How are institutions included in Integrated Conservation and Development Projects? Developing and testing a diagnostic approach on the World Bank's Forest and Community project in Salta, Argentina
Busck-Lumholt, Louise Marie (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)
Corbera, Esteve (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Geografia)
Mertz, Ole (University of Copenhagen. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management)

Date:	2022
Abstract:	The opportunities and challenges of ensuring participation and success of Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) have been fairly studied. However, it is not often well-established which institutional mechanisms explain the failure in meeting participatory and project goals. To fill this gap, we develop a telecoupling-inspired diagnostic approach to assess the level of institutional distance and opportunity for collective decision-making in ICDPs by looking at project information flows, project asset flows, and rules and regulation flows between project actors. We construct three management archetypes based on the direction and directness of such flows: decoupled management, telecoupled management and collaborative management. The archetypes are applied to a case study of a World Bank-financed ICDP in Argentina, drawing on qualitative data collected from individual interviews with project actors. Our findings challenge the notion that a project becomes participatory if the project design provides guidelines for participatory implementation. We find that our diagnostic approach helps to concretize the call for inclusion of local project actors across the project cycle, which is needed to make projects collaborative, relevant, and socially just. Finally, we advocate future project assessments to build on this approach and map the practical institutional relationships between project actors to provide transparency on the de facto level of project collaboration. This article is relevant for both academics and practitioners designing and implementing conservation and development projects.
Grants:	Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación CEX2019-000940-M European Commission 765408
Note:	Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M
Note:	Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UAB
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Integrated Conservation and Development Projects ; Forest management ; Telecoupling ; Participatory approaches ; Argentina ; Salta
Published in:	World Development, Vol. 157 (September 2022) , art. 105956, ISSN 1873-5991

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105956

14 p, 2.1 MB

The record appears in these collections:
Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Experimental sciences > Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA)
Articles > Research articles
Articles > Published articles