TThe goals, methods, actors, and institu-

tional context of development planning

changed globally in the last decades of the

20th century. The emphasis on centrally con-

trolled projects for modernizing the postcolo-

nial states shifted to a focus on participatory

development planning. This sort of “bottom-

up development” rests on the dictum that

efficient and equitable land management

results when resource users become

resource managers in local ‘appropriator

organisations’.^1 This localised approach is

now known as either Community-Based

Conservation^2 or Community-Based Natural

Resource Management (CBNRM).^3 The term

“community” is the most important part of

these policy acronyms because it connotes

equality, agreement, and autonomy.

Although the image of a participatory com-

munity wholeheartedly agreeing to manage

its own resources efficiently and equitably

certainly holds great appeal for analysts as

well as the rural poor, all too often such

projects involve degrees of participation in

non-homogeneous and non-consensual com-

munities.^4 There is a contradiction between

a development agency’s need to pursue its

mandate and its desire to empower the rural

poor to set their own agenda. All too often,

the consequences of this contradiction are

conflict and ambiguity. This article describes

the technical, social, and moral contradic-

tions embedded within a relatively successful

soil and water conservation (SWC) pro-

Development ddilemmas aand aadministrative aambiguities—

terracing aand lland uuse pplanning ccommittees iin NNorth

Pare, TTanzania

Michael JJ. SSheridan

Summary.This article describes the technical, social, and moral contradictions embedded within a rela-
tively successful soil and water conservation programme in rural Tanzania in order to explain why farmers’
participation was tinged with ambivalence, resentment, and resistance. The Tanzania Forestry Action Plan

• North Pare project, funded by GTZ, worked throughout the 1990s to prevent soil erosion by encouraging
  the construction of terraces and the establishment of village-based land use planning committees. Farmers
  have indeed built many terraces, but their participation was reluctant at best. From the farmers’ point of
  view, the technical problems included delayed returns on a substantial labor investment and the destruc-
  tion of cash crops and indigenous terraces, but their misgivings about terracing lay more in social, political
  and moral relationships than in layers of soil. Terracing threatened the web of social relationships in land
  through which farmers borrow, rent, and hold land. Specifically, terracing tended to transfer rights in land
  from women to men and from younger men to older men. These threats led many farmers in North Pare
  to regard the terracing programme as immoral and therefore a threat to the productivity of the land. Land
  use planning committees were also full of contradictions and ambiguities. Development agency facilitators
  usually dominated the agenda of these institutions and prevented local needs and innovations from being
  communicated up the project hierarchy. A more serious problem was the committees’ ambiguous political
  status as advisory groups for village governments without any powers of sanction or control. This issue
  and many farmers’ sense of jealousy toward those in non-participating villages led many to consider the
  committees also rife with moral flaws. Development policy-making should not assume that the term ‘com-
  munity’ does not imply coherence, consensus, and harmony. This analysis suggests, instead, that a politi-
  cal and cultural analysis of the technical, social, and moral quandaries faced by resource users is needed
  to illuminate some of the pitfalls of the CBNRM approach. Yet, the devolution of resource management
  authority to community-level institutions remains one of the best options for ameliorating the contradic-
  tions of neo-liberal economic globalisation.

History, cculture aand cconservation