19 May 2006
Involving everyone in land use planning
Posted by Christy, forest campaigner at the GFRS
Education is hard to come by in Lake Murray. The villages are isolated and schooling costs money that most families don’t have, so a lot of people (girls, especially) never learn to read or write, or to speak Pidgin or English. So how do you get a largely illiterate community, one whose members don’t even all speak a common language, to produce something like a land use plan for forestry?
Back home in Canada, land use planning is a complicated and technical process that’s engaged in mainly by specialists. Indigenous communities are consulted somewhat, but because the process requires such a high level of expertise, they often hire outside consultants to usher them through.
As a result, community members - most of whom don’t have university educations - quickly lose the ability to understand and therefore participate in what’s going on. Thus, they become frustrated and disenfranchised.
The land use planning done in Lake Murray for the eco-forestry project has been completely different. Here, an NGO called Barefoot worked with each clan to figure out what skills and resources they had, and what opportunities they wanted. They then moved into a planning process that not only didn’t require specific expertise, it didn’t require basic literacy.
Here’s how it worked: a rough outline of the territory was drawn in the dirt, with everyone gathered around. Different types of leaves and sticks were presented, each signifying a different category of use. For example:
- Banana leaf = conservation area
- Mango leaf = hunting ground
- Twig = sacred site
- Red nut = eco-forestry harvesting area
The people looked at the map, placed the different markers, then discussed it all and moved things around until everyone was happy with the overall picture. Then Barefoot drew the result on a map, again using leaves and twigs as symbolic markers, and that map became the clan’s official land use plan. The result is a plan that the whole community contributed to, understood, and supports, and a plan that the whole community will work to realise.
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