Participatory planning, evaluation and institutional dynamics in African Natural Resource Management

Abstract

One among other possible approaches towards integrated and adaptive Natural Resource Management (NRM) is participatory planning. Participatory planning entails engaging relevant stakeholders in the identification of environmental issues and the planning of actions to be implemented in order to address these issues. It is now widely acknowledged that plans resulting from participatory planning processes for NRM are more likely to be implemented and sustainable when supported by adequate institutions. However, the extent to which participatory planning processes are able to deliver expected outcomes, and to trigger institutional dynamics, is still largely unknown. The main research question of this PhD is “How can participatory planning processes for NRM trigger suitable institutional dynamics to more sustainably address social and environmental issues of concern in a given context?“ This research question is addressed through two lenses: a methodological lens, looking at the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of participatory planning processes for NRM, and an institutional lens, looking at institutional dynamics and their drivers. Two participatory planning processes were analysed, in the Rwenzori region in Uganda and the Fogera woreda (district) in Ethiopia. This thesis provides four main additions to knowledge. First, it bridges the theory-practice gap in the M&E of participatory processes by proposing combined descriptive and analytical frameworks. M&E frameworks used in practice are generally ready-to-use grids of criteria which are not adapted to the specificity of the case, while frameworks proposed in the literature are often resource-demanding and face the reluctance of practitioners. To my knowledge, no existing approaches have suggested combining both an easy-to-use descriptive framework and an adaptive analytical framework in order to bridge the theory-practice gap in the M&E of participatory processes. Second, this thesis draws from a wide range of social and management sciences to support participation scholars to undertake their “research journey” with more confidence. Most existing studies remain well within one or the other corpus, preventing scholars seeking to draw from both social and management sciences to understand and compare approaches. This thesis provides a typology which helps participation scholars to clarify their underlying assumptions and to identify which research approaches they can draw from to monitor and evaluate their participatory processes. Third, it provides an original contribution to the emerging literature on “critical institutionalism” by exploring a practical application of the institutional bricolage approach. In the past, institutional bricolage has mainly been used for in-depth analysis of institutional changes but no studies investigated how it could be voluntarily triggered through an intervention such as a participatory process. Finally, this thesis uses the process-tracing method to identify contextual and procedural drivers in institutional emergence and change. To my knowledge, no previous concrete application of the process tracing method had been made in the literature to identify concrete drivers of institutional dynamics.