6. 3. Implications for WWF and other conservation organisations.


Enabling local researchers and village analysts to plan, implement, manage and evaluate integrated conservation and development is a challenging frontier for WWF and the Punjab Wildlife Department.This will imply major reversals in roles as well as changes in organisational culture, funding, staff skills and in practice. The points made in Annex 3 need to be carefully considered by the Punjab Wildlife Department and WWF in this context.

The challenge for external institutions and professionals promoting wetland conservation in the Ucchali complex is to become more enabling in their relationships with local communities living in and around the lakes. In this more enabling context, outside organisations such as WWF could usefully facilitate community wetland management by providing:


  • Support for the claiming by communities of legal rights to make use of natural resources in and around wetlands

  • Assistance in developing national legal and policy frameworks that support tenure and usufruct rights, equitable distribution of benefits, and local management structures.

  • Space and incentives for pragmatic approaches that build on indigenous systems of local knowledge, natural resource use and locally recognised decision making structures and inititiatives.

  • Strong commitment to the institutionalisation of participatory approaches and methods in conservation through the transformation of formal sector organisations and NGOs into enabling institutions

  • Flexible, field based training programmes in participatory methodologies for professional staff, an organisational culture in which it is safe to experiment and learn from mistakes, and appropriate rewards and incentives to encourage professional reorientation away from top down conservation interventions

  • Incentives for collaboration between government (local and national departments), NGOs and local communities in joint wetland management schemes, research and the development of appropriate technologies and processes e.g. identification of suitable salt tolerant grasses with the Pakistan Agricultural Research Institute; villagers' selection of suitable of fodder and fuel wood tree species for social forestry around Ucchali lake with the Pakistan Forest Institute.


The preparation of wetland management plans should be the beginning of a long partnership between external institutions and local communities. The most difficult and complex task will be implementing the wetland management plan by assisting communities to establish or strengthen local institutions and providing them with the required legal, technical and scientific tools. To be sustainable, the whole process should empower local communities to manage natural resources in the context of modern realities.


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