Landscapes Forest and Global Change - ESA - Escola Superior ...

Z.L. Urech & J.P. Sorg 2010. Taking into account local people’s livelihood systems for a better management of fragments
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2 Methodology
As a basis and general framework for our socioeconomic analyses we employed the Sustainable
Livelihood Approach (SLA) (NADEL 2007). This approach allowed us to recognize the
complexity of local people’s livelihood systems and strategies at individual, family and
community levels in relation to forest fragments. Diverse methods were used for data collection,
based on the SLA. In general, our aim was to compare the perception of different landscape
types by the local population with concrete quantitative information, as for example about the
income. We therefore worked with interviews and scoring exercises. All in all, we spent 11
months in four villages during the two field periods of the project.
2.1 Village selection
For our research, we worked in four villages situated around the forest massif. The territories of
the four villages have a different forest cover and differ especially in their distance to the forest
massif, what correlates to the distance to markets (see Table 1). The villages Ambofampana and
Maromitety are situated near the massif in a remote area, whereas the villages Bevalaina and
Antsahabe are farther from the massif in a territory of lower forest cover and are less remote.
The category near or far the massif is defined by the walking time to reach the border of the
massif. The differences of the distance to the massif allowed us to analyse the influence of a
changing landscape on the human-forest interface.
Table 1: The four selected villages
Characteristics of village territories Ambofampana Maromitety Bevalaina Antsahabe
Distance to forest massif
[walking time in h] 0.25 0.5 2 3
Category of distance to forest massif near near far far
Forest cover [%] 86 75 43 21
Market proximity [walking time in h] 6 8 2 1
Number of households interviewed 25 22 32 31
Number of groups for scoring exercises 6 4 6 6
2.2 Interview methods
We began with open-ended discussions with several households in each of our villages to get a
general overview. We then conducted the first semi-structured household interviews to deepen
particular topics. In these interviews we gathered more specific and also quantitative information
about the importance, income, perceptions, products collected from and uses of forest
fragments. To complete our data we held discussions with people who have specific knowledge
or play a key role in the social context. These included older persons, loggers or traditional
authorities.
2.3 Scoring exercises
To deepen the information on the perception of importance, we conducted scoring exercises
with focus groups, separated by wealth levels and gender (Sheil and Liswanti 2006). To express
their own perception of value, each group had to distribute 100 pebbles on 9 different landscape
types (Table 2) according to their importance. This had to be done 8 times for 8 different
categories of goods and products (Table 3).
Forest Landscapes and Global Change-New Frontiers in Management, Conservation and Restoration. Proceedings of the IUFRO Landscape Ecology
Working Group International Conference, September 21-27, 2010, Bragança, Portugal. J.C. Azevedo, M. Feliciano, J. Castro & M.A. Pinto (eds.)
2010, Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Bragança, Portugal.