herding—ensuring the retention of some traditional agricultural spaces along with the incorporation of new ones.
• Policy space: The natural resource and environmental spaces were paramount in the creation of this project, but the creation of policy space was essential for continued sustainability. Two key policy actions—the implementation of a grazing ban and the creation of land-leasing options for farmers—provided necessary spaces for success in the short, medium, and long terms. The grazing ban was essential in allowing grasses, trees, and shrubs to grow and in combating soil erosion. This ban allowed for the natural vegetation to fully recover and for astragalus and alfalfa to be grown on a large scale, increasing vegetative cover in the area—even during drought periods—and generating new economic opportunities through fodder production. The implementation of a land-leasing program by the Chinese government allowed farmers to reap the benefits from the output of their fields and orchards, providing economic and cultural incentives for those who ultimately guarantee the sustainability of this project. These policies provided the necessary time for ecological changes to take hold and economic benefits to be fully realized—time that had not been afforded to similar but unsuccessful projects in the past.
• Fiscal/financial space: Inherent to the overall success of policy spaces was the creation of fiscal and financial spaces, which allowed for a shift in agricultural practices without interruption to the economic livelihoods of the farmers most affected by these shifts. To help livestock owners adjust to the newly introduced grazing bans, informal credit was made available and project loans were created that allowed farmers to construct animal sheds and pens, procure fodder-processing equipment, and purchase animals more suitable for pen feeding. The end result of these actions was a sharp increase in incomes and productivity as farmers moved to more intensive production systems. They subsequently benefited from higher wool yields and improved quality of wool.
• Cultural space: The creation of cultural spaces is often the most challenging element for rural development project design and implementation. The Loess Plateau project involved the daunting task of changing embedded farming practices that had been deeply ingrained in the region’s culture for generations. Recognizing that the long-term benefits of
change—especially change that requires radical cultural shifts—are difficult to convey to farmers who rely on the present landscape for their livelihoods, project implementers were able to utilize the policy space to create short-term incentives (for example, the aforementioned credit and loans to smallholders) to support fundamental cultural change. The short-term measures allowed for the long-term benefits to take hold, convincing stakeholders that these shifts could actually be beneficial. Furthermore, these measures were reinforced by deliberately gentle changes—shifting crops and penning livestock instead of eradicating traditional farming techniques all together.
Conclusion
When the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project was first conceived, the common assumption among agricultural development practitioners was that the project, if successful, could not be replicated. The overall size and scope of the project, the low capacity of the targeted beneficiaries, and the rigid political structure of the implementing client country convinced many that this initiative could never be scaled up. The implementers of the Loess Plateau project were instead able to demonstrate that adherence to manageable theories of change, implementation of well-understood drivers, and creation of necessary spaces can provide a roadmap for scaling up that is adaptable to the conditions of any project’s scope, scale, or location.
For further reading: A. Hartmann and J. Linn, “Scaling Up: A Framework and Lessons for Development Effectiveness from Literature and Practice.” Wolfensohn Center for Development Working Paper 5, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2008; D. Pachico and S. Fujisaka, eds., Scaling Up and Out: Achieving Widespread Impact through Agricultural Research (Cali, Colombia: International Center for Tropical Agriculture, 2004), available at
http://webapp.ciat.cgiar.org/impact/pdf/scaling_up.pdf; World Bank, “Restoring China’s Loess Plateau,” News and Views, http://
www.worldbank.org/en/news/2007/03/15/restoring-chinas-loess- plateau; World Bank Institute, Climate Change Unit, “Rehabilitating a Degraded Watershed: A Case Study from China’s Loess Plateau.” Washington, DC: The World Bank Group, 2010, available at http://
wbi.worldbank.org/wbi/Data/wbi/wbicms/files/ drupal-acquia/ wbi/0928313-03-31-10.pdf
John Mackedon (
jmackedon@worldbank.org) is a consultant in agriculture and rural development with the World Bank.
www.ifpri.org
Copyright © 2012 International Food Policy Research Institute. All rights reserved. Contact
ifpri-copyright@cgiar.org for permission to republish.
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