Project Title
"Whose Voices? Whose Choices? Sustaining Collective Action for Empowering Rural Communities and Local Stakeholders for Policy Change in Natural Resources Management"

Project Goal
To enhance livelihoods and the equitable distribution of benefits for the poor, women, and other local stakeholders in eastern African highlands through collective action, equitable NRM, grass-roots policy support and widespread sharing of findings and approaches.

Project Purpose
The purpose of this project is to develop a better understanding of the barriers to collective action in natural resource management (NRM) and support alternative policy options and strategies that guarantee more equitable participation (voices), decision making (choices), and distribution of benefits for the poor, women, and other local stakeholders in the highlands of eastern Africa.

Project Background/Rationale
In Phase 3, the AHI program shifted from a primary emphasis on plot-level productivity concerns to integrating watershed management. This shift has been accompanied by a realization of the critical importance of local institutions and collective action in enabling management of natural resources beyond the farm level. The approach calls for development of new approaches, technologies and policies to foster synergies between farm and watershed-level interventions, and NRM and livelihood. It also calls for attention to the role of local negotiations, by-law reforms and institutions (local and external) in enabling or constraining access to and sustainable management of natural resources. Although AHI's research and development (R&D) teams have embarked on strategies to link NRM and livelihoods, further understanding is needed on the role of existing institutions in enabling or hindering access to economically-important natural resources, and to their potential role in addressing contemporary livelihood and NRM problems. Questions also remain on how (processes, practices, policies) to best ensure engagement of and benefits to women and the poor in CA processes, particularly when abilities and resources to do so are inequitably distributed.

The main thrust of this project is to develop and document successful approaches for facilitating equitable collective action and negotiated solutions to identified watershed problems. This will be accomplished by understanding institutional barriers to collective action and to resource access and decision-making by diverse social groups (choices); action research to overcome these barriers and enable equitable, negotiated decisions for addressing identified watershed problems and linking to outside actors (extension, policy makers) (voices); and monitoring of outcomes to diverse social groups (benefits).

The central hypotheses of this project are that: 1) Farm and watershed-level natural resource management will be more effective if decision-making on technologies and natural resource governance is equitable, given the broad social support required to sustain collective action; and 2) Increased capacity to develop better designed and more equitable by-laws will improve livelihoods by enhancing technology adoption, enabling collective action, and reducing the need for by-law enforcement.

Project Nature
Non-CGS Project

Participating Countries and Institutions
Ethiopia: Ethiopian Agricultural Research Organization; Holetta Agricultural Research Centre (Ginchi site); Areka Agricultural Research Centre (Areka site); government ministries; NGOs
Uganda: AHI/AGILE partners in Kabale and Kapchorwa Districts (Action Aid, Africare), Caritas, National Agricultural Research Organization, District Environment Office

Duration and Status
September 2004 to February 2007

Source of Funding
CAPRi/IFPRI