End of field work

My last couple of entries from the field. Pictures coming later.

Day 6: Asking questions doesn’t lead to answers, it leads to more questions. Natura has been working with Santa Rosa since 2003, and about 20 of the 100+ families in the community are conserving land with Natura’s project. We were hoping to talk with families who are involved and those who aren’t, to get a complete picture of Natura’s impact on the community. We haven’t looked at the data yet, but just from some comments from our enumerators, it is clear that there are some interesting questions here.

A premise of PES is that you are compensating people for changing how they use their land. This means you typically work with landowners. Just as in pretty much anywhere in the world, landowners have more money than non-landowners, so Natura is here working with only the most well-off members of this poor community. Naturally, this makes non-landowners not so fond of Natura.

From my experience, it seems clear that development work should involve an entire community, or at least have support from the whole community. This is not the case here. So what could Natura do to involve everyone, landowners and non-owners alike? Natura is working to get the most land conserved for their dollar, but it seems they may be trading off equity in favor of efficiency. It could be that everyone is helped as the extra money brought in circulates through the community, but this is in no way inevitable. It may be the opposite – if landowners are cultivating less of their land they may be eliminating work opportunities for those who work for pay. Hard to say. What is clear is that something should be done to consider the involvement of all members of a community, and that this is not an easy thing to figure out.

I think I see a new thesis idea on the horizon. Good thing as my previous one crashed and burned over the last few days.

Day 7: We spend all day in various taxis, since we decide not to deal with the broken truck, to get back to Santa Cruz, where there is a hot shower waiting for me.