with the project logo as rewards for success-
ful terracing. TFAP personnel rejected these
ideas because they perceived them as
unreasonable demands for which they had
no budgetary allocation. When I described
these ideas to the German expatriates who
manage TFAP, they were dismayed to learn
that good ideas were not reaching them.
The core problem was that many of the
environmental problems and solutions raised
in the LUPCs were not, strictly speaking,
directly related to TFAP’s mandate as a
forestry and SWC project. Rejecting local
ideas prevented “mission creep” and the
creation of new tasks for busy agency staff,
but it also quashed participation and led
committee members to ask one another,
“Why are we having meetings if we present
our recommendations and nothing hap-
pens?” Many village LUPC members ana-
lyzed the ambiguities of participatory devel-
opment with remarkable candor and acuity,
as this sample indicates:
“The local government officers, from the
District Commissioner down to the village
level, do exactly what TFAP wants them to
do because they all know the local govern-
ment needs the money. But the project is
“bottom up” in its approach, so it’s sup-
posed to be doing what we farmers want to
do, not just what the government wants. So
TFAP tries to get opinions from those with-
out the authority to give them while imple-
menting its plans through people who aren’t
supposed to influence the process.”
Although agency practices regularly prevent-
ed genuine participation despite their policy
commitment to “bottom-up planning,” it was
the political ambiguity of the LUPCs that
systematically prevented them from fulfilling
the goals that TFAP set for them. Village
LUPCs were formally advisory bodies for the
village government, but the tasks that TFAP
assigned them required the authority of gov-
ernment. TFAP tried to overcome this con-
tradiction by inviting village chairs and Ward
Executive Officers into the membership of
the LUPCs. For the few
villages with committed
leaders, this informal
arrangement allowed vil-
lage LUPCs to become
moderately effective. In
most villages, however,
village chairmen (which
are unpaid positions)
were reluctant to
become involved in yet
another time-consuming committee. When
government leaders were not active in con-
servation activities, the village LUPCs
became trapped in the political quagmire of
having an agenda without anyone to imple-
ment it.^24 “We have no people, only the vil-
lage chairman has people,” one village LUPC
chairman told me. “We have no power to
compel people to attend or to do anything.”
To avoid such situations, committees strug-
gled to arrange for the already over-commit-
ted government officials to attend every
conservation activity. They rarely succeeded.The political ambiguity of the LUPCs was
clearly expressed in their inability to perform
the basic political action of a Tanzanian insti-
tution. The essence of a superior position in
the local hierarchy is the ability to summon
an underling to a meeting. The verb for this
action in Kiswahili, kuita, also means “to
name or identify,” and commonly finds its
political expression in formal letters from
superiors to inferiors. Village LUPCs had few
powers to summon, name, and identify,
which meant that they could not fulfill their
function of helping village governments to
regulate land use. Committee members
often complained that they could not send
letters to invite leaders to meetings or to
notify farmers that they were violating land
use regulations. Sending such a letter would
have formalised the communication and put
the committee in a superior position to the
village leadership. Most village committees
therefore did not compel village leaders to
attend meetings and therefore had no
power to make decisions about rule-break-Conservation aas ccultural aand ppolitical ppractice
It wwas tthe ppolitical
ambiguity oof tthe LLand
Use PPlanning
Committees tthat
systematically ppre-
vented tthem ffrom fful-
filling tthe ggoals sset bby
the TTanzania FForestry
Action PPlan