The Role of Civil Society Organisations in the Implementation of Participatory Land Use Planning in Zambia

Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have been instrumental in implementing many donor-funded land projects in Zambia due to their vast experience in interacting with the communities. Participatory land use planning (PLUP) is one of the key elements to achieving sustainable development in a country. Zambia is endowed with abundant natural resources that include forests. However, the rate at which these are being depleted is a source of concern for both the government and the private sector. The eastern province of Zambia has received a lot of interest from both the cooperating partners and the government in implementing participatory land use planning with a particular focus on integrating social biodiversity impact assessment (SBIA). It is in this vein that Petauke District Land Alliance, Chipata District Land Alliance and Nyimba Land Alliance as part of the consortium were hired by Zambia Integrated Forest Landscape Project, a government project funded by World Bank managed to support 22 wards spanning across nine districts in Eastern province to develop Participatory Land Use plans covering a total of over 90,000 hectares of land dotted in four districts implemented in twelve months from February 2021 to February 2022. The assignment was to support/facilitate planning and implementation of integrated land use and resource management that meet the climate resilience/mitigation and livelihoods objectives of rural households in the Eastern Province. This resonates with last year’s COP28 meeting in Dubai, United Arab Emirates where world leaders met to seek for means and ways of combating the effects of climate change. In order to achieve this geo spatial tools such as open data kit incorporating geo ODK, garmin glos, QGIS and GPS have been extensively used in the implementation of participatory land use planning in eight districts of eastern province of Zambia. These geo spatial technologies have eased the work of the implementing team as they cover long distances to capture either line or polygon data in 22 wards spanning across the eight districts. The wards and districts were carefully chosen as they represent different landscapes and cultural diversities. Some are patrilineal whilst others are matrilineal. PLUP has been undertaken both on customary and statutory lands, though the former is more prevalent. The PLUP implementation in Eastern Province is aimed at reducing deforestation and land degradation in the rural communities where unsustainable agricultural practices and indiscriminate cutting down of trees for charcoal production is rife. In order to effectively counter unsustainable agricultural practices climate smart agricultural (CSA) practices were carried out in each ward by mapping agricultural parcels of land through the use of low-cost geo spatial data collection tools. This was meant to assist in meeting ZIFLP’s goal of investing in low carbon development initiatives that include district level integrated land use planning (IDP), participatory community land use planning, sustainable forest management, climate smart agriculture (CSA) and value chain development. This paper seeks to explore how CSOs have been instrumental in the implementation of participatory land use planning that integrates the social biodiversity impact assessment.