seems
the most likely to pull in public funds. Indeed, in several
community meetings with the mission, it was clear that
government funding support, whether through a World
Bank project or from other sources, was seen by rural
households as a right and the muktar was expected to
deliver on such entitled central support.
Source: World Bank 2004.
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incorporate spatial analysis to link objectives at differing
scales into planning and decision making;
integrate planning and management across site, landscape,
region, and (perhaps) continental levels;
predict responses of ecosystems to management activities;
examine relationships and interdependencies of management
actions taken on one spatial, temporal, and biological
scale upon actions at another scale; and
assess tradeoffs among multiple objectives and goals for
the landscape (see box 4.5).
Sustainability of landscape approaches. Projects
building on a landscape approach can draw significant lessons
from several generations of watershed projects. An
important issue is that high subsidies and other inducements
should not be used to lower the real costs of participation
for communities, distorting the true nature of
demand. In many instances, this is a result of a mistaken
assumption that what might be socially optimal for overall
environmental improvements to a community will be privately
optimal to the resource user. Such subsidization
masks the sustainability of these initiatives (Boerma 2000).
FUTURE PRIORITIES AND SCALING-UP
ACTIVITIES
Several successful projects in watershed management
encompass the basics of a landscape approach. Successes in
a few pilot microcatchment areas can generate demand for
appropriately scaling up the model. Incentives, constraints,
and lessons learned will have to be documented, and
processes streamlined, to facilitate such scaling up. 6
Facilitate the application of landscape approaches
in different contexts. Landscape approaches to optimizing
forest functions have boundless potential. Identifying
effective applications of a landscape approach can benefit
from a typology that distinguishes three forest landscapes:
(i) forests beyond the forest-agriculture frontier, 7 (ii) frontier
and disputed forest areas, 8 and (iii) forest-agriculture
mosaics. In forests beyond the frontier, a landscape focus
can help maintain large-scale environmental processes. For
forests at the frontier, it is important to maintain landscape
connectivity and to avoid irreversible degradation and negative
externalities. In mosaic landscapes, a landscape focus
can facilitate managing the forest for production, environmental
services, and biodiversity.
Analyze the policy context and enabling conditions.
It is often stated that lack of ideal political and policy
contexts should not constrain the use of a landscape
approach. At the same time, improved government and
community capacity and willingness to engage in a landscape
approach and an enabling context would facilitate
implementation of such approaches. Currently, additional
analytical work would help to enable the policy context and
institutional conditions necessary for implementing landscape
approaches.
128 CHAPTER 4: OPTIMIZING FOREST FUNCTIONS IN A LANDSCAPE