Section: Home > News and Events > PENEWS 2008-1 (March): The answer may be 23, or perhaps 44

PENEWS 2008-1 (March): The answer may be 23, or perhaps 44

CONTENT:

• The road from Barcelona

• PEN data cleaning: the first study is in the bag

• Good reading: Are households structural and stochastic poor? (Don’t ask directly!)

• A tiger in the woods (in India)

• PEN research in Cameroon: The answer is 44.

• And, introducing the PENroach

Welcome to the first quarterly issue of PEN News for 2008, which introduces two new columns: PEN FINDINGS: a column highlighting emerging research results from the PEN studies, and The PENroach: a column presenting research-friendly gems harvested from cyberworld.

During the Barcelona workshop, we had a small quiz among the participants: what will be the forest income shares in your study and on the average for PEN? This will be one among several key figures to come out of the PEN project. The predicted average share was 23 % for PEN global (21 % for own study), with huge variation among the participants (from less than 10 to more than 40%, and men predicting significantly higher shares than women). The small quiz demonstrated that some of us are in for surprises, which is what research should be about. And, if Julius’ findings from Cameroon (below) are representative, most of us are in for a BIG surprise.

1. The Barcelona workshop

Forty five PEN partners and resource persons descended upon Barcelona - the beautiful capital of Catalonia, in north east Spain - from 8-12 January 2008 to launch the second phase of the PEN project. This phase will establish the PEN global data set, and exploit that to analyze the forest-poverty interface. The workshop provided the first opportunity for all PEN partners and resource persons to get together, review their experiences, and make plans for the future. The experiences are diverse, from boat rides at night and illegal border crossing to weddings and community celebrations when enumerators marry respondents.

The road from Barcelona will be long, and the PEN project still has three years to go. Making sense of data has never been the easiest part of the research process. But the Barcelona meeting provided the inspiration and the foundation for the collective action needed to achieve this.
A detailed summary of the workshop, including all presentations, is available at: http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/pen/_ref/events/barcelona.htm

Data cleaning: one in the bag

PEN has over the last months developed fully automated routines in Stata to check for data wholeness (no gaps), logic, consistency, and to identify outliers and extreme values for further checks. This is essential to get high-quality data. We continue working on additional data cleaning and management routines as well as the global data aggregation and analysis programmes.

The data cleaning process has the following steps:

1. Data are submitted from the PEN partner.

2. The cleaning programs are run the data and a bug report is produced (some have been more than a hundred pages!)

3. The bugs are addressed and the “clean” data are re-submitted.

4. The process is repeated until all bugs have either been addressed or can be explained.

This process has begun for the seven data sets that have been submitted to-date. For one partner, Julius Tieguhong, the iterations have stopped. We are therefore delighted to announce that Julius is the first partner with a certified dataset (meaning that most of his bugs have been addressed). Congratulations Julius, no prizes except that we can immortalize you on the PEN walk of fame.

Good reading: Structural and stochastic poor: focus more on assets

Rural livelihoods change quickly. Rainfall, markets, pests, sickness, security, or maybe just plain good or bad luck – it can call change the situation dramatically for a family from one year to another. An article by Carter and Barrett (2006) argues that one-shot studies, like most PEN surveys are, run the risk of focusing too much on this static income poverty. A second generation poverty studies, using time series income data, distinguish between chronic and transitory poor. They find that poverty mobility can be very high. But one needs to dig deeper, thus the third and fourth generation of poverty approaches focus on assets (static and dynamic), with a distinction between the structural and stochastic poor. The latter have enough assets to move out of poverty, but are poor this period (when the survey is done) due to special circumstances. The article provides a nice overview of income-asset and static-dynamic approaches, and a few conceptual frameworks useful for PEN analysis.

Carter, Michael, and Christopher Barrett. 2006. The economics of poverty traps and persistent poverty: An asset-based approach. Journal of Development Studies 42 (2):178-199.
If you cannot get a copy locally, send an email to Titin Suhartini at CIFOR: t.suhartini@cgiar.org 

PEN PROJECT: Sugato Dutt (University of Hawaii): Resource use, tiger conservation and the local community: perspectives from the Buxa Tiger Reserve, West Bengal, India

The Indian state’s strict legislations and management prescriptions to protect the tiger have been hailed across the world as a “model” conservation program. However, frequent incidents of tiger poaching and the occasional (often violent) protests against park management indicate that all is really not well. Moreover, a nationwide scientific census showed that at least one of the tiger reserves had no tigers (!), prompting the government to initiate a fact finding commission to assess the situation. Conflict between conservation and local communities is of course not unique to India. However, a large human population and the consequent demand for land and resources is bound to exacerbate the conflict.

This study explores the degree of dependence, attitudes, perceptions and knowledge of local communities towards the tiger habitat. The study is carried out in Buxa Tiger Reserve located in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas using the PEN protocols. Three quarters of the data collection is completed, and the project will soon embark on data entry.

The initial impressions from the fieldwork are that widespread sympathy exists for the plight of this endangered species. Buxa residents will not, however, give up their dependence on resources of the forests, as the alternatives are either unaffordable or quite simply non-existent. Also, while a good proportion of the community is taking on the exit option of migrating to the cities, those that stay behind are only too willing to poach timber and sell firewood from the reserve to bolster their slender revenues from farming.

PEN FINDINGS: How dependent are local people on protected forest areas? (Julius Chupezi Tieguhong)

The Congo Basin of Central Africa is home to the second largest global contiguous area of tropical rain forests is located. These forests cover over 228 million ha, store 36.815 billion tons of carbon and provide habitats for over 11 000 species of plants (many of them are endemic) and associated fauna, including the endangered species such as gorillas and chimpanzees.

The importance of these ecosystems for the livelihoods of adjoining communities is appreciated by various stakeholders. However, the extent of the dependence is not fully appreciated and there is little or no empirical data to answer the question: ‘how dependent are local communities on protected areas for livelihoods?’ This study, which is part of PEN and a PhD work at University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, tries to fill the data gap by using the income portfolios approach to answer the question of dependence. The study is carried out in villages around the Lobeke National Park (LNP). LNP forms the western section of the 28 000 km2 Sangha Trinational Park (TNS) shared by Cameroon, the Republic of Congo (RC) and the Central African Republic (CAR). Five out of the 14 villages are located within a distance of 50 km from the LNP, and were randomly identified with 22-23 study households in each. The data collected included incomes (in cash and in-kind) and other socio-economic characteristics of each household.

The preliminary analysis shows that forest is by far the largest element of the income portfolio, contributing some 44 % of total income on average. The most important forest products are wild fruits (35 %), bushmeat (23%) and fuelwood (18%). The other main sources of income included crops (18%), livestock (10%), business (8%) and wages (7%). Significant differences in forest income shares were observed among households in the studied villages, and the degree of forest dependency ranged from 10 to more than 80 % for the most dependent households.

The value of the home consumed goods was at least 45% of total income. The role of forests in the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities might be substantially underestimated using an approach which focuses on market (cash) income only. The non-marketed products consumed directly by the households are more important than cash to some households, especially in remote forested areas.

From the preliminary results of this study, it could be concluded that the well-being of humans is inseparable from the conservation of the forest biodiversity. The high local dependence on forests for livelihoods suggests that international efforts to prevent deforestation and degradation of forest resources in the region will remain ineffective unless alternative means of subsistence are developed for the currently forest-dependent poor.

A major recommendation is that conservation policies need to be overhauled to seriously take into consideration the importance of forest products in the livelihoods of forest peoples. Policy shifts are needed based on new mind-sets of conservation and development practitioners. The results are particularly relevant to policy makers and development planners, who need to be convinced that forests play an important role in poverty alleviation and therefore they need to be managed for the well being of forest dependent poor. This suggests that the dependence of local people must not be overlooked in the management of protected areas. Therefore, factors that determine peoples’ needs should be identified such that innovative strategies can be designed to reduce impacts, ensure peoples’ well-being as well as the sustainability of the forests. Such an approach could provide answers to the concerns of equity and fair play in global attempts to achieving both conservation and development goals as enshrined in the United Nations Development Goals (MDGs).

PENroach

Finally, we are happy to introduce to the PENEWS readers the PEN cockroach, or PENROACH for short. One of us spends a good portion of his free time crawling through the dark alleys of the web, and occasionally stumbles up on some gems. In this new section, we share some the treasures that we think you may find useful in your work and research.

PENroach dispatch 1: Software for shallow/no pockets. If you’d wanted a career with fat financial rewards, you should not have chosen development work but this is a higher cause. So, having settled for the higher cause (read a life with shallow pockets), one of the biggest challenges for your professional work is the proprietary software you use. Best case scenario is that you are associated with an institute that may be able to pay for it, worst case is that you are working alone, deep in the forests of no-mans-land with no budget to pay for it. Enter the open source movement (a less-confusing name for what is also called 'Free Software').. Today we have free solutions for most of the computer applications we use. Here some links:

R – A free alternative to your favourite statistical program. Download and learn more about R from http://www.r-project.org/

Zotero and Jabref – Two free alternatives to Endnote/Reference Manager to keep track of your references. Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) is a Firefox extension whilst JABREF (http://jabref.sourceforge.net/) is stand-alone.

Open office – A free alternative to the ubiquitous but costly MS Office suite (http://www.openoffice.org/).

GRASS GIS – A free alternative to ESRI products. GRASS is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics/maps production, spatial modelling, and visualization. Learn more and download from here (http://grass.itc.it/).

Others: A list of the best freebies for MS Windows http://www.opensourcewindows.org   The same list for Mac OS X http://www.opensourcemac.org/  Finally, one of the longest I-want-to lists complete with free solutions: http://www.econsultant.com/i-want-open-source-software/index.html 

If you have ideas for the PENroach, please send us an email

Arild Angelsen, PEN coordinator
Ronnie Babigumira, PEN Research Fellow