Colfer, C.P.J., R. Prabhu, M. Günter, C. McDougall, N.M. Porro, R. and Porro.. 1999. Who counts most? Assessing human well being in sustainable forest management. C&I Tool No. 8. CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia.Who Counts Most? Assessing Human Well-Being in Sustainable Forest Management presents a tool, ‘the Who Counts Matrix’, for differentiating ‘forest actors’, or people whose well-being and forest management are intimately intertwined, from other stakeholders. The authors argue for focusing formal attention on forest actors in efforts to develop sustainable forest management. They suggest seven dimensions by which forest actors can be differentiated from other stakeholders, and a simple scoring technique for use by formal managers in determining whose well-being must form an integral part of sustainable forest management in a given locale. Building on the work carried out by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) on criteria and indicators, they present three illustrative sets of stakeholders, from Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire and the United States, and Who Counts Matrices from seven trials, in an appendix.

Pound, B., S. Snapp, C. McDougall and A. Braun (Eds). 2003. Managing Natural Resources for Sustainable Livelihoods: Uniting Science and Participation. Earthscan/IDRC.Management of local resources has a greater chance of a sustainable outcome when there is partnership between local people and external agencies, and agendas relevant to their aspirations and circumstances. Managing Natural Resources for Sustainable Livelihoods analyses and extends this premise to show unequivocally that the process of research for improving natural resource management must incorporate participatory and user-focused approaches, leading to development based on the needs and knowledge of local resource users.Drawing on extensive and highly relevant case studies, this book presents innovative approaches for establishing and sustaining participation and collective decision-making, good practice for research, and challenges for future developments. It covers a wide range of natural resources – including forests and soils, and water and management units such as watersheds and common property areas and provides practical lessons from analysis and meta-analysis of cases from Asia, Africa and Latin America. It offers insights on how to make research participatory while maintaining rigour and high-quality biological science, different forms of participation, and ways to scale up and extend participatory approaches and successful initiatives.This book will be invaluable for those professionally involved in natural resource management for sustainable development, and an essential resource for teachers and students of both the biophysical and social science aspects of natural resource management.

Horne, P. and W. Stür. 2003. Developing agricultural solutions with smallholder farmers -- how to get started with participatory approaches. ACIAR Monograph No. 99 120 pp.Contents1 - Before you start2- Why should I use participatory approaches3 - A participatory approach that has worked for us- Selecting villages- Agreeing on issues - Participatory Diagnosis- Searching for technology options with the focus-group- Testing and evaluating options - starting small- Reporting back to the village- Integrating promising solutions on farms- Reaching other farmers in the village- Sharing successful technologies with other villages4 - Communication and facilitation skills- Why is it important to be neutral?- What type of questions should I use?- How do I facilitate group meetings?- Using cards to analyse ideas5 - Tools- Ranking,scoring and weighting- Village walks- Village resource maps- Wealth analysis- Historical calendars- Seasonal calendars- Problem-cause diagrams- Preference analysis6 - Just do it!7 - Where can I get more information

Borrini-Feyerabend, G. (ed. with D. Buchan). 1997. Beyond Fences: Seeking Social Sustainability in Conservation. (2 volumes: a process companion and a reference book. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, UK.

AN OVERVIEW OF PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH AND LEARNING PROCESSES AND THEIR RELEVANCE TO WATERSHED MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food. 2003. An overview of participatory research and learning processes and their relevance to watershed management and development. Paper commissioned to the working group on Participatory Natural Resource Management of CGIAR System wide Program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis. 30 p.

Matsaert, H., Z. Ahmed, N.Islam and F.Hussain. 2004. Actor oriented tools for analysis of innovation systems: Some guidelines from experience of analysing natural resource based innovation systems in Bangladesh. DRAFT.These guidelines are based on our experiences of using actor oriented tools to analyse chilli and livestock innovations systems and identify pro poor interventions in the char lands of Bangladesh, and in sharing and discussing these tools with other development partners. These tools are drawn from a wide range of sources. These include social anthropological and social network research techniques (see Long and Long 1992, Lewis 1998), stakeholder analysis (see Grimble and Wellard 1997), agricultural information knowledge systems (see Roling and Jiggins 1997) and process monitoring and documentation (see Mosse et al 1998). However, the tools are not commonly found in the analysis and planning of interventions in natural resource based innovation systems. Actor oriented tools complement other planning, monitoring and evaluation tools by focusing on the structure of social relationships between the key actors involved in a development scenario. We have found them useful for:- Analysis of a given institution (e.g organisation or enterprise, project or sector) in terms of strong and weak linkages between its actors; planning: visual presentation of critical links which should be supported or developed to meet the overall development goals e.g poverty reduction, inclusion of marginal groups and in monitoring and evaluation for visualising how interventions have impacted on critical linkages over time.

Martin, A. and A. Sutherland. 2003. Whose Research, Whose Agenda? IN: B. Pound, S. Snapp, C. McDougall and A. Braun (Eds.O Managing natural resources for sustainable livelihoods: Uniting Science and Participation. Earthscan/IDRC.His chapter starts with the premise that fostering ownership during the natural resource research process is good practice. Fostering ownership requires time and resources. Moreover, it becomes increasingly complex and challenging as the scale of research moves from farm to landscape levels, and research moves beyond the analysis of situations and into the implementation, evaluation and uptake stages. Conflicts of interest may arise at various levels, as each of the stakeholders has a particular perspective, time horizon and expectation about outcomes. The focus of this chapter is on the factors that influence the ownership of research processes; from the identification of the problems and setting of the research agenda through to the ownership and direction of research implementation, evaluation and dissemination. We use the term ‘research’ liberally, to include situational analysis, participatory learning and planning and the investigation of the constraints to and opportunities for uptake of natural resource management (NRM) strategies and technologies. Three levels of ownership are addressed:    * Ownership at the macro (national and global) level, by policy- and decision-makers in national governments, donor organizations and international research organizations.    * Ownership at the meso/district level, by administrators, technical experts, politicians and private sector players.    * Local ownership, involving communities, households and individual farmers.We begin with a short discussion of ownership at the macro level and then move on to examine a case of a project fostering ownership at a district level. The cases illustrate some of the different institutional contexts and participatory approaches used and bring out important general principles relating to ownership of the process. We then focus in more detail on the local level, through a series of case studies which document interventions in communities covering different aspects of ownership of natural resource research and management processes. These cases describe the involvement of communities and other stakeholders during agenda setting and problem identification, research implementation, review and evaluation. The final section discusses some of the critical issues and factors in encouraging broader ownership of research, the benefits of this sharing and the implications for researcher roles and institutional relationships.

Ravnborg, H.M. and O. Westermann. 2002. Understanding Interdependencies: Stakeholder identification and negotiation for collective natural resource management. Agricultural Systems. Volume 73(1)3-22. Special Issue: Deepening the Basis of Natural Resource ManagementMany natural resource management (NRM) problems transcend farm boundaries. Particularly in hilly regions where land tends to be fragmented among numerous users, managing these biophysical interdependencies to solve transboundary NRM problems implies the coordination of the management decisions of diverse resource users among whom complex social interdependencies are likely to exist. This paper argues that joint learning about the social and biophysical interdependencies existing among users and between the resources they manage is a valuable and often essential element in efforts to improve NRM. Based on action research carried out in the Colombian Andes, the paper presents a process––the stakeholder identification and negotiation process––which facilitates such joint learning using a combination of individual interviews, group meetings and joint problem analysis.