Document(s) 2 of 11

They will feed beside the roads and find pasture on every barren hill. They will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat upon them. He who has compassion on them will guide them and lead them beside springs of water.

Isaiah 49:9–10

Wind-swept and sun-parched in the summer, snowcapped and bitterly cold in the winter, Arsaal, like all mountainous drylands, lives between the two extremes which have forged it: the environment harsh and unforgiving which threatens life at all times, and the unstoppable will to survive of its people, its plants and its animals.

Drylands are aptly named for the lack of water, the basis of life. Besides a severe lack of natural resources, the predicament of drylands is also manmade: rapid population growth, poverty and inequality, and protracted political instability. Under these pressures, dryland communities are breaking down and disasters are expected. And these are indeed occurring: famines, severe land degradation, rural exodus and so on.

However, hidden in the highlands of Arsaal, some unlikely events are unfolding. This village for centuries subsisted on a traditional agropastoral economy based on small-scale farming and seasonal transhumance. In the past 50 years, rapid social, political and economic changes occurred and coincided with the introduction and successful production of rainfed stone fruit trees. Today, about two million trees cover its mountains, planted one by one, against all odds. This is the Arsaali paradox: at a time when the global trend is one of loss of trees and other vegetation, Arsaal, the driest part of Lebanon, is covered with orchards. Yet, every change has its price. The massive introduction of fruit trees resulted in increased fragmentation of the grazing common land, making it less accessible to other users and creating conflict between pastoralists and fruit tree growers.

The paradox was bound to attract the attention of researchers, a breed that lives on the dissection of unlikely events. Thirsty for freedom, yet boxed in disciplinary pens, we, the researchers, rammed our way out of the enclosures in search of job satisfaction. After many false starts, we reached Arsaal on a freezing sunny day in January 1992. That was when we learned to juggle.

We had many apples to juggle with: our promotions (our livelihoods), our curiosity, our social responsibility, our thirst for adventures and our cultural roots. We juggled all these, carefully taking one bite at a time, making sure never to drop any.

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) recognized the potential and helped us through the first, difficult steps. Research money is always a convincing argument to institutions in the drylands. IDRC effectively bailed us out of the disciplinary jail.

That was how we found ourselves rambling in the midst of new concepts and practices: multidisciplinarity, participatory research, community-based natural resource management and others. And when our apprenticeship was completed, we created our own customized tools. Our repertoire included participatory geographic information systems, blending community participation with state-of-the-art satellite imagery; different forms of institutional bricolage, such as a local users network, cooperatives and communication platforms; and new paradigms for development research, such as sustainable livelihood approach and embedded research.

Arsaal became a real-life laboratory to test innovative approaches, assessing them in terms of successes and failures, and to draw on the lessons learned. Arsaal taught us a lot. A striking first lesson is that poor and isolated communities in drylands in the Middle East and North Africa region take development research seriously and eagerly respond to its outcomes. Another lesson is that participatory research can empower the local community through knowledge, but that in order to generate a sustainable impact this knowledge needs to be intimately linked to other development activities taking place around it. We also realize that, contrary to what the development establishment purports, the sustainability of rural livelihood in drylands is not necessarily in line with the sustainability of the ecological systems that support this livelihood. In fact, these communities are bound to invest in multiple options - some of which are not necessarily sustainable - in order to cope with the various uncertainties they are forced to face. The magnitude and the impact of these complexities are driven by global (or, better, globalized) forces that are beyond the control of the local communities and dictate their survival decisions.

None of this would have been possible without the ever-present Arsaali community. Along the journey, we met many people, all of them concerned, albeit in different ways, with our development research projects: suspicious traditional clan leaders, falsely accommodating local authorities, visionary farmers, antediluvian pastoralists, revolutionary social activists, demoralized intellectuals, and empowered yet not so independent women. They were really the people who taught us the meaning of the word participation. And not always kindly.

But who's that El Harid character?

If the spirit of the drylands were condensed into a living object, it would be the cactus. El Harid, the cactus, is the drylands personified. His thick, spiky skin has endured the blistering sun and the bitter cold. His ears have heard the whistling wind, the bleating of sheep and goats, the cries of herders and, more recently, the rumbling of lorries. He belongs to none of them; he belongs only to the land, and it is to it he will one day return. But not before justice is done. His predicament echoes the true situation of the drylands. He is there but no one can see him; he has potential but no one is interested. If the drylands had a voice, what would it say? He has silently witnessed the modern-day scenes unfolding around him, and finally he cannot stay quiet. He dreams of worst-case scenarios but is intent on change.

This book is the tale of our journey in his eyes - a quest for an answer and a plea for hope.

Our thanks go to many people, hopefully none will be missed out. They include the researchers and research staff who contributed to both phases of the Arsaal project: Mounir Abi Said, Efat Abou-Fakhr-Hammad, Ahmad Baalbaki, Riad Baalbaki, Ghada Bistanji, Amal Bohsali, Ragy Darwish, Corinne Dick, Faraj El Awar, Rana El Hindi, Lara Geadah, Amal Hayek, Nahla Hwalla, Wael Jabre, Mazen Makki, Martha Mundy, Farah Naja, Michelle Obeid, Amal Saliby, Christine Sayegh, Helga Seeden, Richard Smith, Salma Talhouk and Farshad Tami. There are also our partners in research and development: the Lebanese Agricultural Research Institute, in particular Salah Hajj Hassan; the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture, in particular Fouad Fleifel, Edmond Choueiri and Ali Raad; the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), in particular Berthold Hansmann; the Green Line Association and all our friends there; UNDP-Lebanon; ICARDA, in particular Adel Nassar, Liz Bailey and Richard Tutwiller; and Oxfam Lebanon, in particular Omar Traboulsi.

We are also grateful to everybody who helped bring this book to life. We have the financial support of the American University of Beirut, IDRC, and the UNDP Drylands Development Centre. Guy Bessette, Bill Carman, Lamia El Fattal, Elie Kodsi and Eglal Rached reviewed the manuscript and provided us moral support. There is also the support of all the friends at the IDRC headquarters in Ottawa.

Special thanks go to Mairi Nasr and Wassim Kays for bringing El Harid to life. Finally, our deepest gratitude goes to the community of Arsaal for all the magical moments we have shared and continue to share.

Document(s) 2 of 11