Lessons learned

Topic:	Citizen Participation in Lempira Sur
Project number:	GCP /HON/021/NET and GCP /HON/028/NET
Background document providing these lessons learned:	Lindemann, T. 2005. Lessons learnt in the field of decentralization and local government development in rural areas of Latin America (available at http://www.fao.org/sd/dim_in2/in2_050501_en.htm ) Proyecto Lempira Sur. 2004. Documento de Campo 01. Honduras, Exmedia FAO, SAG, Gobierno de Holanda. 2002. Socializando la Esperanza, Experiencias de participación ciudadana en el Sur de Lempira. Honduras, Litografía López S. de R.L.
FAO Resource Persons:	Lindemann, Tomás (SDAR); Cherret, Ian (RLCS)
FAO Division:	SDAR; RLCS
Applied Participatory Approaches:	Participatory diagnosis workshops Participatory Rural Appraisal Promotion of interest groups Creation of Community Development Committees (CODECO) Constitutional tools such as plebiscite, referendum, etc.

 

Project Description:

The Lempira Sur Programme was established at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, to prevent a drought from causing a severe famine. The programme was implemented by the Government of Honduras with technical support from FAO and financial resources from the Netherlands over a period of more than 10 years starting in 1990 and ending in 2004.

The first priority of the project was initially food security. The premise for achieving food security was that given the majority of the population were subsistence farmers it was necessary to ensure greater stability of local food production systems. Traditionally, local staple foods were produced on the hills of the Department, using slopes with degrees of inclination that averaged more than 30%. Food was produced through slash and burn agriculture. This system of migratory agriculture entered into crisis in the seventies and eighties and the responses at that time tended to make the situation worse.

Slash and burn agriculture is a legacy from pre-colonial times and has strong cultural value. In fact, slash and burn agriculture used to be a very sustainable agricultural practice as long as people could migrate freely after each crop. However some key factors have curtailed its sustainability, namely:

The first realization was that the crisis could only be solved with food which was produced locally. The second was that the impact of the drought could have been minimized had the farmers adopted more sustainable production practices. It was thus concluded that the project would promote the adoption, on the widest possible scale, of sustainable agriculture practices that would facilitate the retention of rainfall on the land.

The fact that the project was structured with the aim of responding to a crisis that had a disruptive impact on all social groups helped bridge the gap between the better-off and the marginalized, thus creating the conditions for alliances between both with the common objective of jointly addressing the crisis.

As the project entered the communities it discovered that the traditional community structure of the patronato (board of management) was very weak or had collapsed totally. The initial step was the holding of participatory diagnosis workshops with the community and the subsequent promotion of interest groups, both economic and social, in response to the issues and priorities identified in the process. As these groups consolidated, the need for a mechanism to articulate their interests at a higher level arose as well as the idea of creating a “Community Development Committee” (CODECO in Spanish) arose. Patronatos, where they existed, were not seen to be a sufficient mechanism as they tended to focus on social issues (construction of a chapel or a school) while there were now a much wider variety of organizations in the community, including various economic ones. In other words, the patronato was not seen as representative of all the development interests of the community, and a more embracing structure was called for. This inclusive strategy opened participation to a population larger than just the selected few belonging to the local elite. Once these commissions had become operational and worked at full swing in addressing problems related to the communities needs, it became obvious that this structure had the advantage of connecting the rural family upward with higher levels of decision-making. Such committees have the capacity to impose practices that improve the management of natural resources. In the case of Lempira Sur, Communal Development Committees were at the heart of the project’s success in eliminating the use of fire in agriculture. The CODECOs also played an essential role in negotiating better uses for upstream water sources by putting pressure to close off springs and water catchment areas from cattle, thus beginning a process of vegetation recovery and hence water supplies.

Farmer to farmer transfer of lessons on the management of natural resources in the framework of the CODECO also plays a crucial role in the improved management of fragile slopes. The Lempira Sur project chose a demand as opposed to a supply driven approach to technology transfer. That meant analysing in the field with the farmers their crop production problems and experimenting with them possible alternatives. The project professionals looked at the responses that local farmers had developed to their problems, and the project and the farmers together developed a systems response which is now known as the Quesungual Agro-forestry system, after the community where the components of the new system were first validated. This system incorporates various conservation agriculture techniques with the added component of dispersed bushes and trees. The results have been so positive that CIAT has raised US$800,000 from the CGIAR to validate and reproduce the system within the region.

 

Using constitutional tools for promoting participation

The project promoted the use of such constitutional tools as the plebiscite, the referendum, etc. when communities needed to resolve confrontational issues. For instance, when the powerful and wealthy cattle producers of one Municipality opposed the idea of prohibiting the use of fire in agriculture and cattle ranching, the mayor, with support from the CODEM decided to hold a municipality-wide referendum, the result of which would become Municipal law. The major land owner and traditional cacique of the Municipality was convinced that he could manipulate the local population to vote in favour of allowing the use of fire in agriculture and cattle ranching so it was agreed to hold the referendum and all promised to respect its outcome. The mayor and the Municipal Environment Committee with the support of the local priest and the not so high profile of the son of the traditional cacique rallied the population in favour of the local ordinance banning the use of fire while the cacique rallied his supporters with financial incentives. The plebiscite was won by a majority of over 75%., and the power of the cacique was broken (The same cacique had driven out his rival at gun point five years before and had deliberately opposed the project to such an extent that it had had to set up its office in a village outside the Municipality At that time it was the most run down and deforested community in the region but after the plebiscite the change was physical - houses long abandoned were repaired and painted - as a new civic pride took hold).

 

Key lessons

 

Making change happen and getting it right is complex and crucial for project success

Projects such as Lempira Sur require and entail significant changes to have lasting impacts. However, this also causes severe resistance from different quarters. The factors that bring about change are therefore a key ingredient for project success. In the Lempira Sur case, those change factors were:

 

The municipal chain is best positioned to link poor rural producers and their families with higher decision-making levels

It is broadly recognized that the closer the institutions are located with respect to their users, the more effective they will be. This common knowledge is known in technical jargon as the principle of subsidiarity ( The principle of subsidiarity basically consists in the idea that problems should be solved at the level where they arise and should only be elevated to subsequent levels as a function of the complexity they carry). In the Latin American context, as well as in many others, the institutions that are closest to civil society are the municipalities. However, whereas on the one hand municipalities are too small to reach directly into policy decisions at central government level, on the other hand they are too big to reach all families, especially those residing in remote rural areas. For this reason, a chain needs to be built in order to connect the rural producers and their families with the communal (representational) institutions of their villages and through them into municipal decision-making processes and further up-the-line with regional inter-municipal associations, and subsequently with national associations of municipalities which will then be empowered to establish a dialogue among equals with central government decision-making bodies.

 

The connection between local institutional capacity building, food security and natural resources management begins at the family parcel

More often than not, natural resources are the main source of cash income for rural families (when not the main source of food in the same poor communities who live in or around forests, especially). Given the scarcity of financial resources that municipalities usually receive from central governments, municipalities are increasingly relying on locally-raised taxes. However, the capacity of local populations to financially contribute to the municipal tax base depends greatly on their use of natural resources as well as income obtained from alternative (off-farm) ¨economic¨ activities. These resources seldom suffice to fulfil their livelihoods requirements. This is probably the greatest hurdle to the development of rural municipal life.

 

Watershed management requires governance structures that go beyond the political territorial division

Watersheds frequently cross administrative boundaries and even national frontiers. Historically Indigenous societies depended on these ecosystems for their economic and social organization. During the Colonial and post colonial periods settlers were generally ignorant of these systems and their relationships importing their land use models from their countries of origin and pushing the Indigenous population into the marginal areas. This has left an inheritance of a lack of vision of the integrality of watersheds amongst settlers as the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) exercises carried out with facilitators from an FAO project, with rural producers settled along the Río Grande in Northern Argentina discovered. There was no understanding of the connection between the origin of the watershed in the Bolivian Plateau (Altiplano) and the way the river behaves down-stream. Due to this lack of awareness, rather than addressing the real issue, the settlers tend to get into quarrels with their immediate up-stream neighbours blaming them for scarce water supply rather than jointly addressing the real problem. In Indigenous communities there is in general a greater environmental awareness but a sense of hopelessness about people’s capacity to do anything about the situation as recent PRAs in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras have discovered.

 

Risk is best managed by the municipal chain

When Hurricane Mitch hit Central America, The Lempira Sur Programme had just begun its second operating phase, sixth year of full implementation, it was the not just the limited impact of the hurricane on the project area that brought the region into national focus but also the fact that local communities, through the Municipal authorities, organised food aid for the victims of the hurricane. South Lempira had come through the El Niño drought and hurricane MITCH floods with a grain surplus. The government and donor community sat up and took note and as a result a series of requests for assistance were made to the FAO, amongst which Norway, the Netherlands and the European Community, for assistance in extending the Lempira experience to other regions and projects in the country.

Towards the end of the Netherlands funded post MITCH emergency project, an evaluation mission reviewed the lessons learnt (Revisión ex-post de la articulación entre levantamiento de la demanda y formulación de programas en el proyecto GCP/HON/024/NET “Apoyo a iniciativas locales de reconstrucción y Transformación Rural” by Tomás Lindemann, Elías Suazo and Ian Cherrett; December 2002). One key conclusion of the mission was that, where social capital was in place, communities were well positioned to respond to the crisis, both during the emergency post-disaster moments and in the rehabilitation phase. In Lempira, the construction of social capital had been part of the Lempira Sur project strategy. What would have happened in Lempira if 2,000mms of rain had fallen in two-three days instead of 800 is another guess but unlike other regions with a similar rainfall this extreme weather event had little impact; this can in part be attributed to:

In the case of Lempira, the emphasis was on water management in the soil and that proved just as effective for drought as for flood. This is highly relevant in such ecosystems as drought tends to be broken by floods as occurred this time.

 

Decentralization processes require strong (well founded) institutions at sub-national level.

Transferring responsibilities down the line to local level authorities requires having previously built the political, the administrative and the financial capacities of the municipal structure.