Instructions
Review the ns for your final project
Submit here a draft of the last section, where you describe how they have or how they could take into consideration multicultural perspectives when solving the natural resource problem. What tools did they or could they use? What does the implementation of the tool look like? What are the expected outcomes of applying the tool? (see rubric) | will provide brief feedback to let you know if you’re on the right path. Please note, that this is a procedural question, not a determination of the management policy itself. For example, I’m not looking for your suggestion of who should have access to how many fish. | am looking for how the managers would go about determining the needs of the different stakeholders to make this decision.
Consider whether they could or did use one of the tools introduced this week: (But please note this is far from an exhaustive list of options – the process should match the needs of the context)
Historical timelines
Stakeholder analyses
Values and land use mapping
Human Wellbeing monitoring
Multi-stakeholder processes
Collaborative
Week 8 | Draft 2 of Final Paper
With a mix of farming, forests, grasslands, wetland regions, and urban areas, Africa is one of the continents with the most varied land uses. Over 50% of the continent is covered by grassland and forests. The remaining 32.4% of the land area is made up of “other land,” which includes deserts and arid, unproductive regions.
In terms of total forest area, Africa is the third largest continent in the World. This forest is primarily found in the continent’s central and southern tropical nations. Because of its second-largest rainforest, which covers an area five times the size of France and is believed to be 152 million hectares in size, the Congo Basin has earned the moniker “lungs of the earth.”
In addition, 66% of Africa is categorized as dryland. Due to the hot, dry climate that predominates in these desert regions, only around 17% of the territory is covered with trees (Raum, 2018). While global deforestation has declined recently, it has been steadily increasing in Africa since 1990, which has reduced that continent’s ecosystem’s capacity to withstand climate change. Indeed, trees are essential to maintaining a thriving ecosystem. They serve as watersheds, prevent soil erosion, control the local temperature, and gather greenhouse gases, which are crucial in the effort to combat global warming. But what are the primary reasons for deforestation in Africa, and how can it be prevented from having such terrible effects?
One of the tools that can be used to assess the problem successfully is stakeholder analysis.
Stakeholders are any individual or group of individuals, whether or not they are organized, who have an interest or stake in a particular issue or system. They might be at any position or level within society, ranging from global, national, or regional issues to home or even intra-household levels. The stake may be influenced by a mandate from an institution, closeness, historical or identity links, dependence on one another for existence, financial interests, or a number of other capacities and concerns.
The stakeholders typically have particular skills, knowledge, and comparative advantages (such as proximity to the resource or a specific mandate), are typically prepared to invest particular resources (such as time, money, or political clout), and are usually aware of their own interests in the management of the forest or other natural resource.
The stakeholder definition is significantly complicated by the fact that stakeholders’ “interests” are varied and usually internal rivals (even within a group or family). This can be seen in the variation in their “interest” in time and place, given that stakeholders who live in an uncertain environment prefer to use opportunistic methods. A variety of solutions may need to be selected by stakeholders, either individually or collectively. A community that is becoming increasingly land-scarce may feel obligated to convert remaining forest commons into agricultural land for the benefit of future generations, even though doing so makes it more challenging and expensive for the remaining village residents to gather fuel, wood, and other forest resources.
In some investigations, particular groups take the lead, such as those with limited means in a study of poverty. These might be referred to as primary stakeholders in contrast to secondary stakeholders. Once more, some players might not be the “primary” user of a resource for one specific use but rather for other parts of the collection of forest resources (Raum, 2018). An actor could, for example, not be interested in wood as a resource per se but rather in the water that the catchment forest holds or other ecosystem services, like mushrooms, of course.
We might also distinguish between those affected favorably and negatively by choice. These categories are referred to as “active and passive stakeholders.” Once more, certain actors may both influence and have an impact on a particular course of action. For instance, cutting down a tree might damage or obstruct streams that flow to a farm.
Stakeholder influence and importance concerning one another is a subject for discussion. The significance is based on the stakeholder’s ability to shape a process’s outcomes or on their resource access level. Influence is the stakeholder’s capacity to affect the resource’s availability.
The returns
According to the Dubois approach, a player or group of players’ stakes are dependent on the gross and net returns of the goods and services they may purchase from a particular resource.
In this section, I adhere to the Four R’s by using the idea of returns.
Returns may be made in kind and offered for sale as items to be processed further and sold or accepted as items for immediate consumption. While some goods can be sold to customers directly, others are a part of more or less complicated market value chains that frequently involve a number of stakeholders. The category of forest goods includes both timber and non-timber goods. “All biological resources gained for human use from natural forests, other than wood,” are included in the NTFPs. Examples of broader ecosystem services include water catchment, preventing soil erosion, biological values, cultural values, etc. Returns or interests can vary in importance.
This is referred to as the identity landscape and includes values like ancestral trees, sacred groves, and places of worship in addition to a sense of place, belonging, and life. The ability of an actor to further their objectives in the face of opposing interests and actors affects returns. The stakes should be viewed as both stocks and flows.
A stakeholder analysis aims to scale the stakes in order to assess the relative economic and socio-cultural value of various resources for distinct groups of stakeholders. The ability of forest resources to store water for energy and water supply, mitigating climate change, the value of timber and poles, as well as domestic and global biodiversity will be the main economic concerns for society as a whole (Heslinga et al. 2019). Many local communities rely heavily on access to fiber, fuelwood, wild foods, and grazing resources for economic survival.
Poorer segments may have a proportionately more significant “stake” in these resources since they are more dependent on these activities than more rich segments. Resources related to trees are typically used to produce between 15 and 30 percent of overall revenues in rural areas of developing countries (Serravalle et al. 2019). These topics, as well as the connections between these stakes or incomes and diversification methods, money and present consumption, and interconnections between coping, safety functions, and accumulation strategies, are all heavily weighted in the research of environmental income. It’s also crucial to consider the variations in access and usage among the various categories of these resources. While more rich households regularly handle the illegal bushmeat trade, the illegal timber trade, and other more lucrative industries, poorer homes typically rely on fuelwood, charcoal, fodder, and wild foods.
The arguments for monetary and subsistence incomes commonly clash in home economics. It may be challenging to put a market value on natural resource returns that are used entirely or mainly for a household’s sustenance (Heslinga et al., 2019). This is because that component of household income would be less significantly impacted by market pricing (and measures intended to maximize profits).
Due to the limited number of possibilities, the shareholder values some returns highly, even if they may seem to be insignificant. Water is one such easy-to-access resource that typically has no substitutes for drinking and other home needs. Similar laws apply to fuelwood in a lot of developing nations. The importance of access to such necessary, irreplaceable products for many stakeholders is frequently underestimated in conventional evaluations that base the benefits on economic magnitude.
References
Heslinga, J., Groote, P., & Vanclay, F. (2019). Strengthening governance processes to improve benefit-sharing from tourism in protected areas by using stakeholder analysis. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 27(6), 773-787.
Raum, S. (2018). A framework for integrating systematic stakeholder analysis in ecosystem services research: Stakeholder mapping for forest ecosystem services in the UK. Ecosystem Services, 29, 170-184.
Serravalle, F., Ferraris, A., Vrontis, D., Thrassou, A., & Christofi, M. (2019). Augmented reality in the tourism industry: A multi-stakeholder analysis of museums. Tourism Management Perspectives, 32, 100549.
