Monotiroz: ABOUT THE PROJECT

Community Action on

Protection of Village Common Forests in Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh.

1.00 CHANGE AGENDA

This project is completely an academic exercise as part of my course Community Planning, Engagement and Governance. This project aims to strengthen indigenous collective ownership over village common forests (VCF) through formulation of community protocol.

2.00 WHY IT IS NECESSARY?

Village common forests (VCFs), they are also called mouza reserves, play a valuable role in the day-to-day life of indigenous communities economically and ecologically. VCFs are outside the government administered forest categories. These forests are on small patches covering on average 50 - 300 acres in and around the villages. They are traditionally managed by indigenous communities under the leadership of mouza Headmen and Karbaries (village heads). VCFs are an indigenous innovation of forest management in response to restriction imposed by the government through ‘reserve forests/protected areas’ and increasing deforestation.

Without government support, indigenous communities have been managing VCFs in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh. VCFs provide indigenous communities with significant social and economic benefits such as: i) VCFs are a source of non-timber forest products (NTFs) e.g. biomass, medicinal plants, roots and wild vegetables that are necessary for every-day life of the community people; ii) conservation of biodiversity - forest covers help retain water in the springs or aquifers in the village. In addition, VCFs also serve as sanctuaries for flora and fauna; and iii) income support for the poor families – they can collect NTFs to earn income during the hard time in a year.

Despite these benefits, VCFs are under diminishing due to some external factors. Among them, the major ones are: i) lack of express legal safeguard to VCFs, although some laws recognise them; ii) privatisation of forest lands; iii) encroachment upon VCFs due to increasing population; iv) conflict between the customary resource rights and national laws.

Under these circumstances, it is essential to respect and recognise indigenous collective rights over VCFs towards ensuring environmental justice as well as livelihood security of indigenous families in CHT, Bangladesh.

3.00 COMMUNITY ACTION

To achieve the project’s aim I will be carrying out a few activities with participation of community leaders, development workers, civil society members and media people. On the basis of SWOT analysis, I shall consider the following activities:

1. Information dissemination on VCF and best practices;
2. Issue-specific dialogue (online forum e.g. blog)
3. Development of Community Protocol

4.00 Risk

In undertaking this work I will need to be mindful of a few things: valuing indigenous knowledge and practices, and support from the local development/community workers, community leaders and researchers. As there is language barrier, community workers and researchers could play an important role on behalf of the community people. Experts’ views are also necessary on the concepts and contradictions between individual and collective rights.

2 comments:

AnonymousMay 31, 2010 at 9:37 PM
This is great project. Interestingly, in Introduction to Development our second assessment was a very similiar scenario to what you have stated above. There the Forest User Groups was in partnership with the Department of Forestry. Unfortunately, benefits derived from forest resource amangement were not passed onto the low caste men and women. The FUG was controlled by the high caste men, with little or no representation by the intended benficiaries.

This project seems like an example of self-reliant participatory development - see "People First" by Stan Burkey. There is also heaps of stuff on agroforestry as you probably already know.
All the best
PHIL
UnknownJune 1, 2010 at 7:17 AM
Hi Ashok
In my point of view, your project is really interesting as well as appropriate not only CHT context, in fact, I believe this type of project should implement around the world. I feel that, this project meets the demand of sustainable development criteria which save the people and planet at a time. Therefore, I would say, you are on the way of long term continuous process which ensures public participation in decision making process considering three components: environment, society and economy and that cover broader areas of sustainability to bring positive impacts of present and future generation.
Looking back at history, before industrial revolution, people depended on the natural resources by practicing common forest system. In the period of industrial revolution in mid 1800AD, a huge amount of natural resources used into modern technology towards better life. As a result of technological intervention many factories, urbanization, population, air pollution, river contamination have been increased whole over the world. This planet passed just about 150 years. During small period people harmed this globe that was not done in millions of years before. Human being did it in the name of development but most of them came as counter development. Later on, In 1960s altough people could realized that most of the technological involvement and economic growth brought negative impact rather than positive in the planet , but they could not get back . No doubt, if we want to sustain the world, we have to promote indigenous practices.