Abstract EN:

The lack of knowledge about territorial dynamics in Forest Guinea is one of the major constraints in a multi-stakeholder initiative for regional development. This constraint applies to the local agents as well as to the outside contributors (State agencies’ services, NGOs, projects, financial institutions. . . ) from the collective construction of regional development point of view. The actors are in that case confronted with some difficulties to understand the territorial real conditions in relation to its stakes, in order to finally undertake suitable actions for rural development. They need information and methods to analyze the conditions of the existent natural and cultivated resources, to improve their management and to evaluate the impact of development actions. Recognizing the social need for understanding before acting, has leaded us to reflect about the method to be implemented to analyze these rural dynamics and the type of Observatory able to follow up them. To achieve this Observatory, a preliminary work is necessary to set up a shared and negociated elaboration of the aims, objectives and functionalities of the method, defined “on the way going”. We adopted so far a “geo-agronomic” multi-scale approach, which provide a rural dynamics analysis on both regional and local scales of the transformation processes which occurred, and also to make a proposal for the structure of the Observatory to design