BIO-CULTURAL COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS - Portal do Professor

PART II / CHAPTER 6
5.7 Bio-cultural Checks and Balances Against
Commodification of ESS and Towards
ILCs’ Rights to a Bio-cultural Way of Life
A final fundamental contribution of BCPs to the PES context
lies in its facilitation of ILCs’ expression of their bio-cultural
values and knowledge. BCPs add an additional angle to ESS
through the qualitative valuation of ecosystems’ bio-cultural
resources. In other words, BCPs describe ecosystems in terms
of their bio-cultural rather than their economic value, which
provides a much more holistic assessment of their true value.
Even when bundled, ESS can only be measured in terms of
the values they add to certain economic activities or to a
certain user. Yet, ecosystems that generate economically
valuable ESS do so much more than that in terms of the
services they provide to the livelihoods of ILCs, which are rarely,
if ever, measured economically. For example, a forest is not
merely a carbon sink, but also provides ILCs with food,
shelter, medicine, and spiritual guidance, all of which they
have come to depend upon for their livelihoods and biocultural
ways of life. It is for these reasons that ILCs such as
6. Conclusions
While BCPs are not the panacea for making PES work, we
argue that they can be highly supportive in integrating
communities into PES schemes. What may otherwise seem
too complex for possible users of ESS may become feasible
through the BCP process.
BCPs can also serve as a capacity development mechanism
for ILCs that are confronted with the opportunity to enter
into a PES scheme. Participation, capacity development and
increased awareness of what such a scheme entails leads
to empowered communities that are much better prepared
to not only enter into PES negotiations, but also to commit
to the conditions of specific schemes. In addition, basing a
BIO-CULTURAL COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS IN THE
CONTEXT OF PAYMENT FOR ECOSYSTEM SERVICES
the pastoralist Raika community described in previous
chapters has not only become dependent on having access
to the land, but has also taken on the stewardship of the
very ecosystem upon which it relies for survival.
During a long history of interaction, the land and the
community have co-evolved a symbiotic relationship in
which they mutually reinforce each other’s
bio-cultural integrity.
Therefore, basing PES schemes on BCPs allows for the
integration of bio-cultural values into a previously economicallyvalued
system and further acknowledges the importance
of bio-cultural values for the preservation of ecosystems
that generate ESS in the first place. Therefore, BCPs generate
a holistic approach to ESS that extends beyond an economic
valuation and includes broader valuation criteria for the
development of a PES scheme. PES schemes may become an
additional mechanism through which ILCs can assert their
rights and gain recognition for the bio-cultural principles
of conservation and sustainable use entrenched in their
traditional ways of life.
PES scheme on a BCP will highlight ILCs’ bio-cultural values
about the ecosystem in question and allow for a more
organic community-based decision-making process than
what typically occurs in a purely economic transaction.
Many other challenges exist, including the need that still
exists for solid scientific and economic analyses to assign
value to ESS. While BCPs will only address some of the
challenges associated with this new and promising PES
scheme, policymakers and entrepreneurs working in this
field should strongly consider integrating them into their
work as they collaborate with ILCs to design and implement
long-term and effective PES schemes well into the future.
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