BCN Results Dissemination South Asia Workshop (Dec. 22-23, 1998) New Delhi, India

The workshop was organized to share with BCN's grantees and the larger conservation and development community in India and Nepal the results obtained to date, on both the conservation impacts of the projects and the effectiveness of the enterprise based approach to achieving conservation goals. Over 75 people representing the Governments of India and Nepal, NGOs, Project Partners, Funding Agencies, Research Institutes and Universities, and the Media attended the workshop.

The first day's morning session included a brief introduction to BCN, and detailed presentations by the five grantees with fairly active participation from the audience probing for general principles on sustainability, replicability, and scale.

The afternoon session began with a lengthy presentation ["What are we learning?"] on BCN's analytical approach and results obtained to date. The focus was not just on South Asia, but covered the entire BCN portfolio. The Conservation Impact Map evoked much interest. The key lessons being learned include:

• Community-based enterprise projects face many challenges
  
• Management is a critical limiting resource
  
• Marketing is key to enterprise success
  
• Leap-frogging an existing market structure carries rewards and risks
  
• The more "successful" enterprises build on traditional skills and knowledge
  
• "Mainstream" the enterprise by involving local industry participants
  
• Enterprise-based approaches are at best part of the solution, and
  
• There is a critical need for a site-specific adaptive management approach

Several issues and concerns, which have arisen during the course of the projects, were also noted. These include operationalizing sustainability, economic incentives to further conservation, and costs of monitoring. There were also several design and implementation challenges to effective project implementation, including 'local community', the development strategy to be adopted in the context of a three to four year project cycle, and the role of local knowledge vis-a vis scientific knowledge. The presentation concluded with the Enabling Principles for effective community-based action:

Enabling Community Action

• Recognition of rights over the resources
  
• Defining the community groups' responsibilities
  
• Linking rights and responsibilities, and
  
• Developing market mechanisms for community benefits

Enhancing Community Capacity

• Improving the organizing capability of communities
  
• Promoting equitable participation of the poor and marginal sectors, and
  
• Developing the local capacity to manage conflicts

Strengthening Field Implementation

• Embracing the elements of "adaptive management"
  
• Providing hands-on training with subsequent monitoring of performance, and
  
• Providing incentives for better performance

Improving the Implementation process

• Assessing resource availability
  
• Identifying the long-term threats to the resources
  
• Building community-awareness about resource degradation
  
• Developing resource management plans
  
• Developing a demand-driven plan of investment, and
  
• Integrating monitoring with the implementation activities.

Some of the key questions that were raised by the audience pertained to project selection criteria, performance measures, and sustainability assessments.

This was followed by presentations by three well-respected development practitioners. Ashok Khosla, President of Development Alternatives (Enterprises and Innovation at the Grassroots) spoke about the importance of and the factors involved in the scaling up of natural resource-based enterprises to make a dent on rural poverty.

Darshan Shankar, President of the Foundation for the Revitalization of Local Health Traditions spoke on the need for strengthening local stakeholdership as a means of conserving biodiversity.

Kanchan Chopra, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University, spoke about valuation methodology, and its importance in informed decision making.

A number of enterprise products from our grantees were on display as well as GIS maps, brochures, and publications. The BCN Project Map, Conservation Impact Map, Enterprise Analysis posters, Value-Added Chain posters, and a number of BCN/BSP publications rounded off the Display section. Several copies of the publications were also handed out to participants.

The Second Day provided a more informal setting for a candid discussion of the challenges and how the projects coped with them, and lessons for the future. The gist of what they said:
BR Hills: Need for a greater focus on participatory resource management, as opposed to scientific biological monitoring (Dr. Sudarshan)
Sikkim: An analysis of the different stakeholders needs to be done in the Planning phase (Nandita Jain)
Garhwal: Monitoring was initially done as a requirement of the project, but the partners now recognize it as very relevant and essential to the project (Hanumant Rawat)
Humla: The community which is illiterate needs to be educated, and secondly quality control of products marketed is absolutely essential (Tsewang Lama).
Chitwan: Buffer zone bye-laws, providing for 50% of the tourism related fees are now being recycled through the village development committees.

Other suggestions:

Some of the partners would like to see the South Asia BCN-Partner network continue and wondered aloud whether BCN could put some funds to set it up - for example through a newsletter. Sustaining the interest can be only on the basis of common objectives. Any concrete suggestion from the group will be considered.

Another suggestion was to have the 5 Stories from the Field translated into Hindi, Nepali and Kannada for dissemination to community members and others. A budget will be worked out, along with partner contributions in cash or kind before being submitted to BCN.

WHY BIODIVERSITY   FIELD STORIES   PARTICIPATE   RESULTS   MARKETSPACE ABOUT THE NETWORK   WHAT'S NEW   LEARNING MATERIALS   SEARCH   LINKS   SITE MAP   HOME