Ngibikan village, Jogyakarta, 27 May 2006. Photo: Eko Prawoto.

Bamboo is widely used around the world for construction purposes, including in disaster-prone tropical regions. There can be many benefits to using bamboo in post-disaster recovery, including supporting the local economy (as bamboo tends to be grown at the community level), using and strengthening existing community skills (bamboo construction knowledge is widespread in many tropical disaster zones), it is often a cheaper option, it is strong if used correctly, there are vast bamboo stocks in many countries (especially tropical regions) and it grows very fast when compared to timber or alternate natural materials.

Despite this, it has not been a common material in post-disaster recovery by humanitarian agencies, partly due the reluctance to move away from materials familiar to Western aid agencies such as corrugated iron, steel, timber and bricks.

The Humanitarian Bamboo project was set up after the 2006 Jogyakarta earthquake to redress this knowledge gap. Written by an aid worker with a professional background as a builder, it aims to translate knowledge about bamboo, including bamboo academics, bamboo technicians, bamboo organisations and community-level bamboo expertise, into a 60 page manual for humanitarian workers. It follows in the footsteps of the Humanitarian Timber project and the plastic sheeting guidelines.

The manual goes through four sections: an introduction to bamboo, sourcing bamboo, building with bamboo and further resources. It is written as an easy-to-digest text with plenty of diagrams. The manual is downloadable from its website, and is also readable online.

Alongside supporting greater use of bamboo in humanitarian situations, the project also hopes to support better use of bamboo. Another of the drivers of the project was the contested environmental impact of mass bamboo use in the Jogyakarta earthquake. Armed with little knowledge about how to sustainably harvest or purchase bamboo, humanitarian agencies did not regulate or investigate the impact of bamboo procurement. While the extent of the impact is difficult to measure, it is clear that poor harvesting of bamboo has the capacity to kill off bamboo clumps, which is certainly a concern for future humanitarian response. Hopefully this manual will support more sustainable use of bamboo, for communities and their environments.

The UNDP Office for Evaluation and Strategic Planning (OESP) conducted a project to assess the value and the role of participation in evaluation and this manual wants to provide UNDP staff and other development practitioners with information on participatory approaches to evaluation. Specifically, the guide includes reference to tools, exercises and case studies to help practitioners translate plans and theory into actions and practice.

This handbook provides an overview of participatory evaluation, but it does not discuss it in great details. The first part of the guide very briefly introduces the concept of participatory evaluation, pointing out that it developed from techniques such as participatory action research, rapid rural appraisal, participatory learning and action, self-evaluation, and beneficiary assessment. The second section focuses more on the functions of and rationale for participatory evaluation, while part three reflects on the role of participatory evaluation within UNDP. Part four is a brief step by step guide on how to conduct a participatory evaluation, and part five present a case study to make readers understand how participatory evaluation methods can be applied in development practice. This last section of the handbook can be used as a stand-alone exercise, and it is presented in the form of a training module. A glossary, examples of some of the basic tools for participatory evaluation and a list of resources are presented in the annexes at the end of the guide.

Communicable diseases are a major cause of mortality in emergency situations (that is, situations in which people are in need of urgent humanitarian relief) because generally in such circumstances health services collapse, access to health care is very limited, malnutrition is widespread, supplies are interrupted and coordination among agencies providing health care and other assistance is often lacking. This manual is the result of collaboration between the WHO and partner organizations and sets standards for communicable disease control during emergencies, providing very practical advice and logistical information.

This guide deals with the fundamental principles of communicable disease control in emergency situations, dividing the required actions into five steps. Firstly, ideally within one week from the beginning of the emergency, a rapid assessment should be conducted to identify communicable disease threats and define the overall health status of the population. Then, during the prevention phase measures should be taken to maintain a healthy physical environment and good living conditions for the population. Early warning mechanisms should be in place during the surveillance phase, to ensure early reporting of cases, to monitor disease trends and to facilitate prompt detection and responses to outbreaks. During the outbreak control phase, experts must ensure that outbreaks are rapidly detected and controlled and finally, during the disease management phase, cases are diagnosed and treated promptly.

As well as providing advice and suggestions on how to undertake these activities, the manual presents examples of tools to gather required information, such as health surveys to assess the level of risk and the current health situation in the affected populations.

This is a manual aiming at enhancing the legitimacy of international organisations, by presenting an inventory of best practices and innovative approaches to increase accountability, participation and transparency. It was compiled to be of use to top managers of international organisations, with the assumption that better accountability leads to fairer and more effective decisions. As the authors of the guide wrote in its introduction, the primary audience of the manual is architects of existing and possible new agencies, providing them with suggestions to improve the governance of the international system.

The guide is divided into three sections presenting examples of strategies used by international organisations such us the World Bank, WTO, UNICEF, IMF, UNIFEM, UNESCO, FAO, UNEP, UNAIDS and NATO to improve their accountability, participatory processes and transparency. Every activity undertaken is introduced with a summary, with information on its background, with the methods used to develop it, with guidelines and recommendations for future implementation and with a list of resources and contact points so that other relevant information can be obtained. Some of the activities put in place in order to improve organisational accountability are gender analysis, publication policy, creation of dedicated departments and advisory committees, peer reviews and complaint processes. Activities aiming at increasing people’s participation include staff training, orientation of new members, dedicated sessions, capacity building initiatives, open meetings, coordinating committees, community-based methods and forums. Finally, on-line bulletin boards, live web-casting, access to information by making documents and databases accessible, and open evaluations are among the strategies used to promote organisational transparency.

This is a very useful resource that reflects on the issue of participatory development using numerous practical examples of development programs implemented worldwide with support from the World Bank. Because of its structure, the guide not only introduces a number of important factors influencing development in practice, but it also highlights the importance of knowing and adapting to the context into consideration in order for development assistance to be effective. The guide is divided into four chapters, which discuss participation from a very practical point of view, one appendix that presents the strengths and weaknesses of various methods and tools to facilitate participation, and a series of background papers on the issue.

Chapter One presents a reflection on the meaning of participation, showing its importance to actually reach the poor with development interventions. It is interesting to note that the authors of the guide do not just focus on popular participation, that is, participation of poor and disadvantaged people, but also on the fact that all the relevant stakeholders need to be directly involved, including borrowers, indirectly affected groups and the Bank itself.

Chapter Two is more practically focused and introduces context specific examples of participatory strategies.

Chapter Three is a step-by-step guide through participation planning and decision-making, and it starts by recognising the importance of obtaining government support. In fact, the Bank and country governments must have the same objectives in order to keep their partnership together. Collaboration should be established both with directly and indirectly affected stakeholders, which local social scientists, academics, NGO and government officials can help identify. Disseminating information is the first step to take to enable interested people to participate. Building trust comes next and to do so it could be useful to work with intermediaries who have an already established relationship of trust with beneficiaries, to share information, interact, work with the community to build its capacity, to involve the opposition and to create a learning mood among participants.

Finally, Chapter Four introduces a discussion on how to create an enabling environment for participants, in order to overcome obstacles limiting their participation and strengthen their ability to act for themselves. Providing incentives for people to participate, learning from beneficiaries what poverty means for them and what their priorities are is essential to achieve this.

This manual provides suggestions on how to incorporate beneficiary participation in agricultural and rural development projects, while stimulating reflection on what participation is in development practice, on how it can mean different things, on its benefits and its constraints.

After a chapter discussing ways to support effective participation, by ensuring political will and sensitizing governments, promoting policy dialogues, promoting people’s involvement in larger projects and increasing overall support for their involvement, the guide focuses more in detail on various steps which are essential to achieve effective participation itself. In particular, the author provides suggestions on how to identify key areas to intervene in, poor rural people and beneficiary needs. He then moves on to talk about the importance of building on existing groups and organisations, as well as promoting the formation of new ones, referring to what may encourage or discourage the formation of bonds between community members. Ideas to set up income generating and social activities and saving schemes which groups could be involved in are presented, as well as advice on participatory training to improve the social and economic conditions of the poor, and to make groups more active and cohesive. The guide includes a discussion on the cost/benefit analysis of ensuring beneficiaries’ participation, as well as a discussion on the importance of action research and survey administration to identify the best ways to design and implement participatory projects, keeping contextual factors into consideration.

A list of participatory projects supported by FAO in the nineties, a list of useful readings and some schemes summarising how to ensure participation during all the phases of the program cycle conclude the manual.

QMM floating dredge and plant

Rio Tinto says it will have a net positive impact on biodiversity wherever it does business. In Madagascar — one of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots — Rio Tinto’s net positive impact strategy relies on a series of assumptions that are increasingly being questioned. Through local subsidiary Qit Minerals Madagascar (QMM), it operates the world’s largest ilmenite mine along the island’s southeastern coast, in a unique and fragile ecosystem comprised of littoral forest and wetlands.

Fulvus lemur near QMM mine site

The Rio Tinto/QMM biodiversity strategy rests on three pillars: avoidance, mitigation and offsets. It claims to avoid biodiversity destruction by dedicating one tenth of the 6000 hectare mineral deposit zone as conservation areas. Many experts say these areas may be too small to prevent biodiversity loss (Conservation International, 2001; WWF 2005). Given the uniqueness of the ecosystem being destroyed, still others have adopted a “wait and see” attitude.

Unavoidable biodiversity loss is to be mitigated through the partial restoration of the mining zone after extraction of the ilmenite. Again, scientists are divided over the feasibility of this proposition. QMM has spent colossal sums of money to catalogue species and recreate a model of what the littoral area looked like before decades of deforestation and other human-driven degradation. Yet recent evidence from paleoecologist Virah Sawmy shows that QMM assumptions appear to be quite wrong. Instead of the total forest cover postulated by QMM, there seems to have been a mosaic of forest and grassland, due not to human activity but to natural variances in soil humidity (Virah Sawmy 2009). There is as yet no common scientific vision of what needs to be restored, and QMM is thus free to decide what species to reintroduce.

Maki Cata lemur

References

> Burgin, S. 2008. BioBanking: An Environmental Scientist’s View of the Role of Biodiversity Banking Offsets in Conservation. Biodiversity Conservation 17: 807-816
> Conservation International. 2001. Review of an Ilmenite Project in Southeast Madagascar.
> Conservation International – Biodiversity Hotspots
> Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). 2005. An Update on the QMM Mining Project in the Anosy Region.

Further links

Bamboo lemur near QMM mine site