Prediction Tool Puts Development in Hands of Locals

John Roach
for National Geographic News

March 24, 2004

Indonesia's poorest province, Papua, is a natural-resource trove that is both awaiting exploitation and begging for protection.

Conservationists hope an innovative software program will help residents guide the province to sustainable development. The program essentially allows local people to predict the effects of their civic decisions—whether to sell off local forests, whether to ban women from schools, and so on—on their communities.

"Papua significantly contributes to Indonesia's status as one of the biologically richest countries in the world," said Dessy Anggraeni, a resource economist in Indonesia with the Washington, D.C.-based environmental organization Conservation International (CI). "But its people are also among the poorest in Indonesia."

To many people, Papua's lush forests of old-growth timber, latent precious metals, and untapped reserves of oil and natural gas are the answer to province's poverty woes. But environmentalists have long argued against large-scale resource extraction, saying it benefits big, multinational corporations and leaves locals impoverished.

To determine if there is a way to alleviate poverty of Papuans without irreparably harming the environment, CI has brought a planning tool, called Threshold 21, to Papua. The tool is a computerized development model that helps stakeholders and decision makers create and analyze strategies for the future.

"It won't predict the future, but it's the best way of getting a consistent idea of where things will lead," said John Shilling, a senior advisor with the Millennium Institute in Arlington, Virginia. With his colleagues, Shilling has worked over the past 20 years to develop the model.

Already customized for more than 15 different countries and regions around the world, CI recently asked the Millennium Institute to develop a version of Threshold 21 for Papua. Ultimately, CI hopes that Papuans will take control of the model and use it to chart their own course.

Comprehensive and Transparent

CI analyzed a host of available computer models before choosing Threshold 21. Such tools have long been used by financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to decide what projects and initiatives to fund around the world.

"In most cases, a standard cost-benefit analysis is used to assess the suitability of public investments, while the impact of the possible policies to be implemented on the local society and environment is not taken into account," Anggraeni said.

A deciding factor in CI's choice of Threshold 21 was the model's embrace of environmental and social factors in addition to economic factors as it analyzes any given strategy for the future.

The result of this integrated, three-pillar approach creates what the Millennium Institute says is a more "comprehensive" picture of what happens when one path is chosen over another. And that picture comes with all the details of how it was put together, a concept referred to as transparency.

For example, a local group in Bangladesh wanted to limit education to only men. So, using Threshold 21, they theoretically took women out of the schools and ran the computer program to find out what would happen.

Shilling said that some things, like a reduction in gross domestic product and higher fertility rates, were predictable outcomes. But the local group was surprised to learn that by taking women out of the schools, male life expectancy went down. Since the model is transparent, they tracked back to find out why.

"It turns out that women are significant health care providers," Shilling said. "If they are not educated, the health of the whole family declines."

Model Customization

Use of Threshold 21 begins with a vision. In the case of the model being developed for Papua, CI has a vision of poverty reduction and economic development for the local people. At the same time, they want to protect the environment, a goal the organization says is consistent with the challenges faced by the province's decentralized government.

With a vision set, the modelers solicit information from as many local everyday people and decision-makers as possible—specific data on the economy, social structure, and the environment. With the data, the modelers prep the computer program to model the impact of strategies for future development.

"It is using the best information available," Shilling said. "It lays out a range of plausible scenarios and their implications so decision-makers have the best estimates on which to make their decisions. And it is transparent about the assumptions and the positive and negative outcomes."

The transparency of the model, added Shilling, makes it difficult for stakeholders to hide their biases, opening up an honest dialogue about the various options.

CI chose four widely discussed development strategies for Papua to run through the model as a means to demonstrate the model's effectiveness: keeping the status quo, a major roadbuilding and logging initiative, a major dambuilding and mining initiative, and a locally focused urban development initiative.

According to CI's analysis of the outcomes, the urban development initiative proved the best at providing poverty alleviation as well as protecting the environment, whereas the other scenarios led to greater environmental degradation with most of the money from resource extraction going to foreign investors and foreign workers.

Anggraeni said the goal of running the scenarios was not meant to dictate specific development paths. The goal was to impart this approach and method to local planners and other residents. Then they could use the approach to analyze the effects of several widely discussed scenarios and come up with their own agreed strategy. Feedback from the two workshops held so far suggests CI's plan is working.

"Indeed, most of the participants are really enthusiastic to discuss the results of the model and the model itself," Anggraeni said.

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