Conflict management in participatory integrated livelihood security project: A case study from North Western Indian Himalaya
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53550/Keywords:
Conflict management, RIC analysis, Force-Field-Analysis, Livelihood security, Process based monitoring and evaluation, Negotiation performance appraisalAbstract
Rainfed agriculture in North Western Indian Himalaya (NWIH) is highly diversified and presents high opportunities for development with number of challenges in achieving livelihood security through integrated project. These integrated projects are multi-stakeholder and highly dependent on simultaneous development of individually, collectively and government owned resources. Majority of the bottom-up planned projects also failed to achieve its boundary objectives in India owing primarily to sociopsychological constraints. Project implementing agencies (PIA's) are poor in handling these constraints i.e. conflict management skill. Study is based on process based monitoring and evaluation during project planning and implementation phase from NWIH. Study found that application of project management tools viz., force-field-analysis (FFA) and relevance-importanceconstraints (RIC) in project planning can help to identify probable degree of conflict in proposed activity, key players for it and their likely net impact on project activity in advance. Application of these techniques convert conflict from uncertainty to risk and help PIA to set new implementation priorities, and appropriate conflict management tools that can be applied, if required, to achieve the boundary objectives. Study suggests that project management tools and Human Resource Management in general with conflict management techniques invariably be included at undergraduate and higher-level education programmes of agricultural universities so that the future team of agricultural extension's and managers are well equipped to deal with conflicting situations in integrated agricultural and/or natural resource management projects to achieve boundary objectives effectively and make project outcome sustainable. Meta analysis of process based monitoring and evaluation studies will lead to better policy formulation that will have larger impact of future projects.
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