Managing Natural Resources through the Power of Partnership

Following the Rio Earth Summit, in 1994, the CGIAR established the Alternatives to Slash and Burn (ASB) Systemwide Program - an initiative that is now a global consortium of over 80 national and international research institutes, NGOs, universities, private and community organizations, and farmers' groups.

Recently, the ASP Program was reviewed by an eminent panel of scientists, and the findings were presented to the CGIAR Executive Council in October.

“ASB's systematic, pan-tropical approach of implementing common research protocols across a strategically selected range of benchmark sites is cited as a standard for how productive international collaboration on natural resource management (NRM) challenges should be organized” said William Clark of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs who led the review panel.

Developing alternatives to destructive farming practices such as slash-and-burn is essential for environmental sustainability.

ASB partners recognize that deforestation has no single cause, but rather it is the outcome of a complex web of factors that influence the landscape mosaics where environmental problems and poverty coincide at the margins of the world's remaining tropical forests. Research leading to a better understanding of natural resource management dynamics in these areas is crucial if policymakers are to introduce effective measures that curb deforestation and reduce poverty. Members of the Review Panel also observed that “Independent research at these sites would have been valuable, but in the end could only have added incrementally to the mass of non-comparable NRM case studies.”

In the Panel's view, what makes ASB unusually effective as a research program is that it developed standardized methods and research questions that have been applied at all sites, thereby generating data and knowledge that can be compared across sites, and indeed, across the tropics.

As the only global partnership devoted entirely to the kind of integrated, multidisciplinary research needed to inform such policy decisions in the humid tropics, ASB operates on the leading edge of local, regional and global iintegrated natural resource management research (iNRM). The partnership has led to seminal contributions to iNRM research methodology and capacity building, as well as significant and measurable impacts on the ground. As a result, ASB has become a driving force for articulating a more complex, realistic and integrated view of human-environment interactions in tropical forests.