One of the main developments in forestry practice over the last three decades has been its evolution from a practical discipline with a primary, or even exclusive, focus on management of forests for timber, to a more holistic approach recogniz- ing that forests provide a wide range of environmental and social services and that provision of these should form an objective of management. The development of concepts such as forest ecosystem management and multi-purpose forestry are symptomatic of this process. The importance of forests to people has been increas- ingly recognized, as illustrated by the widespread implementation of forest management approaches explicitly aimed at or involving local communities, such as community forestry and social forestry. The importance of actively involving local communities and other stakeholders is consistently an element of approaches to sustainable forest management.
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In a similar way, the practice of conservation has shifted from a primary focus on the conservation of individual species, to a broader approach in which the importance of meeting the needs of local people is explicitly recognized. Many conservation projects now integrate conservation actions with rural development approaches.
What has this meant for forest managers and conservation practitioners? Often, they are now expected to fulfil roles that they were not trained for. For example, many foresters who were trained primarily in practical silviculture and the prin- ciples of forest management now find themselves responsible for managing a wide range of habitats, and having to justify their management decisions to a wide range of individuals and organizations. Multi-purpose forests require multitasking managers. Similarly, many conservation professionals, who might have trained as biologists or ecologists, now find themselves spending more time dealing with people than with the habitats and species that they were trained to manage.
As a result, it is now rare for ecological techniques to be applied in a conser- vation context that does not involve some link with people. Concepts such as the ecosystem approach and sustainable forest management place great emphasis on the need to involve the public, consult stakeholders, develop partnerships with local communities, and understand the role of forests in supporting livelihoods.
These are all laudable aims, but there is no doubt that this shift in focus represents an enormous challenge to those involved in practical forest management and conservation.
Ideally, the social components of projects should be carried out by specialist professional staff who have received appropriate training and possess the required skills. The number of people working in forest conservation with a background in social science or rural development training is, however, very small. Often managers with a technical training in forestry, environmental management, or some other biophysical subject are required to extend their activities to include social elements. However, it is also worth noting that many young people entering into a career in conservation today recognize the importance of social issues and are keen to develop skills in this area to complement their biophysical training. Perhaps the new generation of conservation managers will overcome the traditional barriers between subjects and employ whichever techniques and methods seem appropriate to the task in hand, whether they be social or biophys- ical in origin. In my experience, I have seen many students take on integrated projects of this nature and do them with alacrity and success, and in my mind, this form of integration is definitely to be encouraged. On the other hand, someone trained in ecological science may find their first meeting with a social scientist extremely challenging: the world views of these schools of thought can be profoundly different.
Techniques for social science are often a crucially important part of the toolkit of practitioners involved in forest conservation. A wide variety of methods are available, and a considerable body of experience has now been accumulated regarding their application in situations relevant to forest management and sustainable use.
Widely used methods include participatory rural appraisal (PRA), rapid rural
appraisal (RRA), and the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA). Tools that are commonly used as part of these methods include:
● structured or semi-structured interviews with key informants, group interviews, workshops
● focus group discussions
● preference ranking and scoring
● mapping and modelling
● seasonal and historical diagramming, use of timelines
● direct observation, foot transects, familiarization, participation in activities
● biographies, local histories, case studies
● ranking and scoring.
Detailed description of social survey techniques is beyond the scope of this book. Some excellent guides are now available that provide an overview of the methods. Particularly recommended are those by Chambers (1992, 2002), Holland and Campbell (2005), McCracken et al. (1988), Pretty et al. (1995), and Theis and Grady (1991). An example of how these methods can be applied in practice, and integrated with biophysical research methods, is provided by the CEPFOR Project (Box 1.3).
One approach that has proved particularly valuable for understanding the complex issues surrounding the role of forests in rural development (see Box 1.3) is the sustainable rural livelihoods framework (Ashley and Carney 1999, Carney 2002). This approach views the livelihoods of people as depending on the avail- ability of certain assets, namely:
● Natural capital.This includes the natural resource stocks (forest resources) from which products and services useful for livelihoods are derived.
● Physical capital.This comprises the basic infrastructure and producer goods needed to support livelihoods (shelter and buildings; tools and equipment used for farming or forest management; transportation, energy, and commu- nications; etc.).
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Box 1.3 Example of an integrated forest conservation and development research programme: the CEPFOR Project.
CEPFOR was an international collaborative research project that examined the commercialization of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) in Mexico and Bolivia (Marshall et al. 2006). NTFPs have recently been the focus of a great deal of inter- est among forest conservation and development organizations, as they seem to offer a ‘win–win’ solution by enabling local communities to benefit financially from the sale of forest products, thereby increasing the economic value of forests and acting as an incentive for their conservation. However, in practice attempts at commercializing NTFPs have often failed to deliver the expected benefits. The CEPFOR Project was designed to find out why.
The commercial development of forest resources is a complex issue. Clearly, suc- cess has a lot to do with economics: there must be demand for the product and a market within easy reach. There are many social factors that can also influence suc- cess, such as the way a community is organized and how it collects, processes, and trades the product. Ecologically, the main issue is how the forest resource is man- aged and whether extraction of the product is sustainable. To address these different issues, CEPFOR employed a multidisciplinary team of specialists, with expertise in economics, social science, and forest ecology. Social scientists employed a variety of participatory methods, including structured and semi-structured interviews, group interviews, workshops, ranking and scoring, and development of narratives based on personal experience. Interviews were used to collect much of the economic information, which was analysed by using traditional econometric approaches.
One of the biggest challenges to an interdisciplinary project such as this is how to integrate the different types of data that are generated, including both quanti- tative and qualitative information. Unlike some purely social research projects, CEPFOR explicitly aimed to test a series of hypotheses identified at the outset of the project on the basis of a thorough literature review, and this provided a valu- able focus for analysing the many different forms of data collected. In addition, CEPFOR found that the SLA provided a very valuable analytical framework, which successfully enabled research findings to be integrated and related directly to the livelihoods of poor people. Bayesian approaches were also used to integrate the research results, and to present them in the form of a decision-support tool, designed to support practical decision-making (Marshall et al. 2006).
Fig. 1.3 Interviewing mushroom collectors in Cuajimoloyas, Mexico. An example of one of the social survey techniques used in the CEPFOR project investigating the use of non-timber forest products by local communities.
(Photo by Elaine Marshall.)
● Human capital.This includes the skills, knowledge, ability to work, and health that people need to pursue different livelihood strategies and achieve their objectives.
● Financial capital.This includes the financial resources that people use to achieve their livelihood objectives, including savings in various forms, access to credit, earnings, remittances, and any debt burdens.
● Social capital.This refers to the social resources that people draw upon to help meet their livelihood objectives, including networks and connections between people, memberships; relationships of trust; and the rules, norms, and sanctions associated with different institutions.
The ‘livelihoods framework’ concept considers the impact of different environ- mental, socio-economic and political factors on the availability of these different assets that are required for living. A livelihood is considered sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its assets into the future, while not undermining the natural resource base (Chambers and Conway 1992). The ways in which people combine and use their assets to achieve their goals are referred to as their livelihood strategies, which might include harvesting particular forest products (Box 1.3). The livelihoods framework therefore provides a useful way of considering how different environmental, socio-economic, and political factors might affect the livelihoods of people, and their livelihood strat- egies, by influencing the availability of different assets. Further details of this approach are available at 具www.livelihoods.org/典.
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