Putting PEN to Paper

More than 40 PEN partners and resource persons gathered from the 23rd -28th of March 2009 at the CIFOR headquarters in Bogor, Indonesia for the 5th PEN workshop. The title of the workshop – Putting PEN to Paper – reflects the current stage of the PEN project. Data collection is complete and the task ahead is to clean and analyze the data, see what stories emerge from the results and to publish the stories in journal articles, book chapters and PhD theses.

A large part of the workshop was spent on presentations of results from individual PEN studies (see links at the end), which were well-received by fellow researchers. "This was arguably the most exciting workshop to date,” said Nick Hogarth, who did his fieldwork in southern China. “For the first time in the project history, much of the partners’ data has been cleaned and analyzed. Therefore, there was some insight into the shape of the global results to come. Everyone was engaged and contributing and there was a general buzz and feeling of excitement."  more

List of presentations click here
 

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" -- Winston Churchill

The single largest cluster of PEN studies is being undertaken by the ‘Danida-PEN’ project. This is a four year (2007-10) PEN based research project with approximately USD 1 million in funding and supported by the Research Committee of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The project uses PEN methods for extensive fieldwork in Cambodia, Burkina Faso and Ghana (presented below). In addition, the project includes support for PEN’s central operation at CIFOR. Field work in the three countries is coming to an end, following at least four visits to more than 1500 households and data entry almost completed.

This October, project participants met in Cambodia’s capital Phnom PENh to share experiences, look at some results and map a way forward. The workshop was hosted by the Cambodia Development Research Institute (CDRI), Cambodia’s leading independent development research institute.  more
 

PEN PROJECT: Forest Research Institute (Ghana): Wet and dry

The Danida-PEN study in Ghana is being executed by the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana, Kumasi, and aims to: (i) establish whether local communities’ dependence on forests is significant to their livelihoods, including their role as safety nets, (ii) examine the benefits to local people of forest revenue, (iii) examine the impacts on household income of current resource tenure system and alternative options, and (iv) identify the economic impacts of collaborative forest management arrangements on rural livelihood. more
 

PEN flyer - a brief description of the PEN project

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