Community-based forest enterprises

Mongolia: Community-based Conservation of Biological Diversity in the Mountain Landscapes of Mongolia’s Altai Sayan Eco-region-ASP

Main objectif of the project

The five-year Project Community-based Conservation of Biological Diversity in the Mountain Landscapes of Mongolia’s Altai Sayan Eco-region-ASP (PIMS 1929) aims to ensure the long-term conservation of the biodiversity of Mongolia’s Altai-Sayan region by mitigating threats and encourage sustainable resource use practices by local communities. The project seeks to do this by:

• integrating biodiversity conservation objectives into sustainable natural resource use policy, programs, and practice; and
• linking traditional protected area management to the landscape around each area, including cross-border cooperation.

By the end of the project, stakeholders will apply community-based management and conservation strategies that empower herder communities to resolve forest and grassland management problems and improve livelihoods through partnerships with Government and NGOs.

Immediate objectives

• To integrate biodiversity conservation objectives into productive sector institutions and policies (GEF Financed & Co-financed).

• To strengthen “traditional” protected area-based approaches by expanding their scope to include the landscape around them.

• To successfully demonstrate how to integrate biodiversity conservation into resource management and economic development practice & Policy. (GEF Financed & Co-financed)

• To implement a project that learns from it’s successes and failures and shares these lessons and replicates best practices effectively among it’s own stakeholders and with others

Project implementation

This project is implemented by UNDP; FAO collaborated with the project in training and implement the MA&D methodology in order to support the development of small forest-based enterprises.

The main project office is in Ulaanbaatar and there are 4 provincial offices in Khovd, Bayan-Olgii and Uvs (Western aimag) and in Khovsgol Aimag (North Central).

MA&D methodology

MA&D training was implemented during 2006 and 2007. Main outcomes were:

• A first training workshop was conducted in April 2006 on capacity building of the project’s staff (20 participants: the Training and Community Development Officer, the 4 Community Empowerment and Development Officers, the 17 social mobilizers from the 4 projects’s aimags), and partners’ representatives (from two local NGOs, one national NGO and one UNDP project called “Enterprise Mongolia”), to assist herders and rural community members to establish viable micro or small enterprises that contribute to improve their livelihoods and create incentives for biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of natural resources.
• From May 2006 to August 2006, the participants implemented the preliminary and first phases of MA&D.
• Implementation of the phase 2 and 3 of the MA&D during second half 2006 and beginning 2007. The main purpose was to give the opportunity to trainers to facilitate the workshop on bridging phase 2 and 3 with actual interest groups’ members. For instance, the main points and issues that rose during the training of phase 3 concepts, methods and tools are the following:
• The importance of using a simple language that herders can understand and the adequate understanding and use of project objectives for products selection.
• SMs understood the importance for future entrepreneur to prepare themselves their Enterprise Development Plan (EDP).
• Only EDP that contemplate the 4 areas of enterprise development for natural products will be eligible for support: market/economical, social/institutional, environmental and technological.
• Retention of information by few individuals of the interest groups would deprive other members to prepare sound well documented EDP and at the same time create unfair leadership of these few.
• Understanding that the EDP will serve as a basis of the strategy and monitoring tool for providing adapted support to small entrepreneurs.

The MA&D approach shows that rehabilitation of degraded environment and conservation of biodiversity can hardly been achieved without the involvement of the local population who lives in and depends on the resources of these areas. It also emphasizes the local population in ecologically threatened areas will not contribute to the conservation of the resources in the long run unless they benefit from the conservation effort, especially through raising income from the managed resources.

Follow up and the new project development for Mongolia

A new FAO project has started in 2007 in Mongolia: Capacity Building and Institutional Development for Participatory Natural Resources Management and Conservation in Forest Areas of Mongolia. This project responds to a direct request from the Ministry of Nature and Environment of Mongolia to support the Government’s effort to involve the local population in the sustainable management of Mongolian’s forests.

The problem to be addressed is to stop and reverse the ongoing degradation of the forests of Mongolia and to contribute to poverty alleviation through the development of a model for local level forest ecosystem management at soum level which can be replicated to other sites in the forested aimags of Mongolia. To that effect the project will deal with institutional, social, economic, financial, scientific and technical aspects of this complex endeavour.

The focus of the project will be both at the local and national levels. The local level is fundamental for the development of participatory forestry and the national level is essential for the improvement of the institutional and legislative framework and the creation of an enabling context for participatory forestry in the country. The project will build upon the experience acquired by FAO and other partners in Mongolia and will build on the positive experiences of the MA&D approach in the country.

Please contact Patrick Evans for more information on this project: patrick.evans@fao.org.

For more information please contact:
Sophie Grouwels: sophie.grouwels@fao.org

Forestry Policy Service (FOEP) Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy Phone: +39 06 57055299
Fax: +39 06 57055514