Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

The Runa in Ecuador 39
Ultimately the uneasy alliance splintered, and
Huahua Sumaco moved ahead on its own with a
redesigned project on a smaller scale. The community
succeeded in obtaining use of the carpentry
equipment (officially owned by FOIN). They
reorganized activities to focus on interested individual
community members who were made
responsible for, and would benefit directly from,
different forestry activities, including care of the
mules used to haul wood out and the processing
of what had been extracted. To gain experience
and benefit the community, participants decided
to produce wood for local housing and to construct
crates for selling their naranjilla fruit
crops. Some individuals planned to sell boards,
milled with a chain saw, on the local market.
The lowland communities, however, were stalled
since they had no support to finish their management
plans or revise them midstream. Chonta
Cocha, frustrated by these combined setbacks,
decided to withdraw. Amazonas continues to wait
for the situation to improve, but has not figured
out how to reduce the scale of activities from the
ambitious plan villagers originally approved.
One institution has partially filled the gap left
by the departure of WWF and CS. The Gran
Sumaco Project, which is establishing the national
park, has provided limited funding and technical
assistance. However, until recently its activities
have been planned and carried out directly with
communities and not with the federation. In the
initial phase of park consolidation, Gran Sumaco
has worked with three upland communities in the
buffer zone of protected forests, including Huahua
Sumaco. It has carried out socioeconomic studies
and provided broad support to communities in
agriculture and agroforestry, and limited support
to the forestry enterprise. There are no activities
in the lowland zone. Although support to FOIN
has recently resumed, initial activities were carried
out by hiring individual PUMAREN team
members, whom the federation could no longer
pay, to provide technical assistance to buffer-zone
communities and to train as park guards.
IV. Building Effective
Partnerships—Lessons in Scale
Although the PUMAREN project fell short of
expectations, what happened must be understood
in the context of an evolving effort to build relationships
that achieve conservation through sustainable
resource management. It is rich in lessons
at three levels, with implications that stretch
beyond Sumaco to include the whole region.
4.1 The Role of Federations in Community
Enterprises
Some of the problems of PUMAREN can be
traced to internal contradictions at the core of the
federation and its relationship with member communities.
The LETIMAREN phase of the project
went smoothly, but land titling and surveying
communities to voice their interests politically
were activities familiar to FOIN and within its
traditional scope of operations. Serious contradictions
only began to surface during the project’s
second phase, when the focus switched to
developing economic projects.
FOIN knew that action was needed, not only to
maintain tenure and benefit member communities,
but to strengthen the federation’s autonomy.
Since its inception, FOIN has required foundation
funds to carry out its work and has struggled
with the dependency that resulted. The leadership
believed it was necessary to find ways to
increase their financial independence if they were
to set priorities and keep the strategic agenda
from being distorted. Two possibilities existed.
One was that communities could pay fees to the
federation in recognition of its services. This
could occur through membership dues or through
remittance of a portion of the gains from community
projects. However, the communities had
never been willing to support the federation in
this way. A second possibility was for the federation
to become directly involved in economic
activities and earn a financial return. Some of
the leadership, however, feared that transforming
FOIN into an economic entity could undermine
its political independence. They also feared that
an independent economic structure for community
projects would take on a life of its own that
might eventually undermine the federation itself.
As a result, the PUMAREN team never received
a clear mandate. It was conceived as a technical
arm of the federation that would work directly
with communities to develop economic alternatives.
However, such a unit could play a variety
of roles. It could 1) build networks to broker
marketing, funding, etc.; 2) provide communities