Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

The Runa in Ecuador 35
DINAF and its successor, INEFAN, proved effective.
By 1992, 55 percent of the communities
had secured legal title. By 1997, all except two
new ones had tenure.
However, indigenous participation in planning the
proposed protected area was far less effective.
Government plans to conserve the Sumaco area
proceeded steadily. Studies of the socioeconomic
status of the region’s population, the land-use
capacity of the zone, and possible management
alternatives were carried out by the Ecuadorian
NGO Fundación Natura in 1989 (Pereira et al.
1989) and by a USAID consulting team in 1990
(Hanrahan and Pereira 1990). By 1992, a feasibility
study carried out with German government
support proposed establishment of a national park
for Sumaco Volcano and the adjoining Galeras
Ridge. In April 1994, 205,249 hectares were officially
set aside as the Sumaco–Galeras National
Park. An interim institution, Proyecto Gran
Sumaco, was established within INEFAN with
financial and technical support from the German
aid organization GTZ, and offices were opened in
Quito and in the regional capital of Tena to help
establish the park.
Throughout this process of planning and establishing
the park, there was little coordination and a climate
of mutual suspicion between the government
and the Indian organizations. The government
never seemed to take seriously the idea that indigenous
organizations were capable of managing a
protected area. The lack of any response to
FOIN’s proposal to form a partnership only deepened
FOIN’s underlying distrust of government
intentions. Unable to engage the process from the
inside, FOIN watched park formation unfold from
the outside. It continued to insist on a joint management
model under a conservation category that
recognized indigenous rights to the area, without
being able to show (partly because it was not asked
to do so) how the idea would work in practice.
This proposal regarding Sumaco reflected a
larger strategy being promoted by the regional
Amazonian and national Indian organizations in
Ecuador. In 1990–1991, CONFENIAE drafted a
map that reclaimed existing protected areas in the
Amazon as indigenous territory to be jointly
managed by local Indian federations and communities
in coordination with INEFAN. This proposal
was also greeted with silence.
The Sumaco and regional indigenous proposals
were virtually identical, and both might have been
more persuasive if FOIN had better used its own
resource management team. LETIMAREN
(PUMAREN) staff members were minimally
involved in drafting proposals, or in government
negotiations, despite their hands-on involvement
with local planning, management alternatives, and
the protected-area model. They were on good
terms with INEFAN personnel in promoting land
titling, and were working closely with local communities
to develop forest management plans. As
for theory, the LETIMAREN team had been
immersed since completion of the community
survey in learning resource management.
Indigenous-to-indigenous training had been used
to help Runa staff overcome suspicion of conservationists’
motives. The team had visited other
indigenous experiments in resource management
being carried out by the Awá in northeastern
Ecuador, by the Kuna PEMASKY project in
Panama, and by the Yanesha in the Peruvian
Amazon. Kuna trainers spent four months
instructing the team in conservation models (putting
into perspective the different conservation categories
then in use) and in different management
alternatives that local communities might consider
(including agroforestry, tourism, and community
forestry). At the same time, team and community
members began to learn field techniques for inventorying
forests and planning their management.
From these experiences had emerged an interest in
community forestry that would take shape in
phase two of PUMAREN. Yanesha trainers from
a forestry project in Palcazu, Peru, would visit
twice to aid assessment of this alternative.
None of this knowledge was tapped in responding
to the park proposal, however, because FOIN
and its regional confederation discounted the
team as young and politically inexperienced. As
a result, indigenous organizations framed their
proposals rhetorically and were unable to provide
specifics to show the government and the public
how joint management would work.
3.2 Phase Two: Community Planning
(1991–1995)
As land titling moved forward and began to
occupy less time, project staff began to apply what
they had learned from the Awá, the Kuna, and
other indigenous trainers by helping communities