Problem overview:

     Awareness and visions: Since logging has become a growing environmental concern for the country, the government had set up the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) Programme to enable landowners to manage and conserve their own land.

     Training and educational initiatives: However, the PRA programmes had many problems and one was the lack of skill of forest officers to work with community landowners. Therefore, training programmes have been set up for forest officers in order to develop their skills in working with communities more efficiently.

Background in summary:

     Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) Programme: The Vanuatu Government, concerned with increasing environmental problems from logging began a Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) Programme to determine whether the landowners might be interested in setting up conservation areas to protect their own resources - as opposed to the Government leasing the areas from them, which turned out to be time-consuming, expensive, and eventually unsuccessful.

     Problems that had been discovered about the PRA programme: A review found a wide range of problems in the way the PRA was actually done. The primary problems were, poor choice of target villages, lack of clarity of what the whole process was about, superficial rushed approach with minimal follow-up and no efforts made to develop specific actions, which the community could undertake, nor to identify key individuals and organizations that could participate with follow-up actions.

     Increase in relationship between forest officers and communities will resolve the problem: Recommendations were made to improve the workshop process by improving the relationships between Forestry Officers and the communities, in which the extension agents work to pass on the real decision making power to the community itself. The problem was that the Forestry Officers were unskilled in dealing with either their own behavior in groups or the behavior of others.

     Training programmes were developed for forest officers: This resulted in the development of training courses for forest officers, which turned out to be one of the better training courses and one that should be a model for future extension activities in the Pacific islands. Participants have continued to use their training as the participatory process in Vanuatu expanded into a government wide Land Planning Project.

Peer Review Committee Good practice rating: (1 for the best, 5 for the lowest score)
Sustainability		Efficiency
2	Improvement in either the environment of economic condition with no harm to the other.	2	Cost efficient.
2	Sustainable over time (not one-off)	Process
Adaptability		1	Participation of the community
3	Location adaptability (can the project be done in other places?)	1	Participation of resource owners/users
3	Socio-cultural adaptability.	-	Partnerships between various actors (Governments, NGO, Academia, Private)
3	Level of development adaptability.	-	Degree of coordination and cooperation between government departments.
3	Style of government adaptability.	2	Ability to attract political interest/support
3	Degree of decentralization adaptability.	2	Procedures for feedback and review.
Comments on this example:       The Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) project to build up the relationship between forest officers and forest communities could be applied to other countries in the ESCAP region. When the two parties join forces, the process of monitoring and preventing illegal access from poachers or loggers would be much more efficient Sustainability of the project:   Adaptability of the project to other situations:       Programmes to achieve a similar government/community partnership programme failed in the Solomon Islands due to high level opposition to sustainable forestry (in favor of immediate cash returns). Process of decision making and implementation:   Cost efficiency: