PTD in Community-based Forestland Management: Case Study Vietnam

Preparations For Launching PTD

Questions for Debate

References

Abstract

Participatory Technology Development (PTD) activities in social forestry in Vietnam were initiated by the Social Forestry Support Programme, which aims to build research capacity and to improve undergraduate curricula related to social forestry (mainly extension) so that they reflect field practices and realities. In 1999, the Swiss Centre for Agricultural Extension organised two training events involving the three main actors in PTD: farmers, extensionists and researchers (from five forestry universities). The participants then conducted experiments at selected research and training sites located in diverse agro-ecological situations all over Vietnam: in the mangrove area of the Mekong Delta, in natural forests in the central highlands, in the buffer zone of Bach Ma National Park and in a mountainous area in North Vietnam.

After the first experience involving the rural communities and the local extension service, the participants recognised that PTD could play an important role in renewing efforts toward building a farmer-centred extension system in Vietnam. The initial results of the PTD activities are promising:

the participatory approach to rural communities created a dynamic research and development process between farmers, extensionists and researchers
farmers of different ethnic groups in the same village developed adapted technologies together and strengthened their socio-organisational capacities through these concerted activities
experiments have been implemented successfully and are followed closely by farmer participants.

The experiments focus mainly on new technologies in forestland management and agroforestry, aimed at diversifying current farming practices. At most sites, topics are related to non-timber forest products such as rattan and bamboo or mushroom production. Other experiments prioritised by farmer communities include enrichment planting in allocated forest areas and planting fruit trees. These innovative technologies seem to awaken the interest of neighbouring villages, which have visited the experiments on their own initiative. A range of methodological tools have been developed and tested since PTD was introduced. Gathering ideas and selecting experiments to carry out are key steps in the process of initiating PTD.

To develop social forestry extension in Vietnam, the relationship between the forestry faculties and the extension service needs to be clarified. A strategy is being defined on how to support and expand the PTD concept in the existing institutional structures. The universities can play an important role in the in-service training and coaching of extension staff, with the field-based learning experiences contributing to the revision of undergraduate curricula.

A reporting and documentation system is being set up to provide a basis for sharing experiences with PTD. National networking events and improved exchange of information through the use of Internet and email contribute to disseminating PTD concepts in Vietnam.

Farmers are experimenting …

Context

Extension in Vietnam

Growth of interest in PTD

Extension in Vietnam

Agriculture is the dominant sector in the Vietnamese economy, the principal livelihood of 70% of the population, and plays a critical role in generating employment, income, domestic savings, foreign exchange and food security. As the Vietnamese economy is linked to the world market, the agricultural sector has to compete with other suppliers in Asia and the rest of the world. To compete successfully, Vietnamese farmers require comparatively lower production costs, greater efficiency in resource use, higher product quality and yields, while still conserving natural and environmental resources. To achieve this, farmers need additional support. The central issues concern what types of support are required and how they can be effectively provided by development institutions.

Although the oldest and most widespread support for agriculture in many countries is through extension services, this approach to promoting agricultural production is quite new to Vietnam. Agriculture used to be based on a system of central planning. Technical personnel were assumed to direct or to command production according to plans and targets, instead of supporting farmers in developing appropriate technologies and practices. The national agricultural and forestry extension system was officially established by Decree 13/CP dated 2 March 1993 (see Figure 1) and has been rapidly developed to district level.

Figure 1: Organisation of extension in agriculture and forestry in Vietnam

At national level	Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD): Department of Agriculture and Forestry Extension
At provincial level	Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD): Agriculture (and Forestry) Extension Centre
At district level	District Office of Agriculture and Rural Development: Agriculture (and Forestry) Station
At commune level	Commune People's Committee, Farmers' Association etc: Extension Club, Extension Collaborators

The briefness of the history of the Vietnamese extension system helps to explain constraints in the extension approaches predominantly practised in the country. Emerging after the de-collectivisation period, extension activities were influenced by conventional approaches, dominated by a relatively small number of staff trained as technocrats, and have therefore been production-focused, using training and demonstration plots. These plots, usually called "models", were developed with the aim of disseminating advanced cash crop and animal production methods with little attention to natural resource management (NRM) or socio-economic and cultural dimensions of production systems. Interviews (Hoang 2000) revealed that this approach contributed to developing agricultural production technologies only in areas where natural, socio-economic and production conditions are quite homogenous and that only better-off farm households have access to this public service. Many poor farmers, especially forest dwellers targeted by our programme, said that they "cannot access extension services, simply because we are in very remote areas". Other farmers see technologies disseminated by the governmental extension services as admirable, but not applicable. "We admired ... but the technologies are quite complicated, they need expensive external inputs that we cannot afford. They do not fit with our limited resource situations."

Farmers are experimenting …

Of course, poor farmers in remote areas do not wait for suitable technologies to come to them. They carry out trials and experiments themselves. A man in the South Eastern Province of Tay Ninh caught 15 fresh water shrimps in a pond near his farm and conducted an experiment to see if he could raise this shrimp species in his own fishpond. A woman in Dak Lak returned to her original province in the North in order to bring some seedlings to test on her new land. These farmers did not conduct rigorous and scientifically designed experiments, but these examples show that a commitment to the idea of "finding new things that work" is held by farmers who live and work under poor conditions and who are usually marginalised in the development process. In many cases, the technologies and practices generated during this process are appropriate for them.

Growth of interest in PTD

The development of an effective extension approach is one of the main concerns of the Social Forestry Support Programme (SFSP) and its working partners. Implemented by Helvetas[4], one of the first organisations in Vietnam to introduce PTD, SFSP co-sponsored a seminar in 1997 during which the Department of Agricultural and Forestry Extension reviewed the national agricultural and forestry extension system (Department of Agriculture and Forestry Extension 1997). It was agreed that, in order to achieve more sustainable agriculture:

not only the efficiency but also the stability and the equity of production systems should be taken into consideration;
human development is a critical factor in developing agriculture and forestry extension;
curricula need to be designed and implemented to contribute to a shift from a purely production-oriented extension to incorporation of natural and environmental resource management issues;
the extension system will have a crucial role in linking development and conservation in communities of forest dwellers.

Werner (1997) made a critical review of the "model" and "transfer-of-technology" approach of extension in Vietnam.

In 1997/98 Helvetas initiated action research in the Northern Province of Cao Bang. The evaluation of Phase I confirmed, however, the extension staff’s lack of knowledge about and experience in participatory research approaches and highlighted the need to strengthen this aspect (Helvetas Vietnam 1999).

The PTD Process

Why SFSP launched PTD

The PTD Actors

The Study Sites

Why SFSP launched PTD

At the end of 1999, SFSP launched PTD, focusing on social forestry issues through a set of training workshops, as well as technical and financial support to staff members of its seven working partners from the North to the South of the country. SFSP regarded this as a way to deal with two challenges:

To make the extension system responsive to the needs of poor forest-dweller communities where the situation is complex, conditions are diverse and production systems are risk-prone;
To nurture farmers' initiative and their spirit of self-help, to enhance their capacity to find appropriate technologies for themselves.

Besides generating appropriate technologies with the participation of farmers, the process of introducing PTD should help to develop an alternative research and extension approach to provide input for participatory development of curriculum with the seven working partners involved in SFSP.

Discussion at the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD) of Lam Dong revealed that the lack of relevant technology available to local farmers, especially the many small-scale and poor farmers, was associated not only with the low budget for research and development, but also with the poor linkages between local researchers, extension staff and farmers. Research and extension in agriculture are components of the same system, but they currently operate under different institutional umbrellas. Plans were therefore made to introduce PTD and to analyse motivation for the participation of these two groups of actors.

Box 1: Brief presentation of Social Forestry Support Programme (SFSP) Vietnam

In 1994, SFSP started working with the National Forestry University, located in Xuan Mai just outside Hanoi. Since October 1997, in its second phase, SFSP expanded to include four more Universities of Agriculture and Forestry, one national research institute and one extension organisation in Hoa Binh Province. With this set of partners, SFSP covers all aspects of tertiary-level social forestry education throughout Vietnam. This programme is implemented by Helvetas on behalf of SDC (Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation). The programme focuses on fostering the development of an approach to the education of forestry professionals that will enable them to be responsive to and capable of dealing with the dynamic range of needs arising in the field of social forestry in Vietnam.

The development objective is to establish social forestry, in order to have more effective management of forestland and renewable natural resources to upgrade the living standards of rural people. In order to support this objective, SFSP contributes to the effective transition from state-directed protection and exploitation of forests to local-level and people-centred forestland management through the development of social forestry approaches and training activities. A major challenge is to link field-based experience generated through research and extension activities to the creation and building of curriculum content, and the development of continuous feedback loops from the field to the classroom and vice versa.

The PTD Actors

The selection of actors was a main concern in the initial phase of the PTD process. As a development approach based on farmers' indigenous knowledge, experience, potential, problems and needs, PTD is designed to ensure the active participation of local farmers. In PTD, innovation takes place by combining farmers’ knowledge and local experience with researchers’ scientific analytical skills. Farmers usually innovate within very complex conditions and options, which only the farmers themselves fully understand. On the other hand, researchers are accustomed to handling only a limited number of variables. By conducting joint experimentation, new ideas developed together have a better chance of being adapted to local conditions and being adopted by other villagers in the area. The interaction between villagers and researchers often needs facilitation, which is best done by extensionists possessing good communication skills. This third actor is responsible for a number of rural communities and is therefore interested in developing innovations that are potentially relevant to the majority of farmers (Scheuermeier & Katz 2000).

The three PTD actors

A critical question in the initial phase was: "Which farmers get involved in PTD?" Not all farmers involve themselves in the process. Some farmers are more curious than others to know about new things and are keener to contribute to village development. However, a critical number of farmer resource persons are needed to go through the whole process. We call them key farmers. Their roles are to inform all farmers in the village about the on-going activities, to arrange for cross visits, to guide outsiders through the village, to provide historical information about the village and to interpret local ethnic languages. The key farmers should make sure that the activities are not biased toward dominant groups in the community. Therefore, they need to be willing, motivated and have the personal qualities required to become involved in the PTD process. Ideally, key farmers are selected by the community. Local leaders (both formal and informal) who have a good relationship with the community are usually nominated during village meetings. They are usually better-off farmers and their social positions can affect the effectiveness of technology generation and dissemination. Other selection criteria are ethnic origin, wealth rank and gender. In communities of ethnic minorities, key farmers need to be able use Vietnamese to communicate with outsiders. Informal training is given to enhance their capacity to implement PTD. They improve their skills in experimentation and communication. This is an important outcome of PTD, along with the technology itself.

Other household representatives, women and men, participate at village plenary meetings to discuss and review group work plans and results, to decide which ideas and experiments are to be conducted. As a result, an impressive number of farmers, independent of their financial situation or ethnic origin, put their names on the list for participating in experiments.

Researchers' skills of scientific analysis help to ensure that the process is implemented so that useful information can be collected. The extensionists' facilitation skills are needed to build a bridge for the dialogue between researchers and farmers and to spread PTD results to a larger group of users. The clarification of the roles of researchers and extensionists is open to debate: Is PTD a process of research or extension? We regard PTD as an action-research process. However, a strategy was agreed that, in the near future, extensionists would play a leading role in PTD at local levels. "Researchers" and "extensionists" are identified according to their roles in the PTD process rather than their titles. For instance, some of the PTD experiments in the Northern Province of Hoa Binh have been implemented by the provincial extension centre. In this case, extensionists play the role of the action researchers. In brief, researchers do not have a monopoly on action research simply by reason of its title. In most cases, the participating university staff members are the action researchers. Some of them have been involved in previous Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) exercises and their facilitation skills have been improved. Some staff members in the forestry enterprises take on the role of extensionists.

The Study Sites

Staff members of SFSP's seven working partners from North to South have been involved in the PTD implementation process within their relevant, mandated areas: mountainous communes in North Vietnam, the buffer zone of Bach Ma National Park in Central Vietnam, the natural forests of the Central Highlands and the mangrove area of the Southern Mekong Delta. The activities have thus provided excellent opportunities for learning a development approach in diversified natural and socio-economic settings in Vietnam. However, this case study describes PTD only in three sites in the southern provinces of Vietnam where the authors have had occasions to assist local partners directly in monitoring the process.

The three working partners involved in PTD in the South are the Faculty of Forestry of Hue University of Agriculture and Forestry (HUAF), the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry of Tay Nguyen University (TNU) and the Faculty of Forestry of the University of Agriculture and Forestry (UAF) in Thu Duc, Ho Chi Minh City. Each working partner selected a study site in its mandated area and has been working closely with relevant local development agencies and with farmers.

The HUAF group in Hue selected a commune in Nam Dong District as its study site. This is a poor upland commune in the buffer zone of Bach Ma National Park where local farmers are Kinh immigrants and Kotu ethnic minorities living with a high degree of dependency on the forest.

The TNU group selected a commune of the M'nong ethnic group in Dak R'Lap District of Dak Lak Province. Natural forest resources are still important in this area, but it is becoming increasingly deforested on account of coffee plantations, which are the principal source of income in the region. In collaboration with the provincial DARD, TNU's Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry has tested in this commune a scheme for forestland allocation and has been involved in assisting the local community and development agencies to plan use of the allocated land. The development of technologies for sustainable land use was seen as a continuation of this effort.

The UAF group selected a mangrove forest-dweller commune in Ngoc Hien District, Ca Mau Province. Mangroves, which were badly degraded during the war, had been rehabilitated by state investment. However, the development of shrimp farming in recent years has created a new threat to the restoration process. Farmers need assistance in developing this shrimp–mangrove area to fulfil requirements of both ecological restoration and viable aquaculture production.

The common issues in these three sites are the high demographic pressure on forest resources because of immigration, the evidence of the process of transition toward commercial production systems that are still unstable, the ambiguous resource-tenure situation that affects motivation for sustainable production and resource management, and the poor accessibility to extension services. Accessibility to formal extension services is very limited, but the state enterprises in these areas have provided some form of assistance to farmers. Previous assessments, made through farmers' group discussions and interviews of key informants, revealed that the performance of the extension service in all three provinces did not meet the demand of the local farmers.

At each study site, there is a forestry enterprise (or forestry–fishery, in the case of the Ca Mau site). In Vietnam, these forest "owners" were allocated large areas of forestland to manage. They are the strongest stakeholders in decision-making with respect to local development plans. These institutions are in a process of transition in status from state-run enterprises to public agencies providing services for farmers. In a recent proposal to re-structure the forestry sector, many such enterprises were regarded as "public enterprises" that will be more explicitly involved in rural community development programmes. In fact, many of them already implement such programmes, such as the national Five Million Hectare Reforestation Program Partnership (Programme 661) and the national programme for the rural development of poor communes (Programme 135). Policy is being revised to encourage forestry enterprises to become "two-side development service agencies" i.e. on one side, they are supposed to provide technical inputs and, on the other side, they should support farmers in product marketing. In this case, forestry enterprises take on the role of extension agencies and their involvement in PTD is therefore "justifiable". However, before deciding to involve forestry enterprises in the PTD process, a stakeholder analysis should be made to understand better the relationship between the enterprise and the community.

Initiating PTD in More Villages

Preparations For Launching PTD

Training in PTD

Training in PTD

Although many of SFSP’s working partner institutions thought that PTD was a nice approach to make extension more responsive to farmers' needs, the real meaning of this approach and its applicability in the Vietnamese context had been ambiguous. The first activities were therefore a clarification of basic concepts. Some initial questions needed answering: What is PTD? How can it be initiated in reality? What are the roles of farmers, researchers and extensionists involved in the process?

With the assistance of PTD practitioners from the Swiss Centre for Agricultural Extension (LBL), SFSP introduced PTD by organising two 10-day training workshops. The first workshop was held in the Northern Province of Thai Nguyen at the end of 1999. Some months later, a similar workshop was conducted in the Western Highland Province of Dak Lak. The three main actors in the PTD triangle, i.e. farmers, extension agents and researchers (from five forestry faculties) were involved in these training events. They saw these events as the first time a gathering of different partners working in technology generation, utilisation and dissemination had had the opportunity to discuss a new approach to research and extension linkages, based on field experience.

Both training events were implemented with the same three-step structure:

an introduction to the basics of PTD;
a field exercise to apply participatory methods and tools to initiate PTD in a village;
a final workshop for PTD follow-up planning.

Three phases of the PTD process (preparation, initiating PTD in the village, continuation activities) were explained and actively discussed by the workshop participants. The exhaustive documents of these two training events (Scheuermeier & Katz 1999, 2000) show the objectives, applied procedures and experience gained from each module of the workshop in a very practical way. These documents have been used as examples of how the process of PTD can be documented.

These two training events required quite a high input of resources, but these can be justified as necessary for creating a basis for initiating PTD in social forestry in Vietnam. Important outputs of these training events were a group of trained researchers, equipped with the knowledge and skills to take responsibility for the PTD process in their study sites, and some initial knowledge and experience to contribute to developing a curriculum for extension.

An idea sheet is designed in the field (Nam Dong, Hue)

Preparations For Launching PTD

Preparations For Launching PTD

Initiating PTD in More Villages

The PTD workshops were replicated in selected research and training sites of the Forestry Faculties in Hoa Binh, Nam Dong and Ca Mau. In these follow-up events, researchers who took part in the previous training events assumed the role of facilitators. The same basic sequence was followed, but using only the key modules from the previous workshop. Even though extension staff received less training during these follow-up events, PTD could be successfully launched with a reasonable amount of resources. Concrete and challenging experiments could be designed and planned after about four days of intensive work with villagers. Facilitators documented the efforts to initiate PTD in Nam Dong, Ca Mau and Dak Lak by describing the steps implemented, especially in exploring ideas and designing experiments with farmers (Hoang et al 2000, Le & Felber 2000, Scheuermeier & Katz 2000).

Table 1 summarises the key steps for initiating PTD in a village. This is a well-organised sequence of highly demanding preparation and information work, including hill walking in natural forest in the uplands, or crossing rivers and tidal flats in the Mekong Delta, lively interaction during group work in villages, late-night village meetings with multi-voting exercises and, at the end, tough negotiations with serious-looking local authorities ….

Table 1: Key steps for initiating PTD in a village

Phase 1: Preparation	Information about PTD	In a short training event, provide general information about PTD approach and discuss key experiences gained so far. Explore willingness of villagers to participate.
	Organisational arrangement	Fix period for initiating PTD activity with villagers. Identify key farmers.
	Prepare introductory meeting and work in the village	Explain and discuss in detail the sequence of work in the village.
	Introductory meeting in the village	Explain purpose and key steps of activity. Discuss topic of PTD activity and set the thematic boundary. Agree details of next village meetings.
Phase 2: Work in the village	Walk around to gather ideas	Explore village's issues and opportunities regarding PTD topic(s). Explore ideas in the field that might become interesting things to try out.
	Screening and selecting ideas in the village meeting	Review collected ideas and establish final idea sheet. Clarify commitment of involved stakeholders. Select promising ideas for experiments by voting.
	From idea to experiment sheets	Develop selected ideas into experiment sheets by clarifying justification and criteria. Design experiment(s).
	Selection of experiments to be taken up first	Farmers select the experiments that look most challenging and interesting to them, as the first to be implemented.
	Elaboration of activity plans	Plan each experiment by assigning detailed tasks to involved farmer participants, extensionists and researchers.
Phase 3: Continuation of PTD activities	Debriefing to local authorities and rural development organisations at district level	Provide information about PTD in the village, its results and required decisions and support for following up the initiated activities.
	Building up experiment committees, prepare experiments and set up documentation system	Confirm list of farmer participants, search for additional information regarding the experiments, train farmers and extensionists in keeping track of the experimentation process.

Farmer presenting idea sheet at village meeting (Dak R’Lap – Dak Lak)

Learning from Joint Experimentation to Facilitate Scaling-Up

Field Implementation

Launched Experiments

Monitoring and Evaluation

Documenting

Launched Experiments

After initiating PTD, the "outsiders" – extensionists and researchers – gained a fairly good understanding of villagers’ issues and opportunities regarding forestland management. A couple of experiment sheets and related activity plans were jointly defined, and the commitment of local authorities and rural development organisations in respecting agreements and supporting the PTD process was attained.

Before the experiments were started in the field, the villagers formed interest groups for each experiment. It was encouraging to observe how the farmers created ownership and how much detail they put into preparing the experiments: they collected additional information, confirmed the list of participants, identified the experiment plots in the field, discussed measurements and listed required materials. Subsequently, the first experiments were launched in the Southern provinces (see Table 2).

Table 2: First experiments launched in the Southern provinces

*PTD sites*	*Ongoing experiments*
Dak Lak	Management of 3 rattan species in allocated natural forests Planting grafted durian and seed-grown durian in coffee gardens Planting princess jackfruit in degraded hilly land remote from water sources
Nam Dong	Planting bamboo along streams in natural forest Planting cinnamon in regenerated forest after shifting cultivation
Ca Mau	Thinning methods to improve the productivity of mangrove and the living conditions of shrimps Raising red shells in shrimp ponds in mangrove area

NB: All these experiments are presented on the website www.socialforestry.org.vn

What is common to these experiments is that about ten farmers are implementing each of them and are following an agreed system of very serious experiment protocols in terms of respecting deadlines, methodological design and supervision in the field. The farmers are certainly eager to obtain good results, but it also appears that they want to prove to outsiders that they can carry out efficient experimentation.

Learning from Joint Experimentation to Facilitate Scaling-Up

Farmers play a very active role in the PTD process, but it is important to ensure that all three PTD actors implement the whole process together. If "good" experiments are done in some villages, the PTD approach has a better chance of being extended to other villages in the same district and gradually accepted in the extension system on a broader scale. In order to increase the acceptance of such new participatory approaches in the Vietnamese technique-orientated extension system, the three actors need to analyse each step of the process. Much interaction and learning takes place, and lessons learnt need to be shared among the actors at different levels: locally within the villages, regionally and nationally. In order to scale up PTD, it is important to screen critically and exchange the ways PTD has been launched and continued.

If PTD is to have a broader impact, it is crucial that other stakeholders know about promising experiences and related learning:

Local district authorities have to receive accurate information and reflect on new ways to support community development. Without their agreement, such new farmer-oriented approaches become stalled;
At district level, people responsible for extension need to be regularly informed about what is happening in the forest and in the villages, and why it is happening;
Provincial extension authorities and people in charge of rural development also require information about the ongoing efforts.

PTD can be integrated into the extension system only if all these decision-makers receive accurate and regular information.

Farmer exchange between two villages (Dak R’Lap – Dak Lak)

By making concepts of participatory forest management more clear, PTD helps to promote social forestry in Vietnam. This is why SFSP has supported exchange and joint learning events at national level. At the end of 2000, people came from all the areas where PTD was initiated and, for the first time, could share what had been achieved. This sharing of experience led to discussion of important issues. Such sharing events gradually create a common platform for exchange.

Although such exchange workshops offer a golden opportunity to strengthen PTD efforts, also other tools are necessary. Maintaining contact through the Internet offers possibility for everyday exchange and provides updated and accurate information about ongoing activities. The Internet could play a strategic role for exchanges between PTD practitioners both within Vietnam and abroad. Furthermore, exchange visits among actors from different areas of Vietnam present challenging possibilities to assist each other in improving PTD approaches (Scheuermeier 2001). To organise and enhance doing, learning and exchanging PTD, it is important to monitor, evaluate and document the PTD efforts.

Monitoring and Evaluation

Even though PTD still needs further adaptation to the Vietnamese context, some initial criteria for practising "good" PTD were jointly developed during the last PTD review workshop (Scheuermeier 2001). This was conducted with the intention of launching a quality control system for PTD and using these criteria as tools for activities of scaling-up, monitoring and evaluation (M&E). The first criteria are directly linked to current challenges and major concerns regarding PTD efforts. The Vietnamese PTD practitioners agreed on four types of criteria, which are generally described as follows.

Farmer-led experiments or demonstrations

Demonstrations were perceived by local extension workers as the most important tools for spreading well-tested technologies in rural areas. PTD experiments are different: farmers try out new things. At the beginning, researchers do not come with a set of "blueprint" technologies to demonstrate. They encourage villagers to conduct their experiments properly and to share what they have learned with their neighbours. What we want to show is that, in PTD, farmers can conduct the experiments they prefer in a systematic way, these "experiments" are new to them (i.e. cannot be seen in neighbouring communes) and can be explained by the farmers. We want to show that, with minimum support from formal researchers and extensionists, farmers can carry out experiments wisely and creatively, and can develop learning platforms at the grassroots level. Results so far are encouraging. Local extension workers involved in the process have gradually changed their attitudes toward the recognition of farmers' roles in the development process and the need to change the extension approach.

Support and incentives

A common belief among development workers is that, without financial and material support, farmers will not conduct experiments. However, if experiments can only be launched by providing material support, it is not PTD but rather "participation" induced by material incentives. Such experiments do not necessarily concern farmers’ aims and, in the long run, can destroy the spirit of self-help and self-reliance. These are strong reasons why the support should be restricted. Farmers visiting from other villages will not be convinced by results of successful innovations if they are based on financial and material support. Exceptions may be justified in the case of initial bottlenecks, which always have to be justified in writing and are convincing for neighbouring farmers.

Scope and extension

There is a dilemma in PTD: on the one hand, a PTD programme should focus on experimentation, so that new things can be found that really work. On the other hand, the new things must be extended if the PTD experimentation is to be of any wider use. "Good" PTD therefore needs an extension effort that is operationally distinct from the PTD experiments as such but is, of course, closely linked to the experimentation process. In our case, this issue has been addressed by two strategies: 1) in the screening phase, jointly deciding on the experiment(s) and the potential beneficiaries of its results; and 2) assisting the participating key farmers in initiating farmer-led extension. These farmers have become more confident in facilitating interest-group discussions, explaining the experiments to other farmers and visitors. A balance must be found in involving the right number, which have to be as low as possible in order to manage the experiments well, but high enough to convince visiting farmers. Along with criteria and indicators for monitoring of the experiment itself, related criteria on the extension process were included in the M&E system.

Documentation

Good documentation is necessary so that the involved institutions and organisations can learn from the experience. Farmers also like to have good experiment sheets that properly formulate their ideas and expectations. Participating farmers keep a diary with notes about implemented activities and summaries of their discussion of experiments with visitors.

Documenting

Results and processes have to be documented to ensure that learning takes places, results are not lost, promising innovations can be evaluated, the effects of extension can be followed and the PTD approach can be adapted and improved. All the involved parties need to have access to information that is as complete as possible. Everybody must take responsibility to ensure that information is consistent and reliable. This is a challenge in the Vietnamese context, where reports are often written for bureaucratic administrative purposes, reflecting general descriptions and superficial opinions rather than accurate and profound analysis of emerging issues.

In SFSP, documentation occurs at various levels:

In the village, farmers need a full set of idea and experiment sheets with corresponding activity plans. These basic documents are jointly developed during the activities to initiate PTD. Villagers also keep diaries in which they record all implemented activities and regularly write down discussions of issues with visiting farmers from neighbouring villages or with technicians from extension organisations;
It is more complex to ensure a flow of accurate information within the extension system. The extension organisations at commune, district and province levels should have at least documents summarising ongoing experiments (experiment sheets, activity plans) and periodic progress reports. Until now, slow information flow from district extensionists to the provincial service still creates some difficulties.
PTD researchers from the forestry faculties analyse results obtained in the field, critically study the way PTD is launched and continued and make concrete suggestions for adjusting concepts to the Vietnamese context. At present, there are several diverse documents available, but the level and scope of documentation is quite broad and varied among the faculty research teams.

Adaptation of PTD to the Vietnamese context is still in an exploratory phase. However, the following adjustments need to be considered:

When initiating PTD, a stakeholder analysis needs to be done before selecting local partners to be involved in the process, in order to avoid domination by certain groups. PTD should be better implemented after an exploratory PRA to gain a better understanding of the community's problems. Researchers need more time to think about the potentials of technological options in addressing these problems before going on to translate idea sheets into workable experiment sheets.
In the context of some poor upland communities, the combination of technology generation and local capacity building can help to address resource management issues and to revive the community's spirit of self-reliance. The facilitation skills of involved local partners need to be improved before PTD activities are initiated. Over-emphasis on "newness" can lead to the risk of generating good technologies for better-off groups without adequate attention being paid to disadvantaged groups.
Taking the above-mentioned issues into consideration, a clarification of the role of PTD documentation and reflection on how to make implementation of the documentation work easier and more effective would require the involvement of all partners. This would be based on different partners’ information requirements from PTD as a learning process.

PTD Process Monitoring and Evaluation

Results, Impacts and Lessons Learned

Promising Experiments

Participation

Scaling Up PTD

Capacity Strengthening

Changing Attitudes

Implications for a Social Forestry Extension Curriculum

The evaluation of PTD deals not only with its direct results, but also with the process. In the beginning, many researchers focused on the results without giving enough consideration to the process. Results-based evaluation is directed toward this end, but process-based evaluation helps to explain why new things work or why they fail. In the ongoing PTD exercises in SFSP, it is too soon to discuss the technologies, but the first results of the initiative are promising.

Promising Experiments

All experiments have been well implemented and followed by farmers. This indicates that the objectives of the experiments respond to their interests and priorities. The chosen topics, which are related to forest and forestland management and agroforestry, correspond to their search for ways to diversify current farming practices. At the top of the "hit parade" of the participating farmers are experiments to identify new species of fruit trees that have short-term potential to increase farmers’ income. The high-value fruit-like dragon (Hylocereus undatus) offers excellent opportunities. In natural forests, improved management of rattan (Calamus viminalis, C. tetradactylus, C. poilanei) and bamboo (Bambusa procera) offer promise for increasing the production of non-timber forest products. It is also likely that, when farmers thus receive direct benefits from natural forests, they will be more interested in protecting them. However, a precondition for developing such new forest technologies is appropriate long-term land allocation. This issue was clearly stated by farmers when PTD was initiated in the first villages.

Rattan experiment plot in natural forest in Dak R’Lap (Dak Lak)

Bamboo (Bambusa procera) experiment
(Nam Dong - Hue)

Even when the experiments were less than one year old, they attracted the interest of farmers from other villages, an increasing number of whom visit the experiments to see what they heard had about at the local markets. Such farmer-to-farmer visits were initiated by the district extension service of Dak R’Lap already in December 2000. Some 40 farmers from three communes visited the three experiments and immediately sought to initiate such activities in their own home villages. They were very impressed by the planting of new fruit trees, which could diversify their coffee plantations. It will be interesting to see what kinds of activities are developed after such farmer exchanges.

PTD Process Monitoring and Evaluation

Process evaluation is being emphasised early in the initial phase for newcomers to PTD, as it helps explain why we need to have good process documentation, a system of continuous monitoring in all PTD activities and a strong data platform for scaling up PTD in the future. For instance, the output of the PTD initiating step is experiment sheets, which can be used for monitoring activities in subsequent steps. However, it still remains to be explored and documented how well these sheets have been elaborated, who selected the experiments and why these were selected.

After some initial experiences, the formal researchers became convinced of the necessity to have a good system of process documentation. In the first period, some researchers thought that documents serve a bureaucratic management purpose. However, they then realised that process documents are tools to validate results, like statistical analysis is a tool for traditional researchers. An important improvement is that participating farmers have used these documents to reflect on the experiments. The task remains to improve the forms by making them user-friendlier. This can encourage utilisation of documents as a media for interaction between researchers, extensionists and local farmers.

Participation

Initiating farmers’ participation and establishing trust were the main concerns of the research team in the beginning of the process. On one hand, in view of farmers’ bad experience with interventions like cooperatives and resettlement in the past; their reluctance to participate in any effort affecting their normal life is understandable, especially in cases where security of land tenure is still a problem. During an exploratory exercise, some farmers even asked if the project was working with the state forestry enterprise to seize the land or to develop joint ventures with the enterprise. On the other hand, reactions of different other local stakeholders differed. Some had expectations over and above what PTD could bring to the commune; others expressed a lack of confidence in the success of the approach. The research teams were sensitive to these prevailing sentiments. To establish trust, the team had to explain PTD objectives clearly and ensure the participation of both farmers and the strong other stakeholders in the area (district and commune authorities, extension services, forest protection services and forest enterprises).

The quality of participation is difficult to monitor. Firstly, it depends on the attitudes and facilitation skills of all the stakeholders. Secondly, a set of observable indicators for assessing participation has yet to be worked out. However, the PTD process itself is providing a way to enhance participation.

SFSP monitors farmers’ participation in PTD according to their willingness to share perceptions and ideas when generating idea and experiment sheets, the time they spend on intra-community information sharing and the quality of the process documents (completed forms, experiment diaries). The initiation of PTD was the first time in Vietnam that remote forest-dweller communities, local extensionists and researchers came together to discuss local problems and possible action. In focus-group discussions, the farmers expressed their willingness to take part and were happy with the experiments. "This is the first time our inspirations and ideas have been heard," a woman in the mangrove area of Ca Mau said in a focus-group discussion for monitoring experiments. Judging by their motivation, it is clear that the quality of farmers' participation increased throughout the process. In the first phase, the local research teams had unduly high expectations. Some farmers thought that PTD would bring agricultural inputs or development investment. This thinking was nurtured by a subsidy system in the past. The "outsiders" had to clarify the nature of PTD and the possible roles of formal researchers and to develop a clear policy concerning financial assistance for the experiments, so that this did not distort the incentive for participation.

Provision of material incentives is an important issue, especially in poor communities. A good PTD approach should not depend on strong external support. The limited material support to experiments has to be concentrated in order to be applied properly and to help in addressing conservation objectives. Furthermore, because some of the experiments can pose high risks to farmers, there may be a need for a mechanism to compensate farmers. Some materials may not be locally available. In the first phase, some seed money to encourage activities by key farmers – especially poorer ones who wanted to test innovations – proved to be useful. In other cases, money is paid as compensation to farmers for taking care of some "researcher-led" experiments. A revolving fund for PTD has been set up for long-term development research in which technology generation is coupled with local capacity building. It was important, however, to clarify the nature of PTD as a self-help process early in the initiation phase.

Another indicator of success is farmers' confidence. Participating farmers are becoming more and more confident in explaining experiments to other farmers and to visitors. SFSP observed this confidence not only in PTD activities, but also in self-help activities for community development. In view of this impact, it would be a good idea to consider ways of training key farmers to enhance their spirit of experimentation and to encourage them to become good voluntary farmer-led extension workers at the community level.

An institutional impact of the PTD process is the increased mutual understanding between farmers and local extension agencies. Firstly, problems of farmers and other local stakeholders were shared in focus-group discussions. Secondly, development of mutual understanding has led to attitudinal change among the participating extensionists and to increasing confidence among the farmers.

Like farmers, local extension staff and involved authorities misunderstood the nature of PTD at the beginning of the process. Some of them expected PTD to lead to an investment or intervention, e.g. a development project from the donor side. Others were uncertain about participating, worried that "it can disturb our management system", a view shared in a frank atmosphere. Seeing that this could lead to a distorted view of the roles of formal researchers, the site teams have used different events, more or less informally, to clarify their roles. However, learning by doing, extensionists have gradually changed their attitudes toward PTD and also realised the need to change their attitudes toward the local community.

Scaling Up PTD

The administrative leaders at provincial, district and commune level are increasingly recognising the roles and potential of communities in NRM. However, scaling up PTD is not an easy process and the degree of recognition is still low in comparison with the prevailing culture of obedience to higher authorities and a strict adherence to policy directives from above. "Extension has been planned according to the state programme. Unless that is changed, we cannot do otherwise," said a leader in DARD. This leads to weaknesses, but also opportunities: NRM policies in Vietnam have been rapidly changing toward more decentralised governance, and extension approaches will change accordingly. As in other areas of development of social forestry in Vietnam, supporting policies are needed for PTD to be adopted as an extension approach in complex situations.

Capacity Strengthening

PTD is not only an approach to develop practices; it also deals with capacity building. In our case, PTD has contributed to the capacity building of three partners in its triangle in at least three components:

creation of field-based learning by forming platforms involving different actors who conduct joint experiments;
development of a network of key farmers who are keen on community development activities and establishment of local interest groups that meet to work together on the experiments;
continuous reporting to local authorities and the involvement of local development agencies in monitoring experiments and group dynamics, helping to encourage reflection on the process and on the applicability of the approach in establishing an effective extension system.

Civil society in rural Vietnam is taking a more important role in community development. For instance, the Women's Union in a commune in Ca Mau is providing its members with access to the formal credit system, and a Farmers' Association in the uplands is involved in business activities to provide farm inputs. By working closely with these institutions, the research teams have more opportunities to learn from the communities and to enhance capacities in local organisations.

Changing Attitudes

SFSP clearly observed indicators of attitudinal change in the research team members and some participating extensionists. In the beginning, some of the research team members were exposed to PRA training and field exercises. However, this exposure was too short and led to a misunderstanding of the ease and structure of the approach. For instance, the idea still existed that PRA and PTD were distinct, instead of wisely combining PRA tools to facilitate participation, identification of problems and selection of experiments. Future PTD training should help participants reflect on ways to incorporate different PRA tools into different phases of the PTD process. Linked to this, formal researchers need additional skills in conducting PTD as an action-research process. More time should be allocated to encouraging researchers to interact with experimenting farmers and to share their analytical skills so as to strengthen capacities for farmer-led research and to sustain the PTD process.

In addition, researchers need to learn to take an "un-learnt" attitude so that they are more sensitive to the real needs of farmers, instead of jumping to conclusions according to their own perspectives. For instance, when a thinning experiment in mangrove was discussed, the forester's perspective was that this would optimise timber production, whereas an interview with the participating farmers revealed that they wanted to try out thinning "to make the shrimp pond easier to manage". This "management" included the ease of keeping watch on their shrimps to prevent theft.

Implications for a Social Forestry Extension Curriculum

A university-level "Agriculture and Forestry Extension" curriculum was elaborated in the Participatory Curriculum Development (PCD)[5] process implemented by SFSP and its seven working partners, along with curricula of other subjects relating to social forestry. Thus far, the first draft of the workbook – the result of a long collaborative effort – has been distributed for revision and feedback. The workbook was designed with ambitious aims of providing a comprehensive set of knowledge and skills for future extension workers. However, reflection on the field-based learning experience from the PTD process and its implications can help to improve the structure and content of the curriculum. Instead of over-emphasising the "teaching" role of extension, PTD should be considered the main component of the subject. Firstly, as discussed above, the extension system should be more responsive than directive, to cope with the complex, diversified and risk-prone situations of forest-dweller communities. Secondly, in using PTD as the main approach, future extension workers will be trained to develop their attitudes to become learners rather than "teachers". There is clearly a need to rethink the "target groups" with which the future social forestry extension workers will work and the aggregation of combining Agriculture and Forestry Extension as indicated in the name of the subject can lead to simplification of the approaches. An alternative for the revision is to create ways to de-emphasise some extension approaches in order to provide more space for PTD.

SFSP initiated PTD to create field-based learning experiences as a contribution to the process of PCD. Initial results have provided tangible teaching resources and issues for revising the types of skills to be included in the training programme. PTD monitoring documents have provided good inputs for identifying additional skills needed to enhance PTD results and impacts. Firstly, PTD can be perceived as an action-research process, and some skills relating to this need to be enhanced. Secondly, the role of the action-researchers in PTD is not only to conduct research, but also to facilitate farmers’ own research; to be able to do so, extensionists and researchers need continued enhancement of their facilitation skills. They need training on how to provide effective technical inputs related to the PTD experiments, how to analyse experiment sheets with farmers and how to hold discussions with farmers to improve experiment design. Training should also address the skills required to construct rational layouts of experiments to fit farmers' situations, to identify which criteria farmers want to observe, to select rationally the criteria to reflect farmers' needs and, at the same time, to maintain rigorous experimentation. Skills are also required to develop a system for farmers to monitor and evaluate the results and processes of PTD themselves, how to monitor group dynamics and participation, and how to enhance key-farmers' and interest groups' roles and capacities. Last but not least, skills are needed in lobbying for policies that support PTD.

In the last PCD workshop (December 2000) it was agreed that an integrated social forestry practicum for three subjects would be designed and implemented. In the case of PTD, appropriately prepared students should have the opportunity to work in some important phases of the process. The study sites selected for PTD are excellent learning grounds for field-based teaching and practical training. However, logistical issues need to be taken into account. For instance, accessibility is a problem for one of the three sites of the Southern working partners. The arrangement of training schedules to fit in with the ongoing PTD activities is also a concern.

Idea gathering among farmers, researchers and extensionists (Dak R’Lap – Dak Lak)

Challenges

PTD Experiments

Scaling Up

PTD in social forestry has been launched at various sites throughout Vietnam. Initial experiences are promising:

At all sites, concrete experiments have been initiated jointly by farmers, extensionists and researchers from forestry faculties. The experiments are quite well documented with idea and experiment sheets and with corresponding activity plans;
To initiate PTD in a village, a well-organised sequence of different methodological steps was successfully tested, using appropriate tools;
During the first review workshop involving PTD practitioners in December 2000, exchange of experience took place at national level. It was an opportunity for initiating the emergence of a common platform for conducting PTD related to community-based forestland management and to promote PTD in Vietnam;
Further exchange is continuing with regular updates of current PTD results and debates on emerging questions and issues on the SFSP website. Other exchanges take place during field visits by PTD actors and also by representatives of local and regional authorities and extension services;
University lecturers and researchers are regularly exposed to field activities by collaborating with rural communities and extension staff. Based on such field exposure and learning, social forestry curricula have been revised and improved so as to reflect better the practices and realities in the field.

Even though a dynamic process has been started through PTD experiences, participants have noticed weaknesses and there are still challenges ahead. Having "good" PTD is important not only for the current experiments, but also because it is the only way to convince other stakeholders in the extension system about the effectiveness of the approach. Some of the weaknesses and challenges are as follows:

PTD Experiments

Some PTD experiments were started too quickly after community members and researchers prioritised the problems. By over-emphasising the "newness" of the activities, some experiments were designed to address superficial symptoms and not the root cause of the problems in the local system of resource management. PTD practitioners need to improve their facilitation skills so that the idea sheets can be explored jointly in more depth.
Quality control was launched by jointly defining initial criteria for practising "good" PTD. These criteria need to be strictly observed in the field during M&E of current and future PTD experiments.
Extension of the jointly developed innovations needs to be closely followed so that the effectiveness of PTD can be measured. To facilitate dissemination, local extensionists and authorities have organised farmer-to-farmer visits in neighbouring villages. It is important that extensionists keep records of the farmers who adopt or adapt technologies generated through PTD.

Scaling Up

The most challenging issue is the effective and active involvement of local extension staff. There is an immediate and general need for training and coaching in order to improve their organisational, management, facilitation and communication skills.
As PTD involves tripartite coordination, a collaboration mechanism among researchers, extensionists and local farmers needs to be clarified. In the current situation, one of the options is a kind of "PTD network" in which each Faculty of Forestry participating in SFSP acts as a node to coordinate with extension agencies in its mandated area. Experience from PTD at each site should be used to develop short courses for in-service reorientation for forestry extension staff.
The process of sharing PTD experiences, initiated after the December 2000 workshop, needs to be enhanced.
Concrete PTD processes have been initiated in Vietnamese villages. However, PTD has still to be adapted to the Vietnamese context, carefully taking into account the institutional setting of rural development organisations and their staff. Key concepts and most tools have been "imported" and they may have to be reviewed and adapted to local conditions.

Questions for Debate

Institutionalising learning and sharing of PTD experiences

The SFSP in Vietnam emphasizes the importance of adapting PTD to the local context, of exchanging experiences and learning among PTD practitioners/pioneers and with extension and research organizations at various levels. How can this critical function be performed after the project comes to an end? Is there a place in the existing structure to locate this function? Is the proposed network an option? How is it financed in the long-run?

References

Department of Agriculture and Forestry Extension. 1997. The National Seminar on Agriculture and Forestry Extension, 18–20 November 1997. Hanoi: Sida–MRDP / SDC–Helvetas.

Helvetas Vietnam. 1999. Terms of reference for Ueli Scheuermeier, Consultant, LBL Switzerland, Consultancy on Participatory Technology Development (PTD), Cao Bang Co-operation Programme, Nguyen Binh District (31 May to 26 June 1999).

Hoang Huu Cai. 1999. Report of a training needs assessment for the development of natural resource management curricula (unpublished).

Hoang Thi Sen , Hoang Huy Tuan & Felber R. 2000. Initiating PTD in Phu Mau village, Huong Phu Commune, Nam Dong District, Thua Thien Hue Province (03–06 April 2000). Hue: Hue University of Agriculture and Forestry, Forestry Faculty / SFSP.

Le Ba Toan & Felber R. 2000. Initiating PTD in Rach Goc B village, Tan An Commune, Ngoc Hien District, Ca Mau Province (24–28 April 2000). Ho Chi Minh City: University of Agriculture and Forestry, Forestry Faculty, Thu Duc / SFSP.

Scheuermeier U & Katz E. 1999. Initiating PTD in a village: documentation of a training workshop for SFSP working partner institutions, Thai Nguyen and Vau (Van Lang Commune). SFSP / SDC / MARD / Helvetas Vietnam.

Scheuermeier U & Katz E. 2000. Initiating PTD in a village: documentation of a training workshop for SFSP working partner institutions, Dak Lak. SFSP–SDC–MARD–Helvetas Vietnam.

Scheuermeier U. 2001. PTD review workshop 11–15 December 2000 in SFSP Hanoi. SFSP–SDC–MARD–Helvetas Vietnam.

Werner M. 1997. Government extension service: a need for rethinking the purpose and redesigning the task? Some ideas based on organisational development principles. In: Department of Agriculture and Forestry Extension (ed.), The National Seminar on Agriculture and Forestry Extension, 18–20 November 1997. Hanoi: Sida–MRDP / SDC–Helvetas.