In the 90s, the World Bank, UNDP, bilateral donors and NGOs regarded the
concept as one of the most promising project types for poverty reduction
and supported GT with substantial funding. German Technical Cooperation
(GTZ on behalf of BMZ) became one of the major players in the field,
contributing substantially to the methodological progress and geographical
dissemination of the approach. In the late 90s, land management committees
in thousands of West African villages had elaborated their land
management plans and started implementation. However, the overall
spatial impact of the GT approach remained rather limited. High start-up
costs, the slow pace of participatory procedures (without producing immediate
benefits for the population) as well as the limited implementation
capacities of the communities made it impossible to achieve the goal of
an overall improvement of the state of natural resources in the foreseeable
future. In addition, GT projects tended to operate in an institutional
vacuum outside the state, ignoring the necessity to be formally incorporated
in the administrative structure of the country. Neither the village
as an administrative unit nor the village land management committees
as executive organs had a legal status, thus lacking the institutional legitimacy
needed to fulfil their mission. Due to all these shortcomings, the
international GT community came to realize that the village level was not
the suitable scale for intervention.