In 1996, CIAT and partners designed this project with the goal of helping plan collective action among representatives of organizations operating at multiple political and geographical scales.
The project is part of a larger-scale initiative launched by CIAT in 1993 as the Hillsides Program (subsequently restructured as a CIAT Project entitled "Community-Based Management of Watershed Resources"), in close interaction with CIAT's Land Use Project.

The project to which this report refers was motivated by the fact that progress toward the goal of more productive, sustainable, and healthy hillside environments is being hindered by a lack of clear objectives. These include a failure to quantify variables and a lack of precision in defining physical areas of interest, both of which are indispensable for arriving at negotiated agreements for community action as well as reproducing results achieved.

An accepted premise of this project is that natural resource management goals and economic solutions related to agriculture often transcend field or farm boundaries, necessitating some form of collective action among landscape users. And that multiple goals can only be understood and negotiated, and problems corrected, through analyses and negotiations that explicitly consider multiple, transboundary effects.

This project proposes methodological means for resolving these issues. It was determined that the project should focus on one of Latin America's most impoverished nations - Honduras.

Software developed by CIAT and partners

• ITDEA - Intelligent Team Decision Assistant
• SWBM - Spatial Water Budget Model
• Accessibility Analyst
• Cross Scale Toolbox
• Online Tutorial for community-based Decision Support System

Other freely available software used in this project

• GWR - Geographically Weighted Regression
• GAM - Geographical Analysis Machine
• SOM - Self Organising Maps
• ZDES - Zone Design System