Dreams, Intentions, and Realities: Stories from Vietnam and Indonesia

By Bardolf Paul

(This article was originally published in SDIA’s  magazine, IN CONTEXT. To get a printed copy, please send $4.00 along with your name and address to Susila Dharma International Association, 777 Campbell, Greenfield Park (Montreal), Quebec J4V 1Y8, Canada.)

An often-stated goal of development projects is the active participation of local people in the processes and events that have a direct impact on their lives. An array of methods and techniques began to arise in the late 1980s, created specifically to facilitate this involvement. Later many of these methods were brought together under the banner of Participatory Learning and Action, or PLA for short.

Sugar cane workers in Vietnam (photo by Bardolf Paul)

I was fortunate to start my development career in 1989 in one of the hotbeds of experimentation with participatory methods—southern India. At that time, a number of NGOs were trying out new approaches in communities where they traditionally worked. I happened to be working at MYRADA, and MYRADA staff were very instrumental in refining the main methodology, which was then called, “Participatory Rural Appraisal.”

In mid-1991, I moved on to Vietnam, which was at the beginning of its own development trajectory; and for the next twelve years I was able to experiment with and practice these methodologies on a large scale. At the beginning of 2003, I started work with a Canadian mineral exploration company in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Thus began another journey, applying participatory approaches in a different setting, the island of Borneo, and in a very different sector, mining. In this article, I examine my experience and the interplay between dreams, intentions, and realities in applying participatory practices in Vietnam contrasted with my experiences in Indonesia.

Vietnam

The dream of many development professionals is to make an impact on a large scale and, ideally, to see some systemic change in the process. This often remains just a dream because the opportunity to actualize it never arises, or insufficient thought is given to how to make it happen. In Vietnam, the opportunity arose very quickly, as the project in which I was working was both large and well-funded. It was a forestry cooperation program between Vietnam and Sweden, and it eventually involved 350 communities in five provinces in the north. It was here that the dream began and the first large-scale demonstration of scaling-up eventually took place, though that was not planned at the beginning of the project.

Upon my arrival in Vietnam, I had no idea that I would be using the experience with participatory methods I had gained in India. The approach and methodology of the project had already been clearly defined. Vietnam was a communist-governed country. I assumed there would be no room for grassroots democracy under such a regime. I could not have been more mistaken as, within five years, participatory approaches were widely adopted throughout the country in virtually every project and program and by all key development actors and agencies. The Swedish-funded project had been instrumental in this rapid spread and dissemination.

The project focused on helping poor farmers plant trees on land newly-allocated by the government. I immediately began to question the premise that the households we wanted to work with were only interested in planting a few tree species—mainly Acacia and Eucalyptus imported from Australia. Once I started talking to farmers, I learned that their interests were far broader.

I wanted to try out the Participatory Rural Appraisal methodology and see what might arise. If it didn’t work, we could always take another approach. I discussed it with my Vietnamese colleagues and they were quite willing to try. In India I had received only a brief introduction to the method so I wanted to bring in an experienced trainer; however, none was available and I was faced with doing the training myself. This really deepened my understanding of how to use the methodology. One of the unique characteristics of the Rural Appraisal method is that it can only be learned while actually doing it in a community with local people.

The next hurdle was to get approval to go into a community and start the training. Up to that point, in our project area, no foreigner had ever been allowed to stay overnight in a village and, besides me, there were a half dozen other foreigners from the project who also needed to attend. Somehow we managed to get approval and, with a sprinkling of added security in the village, we were off.

None of the foreigners spoke Vietnamese, which meant that a lot of the time you never knew exactly what was going on and had to trust the process and your feelings. One incident stands out. A discussion had begun about electrification in the village—specifically about using electric pumps to bring water up to the areas where trees would be planted. A division began to emerge in the discussion. Some people advocated working together to haul the water up by hand, others wanted electric pumps. As the discussion heated up, it appeared that people were about to come to blows. At that point, I felt I had to let go and trust in the process. Sure enough, no one started to punch anyone else, it was simply a typical heated exchange between Vietnamese—quite normal, apparently.

That was the very beginning of a process in which the methodology was tried in a small number of villages for a few years to test and refine the application for local conditions before extending the it to new villages. Soon we were invited to introduce the method to other projects and agencies and to train people outside of our project. Several large development projects began to introduce the methodology with our assistance. Once we felt confident that things were working well and that everyone was happy with the approach, we started to develop a plan for scaling-up to cover a larger number of villages in our project area. Because of limited government staff, we trained some villagers to spread the approach to neighbouring communities. Ultimately, 350 villages became part of the project, and in response to farmers’ demands, the scope moved beyond forestry and tree planting to include all aspects of rural livelihoods: agriculture, animal husbandry, small-scale agribusiness, and rural finance, none of which was anticipated when the project first began.

Indonesia

In Indonesia, the small mineral exploration company I worked for wanted to ensure that local people would benefit directly from any mineral production activities. This was the original dream, and ultimately it fostered the development of a unique development approach and methodology that became a mechanism for wider application in Indonesia.

My original intention had been to bring a more strategic focus to activities in the communities close to the potential mining area; however, within the first year unexpected circumstances would cause a rather different focus to emerge, one that resulted in a new and unique direction for the work.

Circumstances for the work seemed ideal. I was coming to run a small foundation called Yayasan Tambuhak Sinta that had been established five years earlier by a junior mineral exploration company, Kalimantan Gold Corporation. I had visited the project before and so had some familiarity with the people and the working environment. Key people in the company were great supporters of participation and had just brokered an agreement with the provincial government and a United Nations agency to foster an integrated approach to regional planning in the province. This agreement was one of the factors that had brought me to Indonesia. I also understood that the Participatory Rural Appraisal methodology had been implemented in the villages. Things looked pretty straightforward. It seemed to be a simple matter of becoming familiar with the terrain and getting on with the job.

Well, it wasn’t that simple. For starters, I discovered that participatory planning was not being used in the villages. I also felt that I needed to learn much more about development dynamics in the mining sector.

The knowledge gap about mining was remedied within a few months. I was invited to help out with a global review of the World Bank’s involvement in extractive industries—oil, gas and mining. For the remainder of the year, I worked largely with the secretariat that was sponsoring this review. In the process I became intimately familiar with the important issues facing the mining sector. The number-one issue that was preventing communities from benefiting from mining projects was the poor quality of local governance. This understanding provided us with a new focus: to strengthen the involvement of local people in community and local government decision-making processes. With this in mind, we began to experiment with a community planning approach using the Participatory Rural Appraisal methodology.

We started off in four villages. It was a huge learning process for all involved, particularly for our staff; but everyone was very committed and enthusiastic. Each village developed its own annual plan, identifying priority development issues. The Dayaks in our area are very independent-minded people and, apart from religion and festivals, do not have a tradition of coming together to plan or to make decisions; so, our biggest challenge was how to engage villagers in a planning process that they would feel was beneficial. It was essential to link community planning with government planning. To our surprise we discovered that, at the same time that we had begun our experiment, the central government had enacted a system of bottom-up planning throughout the country. This provided us with an immediate entrée into the government planning cycle and meant that priorities identified in the community plans could be brought directly into the government plan. This gave villagers an important incentive to engage in the annual planning process.

The coming together of the government and village planning processes made us realise that the methodology we had created had much wider application, well beyond our project and project area. We soon began to engage in activities aimed at promoting this approach to others, testing it out in different locations, and with other partners. We immediately expanded in our own area to include a total of twenty villages. We also started to work with other mining companies, while expanding our own activities into eastern Kalimantan. A network of like-minded people and institutions began to work on similar initiatives, and we started exchanging experiences on a country-wide level.

What had begun as a simple objective to support development activities in a select number of Dayak villages in one province in Kalimantan, evolved into creating an approach and methodology that had the potential for widespread application throughout Indonesia.

Not the end of the story

While we are far from the end of this particular story, in this paper I have tried to show two examples of the unpredictable nature of development that involves participatory processes and the potential for widespread application that can arise. When applied properly, these processes can open up the field for the unexpected to occur.

In Vietnam, the timing and circumstances were important. The country was at a turning point in the early 1990s, and was ready for a new direction in developing its rural sector. The Vietnamese were open for new ideas and were willing to try innovative approaches to address issues of poverty and development.

In Kalimantan, timing was also propitious. We had no idea that what we were developing could ever have the possibility for widespread application. The new government planning mechanism made this possible. And now, new opportunities are arising in Kalimantan to extend this approach on a much wider scale.