Environmental Governance, adaptive and collaborative in model forests, watersheds
07 agosto 2008 Milka Barriga M.
José Joaquín Campos
Olga Marta Corrales
Cornelis Prins
Tropical Agricultural and Higher Education Center, CATIE, Department of Natural Resources and Environment, Turrialba, Costa Rica, 2008
Environmental Governance, adaptive and collaborative in model forests, watersheds and biological corridors. Ten experiences in five Latin-American countries.
CATIE has developed and pretested a community approach to improve the provision of ecosystem services: the adaptive and collaborative landscape management. This approach has five basic components: (i) effective governance, (ii) participatory planning, (iii) sustainable financial mechanisms, (iv) adaptive management and learning, (v) public-private sector alliances. Our experience shows that the improvement on ecosystem service provision at landscape level in Latin America begins with the promotion of a favorable environment for dialog and negotiation among stakeholders. This paper analyzes some experiences, somewhat related with CATIE, on management of model forests, watersheds and biological corridors. Preliminary evidence shows that these platforms improve the interaction among government, society and private sector, and help to transform private interests into common objectives. Besides, they create the conditions for discussing topics of interest in the region, such as: land tenure, human rights, equity, pollution, water scarcity, and vulnerability to natural disasters. Any environmental community approach is likely to generate policies that take into account all the diversity of stakeholders in the landscape; evidence suggests that political incidence is possible, and positive results are easily obtained when there is a strong social capital.
