Engaging Local Communities in Low Emissions Land-Use Planning: a Case Study from Laos

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and enhancing forest carbon stocks (REDD+) is a performance-based payment mechanism currently being debated in international and national environmental policy and planning forums. As the mechanism is based on conditionality, payments must reflect land stewards’ level of compliance with carbon-efficient management practices. However, lack of clarity in land governance and carbon rights could undermine REDD+ implementation. Strategies are needed to avoid perverse incentives resulting from the commoditization of forest carbon stocks and, importantly, to identify and secure the rights of legitimate recipients of future REDD+ payments. We propose a landscape-level approach to address potential conflicts related to carbon tenure and REDD+ benefit sharing. We explore various land-tenure scenarios and their implications for carbon ownership in the context of a research site in northern Laos. Our case study shows that a combination of relevant scientific tools, knowledge, and participatory approaches can help avoid the marginalization of rural communities during the REDD+ process. The findings demonstrate that participatory land-use planning is an important step in ensuring that local communities are engaged in negotiating REDD+ schemes and that such negotiations are transparent. Local participation and agreements on land-use plans could provide a sound basis for developing efficient measurement, reporting, and verification systems for REDD+.

Stakeholder analysis combined with social network analysis provides fine-grained insights into water infrastructure planning processes

Environmental policy and decision-making are characterized by complex interactions between different actors and sectors. As a rule, a stakeholder analysis is performed to understand those involved, but it has been criticized for lacking quality and consistency. This lack is remedied here by a formal social network analysis that investigates collaborative and multi-level governance settings in a rigorous way. We examine the added value of combining both elements. Our case study examines infrastructure planning in the Swiss water sector. Water supply and wastewater infrastructures are planned far into the future, usually on the basis of projections of past boundary conditions. They affect many actors, including the population, and are expensive. In view of increasing future dynamics and climate change, a more participatory and long-term planning approach is required. Our specific aims are to investigate fragmentation in water infrastructure planning, to understand how actors from different decision levels and sectors are represented, and which interests they follow. We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders, but also cantonal and national actors. The network analysis confirmed our hypothesis of strong fragmentation: we found little collaboration between the water supply and wastewater sector (confirming horizontal fragmentation), and few ties between local, cantonal, and national actors (confirming vertical fragmentation). Infrastructure planning is clearly dominated by engineers and local authorities. Little importance is placed on longer-term strategic objectives and integrated catchment planning, but this was perceived as more important in a second analysis going beyond typical questions of stakeholder analysis. We conclude that linking a stakeholder analysis, comprising rarely asked questions, with a rigorous social network analysis is very fruitful and generates complementary results. This combination gave us deeper insight into the socio-political-engineering world of water infrastructure planning that is of vital importance to our well-being.

Protection and Performance

We examine the linkages between import policy and export performance, extending classic macroeconomic trade effects to more recent concepts from the modern literature on gravity models. We also examine these effects empirically with a panel of global and bilateral trade spanning 15 years. Our emphasis on the role of import policy (i.e. tariffs) of exporters as an explanation of trade volumes contrasts with the recent emphasis on importer policy in the gravity literature. It also reinforces the growing body of evidence on the importance of economic environmental (policy and infrastructure) conditions in explaining relative export performance and is in line with the literature on global value chains.

Baseline Survey Report: Case study of Uluguru and Usambara mountains (Bigwa, Tangeni, Peko Misegese, Mashewa and Misalai villages)

Agriculture is the back borne of the economy of Tanzania and its main objective is to ensure food security and eradication of rural poverty through the promotion of production systems, technologies and practices that are environmental sound (Tanzania National Environmental Policy, 1999). However, this has not been achieved due to rapid land degradation, which has consequently lead to massive soil loss, decline in crop yields, disruption of water resources and the destruction of the natural resources in general. This report highlights the extent to which agricultural related activities like agronomic and cultural practices such as use of fire for preparation of farms and cutting of trees to meet villagers’ needs have devastating effect on the quality of the environment. Besides these observed difficulties this paper argued that as the survival, well being and future of the Uluguru and Usambara people it is essential to provide continuous training to farmers, so that they know how best to continue farming and harvesting forest products on a sustainable basis without causing much harm to the environment. Most of all this paper recommends the introduction of Ngolo cultivation technology on steep slopes of Usambara and Uluguru mountains in order to enhance the conservation of the environment.