Protected Areas and the Coproduction of Governance in Peru

• In Event: Party Networks, Indigenous Politics, and Civil Society in Latin America

Abstract

This paper analyzes interactions among the state, communities, and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in protected area governance. It focuses on Peru, home to sixty-eight national protected areas under the purview of a specialized agency (SERNANP) attached to the Ministry of Environment (MINAM). Peru’s protected areas have substantive importance for local communities. For example, many Peruvian Indigenous peoples contest the imposition of protected area restrictions on their livelihoods and territorial rights. Two questions motivate the study: Given Peru’s markedly weak state capacity, how are protected areas governed? How does that governance involve and/or otherwise affect local, including Indigenous, populations?

My research suggests that the governance of Peruvian protected areas and their buffer zones may be a manifestation of “co-production,” defined as the provision of public goods and services through interactions among state and societal actors. Peru’s state fulfills certain functions on its own: SERNANP staff are deployed to manage protected areas, military personnel reinforce ranger stations in some areas, and a MINAM forest conservation program prioritizes work in buffer zones. More striking than independent state action are NGOs’ contributions to governance via their interactions with the state and local communities. Two patterns emerge. First, NGOs help fill a relatively empty state “shell,” by managing carbon offset revenues, supplying park rangers and public security forces, and leading sustainable development projects in buffer zones. Second, NGOs contribute to state building in non-conservation realms, in response to local community requests. Perhaps to secure and maintain positive community relations that they need to carry out conservation initiatives, NGOs finance land surveys for land title registration and transport residents to public health clinics and to state offices to obtain identification cards and lobby for greater investment in public education. NGOs may help direct more state resources toward Indigenous communities relative to other groups, due to both the former’s organizational capacity, and NGO (and donor) commitments to working with Native peoples in sustainable development.

The analysis draws on my August 2023 field research in Lima and in Puerto Maldonado, the capital of Madre de Dios region. Madre de Dios, in the Peruvian Amazon, is known for its biodiversity, including in six national protected areas—three national parks, two communal reserves, and one national reserve. The region also has an international reputation for its environmentally destructive informal gold mining, which has encroached on some of these protected areas and their buffer zones. Many of Madre de Dios’s well-organized Indigenous communities live in buffer zones and claim rights to protected lands, including, in some cases, more rights than those granted through co-governance arrangements, for the region’s two communal reserves. While in Peru, I interviewed NGO representatives, civil-society leaders engaged in the formal management of protected areas, employees of the national ombudsman’s office, leaders and technical experts in Indigenous organizations, and current and former officials at different levels within MINAM and SERNANP.

Author

• Maiah Jaskoski, Northern Arizona University