[Protection
of Forest][Literacy Program][Boundry
Mapping][Biodiversity signifance]
[Eco-enterprise][MOCP][Consensus
Building][Gender Particapation]
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The Managalas Plateau is a raised valley lying between 600 to 1000 metres altitude above the coastal plain of Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. It sits between the Owen Stanley Ranges to the south and west, the Sibium Ranges to the southeast and Mount Lamington and the Hydrographers to the north and east. The 300,000 hectares of the Plateau encompass an extraordinary diversity of environments including alpine heath at 3,800 metres, montane and hill forest, savannah, anthropogenic grassland and gardens. Like many of the mountainous mid-altitude valleys of PNG, the Plateau is an area of high quality agricultural land and relatively dense populations. The surrounding mountains, by contrast, are generally infertile and little populated. 15,000 people from around 150 clan groups live in 40 village communities on the Managalas Plateau. These are largely subsistence farmers and depend almost exclusively on the environment for their livelihood. Ten dialects are found on the plateau that together make up three broad languages (Barai, Managalas and Aomie). |
The Managalas Plateau is relatively isolated and remote from urban Papua New Guinea. It is linked to the Oro Provincial Capital, Popondetta, by a poor quality four-wheel drive road and by two airstrips as well as by foot-tracks. This allows a limited sale of coffee and other produce during dry conditions but high freight costs and poor maintenance prevent regular trade. Over the past decade a number of proposals for timber extraction, oil palm and mining development have been presented to the Managalas Plateau. While welcoming the opportunity for development, Managalas communities are actively opposing many of these projects due to the poor consultation with resource owners and the failure to guarantee benefits or environmental protection. |
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Community
Values and Motivations for Environmental Protection
The community motivation to protect Managalas
forest environments is uniformly strong. Proposed logging and oil palm
operations have been widely greeted with concern. Members of the community
felt that these would damage hunting areas, pollute water supply and increase
conflict with neighbours.
The ubiquitous
nature of this concern attests in part to the effectiveness of the
community
education campaign
undertaken by the boundary mapping team in 1998 and 1999. Most community
members have seen the damage done by logging and oil palm operations
in other parts of the Province and have made decisions to not go forward
with proposals to develop logging in the Managalas Plateau. This is a
major achievement for Partners given the difficulties many rural communities
face in obtaining money and transport. <Back to Top>
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Two large areas of forest on the Managalas Plateau were proposed for forestry operations in the 1996 National Forest Plan. The Gora-Itokama Forest Management Area (FMA) in the centre and north, and the Musa-Pongani concession in the south were large-scale operations that would have removed a significant area of the Owen Stanley Range forests. |
Coordinated action in 1998 in cooperation with MICAD, Greenpeace and ICRAF has resulted in the cancelling of proposed Gora-Itokama Forest Management Area (FMA) and another oil palm operation proposed in the same year. Actions that brought about this result included lawyers letters, placing of a newspaper advertisement, lobbying the government and the Forest Authority Board and holding a press conference.
A significant result of this work was
the designation of the area for conservation in the PNG Forest Authority
plans. This was the first time such formal recognition was given to an
area of forest in PNG that was not already included in a formal conservation
area. As a result, there is greater security for the resources of Managalas
and Collingwood Bay. These two large areas allow the possibility of a
protected forest corridor from the Kokoda trail to the Oro Province border.
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Government services are restricted to a number of community schools, a top up school, two aid posts and a station and Health Centre at Afore. The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) introduced an adult literacy program to the Plateau in the 1960¹s and this has provided an important foundation for many of the development processes now taking place on the Plateau. Materials are produced in both English and two of the Managalas dialects, Barai and Ese, and are generally accompanied by cartoons. Publications supported by RFN have included information on sustainable harvest guidelines, meeting translations, and clan group discussion materials. |
Other information produced, largely with the support of SIL, includes Bible translations, tokples primers for Bible study, syllable charts, ancestral stories, tokples dictionaries, Ese grammar, health information on nutrition and AIDS, and a regular newsletter.
The literacy
groups on the Plateau (Ese Literacy Association and Barai Non-Formal
Literacy
Association) were
established by SIL, and those existing structures are still used. A survey
across six of the region's villages in four zones indicated that literacy
materials were available in many homes- a significant achievement. <Back
to Top>
<Publications (shell books & flipchart)>
| In order to consolidate the conservation area designation, Partners (with funding from the MacArthur Foundation) started a program to assist landowners in establishing conservation areas across their land. The option preferred by most communities has been to establish a Wildlife Management Area (WMA) that requires the definition of the conservation area boundary, establishment of a management committee and gazettal of management rules. The work to establish WMAs across the Managalas has been spectacularly successful largely as a result of the tireless efforts of two individuals. Over the past two years, the "boundary mapping team" has mapped 70 km of WMA boundary with a further 27 km remaining. |
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In itself, this is a major undertaking, but in all cases, it has required long discussions with landowners, walks to the extremities of their land and further negotiations back in villages. It is estimated that the team has walked up to ten kilometres for every kilometre mapped.
Significant conflict has been dealt with efficiently in areas such as Gora and high quality mapping has been completed that exceeds the requirements of PNG law. The training in boundary mapping has also been of excellent value, giving people the skills that are useful within the Plateau, but are also saleable outside. Discussions have begun towards using the Managalas mapping team to assist in CA boundary mapping in other conservation areas such as the Mt Bosavi region in SHP.
<Map>
Biodiversity
Significance
The Managalas Plateau is an area of
national and international importance warranting the level of support
that has been
applied. The region has been identified as one of the highest priority
areas for biodiversity conservation in PNG (Conservation Needs Assessment
1993). It contains a rich diversity of habitats from alpine heath to lowland
savannah. It harbours a large tract of relatively undisturbed rainforest.
And it shelters a number of rare and endangered species including the entire
range of the world¹s largest butterfly, the Queen Alexander Birdwing
(Ornithopera alexandrea). These biodiversity resources are important nationally
and globally as a storehouse of genetic material, as an ecotourism attraction
and as a source of environmental services such as fresh water.
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This high quality environment is also essential to the survival of the human populations of the area. While gardening provides the vast majority of foodstuffs, the forests are important as sources of building materials, medicines, water and other services. The maintenance of this rich subsistence resource base is essential to averting serious poverty in the region. The relevance of a program of environmental protection is further underscored by the immediate threats that have faced and continue to face the Plateau from forest loss, population pressure, water contamination and introduced species. |
Three Biodiversity
Surveys were completed between 2004 and 2006 by teams of students from
the University of Papua
New Guinea . These surveys served to compile and comprehensive list of
flora and fauna found in the Managalas Plateau, identify threats to different
species, and asses the conservation status of any protected species found. <Back
to Top>
<Biodiversity Summary>
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The 1998 Steering Committee meeting develop a set of principles for effective development on the Plateau. The "Sustainable Development Guidelines" covered aspects of forest use, gardening, water and other issues in resource management and community development. These guidelines were intended to inform the plans and decisions of each village. Significantly, these guidelines have now been recognised by government. An MOU has been signed between Partners and Oro Provincial Government providing an initial foundation for government recognition of the Managalas sustainable development guidelines. This is the first local level recognition of community development management rules in PNG and a significant achievement. |
At this time,
sustainable harvest guidelines have been complete for the okari nut.
<Rice report>
| The Managalas Organic Coffee Project (MOCP) is designed to assist the local communities of Managalas Plateau in proper coffee cultivation. The purpose of this project is to strengthen commitment of the local communities of the Managalas Plateau towards the proposed Conservation Area Project at the same time as encouraging a more eco-sound cropping as an alternative form of income generation at a community level. Coffee was introduced to Papua New Guinea in the late 1940's and was taken in the late 1960's to the Managalas Plateau to be grown as a cash crop. |
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The soil
and climatic conditions of the Managalas Plateau have proved to be
very conducive
for Arabica Coffee.
Despite declining road conditions that have hindered the transportation
of the crop, the Plateau is known for its coffee and it is for that reason
that PWM has encouraged coffee as an eco-enterprise option. <Back
to Top>
<MOCP Business Plan>
Consensus
Building
Work in the Managalas Plateau is attempting
to answer one of the most significant conundrums of governance in Melanesian
society. While cooperation within clans has a strongly developed tradition
in the Managalas Plateau and wider Melanesia, there is only a shallow tradition
of consensus building between clans and larger groupings.
A “consensus building” approach
is a significant part of our program that helps clans across a zone
to identify
issues that they are for or against and to develop strategies for collaborative
action. This sets up opportunity for cooperation across boundaries that
have traditionally been sources of conflict.
A central aspect of the Managalas strategy
is to establish a process of discussion and agreement at a clan, zone,
and regional level. The program is based on the clan as the basic unit
of organization. Zones are self-identified natural groupings of clans
based on terms of yam exchange, shared heritage, common dialects, and
song. They are confirmed by social mapping.
The consensus building process works at three levels: clan, culture area (or “zone”), and subdistrict. It seeks to ensure regular informed debate on key issues that start with families, rises to clans, is then brought to zones, and from there can lead to discussions at combined forums where are zones are represented. On all three levels a consensus must be reached on an issue before it can progress to the next level. At each level, written information is provided in the vernacular language by the local literacy associations based on materials prepared by PWM.
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The consensus building structure works to reinforce clan leadership. Elders have an important position in the process at the clan level and often gain opportunities to represent their clans at a zone and regional levels in a way that rarely would have happened in the past. The consensus building process is a considerable achievement. It provides the framework for community decision-making across a large geographical area and among a range of different cultural groups. It allows for the establishment of development plans and policies that can steer activities by and with community villages. |
Gender
Participation
By 2000 it became clear that there was a
strong gender imbalance in leadership roles at the Plateau. As a result
gender awareness workshops were conducted, which were very effective in
increasing the recognition of women's roles on the Plateau, and catalyzed
a change towards increasing women's participation in the program. Gender
equality and participation were needs that were identified and addresses
during various workshops and meetings.
PWM is
committed to challenging traditional gender roles that have lead to
a long history
of gender inequality and
exploitation of basic human rights. Through the use of awareness workshops
and equality training, PWM aims to promote equal rights, participation
and opportunity for all women and men, girls and boys in Papua New Guinea,
and to promote awareness, challenging and changing attitudes and behaviours
in order to achieve equality and respect among women and men in their
families, their development organisation and programs. <Back
to Top>
<Gender Workshop Report>