Commons in Action

Ich freue mich, dass mein Buch Commons unter Unsicherheit: Indigene Organisationen, sozial-ökologischer Wandel und Kooperation in Ecuador in Kürze bei Springer VS in der Reihe Angewandte Ethnologie erscheint.

@ Claudia Konrad

Die Studie ist im Rahmen meiner Promotion am Lehrstuhl für Ethnologie an der Universität Trier entstanden und wurde von der International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) gewählt, um die gesellschaftliche Relevanz der Commons-Forschung exemplarisch zu repräsentieren.

English Abstract

During my research project Commons under Uncertainty I analyzed the impact of a national forest protection program on forest-dependent livelihoods. As social-ecological conditions in the Amazon region are subject to substantial changes, the empirical case study was based on the question, whether the program promotes adaptive governance.

Despite decades of conservation efforts, Latin America suffered the highest net annual loss of forests between 2000 and 2010 worldwide. In South America, Ecuador shows one of the highest deforestation rates. The increasingly serious problem of forest loss raises the challenge of securing the livelihoods of forest-dependent people. In this context, the national Socio Bosque Program aims to reduce deforestation and poverty through direct payments to forest owners, who decide to stop using timber resources and sign a contract with the Ministry of Environment.

Most of the remaining forest areas that are not included in the National System of Protected Areas are located in the Amazon region and collectively owned by indigenous organizations. Only 7 per cent of the conservation contracts that were signed nationwide between October 2008 and January 2013 included collective land tenure. However, this small number covered 88 per cent of the total area under contract. As a consequence, collective landowners are an important target group of the program.

@ Christian Revelo

Forest-related livelihoods are subject to an increasing vulnerability, and change in response to a new situation becomes a premise for handling uncertainty and improve livelihood security. In this context, adaptability describes the capacity of actors in a system to learn and reorganize in response to changing conditions by testing and revising institutional arrangements. Against this background, my research applied conceptional approaches resulting from research on common-pool resources, adaptability and resilience in social-ecological systems.

Furthermore, my research was informed by a social network perspective. The empirical study captured cooperation networks for the management of collectively owned forests under contract with the Socio Bosque Program. So far, little research had been done that combines adaptation theory and resilience thinking with network analysis.

However, for the majority of indigenous groups land ownership is informal and not officially granted. But conservation contracts require clear ownership structures. As a consequence, the program is at risk of increasing social inequality by excluding groups from benefits, who cannot assert formal rights regarding access to and control over productive resources. On the other hand, the program promotes land tenure security in the long term. Since it is one of the government’s flagship projects to reduce deforestation, the granting of legal land titles has recently been pushed forward.

Furthermore, the case study showed that the focus of the program is clearly on the conservation component, since the payment scheme is oriented towards hectares and not towards beneficiaries. This results in very different realities of participation. In 2014, annually per capita benefits of two participating organizations varied between USD 16 and USD 880 according to the amount of hectares under contract and the number of members.

Although collective landowners invest in community projects instead of distributing the received payments in equal shares among members, the significant difference between per capita benefits shows that the objective to reduce poverty must be examined on a case-by-case basis. In many cases, the amount of payments does not provide an adequate compensation for not using timber resources. As a result, landowners decide to put forests under contract, which they do not rely on and that are, thus, not at high risk of deforestation or forest degradation.

To conclude, it can be said that the study demonstrated that environmental policies need to adress the social and ecological dimension of forest-dependent livelihoods equally in order to meet their objectives and the realities of forest-dependent people.