Abstract
Abstract International mountain conservation paradigms have shifted in the past 30 years from establishment of centrally governed protected areas that exclude communities, to collaborative and community-based conservation stewardship with communities that depend on resources for their livelihoods. The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar Convention) embodies this collaborative paradigm by suggesting that people and local governments can be collective stewards for the “wise use” of wetlands on which they depend for water resources and livelihoods. Although collaborative approaches are increasingly recommended to govern large and complex mountain waterscapes across multiple jurisdictions, recent international case study comparisons highlight the site-specific nature of institutional design and the effect that changing social relations and overlapping or conflicting rights and boundaries have on promised collaborative outcomes. This article illustrates the usefulness of a recently devel...
Highlights
40% of the world’s population depends on water that originates from mountain sources (Beniston 2003; Buytaert et al 2006), and many countries have declared headwaters as protected areas
Given a lack of national management capacity and the recognition of livelihood rights, international conservation practice has shifted from the exclusion of people from protected areas to collaborative conservation models such as communitybased natural resource management (CBNRM), comanagement, and adaptive management (Agrawal and Ribot 1999; Falleti 2005; Berkes 2007; Ribot et al 2010)
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of such a framework for understanding the possibilities for community-based and collaborative transboundary conservation of the proposed Ramsar designation of the Saraguro-OnaYacuambi wetland system along the continental divide in southern Ecuador
Summary
International mountain conservation paradigms have shifted in the past 30 years from establishment of centrally governed protected areas that exclude communities, to collaborative and community-based conservation stewardship with communities that depend on resources for their livelihoods. Collaborative approaches are increasingly recommended to govern large and complex mountain waterscapes across multiple jurisdictions, recent international case study comparisons highlight the sitespecific nature of institutional design and the effect that changing social relations and overlapping or conflicting rights and boundaries have on promised collaborative outcomes. This article illustrates the usefulness of a recently developed community-based natural resource management comparative framework for assessing the feasibility of collaboratively governing a proposed Ramsar wetland in the Southern Andes of Ecuador across multiple communities and jurisdictional boundaries.
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