Why did the project fail to achieve its objectives in some villages? The experience of the Upland Settlement Project (USP) in Bangladesh

By sampling an upland settlement project (USP) village, this study examined why the project failed to achieve the planned objectives in some villages, and what livelihood strategies villagers (planters) have adopted to sustain their livelihoods. The paper uses data obtained by qualitative and quantitative methods. The USP was formulated with the objectives of settling 50 landless and marginal tribal families in a project village and introducing agroforestry and rubber plantations for short- and long-term socioeconomic development of planters, in a participatory manner. There are now only 15 planters in the project village and, although agroforestry has progressed well, only 30 to 40% of poor quality rubber trees remain. Planter participation in project activities was limited to wage labour, indicating that the USP failed to adequately achieve all its proposed objectives. In the face of project failure, planters have adopted diversified strategies to maintain their livelihoods. Several shortcomings caused failure of the project, such as the inability of project staff members to organize planters, failure to create awareness among planters about project benefits, lack of regular project money disbursement, sociocultural ignorance, and lack of social capital among planters. Recommendations are made for securing effective participation of local people to assure successful and sustainable project outcomes. Lessons learned will be helpful in formulating future development programmes in this country and elsewhere.     

The significance of social capital in local forest management in Laos: Overcoming latent conflict between local people and local forestry officials

Forest policies that devolve forest-use rights to local people have undergone development over the past few years in Laos. As collaboration between local people and forestry officials is seen as indispensable to effective and sustainable local forest management, the objective of this study is to clarify the issues pertinent to the resolution of latent conflict between these two stakeholders. The issues are examined by presenting two case studies in terms of forest management as perceived by local people and forestry officials; the first in a rich forest area and the second in a degraded forest. Issues relating to land and borders and social capital are identified as the most important in the degraded forest area, while social capital is a very important issue in the rich forest area. Our studies show that the problems of land and border issues in the degraded forest area were caused by an inappropriate resettlement policy. This can be interpreted as the mismanagement of social capital, and for effective local forest management it is very important to overcome problems of this nature. The effective use of social capital has so far been overlooked, however, in the establishment of collaborative forest governance at the local level.