© DIIR, 2004

Guidelines for Development in Tibet

Priorities

1. Poverty alleviation is a top priority in Tibet. Any project addressing this must look at the multi-dimensional nature of poverty-including health and education status, forms of exclusion by gender and ethnicity-in addition to monetary indicators. Vulnerable groups include those stricken by poverty due to gender, age, geographic isolation, exclusion and disability. They might need specific interventions particularly in the form of direct transfers based on a policy of guaranteed minimum income support.

2. On the whole, poverty alleviation projects should shift away from charity and emergency relief only after disasters occur, and move towards income support for the destitute and absolutely poor, as an entitlement. In order that guaranteed income support does not lead to chronic dependence, it should be limited to the destitute. Development agencies can implement pilot projects to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.

3. Development projects should benefit the poorest, most deprived and excluded citizens who, in Tibet, are overwhelmingly rural. Projects should directly identify and reach this segment of the population, rather than relying on general growth in the hope of also lifting incomes and opportunities for the poor.

4. Social capital, traditional knowledge, customary practices of sustainable organic agriculture, also sustainable and productive rangeland management, should be studied, identified, acknowledged and incorporated into development project designs. These are examples of traditional Tibetan solutions to utilising the plateau productively that can serve as the basis for development work.

5. Projects based on the exploitation of Tibetan resources for the benefit of distant heavy industry cannot be realistically presented as poverty alleviation for Tibetans, or environmental remediation, even if such projects generate local employment and invest in repairing damage caused by the project in minor ways.

1. Tibetan carpets, handicrafts, traditional medicines and other traditional Tibetan manufactures-apart from having considerable demand worldwide-have great potential for redressing current inequalities since they are largely rural-based. To realise this potential the traditional products need to be enhanced by transferring to Tibetans modern skills in design, packaging, protection of intellectual property, marketing and financing. This requires considerable training.

2. A real opportunity for redressing the urban/rural divide is to promote the processing of raw rural commodities by the producers themselves, thereby adding value and increasing the returns. This may involve training farmers and nomads in technologies compatible with their way of life, and in the establishment and operation of co-operatives, pooling of micro-finance, and in planning and operating enterprises.

3. In the longer term it may be productive to identify the comparative advantages of Tibet in producing goods that can find distant and highly profitable markets. Comparative advantage has potential in the longer term to create national and international markets for what Tibet does best, especially in the nonviolent production of wool and dairy products. Yoghurt, cheese and wool are in much demand among urban consumers in China’s major cities. It may be that finished products made in Tibet can find a market in cities, but if Tibetans are to benefit, great care will be needed to train producers in quality control, certification, supply chain logistics, marketing and business planning.

1. Infrastructure development must incorporate appropriate technologies based on local needs.

2. Priority areas of infrastructure development in rural Tibet include local market access roads, clean domestic water supply, irrigation, electricity and communications.

3. Infrastructure development should promote food security, including land improvement projects to enhance food production (such as terracing, shelterbelt tree planting, irrigation canals and grain storage facilities) and access to markets.

4. Rural infrastructure projects need to be of small scale and low cost, using paid local labour and simple technologies that facilitate easy repair and maintenance; for example, wells and rain storage tanks, small reservoirs or cisterns, terracing and drainage works. Reaching the rural population through small-scale projects is therefore the priority, and small-scale systems, based on diverting water from mountain streams or pumping it from underground sources, can be linked to individual households at a low cost per household. The development projects should also be sensitive to the seasonal nature of farm-work to determine when labour should be asked of rural peoples.

5. Lower grade feeder roads to villages can quickly contribute to significant income improvements for farmers. This overcomes the present reliance of producers on a single middleman who dictates the price. Village access roads are generally low-cost, narrow gravel roads connected to main roads. They are inexpensive to install and often have multiple benefits: increase access to markets, health centres and schools; reduce marketing costs and costs of obtaining agricultural inputs; allow the transport of heavy materials; and facilitate the installation of valuable infrastructure such as grid electricity and telephone lines.

6. Decisions on infrastructure projects should include active inputs from the local Tibetans themselves. The poor tend to have least voice in any decisions about the type or location of infrastructure. However, they are usually the best placed to know what project would be of greatest immediate benefit. Through involvement in decision-making, and a sense of local ownership, they will be keener to contribute labour and local materials to the project, and more likely to maintain it in the future.

1. Agricultural projects should consider not only intended outcomes such as intensification of production and higher yields, but also long-term soil quality, erosion control, downstream discharge of pollutants released by applying chemical fertilisers, and opportunities for integrated pest management based on time-tested Tibetan organic farming methods.

2. Grassland projects should not focus narrowly on a single development aspect, such as increasing production, invasive pest control, or introduction of exotic grasses. Projects on the rangelands should adopt a holistic approach in line with the New Resource Management Policy embraced by most development agencies, in which nomadic mobility under current circumstances has the best long-term guarantee of biodiversity conservation, sustainability and productivity.

3. We do not encourage sedentarisation of nomads since it results in further degradation of rangelands, overstocking, inflexibility, and poverty among the former nomads. International development agencies have an opportunity to transfer the lessons learned world-wide from the many failed sedentarisation projects of earlier years, and the danger of damaging the viability of nomadic production if land and water sources are sidelined for irrigation, farming and industrial uses.

4. Projects should adopt technologies that strengthen mobility, such as portable solar power. These are preferable to technologies that require settling year-round in one place, such as being connected to a main electricity power grid.

5. Setting aside of large areas as nature reserves can benefit Tibetans if there is training among local communities in skills such as becoming park rangers, tour guides, biodiversity protectors and enforcers of anti-poaching regulations. The establishment of protected areas not only conserves biodiversity and guarantees downstream water purity; it can also contribute directly to development, employment and human capital formation in the protected area. UNESCO is encouraged to investigate suitable areas to be declared World Heritage Sites or Biosphere Reserves.

6. New hybrid seeds of Tibetan crops and breeds for herds can be introduced through effective agricultural extension in which farmers and pastoralists are treated as equal partners of scientists and officials. The higher yields from new seeds and breeds should not require higher inputs of capital, fuel, pesticides or chemical fertilisers.

7. Beijing’s reforestation, mountain closure, and grain-to-green programmes to restore marginal farmland to grassland and forest, should benefit local Tibetan communities through their employment and involvement of Tibetans to care for seedlings, sow appropriate grasses and repair degraded rangeland. Social forestry and local ownership of projects are better models than exclusion, exclosure and subsidies directed only to state enterprises staffed by immigrants who were once responsible for felling the same forests. Successful rehabilitation of degraded grassland and reforestation fulfil PRC’s national goal of safeguarding the water supply, and the global challenge of greenhouse gases by acting as a sink for those gases. This requires considerable training and skills transfer.

8. Even though we oppose any projects that displace or move Tibetan farmers and nomads, in extreme cases, where viability of life is not possible and Tibetans voluntarily accept moving out of ecologically sensitive zones, the projects should take special measures to ensure that the displaced Tibetans are not denied their basic right to a decent and sustainable livelihood. These projects should ensure that Tibetan farmers and herders who are displaced from their land get adequate and timely training, compensation and support, and effective ownership of renewed grasslands and forest. Only then will they recover forfeited income, and become willing and active partners in the restoration of degraded Tibetan lands.

... have made it more difficult for traditional Tibetan urban enterprises to compete with better funded, more experienced and lower cost Han managed enterprises in urban areas. There is growing evidence of Han enterprises, which now constitute about 70 per cent of all enterprises in Lhasa Municipality, squeezing out Tibetan enterprises even in traditional Tibetan product areas such as Tibetan clothing, furniture, painting, restaurants and dry goods and food retailing. (Arthur Holcombe, Testimony to US Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 10 June 2002)

Experience around the world shows that micro-finance succeeds in directly providing poor households with affordable credit, encouraging their self-organisation. Micro-finance has become a widely favoured method of poverty reduction-both with governments and among donor organisations.

1. Micro-finance projects should encourage the direct participation of the poor, both in allowing recipients of loans to choose their own investments and in encouraging them to form their own village-level organisations.

2. An integrated approach is needed that combines access to credit with the provision of additional services and training, including marketing advice and technical support for production activities.

3. The micro-finance system should be a tool for the poor to gain control over assets and become economically self-sufficient. Micro-finance lenders need not subsidise interest rates. The willingness of lenders to spend as well as lend is better directed at subsidising the administrative costs. The very poorest should be designated credit-worthy and eligible for loans. In the present Catch 22 situation, under Chinese law they do not own their land, which is why Chinese banks currently do not lend to them, because they technically lack collateral as surety for repayment of loans.

4. In delivering micro-finance services, involvement of organisations of poor people, such as farmers’ associations, rural cooperatives or local self-help groups, either independently or in cooperation with formal financial institutions, are the key to enhancing outreach, effectiveness and sustainability of micro-finance operations. This requires the active encouragement of traditional community-based organisations, strengthening their voice and capacities.

1. The development focus in education should ensure greater access, equalisation and distribution of resources across regions, to compensate for present inequalities. To address specific local circumstances and needs, including nomadism, more flexible forms of education should be explored.

2. The primary goal should be the practical elimination of rural illiteracy for the younger generation, with the achievement of this target serving as the principal measure of effectiveness. A major percentage of Tibet’s population today is exceptionally young. Their education needs cannot be met by poor counties and communities alone, as is currently the case. Responsibility for financing education has been downshifted to those least able to pay. The need for external assistance is real and urgent.

3. Culturally appropriate education is a high priority. This requires considerable investment in teacher training, curriculum reform, textbook writing, bilingual education programmes, and repair of decrepit physical infrastructure, plus adequate salaries for teachers to remain employed. Since responsibility has been downshifted to local communities to finance local schools, development projects that effectively reduce illiteracy and improve retention rates can have a high level of local community involvement. Tibetans not only need curricula and a medium of instruction that is culturally appropriate to actual needs and circumstances, but that also prepares children to effectively access the modern world.

4. On the rangelands this means taking education to the children rather than marshalling the children in centralised boarding schools. It might seem that this is ambitious, yet the example of Mongolia proves it can be done. Mongolia and Tibet are alike, not only in their religion and culture, but in being vast semi-arid lands well suited to extensive nomadic pastoralism. The Mongolian education system delivered high levels of literacy to the widely scattered nomads. In a survey for the World Bank of lessons to be learned from nomadic education around the world, Saverio Kratli concludes that global experience insists on the importance of not separating support for education from support for pastoral livelihood and economy. Development agencies specialising in education or pastoral production should respect this linkage.

5. In Tibet, development agencies involved in education would have to find innovative ways to tackle the challenges of training and retaining competent teachers to teach in mostly rural areas. Incentives and possibility for advancement in career based on performance and long- term commitment in rural education could be ways of attracting quality teachers for rural schools.

6. Vocational training is a major need among adult and younger Tibetans if they are to have access to wider markets, opportunities, jobs and economic niches. The PRC’s Constitution (article122) states: "The state helps the national autonomous areas train large numbers of cadres at various levels and specialised personnel and skilled workers of various professions and trades, from among the minority nationality or nationalities in those areas." In practice, the PRC needs help in implementing this Constitutional clause.

7. Adult vocational training should include not only production but also the distribution and marketing of new products and services, to ensure maximum benefit to those who have missed out on an adequate education in recent decades. A generation of Tibetans has become adult without becoming literate. Vocational education is the best way of helping them adapt to a market economy. Vocational training at present is largely restricted to laid-off workers of downsizing state enterprises. This is too narrow a focus.

8. Community-based and financed local schools (minban in Chinese), currently under-resourced and receiving little state support, can benefit greatly from international partnerships, to realise PRC’s policy that all children shall have nine years of schooling. Schooling, wherever possible, should be available in a way that does not break up families, and which respects the seasonal cycle and the need for all family members to contribute labour at peak times. World’s best practice models of successful bilingual education will help reduce dropout rates, and enable a significant proportion of Tibetans to enter senior middle school and receive post-secondary training.

9. The number of school places for Tibetan children completing year nine is extremely limited. The shortage of senior middle schools is a major bottleneck thwarting the advancement of Tibetans. International partners can do much to raise the availability and appropriateness of upper secondary and tertiary education for Tibetans, including the acquisition of functional literacy in a global language other than Mandarin Chinese.

10. Curriculum design should assist Beijing in implementing its policy that minority nationality students should receive education, at least in the primary years, in their Tibetan tongue, while also attaining literacy in world languages. Curricula should be expanded to include not only the responsibilities of citizens, but also their rights, now that the rule of law is strengthening across China.

11. Very few Tibetans are currently deemed eligible for international study programmes, on the grounds that their Chinese or English is inadequate. This greatly restricts their opportunity to learn from world experience of best practices in a wide range of disciplines. International education programmes can do much by providing, not only scholarships, but also a bridging-year or foundation-year programme to bring language skills up to tertiary standard.

12. Tibetan language publishing, arts productions, cultural events, film and television need subsidising to restore Tibetan idioms to public life. At present Tibetan writers and artists struggle-for lack of finance, distribution and support-to reach audiences keen to encounter new Tibetan artistic output. International cultural development organisations can also do much to conserve the threatened and deteriorating Tibetan architectural heritage.

13. Employment opportunities for Tibetans in modern secondary and tertiary sectors will benefit from training programmes based on identified needs. Employment of Tibetans, especially in cities, is at present limited to salaried government office work and unskilled work such as labouring on construction sites. The problem is not that Tibetans cannot be educated but that, on graduation, there is no career track available. Tibetans settled worldwide have shown themselves capable of quickly learning modern skills, so capacity building programmes in Tibet have excellent prospects of success.

14. Scholarships and grants for Tibetan students to pursue technical and professional studies, both in Mainland China and abroad, would help to increase the general pool of talent and skills in the Tibetan region.

1. Development should maximise the transfer to Tibetan communities of the training, knowledge, skills and technologies needed so that Tibetans can own, operate and maintain projects successfully, and adapt them to their purposes. The transfer of non-Tibetan experts to live in Tibet and take charge of development projects should not be necessary, except for short periods.

2. Tibetan communities can become effective partners of international organisations if the traditional community based organisations (CBOs) of Tibet are recognised and assisted to articulate what Tibetans need. There are now many NGOs in China, especially in the environment field. Tibetans need the opportunity and encouragement to establish their own NGOs. An interim step is to help existing CBOs attain official recognition. This includes traditional herd management CBOs such as the rukor "tent-circle" and the clan-based tshowa. Community enterprises did, and can in future, have positive roles in post-harvest crop buffer stock protection, seed bank genetic diversity maintenance, social welfare, disaster relief, and community banking.

3. Economically and ecologically the Tibetan Plateau is a unit. The whole plateau could benefit from projects which use Tibetan skills and comparative advantage.

1. Traditional Tibetan medicine (sowa rigpa) is widely trusted, especially by rural Tibetans. It is effective, with thousands of years of experience in delivery of health services. It is cost-effective, making use of locally-available ingredients rather than relying on transnational pharmaceutical corporations to whom all users must pay royalties. A plateau-wide expansion of traditional Tibetan medical college education can enable delivery of a decentralised health care system to remote areas. The current health system is urban-biased, and the widespread provision of emchis-traditional doctors-is an effective way of ensuring that a scattered populace at last has access to health care.

2. Prevention of disease has been much neglected in Tibet, in favour of expensive "modern" cures. Investment in health must focus on essential generic drugs and low-cost interventions. Examples include hepatitis B immunisation, oral re-hydration, immunisation of expectant mothers, and promotion of iodised salt, vitamin A and iron supplements. China’s prevention system-known as epidemic prevention stations-needs fresh finance and revitalisation.

3. Malnutrition is currently common in Tibet, as is stunting of child growth, according to international experts. Nutrition education, primary healthcare and maternal and child health services are high priorities. The government should be encouraged to change the hospital subsidy to a scheme whereby the healthcare costs of the poor are directly subsidised.

4. A supply of safe drinking water brings large-scale, immediate benefits directly related to people’s health and productivity. Lack of potable water is associated with intestinal and other illnesses, as well as with certain deformities or disabilities in areas where available water sources have high natural mineral toxicity.

5. There is a crucial need for outside help in researching and combating diseases that are endemic or specific to certain locales of Tibet-Kashin-Beck Disease or big bone disease, plague, tuberculosis.

6. An HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention programme needs to be initiated, since sexually transmitted diseases like HIV have become a potential threat in Tibet due to thriving sex industries in the towns and cities-an impact of urbanisation and in-migration of a large, single-male population from China.

7. Delivery of health services should be decentralised as much as possible. This is a basic right, a question of access and equity. Decentralisation need not be expensive, if sowa rigpa traditional Tibetan healing is promoted as an integral aspect of a total health care system.

8. Sterilisation, birth control and contraception programmes require special attention to informed consent to ensure that anyone who undergoes such treatment does so voluntarily and in full knowledge of the consequences. Coercion, fines and social pressure should not be permitted to force women into an irreversible loss of reproductive capacity.

9. There is need for better supervision mechanisms for village and township biomedicine health clinics in order to eliminate the prescribing of unnecessary and expensive drugs. Better training and adequate remuneration for health and social workers is important.

Until now, urban slums on a scale common in most developing countries have not developed in Tibet, but such slums could occur if there is no concerted effort to make rural life more rewarding.

A primary cause of urban poverty is that employment opportunities for Tibetans are available only to a limited number of salaried government employees, and as casual unskilled labour. Tibetans face discrimination, as non-Tibetans are systematically favoured by the Chinese administration. As Tibet becomes a market economy, under current Chinese policies, such discrimination is sometimes excused as the natural workings of the market. This is not true. Tibetans are enterprising people.

Available statistics show a remarkably high proportion of the Tibetan population is young. Despite the strong emphasis in these Guidelines on restoring the viability of rural life, not all young adults may be able to find sustainable livelihoods in rural areas, especially in areas of serious rangeland degradation and sedentarisation, restricted to fixed quotas of grazing land that does not grow as families grow. Therefore,

1. Vocational training in service sector industries can help Tibetans overcome discrimination. Start-up capital and training in business planning and management can help Tibetans enter market niches, which are increasingly monopolised by better-connected immigrants to Tibet. A little positive discrimination could do much to prevent unemployed Tibetan youth, unable to make a living in the countryside, from drifting into social evils in towns and cities.

2. Reform of the restrictive household registration system (known in Chinese as hukou) would help give rural Tibetans legal status in the towns, and a chance to cope with discrimination. Such status is readily available to non-Tibetan immigrants from distant provinces, giving them immediate advantages over the indigenous Tibetan population.

Tourism could be beneficial to Tibetan communities, if Tibetans are given a say in the running of the tourism industry. Throughout these Guidelines there is emphasis on the appropriateness of positive discrimination towards the most deprived, neglected and excluded ethnicities in Tibet. Such positive discrimination is especially appropriate in tourism, because the destination is Tibet itself and the product is Tibetan culture, which only Tibetan people are uniquely capable of representing.

However, for those who want to get involved in eco-tourism, adventure tours and pilgrimage tours in Tibet, we expect investors to encourage reform of the present state-owned and controlled industry by demonstrating much higher levels of client satisfaction with smaller scale, locally-controlled operations which enable visitors to fulfil their desire for genuine encounters with Tibetans and their land and culture.

To realise this potential the tourism industry should be structured to create tour circuits designed to promote eco-tourism, adventure tourism and pilgrimage tourism in a sustainable manner by respecting the local culture, tradition and landscape. Tourism in Tibet can employ Tibetans not merely as cooks, room attendants, drivers and waiters, as at present. The potential is great if Tibetan culture, landscapes and sacred places are understood as the core of what attracts visitors. Tibetans are uniquely able to interpret and present Tibet, not as a superficial, exotic spectacle but as a rich cultural encounter that meets the needs of visitors for a different and authentic experience.

We oppose large-scale projects concentrated in small areas since they are not appropriate. Large hydro dams, railways, highways, cities, mines, oil and gas pipelines, and heavy manufacturing industries are not what Tibet needs under existing circumstances. Such projects transfer outputs of Tibetan resources to distant consumers. Tibet gains little revenue while local Tibetans, even those forcibly displaced by development, are not compensated, paid royalties or trained in modern skills suited to operating such projects. Instead, immigrant settlers flood in. It is hard to see how such projects, which usually originate in the Five-Year Plans of Beijing’s central planners, can benefit Tibetans by being financed internationally. Such projects only worsen existing inequalities and rob the land of its natural resources.

Since these Guidelines apply to a situation in which central authorities may persist in devising major projects, some of them involving international partners, it is practical to question what protections can ameliorate the impacts of such projects.

1. Investors are well placed to ensure that International Labour Organisation Guidelines are implemented, and that Tibetans employed in joint ventures receive training in modern skills. Partners can establish standards that include compensation, resource rental taxes, and royalties to be paid to local communities whose land or resources are taken for project construction. Where local communities are displaced by development and forced to resettle, international partners have a special responsibility to ensure that adequate land, of sufficient quality, is provided to ensure resettlers are not pauperised.

2. International investors have a special responsibility to introduce standards of community participation, environmental impact assessment, gender impact assessment and ensure adequate cultural diversity of employment opportunities generated by major projects. This can set new standards for centrally planned state projects. Such partnerships are an opportunity to introduce minimum standards of gender and ethnicity employment in such ventures.

• Defining a coherent population policy for the whole of the Tibetan Plateau and implementing Article 43 of the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Regional Autonomy, which gives autonomous areas the right to control the transient population
• Promoting environmental economic inclusion of free public commodities-such as the clean and abundant water and air of Tibet-to downstream and lowland users
• Promoting linkages between the upland poor and downstream concentrations of the urban wealthy that raise awareness of the dependence of the rich on the natural resources supplied to them by Tibet
• Improving agricultural extension services so that farmers and pastoralists become equal partners with scientists and laboratory technicians in a joint community-owned effort to increase productivity
• Encouraging relevant provincial and regional Peoples’ Congresses to promote training and employment opportunities for Tibetans, and restrict entry to Tibet of floating unemployed immigrants-as Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region does-unless immigrants have specific skills matching identified needs and are willing to transfer those skills to local communities
• Encouraging central planners to build on what already exists, from the pre-existing base of a subsistence economy that could benefit from comparative advantage if linkages are created to other regions where there is demand for what Tibet is best able to produce.