Monitoring Matters: Comparative Analysis of Innovative Approaches (MOMA)

Recent decades have seen substantial efforts by national governments and the donor community to develop and initiate approaches that sustain natural resource use- and management at local levels. Although important results have been achieved, such efforts have frequently been constrained by a lack of cost-effective means of monitoring natural resource use. This has meant that (i) local communities often lack a means of assessing their resource off-take for planning and management purposes, and that (ii) no data is available to document the sustainability of such community-based approaches. The obvious answer would appear to be implementation of standard natural resource monitoring systems. However, conventional monitoring can be costly and hard to sustain. On this background, a generation of new and alternative natural resource monitoring methods is emerging, carried out locally by community members or other
individuals with little formal training. This project examines whether these new approaches can detect true local or larger-scale natural resource trends and address the shortfalls of conventional monitoring.