The article turns now to examine institutional arrangements between project managers and local communities. For this study, two communities were selected on the basis of their longer-term involvement with the carbon project and the fact that they respond to the project in two contrasting ways. Community A plants trees in family-owned plots and only a minority of local farmers are involved in project activities. Community B is reforesting in common grazing areas and forests and all male farmers participate to some extent in planting, clearing and felling activities. These two approaches offer contrasting experiences on local arrangements and their implications for legitimacy and equity in carbon forestry projects.
a. Building legitimacy
Community A’s involvement in the project can be traced back to the project’s early feasibility studies. Project managers approached a group of local farmers due to their affi liation with a rural organization named Unión de Ejidos Lucha Campesina
(UELC), which was receiving political guidance and fi nancial support from PAJAL. However, since the creation of UELC and PAJAL in the late 1970s and early 1980s, confl icts between affi liated families and other community members were frequent. Therefore, when the carbon project was introduced to the community through a community representative who belonged to UELC and PAJAL, the majority of the community saw the carbon project as hostile to their interests. Even for some of the UELC affi liated members, the carbon project did not seem attractive enough and, in 1997, only 22 out of the 45 UELC affi liated families started planting in some of their family-owned plots.
Concerns over the project’s legitimacy were manifested in two different ways. Project participants felt the need for continuous reassurance that they were not implicitly selling their land to carbon investors. They saw the carbon project as a
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strategy to pursue economic benefi ts and a way to defend their family bestowed land rights. Their emphasis on the fact that the project was being developed on their family land endowments helped them to portray the community assembly’s stance against the project as illegitimate. The carbon project was an effective way to incorporate short-term (in terms of cash) and long-term (in terms of the forest growing stands) productive value to areas that were rarely exploited agriculturally and were exclusively fenced to demonstrate the existence of property. These property-related claims were strategically important in a context where land scarcity was severe and landless families had started to challenge the legitimacy of the large properties held by some.
In contrast, non-participants made connections between the carbon project and wider regional resistance to privately led development projects, which owed their existence to a broader regional political and social struggle5. One could argue that
if project developers had attempted to present and develop the project through formal political authorities, this would have opened the possibilities of non-UELC families to participate in the project or it would have opened the door to planting in communally owned land. However, enquiries in this direction indicated that the possibility to develop the carbon project in communal lands were unrealistic because population growth and land scarcity dynamics were already affecting the way in which community authorities could enforce collective action in the forest commons. Despite these concerns, there has been a recent increase in the social acceptance of the project because the community leader dropped out from UELC in 1999. Consequently, the carbon project has gained legitimacy in community A and 40 new families have been incorporated.
Community B was approached through a rural organization that had wider social support in the community and the region itself. The Unión Regional de Ejidatarios Agropecuarios, Forestales y de Agroindustria de los pueblos Zoque y Tzotzil del Estado de Chiapas (UREAFA) was created in 1992 with the objective of developing productive projects in local communities, as well as participating in the struggle for reclaiming land that was still in private or state hands, a task that was being led in the state by the national political organization Central Independiente Obrera y de Acción Campesina
(CIOAC). Even if not all community members were affi liated with UREAFA or CIOAC, it could be argued that the community assembly legitimized the carbon project because of general sympathy towards these organizations. Such legitimization later allowed project managers to deal progressively with local authorities and bypass UREAFA leaders.
5 Chiapas became well-known when the “Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional” (EZLN) occupied
different cities and communities across the state during the early weeks of 1994. The government put down the revolt immediately after but a political and social struggle presently continues. New forms of autonomous political and social organization have emerged in communities belonging or supporting the EZLN. The revolt can be explained by several decades of indigenous socio-political exclusion from state and federal policies and institutions, which at the same time is related to a complex regional history of land rights alienation that left most indigenous communities with the less productive lands. The revolt is also centrally explained by the evolution of Mexican political economy towards free trade agreements and the ending of the national agrarian reform. None of the communities involved in the carbon project belong to or support the EZLN.
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However, the project’s legitimacy is not guaranteed in the long-term in community B. At present, landless families are engaged in a struggle for acquiring land from neighbouring private properties. Some families had already asked the community assembly to distribute the forest commons and select new families from within those who are not formal land rights holders. Current authorities have not accepted this proposal but it could be accepted in the future if authorities (who change every three years) are less supportive of collective management or more land is not secured from neighbouring properties and the pressure of the landless over the commons increases.
Participants in both communities highlight the future benefi ts associated with short-term family or collective income. In community A, each family decides what to do with its own carbon payments. Most families have used them for small household improvements. In community B, carbon revenues are delivered to community authorities who then discuss their allocation. In past years, revenues were used to pay the community land tax, improve community roads and the church, and other collective needs. Both communities also stress the long-term use values of the new forests, such as for local construction, agricultural purposes, timber commercialization, and future environmental benefi ts.
b. Taking equity into account
A critical question when implementing carbon projects is to analyze who participates and why. From an equity standpoint, the institutional arrangements established at the project-community interface should attempt as much as possible to recognize the diversity of productive spaces, resource users, local layers of rights and responsibilities over environmental resources and the potential benefi t streams associated with the use of these resources. For example, from a gender perspective, there is strong evidence in the literature about women’s important role in managing forest resources and contributing to their sustainability (Rocheleau and Edmunds 1997). Therefore, if forests are recognizable spaces in which women conduct important productive activities for household and community development, it seems compelling to pay attention to women’s needs in relation to carbon forestry and identify, not only which tree species would better accommodate their interests, but also which other productive spaces, such as home gardens, would favor the women’s development expectation or those of other marginalized groups, such as the landless.
Based on a survey of 95 community households, which included 53 participants and 42 non-participants, and represented 17% of community A, there appear to be major differences in the average size of land endowments between these two groups, with the former owning larger tracks of land dedicated to grazing and fuelwood collection that could be allocated for tree planting. Some of the richest participant farmers have bought woodland for planting trees under the carbon project since land costs would be substantially covered by future carbon revenues. The land bought becomes an asset that can be used for other purposes in the future, such as animal grazing, timber extraction and fuelwood gathering. For the poorest participants carbon funding has become a good opportunity to extract economic profi t from unprofi table land and invest in household needs, including food, medicines or clothes.
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Women in community A play neither a direct nor indirect role in the management of the family or the communal forest resources. These are essentially male-dominated productive spaces. However, most women play an effective role in the management of their home gardens. In fact, when the carbon project had a more development-related orientation in its early years, women were involved in several discussions and raised their interest in planting fruit trees in their home gardens or improving their cooking stoves. However, as institutional arrangements at project management level changed and the project focused on tree planting and effective carbon accounting, women’s suggestions were not prioritised and they dropped out from project meetings.
In community B, as the carbon project developed in common forestlands, no survey relating family land endowments, forest use and tree planting was conducted. However, it was observed that women play a role in both the management of home gardens and common forest resources, particularly for the collection of fuelwood and animal grazing (Silva 2002). However, the carbon project did not address the issue of women as resource managers. When men attending discussion groups were prompted about women’s participation in the selection of seedlings or in tree planting, they acknowledged that women had not participated. This was a clear sign of the carbon project’s limited capacity to affect locally driven processes of non-recognition and gender exclusion, a fact noted in ongoing carbon projects in different locations (Boyd 2002).
Defi cient recognition and inclusion of particular actors in project-community arrangements is accompanied by a defi cit in the distribution of information across participants. Both communities raised concerns about the need to reconfi gure the existing systems of information delivery and decision-making between project managers and participants. In community A, some participants stressed that now that the project has been consolidated, other members of the group should assume leadership in project management meetings. Participants defi ned the local representative as the only individual who had detailed information about the project, who understood it the most and, as a result, the only one entitled to make decisions on behalf of the group. In community B, several people proposed to create a local committee responsible for communal forestry practices in which those who have decision-making power in the community could be periodically brought together to discuss issues related with the conservation of common resources and the carbon project.