The World Bank/WBI’s CBNRM Initiative

Case Study: February 8, 1998

Author: Wendy R. Townsend

Tel/Fax: +591 352 6919 or +591 347 7050

Email: wendyt@caoba.entelnet.bo

The participation of the local people is vital to the success of community-based management. Long term management success is reflected by the depth of that participation and by the way the people assume ownership of the management efforts. Therefore promoting community participation must be a continual process with new techniques constantly being employed. The following paper includes several experiences from lowland Bolivia that have shown that involving community members in investigating their natural resource requirements by monitoring their harvest level of various natural resources can be a useful tool in increasing participation in resource management planning.

Bolivia has recently passed several new laws which could bring substantial benefits to the indigenous peoples. Perhaps the most important is the new agrarian reform law (INRA) which permits community land ownership and legalizes the creation of indigenous territories (TCO -Tierra Comunitaria de Origin). At this time there are over 30 well substantiated claims for territories throughout Eastern Lowland Bolivia. Most of these claims are at least partially disputed by other "owners". The new forestry law requires that all natural resources harvested for sale from within TCO’s must be accompanied by a management plan. But the forestry law is somewhat ambiguous in the definition of "traditional" use especially when you consider some brazil nut collectors have been collecting the nuts for the commercial market for 80-100 years. However, it is clear that the Indigenous People must find ways to create management plans for their communally held TCO’s. This requires the promotion of management planning and this in turn requires information from the community members. In 4 indigenous communities in Bolivia community members are monitoring their harvest rate of various natural resources. They do this as one of the first steps in creating their own management plans. By making their own assessment of their resource needs they are becoming more conscious of the importance of natural resources in their lives.

The 4 Indigenous communities are the Sirionó and Yuracaré from the Beni Region, the Chiquitanos of Lomerio and the Guarani of the Izozog. Each of these communities has chosen to participate in their management planning by assuring that the information on resource use is as accurate as possible, rather than to trust to questionnaires on use levels. Previously, management plans, if they existed were written in offices with little or no connection to the actual daily needs of the local people. In some indigenous communities this has led to conflicts with outsiders who have government supplied permission to harvest resources without consideration for the local people.

Another problem constantly expressed by the indigenous community is that outside investigators invariably finish their work away from the community and the results are rarely returned to them. Thus, the local people’s active participation in the collection of data assures that the information does not leave the community unless they wish for that eventuality. The people gain a sense of empowerment by their own information gathering efforts and having control over the same.

The 4 communities held a common goal, and that was to insure their inclusion in any and all management decisions about their territory. Two of the communities (Yuracare in TIPNIS y Guarani in Izozog) found themselves bordering on or being within newly created national parks. One community (Lomerío-Chiquitanos) found it necessary to defend their territory by showing they could harvest their own timber. The other community (Sirionó-Ibiato) is being engulfed by colonization some of which may be government sponsored. In all cases the desire to maintain control of the information source made participatory investigation a naturally acceptable solution.

With the help of the author in three of the communities and a rapid rural appraisal (PRA) workshop led by CIDDEBENI (Centro de Investigación y Documentación sobre el Desarrollo del Beni) in the fourth (Yuracaré- TIPNIS), self monitoring of resource use was seen by the people as a viable contribution to their own future as communities. The participatory investigation was appropriated in all cases and some (Sirionó) have been recording their game take for over 5 years. The Izoceños (Guaraní) have over 200 hunters registering their game take. In Lomerío, the process has occurred differently, probably because this effort was immersed within a multimillion dollar project funded by US AID (BOLFOR). With the Yuracaré of the TIPNIS (Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure) the participatory resource use investigation included fish, game, trees, garden products, and fruit from the forest. The week long PRA workshop left data collection forms with appropriate instructions and then they were not able to return and reinforce the work. A year later when we visited the village, 9 families had collected data for the year, now they wanted to know how to use their information.

The participation of the indigenous people in obtaining the information they will need to make their management decisions causes a change in their attitude about their future. The most important change is the confidence in which they approach the management options which are open to them. They become key players in the negotiations because they can offer hard data instead of just opinions on resource requirements. They also become more inclined to take an active role in the management decisions. For example in Lomerío and the Izozog community members have created community wildlife reserves and even some protective regulations.

Perhaps this attitude change can be illustrated by looking at the history of how CIDOB ( Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia) is transforming a DFID (Department for International Development – formerly ODA) financed project who’s original written objective was to rescue the traditional knowledge base of the indigenous people to enable teaching of proper management decisions to colonists. After various years of communication between the British Mission and the Indigenous people, through various organic organizations and including several well attended workshops the project’s principal objective has been re-written. Now, the project goal is to train indigenous people to investigate natural resource management (hopefully traditional) to empower the indigenous people to create their own viable natural resource management options. These pressures come as indigenous people become aware that they no longer have to be the object of investigation but can actually be participants of the research process.

The changes this proactive participation will have on the outside world is yet to be demonstrated. However the information on wildlife harvest registered by Sirionó hunters shows strong statistical correlation with that collected by the author during her doctoral research in the same community.

The lessons learned from these participatory investigations are multiple. In all four cases there are experiences caused by strictly local phenomenon and those that can be generalized over a broader community representation. What is clear is that using self monitoring of resource use as a participatory investigation tool does have ramifications in local planning for resource use.

Considering those lessons which could be said to be globally applicable the most important is that people have a sense that restraining personal resource consumption is futile. For example when talking with hunters about managing the game they use, their first response is that if they do not kill the animal, their neighbor will. When one turns that response around to focus on a solution, communication between neighbors becomes of supreme importance. Communication is the key to community - based management. In the Guaraní experience the organizational structure allows for this as a natural extension, or by including the topic in an already existing dialogue. In Lomerío the need for inter-community dialogue is only partially being met by the BOLFOR project, but it is well recognized by the hunters. The Sirionó have seen that they must begin a dialogue with the neighboring colonists that have been arriving in numbers proportional to the improved access by road into the area. Recent government plans to send over a 100 families of colonists into the zone have increased this urgency. Now the Sirionó have data on their game ( and fish) requirements that increase their negotiation strength.

The Yuracare of San Pablo of the TIPNIS, continued their investigation even though there was no outside reinforcement. The original project had no funding to finance the long river trip for follow up because it had fulfilled it’s short-term objectives which were to produce a PRA (Participatory Rural Assessment). The participation in the investigation into resource use included most of the families in the community. With the Lomerío game harvest investigation, participation is complicated because the game management program is only a small part of the larger effort of BOLFOR to produce a forestry management plan for the Chiquitano people’s Lomerío organization (CICOL). One result was the distortion caused by the obvious signs of a well funded project, such as vehicles, chauffeurs, building construction. These made it difficult to explain the importance of voluntary participation in the creation of community-based management. Thus it may seem that well funded projects might lead to failure of community-based management. However, yet another twist can negate this conclusion as with the Guarani of the Izozog. These people have recently begun involvement in a new multi-million dolar project funded by US AID. However, the organizational structure of the Izoceno Guarani (CABI - Capitania del Alto y Bajo Izozog) has very strong leadership and has been successful in promoting the participation of the communities of the Izozog in their participatory wildlife investigation programs. There is something about the dignity of being able to collect information and make it available to the central planners that seems to be attractive. Some community members have even commented that it allows them to prctice writing for a given and important end result.

Experience with the three communities where specific data sheets were created to reflect local and cultural distinctions, show there was greater appropriation of the data collection process when the local language was included on the data collection sheets. In one experience with the Chiquitanos of Lomerío, we inadvertently left the Spanish lettering too small for the older hunter to read. They requested that the Spanish letters be amplified to almost an equal size as those in Chiquitano. Their reasoning was that although they were actually reading the form in Spanish, Chiquitano needed to be prominently visible to show their children how to use the language. One complication was caused by recent changes in the official Chiquitano alphabet made by linguistic experts recently. What was clear to the Chiquitanos was that the instructions needed to be written in Chiquitano as well as Spanish.

Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned is about the empowerment process generated by asking people to be responsible for producing the information they will need for their planning. By giving local peoples participatory investigation tools such as the self monitoring of natural resource harvest levels, they can begin discovering their own potential at analyzing their own specific problems. It is hoped that this self reliance will eventually lead to community- created management plans which are adapted for the local conditions; cultural, economic and environmental.