Approaches to natural resource management emphasise the importance of involving local people and institutions in order to build capacity, limit costs, and achieve environmental sustainability. Governments worldwide, often encouraged by international donors, have formulated devolution policies and legal instruments that provide an enabling environment for devolved natural resource management. However, implementation of these policies reveals serious challenges. This article explores the effects of limited involvement of local people and institutions in policy development and implementation. An in-depth study of the Forest Policy of Malawi and Village Forest Areas in the Lilongwe district provides an example of externally driven policy development which seeks to promote local management of natural resources. The article argues that policy which has weak ownership by national government and does not adequately consider the complexity of local institutions, together with the effects of previous initiatives on them, can create a cumulative legacy through which destructive resource use practices and social conflict may be reinforced. In short, poorly developed and implemented community based natural resource management policies can do considerably more harm than good. Approaches are needed that enable the policy development process to embed an in-depth understanding of local institutions whilst incorporating flexibility to account for their location-specific nature. This demands further research on policy design to enable rigorous identification of positive and negative institutions and ex-ante exploration of the likely effects of different policy interventions.

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This chapter investigates the Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA) approach that seeks to support decision making and build resilience among smallholder farmers in Africa. In particular, it discusses the development and testing of two proof-of-concept mobile phone applications that use elements of the PICSA approach to provide climate information and decision-making tools. The chapter starts with a brief explanation of the PICSA approach before summarising the findings of a review that was undertaken to highlight the lessons learned from similar mobile-agriculture (mAgri) initiatives. The two mobile applications, which focus on historical climate information and participatory budgeting for smallholders in Northern Ghana, are then examined and discussed. These initiatives are found to have the potential to scale the provision of agriculture-related information and services to a large number of smallholder farmers at a relatively low cost.