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Wider
Implications
This
is an innovative approach to analysing livelihoods and institutions
to develop services that can exploit forestry opportunities
for the poor. The approach involves community-based, district
and centrally driven services, from micro to macro and has
been applied immediately to deepen the National Forest Plan
processes. The pilot initiatives now under way to take these
services forward are effectively a form of business process
re-engineering which could easily be applied to other sectors.
The
strength of using the Sustainable Livelihoods approach is
that it provides quick access to a holistic understanding
of: livelihood assets and preferred outcomes; how forestry
could relate to these; and prominent policy and institutional
constraints. This then provides a good framework for discussing
opportunities in the context of preferred livelihood outcomes
and for identifying services to support these opportunities,
which creates more effective and informed demand. Basing service
delivery plans, and the institutional reforms required to
make these more effective, on assets and opportunities provides
positive and achievable ways forward, whereas basing plans
on problems can be paralysing.
Finally,
the process is a form of livelihoods-based market research,
and as such provides good training for NGOs and other service
providers, and a useful framework for effective use of PRA
tools which can deliver a clear set of demands from poor people
that service providers can respond to. A potential weakness
is that such holistic analysis makes the set of service demands
too complex if one tries also to respond to these holistically.
However, the pilot programmes to follow-up the service demands
are being implemented in a focused way, based on the holistic
understanding derived from the SLA. This is proving to be
effective in creating ownership and self-reliance amongst
target communities, and more client-focussed service provision,
something that has been uncommon in previous forms of extension
services.
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