The trend in many countries to decentralise decision-making power and resources to lower levels of government can be a either good or bad for the forest-dependent poor.
Decentralised power means local governments have greater opportunities to address the specific needs of the poor in their communities. But without good tools and strategies for reducing poverty, their decisions may be ineffective.
A project by CIFOR and Freiburg University, funded by BMZ (Germany’s Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development), aims to come up with tools and strategies to help local governments use their new powers more effectively in reducing poverty.
Specifically, these governments need to be able to prioritise their actions and evaluate the impacts of various programs.
“The project will build on CIFOR’s previous project on criteria indicators for sustainability,” says co-leader of the Poverty and Decentralisation project, social scientist Lini Wollenberg.
“Many people are concerned about poverty, but they’re not sure about how to measure it. National standards are often not appropriate at the local level, yet some standard is necessary for aggregating data for national statistics.”
The team has chosen two locations with significant numbers of forest-dependent rural poor for the project, to run from May 2003 - April 2006.
The first is in East Kalimantan, Indonesia (the district governments of Kutai Barat and Malinau) and the second in Pando, Bolivia (the municipal governments of Bolpebra and El Sena), both with high concentrations of forest-dependent rural poor.
The teams will begin by making baseline poverty profiles for both sites through focus groups, key informant interviews, informal surveys, and workshops.
Alongside this, the teams will analyze stakeholders' interests and capacities to address poverty. They’ll then create a preliminary explanatory framework of local government's role in poverty alleviation.
The teams will also seek information from other partners. “We want to build on our network to exchange information with organisations who are interested in poverty and working on indicators. We hope through brochures and, indeed, newsletters like CIFOR News, to find seven to ten partners working on other major projects,” Wollenberg said.
In phase two this framework will be refined and adapted through repeated small-scale trials of indicators and monitoring systems for use by local governments.
The third phase will include meetings of experts and comparative analyses with other sites to produce a practical resource kit for local governments and organisations working with them.
The teams will also be careful to avoid the problems this area of research often presents.
“One classic pitfall of poverty research is to measure poverty in terms of income rather than assets,” said Lini Wollenberg.
“People’s access to land or forest may be more important to their well-being than a particular cash windfall which they go and spend. One of our partners in Sumba, Indonesia, was measuring poverty per household in a way that didn’t take account of people’s dependency on their extended family. In reality, many people were not so vulnerable to life’s shortfalls as they seemed at the individual family level.” (MJ)