6. INTEGRATING COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVES IN THE UCCHALI MANAGEMENT PLAN

6.1 Lessons from the participatory planning process


A central objective of this participatory process was to initiate local level planning exercises that take full account of local needs, perspectives, capacities and aspirations. The use of Participatory Rural Appraisal methods highlighted the following:

1. The PRAs were conducted to build up pictures of natural resource endowments, the means by which they are managed, and the socio-economic make up of three villages in the Ucchali complex.The quality and depth of information generated on local livelihoods and their relationships with natural resources were much richer than that generated by more conventional survey and questionnaire based studies. Moreover, this information was obtained in a relatively short period (one week) and at a lower financial cost than conventional management plan formulation by outside experts..

2. The boundary conditions and inclusiveness of the villagers' analysis were wider than those of the natural scientists hitherto involved in the wetland management planning. The scientists tended to focus on species of special concern for international conservation and the wetland habitat per se. In contrast, the villagers explored the connections between forests in the watershed, land use history, livelihoods and the White headed Duck's only overwintering site in Pakistan.The villagers' analysis was untrammelled by disciplinary specialisation and, as such, revealed new information to outsiders who were ready to sit down and listen.

3. Many villagers had a very good understanding of the wetlands' ecology and of how watershed management practices (e.g forest clearing) impacted on the lakes. Complex issues such as patterns of migratory bird activity, changes in water quality, rates of sedimentation, relationship between ground water levels and wetland presence were locally monitored and often well understood. Villagers established causal links between recent outside interventions and their detrimental effects on avian species of international importance e.g. negative impacts of introduction of exotic fish species (carp and tilapia) on White headed Duck populations; strong lights of a newly opened military base which interfere with the orientation and landing behaviour of immigrating bird species on Ucchali lake.

4. The interactive dialogues with the members of the three different villages revealed many contrasts between the social make up of each village and between the lakes' ecologies.This local level diversity suggests that standard and undifferentiated approaches to wetland management planning and implementation are inappropriate.There is a need to combine the general validity of the ecological principles on which management plans rest with the site specific knowledge and innovations of local communities.

5. Although the villagers' emphasised the obvious negative externalities and the high economic costs associated with the presence of the wetlands, no rigorous economic analysis was carried out. One methodological frontier for conservation and natural resource management planning is to combine ecological methods and PRA methods with local level economic valuations ( Table 6 ). The complementary nature of different traditions of knowledge and methodologies can provide a sounder basis for conservation planning and conflict resolution.

6. The profound mismatch between locally lived experiences of wetland histories and the perceptions of outsiders. External organisations and professionnals have either assumed that lakes Ucchali and Khabbaki are natural features of the landscape or have not internalised evidence invalidating this belief. Conservationists' failure to understand the relatively recent social and ecological history of the wetlands has led to the neglect of the prior land rights of local people and has thus created conditions for conflicts between the state and local communities.

7. Declaring the Ucchali wetlands as "internationally important"conservation sites is meaningless for local resource users as long as the issues that emerge out of such declarations have not been discussed and resolved to the satisfaction of local communities. Farmers who had lost land and/or traditional rights over resources could not appreciate the value of vague "long term" conservation benefits for society or humanity. In their view, conservation benefits should be immediate and quantifiable, with villagers getting a fair share of the benefits accruing from the successful management of the wetlands or a fair compensation for loss of productive resources.

8. Rebuilding the relationship between local people and conservation organisations (Government and NGOs) after a history of policing and exclusion is difficult. The use of coercive methods that are assumed to be valid for all people, all times and all places is counterproductive. These measures most often disempower local communities and directly or indirectly impose more restrictions, from total exclusion to the denial of access to resources (see Box 16 ).Top down approaches to wetland management in situations where local people directly depend on natural resources for their livelihoods usually result in high management costs for governments, with the majority of benefits accruing to national and international external interests.

9. Wetland management is likely to be sustainable ecologically, economically and socially only if the overall management scheme can be made sufficiently attractive to local people for them to adopt it as a long term livelihood strategy. From the outset, the formulation of wetland management plans should be based on interactive dialogue to understand peoples' priorities, needs and knowledge.


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