Last week we had a District Resource Planning Workshop in
Navave Village. This was the second workshop of a series designed to help
communities come together to discuss environmental issues, think about possible
solutions, and work toward a solid governance structure/plan for sustainably
managing natural resources in our district.
The first workshop was held in June, after general awareness
sessions about eco-system based management principles had been completed in
each village. Every village was asked to elect a few representatives to attend
the district workshop. It was advised that there should be a mixture of men,
women, and youth. Most villages came and there were a few women and youth. At
that workshop we identified targets, threats to achieving them, causes of those
threats, and potential strategies for addressing them. This exercise is called
conceptual modeling. It was divided into
3 habitat types: terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal/marine.
After the workshop, the team from our village took the initiative
to form their own Yaubula, or environment, committee. They gathered at my house
on a Sunday afternoon and planned how to share what they learned at the
workshop during the next village meeting.
At this recent workshop, we revisited the outcomes of the
first workshop, because some new people and villages that weren’t able to
participate the first go-round were in attendance. We talked more about
management rules and strategies, but some of the focus was on building the
capacity of the attendees to go back and be agents of change in their
communities.
Wildlife Conservation Society, with the help of Seaweb,
facilitated the workshop. I was there to provide general support and work with
the team from my village.
Some days it can feel like two years of work hasn’t amounted
to much because things happen so slowly. And some days it’s all you can do not
to give up, especially when some gossipy ol’ lady in your community asks your
boyfriend what you’ve been doing all this time. That hurts. But when we attended
this workshop we were actually an example for the other villages. My fellow
community members were standing up on their own and sharing ideas and
strategies for good practices and tips for problem solving. I felt so proud of
them!
Real change doesn’t take place over night. But change is
happening on Fiji time.
One lesson that I’ve learned is the importance of building a
team in the community. It’s something we’ve learned together. It has taken a
lot of trial and error, various projects and committees, building relationships
and trust, and just a lot of time learning how things work behind the scenes in
a rural village to get to where we are now. But I’m happy to say that we are on
our way to writing our own village natural resource management plan. We intend
to seek funding for implementation, which will also include some income
generating projects. And I’m not doing it alone.
I’d say our biggest advice to other communities wishing to “develop”
would be to first take a hard look at your community and the way you work
together. There is both the traditional and administrative structure to
consider. There can be a lot of other
dividing lines to reach across. If you can identify a few key people to stand
up and keep fighting to knock down those divisions -- that’s the best place to
start. There’s not a whole lot of use rushing into having any type of community-wide
or district-wide plan, if there isn’t a strong foundation for people to work
together to implement it.
The more I’m involved in NRM planning activities in Fiji at
the various scales (community, district, provincial, national), the more I’ve realized
how the key to sustainable resource management is with the communities. They
are the ones who are going to be ones on the ground doing the work in the end.
But the scale at which to do NRM planning is a hot debate. Neither
government or NGOs can target every community, there aren’t enough resources.
And we must always consider the scale at which ecosystems function. It’s much
larger than a village.
If we can’t engage all communities from the bottom up, the
district level isn’t a terrible solution. It can focus on building the capacity
of key individuals who can then facilitate the trickling down of information
and processes. Taking what they learn back to the communities and being an
agent of change.
One of the best outcomes for me to see at the workshops was
communities discussing amongst themselves their unique issues and really
considering ways that they could work better together, as a pre-cursor to what
will be a later conversation of how the various communities can join together.
That’s
not going to be an easy task, to create a working governance structure at the district
level. There are subtle rivalries getting in the way. There are sensitive
traditional issues people do not like to talk about. I’m akin to some of them,
but it is not my place to speak up about them. Our Yaubula Committee is working
to build a stronger relationship with our Bose Vanua, or the elders, in our
village as a place to start.  |
| Workshop participants at the Navave workshop. Can you find me? :) |
