Project Activities Update

Well, it’s been a little over two months since I saw Paul off in Vientiane and it feels like more has happened than in the entire 16 months I have been in Oudomxay before we worked on our documentary together. It’s been far too long between entries on this blog than I would have liked, but I have been far too busy in the last few weeks and internet has been notoriously uncooperative.

The projects I have been working on with the PSTEO staff has been going remarkably well. After 16 months of living and working in Oudomxay I finally feel like we’re really clicking together…my team seems enthusiastic and excited about the projects, and things have been moving forward.

The Nam Ko Watershed Management Project

At this time, we are conducting the community-based participatory research phase of our watershed project. The whole idea behind research being participatory is that the community, groups and individuals involved have some hand in developing the research objectives and methodologies, and the ultimate goal is for a mutual exchange of knowledge and learning experiences, with the objective of developing and implementing actionable, feasible, practical and culturally appropriate strategies to address issues raised from the experience. (At least that is the theory).

Our first step has been to visit seven of the 23 or 25 villages that are located within the study area and to develop relationships with the community residents and try and get a sense of what their knowledge and perceptions of environmental problems and watershed management might be. Thus far we have visited 4 villages: Homxai: a small mostly Lao Leum (Lowland Lao) about 8km from Oudomxay town; Konoy, a larger mixed ethnic village of 1000 people a little over 10km from Oudomxay town on the road to Luang Nam Tha; Houay Lieng, a Khmu village about 8km off the highway in the uplands of the upper Ko river watershed; and Najan, and even more remote village farther up the watershed past Houay Lieng and composed entirely of Khmu. In each village we conducted several activities to achieve our research objectives. Aside from doing some ice breaking games we conducted three main activities:

1. Drawing Watersheds
The first thing we did was ask the village residents to draw what they think is a watershed. The point of the activity was to break the ice, get people to relax with us, and get an idea of what the villagers believed or understood a watershed to be. The idea is this would get everyone on the same page and give my team a clear understanding of where we needed to go to develop a consensual understanding of the issues at hand. Working in teams of 3 to 6 people, the village residents would draw their perceptions and understanding of what a watershed is on large pieces of paper supplied by PSTEO. The exercise was a great way of lightening the mood and the end result was very illuminating. Throughout the seven villages, the villagers consistently drew very similar images: Often, the image depicted a rough sketch of the community in relation to the closest river, roads, and agricultural activities. This wasn’t entirely surprising as these represent the major features of the average farmer’s reality. Interestingly, the maps usually centered on water, but did not depict sources, tributaries or boundaries. Again, not surprising, as these ideals would have very little to do with their day to day decision making.

After the drawings were finished, we had one person from each group present their drawing and we would all discuss together what it meant. After each group went, my staff went about conducting some simple activities to fill in some of the gaps in our consensual understanding of watersheds and to better explain the objectives of our projects. We organized the workshop participants to stand in a large semi-circle, and then my staff explained that they (the participants) represented the mountains surrounding a watershed. Then my staff took turns pretending to be different forms of water during different times of the water cycle (i.e. clouds, rainfall, run off, a river etc) to explain what a watershed was and how all the villages in the area were interconnected by their need for water. The villagers usually found the activity uproariously funny and at the end of it all kind of looked at us with expressions on their faces that said, “Duh! We knew that already!” The one thing I’m learning with this project is that it’s not so much that the people don’t already possess the knowledge we are seeking, but that my staff and I haven’t figured out how to ask the right questions.

2. A Problem/analysis flow chart.
After the “understanding watershed” activities, we would move onto what we have come to describe as a “problem/analysis flow chart” activity. This is a pretty simple activity but a great way to get everyone thinking and you can learn a great deal about what the research participants-in this case the village residents-think and understand of environmental problems and watershed management.

Before continuing on I feel I should give a brief description of watershed management.

I found the following quote in a report from the German Technical Corporation and felt it provided a fairly accurate description of watershed management.

“Watershed Management is the process of people guiding and organizing water, land and forest resource use on a watershed in order to provide desired goods and services without adversely affecting water, soil and vegetation resources. Embedded in this concept is the recognition of the ecological interrelationships among land use, soil and water, and the ecological, social and economical linkage between upstream and downstream areas.”

Basically it comes down to this: managing and using land in a way that will maintain the water cycle within a watershed. Humans, through agriculture and other land use practices, like logging or building parking lots, change the land cover and impact the water cycle. Often this can lead to flooding or droughts if not managed properly over the long term. So, when I say we were trying to learn what the villagers perceptions were, we were trying to find out what they understood or believed about the vitality and health of the forests and land within their environment and the associated impacts on the ability of the watershed to provide important environmental services (for example, good tree coverage will hold water during the rainy season and release it slowly overtime avoiding floods, etc. Cut down the trees and voila! You’ve got water coming in your front door! That’s a little oversimplified, but in a nutshell that’s what watershed management is all about.

After my team had explained the concepts and principles of watershed management through a series of games, we would start the flow chart analysis activity. This would begin with the villagers being separated into at least three groups which would be given markers and pencils and a stack of small blank pieces of paper. One groups would be asked to think about what happens to the village when the water levels in the local village are really high, and then either write or draw as many impacts that they can think about (one of the PSTEO staff would assist and encourage and facilitate discussion with each group). The second group would be asked to consider the same for when the water levels are very low. The third group would be asked to consider and either draw pictures or write down the many uses the village has for water. They were then told that the group that came up with the most examples would win a prize (usually a bag of snacks or something of that nature.) I always enjoyed this part of the research as the villagers usually got right into the game and before long the entire room would be an overwhelming din of shouting and running around as each group raced to beat the others. The results were stunning, with literally hundreds of pieces of paper with drawings and writing on them were handed into the project team members. The papers would be hung up on the wall in a flow chart and my team would facilitate a group discussion of how one issue lead to or was interconnected to the others. What we ended up with is a fairly complex picture of the environmental and socio-economic impacts of invariable water flows in the local river system, and the related causes and impacts. The results were remarkably similar in each village. Sorry I tried to put in a chart but it just doesn't want to work. This simple activity has provided my office with a fairly good understanding of the environmental problems as perceived by the village residents.

3. Community Mapping

After the flow chart analysis activity, my team moved onto what is quite possibly one of my favorite activities thus far: Community Mapping. Basically, this involves getting the research participants to sit down in groups and draw a map of their village and the local watershed with all the agricultural activities, the local streams and rivers in the watershed, the location of the community infrastructure, irrigation schemes, and fish ponds, etc. The objective is to get an idea of where everything is located, understand the village resident’s perceptions of their space and environment and the relationships between the problems and issues articulated in the flow chart analysis. This activity is also very useful in getting my staff to listen to the research participants and to develop a shared language for discussing the issues of watershed management, land use, and the associated environmental impacts and problems. It’s also important in that it provides the villagers with a sense of ownership over how the discussion of their community and the associated issues is conducted.

The groups were facilitated by team members and they would start by developing a consensus on how to draw and represent different features that would go into the maps: rivers, road, homes, farms, etc, and then would start drawing them using pencils. Eventually what we would end up with were fairly well drawn maps of the entire village and the surrounding streams and geography. I never participated directly in this activity, but moved from group to group observing.

A few things we have learned from this activity:

The villagers understanding, knowledge and perceptions of their environment are highly detailed but also highly localized. Meaning that they had a great deal of detailed knowledge on the environment directly around their village, but limited knowledge and understanding of anything outside of that boundary, at least in anyway that they were able to articulate during this activity. Also, they did seem to have a solid understanding of how different land use and economic activities could impact the watershed and environmental services, but had a great deal of difficulty and/or reluctance to show us how or where these issues existed within their community. We were able to develop very detailed maps showing the number and location of streams and tributaries, agricultural practices (although we had a great deal of trouble including upland agriculture as I suspect the villagers were hesitant to admit they were engaging in these activities—upland agriculture is illegal—even though they were visible from the village centre.) Nevertheless, this activity has provided a solid base line of data for us to work from.

So, that is a brief summary of our project activities to date. There are a number of gaps in our knowledge and research that we will be working to address in the near future. These will hopefully include:

Local Ecological Knowledge: What is the level of understanding of watershed management with regard to how the villagers decide what agricultural practices to engage in?

What has been the impact on women in the decision making processes with regard to agriculture as compared to traditional and contemporary practices?

What is the degree of land ownership in the study area?

At this time, my team and are drafting a plan to address these gaps. More to come in the future.