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PENEWS 3/2006: Livelihoods in lively woods

CONTENT: 50-60 PEN household interviewed today; updated Web-pages – and more to come; staying in touch – by email; how useful is the livelihoods approach?; and two reports from PEN country no. 1 (guess which?)

1. COUNTING PEN STUDIES

21 PEN fieldworks and data collections have started, which means that every day, 50-60 households across the tropics are interviewed for the PEN survey (21 * 200 households (average sample) * 4 (rounds) / 300 days (duration of fieldwork)). Another 6 studies plan to start over the next few months, while 10 or so remain more uncertain. 3 have finished: congratulations to Miriam, Ririn and Mutamba (Belize, Indonesia and Zambia), and also to the 5-600 respondents that now can return to normal life.

Here is the geographical balance (planned in ()):

• Asia (9): Bangladesh (2), China, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan (China, India (2))

• Africa (10): Cameroon, Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi, Mozambique (2), Senegal, Zambia (Ethiopia, Zimbabwe)

• Latin America (8): Belize, Bolivia (2), Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru (Mexico).

This means that we will move beyond the target of 20-25 case studies. PEN will become the tropics-wide collection of forest-poverty data we hoped for, with some 5-6 000 households and 200-250 villages from 20 countries! It also implies that recruitment of new PENNERS has become more selective, and any additions should come from the under-represented regions: West/Central Africa, Central America and Indo-China. Any suggestions for candidates welcome.

2. PEN WEB-PAGE UPDATES

The PEN webpage has been updated over the past month: a revision of the project description, a list of all members of the research team included (please submit project descriptions if you haven’t), and a page paying tribute to Vanessa. Also, all the main research tools – the questionnaire, guidelines and database are updated and now in version 3. Please make sure that you are using the latest versions! (Translations available soon.)

The page on literature still needs renovation, and we intend to do so over the next month, partly based on the thematic groups. I would therefore welcome suggestions of key publications relevant to PEN.

3. STAYING IN TOUCH

Some PENNERS have asked for the set-up of a system for keeping in touch, exchanging fieldwork experiences, tips of a good read, and so on: blogs, yahoo group (or similar), or plain old-fashioned emails. The cyber-habits vary a lot between us, but in the end it was decided that we’ll create one email address to reach everyone in the PEN community. There are two reasons for doing this: Blogs and message board are easily forgotten in the age of information overload. And, many are in the field with limited Internet connectivity. Thus something dropping right into the mailbox is the most effective solution. I’ll send out an email shortly to those on the common email address, that is, PEN partners (including planned) and PEN resource persons. If someone still would like to set up a Yahoo group of similar, they are welcome.

4. LIVELIHOODS IN LIVELY WOODS

For some time I had problems with the concept of livelihoods and sustainable livelihoods analysis (SLA). When it gained popularity in the late 1990s, I considered it to be rather vague and “the five capitals” not very useful. Was it just another buzzword to attract money and get papers published - the “emperor’s new clothes”? Well, holistic approaches are often vague, but I have also learned that they can be useful and have a role to play.

SLA in 14 seconds runs like this (in my interpretation): you start with the household’s assets (natural, physical, human, financial, social) and a set of context variables (institutions, markets, …). Based on these, the household chooses certain livelihood strategies, resulting in livelihood outcomes (income, risk, food self-sufficiency, etc.), which feed back into the assets in the next period.

This can be a useful framework to understand and interpret the complexity in the field. Possible starting points for learning more about the livelihoods approach are: http://www.livelihoods.org/ and Frank Ellis: Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries (Oxford UP 2000). Nevertheless, holistic approaches often come at the expense of analytical clarity and precision. Thus for your later thesis and papers, you would probably like to complement it with more specific theories that derive more testable hypotheses, such as agricultural household production models if you’re an economist.

5. REPORTS FROM PEN COUNTRY NO. 1: MOZAMBIQUE

No other country is being surveyed as intensively as Mozambique, with two PEN studies of more than 800 households combined.

Ravi Hedge: Payments for Environmental Services and Rural Household Behavior: The Case of Carbon in Mozambique’s Agro-forests

The current study aims to quantify the contribution of miombo woodlands to households, and evaluate the concept of Payments of Environmental Services (PES) as a strategy for miombo woodlands conservation and economic development. The study is being undertaken in the buffer zone of the Gorongosa National Park (GNP) in Sofala Province, Mozambique, where a small-scale carbon sequestration (CS) project is being implemented. Smallholders voluntary sign a contract with the project implementing agency (PIA) to commit themselves to a 25-year land use. As per the contract, farmers agree to plant and manage trees on their farm to supply CS services and not to clear any more miombo woodlands, in exchange for annual cash payments for seven years.

Chicale Regulado covers a total of 40 km2 area with nearly 1,100 households spread over five villages. The study covers a total of 320 households from these five villages. There is significant variation in the five villages: four villages lie within the park boundaries where some State restrictions on use of miombo resources, while one village is outside with no restrictions.

The initial nervousness from being a first time visitor to Africa and my lack of Portuguese knowledge got worsened when the local people in Goronosa ‘greeted’ us in Sena, the local language. I had to look for research assistants who could speak preferably three languages - English, Portuguese and Sena. I was fortunate to get an excellent host-cum-collaborator whose understanding of the local conditions and rapport with the communities made my job easy. First, it helped keep local protocols at a minimum. Second, it helped recruit an 8-member survey team fairly quickly. The research assistant, being able speak all three languages and having exposure to community level workings, was the key link; and the elementary English knowledge skills of two other members made communication a bit more easier. The first two weeks were spent in training, which included a front to back review of the questionnaire, series of mock interviews amongst enumerators themselves and trial interviews. Once the errors were reduced to a minimum, actual surveys started in a gradual manner.

Meanwhile, discussions were held with members in each of the five villages and a list of all the crops grown and forest products collected in each village, including fish and non-environmental environmental products, was prepared, which helped adapt the PEN-questionnaire. Each enumerator received a bicycle, and started working either in his native village or in the neighboring village, which helped both with the logistics of interviews and trust building. Each member was given the responsibility of 40 households; with the research assistant and I doing both interviews as well as random checking of enumerators (which included surprise visits to the villages during interviews and post-interview inquiry of the respondents).

The survey team met every Friday at the base camp when completed questionnaires were returned, reviewed and any survey related issues clarified and discussed. At the start of the second round of survey, one of the enumerators quit the job, but was kind enough to name a replacement and help with initial training. So far, three rounds of surveys have been completed, with the final round being due in December.

It’s satisfying that in spite of the language and cultural barriers, the work has progressed well. While knowledge of local language is an important factor for success of research of this kind, skilled survey team and team-work are equally important.

Øystein Juul Nielsen: The potential for community-based forest management in poverty alleviation in Mozambique

My main interest is to look at how income and consumption levels and components change for households with different access to forest resources. Little is known about welfare consequences when forest resources disappear in developing countries. It is generally believed that people living in forest abundant areas are comparatively poorer. But on the other hand they have access to a larger selection of natural goods that help them sustain a living. And apart from the direct benefits that we capture in the PEN survey, forest resources also provide a critical pool of nutrients for agriculture. One of the biggest problems in the tropics with regard to nutrient depletion is the use of fire. This problem seems to worsen when natural forests disappear - at least in my study areas where farmers lack draft animal to proper mix organic materials to prevent nutrient losses. There is some indication in my data that points towards lower agricultural production when forests disappear although this is mainly based on preliminary verification of the questionnaires. But it will be interesting to see how this spill over in differences in absolute income and consumption levels across households.

Another aim of my study is to assess whether rural people are able to smooth intra-annual consumption across seasonal income fluctuations. And by which means they smooth consumption: agriculture, savings, paid work, forest exploitation, social networks, etc.? I have therefore included a consumption/expenditure component to the questionnaire including some 70 basic items. There are some indications that the majority are able to smooth consumption and save. By which means they smooth consumption needs more data analyses – but obviously agriculture and paid work plays a key role, in addition to gold panning and charcoal production. Forest exploitation for subsistence also plays an important part in consumption smoothing, but I need to make a thorough analysis to see how this contributes to differences in consumption levels across households.

My research is located in two slightly different natural forest areas: semi-deciduous (miombo-like) forest and miombo woodlands. I have randomly selected about 250 households in each location along a gradient from high to low forest abundance (using satellite images and household lists). Both gradients move along a dirt road where the distance between high and low forest abundance is approx. 30 kilometres in both study areas.

I chose local enumerators for my study (17 in total) mainly for the reasons of gaining trust and insights to local conditions. It has, in part, proven successful but it has not been without problems. I spent a lot of time in the initial phase on finding the right persons and training them - but I still ended up substituting 5 persons during Q2 for various reasons. I also had/have problems with assessing income from wildlife from one of the two study areas – mainly due to suspicion on my true intentions of the survey. But as we move along things are getting better as people realize that we are not representing any government body.

I did some small changes to the PEN questionnaire to make it fit local conditions and to make it easier for the enumerators and respondents to estimate income. For example: instead of referring to a recall period of 90 days for some products in Q2, Q3 and Q4, this was rephrased to “since my last visit” to prevent overlap in information. It is impossible to interview the households with precisely 3 month interval and it provides the respondent with a clear reference period. Respondents also had some difficulties in estimating agricultural production in Q1. We therefore ask the respondents about personal use and sale for every agricultural product in Q2, Q3 and Q4. By summing up the estimates from the 4 periods we will hopefully arrive at a more precise estimate. We also extended the reference period of paid work from 30 to 90 days since employment opportunities are few but important and therefore easy to remember for the household. It also helped explain household expenditures. Also business income I have extended to cover 90 days since the majority of businesses are highly seasonal with the risk that I would not capture them if I used a 30 day recall period.

The survey is scheduled to be completed by the end of March 2007.

Warm regards,

Arild Angelsen
PEN Coordinator