Facilitating Stakeholder Participation Through Communication in Participatory Natural Resource Manag

This guide is about facilitating stakeholder participation through communication, in participatory natural resource management research. It is intended to the members of research teams, their partners in the communities and practitioners involved in community-based natural resources management. It introduces participatory development communication as a tool to facilitate stakeholder participation, addresses topics related to the use of effective two-way communication with local communities and presents a methodology to plan, develop and evaluate communication strategies.

The guide consists of four parts.

Part 1: is an introduction to participatory development communication. It presents the notions of development communication, development, participation and research-action, and defines the roles of research teams and practitioners in using communication to facilitate stakeholder participation.

Part 2: introduces a methodological approach for planning communication strategies. This approach consists of ten steps: approaching a local community; ,identifying a development problem and its causes; identifying the people concerned by the problem; identifying communication needs, objectives and activities; choosing communication tools and channels; preparing and pre-testing communication materials; developing local partnership and collaboration; producing a monitoring plan, a schedule and a budget; planning the evaluation and the documentation of activities; planning the dissemination of results inside and outside the local community.

Part 3: deals with participatory evaluation of communication activities. It offers an approach and some suggestions as to the kind of evaluation questions that may be relevant in this context.

Part 4: discusses some lessons drawn from experience, and invites the reader to note his own observations.