Toolbox structure and the policy modules

The overall structure of the Toolbox is shown in Figure 1. There are two major routes into the Toolbox. In the first, "Evaluation of the Impact of Livestock Management Systems on the Environment" the user initially identifies the livestock production system with which he or she is most concerned. The three main systems, grazing, mixed crop-livestock and industrial, are defined with explanatory text and further divided, by climatic and tenurial categories in the case of grazing, by degree of integration in the case of mixed farming, and by type of activity in the case of industrial systems. This gives a total of 23 sub-systems. Each sub-system is described, and the user is directed to a "Matrix of Environmental Risks", presenting the potential environmental impacts of each system, and their underlying factors (see Figure 2 for an example). Clicking on an underlying factor leads to a descriptive page, which normally provides three further options:

• Summaries of environmental assessment indicators to determine the nature of impacts and whether the impacts are in fact taking place, based on the Pressure-State-Response framework,

• Technology options, and

• Policy/institutional options, for enhancing positive or mitigating negative effects of livestock on the natural resource base.

Clicking on the third option leads, in most cases, to an overview of policy pressures and options leading to a set of linked pages; pressures being the policies that have contributed to an impact, and options policies for controlling it. For example, the page on "Overgrazing: Policy Pressures and Options" (http://www.fao.org/lead/toolbox/Grazing/PolPress.htm)^[5] under the arid and semi-arid communal grazing systems links to pages on the following policy pressures:

• inappropriate land tenure policies,

• subsidies on feed as drought relief,

• subsidies for dryland cropping

• exchange rate and import/export policies

• lack of encouragement of banking institutions and the following policy options

• strengthening local natural resource management

• promoting conflict resolution mechanisms

• curtailing direct control of stocking rates

• introducing well-designed grazing fee regimes

• drought management policies

• planning of water point provision

• human service delivery to mobile pastoralists

• zoning of rangelands

• removing subsidies on feed

• removing subsidies for dryland cropping

• create price incentives for offtake and for stratification

• establishment of pastoral banking systems

• encouragement of non-pastoral employment

Each policy pressure page typically comprises an account of the policy in non-technical language, research/appraisal methods for investigating it, links to options for reversing or counteracting it, and a few key references. Each policy option page typically comprises an account of the policy, links to related options, research/appraisal methods, and key references. The maximum length of a single page is around 500 words, and many are considerably shorter. Key references tend to be publications easily available in developing countries, rather than scholarly articles, and several are links to documents on the Web sites of other organisations. There are numerous cross-links between the pages, to policy pages associated with other impacts, as well as to environmental and technology pages.

The second route into the toolbox is entitled "Identification of Appropriate Technology and Policy/Institutional Development Options". If choosing to review policy options, the user goes to a brief overview of environmental policy, generically and for each main system. He or she can then access inventories of all policy options in the Toolbox, by system, and by type of policy: motivation, information and educational instruments; financial instruments; property-rights instruments; regulatory instruments; voluntary instruments; institutional instruments^[6].

In addition, through the Toolbox structure diagram that is permanently accessible through a sidebar, the user can access an inventory of all policy options arranged alphabetically. A Glossary defines several terms used in the policy pages, and provides substantive detail, including further references, on some methods used to analyse policies and their impacts (such as PRA, RAAKS and Stakeholder Analysis). Finally a search engine generates a list of all pages in the Toolbox containing a given keyword or phrase.