Land tenure and forest resources management in the Sumaco Biosphere Reserve, Ecuador: An institutional analysis of the Socio Bosque program
Ecuador is one of the pilot countries of the UN REDD program, and is currently developing a national framework to regulate REDD activities. The Socio Bosque program is an important component of the national framework, and an incentive-based policy that promotes direct payments to landowners for areas under conservation. The empirical case study refers to the Sumaco Biosphere Reserve in the Northern Amazon region of Ecuador. This area is considered to be a biodiversity hotspot, forms an important carbon reservoir, and thus, is one of the priority regions for implementing the Socio Bosque program.
However, for the largest part of the biosphere reserve, land ownership is highly informal, and a subject of uncertainty, since there are disputes between informally exercised property regimes and officially granted land holdings. Within this legal pluralistic setting, distinct institutions (understood as formal rules, informal norms, and enforcement characteristics) overlap, and may reinforce each other or impede and undermine each other, depending on how they are adopted, and who is involved.
As local livelihoods are subject to an increasing vulnerability caused by diverse macro-level factors (such as climate variation), the capacity of social-ecological systems to reorganize in response to changing conditions by testing and revising institutional arrangements gains highly in importance. The study focuses on the effects of the Socio Bosque program on local land tenure regimes and related institutions for the management of forest resources, and is based on the question, if the Socio Bosque program has the potential to promote adaptive governance. In short, I propose to examine how the outcomes of the program are shaped by the national strategy design, approaches of implementation exercised by national agencies and local user groups, and resulting interactions between the variables of the social-ecological system. According to research on polycentric governance and complex adaptive systems, I assume that the outcomes of the program depend essentially on the existence of self-organized entities that interact and coordinate across multiple sectors and scales.
Data collection and analysis are informed by the social-ecological system (SES) framework, introduced by Ostrom (2007). To evaluate the outcomes of the program, I propose to a) compare data sets of two time periods, before and in the course of participation in the program; b) apply a set of mixed methods focusing on the interface between in-depth ethnographic research and standardized approaches of social network analysis. Thereby, I aim to provide insight into the characteristics of the SES, underlying meanings, dynamics over time, and to contribute to the comparability of results.