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Overview
The Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 generated much rhetoric about the need for collaboration between local communities and multilateral funders of major development projects, in order to preserve natural resources. Since then there has been intense debate about the importance of local participation, accountability to local communities, transparent procedures, and gender-sensitive planning. In this book Patricia Feeney examines the case of the Rondonia Natural Resource Management Project (PLANAFLORO) in the Amazon, funded by the World Bank, and considers the frustrations created when local NGOs and communities were effectively excluded from decisions about a project that claimed to be "participatory". In contrast she considers examples of relatively good practice and then moves to a consideration of a range of accountability mechanisms, ending with a summary of the lessons to be learned by NGOs and by major donors.Editorials
Development Bulletin
Accountable Aid: Local Participation in Major Projects is about poverty and the environment. The subtitle implies that the book's concern is with local participation...it is that; but it is also much wider....The first of the three case studies on natural resource projects, the Rondonia National Resource Management Project in the Brazilian Amazon funded by the World Bank, was aimed as resettling poor farmers ' in search of a better life'. The bureaucratic breakdowns in settling their land claims, the weak protection provided indigenous peoples, the capture of many of the benefits by the elite...and the accelerated rate of deforestation... are all documented.
Although, the author notes, the problems that bedeviled the project were not all of the World Bank's making, she takes issue with the bank for its unwillingness to build a participatory framework with local NGO's. The problems, however, appear to lie more in a lack of political will...
The Western Ghats Forestry Project in Karnataka, India is primarily concerned with the reluctance of the Karnataka Forest Department to adopt a fully participatory approach.
The Natural Forest Management and Conservation Project in Uganda was aimed at restoring degraded and encroached forest, improving forest management plans and increasing forests under conservation... The author's concern is with the evictions by the Forest Department of 30-40, 000 squatters in five national parks and a further 64, 00 evicted from forest reserves....The author believes, and she should be supported, that no conservation objective can justify forced evictions of this type. .