ECUADOR - Land Tenure and Property Rights Portal

7.0 LESSONS LEARNED ANDCONCLUSIONAcross the sample, participants were asked to identify key lessons learned from working with indigenousgroups to secure their territorial rights. This final section provides a summary of these lessons that are insome cases drawn directly from informant responses and in others developed by the assessment team basedon investigation results. In either case, they aim to provide some guiding markers around LTPR programmingfor indigenous territorial rights.7.1 LTPR PROGRAMMING CONSIDERATIONS FOR INDIGENOUSTERRITORIAL RIGHTSProject Design and Implementation of LTPR Activities• Resist generalization across indigenous groups: Cultural, geographical, and contextual differences ofindigenous nationalities (and communities within) must be carefully considered when designing LTPRand NRM projects. These differing realities can influence the willingness and ability of people to makelong-term investments in land and to implement conservation activities.• Gender differences: Men and women within indigenous communities often have different values whenit comes to NRM. They may adopt different criteria to determine the state of natural resources withintheir communities and may be impacted differently by project interventions.• Shifting indigenous value systems: Under traditional practices, indigenous groups may be goodstewards of natural resources; however, economic pressures and the absorption of Western values areincreasingly challenging their cultural customs. With increasing value attached to land and scarce naturalresources, the securing of land rights by indigenous nationalities may not only serve cultural and/orconservation purposes, but also political and economic ends. Indigenous nationalities need to be engagedin shaping project objectives and activities up-front to facilitate their buy-in and increase the likelihoodfor their continuation.• Benefits of an integrated approach: An integrated LTPR approach that enhances both the legal andsocial recognition of rights, supports mechanisms to defend those rights, and strengthens localinstitutions such that they can carry on these functions will yield more sustainable results than the isolatedimplementation of any single intervention.• Securing legal rights (community vs. individual title): Titling by itself is unlikely to lead to tenuresecurity or sustainable NRM. Inalienable community land titles are more suited to maintaining the longtermterritorial integrity of indigenous communities’ ancestral lands than are individual titles. Withcommunity titles, indigenous groups are likely to be in a stronger position to defend their rights in theface of powerful outsiders and possess greater political clout. Conservation of landscape level resources(e.g., forests and waterways) is also enhanced when communities have shared rules about theirmanagement and take joint action to conserve them; such collective action is aided when the rights toresources are held in common. In protected areas, co-management agreements are falling short indelivering tenure security and promoting compliance with their associated NRM plans.INDIGENOUS TERRITORIAL RIGHTS IN ECUADOR: RAPID IMPACT ASSESSMENT 25