Sublimity…

Here it is folks, the long delayed details of what I’m actually doing, working with PSI out here in the Himalaya. Like I’ve said for other entries, I’ve started writing bits and pieces about work, but I never get around to finishing them because there is so much to say, and I just get overloaded with thoughts. However, I’ve recently been able to sort things out and simplify the situation down to something that I think is possible to write about in a decent length entry, and also something I think is important/interesting to share.

Basically, the super-summary is that our project is enveloped in utter confusion, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if we want to meet the project goals, we are doing the wrong things in the wrong place. Of the 6 basic questions (who, what, where, why, when and how), only one (when) can be answered about what we are currently doing in a way that makes sense. To fully understand what’s going on here (something I don’t think anyone has really put any time into doing), we have to start right at the beginning – looking at how the project was developed and what it is supposed to accomplish.

The Background

The whole story starts (as far as I’ve been able to figure out) with a request for proposals that was sent out by a group of international NGOs lead by http://www.cgiar.org/” title=”Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research”>CGIAR and http://www.iwmi.org/” title=”Internation Water Management Institute”>IWMI. Basically, this group of NGOs has come to the conclusion that the nearly all present and past water-supply development projects can be grouped into two categories. One is projects that are designed to supply drinking water to households, and the other is projects designed to supply water for uses that provide livelihood for communities (eg. irrigation). However, drinking water projects usually only provide small amounts of water and thus don’t help improve livelihoods, while livelihood projects often don’t reach everyone (often leaving out minorities, poor, women etc) and do not provide water for domestic uses. Therefore, the group created a fund (called the “Challenge Program Water for Food”) to finance projects that would either: a) investigate, document and disseminate learnings from existing multiple-use water-supply systems (10 projects), or b) design and implement innovative new multiple-use water supply systems based on the previous findings (10 projects). The overall goal of the program is:

“The project goal is to improve poor people’s food security and health, reduce unpaid workloads, alleviate poverty and enhance gender equality through more productive use of water. This will be achieved by generating and upscaling science-based and field-tested models and guidelines for self-financed, sustainable multiple-use water supply systems. This will significantly improve the opportunities of the world’s poor and contribute to the Millennium Development Goals of  halving by 2015: the number of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, and the proportion of people whose income is less than a dollar a day.”

In response to this request for proposals, IMWI – Nepal (in partnership with several local organizations, one of which was PSI) developed a project titled “Linking Community-Based Water and Forest Management For Sustainable Livelihoods of the Poor in Fragile Upper Catchments of the Indus-Ganges Basin”. The project emphasizes the inter-relationship between natural resources (water, forest and soil) and the susceptibility of the predominantly natural-resource dependent population to land use changes (that commonly lead to the degradation/depletion of the resources they depend on) that occur in areas outside their control (government land, other villages, towns etc). For these reasons, the project seeks to generate “a better understanding of, and policy recommendations on, the development of an institutional framework for the integrated management of water and forest resources” with the goal of “enhancing livelihood opportunities and reducing vulnerability for poor rural people in the upper catchments of Nepal and India”. This is to be achieved via four main activities:

1. Conducting a study of the legal and policy implications for development of community based integrated natural-resource management institutions.
2. Examination of the natural resource base of the project area to determine its present use, and identify constraining and facilitating factors for enhancing its productivity.
3. Examination of the existing community institutions and natural resource management practices – and the role of users in each – to identify challenges and opportunities for integrating the management of community natural resources.
4. Identifying mechanisms for scaling up research methods and developed institutional frameworks to determine options for integrated natural resource management at the watershed level and beyond.

Activities 2 and 3 require extensive fieldwork and community interaction, and given their scale/complexity, would be very difficult to do with the entire area/population of the watershed. Therefore, the project proposes that this village-level research programme (activities 2 & 3) be carried out in only five villages in each watershed, and the watershed-level institutional framework for integrated natural resource management is to be developed based on these results.

One important aspect of the project is that it is basically a twin project – the same process is being carried out in two different micro-watersheds (one in India and the other in Nepal) by two different organizations (PSI and Institute for Water and Human Resource Development – a Kathmandu based NGO). This allows the project to collect/analyze more information, provide benefits to a larger number of people over a larger area, and also allows comparison/cross-checking of all aspects of the project (methodologies, results and conclusions).

On paper, everything looks wonderful – development at its best. We’ve got a number of big international NGOs working together to fund a project that is relevant to an important global issue, and the requirements/goals of the fund/project cover all the important areas: targeting benefits to those who need them most, making use of existing/traditional knowledge rather than imposing external ideas on people and using a community-based approach that involves all the stakeholders in the process. However, this is all on paper, and though important, what matters more is what actually happens on the ground, which is a different story.

The Methodology

PSI’s component of the project got off to a bad start, as the first two watersheds that were selected turned out to be unsuitable (the first had been recently selected as the field area for a government funded project investigating natural resources and providing funds to implement proposed solutions, while the other lacked villages with sufficient irrigation – one of the selection criteria), and so the current watershed that we are working in is the third choice. It’s called the Lustar Gard (Hindi for river) watershed, and is located in central-western Rudrapryag district in the state of Uttaranchal. To give you a sense of it, it contains two main rivers (Luster Gard and Hilong Gard), covers an area of roughly 300 square kilometers (12km x 25km) of steep mountainous terrain and contains about 75 villages.

The Picking Process

The first phase of the fieldwork is to select the five villages in which the village-level research programme will be done. This involves going out to each of the villages in the watershed and conducting informal meetings with whoever is available to gather some basic data about the village, explain the project, and gauge the villagers’ interest in participating in the project. Using this information, we determine if the village meets the project’s selection criteria, which consists of the following:

• Location in the watershed
  The watershed is divided into three parts – upper, middle and lower reaches, and of the five villages, one must be from the lower reach, while the other four come one-each from the upper and middle reaches of the two major rivers in the watershed.
• Forest area
  The villages must have substantial forest area within their village boundaries so that there is an area where the new integrated institution can implement management changes that will improve the quantity/quality of water entering the river system.
• Irrigated area
  This is particularly important in middle and lower reach villages as it is where the impacts of
• Linkage
  The villages must be selected so that the impacts of any changes implemented in each village can be seen in downstream villages (upper reach impacts middle and lower while middle reach impacts the lower), thus providing a basis for evaluation of the success of the changes.
• Class/Caste distribution
  One of the stated goals of the project is to improve the quality of life for the poorest, most disadvantaged people, so villages with larger percentages of poor/low caste households are given priority to maximize benefits to these groups as quickly as possible.
• Community response
  This is a critical criteria, as the work done with the villagers is all based on the PAR model, and if the community isn’t interested/motivated to participate, the project will not succeed.

Developing the Information

The second phase of the fieldwork is actually conducting the village-level research programme in each of the five villages selected. In the proposal, only the outcomes of this programme are defined – not the methodology, and so PSI has selected a process called “Micro-level Planning” (MLP) as the toolset for developing the required information, a process that PSI has used before – very successfully – with poor tribal villages in Orissa (a state on the east coast of central India). MLP is a process that has become widely accepted and used here in India in a standardized form, and is based on the philosophy of PRA (which as far as I can tell is basically a specialized form of PAR and follows the same ideology). The goal of MLP is to draw out and visualize villagers’ knowledge of their own community, and then have them collectively analyze this information to not only identify the problems in the village but more importantly discover their root causes, and based on these, design a plan of community-level projects to mitigate the problems. Though the exact procedure of MLP isn’t defined (it has to be flexible to accommodate the different situations in different villages and what issues arise in the process), there is a generally accepted series of exercises that are done in MLP. They are:

• Initial Meeting
  This is the first, and one of the most important steps in the process, the time when the entire village (or as many as possible) gathers to be introduced to the project, what the goals are and how they will be accomplished. Based on this, the villagers decide whether they want to do MLP in their village.
• Transect Walk
  In this exercise, the facilitators (accompanied by several villagers) walk across the village area to get a first hand look at what the community is like, and by asking
• Timeline
  This exercise maps out the important events that have occurred in the village which can be used as temporal landmarks in other exercises as well as to discover issues/trends.
• Social Map
  A large (on the floor) map of the residential area is drawn showing all the houses, and then symbols/objects are added/moved around to show various social information (population, education, health, income etc). This is primarily done to discover groups within the community (and the issues that define them) so they can be investigated further later.
• Wealth Ranking
  This is another exercise that is designed to discover groups within the community, but more importantly it discovers what characteristics villagers use to determine wealth/status, and thus provides goals as to what things should be enhanced/decreased in villagers lives to improve their quality of life.
• Resource Map
  Another big floor map is drawn, but this time of the entire village area, and on it are drawn areas (land use, soil type, ownership, erosion, irrigation etc) and features (streams, roads, tanks, etc) that are analyzed to determine the availability and spatial relationship of resources, as well as problems and solutions.
• Seasonality Diagram
  This looks at how various parameters (such as crops, diseases, weather, workload, income etc) change throughout the year to identify periods of stress and what their causes are.
• Daily Activities
  Maps out the daily routine of the different groups of villagers to examine any inequities between groups (primarily gender), the amount of free time available, and identify major workloads so that solutions can be targeted to reduce these.
• Trend Analysis
  This activity takes many different parameters and investigates their general changes over broad periods of time. Identified trends can then be investigated to determine their causes and impacts on the villagers, and can help provide indications as to what may happen in the future if there is no intervention.
• Institution Map
  This map shows all the various organizations and services that are working in/available to the villagers, and visualizes them based on their perceived importance and accessibility to the villagers. With this, critical groups can be targeted for reform (which can be discussed) and new organizations/services can be developed to fill gaps in services.
• Product/Mobility Map
  The product map shows the products coming into/out of the village to determine opportunities to reduce external dependancies and increase the value of exports, while the mobility map looks at where and why villagers go outside their village to identify services/products that should be made more accessible.
• Final Meeting
  This is again a meeting of the entire village, where the results of the MLP process are disseminated within the entire community (as not everyone participates in every exercise/group) highlighting the problems/issues that were identified, and then the community as a whole reviews any proposed solutions – or if none were suggested, tries to develop them.

All throughout the process, the findings/results are analyzed and discussed, and many specialized exercises are done to further develop issues/opportunities that are identified. All these activities are done in ways to maximize the participation of the villagers, and in each one, the diversity of opinion/information in village is sought either by conducting the exercises with all villagers at once (generally the large mapping exercises) or doing them in numerous small groups, sometimes diverse and sometimes homogeneous to explore the different perspectives of various groups of key stakeholders.

The Reality

Before I go into the details of my rant about the project, there’s one thing I’d like to point out to give an indication of the mood here with the field team. For obvious reasons, no one at PSI uses the official project name very often, and whenever it is being discussed it is instead referred to as “The Challenge Program” or simply CP. However, given the way things have been going lately, we (the field team) have come to think that a better name for the project would be “The Challenging Project” or “The Confusing Project”, and whenever we get frustrated, we start referring to it by these names…

So speaking of confusion, it starts right at the beginning in the project proposal. The request for proposals is in my mind a well-thought-out, unified document that is easy to read and understand, which is in stark contrast to the our project proposal. The backgrounder I’ve provided above is the result of about 3 hours of reading, re-reading and trying to understand the document, and even still I don’t have a clear sense of what it is that we are supposed to be doing, every paragraph seems to state slightly different things, and there are several parts that seem to contradict eachother. I challenge you all to read it through (download link above) and see if you can understand what’s supposed to be happening here – if you figure it out, let me know!

To Implement or not to Implement – That is the Question

The first point of confusion is how our project actually qualifies for the CPWF fund. The fund is designed to support two types of projects (research projects and implementation projects), but I can’t really decide which one we are doing. On one hand, our project’s goals and general outline seem to suggest that it is a research project only (with no implementation), but if you read the entire report in detail, there are sections that hint (and even directly state) that the project will not only develop frameworks for integrated natural resource management institutions, but actually pilot/implement them by developing these institutions in the selected villages.

For example, the summaries of the 4 main activities (and most of the background/goals section) are carefully worded so that there is no reference to implementation (based on these parts it is purely research to develop frameworks), however, the detailed breakdown of the Activity 4 tells a completely different story. It starts out with “This activity will focus on the actual implementation of the action plan prepared as per foregoing activity for improving community based resources management system”, and goes on to talk about “Natural Resources Management Clubs” that are to consist of around 25 resource users, and meet every two weeks to discuss resource management issues. Tell me that’s not implementation (and if we’re going to do it, I think they’d better pick a different name, feels like we’re back in Grade 2 joining clubs to be cool)…

Another strike against the research option is that the CPWF fund states that it will fund research projects that investigate existing multiple-use water supply systems, but for this project, there doesn’t seem to be an existing system we are researching, so I can’t see how it would qualify. On the other side, the sections mentioning implementation and monitoring suggest that we are going to do something, and so there is a chance this project is funded as an implementation project, but argument seems pretty weak given the project funding and type of implementation we may be doing. Fundamentally, I don’t know why this project was funded, and therefore the CPWF request can’t be used to enforce any criteria on the project that can be used to help decipher what we really are supposed to do, why and how.

Confounding Criteria

In the fieldwork, the confusion becomes even worse. On paper, village selection sounds really easy, but we’ve found that in fact it is extremely difficult. Given the number of criteria, we haven’t been able to select any villages that fit perfectly, and this problem is compounded by the fact that there is a lot of confusion surrounding what the criteria actually are, what they each really mean, and the order of their priority. The most confusing one is location in the watershed, and as I wrote before, there seem to be two models being considered. One simply divides the watershed into three parts based on how far along the main stream the village is (basically a geographic division) and the other looks at water flows and divides the watershed into three regions based on drainage patterns and volumes of water passing through each area (hydrological division). Given that the project talks of monitoring changes implemented in upper reach villages in middle and lower reach villages (though the confusion about implementation makes this uncertain), the geographic division makes no sense as it only enforces a link to the main river (basically stating that the village must be in the watershed) and doesn’t ensure that there are proper up-stream/down-stream links that can be monitored. I’ve managed to convince the rest of my team members that the hydrologic division is the one that must be used (though it has been quite an effort), but Debashish and Ravi (the two direct project supervisors at PSI who set criteria and approve our selection) remain confused. Ravi apparently wants to follow the geographic division (I haven’t been able to talk to him about it), and Debashish bounces back and forth between the two (whenever I talk to him he agrees with me to use the hydrologic model, but then if he talks with anyone else, he tends to use the geographic model). Since this criteria specifies that only one village should be selected from each region, the fact that the two models are quite different (there is very little area where both models agree) means that it is nearly impossible to select villages.

The other thing we’ve come to realize is that (unfortunately for us) there is one additional (obvious) criteria that needs to be considered (and currently isn’t being) – dependancy on natural resources. On it’s own, this criteria makes perfect sense, but it’s even more important when combined with the others because I’ve come to realize that, although they make sense on paper,our current important criteria (village response, forest area and irrigation area) can produce unexpected/unwanted results in reality…

Basically, the lifestyle of the disadvantaged, natural resource dependent villagers (target beneficiaries) requires that they work extremely hard and long in order to meet their needs. For example, everyday the women go to collect grass/fodder for the family’s livestock, a task that takes a couple hours at the best of times (when it is available nearby), but can take much longer (the women of one village we visited told us that there was no fodder available near their village, so they have to go half way down the steep mountainside to the river, across the river and back up the other side to the top of the ridge, then collect the fodder and carry it all the way back – taking around 8hrs total). Bear in mind that this is only one of the womens’ tasks, they also have to get water and firewood, do all the domestic cleaning and cook all the food. Men are typically slightly better off, but still don’t have much free time either, and so when we go to the villages and try to meet with the people, it’s nearly impossible as they’re either not around, or don’t have any free time to spare. Even if we find a few and try to arrange a village meeting for a later date, it’s still often hard to find a time, and even if one is arranged, turnout is usually very low (Indian hospitality demands that the villagers agree to arrange a meeting, but doesn’t mean they have to come). Therefore, in this situation, we classify the villager’s response as “poor”, and since the whole village-level research programme is participatory and requires a substantial amount of time (over 20hrs as a rough estimate), poor response and lack of time basically mean we have to reject the village.

On the other hand, the places where we are most likely to find people to talk to (and have free time they can give to participate in the project) are people who are fairly well off, and typically earn their living from government jobs or private businesses – places where there is a constant source of income. These people are also often better educated/exposed to the larger world and so have an easier time understanding the project and being able to see its potential value. Therefore, the villages that tend to have the better responses are those with populations that are relatively wealthy and not dependent on natural resources – the opposite of who we want to work with. Likewise, poor, natural resource dependent people put a much larger demand on the surrounding forests, and so these communities are most likely to have small, degraded forests (or even none at all), whereas large healthy forests are most often found in communities that don’t need forest products. Therefore, by taking forest area (with bigger as better) as a criteria, our selection tends to bias towards the wrong group, even though on paper it makes sense that more forest is better for our project as it gives more area to apply management changes to and thus have a larger total effect on waterflows. Irrigation is similar, poor people have a much harder time affording expensive canals/pumps, whereas well off businessman can, and so even though it isn’t their main source of income, they will tend to own irrigated land on which they grow cash crops (water-demanding vegetables etc.) which they sell as supplementary income.

The question of implementation becomes important here as well as it relates directly with the linkage criteria. The whole point of the linkage criteria (as it has been explained to me) is to ensure that the impacts of changes to the management practices can be physically measured by monitoring the river in middle and lower reach villages. If there is no implementation, there certainly will be no impacts and so the whole criteria of up-stream/down-stream linkage of villages becomes pointless. Furthermore, even if we assume there is implementation (which by the above logic can be assumed by the fact that linkage is a criteria – and one that Ravi and Debashish are strongly enforcing), the project is only scheduled to last for three years. Based on the schedule section in the proposal (which doesn’t mention implementation or impact assessment), the first year is for the policy study, village selection and preliminary village-level research (Activities 1 & 2), the next 1.5 years is for detailed village-level research (Activity 3) and the last 6 months are for Activity 4 (which is where the proposal talks about implementation). From this perspective, there seems to be only 6 months in which both the implementation and impact assessment would have to be completed, but I can’t see how this is enough to develop the institutions, let alone have them decide upon and implement changes to their resource management practices that will produce the impacts we need to assess. Given that we are looking primarily at the forest/water relationship, I’d say you’d need to wait at least 5 years before trying to do any impact assessment as growing/managing trees is not a quick process. Based on these two lines of thought, there just seems to be no logical argument for keeping the linkage criteria – especially since it’s caused us to reject some otherwise potential villages (which are hard to find in this watershed).

So in summary, of the 5 selection criteria we have, three (village response, forest area and irrigated area) – though ideally good – tend to discriminate against villages with larger populations of poor, natural resource dependent people (who we are supposed to help), one is surrounded in confusion as to how to define it (location in the watershed), one (linkage) seems to be pointless, and so that only leaves us with one criteria that is appropriate (caste/class distribution) – and as luck would have it, that is the one that has been given least priority at this point. Throw in the fact that we aren’t using what should be the most important criteria (dependancy on natural resources), and it basically means that village selection is a mess, and if the current criteria are blindly applied (which is what our supervisors are doing, and therefore want us to do), you end up in the situation where very few villages meet the criteria (the three biased criteria tend to contradict the caste/class criteria), and those few that do are less likely to include our target beneficiaries and instead have people who don’t depend on natural resources, and thus don’t really care about them much (which makes doing extensive and intensive participatory research difficult).

Wrong Place

Putting aside the problems with the criteria, we’ve also come to realize that this watershed is just not suitable for this project. The biggest reason is that it is just too large. Trying to go out and scout even half of the 75 villages is a huge task, especially when distances are so long (up to 30km from our base) and roads (when present) are often in poor condition and have limited (if any) reliable transportation. These factors mean that on average, by splitting our team of five into two groups, we can cover 3 – 4 villages per day, though for most of the upper and middle reaches (especially in the Luster Gard valley) each group can only visit one village per day, and there are some villages that are essentially unreachable (too far from a serviced road to walk there, have a meeting and return in time to catch transportation back to Mayali). So while the size of the watershed means that there are more villages to chose from, the logistical problems for scouting (combined with our schedule, see below) mean that the size is more of a burden than a benefit.

The size of the watershed also poses problems for the later stages of the project. The idea that a five village sample can represent the diversity present in the valley is hard to believe, and the thought of trying to scale up the frameworks for integrated natural resource management that will be developed in each village to a single, watershed scale framework makes me shudder (thank goodness that’s later – something I won’t have to deal with). If we consider the possibility of implementation, the chance of discovering any impact on the watershed due to changes to resource management practices in our five villages is laughable. The reality is that the watershed is just too big, and there is so much water coming from so many different places that changes will be so diluted they won’t be detectable, and even if impacts are identified, it will be extremely hard to prove they are based on our work. Even in a smaller watershed this monitoring would be difficult, but it could be possible.

The size of the watershed isn’t the only problem though – as we’ve done more and more village scouting, we’ve started to identify trends that don’t look good for the project.

• Large Villages
  Given that MLP is a participatory process in which you want to get everyone involved, it gets increasingly difficult to do as the number of participants (village population) increases. Based on previous experience, MLP works best in villages that have between 20 and 40 households (with Indian extended families, this still works out to 100-300 people), but in this valley, the average village size is 87 households, and only 25% of villages fall in the ideal window, so right off the bat, there are very few good choices.
• Little Forest
  While there is certainly lots of forest in this watershed, it is mostly on government land on the upper slopes of the mountains, away from water sources and thus away from villages. The large village populations means that a large proportion of village land is used for residential purposes, and the large population also means increased demand for agricultural area (income) and firewood/fodder, all of which contribute to deforestation.
• Low Natural Resource Dependancy
  Despite what the project proposal says about the large number of poor, natural resource dependent people in the Indian Himalayan region, there doesn’t seem to be so many here. The proportion of villages connected to roads is quite high here, and combined with the large population, a large percentage of families run shops/businesses as their main source of income. Also, there seems to be a fairly high level of migration, people from the villages working in towns/cities across northern India (and even a significant percent working overseas!) sending money back to their families in the villages. Given that things here are relatively cheap and the earning potential outside is fairly high (especially abroad), even just one son working outside reduces a family’s financial burden dramatically, making them less inclined to do labour intensive, low-income natural resource dependent work. The Indian love for bureaucracy also contributes, as there are quite a few government employees in the region.
• Approaching Summer
  Yes, it may seem a little hard to believe, but spring is upon us here in India, and for farmers, this means they have to go out and get their fields ready and planted. However, here there are no tractors to do all the work and ploughing a field means taking the oxen and wooden plough around each tiny terraced field (or if you don’t have oxen, doing it all by hand with picks, hoes and shovels as many people do here). All the other tasks are similarly labour intensive, so anyone who can work is recruited to go out into the fields. This means that very few people have free time to sit around and talk with strangers from an unknown NGO (this is the first time PSI has worked in this area) and so turnout has been low (particularly in terms of natural resource dependent people) for our meetings/exercises lately – and will only get worse as the planting season kicks into full gear.
• Poor Community Response
  For various reasons in addition to the two above, the turnout/response from villagers in this watershed has been a lot worse than expected/hoped. People here seem to be relatively wealthy (compared to what I expected), and there seems to be a large population of upper caste people here (who tend to be a bit snobbish and more interested in themselves). Another possible reason is that there are many other NGOs already working in the area, so people have gotten a little fed up with constantly having people coming around trying to organize meetings that (according to the villagers) are, more often than not, a waste of time. However, the NGO presence isn’t only about talk, in many cases the proposed projects have funding for implementation, and so people have become used to getting financial/physical benefits from programs and so the first question we always get is, “what are we going to get?”. Given the confusion about our project, we can’t really give them a proper answer at this point so we only tell them what we know (what we’re doing now), that they will get a copy of a plan (they develop based on the information they know about their village) outlining the problems in their village and potential solutions. Compared with the benefits offered by other projects, most people don’t see the value in this, and thus don’t see why they should give us their time. Even if our project was clear, it seems to me the only possible other major benefit would be an institutional framework for better managing their natural resources, and if they’re lucky, some help in starting up these institutions, which I think in their minds isn’t going to be worth anything either.

Based on all this, it’s pretty clear to me that this watershed isn’t the right place to be. What is more troubling though is the fact that this is the third watershed we’ve tried to run this project in, and while some of the problems here seem like they’re caused by characteristics of this particular watershed, there seems to be a possibility that these problems would be encountered anywhere we go in this region…

Lack of Control

In my mind, the biggest problem with the way things are being implemented here is that while we (the field team) are the ones out here doing the work, seeing the realities of what we have to work in/with, it’s the project leaders back in Dehradun (none of whom have come out the the field) that have set the list of things that we need to accomplish, and by when. To make matters worse, they don’t understand the realities of working in the field (and don’t listen to us when we try to explain the situation), and think that everything should work out ideally (anyone who has ever done fieldwork will know this is impossible). Furthermore, since they’re not the ones out here, they don’t seem to care about what kinds of conditions we are dealing with, they just have their checklist of things that they want done (and done by or before the unrealistic schedule they’ve set) and they don’t want to spend any more of their time than necessary even discussion what we’ve been doing – they want no excuses, only results. Basically, we’re the ones out here doing the work, understanding the realities of what it entails and trying to cope with them, but we’ve got no control over our situation.

The village selection process is even worse as Debashish has to approve our final list of villages, and though he doesn’t have any of the field information, he has some basic data (village population, forest & irrigation area etc.) about all the different villages from the 2001 national census, and based on that and a GIS map (whose data source I don’t know), he has come up with a list of which villages he thinks should be selected, and is constantly asking us about them and whether we’ve finalized them or not. If either the map or census data were accurate it wouldn’t be so bad, but we’ve found from our field experience that neither is (while they’re more right than wrong, there are some glaring discrepancies) and so you certainly can’t make decisions based on them alone, and furthermore, they don’t tell you anything about community response – a critical factor. We’ve made a point of ensuring that we visit all of Debashish’s villages, but based on what we’ve found there, most of them aren’t as nice as the rough data makes them seem, and so we don’t feel that we can confidently select them for the project. However, since we’ve been unable to find any other villages that match perfectly, it’s hard to argue against his choices if we have no other options. Fundamentally the root of this problem is that as I’ve said above, we’re in the wrong watershed, but again, that’s something that’s hard to tell him (especially over the phone).

 

Double the Work, Half the Results

Writing all the above has been such a task that I haven’t been able to finish the rest of it as of yet. I arrived back in Dehradun last night and so now have internet access, and since I’ve gotten this far (which I think is pretty good for me), I figured I should share this with you all as is, rather than waiting for the last little bit. I hope to finish it tonight, but we’ll see, the rough outline below should give you a sense as to how this ends – this is the last little section, so you’re not missing much.

I’ve spent enough time complaining about the village selection process, now it’s time to tackle the issues around what we’re doing in the villages we select. Based on the results of our last field trip (investigating villages in the Hilong Gard watershed only), we identified not five, but only two villages that we thought would be suitable for the project. When we returned to Dehradun to discuss these results, we were told to expand our field area to include the full Luster Gard watershed too and thus return to the field to complete the village investigation process by finding the remaining villages we needed. However, in addition to this, we were told that we had to start doing the actual village level research, and thus had to start (and complete) the MLP process in one of the two villages we’d selected. This was due to

So this trip, we’ve spent about half our time doing the village investigation, and half our time doing MLP in the village of Banoli. Before coming out to the field, we went through a brief “re-orientation” to the MLP process (the rest of the team had already had an orientation, but when they returned after doing MLP in a village in the previous watershed – which was later rejected, Ra

Basically, what I’ve come to realize over the course of doing MLP in Banoli is that MLP is not appropriate for our project. The fundamental problem is that the outcome of MLP is a plan designed to address the problems identified by the villagers – whatever they feel is most important to them. However, our project is very different in the fact that it deals with a specific problem (natural-resource management) and has the goal of developing an institutional framework for integrated natural resource management. From this, the question arises, “What happens if the villagers don’t identify problems with natural resource institutions, or even natural resources in general?”. How can we – the facilitators – force the villagers to consider an issue that may not be important to them and still call it a participatory process designed to meet the needs of the community. This situation has come up in Banoli, we’ve come to realize that there is extremely little dependance on natural resources in the village, and that for the most part, people don’t really care about them. While some of the issues that they’ve come up with are relevant to use (erosion problems, low production in some fields), there are some that aren’t (hospital is too far away)
In a situation where villagers’ response is not great, dependance on natural resources is low (and thus related issues are less likely to be identified by villagers left to freely choose), time is precious (villagers have little time to give, and our tight deadlines mean we have little time to spend) and the final output (plan) is of little use to use, how can we justify following a process that demands maximum participation/response, doesn’t allow us to specify issues to discuss, takes much more time (since other “project irrelevant issues” are investigated)

I haven’t been able to reconstruct much of the history of how and why it was decided to use MLP for the field implementation of this project (I’ve only talked with Ravi and Debasish about the project for about an hour combined), however I have some guesses. Basically, I think that PSI selected MLP as the implementation vehicle because it was something that they were already familiar with and had some experience in implementing, and given that MLP is such an extensive process, most of the information/analysis required by our project is developed/analyzed. By using an existing methodology, the work could begin (and finish) quickly (PSI likes to get things done ASAP or faster) and more importantly, it minimizes the amount of time that senior PSI staff (Ravi, Debashish and Salil – who are all extremely busy with the multitudes of projects PSI is working on at once) need to spend on the project as simply training field staff to conduct MLP takes much less time than to actually sit down and develop a new field program to meet the specific goals of this project.

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