CGIAR Systemwide Program on
Collective Action and Property Rights
Several major global and local dynamics, such as climate change, trends in global economy, and demographic shifts, are affecting the livelihoods of the poor in the developing world. These and other changes present new challenges to resource-dependent communities. In 2008 CAPRi became involved in several initiatives to explore the effects of climate change on the rights to resources of the poor. The topic of Securing Access to Resources fits with most of CAPRi’s core themes and explores the effects of other challenges besides climate change on the livelihoods of the poor.
The objective of this research is to develop policy-relevant findings on the threats that the poor face in accessing resources vital for their livelihoods and the approaches they currently use or can potentially use to secure access to these resources based on the institutions of collective action and property rights. Such research on threats and resolution mechanisms would show how the institutions of collective action and property rights can be used to deal with current challenges experienced by the resource-dependent communities and provide alternative policy approaches to deal with these challenges. Through a competitive selection process, four grants were awarded:
Bioversity International
Payment for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services (PACS) and Implications for Collective Action and Property Rights
Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
Biofuels Development, Local Resource Rights, and Governance in Africa and Asia
International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)
Securing Women’s Access to Livestock Assets and Income in Kenya and Mozambique
WorldFish Center
Building Resilience of Community Fisheries in the Tonle Sap Lake: Collective Action and the Capacity to Manage Resource Competition
Payment for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services (PACS) and Implications for Collective Action and Property Rights
Bolivia, Peru
Bioversity International
Contact: Adam Drucker (a.drucker[at]cgiar.org)
Collaborators
Centro de Investigación de Recursos Naturales y Medio Ambiente (Peru)
Fundación Promoción e Investigación de Productos Andinos (Bolivia)
Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge UK
Project objectives
The project aims to assess the degree to which the innovative concept of PACS can draw upon, support and complement local practices, rules and institutions of collective action and property rights that are included in farmer systems for managing and using agrobiodiversity.
Project description
Agrobiodiversity conservation and use provides a mixture of private benefits to the farmer, together with local, national and global level public benefits. It is this impure public good nature that distinguishes plant and livestock genetic resources from many other natural resources and has led many poor farming communities to use institutions of collective action to manage them. Furthermore, it is hypothesised that the loss of agrobiodiversity from traditional production systems can be associated with the erosion of such institutions of collective action, and a widening gap between private and social incentives.
The innovative concept of payment for agrobiodiversity conservation services (PACS) may be seen as a means for aligning private and social incentives in order to manage the public good characteristic of agrobiodiversity in a decentralized way. PACS schemes are likely to require the creation of new institutions (and through the contracting of environmental service providers, the definition of new property rights) which interact with existing institutional arrangements, as they complement, overlap or even clash with existing patterns of behaviour. However, research is required to determine whether PACS schemes, can in principle, be designed to provide an incentive to farmers to act collectively in order to reach conservation goals (e.g. through the provision of community-level monetary and non-monetary rewards), as well as by fostering collective action via social learning and social capital formation facilitated by PACS institutions.
It is also possible that PACS schemes, if not appropriately designed, could undermine existing institutions of collective action in poor farming communities. Communities and households that are able to take advantage of market-based interventions (including PACS schemes) may be relatively few and may encompass the most powerful actors, leaving the poorest unable to participate. Existing patterns of collective action might consequently be undermined if market-based solutions provoke a large increase in perceived inequalities within the community.
This project will examine different PACS instruments and their impact on collective action as well as their effectiveness (i.e. do they reach the conservation goal?), their efficiency (i.e. do they reach this goal at least-cost?), and their impact on equity (i.e. can the poor participate?). Mixed qualitative and quantitative data will be obtained through secondary data analysis, expert consultations facilitated by the national partners, focus group meetings, structured interviews with key informants and household surveys encompassing traditional landrace and non-landrace growers.
Biofuels Development, Local Resource Rights and Governance in Africa and Asia
Indonesia, Tanzania
Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
Contact: Esther Mwangi (e.mwangi[at]cgiar.org)
Collaborators
Faculty of Forestry, Sokoine University, Tanzania
Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, Papua University
Tropenbos International Indonesia Program, Indonesia
Project objectives
This project seeks to understand how access and rights to land and forest resources by the rural poor are affected by large-scale biofuel investments and to evaluate their collective responses to these investments.
Project description
The rising demand for biofuels has generated great interest in many developing countries in Africa and Asia. This interest emerges from the assumption that developing countries have large expanses of unutilised land, high levels of unemployment and cheap labor, and that biofuels could contribute to income for smallholders. Policy-makers and investors are eagerly moving to capture this opportunity and many countries are establishing plantations and/or small holder out grower schemes.
Rapid biofuels development has potentially large impacts on local land and resource rights that are not yet adequately understood. Direct effects include rising land values, due to policies and incentives that encourage production, which may price poorer land owners out of the land market, thereby weakening their access to land. Farmers may be evicted from fertile farmlands, sometimes with inadequate compensation, or forest resources can be directly handed over to investors by central or local government authorities. Additionally, land officially categorized as wasteland or barren lands may be allocated to investors without consideration of the diverse ways that local actors use that land to construct or supplement their livelihoods. Indirect effects include increases in food prices, increased pressure on forest resources as more land is allocated to biofuels relative to food crops. Fallow periods may be shortened to compensate for cropland scarcity or men may even take away land that was being used and cultivated by women.
The goal of this research is to contribute to an understanding of the circumstances under which biofuels can be developed and produced with minimum negative impact on local rights and with positive livelihood outcomes and equitable distribution of benefits. It seeks to also identify the most important actions that can be taken to overcome the barriers impeding the contribution of biofuels to rural poverty reduction. Specifically, the project will identify the tenure impacts of biofuels development on rural people’s (both women and men) access and control over land and forest resources, which is fundamental to rural livelihoods, cultures, identity, and gender equity. The research will also explore the mechanisms by which communities resist and counter practices in the sector that they perceive to be harmful and/or threatening to continued resource access and control.
It will use a comparative case study design, which compares outcomes across two different socio-political contexts (Tanzania and Indonesia), but which selects for similarities in recent governance reforms and in the development of the biofuels sector, including community responses to the sector’s expansion. A mix of methods, including archive searches, focus groups, key informant interviews, and household surveys will be used to answer the research questions.
Securing Women’s Access to Livestock Assets and Income in Kenya and Mozambique
Kenya, Mozambique
Internatinoal Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)
Contact: Jemimah Njuki (j.njuki[at]cgiar.org)
Collaborators
Ministry of Livestock Development, Kenya
Agricultural Research Institute of Mozambique (IIAM)
East Africa Dairy Development Project (coordinated by Heifer International).
Project objectives
The goal of the project is to improve and secure women’s access to livestock assets and control over income and products derived from them, in the face of increasing commercialization and formalization of livestock value chains
Project description
Smallholder agriculture is increasingly being recognized as an important driver of economic development and poverty reduction. The major obstacle facing smallholder-led agricultural growth, however, is lack of markets. Thus linking smallholder farmers to markets and making markets work for the poor especially through value chain development is increasingly becoming a focus of research and development organizations in Africa and beyond.
Agricultural marketing systems are highly gendered. This gendered nature varies depending on context such as the nature of the commodity, distance to markets, and type of marketing system (whether informal, formal). Women are more likely to be involved in and retain control of income from informal markets for traditional food crops, although recent evidence suggest that this may be changing with increasing commercialization of traditional food crops and small livestock. Increasing commercialization can also have negative consequences for women. Women traditionally engage in more informal trade in local rather than regional or international markets therefore they may be left out of formal value chain trading arrangements designed to link rural areas to cities and towns.
This project will examine gender-mediated rights and control of livestock and livestock products across 3 market-oriented projects in Kenya and Mozambique. An analysis of the impacts of commercialization on these rights and the role of collective action in improving rights and control by women of livestock, livestock products and income will lead to enhanced strategies being pursued by these project teams and to broader policy change recommendations related to collective action and property rights for enhanced market participation and benefits for women. The interrelationship between access and rights to livestock and access and rights to other resources on which livestock depend including land and water will be explored.
To address these key gender-related questions, this project will study the experiences of three research-for-development projects designed to increase access to, and participation in, livestock markets by smallholders: The BMFG funded East Africa Dairy Development Project (Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda), the IFAD funded Government of Kenya Smallholder Diary Commercialization Program (Kenya) and the EU funded Livestock and Livelihoods Project (Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Namibia). The project will use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods.
Building Resilience of Community Fisheries in the Tonle Sap Lake: Collective Action and the Capacity to Manage Resource Competition
Cambodia
WorldFish Center
Contact: Blake Ratner (b.ratner[at]cgiar.org)
Collaborators
Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI)
Coalition of Cambodian Fishers (CCF)
Fisheries Administration (Ministry of Agriculture, Forests, and Fisheries)
Project objectives
This project aims to strengthen the capacity of a network of fishing communities of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake to engage in collective action beyond the local scale, in support of governance arrangements that anticipate and manage competing uses of aquatic resources equitably.
Project description
More than half of Cambodia's rural population depends on fish and aquatic resources for some portion of their livelihood. Fish is also the leading source of animal protein in the rural diet, and a vital source of nutrition in a country where 30% of children are undernourished. The Tonle Sap is the heart of this remarkably productive fishery. Today the resource is under threat from a combination of sources, including destructive fishing practices, land use change, fishing beyond the natural capacity of the system to regenerate, dam development in the Mekong upstream, and climate change. As the range of competing uses of water and wetlands expands, as well as the numbers of people seeking a livelihood from fishing, the most vulnerable risk being excluded.
Community mobilization and government reforms have now produced a hybrid system with increased space for "community fisheries". Yet the fundamental drivers point towards increased resource conflict and loss of livelihood by the most vulnerable. Amidst these risks, the potential for building a resilient fishery with equitable distribution of benefits remains.
This action research project aims to strengthen the capacity of fishing communities of the Tonle Sap Lake to engage in collective action in pursuit of this goal of social-ecological resilience, which encompasses improved livelihood security, reduced vulnerability, and sustained productivity of the fishery resource. Specifically, it will focus on the collective capacity of the emerging grassroots network of fishing communities to identify and articulate threats, negotiate with authorities to represent the common interests of fishing communities, and collaborate with government and private actors to resolve resource conflicts equitably.
The project will use the Appreciation-Influence-Control approach, which is a whole-systems approach to stakeholder interaction, analysis, and collaborative planning. The research team will employ the AIC approach for planning the overall research and stakeholder engagement process, to structure and facilitate the consultations, to analyze emerging results collaboratively, and to develop the communications strategy.