The World Bank/WBI’s CBNRM Initiative
Case Received: February 5, 1998
Author: Krister Andersson and Francisco Cevallos Páez
Tel: +593 2 506775
Fax: +593 2 506774
Email: krille@uio.satnet.net
PREPARING THE GROUND FOR CHANGE:
A Case Study: About Conflicts, Institutions and
Environmental Action in the Ecuadorian Amazon
As more and more states decentralize their central administrations, many local governments find themselves disoriented, overwhelmed and unprepared by all new responsibilities and increased pressure from the citizens. For municipal governance in the New Frontier setting of the Ecuadorian Amazon, the present situation is critical. Historically, these municipalities are poor, technically weak, lack political clout and are just as badly organized and disordered as the societies surrounding them. Efforts to strengthen the local governmental authorities and their administrative, economic, and legal capacities are urgently needed. One way of supporting a weak, local governmental authority is to introduce new institutional arrangements that are based on processes of consensus building, involving the main local stakeholders in the local decision making. Using a consensus building or participatory planning technique often require more time before activities are under way, as compared to the more conventional top-down approaches, but the time invested is likely to pay off in better long term results.
This paper presents the efforts of the Ecuadorian Ministry of Environment to get different interest groups to agree to take collective action to reverse the trend of environmental degradation in Shushufindi County. Special attention is given to the introduction of institutional governance regimes at the central and local levels that need to be in place to ensure effective stakeholder participation. During the past 25 years, the interests of a great variety of actors have competed over the county’s natural resources in the 2,000 km2 territory. Through a recent environmental management program, promoted by the Ecuadorian Ministry of Environment, an environmental action plan is being elaborated in close collaboration with representatives of the key stakeholder groups, including three oil companies, four indigenous groups, the Municipality, the church, the army, agro-industries, farmer organizations and environmentalist NGO’s.
A recent participatory stakeholder analysis resulted in an initiative to gather representatives from these groups to form a local environmental commission with the objective to build consensus around environmental action. The commission has proved to be an important platform for dialog, negotiation and planning – activities that have helped to ease tension between conflicting groups and their interests. At its monthly meetings, the stakeholder groups discuss specific environmental problem areas, define institutional commitments and agree on appropriate action alternatives in coordination with the Municipality.
After a short background description of the physical and socio-economic characteristics of the Shushufindi County followed by the methodological approach and strategy of the World Bank financed activities, the case study concludes by discussing some of the main lessons learned about institutional arrangements for effective municipal governance of natural resources.
Shushufindi is an oil-town located in the North Eastern part of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Shushufindi means Head of the Hummingbird in Cofan, the language of one of four indigenous groups living within the boundaries of the Shushufindi County. But in the center of Shushufindi, no matter how hard you look, you will not see any more hummingbirds nor any other signs of tropical fauna. 25 years of uncontrolled oil exploitation, agro-industrial activities and new frontier colonization have set their mark on large parts of this corner of the Amazon Basin.
In an effort to address the serious situation, the Ecuadorian Ministry of Environment selected Shushufindi County as the pilot site for the elaboration and implementation of an environmental action plan. During three years the Ministry will offer technical assistance to the Municipality and other important local institutions on issues of environmental management. It is no easy task to reverse the present trend of social and ecological deterioration, and it would be an illusion to think that the publication of studies, the presence of external experts and other technical assistance activities in and of themselves would be enough to change the historically complex situation in Shushufindi. But it is a clearly pronounced goal of the project to facilitate a process of change that will empower the municipal government and enhance their governance capacities as they relate to natural resource use. If this effort works, plans exist to apply the Shushufindi model for environmental management in some of the other 35 municipalities in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Approximately one year after we started the first activities in Shushufindi, many inhabitants have begun to express cautious optimism. Early project results suggest that the day when the hummingbirds return to the center of Shushufindi may not be so distant after all.
The Shushufindi project is both big and small. It is small in the sense of its limited geographical area (2,000 km2) and relatively small population (22,000 people). But at the same time it is big because it involves a wide spectrum of activities ranging from an extension program for small scale farming activities to contingency plans for accidental oil spills, sewer treatment plants, environmental awareness campaigns and ecotourism. Despite the limited size of Shushufindi, the people who are involved with the project feel we have a monumental task ahead of us.
The Shushufindi project has adopted a "take the bull by the horns-strategy" as its working philosophy. Normally, when selecting sites for pilot projects, one is naturally inclined to choose a place where conditions seem favorable to the success of the foreseen activities. But there is also a good point to be made for the exact opposite – to choose the worst possible conditions for an environmental project – with the logic that if it works there, there is no reason why it could not work anywhere else. The lessons you learn on the "impossible" site will be much more valuable and more widely applicable than the experience from an "easy" and non-representational place. If the project is successful in Shushufindi, there is no reason why it would not work anywhere else in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
The two authors of this case study are the responsible officers for the Ministry’s World Bank-financed Environmental Management project in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The project counts with an annual budget of half a million US dollars, designated exclusively to technical assistance activities.
The project was formulated in a flexible format allowing for a one year inception phase with an open-ended, participatory planning process through which the priority areas of intervention were identified and institutional commitments for the specific activities were defined together with all concerned stakeholders. The inception phase served to establish the appropriate spaces for social control, interactive planning and mutual learning. Through the Shushufindi experience, we have seen that it is possible for the State to take a participatory approach to project planning, without giving up its normative role as policy maker.
Before starting to deal with the technical problems of environmental management, it was necessary to first prepare the ground and deal with many of the organizational and institutional constraints that are indirectly related to environmental management issues. We assumed that only when favorable conditions exist in terms of institutional regimes for self-governance and active civil society participation, would it be possible to embark on a meaningful program of technical assistance for environmental management. Many other earlier technical assistance projects in the country have failed because not enough attention was given to these indirectly related issues. We did not want to repeat the mistakes of strictly focusing our efforts on technical studies that do not place the technical recommendations into the social, cultural and institutional context of the local medium.
Natural resource management practices at the New Frontier are often individualized in the sense that there is seldom any authority present on the ground to ensure conformity to the central State’s policies and laws. Typically, the lack of an ordered and controlled use of the resources has led to over-exploitation and deterioration of the natural resource base. An unbalanced resource use and thirty years of extractive policies through which commercial concessions and colonization have expanded at the cost of indigenous groups have lead to these groups being pushed further and further away from their original territories. The interests of many different stakeholders in terms of natural resource access and use in Shushufindi are often in direct conflict with each other, complicating the conditions for collective action and for effective environmental management.
Apart from poverty as both a cause and effect of environmental degradation, the area is affected by a disordered and uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources especially of hydrocarbons, minerals, and wood products. The symptoms are high deforestation rates, soil erosion, loss of biological diversity and genetic resources, contamination of water and soils by human settlements and commercial companies.
The Ecuadorian Amazon is full of contradictions. In an area that boasts such great natural richness, the local institutions that are supposed to ensure a sustainable use of these resources, are economically poor, technically weak and politically marginalized. Another contradiction is that according to recent statistics, more than 90% of the population of Shushufindi county lives in poverty. Yet, the oil extracted from the Shushufindi oil fields constitute a considerable part of the country’s total petroleum exports. In 1997, roughly half of Ecuadors Gross National Product was generated by oil exports.
The bio-physical degradation may be more visible than the socio-economic problems to the occasional visitor, but is is precisely the socio-economic problems that make it so difficult to achieve successful results through outside interventions. Problems related to poverty, poor community organization, conflicts, and the lack of governmental presence and authority complicate the carrying out of any outside initiative to generate change. But it is exactly these problems that our project has been addressing in its initial planning phase.
Despite many constraints, several positive factors for locally governed environmental management do exist. The following represent opportunities for the project:
A commonly held belief among development workers at large is that it is virtually impossible to work with locally based natural resource management in the colonized parts of the Ecuadorian Amazon because the local institutions among the so called "colonos" are considered to be too weak or even non-existent. The project’s stakeholder analysis found several examples of the exact opposite. We think this is because more and more the second generation dwellers stay in the communities that their parents once founded, and they tend lead a more settled and less migratory lifestyle than their parents. This stability has generated a noticeable community identity and sense of belonging among settlers.
In 1997, the Ecuadorian Government passed the Special law of decentralization and social participation. It recognizes the role of sectional governments in the area of natural resource management.
Thanks to the presence and constant threats from internationally connected environmental activist groups, private companies are eager to participate in image-improving environmental activities. This has opened up for opportunities of public-private partnerships in the Shushufindi area.
The Amazon Basin represent an exotic and interesting area for many international and national development organizations, facilitating the acquisition of direct investments in Shushufindi’s many environmental management projects.
The people of Shushufindi are tired of talk and empty promises from outsiders. They are not interested in taking part in any more academic exercises that do not produce any concrete improvements in their daily lives. Who can blame them? After 25 years of detrimental resource use, many studies have been published on the area’s problems but with meager results. People feel abandoned by the government, they have lost trust in international organizations and in environmental activists alike. People will listen to you only if you are prepared to take concrete action, preferably through monetary investments in construction and infrastructure works. This very understandable skepticism is a challenge for any project whose primary mandate is to offer technical assistance. But the project was never interested in writing studies that would only collect dust in the municipal library. We wanted the project to generate actions. Action for environmental change.
Action is the basis for any real change. Planning for change may be an important part of the change process but if it stops there is no real and lasting change. The action plan of the project is essentially a plan for how each individual stakeholder will change their daily activities and operations into a more environmentally friendly manner. The success or failure of this endeavor rely heavily on our ability to establish our credibility with local stakeholders and from there build relationships of mutual trust with local groups and institutions. Moreover, since the project is prohibited to make direct investments it is equally important to involve external partner institutions that have the competence and financial means to execute the technical recommendations made by the project, i.e. build the municipal laboratory, dig the septic tanks and recycle the solid waste. In order form these important partnerships, we had to first prove ourselves as reliable, honest, competent and hard working partners.
During our first month working in Shushufindi, we talked with the known, local actors in the Shushufindi area and made clear the limitations of the project - as to avoid the creation of any false expectations of direct investments. But we also explained that this was an open-ended project that would be formulated together with them. The moment they felt they did not have sufficient influence over the decision making of the project they could ask us to leave. They saw this as a good control mechanism that would guarantee that the project would address their concerns. The actors made very clear from the beginning that if they were to get involved they wanted to waste as little time as possible talking and most of their time doing "real" things. We agreed on a general time frame for the inception phase, during which we would carry out stakeholder analysis studies, define structure for participatory planning events and create an appropriate institutional framework for the effective operation of our project.
In our efforts to empower the presently weak local institutions, we are faced with a set of challenging issues. For instance, in this New Frontier setting, how can the Municipality earn legitimacy and gain acceptance for its actions among the different, conflicting actors? And in the cases where the local institutions do not exist or are unable to assume the formal responsibilities of natural resource management (NRM), what may be done to strengthen, and in some cases even create the local community institutions that are necessary for effective self-governed NRM?
Referring to the problems outlined in section three of this paper, our working hypothesis emphasizes the need to recognize the crucial role that local institutions play in effective NRM. It is therefore the foremost objective of the project to enhance the Municipality of Shushufindi in their capacity to employ a participatory, interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial approach in order to be effectively deal with the issues at hand. Below, we briefly present the institutional reforms and arrangements that have been introduced in Shushufindi in order to prepare the ground for change.
By opening up the decision making process at the local level, actors that have not particiapted in local development efforts before, are given a voice and a defined role in a new, more democratic context. Non governmental organizations (NGOs) along with other members of civil society, that in the past have not been invited to take part in local governmental affairs causing strained relations with the State authorities, have often resorted to resistance, protest and denunciation against the government initiatives and policies. NGOs represent a tremendous force for local develoment, a force that may be harnessed with new institutional arrangements for local decision making and consensus building processes. We believe that by involving the local stakeholders in concrete activities, and moving away from ideological or theoretical discussions, actors will become more reasonable and adopt a more pragmatic and operational "get-things-done" attitude with the new responsibilities acquired. As Robert Putnam observes his book Making Democracy Work, referring to the previously opposed political parties in the new regional governments in Italy, "involvement in regional government itself converted its protagonists from ideological dogmatism to a more consensual pragmatism."
The project’s stakeholder analysis produced a proposal for how an inter-institutional working group could be created in Shushufindi. The idea was to provide a platform for dialogue between the key environmental actors as to release tension between previously groups by working for a universally accepted common good - the improvement of the human environment in Shushufindi County. The Shushufindi Commission for Environmental Management was created in November 1997 when its 12 members signed the Shushufindi Charter, a declaration that presents the objectives and institutional commitments and recognizes the Municipality as the local authority of Environmental Management. One of the most important tasks of the group is to provide technical advice and practical support to the municipality in matters of environmental management. They do so by preparing the annual work plan of environmental actions together with the Municipality.
Taking advantage of the private sector’s desire to improve their corporate images by assuming more social responsibilities, public-private partnerships may offer not only increased financial resources for the local municipalities but can also involve technical collaboration and human resource support. In Shushufindi, a multi-party partnership between an North-American sanitation firm, the Shushufindi Municipality, the Ministry of Environment and an international oil company will work together using appropriate technology solutions to build a series of sanitary infrastructure works, including a sewage treatment plant, a solid waste treatment system, drinking water systems for rural parishes and sanitary improvements of the municipal slaughterhouse. In addition, the project staff work actively to attract direct investments in Shushufindi’s environmental efforts from Ecuadorian state institutions and international donors.
The Ecuadorian Environmental Law is quite general and abstract, and does not provide quantitative thresholds for natural resource use. In the case of industrial activities, no legal norms guide the level of wastes and emissions allowed for specific substances. But according to the constitution (the Municipal Regime of 1978) municipal governments are granted autonomy to pass local laws or ordinances to regulate natural resource use, as one of their areas of jurisdiction. In Shushufindi no local laws exist yet to regulate natural resource use. But by signing the Shushufindi Charter, all stakeholders have formally recognized the Shushufindi Municipality as the local authority of environmental management, granting them extensive legal powers to enforce the law, ordinances and specific regulations related to resource use. In practice, however, there is still a considerable hesitation on behalf of the private sector (that has historically operated freely without any state control or intervention) to open up their doors and invite municipal inspectors to control their environmental procedures and practices. With the objective to address both the legitimacy problem and the lack of quantitative environmental norms for productive and extractive practices, a program of participatory law making has been initiated by the project. The program may be described as a negotiation process between the organized natural resource users, such as oil companies and agricultural cooperatives on one hand, and the municipal government with the input from the Commission of Environmental Management on the other. The goal is to agree on reasonable and enforceable quantitative norms for resource use, emissions and wastes that will become municipal ordinances monitored by the local government’s technical personnel.
The devolution of natural resource management responsibilities should not stop at the municipal level but should be applied all the way down to rural communities. Learning from findings from empirical research on common property regimes for natural resource management, responsible resource use is often a result of well-defined group ownership and local user rules enforced by the community organization. A consultant has been hired by the project to facilitate the development of environmental management plans for local communities. These plans will be presented to the municipal government for technical review and subsequent approval and state ratification. Once the local rules have been formally recognized by the government, community land titles will be issued for common pool resources such as forests and watersheds.
Without successfully addressing the poverty situation in Shushufindi, no persisting improvements of the human ecology can be expected. Since agriculture is base of the rural economy throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, the project has invested in the development of a participatory research and extension program together with a grassroot farmer organization, the five rural parishes and an Amazonian agricultural research and extension institute.
At the close of the one year inception phase and using the Shushufindi criteria for evaluating progress, the project activities have produced the following concrete and tangible results:
It may be premature to draw far-reaching conclusions about the success or failure of various aspects of the project. For example, will all the new institutional arrangements endure over time, once the project has phased out? Despite the short period of time, however, several lessons have been learned by the people involved in the Shushufindi project.
There are not enough women involved in the decision making process. Despite a participatory planning approach with a gender focus, the project has not been successful in getting equal representation of the men and women. A special effort will therefore be made in the immediate future to correct the present imbalance.
The stakeholder analysis served to identify common ground and differences in interests as well as negotiating institutional commitments from local institutions to join forces and work for a common good of Shushufindi at large.
The practical focus and action-orientation of the inter-institutional commission, through which the members have assumed shared responsibilities for implementation of concrete activities, has worked well to prevent and manage conflicts.
Contrary to popular belief, local community institutions do exist in the Ecuadorian Amazon - not just in indigenous communities. Devolution of natural resource management responsibilities to the community level is therefore likely to produce the desired effectiveness and efficiency gains.
Agriculture is a good point of entry for an environmental management project and should be the main concern of any such project. Poverty reduction activities are absolute prerequisites for a healthier human environment, and should be the focus of all technical assistance activities.
Despite decentralization, centralism and refusal to let go of control among government and state run companies persist and remain big policy constraints for locally based projects. National policy and practice must be reformed in order to provide the proper enabling environment for municipal self-management of natural resources. In Ecuador, the central government insists that it is their responsibility to grant commercial concessions, review environmental impact assessments, and collect corporate taxes from the oil industry since it is of national interest that this sector functions smoothly (although these are functions that the local governments have been authorized to perform through the Law of Municipal Regime). If the Shushufindi Municipality is ever going to be able to guarantee a healthy environment to its citizens, a change in state policy and practice is needed as to empower the local government to enforce the law and allow them to collect taxes to finance their management control functions.