Células Progenitoras Neurales (NPCs)

Over the course of the early 2000s, FONAFIFO was coming under increased pressures to resolve the access problems faced not only by the indigenous territories, but by other non-indigenous small landowners failing to access the program, as well. Most of these pressures came either from NGOs, which found a lucrative business operating as intermediaries for the negotiation of PSA contracts in bulk, on behalf of small landowners (Vaas, 2013); OFIs, which had been sponsoring the narrative of PES schemes as tools for poverty reduction in rural areas, that was clearly not being materialized in Costa Rica; and indigenous organizations and national platforms (including the ADIs) which saw the PSA as a reasonable alternative for supporting their own forms of governance (see Pagiola, 2002).

In that context, the Ecomercados project was launched through a grant of 8 million dollars financed by GEF and designed as a comprehensive administrative reform of the PSA that also included a considerable expansion of its geographical coverage. Originally designed as a tool for re-orienting the PSA to fill perceived gaps in the national system of protected areas, the project was influenced by these continuous criticisms regarding low level of enrollment of poor farmers. Expectedly, the project included a 50% expansion in the number of contracts with small landowners until 2009 as one of its main objectives (Borge and Martínez, 2009) Attention was quickly granted to the Talamancan indigenous Reserves, being not only a poor region, but also towards key conservation gaps for the consolidation of the buffer zone of PILA, the Costa Rican lynchpin of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor.

Of course, to overcome the contradiction between neoliberal goals of the PSA and the territorial realities of the Talamancans, Ecomercados did require the elaboration of an informed political and discursive strategy to justify their intervention. Such policy strategy was published by FONAFIFO in 2003, with the objective of “delineate the (administrative) changes required for the three traditional modalities (of the PSA) – Protection, Reforestation and (Forest) Management), according to the Bribri-Cabécar rationality” (Borge, 2003: 4). It is a lengthy document that resulted from negotiations between FONAFIFO and various indigenous organizations, including the ADIs. The document focuses on two main goals: 1) appease concerns over Bribri and Cabécar misuse of the payments by reframing their land management decision-making as being coherent with the PSA

mindset; and 2) define the specific modalities with which FONAFIFO was to intervene the indigenous reserves, to guarantee the additionality and directedness of the payment, efficient ecosystem service commodification, poverty reduction goals and as little misuse of resources as possible.

Regarding the first goal, the strategy basically argues that Bribri and Cabécar rationalities fall neatly within the neoliberal economic logic that support the PSA. Beginning with a description of Talamancan farming practices (that is also bereft of any attention towards the cultural or political determinants of these practices), the strategy explains that the Bribri and Cabécar dual agricultural system is the result of an economic rational choice to maximize labor efficiency, guarantee lower farming maintenance costs and maximize farm utility in a wider economic context of vulnerable and unstable commodity markets. The argument is then that the Talamancans choose to cultivate different plant species at different distances and with different uses as a risk management strategy, whereby they are meant to guarantee productive and stable harvests to fulfill a goal centered on income generation, but without abandoning some forms of subsistence production for when markets are not viable. Put plainly, the FONAFIFO strategy frames indigenous farmers as marginal utility maximizers by default. Their choice of what to produce, when and how is determined by the recognition of inefficient markets and the imperative to reduce costs to reap high benefits. Conservation is part of this goal as maintaining some biological diversity is paramount for reducing farming costs regarding plague control.

However, the perceived problem with this system is that it is becoming increasingly vulnerable to population growth. Subsistence agriculture is considered here to be incapable of supporting the ongoing population burst faced by the Bribri and the Cabécar in the future, at least without also leading to some form of colonization of the forests. However, for-profit agriculture is deemed incapable of providing enough income to the locals to live of these products, given unstable commodity markets.

So, the FONAFIFO strategy states the necessity of developing new alternative forms of production and income generation.

These perceived assumptions about cultural rationalities of the Talamancan indigenous peoples could be logical recipients of neoliberal-minded PES schemes. Indeed, the actual effectiveness of these programs is directly dependent on the role of money transfers at steering land management behaviors towards the desired land uses defined by the buyers of said ecosystem services, in this case, conservation of forest cover (Muradian et al., 2010). This of course, also implies the susceptibility of potential users to re-conceptualize nature as a potential subsystem of the economy. Indeed, the strategy does further the idea that Bribri and Cabécar people already conceptualize Talamancan forests as a form of investment and capitalization, but without monetary components.

Indeed, one of the theses brought back from NAMASOL here, is that while much of the Talamancan economy exhibited extremely low levels of

monetization, savings or financial investments, Bribri and Cabécar had internalized these economic processes within their own land management practices, particularly with regards to husbandry animals and forests (Borge and Laforge, 1996)

Of course, while the strategy affirms that the necessary mindset exists, attention must be offered to how the PSA is going to be implemented without compromising additionality, payment directedness and commodification. While the PSA program offers different contract modalities – with some oriented towards reforesting pastures and other devoted to different forms of forest management that allow a sustainable extraction of lumber for productive purpose. The FONAFIFO strategy put emphasis on the PSA using contracts centered on conservation of forests belonging exclusively to the ADIs. This is not to say that interaction between FONAFIFO and the indigenous territories should exclusively focus in this modality, implying that this could be the most effective and the less conflictive option.

This conclusion was perhaps the main result of the negotiation process between FONAFIFO and the indigenous organizations, according to both FONAFIFO officials, the consultant in charge of developing the strategy and the indigenous leaders themselves. From FONAFIFO’s point of view, forest management and reforestation contracts would require various institutional arrangements that would be extremely difficult to afford or control by the farmers, the forestry regents or the ADIs themselves. For example, forest management contracts would have required every individual beneficiary to develop expensive management plans and implied new obligations for continuous control of the ADI regarding domestic consumption of lumber, that these organizations could not possibly afford. Whereas, for a reforestation contract FONAFIFO, the regents and the ADI also needed to create a control system to avoid farmers from cutting down already existing agroforestry systems and to demand an even more costly management plan determining which specific tree species were to be planted and following specific forest densities (Borge, 2003). Furthermore, and even more important, this would have required an intensive intervention of the territories in order to clarify land rights over individual patches of land, which, according to Bribri leaders interviewed, was bound to generate internal conflict. While the idea of an indigenous-minded PSA program was certainly put on the table by the indigenous organizations it was discarded by FONAFIFO given that it would entail the development of complicated institutional arrangements, it would entail the same problems and costs as the other options and it would fail to guarantee additionality and conditionality of the PSA program. As somebody involved in the negotiations said recently: “if someone were to demonstrate that there is hunting and cutting down of forest in these places then there will be trouble, how could you value biodiversity services in that way?” (SINAC Official, interview, August 13th, 2014).

On the contrary, the use of a PSA Forest Protection modality on forests under control of the local ADIs was a much cheaper and politically feasible option for all parts. Instead of a bunch of individual contracts, the indigenous territories would only require developing a couple each year, thereby reducing forestry regency and forest management costs significantly. Moreover, the program could have the chance of focusing on bundles of ecosystem services, as ADI forests often include areas with great religious and archeological value, with high levels of biodiversity, critical to water production, and often in mountainous areas with great terrain inclination. Given that these lands have only one owner (the ADI) and are considerably large, it is easier for forest regents and PSA officials to delimit specific plot sizes for the contracts without overlapping with plots from other indigenous peoples. In other words, these are specific lands in the territories that are much more susceptible to be bounded and put under some form of control for exclusive forms of environmental conservation. In other words, the solution was the enclosure of the lands with greatest collective social and cultural meaning for the Bribri and the Cabécar, with the objective of imposing a conservation-minded financial mechanism.

While this decision to use the PSA at culturally-relevant forests has spurred periodic opposition from some sectors of the Bribri and the Cabécar, many indigenous leaders interviewed considered it to be the best tool for attaining poverty reduction and guaranteeing political autonomy and strong institutions to govern the territories:

“What are we going to conserve if we are losing our lands? No, the first thing is the institutional strengthening. Many institutions come here and do their investing in building things that we have no use for. For example, there is a community center that was built recently and nobody is using it, and that’s not fine. We didn’t want that back then.

For us the priority is to organize ourselves.” (Former ADITIBRI President, interview, August 15th, 2014).

Indeed, this ‘social capital solution’ to the PSA property legibility problem was framed as a collective solution for poverty and development problems for the entire community in the FONAFIFO strategy:

“What is looked for (by these projects and interventions) is the visibility of the project, a way of proving that budget goals are being met and to fulfill the aspirations of the recipient populations, but only for a short period of time, of about five years, which is the expected lifespan of these endeavors. The indigenous organizations have been making these criticisms for more than ten years (…) and on the contrary, they point towards efficiency, to serve as leverage for autochthonous economic initiatives, support for the political development of the local political and entrepreneurial leadership, support for education projects, means to collaborate with the defense of natural resources and to improve land tenure as a way to stop the threat of potentially harmful extractivist tendencies” (Borge, 2003: 68).

In other words, what seems to be lacking in the territories is the presence of a strong institutional framework that may reorient these much-needed interventions and financial investments made from abroad, towards supporting a local and autochthonous project of development, or as it is argued earlier in the document: “(t)he tasks required to combat poverty cannot be continued if not previous sustained by strengthened local institutions.

Whatever bridge, food distribution process, road or school that may be built will not have positive and irreversible results if the institutions that have to deal with these affairs are not strengthened as well” (Borge, 2003: 35). In other words, for the PSA program to combat poverty in the territories, its focus must be re-oriented towards fostering a strong territorial governance (mainly through continuous investment on the local ADIs as the informal local governments of the territories) and other forms of social capital formation, to guarantee a strong indigenous position when approached by NGO and state interventions and development projects in the future.

To summarize, indigenous involvement with the PSA program was faced with a complicated problem of how to make the neoliberal objectives of commodification and privatization viable in Talamanca, a place where the lack of necessary and pre-existent legible and verifiable private property rights is noticeable and prevalent and where the cultural forms of resources uses were deemed incoherent with the rationale needed of potential beneficiaries. Under pressures by NGOs, indigenous communities and IFOs, FONAFIFO was forced to deal with this issue and the best possible choice was to enclose the lands of the ADIs that were deemed to protect particularly important sites for Talamancan culture, water provision and cultural uses of resources. The rationale behind this choice included a reconceptualization of the Bribri and Cabécar as inherently rational economic subjects, and of the PSA becoming a tool for fostering autochthonous development, political autonomy and self-determination. In the following section, I will examine the effects of the PSA regarding these latter issues.