Projects in Mesoamerica

Management Programmes for Indigenous Voluntary Conserved Areas in Oaxaca, Mexico

April 2009 to March 2012

Donors:    

Darwin Initiative, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom

Field site:

The project is designed to include the six member communities of The Committee for Natural Resources of the Chinantla (CORENCHI, Comitė de Recursos Naturales de la Chinantla A.C.), but most activities are concentrated in the communities of Santiago Tlatepusco and San Pedro Tlatepusco, municipality of Usila, in north Oaxaca, Mexico.

Partners:

Funded by the Darwin Initiative of the United Kingdom, this project is executed by the Mesoamerican Regional Programme of the Global Diversity Foundation (GDF-MA), in collaboration with CORENCHI, the National Polytechnic Institute’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Integrated Regional Development (CIIDIR-Oaxaca), the National Commission of Forestry (CONAFOR), the NGO Geo-Conservation, and the Anthropology Department of the University of Kent, in the UK. Likewise, during 2010, we started a fruitful relationship with the Institute of Ecology (INECOL, Instituto de Ecología, A.C.) to conduct training and dissemination activities.

General Objective:

To enhance Oaxacan indigenous voluntary conserved areas (VCAs) by strengthening the capacity of indigenous people and collaborating researchers to produce a management programme that incorporates local ecological knowledge and community-based research on the cloud forest ecosystem.

Project Components:

1. Development of a management programme for community conserved areas.
2. Setting up a community management programme with an ecosystem, biocultural and adaptive approach for the communities of Santiago Tlatepusco and San Pedro Tlatepusco.
3. Local capacity building through the creation and training of Community Research Teams (CRT) in research techniques, theoretical and legal frameworks for the elaboration, application and monitoring of conservation activities, research and promotion of local biocultural diversity.
4. Community Research Team (CRT) trained to conduct social and environmental research for the management programme.
5. Promotion of local biocultural diversity through biodiversity fairs and biocultural integration of the whole project.
6. Dissemination of information through seminars for students, researchers, government representatives and civil society, to present and share the approaches and results with local, national and international audiences. Presentation of project approaches and preliminary results at national and international conferences.

Activities and Preliminary Results during the first year of work (2009-2010):

1. Consultation with authorities and community members of Corenchi through visits, ongoing dialogue and formal meetings that allowed reviewing the proposed activities, gaining Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) and establishing the basis for a collaborative agreement.
2. Working sessions between GDF-MA team and CRTs at San Pedro Tlatepusco and Santiago Tlatepusco to design and develop the management programme for local Voluntary Conserved Areas (VCAs).
3. Rural appraisal that generated basic geographic, social, cultural and environmental information.
4. CRT and other community members trained in community video, socio-cultural research tools, community mapping and participatory Geographical Information Systems (pGIS).
5. Community research on social characteristics of the communities and its region; agricultural characteristics, production and calendar; inventories of useful animals and pests; inventories of useful plants; weather tendencies; and predominant socio-environmental issues.
6. One-day seminar for 27 postgraduate students and NGO colleagues at the INECOL on Biocultural Community Protocols conducted by Harry Jonas, from Natural Justice.
7. One-day seminar for 31 postgraduate students, researchers and NGO colleagues at INECOL on the approaches, practices and implications towards community participation and biodiversity research, conducted by Diana Pritchard, from the University of Sussex.
8. Presentation of project approaches and results at the VII Mexican Congress of Ethnobiology and the I Latin American Congress of Ethnobiology at Pachuca, Mexico, and at the XII International Congress of Ethnobiology in Tofino, Canada.