One of the elements of both discussions that stood out was the overall agreement on core themes and challenges, guidelines and principles of CNRM practise, and recommendations for future action. This is however not to say that there wasn’t debate and different opinions voiced and strongly held, but underpinning the debate there was a strong sense of agreement around central lessons learned and challenges faced. Below is a summary of these areas of agreement. They have been kept brief and in point form, but hopefully framed so that they provide the casual reader with a good sense of the substance of the discussion. Anyone wanting more detail and more of a sense of the areas of debate can refer to the full contributions which are found in chapter 5.
There were some key themes and challenges that emerged several times during both discussions:
CNRM is a significant realm of development practise with years of experience and many skilled practitioners to draw on;
CNRM has a stronger tradition of doing than theorising, even though the ‘doing’ is conducted in the context of widely shared common principles and guidelines;
In spite of the first two points CNRM is not as central to the development practise and planning by many actors as it should be, and it is often added on to initiatives as an after thought and implemented by people without adequate understanding or training;
There is a need to look for ways to bring together the lessons and experiences of years of CNRM work and to find ways to share this learning;
Central to the entire discussion was a debate around the role that theory should play in CNRM. Most felt that theory had an important role to play but that time should not be wasted looking for a single unifying theoretical approach to communication practise. Communication was linked to specific contexts and realities and required flexible approaches that emphasise participation and control by the groups participating in the project or initiative. A number of people submitted guidelines and principles which they used as a framework for CNRM which allowed flexibility but also provided a structure to capture lessons learned from previous experience[5]. These are skeletal as presented but a number of participants suggested they provide a good basis for significant further discussion:
Don Richardson:
Start communicating, early in the life of a project or programme, with all the parties involved.
All the activities under the consultation and communication process should:
contribute to the social, environmental, and financial sustainability of the initiative,
be flexible and adapt to local needs and conditions,
promote the participation of the stakeholders throughout the life of the initiative, and
be conducted in a transparent and open manner.
Provide full information promptly to encourage fair and informed decision.
Support consultation to the maximum by responding to information requests fully and quickly.
Provide opportunities for people to inform each other within the context of the initiative, and to offer advice and guidance to the initiative.
Help in identifying and understanding the diversity of perspectives, values, and interest.
Strive to work with stakeholders to identify how best the consultation and communication process can help to guide the flow of discussion.
Develop areas of common ground, understand where differences exists, and the underlying reasons for them.
Establish clear and realistic timetables for facilitating discussion, and arriving at decisions.
Be sensitive to the limited resources available to people and groups, and provide tools and resources for building stakeholder capacity to participate where feasible.
Provide information in plain language.
Give practical help to people and groups to take part with particular attention to equal opportunity.
Provide frequent feedback.
Stimulate constructive exchange of views.
Frequently monitor and evaluate the process.
Share with stakeholders the responsibility for effective consultation and communication.
Ketline Adodo:
Striking the responsive chord
Participation towards ownership
Sharing instead of transferring knowledge/information
Two-way communication
Ricardo Ramirez:
Offer concrete solutions and use realistic technologies
Move forward at the pace of the community
Learn from mistakes
Localize globalised communication
Work with a gender perspective
Let people speak with their own voice
Generate new knowledge and promote local content
Address info costs: who pays?
Ensure equitable access
Strengthen existing policies and systems
Build capacity
Build knowledge partnerships
Guy Bessette:
The key word is participation and this must take place at the moment of project identification not the moment of implementation of activities.
Horizontal communication needs to be facilitated within the communities in which people are working.
Work with specific community groups instead of only approaching representatives of the community as a whole.
Involve each group in the identification of priorities and the potential solutions they are willing to experiment with.
Plan communication with the participating community groups.
Accompany this process with a communication plan involving other stakeholders (NGOs, other villages, timber companies...) and local or national authorities.
Alfonso Gumucio:
Language and cultural pertinence, respect for diversity,
Community ownership,
Local content, rather than imposed agendas,
Appropriate technology, better to "appropriate" by communities (socially, technically, economically),
Convergence and networking,
Processes, rather than products,
Strategic thinking, not patches,
Being accountable to the community, not to donors,
Dialogue and debate, rather than "dissemination",
Communication is not equal to media,
Communication is not the same thing as "communications"
The Main Discussion generated a number of ideas focused on moving the field of CNRM forward. The Evaluation Discussion picked up on the themes and ideas identified to draw conclusions for future action. The list below integrates perspectives and recommendations from both discussions and breaks them into several key categories.
Systematization of CNRM approaches:
The need for greater systematization of guidelines, and fundamental principles for CNRM that will give it both flexibility and help form a methodological framework;
There is need for more but pragmatic theoretical work to be done.
Collecting and making accessible key CNRM documents and tools such as case studies, evaluations, policy papers, and training materials.
The need to support the work of practitioners through the collection of high quality and well organized information on CNRM (case studies, evaluations, programme experiences etc) that is easily accessed, shared and discussed;
The need to better entrench CNRM in development practise by providing hard evidence of success in formats accessible to policy and decision makers and by providing tools for professional training and skill development for CNRM practitioners;
Improving communication between people working in CNRM at all levels and across areas of focus.
The need to develop information flow and sharing between local and field CNRM practitioners and policy makers and academic and development institutions and to make sure this is a dialectic communication not one way, up/down or rhetorical;
The need to make information useable and accessible to CNRM practitioners, advocates and students;
The need to ensure face-to-face contact and exposure to working programmes and people as well as on-line forms of communication.
Mechanisms need to be created for those working in CNRM to share experiences, evaluate trends and new initiatives, discuss critical issues and advocate for CNRM to play a more central role in NRM initiatives.
Ensuring that more skilled CNRM practitioners are trained.
Having more trained CNRM practitioners will help to better plan and implement NRM programmes that embrace the lessons and the principles and guidelines that are the result of years of experience;
More theoretical training amongst CNRM practitioners;
Recommendations for action.
Establish an information sharing mechanism that enables institutions and individuals to access resources focused on CNRM methods, approaches, and field experiences so as to improve the effectiveness and success of their own work.
Create a repository of case studies, research and evaluation documents, and strategic thinking and policy papers which contributes to building a widely accessible resource base on CNRM for practitioners, policy makers, academics, funders, and community leaders.
Identify existing human resources and field experiences and facilitate cooperation and communication among them.
Seek to build capacity at national and international levels by encouraging the exchange of information and the development of networks.
Raise the profile of local appropriation of communication for development initiatives and build local capacity through increased access to training.
Highlight and encourage discussion and debate on policy in relation to NRM.
Increase the capacity of individuals and institutions to share experiences, materials, tools, methods, and other key components of successful CNRM.
The following general conclusions can be drawn from the e-form on CNRM.
The field of CNRM has a strong history and experience that is beginning to be captured and framed through the practical use of principles and guidelines.
It does need to systematise the lessons learned through decades of CNRM practise through flexible frameworks that capture the lessons and experience.
There is a body of CNRM knowledge that is not being shared as widely as it should and this is leading to too few skilled CNRM practitioners, too little understanding of the importance of CNRM in development planning and implementation and too many valuable lessons being lost.
Mechanisms for linking and easily accessing important CNRM resources and lessons need to be developed.
More and ongoing communication among those involved in CNRM needs to be encouraged and mechanisms to facilitate such communication need to be strengthened or where necessary and appropriate, established.
More training and skills development needs to be offered for CNRM practitioners and focus has to be placed on training a new generation of CNRM practitioners who can take the field forward with a strong understanding of what’s already been accomplished.
Communication strategies to convince policy makers, funders, and development agency leaders of the contribution that CNRM can make to successful development initiatives need to be a central aspect of any concerted attempt to move the field of CNRM forward.
Finally, processes like this E-forum are important tools to bring practitioners together to discuss the issues they face, to share experiences and perspectives, and to strategise. We need more of them but they need to be well moderated, planned and focused on strategic issues for the work at the field level.
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[5] Other sources for such
lists can be found at: |
