Catalog

The Cordillera Highlands Agricultural Resource Management (CHARM) Project in the Philippines is an integrated rural development project—with a difference.

Like most other projects, it has several components:

• rural infrastructure development

• agricultural support services

• reforestation

What makes the Project stand out, however, is its community mobilization component that involves stakeholders in a bottom-up, participatory development planning.

The people the Project is meant to serve have driven the development planning process.

From the beginning of the Project, residents of poor communities were involved directly in defining priorities and identifying subprojects to address local needs. Elected officials, nongovernment organization (NGO) representatives, and local government agencies also took part in this process.

Subprojects identified by the communities then went through a collaborative screening and selection process involving the stakeholders—including government agencies — at municipal and provincial levels.

Beginning in 1996 and running through 2003, the CHARM Project is being implemented in 82 barangays—the smallest political and administrative unit in the Philippines — in 16 municipalities in Abra, Benguet, and Mountain provinces in northern Philippines.

Top

The Project’s development planning process provides significant opportunities to strengthen stakeholder participation and make decision making more democratic.

Residents from poor communities were organized into project management groups to identify and prioritize development needs.

The residents represented diverse groups within their communities, including youth groups, women’s clubs, farmers’ associations, elders, religious groups, and barangay officials.

As a result, residents say, subprojects were selected to meet their needs and priorities. Before the CHARM Project, only local barangay officials and a few community leaders had been involved in development planning.

Because of the participatory nature of the planning process, residents and barangay and municipal officials felt a greater sense of ownership over the development plans and priorities.

Commitment to the process was strong: the planning workshops were well attended despite bad weather, travel costs, and work demands.

One barangay official pointed out that the people of his barangay had never been involved in such an intensive planning process before.

He said they were proud of their achievement as a community in coming up with a barangay development plan. Others felt they had learned new skills: they learned how to articulate needs, set priorities, and identify schemes to meet their prioritized needs.

Elected officials at the municipal and provincial levels gained a greater appreciation of widening the scope of participation in development planning.

The participatory planning process also helped strengthen collaborative partnerships between provincial and local government agencies and NGOs; before the CHARM Project, government units and NGOs rarely worked together.

Top

The participatory planning process helped ensure that the development interventions supported by the Project meet the perceived needs of the poor.

The sense of ownership and the collaborative partnerships the process engendered will help make the interventions effective and sustainable.

But the participatory process should not be a onetime experience. A critical challenge facing the Project is how to institutionalize this process. Some important lessons were learned in meeting this challenge.

Adhere to the participatory process while developing new strategies to improve it. The planning process at the barangay level was generally inclusive, but women and the poorest households may have been under- represented.

Given their child-care and household responsibilities, some women found it difficult to attend the lengthy workshops on participatory planning. Also, participants bore the transportation costs and gave up regular work schedules to attend the workshops; these are luxuries that poorer households can ill afford.

A need exists to innovate and develop different strategies to make the process more practical, realistic, and accessible to local people.

New strategies are required to overcome practical constraints. For instance, the planning process may be staggered over a longer period so that meetings can be held on weekends or in the evenings.

Building partnerships takes time and requires capacity building. Building trust was an important element in strengthening working relationships.

As government officials, NGO representatives, and residents got to know and work with each other, it became progressively easier for them to meet and collaborate.

But they discovered that participatory planning requires skills in facilitation, conflict resolution, and negotiation. Some government officials, who were not accustomed to participatory management, felt the process slowed them.

Accepting that participatory development usually needs more time than top-down, nonparticipatory development, project schedules should allow participants time to build partnerships and acquire the skills essential to successful participatory planning.

Make participation an integral part of project monitoring and evaluation.

If stakeholder participation is an integral part of the project, as in the CHARM Project, it is important to measure the quality of that participation.

This is best done as part of the regular project monitoring and evaluation. Otherwise, institutionalizing and sustaining participatory planning processes become secondary to delivering project outputs and achieving targets.

The project design should include appropriate indicators of participation and ways of effectively involving all stakeholders, especially at the community level, in project monitoring and evaluation.

Top