Mariel Aguilar-Støen

Integrative ecological restoration and the involvement of local communities in the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley, Mexico

Restoration ecology is a science focusing on using ecological principles to improve ecosystems degraded usually through habitat destruction (Bradshaw & Chadwik 1980, Handel et al. 1994). Successful ecological restoration depends on negotiation and understanding of different stakeholders, including the daily users of the resources, government institutions that will regulate resource use and the research community working in the area.

Medicinal plant conservation and management: distribution of wild and cultivated species in eight countries

In order to understand the particular challenges that medicinal plant conservation and management raise at the global level, it is necessary to address issues pertaining their distribution and the environments where they grow. When reviewing medicinal plant studies from eight countries in four regions we found that a high proportion of the reported medicinal plants had wide distributions across countries and continents. Most plants are found wild (40.5%) or naturalized (33.9%), while only 3.3% are cultivated. Since many species are distributed in wild conditions, cultivated and naturalized in several continents, conservation and management interventions would be best served through collaboration between host countries.

Back to the Forest: Exploring Forest Transitions in Candelaria Loxicha, Mexico

Declining profitability of agriculture and/or higher prices of forest products and services typically drive an increase in forest cover. This article examines changes in forest cover in Candelaria Loxicha, Mexico. Forest cover increased in the area as a result of coffee cultivation in coffee forest-garden systems. Dependence on forest products and services, and not prices of forest products, drive the process in our study site. Low international coffee prices and high labor demand outside the community might pull farmers out of agriculture, but they do not completely abandon the lands. A diversification in income sources prevents land abandonment and contributes to maintaining rural populations and coffee forest gardens.

Beyond Transnational Corporations, Food and Biofuels: The Role of Extractivism and Agribusiness in Land Grabbing in Central America

Land grabbing in Central America is driven primarily by agro-industries and mining. Tourism development and infrastructure are also important forces behind new processes of land acquisition. Examining land grabbing in Central America allows us to move beyond single-cause explanations of land grabs and shows that it is a complicated and multi-actor process occurring at many scales. Contemporary processes of land acquisition and land re-concentration in Central America are embedded in a historical continuum of indigenous dispossession by colonial powers, later by international corporations and more recently by a combination of domestic and international capital in which the domestic landed elites play an important role. Even when the size of scale of land acquisitions is smaller compared with other parts of the world, new processes of land deals in Central America impact thousands of peasant livelihoods. These impacts are related both to changing property to land and to grabbing control over resources with implications for among other things, food security, human health, employment conditions and taxes, resulting in violent agrarian conflicts. Future research on land grabbing in Central America should focus on how drug trafficking interacts with land deals, the role of domestic elites in mining deals, the legal, illegal and quasi-legal instances in which the State operates in alliance with corporations, private security forces and the military.

The emergence, persistence and current challenges of coffee forest gardens: A case study from Candelaria Loxicha, Oaxaca, Mexico

In many parts of Latin America coffee is produced in forest garden systems, which fulfill a variety of household needs, enhance food security, and conserve biodiversity. We investigate drivers in the emergence, persistence, and decline of coffee forest gardens, using a case study in southern Mexico and combining historical, socioeconomic, and institutional analysis. Social, cultural, and political benefits linked to forest gardens are important drivers of change. The analysis supports the hypothesis that forest gardens emerge in places where they complement broader land use systems, land tenure is relatively secure, and the local economy is a combination of cash- and subsistence-based activities. The article further illustrates how the international coffee agreement and social-welfare programs supported the emergence of forest gardens. Low coffee prices, changes in land tenure, and reduced availability of labor could result in the eventual abandonment of coffee forest gardens.

Better Safe than Sorry? Indigenous Peoples, Carbon Cowboys and the Governance of REDD in the Amazon

Indigenous peoples around the world and particularly in Latin America are struggling to strengthen their control over land and the territories they inhabit. The strengthening of rights has come as a result of multiple processes both at national and global levels, in which the role and responsibilities of states have been transformed. Transnational processes challenge the presumed association between nation-states, sovereignty and territoriality. One of these challenges comes from international initiatives such as Reducing emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD). Global REDD in its broadness and national REDD in its uncertain early phases represent opportunities for private actors to negotiate with holders of land rights. In the Amazon, indigenous peoples’ territories, given their wide extension and that they are mainly forested areas, become interesting for all sorts of REDD actors. However, despite legal and rhetoric recognition of indigenous land rights, effective recognition is still lacking. In this paper, I will focus on one particular type of actor, so-called carbon cowboys – a term coined by journalists to signify actors who are willing to push the limits of established negotiation mechanisms to gain control over forest areas. I will focus on carbon cowboys’ practices and the responses from indigenous peoples in Colombia to highlight a common claim across the region, namely better state presence and regulation. The response from indigenous peoples’ organizations indicates that although territorial control is an important achievement, some form of state intervention is required to protect their rights in an uncertain REDD terrain.

Forest governance in Latin America: Strategies for implementing REDD

Global interest in and attention to forests have grown as concerns about global warming and climate change have taken a heightened position in international policy debates. Forests have been repositioned in international arenas as repositories of global value for their contribution to carbon sequestration and climate mitigation (Fairhead and Leach, 2003; Peet, Robbins and Watts, 2011). In this context, Latin American forests are seen as globally important in fighting climate change.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Frontiers of Research on Development and the Environment

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro culminated a process initiated in Stockholm in 1972. It is remembered as an event that marked the start of a new era. Global cooperation was seen as a new and necessary mechanism to face the challenges of climate change, population growth, pollution, deforestation, poverty, security and health. The Rio Summit had its foundation in the establishment of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1983. In 1987 the commission presented its report Our Common Future (WCED, 1987) at the United Nations General Assembly. The report achieved something unprecedented: to address environment and development as interlinked, forming one single problem. The report argued that to tackle environmental problems it was necessary to consider ‘the factors underlying world poverty and international inequality’ (WCED, 1987, p. 3). The report is most famous for launching the concept of ‘sustainable development’, defined as development that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987, p. 8). The concept thus encouraged differing interests to find common ground and to reconcile competing perspectives. On the one hand, environmental activists from the North, concerned with the limits to economic and population growth, sought to incorporate environmental concerns in development policy. On the other hand, governments and activists of the global South argued that environmental concerns could not be separated from concerns about economic growth and equality. Our Common Future also sets the stage for the establishment of several research centres around the world. One of them is the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo that celebrated its 25 years of existence in 2015. To mark this event, this special issue presents articles based on some of the recent research at SUM. Critical knowledge production is crucial; but also, as we have learnt, research on development and the environment is necessarily interdisciplinary and – by comparison with many academic endeavours – it is more closely connected with policy-making. Here, the frontiers of research should, we suggest, be primarily shaped by what is happening ‘out there in the world’ – both of practice and policy. This means, for example, addressing the challenging issue of consumption in the South as well as the North (Hansen, Nielsen and Wilhite); and including questions

Changing Elites, Institutions and Environmental Governance

The topic of elites has always been controversial in Latin American social sciences. Elites have been studied indirectly as landowners, capitalists, business-leaders or politicians, and have also been approached directly using concepts and theory from elite studies. Although there is a significant amount of literature on the role of elites in democratic transformations (see e.g. Higley and Gunther, 1992), elites have often been considered to be an obstacle to the formation of more democratic, prosperous and egalitarian societies (e.g. Paige, 1997; Cimoli and Rovira, 2008). This is also the case in the literature on environmental governance, in which elite groups are often considered to be an obstacle to sustainable development and an obstacle to establishing more equitable influence over the use and benefits of natural resources. Therefore, although an elitist conservation movement has long existed in Latin America, struggles to protect the environment from overexploitation and contamination have commonly been related to struggles against local, national and transnational elites by subaltern groups (Martinez-Alier, 2002; Carruthers, 2008; chapters 1 and 2 in this volume).

Exploring participation in new forms of environmental governance: a case study of payments for environmental services in Nicaragua

This article discusses a “payments for ecosystem services” project in Nicaragua involving different public and private actors. The main contribution of this paper to the literature is that this study shows how the participation of the poor and marginalized in environmental governance projects, particularly in payments for environmental services (PES) projects, is shaped by asymmetrical and preexisting power relations that do not simply disappear with the inception of a project. This study also contributes to better understand and to nuance the motives of different actors to engage in PES projects, and my analysis confirms that a sole focus on economic incentives is too narrow and insufficient explanation for actors’ involvement in the project. The project constitutes a hybrid arena where different ideas meet. One of the outcomes of such hybridity is that the expansion of the activities of corporate actors remains unquestioned and their perspectives are favoured, while at the same time claiming to promote the conservation of natural resources. The study reveals the engagement of international development agencies in influencing the relations between private and public actors. Powerful actors are able to draw the borders of what is possible to discuss and negotiate in “invited” spaces for participation like this PES project.