Collective action in watershed management - Springer Link

Agriculture and Human Values 16: 257–266, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Collective action in watershed management – experiences from the Andean hillsides Helle Munk Ravnborg1 and Mar´ıa del Pilar Guerrero2 1 Centre for Development Research (CDR), Copenhagen, Denmark; formerly Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT), Cali, Colombia; 2 Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT), Cali, Colombia

Accepted in revised form November 24, 1998

Abstract. Watersheds constitute a special case of multiple-use common pool resources (CPRs). In a textual sense, watersheds tend to be mosaics of privately owned and managed patches of land. At the same time, however, watersheds are also ecosystems in which multiple resources and people interact through an infinity of bio-physical processes. Through such interaction, new watershed-level qualities emerge that, together with other factors, condition watershed users’ continued resource use and access. In this perspective, watersheds become common-pool resources. Hence, watershed users do not only manage their individual plots, crops, forests, etc., knowingly or not, they manage landscape patterns and bio-physical processes that transcend their private property. In this context, drawing on experiences gained through participatory action research in a micro-watershed in the Andean hillsides of southern Colombia, this paper describes a process aimed at fostering collective watershed management. The paper illustrates the importance of platforms as a mechanism for negotiating and coordinating collective action by multiple users and discusses the issues of representation on such platforms as well as the importance of third party facilitation. Key words: Collective action, Colombia, Negotiation, Platforms, Representation, Social constructivism, Stakeholder analysis, Third party facilitation, Watershed management Abbreviations: ASOBESURCA – Asociación de beneficiarios de la subcuenca de R´ıo Cabuyal (Cabuyal watershed users’ association); CIAT – Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (International Center for Tropical Agriculture); CPR – Common pool resource; IDB – Inter-American Development Bank; JA – Junta de Acción Comunal (Village government) Helle Munk Ravnborg, a Danish national, currently works as a research fellow at the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen, Denmark. From 1994 to 1998, she was employed as a rural sociologist at Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT), in Cali, Colombia. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Environment, Technology, and Social Studies, Roskilde University, Denmark, and has worked extensively in Tanzania, Kenya, Colombia, and Honduras. Mar´ıa del Pilar Guerrero, a Colombian national, is a research assistant at Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT), Cali, Colombia. She is a rural sociologist and has worked extensively in participatory research in Colombia.

1. Introduction Watersheds constitute a special case of multipleuse common pool resources (CPRs). Rather than a resource in itself, a watershed is a geo-hydrological unit, defined as the area within the confines of a drainage divide (Jensen, 1996). Thus, it can vary in size from a few to several thousand hectares. Watersheds contain multiple resources (water, soil, vegetation, and fauna), each of which has multiple uses: irrigation vs. domestic or downstream water use; forest for firewood,

forage, construction, timber, and ground cover; land for buffer zones, arable cropping or grazing. However, in what Rocheleau (1997) refers to as a “textual” sense, i.e., a legally recognizable two-dimensional space, a watershed might not be considered a common pool resource, since all its land, trees, crops, etc. may be privately owned and managed. However, irrespective of property regimes – refer to the decision-making arrangements that define the conditions of access to, allocation of, and control over a range of benefits arising from a collective used

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resource (Steins and Edwards, 1999) – a watershed is also an ecosystem in which the multiple resources and – not to forget – people interact through an infinity of bio-physical processes. As a result of such systemic interaction, new watershed level qualities emerge, which together with other factors, condition watershed users’ continued resource use and access. For example, the severity of crop damage caused by crop pests and diseases depends not just on the management of individual plots, but on the structure of the landscape in time and space, with respect to plot sizes, intra- and interspecies diversity, habitat connectivity, etc. (Altieri, 1987; Barrett, 1992). Soil erosion is another transboundary problem in natural resource management. Cropping practices and, more generally, land use patterns in the upper part of a watershed, directly affect soil and water movement in the lower parts. To solve problems in one part of the watershed, or at one point in time, it might be necessary to take actions in other parts or at other times. Viewed in this perspective, which Rocheleau (1997) refers to as “contextual,” watersheds become common pool resources. Watershed users do not only manage their individual plots, crops, forests, etc. Collectively – knowingly or not – they manage landscape patterns and bio-physical processes that transcend their private property. This implies that watershed users potentially would gain from engaging in collective action to co-ordinate the management of individual plots. Where no institutions are in place to regulate this management of landscape patterns and biophysical processes at the watershed level, watersheds can be characterized as common-pool open access resources. In the past, the focus in watershed management has typically been upon the construction of physical structures for soil conservation such as bunds and terracing and, particularly in Latin America, on reforestation (IDB, 1995; Shah, 1994). Such approaches are characterized by the fact that they are planned from the outside, based on purely technical criteria; although such planning is rarely successful. Much less attention has been paid to management options and approaches that are social capital intensive, rather than physical capital intensive. Social capital is understood as what “. . . is created by individuals spending time and energy working with other individuals to find better ways of making possible the achievement of certain ends that in its absence would not be possible” (Ostrom, 1995: 126, citing Coleman). In its review paper of concepts and issues in watershed management, the InterAmerican Development Bank describes how an alternative, but rarely chosen, option to reforestation would be to allow the reestablishment of vegetative cover by seeking popular consensus about the need for protect-

ing the area from fire and grazing for a certain period (IDB, 1995). Shah, in the case of India, describes how watershed management programs planned and implemented by watershed users themselves, assisted by process facilitators and technical experts, proved to be much more cost-effective than traditional governmentadministered watershed management programs (Shah, 1994). In both cases, the alternative approach is characterized by building not only physical, but also social capital. Since early 1996, CIAT’s hillsides project has been working in Los Zanjones and Guadualito, two, small multi-ethnic watersheds in the Andean hillsides of southern Colombia, where little collective action has previously taken place. This work focuses on the social capital aspects of watershed management, that is, on ways to foster collective or concerted efforts among watershed users in their day-to-day management of natural resources, and thereby enable them to deal with problems that cannot be solved by individuals acting alone. The work is an example of participatory action research, in which CIAT sociologists act as facilitators as well as researchers, observing the processes by and within which collective action is fostered. The project grew out of experiences gained from observing the organization and evolution of ASOBESURCA.1 the watershed users’ association for the Cabuyal river watershed. Based on this work in the Cabuyal watershed, and in the micro-watersheds nested within it, the paper deals with two major issues related to platforms for collective action in watershed management. The first issue is that of ensuring the representation of all stakeholders related to the watershed. The paper discusses the problems related to building platforms on already existing platforms and to indirect representation in contexts such as the Andean hillsides, characterized by poor means of communication, lack of trust, impaired democratic traditions, and thus without a strong base-level or local platform. Hence, it addresses the discussion statements put forward by Steins and Edwards (1999) that “platforms for resource use negotiation in multiple-use CPRs must consist of representatives of the different user groups (i.e., individual user groups need to appoint a representative who negotiates on their behalf in the platform)” and that “new platforms for resource use negotiation in complex, multiple-use CPRs must not be built on existing platforms for single-use resource management.” In this light, the paper turns to discuss the importance of and methods for comprehensive stakeholder identification and describes how this constitutes the first step towards creating local platforms for watershed management negotiations. Such local platforms might eventually form the basis for a larger scale plat-

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form with indirect representation of the various interest groups. Second, the paper addresses the issue of the importance of a third party to facilitate platform processes, and thus addresses the fifth of the discussion statements formulated by Steins and Edwards (1999), namely that “platforms must be facilitated by a third party to co-ordinate multiple user groups, to ensure continuity and to reduce or absorb the transaction costs of forming and operating the platform.” As mentioned above, the research reported in this paper has the character of action research. In this way, the case study described in the paper serves in itself as an illustration of the importance of a third party facilitator. The paper is organized into six sections. Following the Introduction, Section 2 summarizes the experiences from the larger watershed users’ association, ASOBESURCA, which lead to subsequent work in the micro-watersheds. Section 3 addresses Guadualito, one of the micro-watershed in the Andean Hillsides and describes the conditions under which local platforms for watershed management have to operate and how the process towards the creation of a local platform for the collective management of Guadualito was initiated. Section 4 discusses the importance of and methods for stakeholder identification. It argues that stakeholder identification in the context of multiple use CPRs has to take place as a constructivist inquiry. In Section 5, we summarize the constructions emerging from our interviews with watershed users in Guadualito with respect to their perspectives and concerns related to watershed management as well as the actions that are currently emerging as a result of stimulating the negotiation of these diverse perspectives and concerns. Finally, Section 6 draws conclusions with respect to representation and the importance of third party facilitation.

2. Background – experiences from a larger scale watershed users’ association Prior to starting work in these small watersheds, CIAT’s hillsides project, as part of its overall research aimed towards strengthening community-led watershed management in the Latin American hillsides, had facilitated a process that led to the formation of a watershed users’ association for Cabuyal river watershed, ASOBESURCA (Ravnborg and Ashby, 1996). The Cabuyal watershed covers an area of about 7,000 hectares, divided into 23 villages or veredas and some indigenous reserves.2 ASOBESURCA has a total of 29 representatives. Each of the 23 villages is represented in ASOBESURCA by a representative appointed by the local village government. In addition, a few

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locally based organizations, like the indigenous local government (the Cabildo La Laguna), the local water board, the school teachers, the cooperative and the local agricultural research committees, each have a representative in ASOBESURCA.3 ASOBESURCA was endowed with a fund to support watershed development projects proposed by groups of watershed users. Apart from its “mid-wife” role, CIAT has been allowed an observer status in ASOBESURCA’s monthly meetings. One of the observations made in this process has been that ASOBESURCA very rapidly came to perceive of itself as a project fund, supporting projects of a physical capital nature, such as “the creation of × hectares of buffer zones along streams and springs” or “the planting of Y number of trees,” whereas its potential role as a platform for the identification, analysis, and negotiation of interests related to watershed management was neglected, if ever recognized. There are at least two elements in the explanation of this development. The first has to do with scale and the wish for visibility. With an area of responsibility of 7,000 hectares and a population of 1,100 individual decision-making families, it seems an enormous task to attempt to focus on the social capital aspects of watershed management, that is, the negotiation and coordination of day-to-day agricultural activities. Moreover, the tradition among the institutions working in the area is that only inputs, external to the watershed (such as seedlings, fertilizers, fences), can be covered by projects. Given this, and that virtually no guidance in project formulation has been provided to watershed users by ASOBESURCA or other organizations working in the area,4 watershed users have tended to reproduce the type of projects that they are used to receiving; focusing primarily on physical structures without paying attention to the building of social capital. Another, and equally important part of the explanation relates to the lack of representation in ASOBESURCA of important stakeholder groups from within the watershed. Having its representatives appointed by established local organizations, ASOBESURCA has inherited the biases existing within these organizations with respect to features such as well-being status, gender, and ethnicity. The most immediately visible example is that of the constitutionally determined under-representation of the indigenous Paez5 population: The Paeces constitute 10–15 percent of the watershed population. In contrast, the indigenous local government has only one out of the 29 representatives forming ASOBESURCA, compared to the non-indigenous local governments, which have been assigned one representative per village (a total of 23 representatives).

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With respect to well-being status, a similar story emerges. Using well-being rankings conducted in Cabuyal watershed, local well-being indicators were identified, made quantifiable, and applied to a data base, which originated from a questionnaire survey conducted in 1993 and included all households in the watershed. This resulted in a classification of the population into three well-being levels: highest (23 percent of the households), middle (46 percent of the households) and lowest (31 percent of the households) (Ravnborg and Pilar Guerrero, 1996). The population proportions were then compared to ASOBESURCA membership and local government representation. Only 9 percent of the members of the non-indigenous local governments came from households belonging to the lowest level of well-being. In ASOBESURCA, the corresponding proportion is 10 percent of the representatives. Looking at the well-being status of watershed users proposing projects to ASOBESURCA produces a similar picture. Of all projects proposed between 1993 and 1996 (that is, projects proposed by small groups of households as well as projects proposed by entire villages and, therefore, including also the poorest households), 25 percent of the highest well-being level households had participated in one or more proposals as compared with 15 percent of the lowest well-being level households. Excluding village level projects, the percentages are 24 and 11 percent respectively. It is difficult for representatives to voice interests others than their own, given the low level of communication between the ASOBESURCA representatives and their supposed constituents, that is people living within their village. This has been stated as a weakness by representatives themselves, for example in the internal ASOBESURCA evaluation made in 1995, and is supported by the fact that a grand proportion of watershed users are unaware of the existence of ASOBESURCA. These biases in ASOBESURCA’s membership structure and in the organizations appointing representatives to ASOBESURCA, have clearly prevented ASOBESURCA from becoming an effective platform for analysis and negotiation of interests related to the management of Cabuyal watershed. 3. Starting from below – towards local platforms for collective action in micro-watershed management In early 1996, CIAT’s hillsides project decided to embark upon a new line of research, seeking means of fostering collective watershed management. Instructed by the ASOBESURCA experience, one of the

premises was that we wanted to start small-scale to allow for direct face-to-face contact among watershed users. In the Andean hillsides, where the means of transport and communication are walking, biking, and talking, people have to live relatively close together for face-to-face contact to be feasible for management purposes. Moreover, for such contact to be effective in building up mutual trust and understanding among watershed users – necessary ingredients in fruitful analysis and negotiation of potentially conflicting interests – the number of users should be reasonably small (Cernea, 1988; Uphoff, 1992, 1994), that is up to a maximum of 30–40 users or families. In a smallholder context, this typically means an area of less than 200 hectares. This, in turn, implies that work has to start by focusing on watershed management problems that, besides being important to watershed users, are solvable or ameliorable at the small scale. Once successful experiences are gained at this level, problems that require coordinated management of larger areas and between larger numbers of users might be embarked upon through linking neighboring small base-level groups or platforms into multi-tiered organizations (Ostrom, 1994; Uphoff, 1994). Through the use of a geographical information system (GIS), potential watersheds situated within Cabuyal watershed and ranging in size between 25 and 200 hectares were identified. One of these was Guadualito.6 Stimulating the recognition of the need for collective action Guadualito is, and has long been, a contested area. In July 1975, a group of Paeces invaded (or “recuperated,” as the Paeces express it) an area in what today is Guadualito. Some of the Paeces were living in the area already, working as caretakers and daylaborers on the bigger farms; others came from further up the mountains. Today the invaded area is recognized as part of the indigenous reserve of the Cabildo La Laguna. About half of Guadualito’s 29 families are Paeces, the rest being Mestizos, born in the area, or families from other parts of Colombia, who have settled in Guadualito over the last 10–20 years, in the area often referred to as caleños.7 Guadualito is situated in the Andean hillsides in Cauca Department in the south-western part of Colombia, and covers an area of approximately 150 hectares. Small-scale farming combined with day-laboring on neighboring farms are the dominant economic activities in the area and almost all of the 29 families own land, with the majority owning between 1 and 3 hectares.


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Figure 1. Drawing of fictive landscape used to stimulate recognition of watershed interdependencies.

In June 1997, we invited everybody who lived or owned land in Guadualito to gather for a meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to introduce ourselves and to explore whether or not people would be interested in working with us. Also, we wanted to introduce the objective of our work and our specific focus upon problems that cannot be solved by farmers individually, but require some degree of concerted action. However, rather than us explaining this, we attempted to stimulate participants themselves to recognize the existence of this type of problems within their area. To do this, we developed a poster showing a fictive landscape, with a number of ongoing, and via bio-physical processes, interacting activities such as spraying of tomatoes, fishing, incautious use of burning for land preparation, and outlets of sewage water to a stream (see Figure 1). People in the meeting were asked to make observations about the activities taking place in the landscape as well as with respect to the persons, their intentions, concerns, and their mutual relationships concerning the natural resource use. Afterwards, watershed users were asked to relate these observations to their own watershed. Water was one of the main issues mentioned in this context. Many households use water from local springs for consumption but these springs are increasingly being contaminated by users in the upper part of the watershed. Comments were also made in favor of our future engagement in the area, referring to the lack of organization among people in the watershed. As one participant put it: “Meetings are important because you don’t know what might be happening to your

neighbor.” In subsequent informal conversations with participants in the meeting, we learned that one of the expectations from our presence in the area was that we, as an external party, would be able to facilitate a currently non-existent but strongly needed dialogue primarily between the Paeces and the socalled Caleños. The meeting was concluded by a consensus about the usefulness of us coming to visit people in their homes, “to see how we live” as it was expressed by the participants and to learn about the different points of view and concerns guiding the management of natural resources within Guadualito.

4. The importance of comprehensive stakeholder identification In August 1994, a fire had partly destroyed a buffer zone in Cabuyal watershed. The buffer zone had been created by ASOBESURCA earlier that year to protect some important springs. Speculations suggested that the fire had been set as a protest against the creation of buffer zones. Many people in the area are in search for land and therefore perceive buffer zones of 10, 30, or sometimes 50 meters as a waste of land, “only serving to invite more snakes.” The fact that the benefits of such sacrifices are more likely to accrue to downstream populations than to people living close to the buffer zone, only reinforces this perception. Triggered by the incidence and facilitated by CIAT, ASOBESURCA began to analyze the problem of the fires, including the use of burning as a common means of

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clearing the fields for crop residues and weeds. Very soon in this analysis it became clear that important stakeholders such as people hungry for land or short of labor, and the indigenous people who initially had expressed strong opposition to the creation of buffer zones, were not represented in ASOBESURCA. To deal with the problem of burning, ASOBESURCA therefore had to invite more people to participate in the analysis and the exploration of possible alternatives (Ravnborg et al., 1996). This example illustrates simply how failing to identify and ensure the representation of all stakeholders might prove detrimental to the efforts of others to improve watershed management and complicates negotiation about desirable resource use. Many factors are in play to shape who the stakeholders are, particularly in the context of multipleuse CPRs such as watersheds.8 In some cases, there are pronounced upper-lower watershed conflicts; in other cases, stakeholders are defined according to ethnicity or gender or the interaction between these and other factors. The list of potential factors and how their interactions contribute to the presence of different stakeholders is, therefore, long. Moreover, the factors shaping the existence of different stakeholders are not only watershed, but in many cases also issue-specific. Those who are the stakeholders when the forest is the issue might be different from those who are the stakeholders when the issue is water. Methodologically, this presents a problem. It precludes, or at least complicates, a priori stakeholder identification based on a predetermined checklist of possible factors. Instead, stakeholder identification has to be contextual and requires open-ended constructivist inquiry or exploration (Guba and Lincoln, 1989). In the context of watershed management, this means a process through which watershed users are invited to relate their constructions, that is their way of understanding resource use and related problems within the watershed, their concerns, ideas, values, and issues. Central in social constructivist thought is that such constructions or understandings are products “. . . not of objective observation of the world, but of the social processes and interactions in which people are constantly engaged with each other” (Burr, 1996: 4). Experiences from work elsewhere showed us that claims of homogeneity and agreement made in group sessions in fact covered various types of disagreements and disapproval of the resource use of others, such as clearing and burning of river banks or excessive use of agricultural chemicals. Drawing the attention to the existence of different interests or conflicts in a group session, however, implies distancing oneself from neighbors in their presence or putting oneself at risk to be reproached by neighbors – something

which is often socially unacceptable. Therefore, a crucial feature of successful stakeholder identification is to base it on interviews with individuals and to depart from the individual user’s personal constructions, since these are what make people act and since each different construction brings with it, or invites, different kinds of action (Burr, 1996; Röling, 1994). Stakeholder identification in practice Inspired by Guba and Lincoln (1989), we developed five questions or rather “themes” (see box below) to be used as the guide for the stakeholder identification interviews. The first two themes aim towards getting insight into stakeholders’ views and concerns with respect to their own natural resource use. Theme 3 aims to explore if and how individual resource users see their options for resource use affected by that of other resource users in the watershed, and thus if they perceive some degree of interdependency between their own and others’ resource use. Inspired by the experiences from Gal Oya (Uphoff, 1994), the fourth theme seeks to stimulate the interviewee to think about the need for collective action to solve the perceived problems. Finally, the fifth theme serves to ensure that all stakeholders are identified. Each person interviewed (“Interviewee A”) is asked to nominate another watershed user who would be likely to hold a different perception from his or her own (“Interviewee B”). By subsequently interviewing the nominated person, watershed users are eventually “sampled” according to what could be called “contrast” or “maximum variation” sampling. Following each interview, central themes, concepts, ideas, values, concerns, and issues proposed by the interviewee are analyzed by the inquirer and put into an initial formulation of the interviewee’s construction. Themes for stakeholder identification interviews in watershed management 1. How do you and your family use the natural resources within Guadualito? 2. Which are the problems that you and your family have experienced with respect to the natural resources? 3. From working in other areas, we have seen that conflicts can be very common between people living in the same area about the use of natural resources. Could you perhaps give some examples of such conflicts in this area? Do you and your family see your own possibilities for resource utilization affected by other families’ use of natural resources? 4. What do you think would be needed to solve these conflicts?


5. Thank you very much for telling us all this. That is very useful, indeed. Now I am sure that there are other people in this area who see things differently from how you have just described. Could you, please, give us a name of a person who would be likely to have a different viewpoint? After Interviewee B has volunteered his or her perception, the themes suggested by the preceding interviewee(s) (Interviewee A) are introduced and Interviewee B is invited to comment on those themes. The process of interviewing and soliciting nominations for new persons to be interviewed is repeated until the information being received either becomes redundant or falls into two or more constructions that remain at odds in some way. The constant comparison and contrasting of divergent views is a salient feature of constructivist inquiry and seems essential to any attempt to meaningfully identify and appreciate the existence of conflicting interests. After eight interviews, it was felt that we had a good understanding of the themes that emerged and the context in which they were embedded. Our next step was to invite all watershed users for a second meeting, in which we presented our construction of the issues with respect to management of the natural resources as well as the different perspectives encountered on these problems, corresponding to the stakeholder groups. In this way, we, as facilitators, assumed the unpopular role of making explicit the conflicts that exist in the area. However, we attempted to avoid compromising the persons who had been interviewed by constantly emphasizing that this was our perception, our construction and that maybe we had “altogether misunderstood everything.” This also served to invite people to comment upon our constructions. Subsequently, we invited the meeting participants to divide into stakeholder-based subgroups to reformulate or refine our construction according to their own perceptions. These refined, joint constructions then formed the basis for the development of action plans. In the following section, we describe in more detail the contents of these constructions, debates, and action plans.

5. Emerging constructions and actions from Guadualito Guadualito is an area marked by ethnic conflict. Many of the issues raised in relation to natural resource use, particularly related to water, have ethnic connotations. In this section, we use the water issue as an example. Water for household consumption was a problem mentioned exclusively by the indigenous people inter-

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viewed. Whereas all the Mestizos and Caleños living in Guadualito get water from the aqueduct, half9 of the Paez families get their drinking water from local springs and streams. The Paez families interviewed claimed that this water is increasingly contaminated and scarce and, in their view, that the Caleños were to be blamed. Some discharged sewage water from their toilets, which subsequently drained into the spring water; others discharged water used for washing coffee beans; and others used pesticides, some of which reached the spring water. Others complained that the Caleños had cleared land all the way down to one of the springs in order to create pasture, which the Paeces believe reduces the amount of water available, due to a lack of shade and deep roots on the pasture land to keep the water close to the surface. Finally, in the rainy season, a culvert designed to drain the road running along the upper rim of the watershed empties huge amounts of water, full of silt, which gets mixed with the spring water as it flows. In contrast, some of the Caleños living along the road were not well aware of where the springs were located and even less of the extent to which some of their neighbors depend on these springs for their drinking water supply. The Paez families interviewed had not tried to discuss their problem with the Caleños. As one of them explained, it was not really worth the effort. First, some Caleños do not stay permanently in Guadualito, but only come once every week or fortnight, using “caretakers” to tend their land (and those caretakers are changed frequently). Second, the Caleños tend to trade their land and holdings frequently, so you never know who your neighbor is. This is, however, not true for all the Caleños. Some do stay and cultivate their own land and have done so for many years. The ethnic connotations to the water problem date back in history. It was in the 1970s that piped water was led into the area. Allegedly, the president at that time of the local village government (a legendary Mestizo woman) decided that water pipes should not be installed to supply water to the indigenous families who had just “recuperated” their land. After various incidences of confrontations between her and indigenous people as well as the guerrilla, she was eventually forced to leave the area. As a means of presenting our construction in the second meeting, we chose to prepare a sketch map of Guadualito, since the ethnic conflict contains a geographical dimension, with the Caleños typically living along the road in the upper part of the watershed and the Paeces living in the lower part. Presented with this information and the fact that many Paez families do not have piped water supply, one

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of the Caleños participating in the meeting reacted by suggesting that perhaps the Paeces did not want piped water supply or were unwilling to pay the cost. This brought the legendary Mestizo woman into play again. In his response to these somewhat racist accusations, one of the local Paez leaders explained how this Mestizo woman had been a racist, refusing to install piped water to the Paez families and stressed how she eventually had been forced to leave the area. Another indigenous leader followed up by proposing that it was time to put aside old conflicts and that Mestizos, Caleños, and indigenous should collaborate in order to solve important problems. Instead of reinforcing the sense of ethnic conflict, we chose to emphasize the geographic – upper/lower – dimension of the problems and conflicts relating to natural resource use by proposing that participants should subdivide into stakeholder-based groups, based on whether they lived in the upper or lower part of Guadualito. Essentially, the group discussions consolidated the construction presented, with the exception that people from the upper part of the watershed added burning to the list of themes that we elicited during our interviews. The sense was that it was mainly people in the lower part of the watershed using burning for land preparation. However, as if in a search for reconciliation, participants in the upper watershed group proposed to help those in the lower part of the watershed in their land preparation, so that they would not have to turn to burning as the only feasible means of land preparation.10 A third meeting, held shortly after, was dedicated to the development of action plans with respect to the identified problems. In the context of the water issue, it was decided to make an inventory of the springs in Guadualito. This inventory was made in September 1997. Guadualito was divided in two parts from top to bottom of the watershed, and for each part a mixed group of watershed users (that is, a group containing people from the lower as well as the upper part), visited all the springs in order to locate them in a map and note down what was happening around the springs and the problems immediately observable. On this basis, the springs were prioritized according to their importance to people, and more concrete action plans were developed for the three most important springs. The plans had three elements: (1) to reforest and protect the area immediately around the springs; (2) to negotiate with the persons whose actions11 affect the quality and/or quantity of water; and (3) to construct a tank and/or a canal to collect and divert run-off water, primarily from the road. These plans are currently in the early phases of execution.

6. Conclusions Platforms, that is, a forum where different stakeholders can come together to analyze and negotiate diverse interests and agree on action strategies to solve natural resource management problems, are, as argued by Steins and Edwards (1999), essential mechanisms for coordinating collective action by multiple users. The fact that in Guadualito, the issue of water scarcity and contamination was not brought up by the affected Paez families until a platform to voice such issues was established, confirms this proposition. For a platform to be an effective negotiating body, all stakeholders relevant to the problem or resource in issue must be represented. This became clear in the case of ASOBESURCA, the Cabuyal watershed user association, trying to resolve the issue of burning. No stakeholder analysis had been conducted as part of the process of organizing ASOBESURCA and representation in ASOBESURCA was, and still is, defined primarily on a village or geographical basis, rather than on a stakeholder basis. Consequently, important stakeholders were not represented. However, even if a stakeholder analysis had been conducted and representation of all stakeholders had been ensured, it is highly unlikely that ASOBESURCA would have constituted an effective platform. First, people do not identify themselves as belonging to a specific natural resource management related stakeholder group and would therefore not have a collectively and explicitly formulated agenda. Second, communication in an area as big as the Cabuyal watershed is difficult, since transportation is limited to cycling or walking and technological aids, such as telephones, are absent. This would complicate, first, the appointment of representatives and, second, the effective communication. Thus, the development and maintenance of trust between a representative and his/her constituents would be difficult. Efforts to stimulate collective watershed management, and thus promote local platforms, have to start at the “operational level,” to create “stakeholder identity” and construct new forms of communication. Only when this has been achieved, can steps be taken to establish larger scale platforms with indirect representation, that is, platforms comprising representatives of user groups in contrast to base-level groups consisting directly of the user groups, to enable the effective negotiation of problems that require larger scale actions.12 This suggests a modification of the hypothesis proposed by Steins and Edwards (1999) that “platforms for resource use negotiation in multiple-use CPRs must consist of representatives of the different user groups,” so that this applies “only when base-level platforms exist and the nature of the prob-


lem requires action at a scale that is larger than what is under the domain of the base-level platform.” This issue of scaling up, that is the issue of how to nest base-level platforms into a larger organizational structure, clearly calls for further action-oriented research. The Cabuyal/ASOBESURCA case also serves as an illustration of the dangers involved when building new platforms on existing ones (Steins and Edwards’s discussion statement 3). Not only does it involve the danger of reproducing the biases that are present in the existing platforms, it also carries with it legacies of modes of operation specific to existing platforms that might not correspond with the purpose of the new platform. Conflicts relating to watershed management are often sensitive and are likely to be nested in a web of social relations. A watershed user living downstream and suffering from water contamination caused by his upstream neighbor, might choose to keep silent about these problems in order to continue being contracted as a day-laborer by the upstream neighbor. As our case from Guadualito illustrates, third party facilitators are important in such situations (cf. Steins and Edwards’s discussion statement 4). Their role is to elicit personal perceptions of concerns, conflicts, and issues related to natural resources and take on the task and responsibility of presenting these in a way that makes explicit the conflicting uses without compromising the individuals who have volunteered these perceptions. In this way, third party facilitators can help foster public negotiation about watershed use where such issues had been either suppressed previously, or had resulted in a violent ending. Notes 1. ASOBESURCA stands for Asociación de Beneficiarios de la Subcuenca de Río Cabuyal. It is the watershed users’ association for the Cabuyal watershed, comprising the micro-watersheds, Los Zanjones and Guadualito. 2. At the local level, two parallel administrative systems exist in Colombia: one for the non-indigenous part of the population and another for the indigenous part of the population. The vereda – the village – is the smallest administrative unit for the non-indigenous part of the population, normally covering an area within which between 20 and 100 households live. It is governed by a Junta de Acción Comunal (JAC) – a village government. For the indigenous population, the smallest administrative unit is the resguardo – an indigenous reserve – governed by a Cabildo, which is the indigenous local government. 3. The school teachers have two representatives in ASOBESURCA. 4. The only exception was the manual for project formulation developed by Guerrero (1997), written to extend the know-

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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ledge of the possibility of submitting a project proposal to ASOBESURCA and the details of how this should be done. The Paeces is the largest indigenous group in Colombia, living mainly in Cauca Department. Ironically, Guadualito comprises two, rather than one watershed. However, for reasons related to social relations – the indigenous reserve cutting across the two watersheds – it was decided to work with the two watersheds as one. Literally, “caleños” refers to people from Cali, but in the area, the term is used more loosely to refer also to people coming from the area around Cali, as well as from the coffee zone, i.e., the departments of Risaralda and Caldas. By “stakeholders,” we understand “any group of people, organized or unorganized, who share a common interest or stake in a particular issue or system” (Grimble and Wellard, 1997). After completion of the stakeholder interviews, we conducted a census of the families in Guadualito. The quantitative information regarding percentages of families stems from this survey. One of the most frequently mentioned advantages of using burning as a means of clearing crop residues and weeds from the land before planting is that it is fast and thus saves labor. For example, direct outlet of water from toilets; washing of coffee and cutting down vegetation close to the spring. Which problems should be dealt with at which level of organization should be determined following the so-called principle of subsidiarity, that is, issues should be dealt with and decisions should be made at the lowest possible level in terms of who is responsible for and/or affected by a given problem.

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