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Abstract:
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"The University of the Amazon of Pando and The Field Museum of Chicago have been seeking new ways to conserve the globally valuable biodiversity of Pando through promoting collaboration between local communities, individual landowners and muicipal governments. The experience offers an alternative methodology and framework for designing and implementing biodiversity conservation, particularly in lightly populated biodiversity corridors, and one possible solution to the difficult dilemma of constructing functional cross-scale institutional linkages for conserving globally important resources without simply shifting the costs of 'prohibition' to local residents who depend on the resources for their daily living and identities. The study area is on the western side of Pando, Bolivia -- the two municipios (counties) of Filadelfia and Bolpebra -- on the frontier where Brazil, Peru and Bolivia meet. The corridor created by these two municipios extends from the Brazilian border between an indigenous territory (Yaminahua-Machineri TCO) on the Acre River, southward to the Manuripi Wildlife Reserve between the Manuripi and Madre de Dios Rivers on the border with Peru. The area is habitat to 14 species of primates as well as a wide diversity of other animals, fish, birds, insects, and plants of the Lowland Amazon forest. Pando Department (state) retains 90 percent of its forest cover and has a low population density. Bolivia has strong laws promoting public participation in conservation, and community-based titles are among the legal instruments for land tenure. Hence the area offers an ideal opportunity for designing an alternative framework to achieve development with conservation. Work began in 2003, with interviews with all individual landowners, a participatory information gathering and analytical process with communities (RIPUI - derived from asset mapping) and linked to participatory land use planning required under Bolivian law, creating POPs - which involve the establishment of community-based resource management rules and enforcement mechanisms, as well as community-owned conservation areas. Municipal governments were involved from the initiation of the work. In 2004, the two municipal governments will consider plans to create a joint mancomunidad (a management district) for conservation that will link the land use rules and plans created at community and individual landowner levels with municipal conservation areas under a mancomunidad-wide framework for enforcement and assistance (ANMI natural area under integrated management). It is expected that the mancomunidad will seek department (state) level recognition. At this time in Bolivia, the national government has taken a stand that there will be no new national level protected areas due to conflicts with rural people. The authors will report on the overall process and the principles on which it was based, the analysis of data from RIPUI, the resulting management frameworks, the policy challenges, and the lessons learned."
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