Use of IMET and SAPA assessment tools to identify priorities for action in the Bouche du Roy Reserve

Solución completa

by Afolabi Juste Maxime Djagoun, BENIN ECOTOURISM CONCERN

Weighting of social impacts by women at a community workshop as part of the SAPA evaluation

ECO-BENIN,2021

The Bouche du Roy Biosphere Reserve was created in 2017 to protect the mangrove and coastal ecosystems located in the RAMSAR 1017 site in Benin, and comprises several sites including Bouche du Roy. It is home to a human population of over 25,000 inhabitants, most of whom depend on the exploitation of natural resources for their survival. The success of conservation actions therefore represents a real challenge. We have therefore initiated management effectiveness and social impact assessments to evaluate the major impacts on biodiversity and the well-being of local communities at the Bouche du Roy site. These assessments, carried out with the support of the BIOPAMA action fund, showed the existing gap in terms of biodiversity monitoring, technical staff, financial resources and local development actions. Based on these shortcomings, a priority action plan was drawn up to reduce the gaps identified while consolidating the gains made.

Last update: 12 Jun 2023

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Contexto

Défis à relever

Loss of Biodiversity

Lack of access to long-term funding

Poor governance and participation

Unemployment / poverty

The Bouche du Roy site of the Mono Delta Biosphere Reserve, despite having a management plan, is increasingly faced with problems whose solutions were not envisaged in the management plan when it was drawn up. What's more, the approach to drawing up management plans does not always sufficiently take into account the social problems of local communities, who must be placed at the heart of conservation. The first challenge here was therefore to draw up an action plan based on investigations carried out at village level, in order to build up a repertoire of actions taking into account the specific needs of the various stakeholder groups. In addition to drawing up this action plan, another challenge was to disseminate it to the stakeholders involved in management, so that it could be effectively integrated into interventions.

Scale of implementation

Local

Ecosystems

Lagoon

Mangrove

Beach

Tema

Protected and conserved areas governance

Ubicación

Grand-Popo, Mono, Benin

West and Central Africa

Procesar

Summary of the process

The constitution of the local facilitation team to conduct the SAPA assessment, followed by their training, was the first major step in the process. As the assessment could not be carried out without the involvement and consultation of local communities, their commitment and mobilization were essential to the smooth running of the process. It was this involvement, combined with the local experts' understanding of the evaluation method, that enabled us to obtain quality results which, on several points, concurred with the IMET evaluation results.

Building Blocks

Engaging and mobilizing local communities

IMET and SAPA assessments are community-based, participatory processes that require the involvement of local communities to ensure the quality of the assessment. To this end, prior to the start of the evaluation workshops and meetings, we worked with the site managers to identify all the stakeholders likely to hold information essential to the evaluation. All these stakeholders were informed from the outset of the planned action, of the various evaluation phases, the objectives pursued and expected results, and finally of the future use to be made of the results obtained. This information and involvement stage ensured that the local communities were fully on board and participated effectively in all stages of the evaluation.

Enabling factors

Workshops and field meetings were planned and organized in collaboration with local village authorities.

All stakeholders were represented during the activities in order to gather their opinions.

Community workshops were facilitated in a lucrative approach in the local language to enable the effective participation of as many stakeholders as possible.

Evaluation questions were translated into expressive drawings to enhance community understanding.

Lesson learned

The inclusion of local communities as key players in the assessment provided a true and faithful assessment of the protected area's management situation and the well-being of the communities.

Facilitating community workshops in the field in local languages attracted a high level of participation. This enabled all participants to clearly express their feelings about the management mechanism in place, the consequences for their well-being, and to propose approaches to alleviate their difficulties.

Several evaluation questions were translated into images to enable the local communities taking part in the community workshops, most of whom were illiterate, to understand the evaluation questions and respond appropriately.

Constitution and training of the facilitation team to conduct the SAPA assessment

Evaluating social impacts using the SAPA tool involves setting up a multi-disciplinary facilitation team that brings together a diversity of players and skills to bring the process to a successful conclusion. This team had to be coordinated by an expert specializing in the SAPA method. Given the absence of a SAPA expert at local level, we turned to an expert at regional level. After contacting the SAPA expert, a local team was set up comprising six resource persons with diverse but complementary skills in protected area management. The local facilitation team benefited from several distance training sessions on the SAPA methodology to better understand the specificities of this assessment. The success of this stage in setting up the facilitation team was decisive in the assessment process and the quality of the results.

Enabling factors

The existence of a manual describing the SAPA methodology was a great help to the local evaluation team who, in addition to the training sessions given by the experts, were able to use the manual to understand in detail the subtleties of each evaluation stage.

The availability of local skills adapted to SAPA evaluation and with a good grasp of the intervention context facilitated the evaluation.

Lesson learned

This training course for local experts has shown us that the skills available locally are invaluable, and that it is possible to manage them successfully to achieve the desired results.

Relevance and concordance of social impact assessment (SAPA) and management effectiveness assessment (IMET) results

The assessment of social impacts was based on a participatory method that involved first consulting local communities on their perception of the impacts linked to the existence of the protected area, then carrying out an in-depth analysis of these impacts through a survey of a sample of households, and drawing up an action plan. At each stage of stakeholder consultation, a report is made to the consulted stakeholders on the results obtained and the next steps to be taken. The IMET evaluation involved the same stakeholder groups as the SAPA evaluation, but in smaller numbers and using a different method based on a series of evaluation questions. At the end of the process, each assessment produced action proposals based on the gaps identified. Although conducted by different teams and using different methods, most of the actions proposed by the two assessment methods were similar. This reflects the quality of the investigations carried out, as well as a sound methodological application and analysis of the results. We can also conclude that these two methods, although one addresses social impacts, the other management effectiveness, can be complementary in the evaluation of protected areas.

Enabling factors

The rigor of the evaluation method was decisive in obtaining the results. In fact, although the assessment methods were different, each with its own stages and methodology, similar conclusions were reached regarding the actions to be implemented as a result of each assessment. It must also be said that the experts' in-depth knowledge of the site involved in the assessments enabled them to draw up an accurate assessment of the situation, and to propose actions that were certainly appropriate.

Lesson learned

As far as lessons learned are concerned, we can say that it is important, when implementing protected area assessments, to call on specialist assessors who, in addition to their methodological knowledge, have a certain mastery of the protected area management context, in order to provide finer-grained analyses in line with local realities.

We also believe that in the context of community protected areas, IMET assessment alone is not enough to identify management priorities. The strong presence of communities in this type of protected area means that the social well-being of local communities must be taken into account to ensure effective overall management of the protected area.

Impacts

Thanks to the development of a priority action plan for the Bouche du Roy site, managers have gained a better understanding of the actions that have impacted local communities since the creation of the protected area. To date, this has provided quantitative and qualitative data justifying the need for several interventions, both in terms of strengthening biodiversity conservation actions and as a tool for mobilizing resources for conservation. To date, several intervention project proposals for the site have been inspired by the gaps identified by the assessments.