The World Bank/WBI’s CBNRM Initiative

Case Received: February 5, 1998

Author: Kathy Fry, Foundation of the Peoples of the South Pacific International (FSPI)

Tel: +678 22915

Fax: +678 24510

email: kfry@vanuatu.com.vu

The global "we", have discovered that integrating income generating opportunities for land owners and other utilisation stakeholders with environmental practices increases the sustainability of natural resource management by communities and thereby increases conservation. Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) in particular have become the promoters for village based business training and small enterprise development. But, there has been somewhat of a taboo to date for NGOs to actually become involved in trading or business operations themselves. The taboo comes from the misconception that 'profit' in commercialism is always exploitation - the anti-thesis of NGO work. The irony of this is that we therefore have organisations who are teaching and promoting something for which they have little realistic experience. This model also implies that all the work that NGOs do to promote business or other development is not inherently sustainable and must rely on a continual approval from donors and their grant funding criteria to endure. Immediately, this creates an imbalance between development priorities identified from the grassroots and those of the donors.

The proposed case study intends to illustrate not a fixed model, nor a completed one, but an emerging paradigm that calls for a new type of operational linkage between NGOs, governments, the private sector, and community based groups that will promote the sustainable management of natural resources at grassroots levels - thus addressing the third theme of the workshop.

The emerging model sees NGOs more actively involved as commercial agents in the promotion of sustainable natural resource development and conservation, in particular for marketing and middleman promotion functions which stimulate and sustain rural industry infrastructures. In this manner, the NGOs can ensure that maximum 'profits' are returned to the rural producers who are the stakeholders of development, thus eliminating profiteering and exploitation. But the NGOs must engage also in a profit margin in order to promote a realistic, un-subsidized and sustainable infrastructure model. It is the transparency and use of 'profts' to the NGOs that will dissipate the taboos associated with NGO enterprise. A secondary benefit is that NGO profits can be used to fund core operational costs and development trust funds, thereby enabling the NGO to become, in effect, their own donors, with the ablility to respond directly to the needs of their constituencies.

The new NGO paradigm calls for a shift in NGO perspectives to become more commercial minded, to utilize business and marketing professionals in their staff, and to intimately understand the business world for which they are currently providing training.

Our case study proposes to illustrate the emerging models in the Pacific that will change the way NGOs do business for the sustainable management of rural natural resources as well as for their own sustainable futures in an era of declining donor assistance to the region. It will invite discussion on the pros and cons of the paradigm as well as a shift in NGO consciousness to take up the task required.

The case study will deal with several enterprise models in the South Pacific region that promote community based management of forest lands, including their ecosystems, bio-diversity, and watersheds. In particular, it will use examples from the Melanesian countries (Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji) who have similar land ownership traditions and rights and face increasing pressures from overseas logging companies to purchase timber rights for extraction and export. The author has worked with community based ecoforestry programs in Melanesia over the past 15 years, holding a variety of field positions ranging from extension worker/trainer to regional director in her employment with a Pacific based NGO involved with community based integrated rural development.

Initial efforts in the Pacific designed to engage resource owners in the sustainable management of their natural resources were and are still very much directed at protected or conservation areas. Programs of environmental awareness directed communities to agree to cordon off lands of high bio-diversity value for future preservation. The people of the South Pacific have a high affinity for their land, and in most cases the initial establishment of a conservation area paralleled traditional mechanisms of conservation, such as when chiefs placed taboos on the use of certain areas to allow re-growth. However, a permanent taboo did not take into account the vital need for eventual utilisation in a population which is still 88% subsistent and has expanding population concerns. The costs of management and control were unsustainable in many cases.

The change process in the Pacific occurred along with the emerging global consciousness of governments and NGOs that moved conservation area projects more towards integrated conservation and development projects (ICADs). ICADs gave recognition to the fact that resource owners could have tradeoffs - perhaps a combination of protected and sustainble use management. More importantly, they also included alternative income generation in the conservation package. This acknowledged the fact that Pacific people were wanting to use some of their natural resources, particularly forests, to move into the cash economy. There was hope that conservation and poverty alleviation could be tackled within the framework of one project.

The emerging paradigm that is the focus of the proposed case study, however, has only just begun. Whereas ICADs tend to promote enterprise projects in isolation, we are starting to see that these are difficult to sustain. ICADs tend to be in the most remote and isolated areas of a country where one can still find high bio-diversity - and also little infrastructure for a market economy. Isolated villlage eco-tourism projects, as one example, have had difficulty to attract continuing clientele once the government or NGO infrastructure that linked the outside world to the community moved on. Village nut oil processing as an ICAD enterprise is a brilliant model that encourages communities to maintain their forests that produce the wild nuts because they can also earn a productive cash income from a renewable resource. However, it is not cost effective nor sustainable to expect 20 different isolated Pacific communities to deal directly with overseas oil purchasers.

Therefore, the new paradigm shift is towards linking rural natural resource industries that by their nature actively promote conservation and sustainable management by the resource owners. The linkages will be the development ofa conservation industry infrastructure and need to be planned and strategised. The lessons we need to look at carefully are the past histories of the development of any rural commodity. We did not expect rural communities to produce and market overseas their copra, coffee, honey or kava. Therefore, the NGOs and other institutions concerned with conservation need to develop sustainable conservation industry infrastructure that parallels any previous rural industry success models without abandoning the intial conservation objectives.

NOTE:

FSPI is a Pacific NGO network of 10 independent indigenous member NGOs (Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Australia, UK and USA), that have been working together since 1965 to promote sustainable rural development with and for the Pacific peoples. Their strength is a considerable grassroots network throughout the Pacific region. Their programmatic focus expands the sector of 'integrated rural development', although the pillar programmes are: health, population and nutrition; forestry and environment; and rural enterprise development.