Participatory valuation of wild resources : an overview of the Hidden Harvest methodology.

Wild resources are often of vital importance to rural people's livelihoods but are often overlooked in conventional valuations. This paper provides an over view of the methodological approach used by IIED's Hidden Harvest research programme which undertook inventories and valuation studies with the resource users themselves withnthe aim of revealing more comprehensive and relevant, rather than assumed, economic values of local resources and incentives for their management.
The paper is illustrated throughout by examples from case studies conducted in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Brazil, Nigeria and Papua New Guinea.