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PENEWS 1/2006

Welcome to the first 2006 issue of the newsletter of the Poverty Environment Network (PEN)!

CONTENT: Fieldwork lessons, upcoming mini-workshop in Copenhagen for new penners, updated and complete guidelines, data entry template is coming, Julius and Santosh present their projects on how tourists can save forests and reduce poverty, and Adam Smith gives penners a lesson on water, diamonds and firewood!

1. THREE FIELDWORK LESSONS

With more penners starting their fieldwork, experience is accumulating. Here are three important lessons:

1. The choice of study area and survey villages is a critical decision. Key criteria for this decision are: (i) some forest dependence (the purpose of PEN); (ii) the area (and villages within that) are representative such that the findings have a wider applicability and national relevance; (iii) there is variation between the study villages in terms of market access/remoteness, forest abundance, and institutional arrangements.

2. One cannot just print out the PEN prototype questionnaire and start implementing it, although it may be tempting. Getting accustomed with the study area is needed, and the questionnaire must be pretested: the research team get familiarized with the questionnaire, it is modified to local conditions (e.g., lists of forest products to be included), and one learns how to ask questions.

3. Getting a good research team in the field is critical for the success of the project: select good enumerators and possibly also field supervisors, train them, and build commitment.

2. PEN MINI-WORKSHOP IN COPENHAGEN 15-16 MAY

The last ‘recruitment’ workshop will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark 15-16 May. This will be a mini-version of the previous Bogor and Brisbane workshops, and cover the PEN research project, fieldwork and data collection, as well as a discussion of individual projects. The number of participants will be limited to 10, and CIFOR will cover the travel costs and accommodation for those invited. We are still looking for participants that are likely PEN partners, i.e., are planning fieldwork along the PEN format (see guidelines, section 2) in the near future. If you qualify or have suggestions on PhD students/researchers that may be interested, please get in touch with the PEN coordinator: arild.angelsen@umb.no

3. UPDATED AND COMPLETE TECHNICAL GUIDELINES

The second version of the PEN technical guidelines is ready and very soon available at: http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/pen/_ref/tools/index.htm (if you need it NOW, drop me an email). A new section 5 gives a detailed section-by-section guide to the prototype questionnaire. The general fieldwork guidance (section 6) has also been expanded, reflecting inputs from those that have started fieldwork. Section 2 now includes a section on choice of study area and villages.

4. DATA ENTRY TEMPLATE BEING DEVELOPED

A data entry template in MS Access is currently being developed for PEN by Ronnie Babigumira and Betty Abang. Data will be entered in a questionnaire look-alike screen, and then stored in a data sheet that can be imported to any statistical programme for further analysis. This will save time for data entry, minimize errors, and make data from the individual studies available in the same format. A beta version for the quarterly survey is available and anyone interested can test and help debug and improve it. Send a request to: arild.angelsen@umb.no

5. PEN PROJECT 1: JULIUS CHUPEZI TIEGUHONG: ECOTOURISM FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: ECONOMIC VALUATION OF RECREATIONAL POTENTIALS OF PROTECTED AREAS IN THE CONGO BASIN

This study involves two sets of activities: a household survey to evaluate households’ forest dependence, and a survey among tourists to illicit their perceptions on ecotourism in the Sangha Tri-National park (TNS) and evaluate their willingness to pay for the park services.

Activities started in September 2005 on the Cameroonian side of the TNS. Five surrounding the Lobeke segment were randomly selected for this study. Initial activities included designing and testing two sets of questionnaires, training of enumerators and conducting village meetings, taking GPS points, conducting household surveys, and visiting other actors active in the region. In each village the population was stratified based on ethnicity (Bantu, pygmies and immigrants) and a total of 22 households were randomly selected.

I left for Central African Republic in early December to repeat the same process in five villages around Dzanga-Ndoki segment of the TNS. However, I did not succeed to get to Bayanga due to administrative difficulties. Therefore, household surveys in villages around the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park segment have been suspended. However, tourists’ survey in the Dzanga-Ndoki segment is being arranged with the assistance of the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ). The only difficulty encountered on the Cameroonian side was with regards to the reliability and availability of enumerators. Some got involved with the national census or got more permanent position with a logging company. A way out of this might be to pay the enumerators for the entire period of the research instead of just paying them for the few weeks when the (quarterly) surveys are conducted. The second quarter of the household surveys will be concluded in early/mid March.

6. PEN PROJECT 2: SANTOSH RAYAMAJHI: CONSERVATION AND UTILIZATION OF HIGH ALTITUDE FORESTS IN NEPAL

This PhD project intends to provide an understanding of (i) the role of forests and tourism on livelihoods, and (ii) how humans have influenced the land use/land cover in the high mountain ecosystems of Nepal. Socio-economic panel data will be gathered for understanding of the dynamics of natural resources in the household economy, as well as biophysical data to understand land use/land cover dynamics in high altitude forests. The project is part of the ENRECA (Danida) programme "Community based natural forest and tree management in the Himalaya" (ComForM), which is a partnership between the Centre for Forest, Landscape and Planning of KVL, Denmark and the Institute of Forestry, Tribhuvan University, Nepal.

The field work preparation started in October 2005. It takes two days to reach my field site in two villages (VDCs) of Mustang District, Central High Mountain region of Nepal, including 6 hours of trekking. Preparatory work included reconnaissance visit, questionnaire pre-testing, pilot survey for land use/land cover change, initial village discussions, and recruiting six enumerators. We selected 50% of the households plus 10 extra in each VDC (91 plus 97). In addition to the PEN survey, a daily and weekly fuel energy consumption survey of 20 hotel/lodges and 40 other households in the two villages were undertaken. A tourism survey was accomplished of almost all the 25 hotel/lodges lying along the main trekking trail of the Annapurna circuit. The first round of socio-economic surveys started in late December.

The annual household survey took on an average 45 minutes and the quarterly survey ranged 45-60 minutes with each respondent. Serious concern was raised by some villagers and a political leader with regard to the questions about personal wealth and property. Though assurance was given on maintaining secrecy of the data during the village meetings, people were not fully convinced, basically due to the current state of insurgency in the country.

We also encountered problem of documenting the forest products on a one month recall period. Pine leaf litter is an important bedding material and manureing component for livestock and agriculture respectively that is collected only once in a year. Similarly, fuelwood is collected and stored during the winter almost for the entire year. Likewise, timber collection for agricultural implements is seasonal and for house construction is regulated through permit system. Collection of other forests products such as food and fruits is very high during the monsoon. (NB: This issue is addressed in the revised PEN guidelines, section 5.7.)

Overall, I have gained very good experience and learning through this socio-economic survey and I feel very satisfied of participating in the PEN. I am lucky that almost all the respondents in my study area were supportive during data collection and I am very thankful to the local enumerators who played a key bridging role in this regard.

7. ADAM SMITH TEACHES PENNERS A LESSON (AND SVEN WUNDER TOOK NOTES): THE WATER – DIAMOND PARADOX IN DRYLAND AFRICA

When Adam Smith published his famous “Wealth of Nations” in 1776, he used the so-called “water-diamond paradox” as a didactical example for illustrating the power of marginality in determining economic value. Water is essential for all life on Earth, yet since usually it is in abundant supply, it normally cannot be sold – at least, not at the time of his writing. In turn, diamonds are a luxury commodity of limited use value – life could easily go on without them – yet in their frippery use, they are highly priced for being scarce. Supply and demand thus determine exchange values, sometimes in contradiction to the logic of use values.

230 years later, Mutamba and I were conducting a village interview in Mufulira District in the Zambian copper belt, asking villagers about what is the most important forest product. It proved quickly that this was hard to nail down: “most important” -- for what? Food? Shelter? Cash? Economists typically rank between “apples and oranges” by assigning prices to different commodities, but in this case, most products were for subsistence use and not being traded. There was no intuitive yardstick on how to reduce things to one single dimension of “importance”.

We thus asked people: “Which one would be the product that it would be most difficult for you to lose?” Surely that clever hypothetical question would force them to prioritize. After some internal discussion, the group consensus was: “Firewood”! Why? Because without firewood, it would be impossible to cook – and that would clearly be a disaster.

For an economist, this was a surprising response: over the last five years, walking distances to collect firewood had according to the villagers grown slightly, but a walk in the village surroundings revealed that trees and wood material remained extremely abundant. Since there was no shortage of firewood, it would also not have any exchange price, and thus be of little economic value. Moreover, any management attempt producing marginal changes in firewood availability would also have negligible influence on peoples’ livelihoods. So, why bother about firewood?

Obviously, the seemingly perplexing answer was fully explained by the nature of our question. We had not asked people about what commodity they would be most worried to lose at the margin, but in totality. We had asked them about which product had the highest use value, not exchange value. The scenario we implicitly had given to them – the prospect of losing all access to firewood – was a counterfactual completely outside of their local reality, without relevance in any foreseeable future. Firewood to them was what water was to Adam Smith. What, then, are the villagers’ equivalents to Smith´s diamonds? Well, we would need to go back and ask them some yet more intricate questions!

The example shows that questions about the “importance” and “value” of certain products will depend heavily on the implicit counterfactual scenarios that respondents associate our questions with. In PEN, we are generally looking for economic values, in the tradition of Adam Smith, neo-classical economics and its marginal analysis, since these are also the values that are most relevant for policy- or management-induced changes in livelihoods. However, in many cases local people’s vision of values is not based on marginal exchange, but on total use (corresponding to the term “consumer surplus” in economics), customary beliefs and other locally accepted concepts. We have to keep in mind this diversity of values, both for the way we are asking PEN questions, and for the manner we eventually interpret the results. Adam Smith has a lesson to teach penners