Fjölrit RALA - 05.12.1999, Page 24

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Participatory planning processes
Box 1. Eppalock Catchment Project, Australia.
From 1838 to 1960, forest destruction, overgrazing and overcropping brought on the ruin of the
pasture and rangelands in Heathcote area of the State of Victoria, Australia. Reservoir construc-
tion was due to begin in 1960 concurrently with integrated catchment management.
Over the most degraded area of 830 km“2 the major treatment was to be pasture improvement
with Trifolium subterraneum (subclover, leguminous annual) and Phalaris aquatica (perennial
grass) together with phosphate and lime applied with chisel seeders, a minimum tillage operation.
Govemment shared costs with land users. The inappropriate annual cropping was practically
abandoned by all upland users and long pasture rotations became the norm on gently-sloping al-
luvial soils.
At the same time, Government began a rehabilitation programme on tlie “badlands”. Works
included erosion gully smoothing and revegetating, protective fencing, reforesting badlánds, gully
head structures and silt traps, streambank stabilization, aerial topdressing and a concerted rabbit
destruction campaign with the land users over the entire range and crop area.
This required a major extension effort in which soil conservation officers were allocated spe-
cific micro-catchments for planning and implementation. Tliis became a personal service to land
users to help plan pasture improvement, water supply and subdivision fencing as well as helping
refine plans for structural and vegetative works carried out at public cost.
21,000 hectares of chisel seeding produced dramatic improvements in soil cover and a signifi-
cantly decreased volume of runoff by 1975.
Economics: Net value of improvements in 1975 was AU$ 2.91 million with an intemal rate of
return of 25.4% and benefit/cost ratio of 2.0 using 8% discount rate. Production was roughly tri-
pled in income and livestock carrying capacity, with added diversity into lamb fattening and beef
cattle, Land users gained more than the community but even so, the community gained more
through additional taxation than it contributed in subsidies.
Community costs were those for the Soil Conservation Authority and the Department of Agri-
culture of the State of Victoria, Australia, plus provincial and municipal authorities, as well as the
fertilizer subsidy provided by the Commonwealth of Australia.
(Department of Conservation 1985)
ministry representative in their area. This Landcare effort has been an intemationally-
recognized success story.
IIED (Dalal-Clayton 1997) recommend that govemments and donors actively pro-
mote participatory approaches; their advice is perhaps tardy but the point is valid.
There is a need to facilitate dialogue and “ownership” for problem identification and
devising solutions. And this must happen vertically and horizontally with the aim of
“top down” meeting “bottom up” somewhere in the middle, taking care to include
those groups that are often marginalized. IIED also wam against “collecting vast
quantities of unnecessarv information” but to fit data to specific interest needs.
In the search for sustainability, participatory planning plays an increasing role for
identifying the real causes of problems and choosing appropriate remedies from a
range of options. It is important to recognize that there are various levels or degrees of
participation (Box 2), in order to avoid misunderstandings of terms. Participation can
be imposed; some organizations systematically write “participation” into the project
documents but that may be counter-productive in the wrong circumstances.