English 2.28MB - Center for International Forestry Research

0. Conclusion and recommendations
In conclusion to the MLA activities implemented during this SDC-funded project,
‘Stakeholders and biodiversity at the local level’, we discuss the relevance of the
method, summarize the main results of our surveys in the context of the different
objectives of the project and provide recommendations in the Khe Tran village
context.
10.1. Conclusion
10.1.1. Relevance of MLA in a Vietnamese context
If the overall project sought to strengthen local capacity to plan and implement
locally relevant and viable forest landscape management, two objectives were
particularly relevant to our MLA activities:
• to develop appropriate mechanisms for integrating local perceptions and
views in decision making and planning; and
• to facilitate greater involvement of local people and other stakeholders in
decision making and planning at the local level.
We proposed, by our activities, to test a set of tools, the MLA, designed to
study local perception of landscapes and natural resources in the local context, a
small village in rural Central Vietnam.
We are now able to confirm that the MLA tool was relevant to this kind of
study and provided valuable information on the local management of natural
resources. It was adapted to the Khe Tran context, where forest has been disturbed
and no longer plays the role it used to play in local livelihoods. Plot sampling,
because it records both tree and non-tree specimens, can be used in various
environments: forests, plantations or even rice fields. The socio-economic data
and the information about local perception gained through scoring exercises and