• Home
• Site Map
• Foreword
  • Foreword
  • Contributors & Copyright
• Introduction
  • Introduction
  • Methods
  • Sites
    • Why Pando and East Kalimantan?
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Bolivia
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Indonesia
• Part I. Concepts
  • Wellbeing and Poverty
    • Poverty is More Than Low Income
    • Poverty is a Lack of Wellbeing
    • Poverty and Wellbeing Have Many Dimensions
    • Further Reading
  • Local Governments and Poverty
    • How can Local Governments Reduce Poverty?
    • Four Steps to Improve Local Governmental Action
    • Further Reading
  • Forests and Poverty
    • How do Forests Influence Poverty?
    • What is Poverty in Forest Communities?
    • Are Forests Safety Nets, Poverty Traps or Escape Routes?
    • Further Reading
• Part II. Tools
  • Monitoring
    • What is monitoring?
    • Types of Monitoring
    • Indicators
    • When to monitor?
    • Who conducts monitoring?
    • Linking monitoring to planning
  • Participatory Planning
    • What is participatory planning?
    • Why is participatory planning useful?
    • When and where is participatory planning done?
    • Who should participate?
  • Tool 1: Interactive Mapping
    • What is interactive mapping?
    • Interactive mapping step-by-step
    • Use interactive mapping for monitoring
  • Tool 2: Wellbeing Monitoring
    • What is a local wellbeing monitoring system?
    • Wellbeing monitoring step-by-step
    • Step 1: Define purpose, develop plan and budget
    • Step 2: Develop local poverty indicators and formulate survey questions
    • Step 3: Design the sampling strategy
    • Step 4: Train staff and perform the survey
    • Step 5: Analyse and present the data
    • Step 6: Present findings
  • Tool 3: Community Evaluation
    • Evaluating local government programmes through community focus groups
    • Steps 1-3
    • Steps 4-6
    • Steps 7-8
    • Community evaluation step-by-step
  • Tool 4: Scenario-based Planning
    • What is scenario-based planning?
    • Scenario-based planning step-by-step
    • Visioning
    • Pathways
• Final Remarks
• Acknowledgements
• Additional Resources
• PDF Version

Why Pando and East Kalimantan?

Pando and East Kalimantan represent areas with extensive forest resources where local governments are learning to tackle poverty:

• Both regions are poor, though official poverty data are not reliable;
• Both areas are still largely covered by forest and economically dependent on forest resources;
• Decentralisation is relatively new in both countries, though Bolivia started the process almost a decade earlier than Indonesia;
• In both countries, decentralisation was aimed at promoting more public participation, although there have been mixed results in both cases;
• Both regions are remote from the country’s centre and thus face problems typical of isolated rural areas;
• In both areas, CIFOR has a long-term research history that allowed a deeper understanding of the local context.
  

At the same time, Pando and East Kalimantan show important differences in administrative capabilities and resources. They provide a contrast in size, capacity and influence: small, poorly equipped municipalities in Bolivia compared to large relatively well-funded Indonesian districts. For example, districts in East Kalimantan had annual budgets (2003) of about US$ 58 million (Malinau) to US$ 74 million (Kutai Barat) and a gross domestic product (GDP) between US$ 56 million (Malinau) and US$ 278 million (Kutai Barat) mainly generated by mining and forestry. The districts in Indonesia had large administrative and technical units. On the other hand, municipalities in Pando had far fewer resources in terms of budget and staff. El Sena’s budget in 2003 was about US$ 350,000, although changes in the distribution of direct tax on hydrocarbons raised the annual budget (2005) to approximately US$ 1,125,000.

East Kalimantan and Pando also face different administrative challenges. People in East Kalimantan live typically in nuclear settlements, while in Bolivia people are more dispersed. The average population of a community is much higher in East Kalimantan (30–1000 people per community in Malinau). Communities in Pando have larger territories and their populations tend to be smaller (30–200 people per community in El Sena).

Detailed analyses of decentralisation and poverty in Pando and East Kalimantan are available in separate site reports (see Fuentes et al. 2005).

Forest in Pando Bolivia. Photo by Kristen Evans

© 2007 Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
Contributors and copyright information