In 1997 the South African government initiated the National LandCare Programme within the national Department of Agriculture (DoA). LandCare is a community-based approach to natural resources management, supported by the government in partnership with a variety of groups. The key principles of LandCare are to promote the use of participatory approaches and ensure effective community involvement in the design, initiation and management of projects.

Within the programme, the Institutional Strengthening Departments of Agriculture (ISDA) project aimed at building the capacity of the staff of national and provincial Departments of Agriculture to implement and manage the LandCare programme in a participatory manner. Initially, the project focused on training, but later adopted a broader approach to capacity development in order to ensure the sustainability of project interventions.

The ISDA project was funded by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) in South Africa between 2001 and 2004. This article documents some the steps taken by the project focusing on institutional capacity building, and the lessons learned.

LandCare in South Africa

The primary goal of the ISDA project was to build the capacity of staff of the DoA and provincial Departments of Agriculture (PDA) to implement and manage the LandCare programme using participatory approaches. In the South African context, however, various factors served as major limitations on the development of a truly participatory LandCare model. These factors included the focus on employment relief versus community ownership of projects, some confusion over the difference between LandCare and traditional soil conservation approaches, the departmental ‘capture’ of the LandCare programme, and the lack of effective community ownership [1]. These factors were compounded in a context where rural communities operate within an historical dependency situation. Other issues, such as annual project-based funding, hierarchical and bureaucratic structures, limited resources and the multiplicity of duties among departmental staff with some role in the programme, all posed challenges to the adoption of a participatory LandCare approach.

In order to bring about change within the department, and to get those changes to stick, key actions included generating sufficient pressure for change, developing a shared vision for change, developing sufficient staff capacity, and deciding on some actionable first steps [2]. Given the major constraints facing the ISDA project, it was important to develop a shared understanding and a vision for, LandCare among all stakeholders. One way to do this was to ensure that key departmental staff involved in the programme had a shared experience of seeing and discussing elements of a good LandCare project.

Shared involvement, shared vision

Despite the rhetoric about LandCare, many of the staff had no first-hand experience with the community-based approach. They therefore struggled to see how it could work in practice, and some doubted that it could really happen. Reading and talking about LandCare was one thing but, as the saying goes, seeing is believing.

We therefore organised local, provincial and international LandCare ‘look and learn’ tours so that departmental staff and other stakeholders could visit a number of ‘model projects’. These were local community projects that had previously received programme funds and could demonstrate good LandCare practices and principles in practice. They had also been documented by ISDA as part of its LandCare awareness-raising campaign [3]. The ‘look and learn’ tours assisted in motivating the participants, clarifying the key elements of the programme, and developing a common vision for LandCare.

These tours, in particular the local and provincial ones in South Africa, were more effective than the ‘holiday’ tours that are often organised by development projects. They used the LandCare Good Practice guidelines developed in earlier assessments of various projects as a way to focus discussions, and to clarify what made a good LandCare project. The participants were encouraged to discuss each project in terms of the guidelines and participated in group processes aimed at fostering their commitment to action as a result of the experiences and the insights gained during the tours. The use of these guidelines during the tours helped to reinforce the core principles of LandCare – promoting community involvement, dealing with natural resource management issues in an holistic manner, focusing on the causes of problems rather than just the symptoms, and enhancing local capacity.

Lwatshatsimu LandCare project

On one tour, departmental staff and community members from the Lwatshatsimu LandCare project in South Africa visited neighbouring Zimbabwe, where they were exposed to a number of low-cost practical erosion control measures that could be easily adapted to South African conditions. That visit was instrumental in triggering greater community involvement in soil conservation. ‘The experience from the visit proved a turning point in the group’s perception of soil conservation measures. It was apparent that the group understood what they saw’ [4]. This marked a transition to a situation where the community recognised that they needed to manage and own their natural resource problems rather than waiting for the government to take responsibility.

The community used professional staff to survey contour lines, but undertook the work of constructing soil conservation structures themselves. Later, community members from Lwatshatsimu participated in some of the inter-provincial tours, where their knowledge of basic appropriate soil conservation technology proved inspirational both for the communities they visited and departmental staff alike.

As a result of visiting projects on the ground, the tour participants were able to see that community-based approaches were indeed possible, and were motivated to share them with communities back home.

The costs of such tours can vary considerably. The larger inter-provincial tours, involving transporting staff from all provinces to a particular location by air and by bus, are the most expensive. Tours within a province or between two neighbouring provinces were less expensive, requiring only local bus hire to transport the participants (which also facilitated group discussions, thus building connections between the people on the bus). The inter-provincial tours were so effective that the PDAs started to replicate them on a smaller scale (and at lower cost) with only limited support from ISDA towards the end of the project. For the local tours, visits to a good practice project often took only a few hours, thus avoiding the need for overnight accommodation and keeping costs down. On one of these tours to Lwatshatsimu, half of the group were community members and other stakeholders so that they could share the message with and motivate their neighbours on their return. In Lwatshatsimu they had seen other landholders very much like themselves or their ‘clients’ achieve impressive results. They returned home determined to reduce soil erosion on their own land by making their own gabions (wire baskets filled with stones) and planting vetiver grass along contours.

Champions

Although the tours were intended to involve a core group of potential LandCare champions from each province (usually provincial LandCare coordinators and other key programme staff) this did not always happen. In some cases, staff participated in just one such tour, and new members were involved in other events. While this may have helped to broaden awareness, it would perhaps have been more effective if a core group had participated in several tours in order for them to develop a deeper understanding of the potential of LandCare and community-based projects. In response to this observation, ISDA developed a set of guidelines to assist the provincial departments in selecting appropriate participants for future tours. The idea of using ‘champions’ was to ensure there was a core group of staff and community members who were sufficiently exposed to good LandCare practices and approaches, and that they were both motivated and confident to explain them to others, thereby reinforcing a consistent message of what LandCare was about. This was seen as an alternative to exposing more staff, but perhaps it did not generate sufficient commitment or understanding for them to have an impact on their peers or colleagues within the department.

The tours also helped to raise awareness of LandCare in general. In Limpopo province, for example, tours to model projects are now an integral part of ‘Landcare Week’. The tours are a low-cost way to tap into individual experiences, and to increase knowledge and motivation to implement measures aimed at promoting sustainable agriculture.

High-level support and engagement

Exposing departmental staff who work with communities to participatory approaches may not work if their managers do not understand the value of, or have little interest in such approaches. The support of senior management may be needed to facilitate the creation of structures, internal processes or cultural conditions that can effectively challenge the traditional top-down approach that often devalues participatory approaches. It was therefore necessary to target managers as well as practitioners in participatory LandCare approaches. Without targeting the managers, the project risked training practitioners in participatory approaches while they still had to work in a traditional context, thereby setting them up for failure. Unless leaders themselves understand the changes desired, support them and model the way, capacity development efforts are likely to falter [2]. Within the DoA’s hierarchical systems, high-level support was needed in order to turn policy and strategy into action.

The various tours and high-profile visits to model projects provided excellent opportunities to involve senior managers and enlist their support for LandCare initiatives. Even busy senior managers and heads of department found time to attend or open an event linked to a tour of a model project. Short tours to projects in Australia were organised for key decision makers, and these were effective in demonstrating the widespread involvement of community members in decision making, and the power and centrality of participatory approaches in LandCare. These senior managers were able to see their peers in other countries supporting community-based projects, and benefiting from working in more participatory contexts.

These techniques to ensure the involvement and support of powerful champions were especially important in strengthening the commitment of PDA staff to support LandCare in at least two provinces. In Limpopo province, for example, the Chief Director of Agriculture commented that his visit to a model project had been ‘inspirational’, and he had since supported several initiatives to strengthen the LandCare programme in his province [1]. With his support, the department has established a directorate dedicated to LandCare, and has allocated up to 5 million rand per year to cover the ‘up-front’ costs of developing LandCare projects that are based on community ownership and planning. The Department has now changed the way it identifies and designs projects, ensuring that livelihoods and sustainability criteria are included. The Department has recognised the deficiencies in the traditional top-down extension approach, and is planning to provide training for its extension staff to enable them to become facilitators using the participatory LandCare approach.

Lessons learned

A number of factors served as major obstacles to the greater uptake of initiatives supporting the community-led philosophy of LandCare, however. These included the lack of understanding and engagement at strategically significant levels within the department at both provincial and national levels. This meant that the pressure for change was variable and that there were insufficient models of participatory approaches or reinforcement mechanisms to ensure that the changes would survive beyond the initial flush of enthusiasm. Having a greater number of high-level champions with strategic influence in more departments would most likely result in the greater adoption of generally agreed policy frameworks or institutional arrangements across the country. Despite some notable successes, as noted above, greater effort in targeting and following up with key people earlier in the project would perhaps have led to more influential LandCare champions, such as heads of department, ministers, etc., who could have provided greater leverage for ISDA’s efforts. Greater success in developing such influential champions among other stakeholder groups (such as NGOs, research organisations, community movements, etc.) would also have enhanced the institutional uptake and sustainability of LandCare as a broad-based movement.

To complement the use of the study tours, ‘champions’ and the focus on gaining high-level support, the ISDA project introduced a range of other capacity development strategies [5]. A key strength of ISDA was that it operated a parallel process of institutional strengthening that supported its capacity building initiatives. Also, it worked with the LandCare implementation sphere at the provincial level as well as the policy sphere at the national level. Lessons from ISDA suggest that cultural change requires high-level support and a range of interventions operating at various levels in order to build an agreed vision for change and to support capacity development.

References

[1] R. Holt (2004) Towards Sustainable LandCare Practices in South Africa: Caring for our Land, Caring for our People. Department of Agriculture, South Africa.

[2] R. Cacioppe (1998) Getting change to stick, HR Monthly (March) 20: 22-23.

[3] J. Prior (2002) Assessment of Past Experiences in Natural Resources Management, ISDA Milestone report, 2 vols.

[4] Lwatshatsimu LandCare projects: Landcare International Group Award 2006, nominee profiles.

[5] T. Nabben (2006) Capacity building: Lessons learnt from South African LandCare, in R.J. Petheram and R.C Johnson (eds) Practice Change for Sustainable Communities: Exploring Footprints, Pathways and Possibilities: Proc. APEN International Conference, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia.

Links

Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID)

Landcare International

National Department of Agriculture, LandCare South Africa

Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC), Cooperative venture for capacity building in rural Australia.