fieldwork

What should REDD+ safeguards learn from the past ‘safeguarding’ experience in Madagascar?

BBC News wrote “Climate compensation schemes ‘failing to reach poorest’” covering our recently published paper from the p4ges project in which we analysed whether social safeguards that are meant to target the project affected persons (PAPs), often the poor and vulnerable groups in the community, actually succeed in doing so. BBC Science & Environment covers the findings from our article on social safeguards in CAZ. Using an in-depth case study of one of the recent social safeguards implementation carried out to compensate the potential negative impacts due to the creation of a new protected area (which also has a REDD+ pilot project) in the eastern rainforests of Madagascar, we show that the identification of the PAPs was severely flawed.

Notes from a rural study site

Notes from a rural study site Antenina Commune, North-Eastern Madagascar, 6 February 2015 Every time I come to the field in Madagascar (and by ‘field’ I don’t mean the capital Tana or any other urban areas), I get the sense that I am witnessing more extreme poverty than the trip before. Last summer (European summer not Gasy) I spent a couple of weeks in one of the most difficult rural areas anywhere in the world that I have worked in, and it was not very far from the bustling town of Moramanga.

Access to P4ges WP6 study sites

All of the WP6 in-depth sites are purposively selected based on a set of criteria, such as their distance from the protected areas (new and existing), deforestation history and history of intervention in the form of conservation and development projects. What this has meant is that most of our sites, in fact all of our sites to some degree, are very difficult to access — primarily because there are no motor-able roads to these sites.

On the challenges of staying clean and healthy in the field

Challenging fieldworks: lions or lice 31 July 2014, near Moramanga Thinking of challenging fieldworks, I’ve had to come face-to-face with Maoist guerillas in the Nepali mid-hills (2001); been chased by wild elephants in Chitwan National Park in Nepal (2003-2004); come out safe from some of the most dangerous bus rides in Northern Ghana (e.g., bus ride along a two-lane highway in torrential rain without windscreen wipers!); survived drinking absolutely disgusting water from a puddle to avoid dehydration and collapse in the field at over 42°C; and had some close escapes from dangerous snakes and scorpions in Northern Ghana.

Some thoughts after seeing teviala for the first time

Where have the Indris gone? 10 July 2014, near Moramanga For the first time in this field trip, I heard Indri the other day as I was talking bath in a small stream, that really ought to have been a big river given the landscape we were in and from what I have seen around the eastern rainforest in Madagascar. The sound was distinctly audible so they couldn’t have been much far from where we were — an area that was probably dense primary forest until a few years ago.

Doing field research in Madagascar

Since September 2013, I’m working as a researcher in the ESPA-funded P4ges project.1 After almost a year in the project and on my third field trip to Madagascar, I now feel I should share my field experiences from this project here as blog posts. This is just a preamble for what will hopefully be a series of posts about doing field research in Madagascar — primarily about conducting socio-economic surveys at the household level in rural Madagascar.