Interfakultäre Koordinationsstelle für Allgemeine Ökologie (IKAÖ) |
Forschung
Partnership in local resource and conflict management
a frame of reference
1. General Information
The Discussion Forum enhances the integration of insight gained in view of policy making through (1) providing a place of exchange, (2) promoting a joint learning process and (3) strengthening links to policy development.
The scope of the discussion forum is put on linkages between strategies and instruments that aim to reduce constraints on environmentally responsible action at the community level (or the "lowest level possible"), in particular, and various societal levels in general and on corresponding innovative institutional arrangements, both in rural and urban environments.
The Project Group „Urban Environmental Management“ held its 2nd workshop in Jinja/Uganda in March 1998, focusing on the topic of „developing innovative partnerships for sustainable urban management: the roles of urban authorities, researchers and civil society“. This topic relates to the previous workshop of the Project Group, held in Ouagadougou in early 1997 where methodological findings on participatory research methods and concepts around urban environmental problems have been exchanged and discussed. The Research Group felt the need to draw more critical attention to the issue of institutionalisation and sustainability of social and communication achievements resulting from participatory research and development.
The Project Group is ready to make available its findings and considerations to the Discussion Forum North-South and to contribute to a continued debate in view of more adapted options of local environmental management in countries of both South and North.
For that matter, the Project Group and the respective project leaders have appointed Mr. Cissé Guéladio of Burkina Faso as their „ambassador“. Other researchers have shown an interest to participate as well in the future work of the Discussion Forum. [1]
The Integrated Project (IP) "Strategies and Instruments for Sustainable Development" focuses on linkages between strategies, measures, and instruments that aim to reduce constraints on responsible environmental action, in particular at the level of communes and in the sectors of energy consumption and of the management of water supply, waste water and solid waste.
The objectives of the project are
- to conceive, analyse, evaluate, and optimise, in a transdisciplinary
process, the interlinkages of strategies, measures, and instruments
aimed at enlarging the margin of action or at overcoming obstacles on
the different levels of human acting;
- to estimate the ecological effectiveness in selected fields;
- to improve the scientific knowledge base required for the conception
of particular instruments;
- to test empirically the application of interventions and instruments and their effects in selected Swiss communes with their private and public actors.
The projects of the IP focus, in short, on (1) new institutional approaches in environmental policy making, on (2) typologies/arrangements of instruments incl. their effectiveness and on (3) typologies of restrictions to responsible environmental behaviour. In addition, other projects and groups of researchers within and outside of SPPE study similar aspects in the Swiss context.
The IP is ready to make available its findings and considerations to the Discussion Forum North-South and to contribute to a continued debate in view of more adapted options of local environmental management in countries of both South and North.
For that matter, INTERFACE, Lucerne, will summarise the main findings and open questions of the relevant research carried out in the field mentioned. In addition, INTERFACE will include relevant findings of other research groups within and, if deemed meaningful, outside SPPE.
2. The Debate
Innovative approaches in environmental management on local (or lowest possible) level is a topic of first and foremost interest in countries of both the South and the North.
The growing significance of environmental and resource protection give rise to environmental conflict. There is, however, growing resistance vis-à-vis state interventions and environmental decisions encounter resistance by those affected. There is a general societal change towards growing participation of the individual subjects at the definition of societal rules and regulations. This general change concerns as well resource management. Classic top-down, technocratic resource management, based on scientific and expert knowledge and fixed on norms, values and rules have lost their broad acceptance and become inadequate.
Besides the growing number of conflicts between different resource users for scarcity reasons, there is an increased conflict potential due to increasing negative environmental impacts of unsustainable resource use strategies. The burden the affected, the "losers", have to bear is growing to the benefit of the "winners". Conventional resource management approaches do not dispose of appropriate instruments for compensating such external costs.
In line with the growing actor-orientation in resource management and the corresponding understanding of resource management constituting a social process in itself, experience and know how of the actors, i.e. the resource users, is being recognised of at least equal relevance as expert knowledge and not to be substituted by quick transfer of retort knowledge
The multi-stakeholder approaches require an appropriate institutional and legal framework for the related negotiation processes. Such processes would ideally focus on reaching contractual arrangements, based on all parties' voices having been heard, available evidence, theory and arguments having been considered, potentially useful options having been assessed and evaluated and latent consequences and their distributions among the many publics having been identified and evaluated.
Given that among an important number of projects of SPPE related innovative arrangements in view of more sustainable resource management in both rural and urban settings are subject of research, the Discussion Forum would provide the platform for exchanging concepts, experiences and possible conclusions and for promoting well proved and adapted options.
The following aspects provide a frame of reference and would assist exchange and debate:
Basic understanding
-> justification/origin of stakeholder approach and actor orientation
-> ‘stakeholders’ vs. ‘actors’: two different concepts
-> conflict and conflict management
Practical experiences
-> resource use issue: what is the problem to be solved? what are
the conflicting issues?
-> actors, stakeholders? their visions, aims, resources and strategies
-> specific (institutional and technological) approaches to resource
management
-> technological and institutional know how and experiences of actors/stakeholders
Effects; Conditions of success
-> (initiation and) facilitation of process
-> character of specific institutional framework adopted
-> role of the overall political, legal and administrative framework,
including overall political environment (e.g. empowerment vs. instrumentalisation)
-> role of sensitisation, information and training efforts; role of
practical experience
-> role of technological options
Role of research (issue of secondary importance in this context)
-> role of research
-> formulation of research agenda/questions
-> co-ordination of research and development
Manuel Flury
31.5.98
[1] Ref. is made to the note edited by R. Kaufmann-Hayoz on the „Outcomes of the „Event“ Jinja, Uganda, March 16 - 20, 1998“.