Stakeholder Mapping: A Key Step for Restoration of Degraded Lands
To undertake restoration projects in Chikkaballapur and Raichur districts, CSEI set up field visits to understand the landscape and interact with the different stakeholders.
Ananya Rao and Manjunatha G.
Land restoration is complex work. It involves evaluating multi-dimensional challenges driving the process of degradation such as inefficient land-use management strategies, poor governance and tenural systems, biodiversity loss, and the deterioration of ecosystem services such as provisioning for food, fodder and fuel.
Any effective restoration strategy must carefully consider the ecological, economic as well as the social and cultural nature of the landscape. It must take into account the political economy of local bioresources. These aspects involve a range of different stakeholders operating at different scales — from the local to regional to national.
Stakeholders, i.e. individuals or groups of people, are defined as those ‘who affect, and/or are affected by, the policies, decisions, and actions of the system’. They share a common interest in a particular issue. Given the scale of restoration efforts, it is necessary to evaluate the interests and influences, as well as conflicts among the multiple stakeholders involved. This can be done through an exercise called stakeholder mapping.
Under the Farms and Forests initiative, which focuses on restoration of degraded lands, CSEI-ATREE is working with local partners such as Prarambha, Foundation for Ecological Security and Libtech India in Karnataka’s Raichur and Chikkaballapur districts.
Our team conducted interviews with multiple civil society organisations, local farmers, agricultural extension services and local government officials to understand the landscape and identify stakeholders critical to restoration.
This blog post explains the process of stakeholder mapping, how we went about this work and what we have learnt so far. This exercise was also in preparation for a social network mapping to be conducted in the next phase of the project.
What is stakeholder mapping and why is it important?
Stakeholder analysis is the process of determining which groups have an interest in the project, whether these groups endorse or oppose it, whether they will benefit or be disadvantaged by it, and what kind of an influence they may wield over the project. This analysis is necessary to ensure that the solutions proposed are both equitable and effective because it helps clarify which actors are important to the process and why.
It is important to carry out stakeholder mapping early on because it helps identify the potential obstacles to be avoided and assets to be leveraged.
- Understanding different perspectives will clarify the context and the problem at hand.
- Involving stakeholders in decision-making is more likely to result in solutions that are effective, relevant and sustainable.
- Understanding the differing motives, interests and goals of the stakeholders will help mitigate or avoid conflict.
- Fostering cooperation will allow for future collaboration between the different stakeholders, which is necessary for restoration efforts to succeed.
For any stakeholder mapping exercise, it is necessary to be mindful of the existing relationships and power structures between the different parties. In evaluating the importance of each stakeholder and the influence they exert on the restoration process, it is also important to avoid prioritising only powerful stakeholders and underrepresenting those who are already marginalised.
CSEI’s field visits in Chikkaballapur and Raichur
During our field visits to these two sites, we interviewed four broad groups of people: NGO workers, farmers, government officials and researchers.
In our interviews with NGO workers, we spoke about the size and composition of their teams, their main areas of intervention, sources of funding, which government schemes they use and which government departments they work with. Additionally, we spoke with researchers who are working in different institutions, ranging from public universities to private research centres, to understand what interventions their institutes are carrying out in the region and to learn from the research they have already done regarding the extent of land degradation and the need for restoration.
Our interviews with farmers involved two types of questioning
We gathered data on a set of fixed parameters, such as how long they had been farming for, what crops they grew, where they sold their produce, whether they farmed full time or not, whether they used organic methods or not, whether they owned livestock or not, and how much they earned.
It also involved more open-ended conversations about how they irrigated their land, how they managed diseases and pests, how they managed the soil, and their observations and opinions around soil and water conservation.
In order to better understand the causes for greening (increase in land under green cover) and browning (change in land use) in the region that is visible through satellite imagery, our team also visited some of the areas in person and spoke to communities residing there to understand why and how the land had changed over the past few years.
Read | The ‘Ground Truth’: Understanding Land Degradation in Raichur
We have initiated preliminary conversations with the Zilla Panchayat, District Collector and the relevant district line departments on the potential for leveraging public finance towards ecological restoration lens. These initial conversations will be built on and taken forward in future engagements.
While we initially attempted to create two different maps for Chikkaballapur and Raichur districts, an analysis of the data we gathered during field visits showed that most of the stakeholders in the two districts overlap with each other. Hence, we created a single map for both districts:
The groups that will benefit the most from restoring the land are those that use it or depend on it in some way. These are the groups that will likely be most interested in participating in restoration efforts.
As the centre of the diagram shows, fieldwork helped us identify four main groups who use the land:
- Farmers who use the land to grow their crops.
- Those who collect resources from it for their daily subsistence. Majority of this group is composed of landless labourers and smallholder farmers, though a small proportion of landed farmers also use the commons to collect uncultivated greens.
- Those who own livestock and use the land to graze or feed their animals.
- Self-Help Groups and other microenterprises who collect resources or grow certain produce that they then sell.
Based on the interviews we have conducted so far, farmers in the region can be categorised into many sub-groups, based on whether it is their full time occupation, how much land they own, how many crops they grow, how they irrigate their land, and whether they use organic methods or not.
The National Policy for Farmers 2007, however, categorises farmers into agricultural operational holders, cultivators, agricultural labourers, sharecroppers, tenants, livestock and other animal rearers, and those engaged in farming-related activities such as sericulture, vermiculture, and agro-forestry.
Our current data does not include these categories, but these will be incorporated in the next stages of data collection. The stakeholder map will be modified accordingly.
Supporting restoration efforts
There are two sources of support that can be provided for restoration efforts: financial support (funding), and facilitation support (which involves other resources and technical aid).
Facilitation support is currently being provided by a number of different groups: NGOs working in the area of natural resource management and rural development, research institutes, labour groups, and various government departments. These institutions, along with the Gram Panchayat, can be leveraged to provide support for restoration efforts in the future (this is marked on the right of the diagram).
Read | Summer Bloom in a Semi-Arid Land: Field Notes from Aurangabad
Financial support is also being provided by the same government department, as well as by CSR funds and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) (marked on the left of the diagram). These institutions can again be leveraged in the future for funding.
Policy and markets too wield an important influence on restoration efforts as they can act as both an incentivising factor for restoration or a disincentivising factor — which is why it has been prominently featured in the diagram above. Based on the interviews conducted, we know that multiple factors such as transition finance, an assured market and a minimum support price can influence the crops farmers choose to grow, the methods they use to cultivate them, and as an extension, the health of the land being cultivated.
The exercise of stakeholder mapping that has been conducted will be followed up with the process of social network mapping, which will further explore the nuances and complexities of the relationships between the various stakeholders who are interacting in this landscape. These maps will be used to inform the strategies we are co-designing with local partners to pilot a land restoration initiative in Raichur.
