Midterm Evaluation
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Midterm Evaluation |
Below is the executive summary from the midterm review of the Biodiversity Conservation Network. This review was conducted and written by John Mellor Associates. It summarizes an outside assessment that was done of the BCN program.
MIDTERM REVIEW OF THE
BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION NETWORKby John Mellor Associates
BCN As a Bellwether for the International Community
The Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN) is a program dedicated to enlisting the help of indigenous and local people in the conservation of biological resources. To this end, the BCN supports enterprises that earn their income from the sustainable use of those resources. A major task is to monitor resource use, enterprise profitability, and social organization.
More specifically, BCN's function is to (1) monitor the biological resource base to ensure its sustainable management; (2) establish and monitor profitable enterprises that give indigenous and local people a stake in that resource management; (3) develop institutional structures that enable indigenous and local people to participate in all phases of the income-earning enterprise, in the sustenance of the resource base, and in effective action to protect the resource base from internal and external forces; (4) facilitate networking across projects; and (5) promote policy changes essential to biodiversity conservation and to related enterprises.
The BCN is simple in concept, but complex in its operation. Since some of the above actions must be performed in sequence, they take considerable time to achieve their full effect. The present review examines the factors critical to the success of BCN's operation, the adequacy of the monitoring procedures for each of its functions, its progress in establishing enterprises, the policy issues affecting this progress, and institutional developments designed to ensure indigenous participation in the effort as a whole. The review team consisted of specialists in biodiversity and its monitoring, enterprise management, social institutions and organization, and policy (see Annex 6).
The analysis is based on a review of BCN project reports, interviews with numerous persons responsible for formulating and running the network, visits to 3 field sites, meetings and telephone interviews with key personnel directly involved in the work of most of the projects, and discussions with national policy makers and representatives of foreign assistance organizations. A questionnaire was also administered to all the implementation grantees. A draft report was reviewed by key project personnel and discussed in a seminar for BCN staff. This final report reflects those interactions and suggestions.
How Is The Program Doing?
The BCN is by and large on track. Essential administrative structures, while still evolving in response to feedback from the field, are in place. Financial flows, while somewhat slow (28 percent disbursed by the end of the third year), are on track with respect to the realities of project contracting and implementation. Although monitoring urgently needs to be simplified, it has received substantial attention in comparison with other environmental projects and is headed basically in the right direction. Enterprise profitability is at the level expected, but individual accounting systems need improvement. In addition, the BCN is making good progress in understanding and addressing important social organization issues. Emphasis should now shift to the development and utilization of local social structures.
The grant agreement between the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Biodiversity Support Program was signed on September 30, 1992. After a brief initial delay, a responsive, efficient administrative system was established with headquarters in Washington D.C. and a regional office in Manila. The organizational structure is continually evolving to meet felt needs, and an increasing proportion of the staff is being deployed to the region. Only four regular staff members are now located in Washington: the project director, one senior program officer, one project coordinator, and the program secretary.
The Regional Representatives' Office in Manila has eight regular staff, two of whom are posted in other regions, one in Indonesia and the other in India. Five of the eight are dedicated technical experts in biodiversity conservation, social organization, and enterprise development.
As a first step in applying the BCN concept, the program launched an open and transparent system of selecting projects. It provided a wide range of projects for testing the concept and for identifying problems and future modifications needed to achieve widespread emulation and success. The effort was then widely advertised, particularly in the institutionalized conservation community, and over 400 proposals and concept papers were received. A distinguished selection panel was appointed with worldwide representation (see Annex 4) to assist in the award process.
It soon became apparent that most applicants lacked the experience to formulate a proposal detailing their project's relevance to the BCN concept and did not have the capacity to carry out the project. Thus 34 applicants were awarded planning grants in support of technical assistance in feasibility study, project development, and proposal preparation. A total of 20 proposals were selected for implementation grants (see Annex 5). Seventy-five percent of these were drawn from the pool given proposal preparation grants. This selection process was expensive and time-consuming-it was completed in the thirty-third month of the project. However, the lessons learned made it possible to devise a far less expensive set of procedures for the future.
The total grant of $20 million is to be disbursed in five tranches. The first, $7.9 million, was received from USAID in 1993 and the second, $4.0 million, in 1995. The third tranche, $1.5 million, is expected in 1996. The fourth tranche, $4.5 million, is due in the third and fourth quarter of 1997, and the last payment, $2.1 million, is due in 1998. The project has committed $11.56 million to grants, of which $1.64 million has been disbursed for 34 planning grants averaging about $48,379 each; $94,317 for 6 small research grants averaging $15,720 each; and $9.8 million for 20 implementation grants averaging $490,986 each. The smallest implementation grant, amounting to $179,632, is for the ARFAK project in Indonesia, and the largest, totaling $899,940 and awarded to Conservation International, covers a number of projects in different countries of Asia. The implementation grant obligations were expected to be disbursed in three years, from 1994 to 1996. As already mentioned, however, less than 28 percent of the amount obligated in each of the three years was actually disbursed.
Of the 20 projects selected, 7 were designed to promote ecotourism (one in the marine environment), 12 to utilize nontimber forest products, and 2 to harvest timber resources. The projects are being implemented in 7 countries: 6 in Indonesia, 3 in the Philippines, 3 in India, 2 in Nepal, 3 in Papua-New Guinea, 1 in Fiji, and 2 in the Solomon Islands. Each project has an on-site agency to oversee the work. Through the diversity of the projects and their wide geographic distribution, the program has established a sound basis for judging the success of the BCN concept and its implementation.
Most of the enterprises (at least 15 of the 20) were ongoing efforts prior to project funding and thus will meet the three-year time horizon required to show the effectiveness of an enterprise. The fact that these are ongoing enterprises should in no way bias judgments about the value of the BCN concept. Unlike the enterprises, the indigenous institutions for ensuring local management were almost all in the early phases of development at the beginning of the project. Thus it will clearly take longer than three years to assess the long-term social, institutional, and biological viability of the projects, especially where indigenous takeover of the projects is concerned.
Although three years may be enough time in which to establish and prove the various monitoring systems or to detect the direction of change, it will take much longer to judge the project's overall effect on biodiversity. A longer time frame will also be required to assess the important impacts on local community organization. This suggests that once the monitoring systems are in place, grants will need to be extended to achieve BCN objectives, at least for the monitoring activities, and perhaps for the continued development of appropriate community structures. In any case, the institutional structure built by the BCN represents a large investment and should continue to evolve and provide important services far beyond the present AID grant.
An intense effort went into the review, not to mention a high level of expertise and experience. Thus the preliminary assessment of the likely effectiveness of several aspects of the BCN and the recommendations for improving it and for increasing the probabilities of success will be of great assistance in shaping the future of the program. Most important, the review has clearly established the soundness of the BCN concept.
First, it shows that biological resources used by very poor people cannot be preserved even with police action if the social and economic needs of the indigenous and local people are ignored. As with wildlife preserves, the situation becomes dire when the interests of the indigenous and local people are in direct conflict to those of the animals in their ecosystem.
Second, it demonstrates that profitable enterprises that draw upon biological resources in a sustainable manner can be established in a wide range of ecological conditions. In general, the enterprises BCN selected had large operating margins and low capital costs; thus their potential for success was high. Some projects will undoubtedly prove their success within the three-year time frame.
Third, in several cases national policies will need to be changed to ensure the success of BCN activities. BCN resources are being used to pursue those policy changes, with early indications of a high success rate. By way of example, legislative changes now under way will provide indigenous and local people a major share of the revenues from Chitwan Park in Nepal; land tenure changes in Kalahan prior to BCN also demonstrate how such policy can be modified. As this report cogently argues, the benefits to local people attempting to harvest nontimber forest products under the TERI project will be slim without major institutional change. Indeed, policy impact must remain a primary concern beyond the three-year time horizon to ensure long-term success.
Fourth, indigenous and local people readily understand the relationship between sustaining the resource base and their livelihoods. Educational programs in the BCN projects have already awakened many of them to a broad concept of resource sustainability that incorporates concern for biodiversity itself. Educational programs in Kalahan, for example, have elicited indigenous support for the protection of primary forest resources. Such a response is best achieved if biodiversity-oriented educational programs are presented as part of an overall social and economic development effort.
Fifth, monitoring systems are difficult to implement through indigenous means. Therefore they must be simple and clearly related to the objectives of indigenous and local people. That means the BCN needs to simplify its monitoring efforts. It can do so by providing specific, results-oriented technical assistance to the project monitoring activities. A simplified monitoring system will not only have greater applicability across projects, but it will accelerate the implementation of the correct activities.
Sixth, it takes a great deal of time to train indigenous and local people to take full charge of enterprise development, monitor the resource base, and build support mechanisms for conservation. Equally important, implementation agencies at the local level must be committed to the turnover of activities. That commitment will have to be fostered by the BCN, since local support groups often fail to undertake the actions needed to make the effort completely indigenous. Because these groups tend to identify with the indigenous and local people, they often, unknowingly and naively, behave in a somewhat patronizing manner. The BCN needs to be more vigorous in encouraging the indigenous takeover of project activities.
In summary, the BCN concept is being proved. Newly established enterprises are beginning to turn a profit, indigenous and local people are learning how to protect their resource base, the participating nongovernment organizations are testing monitoring systems, and the required policy changes are becoming increasingly clear. The next critical step is to greatly simplify the monitoring systems so they can be implemented by the indigenous and local people themselves. Above all, local people need to be organized and more directly involved in all aspects of biodiversity conservation. This, however, will take far longer than the time currently mapped out for BCN projects.
Monitoring
As already mentioned, the monitoring of biological, economic, and social processes is central to the BCN concept. Three workshops (two in Los Banos, Philippines, and one in Bangalore, India) have been held to determine what form such monitoring should take. But in cutting across all the projects, the workshop approach produced a complex monitoring system that is too cumbersome to implement effectively and too expensive to sustain beyond the present projects. Furthermore, this system has been devised by those purportedly speaking for indigenous and local people but not by the people themselves. To bring them into the process, meetings must take place at the project level. That point should be emphasized in the BCN's follow-up activities. Such meetings would probably give rise to a simpler, more efficient monitoring system, one that stressed sustainable harvesting of the economically productive resource and that could continue beyond the subsidies provided by the project.
Simple, appropriately focused monitoring systems based on scientific principles can only be arrived at by examining the needs of indigenous and local people. The review team suggests that such bare-bone systems be instituted for each of the network's three fundamental objectives in projects already on the ground: biological conservation, economic profitability, and institutional viability. In addition, some high-level technical assistance and more local personnel may be needed at the country level.
Biological Sustainability
Thus far, biological monitoring has been experiencing three kinds of problems. In some cases, such as the TERI project in India, a high level of scientific effort has gone into shaping the monitoring system, and the results are likely to be scientifically sound, but almost no indigenous and local people have been involved. In others, such as Kalahan in the Philippines, project implementation personnel have expressed an interest in intensive monitoring, but they have no knowledge of the basic scientific principles that need to be applied to make monitoring cost-effective. In still other cases-for example, Humla-local people are involved in the enterprise, but they do not fully grasp the need for biodiversity and sustainable monitoring, and hence there is no basis for implementation. In general, the monitoring plans are too complex to be implemented efficiently and certainly do not lend themselves to continuation after BCN subsidies are ended.
The review team attaches great importance to monitoring biodiversity. Monitoring, team members point out, is usually overlooked or downplayed in internationally financed biodiversity projects, and the BCN deserves high praise for its emphasis on biological, social, and enterprise monitoring. The team's suggestions therefore concentrate on further strengthening the BCN's monitoring capabilities. Since so little is usually done in this area, the team also encourages the BCN to develop community-level monitoring procedures that can be widely emulated.
Biological monitoring should focus on the actual resource being utilized by the enterprise. The first important step is to enumerate the species directly affected by the enterprise; the second is to conduct periodic inventories of minimal sample size to measure significant changes in species distribution and abundance. The indigenous and local people need to participate in all discussions of the importance of maintaining their resource, the dangers of over-exploitation, and the role of monitoring in regulating the use of the resource. Their input into the details of the monitoring process will greatly improve its effectiveness.
Monitoring should be inexpensive and easy for indigenous and local people to manage. At times, conservation concerns and interests may call for a survey of somewhat larger areas than the local people are utilizing. If that is the case, a primary concern should be who is going to pay for the survey, how it will be paid for in the future, and the value of such an effort if it is not to be kept up over time. Above all, it is essential to determine what resources local people use and consider important to conserve.
Economics of the Enterprise
With the aid of basic cash flow information, the review team was able to make a preliminary assessment of the financial viability of BCN enterprises and to elucidate BCN's general approach to monitoring an elaborate program. The team concluded that grantees need to keep enterprise accounts separate from other NGO accounts as far as is possible and require assistance in this regard. For biodiversity monitoring, they recommended a simple system of enterprise accounts that can be applied across all the projects and thus be used to compare the success record and sources of success among enterprises.
Institutional Organization and Participation
So far, indigenous and local people have not been sufficiently involved in the development of project activities to give them a stake in the outcome. Instead, the NGO often speaks for the local people and thus tends to leave them out of the process as a matter of course. In several cases-the TERI project is one-the enterprise touches only a small proportion of those gathering the resources. Attention needs to be given to how to organize the participation of indigenous and local people and develop simple systems for monitoring that participation.
Basic Concepts
Several basic concepts lie at the heart of the BCN system, in addition to the central belief that enterprises dependent on the biological resource should be used to enlist support for conservation. These concepts have to do with population density, income dynamics, macro impact, the intermediary role of the BCN, and specialization.Population Density
In general, the natural resource base of biologically diverse environments can only support low population densities. However, that means sparsely populated areas like Humla, Nepal, can take advantage of biologically based enterprises to improve the aggregate incomes of their inhabitants.
Conversely, in areas with dense populations of very poor people, any income effect of the biologically based enterprises will be lost in the general poverty. The mass of poor will overwhelm the protective efforts of the few. This is a serious problem in Royal Chitwan National Park, in the terai of Nepal. In such circumstances, the BCN effort will fail unless an attempt is also made to raise incomes more broadly. This is not to say that the BCN should be directly involved in such activities, but that the program needs to recognize the problem and to encourage other agencies to take the necessary steps to resolve it. Since such encouragement is vital to BCN interests, it must an explicit part of the network's policy mandate.
For the most part, the problem is already being taken care of in the BCN countries experiencing rapid economic development. For example, there is no serious danger that the plains people near the TERI project will overwhelm the natural resource because incomes there have risen appreciably as a result of effective agricultural development. Now, the returns to raiding the biological resource are far lower than those gained by other means. The problem is acute, however, in the few countries or regions of Asia not yet experiencing much economic growth, such as Nepal. It would be an immense and perhaps insurmountable problem if the BCN concept was introduced in Africa. In that case, the issue would have to be given explicit attention in the planning stages.
Income Dynamics
In a developing country, per capita incomes rise over time, often rapidly, owing to advances in technology and increases in real prices. BCN enterprises need to identify the means by which incomes can be increased gradually over time. One possibility is to raise productivity, although in general it will be more difficult to continually increase the productivity of biological resources gathered in a natural state than in settled agriculture. The potential contribution of improved technology in this regard should not be ignored, and the opportunity for market differentiation must be seized.
The critical point is that BCN needs to think not in static terms of a single increase in incomes, but rather in terms of how incomes can be increased continually over time-at least up to the time when employment and income opportunities in the rest of the economy will pull people completely out of poor areas. Although such a move may occur, it will probably take place well into the future, particularly if the people are somewhat marginalized by the social attitudes of majority communities. A more dynamic approach would be to address what are now largely neglected technical issues in resource development and market development, notably those connected with green markets in developed countries, where higher prices may be quite feasible.
Macro Impact
A common problem with BCN enterprises, particularly those oriented toward nontimber forest products, is that they directly employ only a small proportion of the people drawing from the natural resource base. Those enterprises should be looked upon as pilot projects for identifying large potential and for showing the way to a broader set of activities. For a macro impact, greater attention will have to be given to the gatherers themselves-a group neglected in both the Kalahan and TERI projects. It is also vital to encourage private sector activities so as to stimulate competitive marketing and processing on a far larger scale than the BCN project can directly support. At the same time, development activities could explore the potential for raising incomes in areas in which natural resource preservation is important.
The Intermediary Role of BCN
Although the BCN is considered an intermediary, its projects employ two or more intermediaries between the sources of funds and the indigenous and local people. The BCN needs to ensure that the local people are indeed organized and speaking for themselves. The report outlines specific ways in which the BCN can promote such participation. In addition, the BCN needs to carry technical assistance all the way to the local organizations of indigenous and local people. Most of the intermediaries that the BCN works with and that are essential to its purpose have little capacity to provide technical assistance in monitoring, in business management, and in the technical aspects of biological resource development.
Specialization
The BCN has developed a diverse portfolio of projects to properly test its key hypotheses. If the network is to develop further, however, it needs a mechanism for wholesaling intermediary services for large funders; otherwise it will be unable to achieve a macro impact. In addition, it must develop a base for the efficient provision of its services and must increase its technical competence. To do so, it will have to divide its own portfolio of projects into groups that will promote such efficiencies and help develop a concept on which to concentrate in the future.
Recommendations
The following recommendations are set forth in order of priority and pertain to a BCN project that appears en route to fulfilling its objectives. They should be seen as supplements to an effective operation.
- Develop simple techniques for monitoring biodiversity, enterprise profitability, and social structures of participation. This may require some additional funding in order to provide technical assistance from outside consultants for specialized aspects of monitoring. The local staff may need to be expanded in this area. The BCN also needs to persuade NGOs on the scene that local people should be helping to develop and implement systems of monitoring.
- Make sure that indigenous and local people are participating in all aspects of project activities. Local NGOs should not be confused with the indigenous and local people themselves. Those NGOs of course play a vital role in establishing the institutional structures that will involve local people. But they must remember that the structures should be designed specifically for this purpose. This is another area in which the BCN needs to have direct contact with indigenous and local peoples.
- Begin to plan for a larger enterprise impact by increasing the competitiveness of the private sector in nontimber forest products. BCN projects tend to be implemented in areas where the infrastructure is poor and thus they attract relatively few private operators. This activity will have a longer time horizon than current enterprise activities and thus would require the project to be extended.
- Be aware of the relationship between broader development efforts on the perimeter of the biological resource bases and encourage other institutions to take up appropriate action where necessary.
- Identify the broader policy issues of concern, from the rights of indigenous and local people to land tenure, and develop a plan for policy action across projects and for a general set of policy thrusts. As part of that thrust, the help of NGOs should be sought to generate action at each appropriate level of government.
- Classify projects and develop a concept of specialization that will make it possible to supervise a large portfolio of projects with the utmost efficiency.
- Seek funding from AID beyond the present grant, preferably for another five years, to enable the BCN to pursue and spread its central concept as modified by the experience of the first five years.
BCN As a Bellwether for the International Community
International support for preserving the biological resource base in developing countries is massive. Foreign assistance is already pouring vigorously in this direction. The BCN has a rare opportunity to ensure that those resources fulfill their mission: it can help indigenous and local people conceptualize projects, improve their capacity to articulate their needs, and apply the foreign resources to meeting those needs.
Despite all the limitations and inefficiencies noted in this report, the BCN offers a far more cost-effective approach to biodiversity conservation, with a much more fully developed panoply of resources and approaches, than is typical of other approaches. It stands out for the clarity of its conceptualization, breadth of its approach, and holistic nature of its philosophy. In short, it lays a strong foundation for larger efforts. The international review committee constituted for the award of the BCN grants provides the network with an extensive network of reputable advocates for its approach. The BCN should continue to build on its ongoing involvement with the committee members seeking further input and comment and obtaining outreach.
Above all, that strength lies in the BCN's primary objective: to enable local people to raise their incomes by monitoring the sustainable, economic utilization of biological natural resources. The network provides technical assistance to enterprises that pursue that objective. It mobilizes local people to protect the resource base in their own interest. It relies on national NGOs to provide the protection and support for nascent indigenous organizations. And it provides technical assistance to the monitoring operations so essential to the sustainable use of biological resources.
The foreign assistance community needs to be made aware of each of these elements of the BCN story. That will help to guide environmentally oriented foreign assistance into the appropriate channels and define appropriate levels of foreign assistance. Through the breadth of its projects, the BCN can also demonstrate the priorities for foreign assistance, the kinds of technical assistance that are currently lacking, and the need to sustain and preserve biological resources for the benefit of overall development.
The burden the BCN must carry is unquestionably a heavy one. But the value of the collective experience gained through the mass of its projects will be enormous.
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