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Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

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77<br />

The District administration is an important node to create information systems. The District level<br />

is important since this represents one <strong>of</strong> the most important meeting grounds between<br />

administration <strong>and</strong> civil society, in which large numbers <strong>of</strong> actors involved in District<br />

administration <strong>and</strong> policy making are directly accountable to an electorate, <strong>and</strong> the electorate is<br />

m<strong>and</strong>ated to participate in development planning <strong>and</strong> the formulation <strong>of</strong> development plans. This<br />

is the only forum at the local level with the legitimacy to arbitrate between resource claims, <strong>and</strong><br />

reconcile competing interests. The producer institutions need therefore to be articulated with this<br />

level <strong>of</strong> democratic government, so as to establish their own voice in the policy process in a way<br />

which supports the functioning <strong>of</strong> democracy. OVI-3 (“Uptake pathways for alternative policy<br />

<strong>and</strong> other innovations defined <strong>and</strong> assessed”) relates to this interface between livelihoods <strong>and</strong> the<br />

democratic process.<br />

Several donor programmes are working within the districts to improve the planning process, to<br />

make it more accountable <strong>and</strong> transparent, to integrate democratic formulation <strong>of</strong> plans at the<br />

local level with a more transparent process <strong>of</strong> allocation <strong>of</strong> funds to development projects within<br />

the district planning units (e.g GTZ). Other programmes encourage networking among district<br />

personnel to integrate planning capacities <strong>of</strong> different agencies <strong>and</strong> lead to enhanced<br />

environmental planning (eg. DFID). The argument has been put forward that these initiatives<br />

would st<strong>and</strong> to benefit significantly from the development <strong>of</strong> the farmer platforms here proposed<br />

to help them achieve their stated goals.<br />

Thus, the project aims to build upon these district-level initiatives, extending participatory district<br />

planning to natural resources management <strong>and</strong> creating an information system <strong>and</strong> multistakeholder<br />

fora which will influence the collection <strong>and</strong> analysis <strong>of</strong> data. The objective is to build<br />

a system <strong>of</strong> natural resource administration that is responsive to the needs <strong>of</strong> communities <strong>and</strong><br />

different resource user interests.<br />

77

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