Resources

Perhaps the most fundamental challenge facing indigenous peoples in Central America is securing legal protection for their homelands, to preserve their way of life and the ecosystems that are essential to it. Two years ago Indian leaders and cultural activists in the north-east corner of Honduras decided to remedy the political invisibility of the Indians of the Mosquita region by carefully mapping where and how the different tribes lived. This article describes a project which helped the Indians create detailed records of their homelands to establish who inhabited the land and how it was being used. The project was also successfully replicated in the Darien region of Panama. Mapping indigenous homelands demonstrated that these lands are not uninhabited and degraded, and raised the regional awareness of the Indians, showing them the common ground they shared with other indigenous peoples and empowering them to pursue legal protection for their homelands.

This report summarizes the result of the 2nd Internal evaluation of the ongoing 4th phase implementation of the 'Rural Family and Welfare Project'. The evaluation objective was not only to assess the current progress of the project and the willingness of the actors at the village level to sustain the program but also to 'test relatively new methodological approaches, mainly PRA, in order to further strengthen grassroot participation'. In doing so the report devotes a great deal of attention to exploring the ideology and rational behind the 'PRA approach' to M&E and provides an extremely useful summary of the key issues involved (in Chapters 1 and 2). There were six main methods applied in this evaluation: 'Rapport building with participants', 'Transect walks', 'Matrix scoring and ranking', 'Trend and situation analysis', 'Dramatized case study/role play' and 'Balloon opinion analysis'. Each of these methods are well introduced in the first two introductory chapters, while the results generated from their application are provided in the remainder of the report. An extensive bibliography is also provided in Chapter 7. This report presents a powerful, and well argued, case for the use of both PRA methods and a 'PRA orientation' in M&E activities (as the reported highly positive impact of these evaluation activities illustrates) while, in addition, it provides a well structured basic reference source for those interested in implementing such activities.

This study explores the method of wheat production among the Mapuche of Repocura, a poor indigenous area in the south of Chile, and how this can be successfully combined with the capacity and understanding of formal researchers. Six typical properties were selected after examining the land of 115 smallholdings, and a survey was done of those in charge of wheat technology in the main productive areas of the region. The authors concluded that for Mapuche knowledge to be successfully combined with the capacity and understanding of formal researchers, the latter must first change their values and recognise the worth of forming partnerships with peasants. Secondly, high quality interfaces between the producer and apparatus for the production of agricultural technology are required. The most immediate obstacle to achieving such an interface is identified as the isolation of peasant knowledge from its social and ecological context, which leads to significant errors of interpretation, assimilation, and application. The authors argue that such a creative interface is unlikely to occur for some time to come unless state and NGO decisionmakers working in peasant farming take the necessary political decisions to change the nature of agricultural research and extension intervention.

Argues that, given the weaknesses of both published statistics and questionnaire-based socio-economic surveys, some fundamental changes must be made to the way information is collected and analyzed. It looks first at some of the problems of data collection using questionnaire surveys, then suggests how these problems can be overcome by using participatory techniques. A practical example is given from Nepal, where PRA was used to examine the seasonality of fodder supplies.

This book examines 'the ways in which people form images of other places and how these images influence many decisions'. Examples are given of how people's mental maps reveal their perceptions and beliefs about the world. Planners asked people in Birmingham, UK, for 'the maps that they had in their heads and which they used in moving around the centre of the city'. The response was very large because 'people seemed to like the idea of helping planners and being involved in some small way with the planning process going on in their town'. As in PRA mapping activities, the maps drawn reflected people's experiences. In another example, a black school boy in Boston drew five educational institutions in the area, 'indicative of his perception of education as an escape route from the segregated life he leads'. Our mental maps are influenced and shaped by information, such as that provided by the media and school text books. School leavers ranked the places where they preferred to live, revealing 'local domes of desirability and a shared national viewpoint' regarding images of certain towns. The book ends by looking at how to change people's mental maps : 'the maps and models of the world we carry around with us need larger and much more relevant information inputs'.

Participatory mapping is used as a way of collecting complex socio- economic and bio-physical data needed to understand the relationships between farming and forests. This has been used in Nepal where there is little other information available to fieldworkers. boundaries, features and uses of forests can be recorded, although field workers have a tendency to construct sketch maps themselves with little consultation with villagers. Participatory mapping overcomes the problem of fieldworker bias and allows a much greater amount of information to be portrayed on the map. Different user groups or key informant can produce different maps depending on their perception and use of the forest. Participatory maps are generally more accurate than fieldworker produced maps. They are considered to be detailed, non threatening, reliable and cost effective.