The Holistic Management® Model: Enabling Scientists to Grasp Complexity as Well as Villagers Do
by Sam Bingham
This paper was presented at the SANREM/CRSP Scientific Research Meeting - November 28-30 at the University of Georgia in Athens. (SANREM/CRSP stands for Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management / Cooperative Research Support Program.)
Abstract
The Holistic Management® Model evolved from work by Allan Savory in Southern Africa in the 1950’s in response to the rapid degradation of semi-arid grazing land where human management had changed the grazing patterns of wild herds. Today, most schools within the range science academy share elements of Holistic Management®. Reinforcing evidence has also come independently from anthropologists and economist based in England. Since the early 1980’s a series of papers have documented the environmental and economic superiority of traditional nomadic practices. Reflexion on the thought processes that led to this breakthrough in understanding a particular ecosystem inspired a fresh approach to the general problem of modeling and managing complex self-organizing systems in which the total number of variables is neither constant nor even knowable - the Holistic Management® Model. Its application in SANREM-Africa has put on trial both the Holistic Management® Model and many conventions of American-style development research.
Context and Questions
The program for this, the SANREM Research Conference, classifies this paper under "Values-Based Community Planning". To facilitate this, SANREM first contracted for Holistic Management® training of villagers and village-level community workers during the Phase I of the Africa Program in Burkina Faso. That began in late 1994 and included five ten-day sessions spread over 30 months.
Both groups responded well. The community workers actually incorporated themselves as an NGO with the goal of continuing the training independently. Its members have since been dispersed through reassignment by their various services. Nevertheless, they remain in touch with each other and their trainer, and continue to promote the Holistic Management® Model in creative ways – in adult literacy programs, for example. As recently as last August (2001), an extension agent for the Provincial Agricultural Services responsible for the former SANREM target village of Donsin sent me a photograph of over 75 people, he said, packed into a community center for his presentation on Holistic Management®.
Joanny Ouedraogo has asked for, and received, French Language training packets for Holistic Management® prepared for West Africa by the World Bank. We can thus include Holistic Management® among SANREM impacts durable enough to survive beyond subsidies. This response is not isolated. The World Bank’s West Africa Pastoral Perimeter Project which began training village technicians in 1992 has enjoyed a similarly positive grassroots reception to Holistic Management® as documented in the evaluation of the pilot phase completed in late 1999. In Zimbabwe, too, spontaneous and vigorous response from the adjacent communal lands recently discouraged an armed band of squatters from occupying the Center for Holistic Management®’s demonstration site and training center and beat back several government attempts to confiscate it as well.
On the other hand, even in Zimbabwe, grazing practices (the original focus of Holistic Management®) have changed little, and the degradation of communal lands continues. Independent evaluators of the World Bank projects also remarked that they could not explain the enthusiasm of villagers and transhumants on the basis of any hard evidence of progress as they defined it. As in the World Bank project, SANREM-Africa has looked to Holistic Management® training and the Holistic Management® Model itself as way to approach grazing and livestock issues, which have long been the stepchild of development programs everywhere.
Coincidentally, it is hoped that the conceptual framework of the Holistic Management® Model will help farmers and herders fulfill the requirements of "participatory research." And yet evaluators have not cited dramatic success in achieving even these modest objectives, and however enduring its memory, the Holistic Management® program actually figured among several sources of conflict during Phase I in Burkina Faso. Today in Phase II it still goes in the box of "Values-Based Community Planning" as distinct from "Science", and, well…we have to appear to do something about livestock problems.
We will argue here that the Holistic Management® Model in fact represents science of a high order and, unique among scientific models, addresses two problems that plague development research everywhere. Namely, it promises to reduce the tension between the development and the research functions of programs like SANREM, and it does presume to offer a basis for fruitful dialogue among scientists, farmers, herders, and others such as politicians, bureaucrats, and technicians. That’s good for Community Planning. On the other hand, the Model is "Based on Values", some of which all parties tend find difficult to live up to. The Model is also a work in progress and thus imperfect, and our experience in transmitting and applying it is still quite shallow. That is not an excuse for the model’s admitted shortcomings, but a challenge to understand it, and the response to it.
We shall explain the Model and then use the SANREM experience to illustrate its operation in three modes – Land Use Analysis, Selecting Research Priorities, and Natural Resource Management. Presumably these areas strongly overlap other categories explored in this conference – Economic and Environmental Decision-Making, Moving from Research to Policy, as well as of course Values-Based Community Planning.
The Challenge
The Holistic Management® Model results from the reverse engineering of a particular scientific theory about the ecology of semi-arid grasslands that wildlife biologist Allan Savory synthesized from his own observations, published research, and practical experiment. He credits the revolutionary insight that overgrazing is a function of time management and animal behavior, not herd size, to the French scholar of pastures, André Voisin.
Savory himself grew up in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbawe (Savory 1999). He sought to explain why the "unmanaged" grassland he knew from his youth supported enormous herds of wild ungulates and recovered from even severe droughts without loss of biodiversity while land grazed by domestic stock under human management degraded rapidly. Eventually, he found four keys to unlock the riddle.
- The health of "Brittle" environments, characterized by low humidity, a prolonged dry season, and erratic precipitation, depends on animals to recycle the carbon sequestered in plants. Thus, rest in brittle environments leads to stagnation of the plant community and loss of soil cover and fertility, while rest in non-brittle environments produces the opposite effect.
- Large ungulates, wild or domestic, are the most efficient recyclers of plant material, both through trampling and digestion and are thus NECESSARY to maintaining diversity, productivity, and stability in brittle areas.
- Overgrazing and overtrampling are principally functions of time, not numbers. Dense herds of great size that move frequently and allow plants to recover before regrazing them recycle nutrients without weakening plants. Even single animals that do not move overgraze the most palatable plants in the areas where they linger.
- On the enormous unfenced ranges of pre-colonial Africa (and similar brittle environments elsewhere), pack-hunting predators assured beneficial herd behavior, and nomadic herders generally developed similar patterns. Limited lands, however, demand management that is "holistic" to the extent that it respond to ever-shifting conditions of weather, economics, culture, and environmental conditions.
Savory figured that the conjunction of these principles would bring a new dawn to livestock production, game management, and most efforts to reverse desertification in areas impacted by livestock. Sheep, goats, cattle and horses would become instruments of restoration. Reducing livestock stock numbers, a policy no herding society has ever accepted, would fade as a policy imperative. The economic potential of long-lost grassland would salvage the balance sheet where irrigation, fertilizer, and supplementary feed had failed.
The documented success of individual managers over the past 30 years leaves no doubt that Savory had got something right, though the revolution is taking its time.
Anthropologists, meanwhile followed a parallel path to similar conclusions. In their seminal paper Rethinking Range Ecology: implications for rangeland management in Africa, published in 1991, British-based scholars Ian Scoones and Roy Behnke argued the genius of traditional nomadic societies in managing land and animals for maximum efficiency.
They debunked the stereotype that traditional people acquired large herds for prestige only and attacked a brace of standard development policies such as veterinary programs, fencing, water development, genetic improvement, confined feeding, sedentarization, and matching stocking rate to "carrying capacity" – this concept being meaningless where conditions fluctuated and herds moved so dramatically.
Their findings rested on a decade of research issuing from the same institutions which did the original development of Rapid Rural Appraisal techniques - the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, the Institute of Developmental Studies at the University of Sussex, and the British Government’s Overseas Development Institute. A stream of studies in the same vein gave academic support to recent policy initiatives to establish (re-establish) the grazing rights of transient herders in the brittle environments of Africa (Behnke 1991,1993).
Behnke and his wife and colleague Carol Kerven published similar findings from an extensive study of Central Asia following the Soviet collapse (Kerven 1998).
They also concluded that productive, environmentally sound, husbandry of brittle lands depended on large, moving, herds and the enormous flexibility of herding societies, including their willingness to take up other professions in time of drought.
This refrain of extreme flexibility, common to both Savory and the British anthropologists has made the claims of both difficult to document through methodologies based on controlled studies of short duration (less than 20 years, depending on prevailing weather cycles). However, discounting local successes as "anecdotal" or "not replicable" ignores the possibility that the most important "constant" to observe may be inconsistency. Good management responds quickly and properly to changing conditions, including conditions changed by management itself (feedback).
Economists have encountered similar difficulties modeling markets, because the most profitable strategy today draws in players whose mere interest creates a different market tomorrow. Economists have won Nobel Prizes for their attempts to factor herd psychology and technological innovation into this riddle but none has fully cracked it. A winning market strategy is by definition NEVER replicable.
Just as economic thinkers such as Herman Daly and Robert Heilbroner have questioned the validity of the assumptions behind many of today’s economic models, so Savory tried to deconstruct the "intuition" that led to his insight and refine it into an explicit structure that paralleled and complemented the standard scientific methods practiced in his field.
What kind of model, then, would help a scientist or manager make decisions of subtlety and power comparable to the dance of wolf pack and bison that made the prairies lush or to several thousand years of nomadic tradition forged out of war, drought, and struggle? What kind of science would it serve? If you made such a model, would it apply to more than bison and goats?
The Holistic Management® Model
A good model predicts. You tweak it here and see what wobbles there. It interprets. You can look at a wobble and deduce the tweak that produced it. It instructs. You can tweak it this way and that until you learn what makes the wobble you want. And best of all, you can do all this cheaply without wrecking anything important. Computers allow us to poke around complicated models, but the most powerful are simple, and our circumstances require one that amplifies the brainpower of the cowhand ahorse with tobacco in her cheek and the scientist sipping coffee at the stop light on the way to her institute.
The Holistic Management® Model rests on four axioms:
- The condition of our resources always reflects our management of them. No excuses.
- Management means management of "wholes" which have characteristics not present in or predictable from their constituent parts studied in isolation. (Knowledge of hydrogen and oxygen doesn’t give you the whole story on water.)
- In complex self-organizing systems, processes and the relationship patterns of wholes are the only constants and therefore become the focus of research and management.
- Management, being a human endeavor, must have a goal, an assumption of a better state.
So the cowboy/scientist-friendly Holistic Model looks like this:
www.holisticmanagement.org/ahm_model.cfm
There’s the whole at the top followed by a three part goal describing the quality of life you expect, the production needed to support it, and the condition of your resources required to produce that.
Next are the processes that define the ecosystem – community dynamics (succession), water cycle, mineral cycle, and energy flow. Therein lies the genius of nature – that the interplay of untold variables boils down to measurable effect on only four basic processes.
And since we posit that conditions reflect management, we can assess past practices and future propositions by looking at the effect of management tools on the four processes. Fortunately there are only six direct tools to consider, plus money/labor and creativity. If this seems oversimplified, consider that virtually all our past policies and management practices have not included living organisms, grazing, or animal impact in the tool kit and do not recognize the different effect of long term rest in brittle and non-brittle environments. For that matter, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, for all his wisdom and power, has only two crude and indirect tools for managing the entire Global economy. He can tweak the Federal Reserve’s short term interest rate or ask the President to ask Congress to tweak spending.
When planning future actions, ethical, economic, ecological, and social considerations weight the value of a given tool, and these appear in seven testing questions which are augmented by certain guidelines that determine how the tools are applied.
Finally we have a feedback loop of planning, monitoring (the four processes), controlling and replanning.
In general, village level people very much enjoy the exposition of this model, because it honors their intellectual capacity and personal experience. They frequently return comments on the order of, "Thank you for explaining what is going on. We see things in our own way, but up to now outside advisors just told us what to do but never why they thought it was right."
They quickly see the sense of seeing erosion, drought and falling water tables as manifestations of a damaged water cycle; weed infestations and pest outbreaks in terms of succession; and fertility loss as a failure of the mineral cycle. People who see how they got themselves into a crisis can hope to find their own way out. This is liberating knowledge.
Unfortunately, though the model may make the path from understanding to action clearer, it does not make it easier, as the following anecdotes illustrate.
Land Use Analysis
The Natural Resource Management Advisory Committee (NRMAC) of the Commune of Madiama, organized by SANREM, roughed out their Holistic Goal without much debate. It reflects very universal values – A desire for food security, health, safety, education, respect, free time, and opportunity; a stable income from small enterprise, crops, livestock, fish, and increased skills; and a resource base of good water, fertile soil, lush grazing, and vigorous people.
Beginning with the initial Landscape/Lifescape appraisal, however, session after session produced lists of "constraints" which put such a vision beyond hope, unless of course SANREM could find solutions and pay for them. Wells are drying up. The parasitic striga plant destroys the grain. The cattle are starving. The soil doesn’t produce like it used to. The all-sustaining Bourgou plant has vanished from the lakes. Firewood has disappeared. The transhmants come through before the harvest and ravage the crops. Etc. Etc.
As merely documenting the degree of each symptom of the general disaster will exhaust a healthy research budget, we need a model that will help formulate a response more efficiently.
For input, the Holistic Model asks:
What happens to the water that falls on Madiama and the surrounding area (the Water Cycle)? Historical data on well levels and rainfall may be interesting but are mostly useful to substantiate the unanimous opinion that enormous amounts of water that once entered the water table through percolation into friable, protected soil, now leave the system through runoff and evaporation.
Where do soil nutrients come from in Madiama, and where do they go (Mineral Cycle)? The process of loss concerns us more than the fact of it.
What changes in plant and animal communities have occurred (Community Dynamics)? Concern for biodiversity loss is a step in the direction of holism as opposed to our customary fixation on controlling pest and weed outbreaks.
What happens to the available solar energy (Energy Flow)?
Neither NRMAC members nor even outside observers had much difficulty reaching consensus on their answers.
In Madiama, the almost complete loss of perennial grasses and the expanding extent of bare ground where nothing grows at all means a high percentage of rainfall never enters the productive cycle, so "virtual drought" coexists with flooding.
Nutrients in surface soils historically had to have been brought from lower levels by deep rooted plants or imported through the manure of transient livestock, and they would have been held in topsoil by organic material. Now, evidently one or more of these processes had broken down. The cycle no longer functioned as it should, and nutrients had moved somewhere else.
Plant communities had shifted toward non-palatable species and annuals. Perennial grasses had almost entirely disappeared except for vestiges of the least desirable. Larger game species had virtually disappeared, and domestic stock had shifted toward small ruminants. A visiting scientist from Virginia Tech noted that bio-diversity is now actually greater in cultivated areas than in grazing areas, though in the former Striga and weed infestations have increased markedly.
And, yes, the sun wasn’t producing like it used to. Crop production per hectare had fallen. Grazing land was bare. Herd fertility and milk production had fallen. Little of use now grew in the ponds.
What tools had been used? How had the use of tools changed? Going tool by tool, what impact on the four processes could we expect?
Again the answers did not require a PhD.
Technology: Steel plows pulled by bullocks have largely replaced hand cultivation, enabling exploitation of much larger fields, and this has practically eliminated the old practice of 6 to 10 year fallowing. Older inhabitants note that today even land that is taken out of crop production does not recover, but in fact degrades further
Rest: Cultivated ground gets little rest now. Nor does grazing land, as increasing numbers of small ruminants are kept year round. Overrest is not a serious issue.
Fire: Burning has not been used as a tool much in recent years, though outside the commune annual grassland is fire prone.
Grazing: Although transhumants with cattle continue pass through the commune, more small ruminants and draft animals graze continuously year round than in the past, assuring severe overgrazing of plants.
Animal Impact: Passing herds continue to create significant trampling events and deposit large amounts of manure, but much of the latter does not enhance crop land, and wide areas around water sources are severely degraded.
Living organisms: Little has been done to promote habitat for beneficial creatures.
Such an analysis, crude as it may appear, allows both villagers and researchers to focus on probable causes of degradation that they may be able to address, immediately raising the question of whether to attempt that or simply mitigate the symptoms. In the case of Madiama, this discussion resulted in a conclusion that the soil fertility question and the grazing land biodiversity loss are linked and that livestock and crop issues cannot be solved separately.
This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that in an erratic environment the food security envisioned in the holistic goal will depend on maintaining multiple forms of production.
Nevertheless, many find confusing the Model’s insistence on distinguishing between cause and symptom. Observing that the soil fertility and tilth that previous generations enjoyed did not depend on periodic doses of rock phosphate doesn’t automatically cause a trained fertilizer specialist to reflect on whether it now must as the following true dialogue illustrates.
Question: "Seriously, why are Madiama’s soils so much worse today?"
"They lack phosphorous and nitrogen!"
"Why?"
"Because they are degraded!"
"Why are they degraded?"
"Because they lack necessary nutrients!"
Selecting Research Priorities
The Land Use Analysis provided by the Holistic Management® Model highlights systemic failures and implicates specific tools – rest (by its lack), grazing, animal impact, and the technology of cropping.
The testing guidelines further focus the search for knowledge relevant to the holistic goal. Particular research projects should address causes before symptoms; lead to economically and environmentally sustainable practices; and respect society and culture. Where possible, they should strengthen "The Weak Link" first, though the Model recognizes that by the phenomenon of community dynamics a different link may be the weak one tomorrow. It is also important to recognize and use, not repeat, the enormous amount of past research by local and foreign institutions.
Questions:
What do we know and not know about repairing the nutrient cycle in Madiama?
Among many things we know:
Several cultivation practices, such as zai planting and mulching, restore organic matter and improve soil structure. Livestock is a good source manure. Legumes fix nitrogen. Deep-rooted plants build top soil. Phosphate applications improve yields enormously but the pay back time is too long and too unsure, due to the odds of losing the crop for other reasons. A number of lucrative or environmentally beneficial crops are hard to market or unreliable.
Things we don’t know or have lost the ability to do: How to manage livestock to make best use of manure and crop residue. What a productive balance between grazing and cultivated land might be. What management will speed the recovery of fallow. What management will restore, maintain, and effectively harvest Bourgou. How to create short term incentives for rotations and cultivation practices whose benefit is long term. How to design a monitoring program that producers can conduct themselves and which will give them useful information in a timely manner. What habitat is critical to sustaining beneficial insects, birds, and mammals.
In areas of the flood plain that have been or will be subjugated for rice production, we need to know how to accommodate the herders and fisherfolk who used that land before.
It would be a stretch to claim that the Holistic Management® Model deserves complete credit for guiding the Natural Resource Management Advisory Council through a smooth and orderly discussion of research priorities, but it did add a focus on management and discourage a fixation on quick fixes that influenced the outcome. One result was the decision to attempt restoration of a critical Bourgou site.
A discussion that took place during one of the first community meetings following the initiation of Holistic Management® training illustrates how a line of inquiry rises from the framework of Holistic Management® Model.
Following a general presentation of the four ecosystem processes by NRMAC committee members who had attended our first session, we posed the question, "What do you consider to be the causes for the decline of the Bourgou?" After some reflexion, an elderly man opined that a lot of it succumbed to drowning, a counter-intuitive diagnosis for a plant that grows in water. But the man pointed out that the water had changed. He argued that now, since the land around had lost its cover, the runoff came in fierce sheets that filled the lakes faster than even Bourgou could grow, and silt from the erosion blocked sunlight. The Bourgou would not come back, he predicted, as long as the adjacent land remained bare. He remarked, too, that Bourgou was not the first good plant to vanish from their ponds.
Such a discussion could generate a number of research projects based on consideration of the water cycle and energy flow, not just water or plants. Whether or not the man’s hypothesis proves true, the answers have many implications for Natural Resource Management. In fact SANREM’s first replanting of bourgou washed out altogether as to old man and the Model had warned it might.
Natural Resource Management
The Land Use Analysis through the Holistic Management® Model implicates specific tools in bringing Madiama Commune’s natural resource base to its current state – cultivation practices (technology) and grazing, (in this case unplanned continuous grazing, as opposed to managed grazing that we know for certain is necessary to the health of a brittle environment). A great many valid research questions relate to understanding specific aspects of reforming the application of these tools. For instance, we must better understand the economics and labor demands of rock phosphate and zai hole cultivation to know why few farmers use them. We need to know what Bourgou requires to establish and flourish, and how to monitor its management.
At the end of the day, however, a fearless application of the Holistic Management® Model returns an unequivocal conclusion that reaching the Holistic Goal will demand major changes in standard operating procedures that are as embedded in the life of Madiama Commune as freeways, strip malls, and gas guzzlers are in our own. The perfect management arrangement for Madiama that a foreign consultant might extrapolate from the rendering of the Holistic provokes a response not unlike a proposal for zoning and rapid transit in, say, Houston, Texas. And the dislocations demanded of the society are no less severe.
Furthermore, what we now see as dysfunctional incentives are supported by layer upon layer of legal, social, and physical scaffolding – the land tenure laws, a history of ethnic relationships, the placement of wells and fields, administrative districts, and no end of colonial and post-colonial foreign aid.
This thicket of complications does not imply that the Model or any of its conclusions are not "values-based."
We in America know that managing urban sprawl means changing the legal structure, building new transport systems, and fighting the highway lobby, and the people who take on these issues do so in the name of values that often annoy the status quo. Bringing up a bond election for mass transit at a cocktail party in Houston will get you much the same response as a lecture on the uncontrolled grazing of small ruminants or the damage caused by extensive plowing in Madiama. "Yeah, sure, the smog’s terrible, and the rush hour jam lasts all day, and we do value clean air and short commutes, but taxes are high enough already." Values-based decision-making.
Mind you, the NUMBER of goats is not the problem, it’s just that since all the predators have been killed off, it would be foolish not to have a few running around out there in the dry season to scavenge what they can. They’re a separate savings account, and you don’t have to be land rich to keep a few.
Neighbors engage in and work through conflict, make alliances and compromise. This is Community Dynamics – one of the four basic processes of complex, self-organizing systems. It is the natural mechanism of change. It is healthy as long as the inevitable conflict doesn’t spin out of control. The Model itself goes a long way toward convincing people that their holistic goal is attainable and will justify their struggle to reach it. It disciplines thinking to keep the focus on steps that are economically, ecologically, and socially sound. But the enthusiastic response to conflict management training in Madiama shows that people there, too, recognize that managing human relationships is ultimately key to success.
In one of our early sessions in Madiama, trainer Jeff Goebel asked members of the NRMAC to list reasons why improving soil fertility and restoring the Bourgou was impossible, to which they replied with the familiar and very convincing list of constraints. Then, at the bitter end of the session, he asked them to imagine what they might do if these objectives were not in fact impossible, and they gave a comprehensive litany of advice from the Holistic Model. Everyone laughed, because in that moment impossibility lost its authority, and the long hot day in the dust and heat yielded measurably to the evening cool.
So where are the numbers from the demonstration sites, the percentages of new perennial ground cover from the grazing exclosures, the increased profits from experimental crops, and graphs of rising levels in the wells? After a few weeks of training scattered over two years, has the Holistic Model not left any tangible trace at all on Madiama or SANREM or the Institut d’Economie Rurale (IER), our Malian collaborators? Well...Madiama will organize its goat herds before Texans start building subways.
There is progress. First of all, at the very top the Holistic Management® Model asks us to input a definition of the "whole" under management, and early on the discussion of this revealed that it’s a whole lot bigger than Madiama Commune. It must include the both the transhumants who pass through, the people who live where Madiama cattle graze during the wet season, the outsiders who come to harvest Bourgou, the women who come to fish in the lakes, the communes where Madiama people gather wood, and the agencies which are developing rice production on adjacent land, to name a few. No natural resource management plan will succeed without agreement among these interests, and the NRMAC and IER have begun the complicated task of bringing them into the planning process.
Further down in the Holistic Management® Model, the second test for actions reads "Weak Link – social, biological, financial." All systems in any state functions no better than their weakest link allows. Therefore, strengthening other elements does not improve the performance of the whole. In natural resource management, universally the first weak link is almost always social consensus and organization. Successful action follows when the community of the whole can handle it. Better cohesion, a small action. More education, a bigger action. Improved organization, a more complex action. And so on.
The weak link changes as the system evolves. At some point lack of scientific knowledge becomes the weak link. It is well to anticipate that, research goes on, but we are not there yet. The decision of the Advisory Council and the leaders of Institute for Rural Economy to undertake restoration of the Bourgou in one location itself bears witness to the growing strength of the social link, because the Model warns us all of the risk that attends the task.
We still encounter the perception at all levels that IER, CARE, SANREM, and the NRMAC aim to deliver a new incantation or technology that will turn the desert green. Nevertheless, through long training sessions in the sweltering heat, delegations to Chad to see how other communities have organized, consensus building workshops patiently conducted through multiple layers of translation, stormy community meetings, and outreach to groups and individuals beyond the Commune we attend the birth of a critical mass of understanding that success depends on change and the shared faith of multiple interests that success is possible without high tech wizardry and continuous aid money.
We count on research and monitoring to fill in the details, but the Holistic Model tells us that achieving the Holistic Goal will depend on flexible management of rest, grazing, animal impact, and living organisms, and almost certainly over an area beyond the Bourgou zone itself. Herd density, timing, and herd behavior will be critically important. The total number of animals less so. Questions of access rights, land tenure, enforcement of the plan, monitoring, settling disputes, and adjusting procedures will touch every level of society and traditional and state judicial and administrative structures. As the project succeeds, we can anticipate that pressure against it will increase as the improved resource draws new consumers and former stakeholders jockey for greater shares.
Rigorous scientific control will be difficult, because management will be imperfect and will vary according to weather, and progress may indirectly affect unmanaged "control" areas.
In the planning for the Bourgou, the easy part is planting the cuttings, especially if the SANREM budget supports it, but if we don’t get management right, no end of plantings will fail. In fact, planting is only a technological tool we use to accelerate a natural process. In due time, we could count on succession (Community Dynamics in the Holistic Management® Model) to propagate Bourgou all by itself after management comes right, and we must rely on community dynamics to regenerate the biodiversity of perhaps thousands of organisms on which the health of a Bourgou zone depends. Remember, the condition of the resource always reflects management.
Planning management that will allow the Bourgou zone to flourish is much harder. It is harder yet to engage the local Bambara farmers, the Bobo fisherfolk, the local Peul herders, the transient Peul herders, the regional Bourgou merchants, and the old widow with a herd of goats. They, too, must share the Holistic Goal and put enough faith in it to want to improve the plan rather than abandon it when deficiencies inevitably show up!
Conclusion
There is no conclusion yet. We have invoked the Holistic Management® Model in the interest of "values-based planning" and discovered that this also challenges values. In Madiama commune and the wider "whole" in which it functions, it challenges the "values" of group pride and domination in favor of the "value" of complementarity and cooperation.
In institutions like IER it questions the "value" placed on technological fixes and sponsored research directed by foreign institutions, and reinforces the "value" of deep roots in the culture and landscape of a historic place and the ability to communicate directly with its people. In programs like SANREM it proposes that the practice of science does not begin and end with neat five year research projects that package quantified relationships from strictly controlled experiments into papers for obscure publications. Good science also "values" close observation of the creative side of nature, the dynamics of great herds upon the plain, the random but purposeful growth of communities, and the dogged struggle of people to win nature to their side.
Bibliography
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Carol Kerven (Overseas Development Institute, London) and I.I. Alimaev (Kazak Scientific Institute of Pasture and Fodder, Almaty) 1998; Mobility and the Market: Economic and environmental impacts of privatisation on pastoralists in Kazakstan, Paper presented at the conference on "Strategic Considerations on th Development of Central Asia". CODOCA and Chinese Academy of Science, Urumchi, China. September 13-18 1998.
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Louis Uchitele, 1999, "Robert Heilbroner: An Economic Pioneer Decries the Modern Field’s Narrow Focus", article in the New York Times, January 23, 1999.