Implementing Community Participatory Action Research in Disadvantaged communities in PVH,SR, and RTK

General

The project is to support the poor and disadvantaged IPs communities in Preah Vihear, Rattanakiri, and Siem Reap province to become self-reliant in managing their natural resources and participating in community development. For many years that Indigenous Communities in Cambodia have been supported to claim their rights to legally own their forested land and protected areas. Though not many of them have been granted legal ownership by the government, those who has legally secured official recognition are not able to enforce their rights to protect their resources from being exploited by outsiders. Some communities already have their strength to apply for legal support from the government, but they do not use it for their own development. It has shown that participation from the whole community members remains very limited. Therefore, their local natural resources are not well managed, and cases of illegal logging, fishing, and land grabbing persist. To support communities to address these issues, the project will be piloting a new approach PAR (Participatory Action Research) as a community-led development process that involves communities in the whole process of project life cycle from problem analysis to project implementation by their own capacity and resources. Through PAR process, the partner acts as good listener, clearly understands communities, and facilitates people to have critical thinking about priority issues, analyse root causes, find out solutions from one to another, and mobilise existing resources within communities. The partner will be spending the first 3 months of the project to do a participatory project design from which community initiatives will be developed into a proposal and implementation. At the end of the project, ability and capacity of local communities will be improved. And, they will be empowered to come up with initiatives, own their plans, mobilise local resources and work collectively to protect and manage natural resources in a sustainable manner. The project objectives are: - To strengthen capacity of target IPs community members to be able to develop their own initiatives, community development action plans, and to engage with all stakeholders to implement their action plans. - IP people (45% women) in 4 communities exercise and advocate for their rights to protect and manage their natural resources sustainably in order to promote their livelihood prosperity, and conserve their tradition, culture celebration, and solidarity practice in their communities. This project also complements well to the existing work that has been built with DPA on legal land and resources tenure of indigenous communities in Cambodia. And, the partner ADIC works to empower both legally recognised communities and non to advocate for and enforce their land rights.