PEN workshop in Barcelona, January 2008
Since its inception, PEN has held four workshops. The first three, all part
of the first phase, were about getting the project started, planning fieldwork,
and developing methods of data collection. While fieldwork is still going on in
a few studies, most have been completed and partners are in the process of data
entry or cleaning.
The time was therefore ripe to launch the second phase of the project: global
data analysis and synthesis. The 4th PEN workshop was held in Barcelona, from
8-12 January 2008, and brought together some 45 partners and resource persons to
review field experiences, present some preliminary results, and look ahead. What
follows is a brief summary of the workshop, with links to the individual
presentations.
Day 1:
Arild Angelsen, the PEN coordinator, kicked things off with a presentation on
PEN: Status & future. Arild noted that, as a family, PEN had four stories: that
forests are important to the poor; that the links between forests and poverty
have not been well articulated in policy papers; that there is a huge gap in
quantitative studies on environmental income; and finally, that the best
empirical work is being done by lonely PhD students. PEN aims to bring PhD
students and other researchers together to fill this information gap, and to
have an impact on policies that affect the poor and forests, he said.
The next session was on obtaining high quality data, and featured two
presentations. CIFOR scientist Terry Sunderland, in his presentation How (not)
to do it in the field, shared his experiences on a comparative project in West
Africa, emphasizing the challenges of data management. The second presentation,
Data quality step by step, by PEN’s research fellow (statistician)
Ronnie Babigumira, discussed steps that PEN had taken to ensure the quality of the
data. An output from the discussion that followed these two presentations will
be notes on data checking and quality control to be included in the PEN
Guidelines.
The afternoon had seven presentations on field experiences and preliminary
results by PEN partners: Latin America was very well represented, starting with
a “nutty” presentation from Amy (Brazil), a “reserved” presentation from Miriam
(Belize), and out of the Christmas tree came a presentation from Pablo
(Guatemala). Ravi presented Mozambique villagers’ response to PES incentives,
Ririn investigated why Indonesians cut down rainforest, Khaled tried to detangle
the peculiarities of VCFs in the mouza reserves in Bangladesh, and Ha is trying
to keep grounded on some floating islands in Vietnam.
Day 2:
Jens Friis Lund from Copenhagen University – the university with the largest
number of PEN partners (6!) - kicked off the fieldwork review with a
presentation on PEN surveys: how to do it in practice. This was followed by
focus group discussions themed around Jen’s presentation. A proposed output from
this session is a series of methodological papers/reports, and possibly a
textbook on fieldwork, building on the PEN guidelines and experience.
One of the topics to be explored by PEN research is how different methods
affect the results. Marty Luckert and Pam Jagger’s Aggregated vs. disaggregated
responses compared two approaches: the PEN survey and a more RRA-type of survey.
A related presentation was made by Santosh Rayamajhi who, working in Nepal,
tested the effects of different recall periods (one vs. three months). In both
cases there were large differences between the methods, suggesting that methods
matter.
With the discussion on data collection and quality concluded, it was time to
think about how to make sense of the data being collected. To get this
discussion going were two presentations. The first presentation, The livelihoods
approach, was by Frank Ellis from the University of East Anglia, UK. Frank, who
is among the founders of the livelihoods approach, showed how forest connections
could be made to the framework, and shared some ideas on data analysis. The
second presentation was by Mario Giampietro from Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona (UAB), the author of Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of
Agroecosystems: A multi-scale integrated analysis of rural development. Mario
demonstrated the importance of multiscale and interdisciplinary approaches, and
how these could be useful for PEN. Both presentations were followed by lively
discussions.
Day 3:
Day three continued with the theme of analysis. The main task for the day was to
get inputs into the thematic and global analysis. Arild Angelsen, PEN
coordinator, gave a brief Outline of thematic and global analysis and the main
research questions to be answered by PEN. This was followed by a presentation
Learning from NTFP project by Brian Belcher, a former CIFOR scientist now at the
Royal Roads University in Canada. Brian shared lessons learnt from the global
comparison of NTFPs project. Among the important lessons for PEN include the
importance of meeting regularly to produce joint outputs, and generating
different types of outputs for different audiences.
Kate Brown from the University of East Anglia, UK, asked: How can PEN inform
global debates on environmental change and human well-being? She demonstrated
how PEN – by using a unique dataset – can shed light on the challenges of
stopping deforestation. The Stern Report has presented reduced deforestation as
a quick fix, she said, but if it’s so easy, why hasn’t it been done already?
This session also included a presentation The economics of smiling, by
Viki
Reyes Garcia. Smiling research is a serious research topic: those that smile
frequently get 10% higher salary. Garcia also pointed out that smiling is used
as an indicator of psychological well-being. Given that respondents’ frequency
of smiling and laughing is included in the PEN questionnaire, we anticipate some
interesting results. Moreover, the discussion from participants experiences – eg. “respondents who don’t smile hide something” - cemented the importance of
this topic.
With the stage set, the participants broke into 5 groups to do some
brain-storming on the thematic and global analysis and again, some very useful
input was generated from these discussions. A key output from these
presentations and discussions will be a number of concept notes for the various
themes.
The afternoon had three presentations on tenure and livelihoods. William Sunderlin, also a former CIFOR scientist now at the Right and Resources
Institute in Washington D.C, asked What is the Role of Tenure in the
Poverty-Forest Link?
Pam Jagger, PEN partner from Indiana University, USA, looked at Forest Sector
Governance Reforms. She gave a thorough theoretical review of decentralization,
although one of her main points is that there is no uniform theory on
decentralization.
Finally, Jerry Shively of Purdue University, USA, presented Issues and
methods in livelihoods analysis in which he reviewed a number of methods that
could be used by both individual studies and the global analysis.
Summarizing the discussions of the workshop, Arild presented some of the
Plans for PEN in 2008. A major task is the establishment of the global data set,
to synthesize the field and data collection experience, and to initiate the
thematic and global analysis and synthesis.
Recall that one PEN story is that the best empirical work is often done by
lonely PhD students. This work, in the case of PEN, is largely based on raw data
collected from very remote places and has been bourne out of great sacrifice on
the part of the partners. That said, it is easy to forget how dangerous some of
these places can be. Participants were reminded of these dangers by the fitting
tribute, from Arild Angelsen and Amy Duchelle, to Vanessa Sequeira who lost her
life during fieldwork in September 2006. Amy, a close friend of Vanessa, talked
about the great work Vanessa had started to improve the lives of the communities
she worked with. Amy ended her talk with a call on PEN to pay tribute to Vanessa
by continuing these efforts.
Days 4-5:
With the plenary sessions completed, participants got hands on experience with
PEN data analysis by way of a two day crash course in statistical analysis,
presented by Ronnie Babigumira. The lecture notes are available here. According
to PEN partner Shah Raees Khan, programming is a dry and boring subject, but the
applicability of the course made it interesting.
Days 0-6:
The workshop was also a great social event. In addition to the academic
component of their field studies, partners shared stories from field work. There
were the challenges, such as Angelica driving across borders at night to
interview a household, where the household head re-assured her that she was safe
as it had been a week since drug lords had paid them a visit; Amy’s boat rides
in the middle of no where and Thabbie’s encounters with rude households.
However, there were also the “nice” stories, such as enumerators marrying
respondents, communities thanking Pam for teaching them how to take stock of
their time use, etc. These experiences were shared across the board and for the
partners, were a reminder that they were not alone.
The workshop venue was close to the city centre of Barcelona, and many
participants enjoyed the long afternoons (or rather evenings, as dinner is not
served before 9 pm), exploring whatever culinary delights that Barcelona had to
offer. These included a visit to the famed Origens 99.9% restaurant, which
serves 99.9% Catalan cuisine.
The workshop also launched the PEN song. More verses are to be added as the
project goes on and on. In the meantime, everyone is encouraged to learn the
tune from this site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNTxr2NJHa0
The road from Barcelona will be long. After all, making sense of data has
never been the easiest part of the research process. But we are confident that
Barcelona provided the inspiration and the foundation for the collective action
needed to achieve this.
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