CITINGS
PROMISING INITIATIVES e Contd.
N o Jabbas." The possibilities are, well,
possible.
Others agree we could use some
guidance on how to spend our limited
personal energy for planet care. "1
think of thousands of people carefully
snipping six-pack rings" but never
pushing leaders t o make t h e big
changes the Earth needs, says author
John Javna of Berkeley, California.
Javna's best-selling book 50 Simple
Things Tozl Can Do t o Help Save the
Earth recommends, a m o n a other
things, snipping six pack h d d e r s t o
protect sea birds and mammals, which
sometimes get snared in the rings.
O n one score Don Lotter has already succeeded with EnviroAccount.
His personal green score hit the coveted Eco-Titan range in June after he
cut his driving down t o 3,000 miles a
year. (It also surpassed the point total
of your humble author, whose family's
otherwise Titan lifestyle was heavily
uenalized for its thousands of jet miles
iogged visiting relatives in'distant
states.)
O n another important scoresales-it's t o o early t o say. EnviroAccount is "just getting out into the
market," Lotter explains, and as of
early 1993, was selling at a rate of
about 50 a month. His credit card carriers undoubtedly wish him success in
this other shade of green.
takes "a minimum of 9 0 minutes,"
Lotter says, emphasizing minimzlm.
"Goods produced under conditions
At the session's end, you will have
which do not meet a rudimentary stanan assessment of your earthly impact,
dard of decency should be regarded as
both positive and negative, with scores
contraband and notallowed to pollute the
in six categories: household energy and
channels of international commerce."
water, transportation, consumerism,
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a 1937
waste, land use and demographics, and
address b fhe U.S. Congress cited in the
advocacy. You will also earn a total
World Policy Journal
score and, with it, a label: Eco-Titan,
Eco-Yeoman., Yuvuie-Wanna-Be. or
Jabba-the-Hut.
"Can a business make a top-quality,
Whatever your score, Lotter hastens
all-natural product, be aforce for progressive
to
a ~ . ~You
- e not to WorrY. l%virochange in its comrnuniiy, and be financially
Account
declares
at the very beginsuccessful? Yes. Sure. Why not?
ni%, "This Program does not judge
We're doing it and so is a small, but
Your self-worth, so leas se d o not take
growing and (we think) influential, group
it personally." The idea is to learn and
of socially responsible companies, We
to set priorities for change.
cal1 our approach Caring Capitalism."
The learning comes in commentary
-Ben & Jerry's on Caring Capitalism and
that is s~rinMedthroughout the ProLinked Prosperity, a pamphlet given out to
customers in the ice cream makers'stores. gram: "Your car sir conditioner leaks
CFCs whether vou use it o r not."
"Your refrigerato; is the biggest user of
"Last fall, we undenvent an environ,-lectricity in your heme." "Adopted
mental audit to investigate the impact of
children need not be counted in questhe clothing we make. The results are still
tions o, population growt..~
preliminary, but-to no one's surpriseOf course, any such point system
the news is bad. Ever~thingwe make Polhas its pitfalls. Because it mixes so
lutes. Polyester, because it's made from
forms ofecological harm, it can
petroleum, is an obvious villain, but cotbe ,,iCtly scientific. ~ ~ 1Lotter
1 ,
ton and wool are not any better. . .
based his scale on three critica1 vari"We decided to make a radical change: we
ables. ~n action is bad, he asserts, ifit
are limiting Patagonia's growth in the United
depletes natural resources, pollutes he
States with the eventual goal of halting
env~ronment, degrades habitats.
EnviroAccount Sofnvare ($29.95, indigrowth altogether. We dropped 30 percent of
One can quibble over the details of cate disk size), 605 Szlnset Cozlrt, Davis,
our clothing line.. .We think that the future of
California
95616,800/688-9006.
E
~ point scale-.alumi~
~
~
~
clothing will be leSS is more, a few good
consumption may be undervalclothes that will last a long time."
ued relative to steel and glass, five bo-Yvon Chouinard, founder of the Patagonia
points for each letter written to
ClOthinQComPanY, in a recent PataQonia
goVernment officials may be toa few,
mail-ordercataloQ
and so on-but he has al1 the basics
right.
As a result, the big issues loom large
"Scientists know far more about (and
in
the scoring: driving, consumerisrn,
spend vastly more money studying) the
BY VIKRAM AKULA
heme energY use, waste reductiOn,
systematics of stars than the systematics
activism.
of earthly organisms. Consequently, they
Lotter thinks big, guessing there are
have as good a knowledge of the number
millions
ofpeople out there waiting for
gricultural scientists experiof atoms in the universean unimaginEnviroAccount. And in the long run,
ent in researoh stations under
able abstraction-as they do of the numit could pass into popular culture. Just controlled conditions to produce seeds
ber of species of plants and animals."
imagine, renters seeking rOOmmates that eventually prove to be inappropri-Robert M. May, a professorat London's
might advertise: "A~artmentt0
ate for the needs of poor, rural farmUniversity of Oxford and Imperial College, in
Scientific ~~~~i~~~
with non-smoking Eco-Yeowoman." ers. Education officials pump millions
Personal ads might read, "Mature of dollars into rural schools that poor
woman ISO romance, companionship. children are never able to attend beL .
VOICES
FROM
THE VILLAGE
A,
MARCH 'APRIL 1993
.e, well,
some
limited
are. "1
arefully
: never
he big
author
fornia.
Simple
;ave the
; other
ders to
,,which
ngs.
has alccount.
he covafter he
miles a
nt total
family's
heavily
et miles
distant
;coreEnvirointo the
id as of
rate of
:ard carlccess in
95, indit, Davis,
306.
experins under
Ice seeds
ippropriral farmmillions
hat poor
tend be-
cause their families depend on their
labor to survive.
Failures of this kind plague development.efforts throughout the world.
They stem from a misguided "topdown" approach. Planners typically
work in cities far removed from the
rural communities t'hey are trying to
help. At best, they make brief visits to
well-off, accessible, roadside villages or
rely on standard questionnaires that
intimidate and alienate the usually illiterate rural poor. The result is that planners develop programs using incomplete, inaccurate information, and end
up squandering huge sums of
money on projects that don't
work.
In the face of these failures,
some developmentprofessionals began searching a decade
ago for a better way to design
rural development projects.
One of the most promising approaches they turned up is "Participatory Rural Appraisal." It
may sound complex, but PRA basically means asking local people
what they need rather than telling
them what they need.
Unlike conventional appraisal
methods, the participatory approach
emphasizes seeking out remote villages and using group activities
that enable villagers to communicate their problems
through visual m
While there are
glitches to iron out in
participatory
.
- . philosop
.
.
much of the development community-from large groups
like the United States Agency for International Development t o small
grassroots groups-has shown support
for it.
PRA emerged in Kenya in 1988,
when a team from the country's environmental protection agency and
Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, put the theory to the test in
addressing soil erosion and water
shortages in the village of Mbusyani.
The team had villagers draw a map
of the area on the ground using items
like chalk, stones, tin cans, and sticks.
Not only was the exercise more engaging than a formal, sit-down interview,
it was more informative. The mapping
session and the discussion that followed gave a precise picture of the
area-including rainfail, location of the
community's most degraded areas, its
water sources, and social stratification.
Through the discussion, the development workers discovered, for instance,
that farmers were having soil problems
because they were trying to cultivate
land that had deteriorated after livestock grazed on it for years.
Mapping and other exercises
also provoked spirited
And Mbusyani's residents have
tracked down funds for severa1
projects. Using material they requested
from the Ministry of Water, villagers
dug and installed a well that serves 100
households. Women rehabilitated a
reservoir previously infested with parasites. The women dqg.drains and terraces to reduce siltation, planted trees
and grasses to hold soil in place and
retard water runoff, and, with h n d s
from a local non-governrnentalorganization (NGO) built a fence to
keep livestock out of
the reservoir.
debates among villagers about how to
regenerate the land, giving them a
chance to share their own ideas rather
than waiting for "experts" to te11 them
what to do.
The 10 days of exercises concluded
with a community discussion about
Mbusyani's priorities. Villagers, with
technical assistance from the team,
then developed a "community action
plan." The team did not, however, give
the community money for projects
outright. Instead, since participatory
development aims to make the community its own agent of change, the
appraisal team helped villagers find resources.
participatory appraisal, popularized a
decade ago by Robert Chambers and
Gordon Conway of the University of
Sussex, have actually been used for
many years by NGOs in developing
countries. "It's old wine in a new
bottle," says P. Sumangala of the
Gandhigram Rural Institute, founded
nearly 50 years ago, in the Indian state
of Tamil Nadu. Like many grassroots
groups, Gandhigram has been using
participatory methods for years.
Over the past five years, development groups like the London-based
International Institute for EnvironPROMISING INITIATIVES ' Contd. on page 30
WOiUD ' WATCH
PROMISING INITIATIVES e Contd. from Page 9
ment and Development, MYRADA in
Bangalore, India, and the Washington,
D .C.-based World Resources Institute
have combined ancient community
planning traditions, which harken back
to village councils that strove for consensus, with modern research methods
to produce the participatory rural appraisal model. These groups have also
held training workshops and produced
manuals to get the word out about
PR4.
And the approach is catching on. In
India, grassroots groups have conducted close to 200 PRA exercises;
community workers use it to do everything from involving farmers in agricultural research to determining the
health and social needs of villages.
Kenya's Egerton University has developed a training component for government extension workers, and even
large agencies like UNICEF and the
Peace Corps are beginning to train
their staffers and volunteers in participatory strategies.
As PRA's use picks up, groups are
adapting and adding to its original repertoire of activities. In one exercise, for
instance, villagers use circles to represent people, groups, and institutions,
and arrange them according to the
overlap or the strength of the relationships.
Participatory appraisal, however, is
not perfect. Although it does reach the
rural poor, it sometimes neglects other
groups. Because men and upper classes
are traditionally the most vocal at village gatherings, women, children,
lower classes, lower castes, and ethnic
minorities are often overlooked. Clark
University's Barbara Thomas-Slayter,
who researches how planners can reach
marginalized groups, notes that focusing PR4 on women is especialiy important. Women frequently manage the
household and natural resources, since
men usually leave the village to look
for employment.
Development experts are also
studying how villagers' ideas could
somehow percolate up to influence
district and national poiicies. This wiii
be difficult, however, because government ministries separate development
MARCH e APNL 1993
into water-tight compartments, while opment planners worried. They fear
participatory appraisal emphasizes an that it may be heralded as the latest
integrated approach. This organiza- technical fix and turned into a rigid,
tional structure, coupled with the structured method rather than remain
common perception that rural villag- a technique that builds on the creativers are ignorant, make the prospects ity and experience of grassroots activdim for winning over government ists. "It may be becoming the new orthodoxy of rural development," warns
agencies.
There has been some progress in G . Biksham of the Deccan Developchanging perceptions, though. In the ment Society in India, one of the
Indian state of Karnataka, the director groups that pioneered participatory
of the Drylands Development Board, techniques.
There are ways to head off such
which is the government agency responsible for regenerating arid lands, problems. "Users need to remember
trained his staff in participatory ap- that PRA is only a tool, an analytic
praisal in 1990. Drylands officials tool, that will be as effective as the skill
used to make, at best, brieffield visits, and experience of the person o r
wheeling into village squares in jeeps agency using it," notes Richard Ford,
and expecting villagers to come to director of the International Developthem. Today they spend days in vil- ment Program at Clark University.
lages, seeking out and talking infor- They should also keep in mind that
mally with a wide range of villagers. participatory appraisal methodswere
"In one year, our bureaucracy has be- developed in the field, not in a recome sensitive.. .. PRA has totally search center.
If Ford's advice is heeded, then parchanged our attitudes toward the
planning process," said the board's di- ticipatory appraisal could indeed be
the catalyst for a sustainable developrector.
But participatory appraisal's new- ment that truly emerges from the
found popularity also has some devel- ground up.
MANGROVES
BY PETER WEBER
O
the island of Negros in the
Phiiippine archipelago, Wilson
Vailoces has been planting mangrove
trees since the early 1980s. His neighbors made fun of him at first. Thev
said the mangroves looked funny, liké
little trees perched on stilts in the mud
and brine. They didn't see any use in
30
his back-breaking labor to revive the
murky mangrove swamps that had
once lined their tropical coast.
Vailoces, however, was resolute. In
his 50 some vears, he had watched
people cut dokn &e mangroves and
dynamite the coral reefs offshore, and
he had seen his fish catch fall. For