Goal programming: Application in the management of the miombo woodland in Mozambique

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Abstract

Community-based management of natural resources (CBNRM) is a priority in Mozambique's policy on forestry and wildlife resources. In essence the government's policy is to manage the natural resources in partnership with the rural communities and the private sector. This represents a change in policy in the agricultural and natural resources sectors, and has potential for significant impact in economic development. This paper demonstrates the potential for employing goal programming as a planning tool in participatory natural resource management in Mozambique. The focus is on the miombo woodlands, which are the main natural forest resources in the country and which most of the local communities, the forestry and tourist industries depend on for a variety of forest products and services.

Introduction

The government of Mozambique has been effecting institutional changes over the past two decades in the search for adequate policies and strategies for the management of its natural resources. In 1997 the government approved three main policies and strategies to guide the management of the natural resources. The first is the National Land Policy, whose principal innovation is the explicit recognition of traditional ownership systems (guided by traditional laws and rules) and the intention of the government to design a strategy for their formalisation. A related aspect in this policy is the empowerment of the local communities to participate in the delimitation of their community areas and government recognition of this as a land use category. The second major land-use-related policy is the National Forestry and Wildlife Policy. One of its salient features is the empowerment of local communities in ownership and participation in the management of natural resources through community-based natural resources management (CBNRM) initiatives. This represents a significant shift in policy, from emphasis on large investments in forestry plantations by the government to a participatory management approach. Presently the State is the only stakeholder, but with the changed policy thrust the State intends to manage the natural resources as a joint venture with the private sector and the local communities. The third major related directive is the National Environmental Law. This law does not explicitly recognise the contribution of the local communities, but serves as a basis for designing regulations intended to minimise negative environmental impacts resulting from development activities and/or irrational use of natural resources.

The challenging aspect of many natural resources planning frameworks is that they inherently involve various goals within each group of stakeholders and the integration of the interests of the various users (in the Mozambican case, the State, the private sector and the communities) multiplies the number of potentially conflicting goals. Implementing the above three policies in Mozambique, together with other related land-based policies like the one on agriculture, will most inevitably result in conflicting demands on limited land and other natural resources. The miombo woodlands offer a variety of forestry and wildlife products and are encroached on by rural communities for agricultural production. This paper seeks to demonstrate how such demands can be reconciled within the miombo woodlands setting. For this purpose we explore the use of goal programming.

The paper is organized as follows. A brief description of miombo woodlands is given in Section 2 while Section 3 presents the problem. Section 4 presents the planning matrix and Section 5 explores the data requirements. Section 6 presents some results on the application of this approach to regional planning in Mozambique, and in Section 7 some conclusions are drawn as to application of the model.

Section snippets

Miombo woodlands

Miombo woodlands are a type of vegetation which, in the writing and discussions of the 1980s, was generally designated as savanna. According to Johnson and Tothill (1985), water is the major determinant for the classification of vegetation as savanna, while fire, soil nutrients and the presence of herbivores are important modifiers of the structure of the vegetation. The miombo woodland is an African woodland dominated by tree species of Brachystegia, either alone or in combination with

The problem

The government policy in the forestry sector of Mozambique is to form partnership with the private sector and local communities in order to achieve sustainable management of the natural forest resources. Economic development planners will therefore need a planning framework, which should enable them to evaluate the contribution of and benefits to each stakeholder. Such a framework is also important in a number of other situations. For example, in evaluating the impact of pursuing government

An overview

The multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) approach advocated in this paper is goal programming. The underlying principle in employing goal programming in the woodlands management problem is to minimise the sum of undesired deviations (under- or over-achievement) from goal levels set by the three stakeholders. Rehman and Romero (1993) note that goal programming does not necessarily produce a Pareto optimal solution. Therefore, it could be regarded as a model that operationalises Simon's

Data requirements, collection and the decision-making process

The matrix presented in Fig. 1 represents an aggregation at two levels. The private sector and local communities represent the micro-level, while the macro-level presents the incorporation of State goals and resource allocation to the other two stakeholders. The aggregation at the two levels raises the need to evaluate trade-offs between conflicting and non-overlapping goals and objectives as well as the consideration of spatial and temporal aspects in the policy analysis (Mallawaarachchi et

Example application in Mozambique

In order to test the feasibility of this planning approach a study was conducted in the Maputo rural district of Mozambique. The study site has agriculture and animal grazing as the main land activities. There are woodlands which provide a myriad of forest products like poles for building, firewood and fodder for grazing animals. The area was stratified into ecozones as in Table 1. The classification of the ecozones was based on land use and does not match any particular administrative

Conclusion

The regional model framework illustrates the impact of macro-policy using micro-planning-level (farm) constraints in a data-scarce environment. The weighted goal programming model employed at the regional level allowed different goals to be weighted according to the importance attached by the decision makers and provided for the simultaneous consideration of all goals in a composite objective function. Changing priorities from wood production to food or conservation indicated the opportunity

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