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The meanings of forest governance in Esmeraldas, Ecuador

Article  in  Oxford Development Studies · December 2003

DOI: 10.1080/1360081032000146645 · Source: RePEc

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Oxford Development Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4, December 2003

The Meanings of Forest Governance in Esmeraldas,

Ecuador

LAURA RIVAL

ABSTRACT Participatory forestry has become the most accepted way of exploiting timber
resources in tropical rainforests. This paper shows the links between participatory forestry,
sustainable forest management and the continuous objective of reconciling conservation with
commercial development in the province of Esmeraldas, one of the poorest and most rapidly
deforested regions of South America. I describe and contextualize the evolving logging
programme of a leading Ecuadorian wood-processing group to show that the decentralization
of the development process, the recognition of local communities as legal entities in the
management of natural resources, and the active involvement of profit-oriented firms in
biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation all contribute to the emergence of new
alliances between the Ecuadorian government, the logging companies, conservation and human
rights organizations, and local Black and indigenous communities. My central argument is
that devolution in this context leads to conflictive interpretations of regulation. I end with a
discussion of the multi-scalar nature of “forest governance”, and highlight the contribution it
makes to our understanding of control, regulation and management in new contexts of
privatization and decentralization.

1. Introduction: Tropical Rain Forests and World Politics

Tropical deforestation became a major international issue in the late 1980s, and over
the past 15 years considerable human and economic resources have been mobilized to
slow the rate of deforestation and protect the world’s remaining tropical rain forests.
The political will to control tropical deforestation has led to an impressive array of
attempts at policy reform at both the highest (“global”) and the lowest (“local”) levels
of government in Latin America, Asia and Africa. In 1991, the International Tropical
Timber Organization (ITTO), established in 1983 by the International Tropical
Timber Agreement (ITTA), agreed to prohibit international trade in tropical wood or
wood products not originating from sustainably managed forests by the year 2000. At
the UN “Earth Summit” held in Rio in 1992, a much-debated objective was to develop
a single, overarching global forest governance arrangement to regulate access to, and
use of, the world’s forests envisioned as “global commons” in need of protection. As

Laura Rival, International Development Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford, 21 St Giles,
Oxford OX1 3LA, UK.
This paper was first presented at the Symposium Ethnographies of Governance, at the Biennal Conference of the
EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) held in Copenhagen in July 2002. I thank the participants
for their sharp criticisms and fruitful comments. Research for this article was funded by the ESRC (Economic
and Social Research Council, Grant R000 23 8375), whose support I gratefully acknowledge here.

ISSN 1360-0818 print/ISSN 1469-9966 online/03/040000-00  2003 International Development Centre, Oxford
DOI: 10.1080/1360081032000146645
480 L. Rival

various authors (cf. Smouts, 2001) have pointed out, these international agreements do
not present a set of commitments to be fulfilled, but, rather, a list of questions to be
considered in order to move towards “sustainable forest management”.
In the build-up towards the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development,
there has been much concern regarding the optimal scale at which resource manage-
ment institutions should operate. There is a general feeling that “global green gover-
nance” has failed because of the weakness of current institutions and policies
(Shepherd, 2002; Speth, 2002; Juma, 2002, p. 2). That these policies have been
formulated, debated, agreed and—partially—implemented by a wide and complex set
of emerging political actors, often operating simultaneously at the international and at
the community level, should be of particular interest. An influential organization such
as WWF,1 for example, is both a key player on the world scene (it played a major role
in defining the terms of several multilateral environmental agreements) and, at the same
time, a central partner providing funds and expertise to numerous national, regional
and local organizations jointly implementing community-based resource management
programmes in remote rain forest localities.
The existing literature on the nature of “global” and “local” forestry policy reforms,
their results and their impacts is now almost as vast as the studies of tropical
deforestation, its causes and its social, economic and cultural impacts. Most of this
literature seems to fall in two quite separate categories. Political scientists, political
sociologists and political geographers have written on international environmental
policies, while geographers, natural scientists, development sociologists and anthropol-
ogists have produced numerous critical analyses of local natural resource management
projects. “Governance” as politics of control, regulation and management seems to be
the central concern of both sets of studies. Because they are the repository of a newly
recognized—albeit ancient—kind of natural wealth or “capital” now commonly referred
to as “biodiversity”, and because they can be conceptualized as places where harmful
gases could be trapped,2 tropical rain forests must be managed. In particular, the
economic use of tropical rain forests must be regulated.
In the case of tropical deforestation, the issue of governance relates to political and
economic reforms associated with the notion of sustainable development. To be
sustainable, the use of tropical rain forests must be based on a new, more rational, form
of management, for which new regulations are required. Economic enterprise, adminis-
trative decentralization (or political devolution) and environmental conservation form a
single issue of governance. This is why various levels are implicated, from international
agreement to community-based natural resource management, via national environ-
ment and forest policies. Sustainable development, with its implicit reference to the
long term, implies regulation, hence the exercise of governance. Sustainable develop-
ment refers to the fact that development must be regulated, and this for three main
reasons. Natural resources, being finite: (1) should be exploited in a way that does not
lead to their total exhaustion; (2) should be shared more equitably among the living
population; and (3) constitute heritage which should be passed to yet-to-be-born
people undiminished.
As I understand it, the global governance of forests proposed in the treaties referred
to above directly contradict the neo-classical economic theory informing most inter-
national development policy. Neo-classical economics states that when firms (as indi-
viduals) act in rational self-interest, that is, to maximize profit, optimum efficiency in
resource use and resource allocation results for society as a whole. Efficiency and
welfare are taken to be the “natural” outcomes of well-functioning markets. Markets
function well when they are able to evolve without interference of non-market institu-
 Forest Governance 481
tions, when information is freely available and when infrastructure (transport, com-
munication, power and land) is in place. International development institutions inter-
vene when they judge that current arrangements lack efficiency and propose measures
to reduce the hindrances of government regulations, cartels, inadequate competition,
deficient information and lack of infrastructure, which prevent progress towards
efficient markets (Fligstein, 2001). Shifts in international economic policy and the
integration of development and environmental issues in the 1980s have changed the
meaning of development. As a result, a new consensus in development thinking and
co-operation has been reached. Economic growth remains central to development, but
growth is increasingly defined in terms of efficiency and quality, rather than simply as
profit. Poverty reduction is the main objective of development and co-operation, and
governments are now assigned the role of ensuring that growth directly contributes to
poverty reduction and social equity. Institutional reforms at various levels and new
environmental regulations must be implemented to ensure that growth does not
contribute to environmental degradation and natural resource depletion. Underpinning
this consensus are redefined roles for the state and the private sector.
In this paper, I propose to examine the particular nexus of commerce and the state,
both to be reformed and made sustainable, which structures the accelerated defores-
tation of Ecuador’s Northwest Pacific Coast. I do this through the ethnographic study
of a wood-processing group which articulates through its business strategy, as well as its
commercial, political, research and social development activities, most of the gover-
nance issues raised by sustainable forest management. My central argument is that
devolution in this context leads to conflictive interpretations of regulation. Governance
in this case relates to the issue of who should regulate forestry activities, and which
particular aspects of timber production, trade and consumption should be regulated.

2. Between Plantations and Natural Forests: The Making of a Green Logging

Company
In Ecuador, the first organization to engage actively with the new international policy
agenda outlined above was a leading wood-processing group concerned with securing
its long-term wood supply. While most Ecuadorian environmental non-govermental
organizations (NGOs)3 had just started forming around general conservation issues,
this private organization was defining a new business strategy in line with the World
Bank Forestry Paper (1991) and the new ITTO recommendations (1990), which it
submitted to the World Bank’s brand new pilot funding mechanism for environmental
conventions, the Global Environment Facility (GEF)4 in 1992, under the name of
Ecoforest 2000.

2.1 Ecoforest 2000

Reading the Ecoforest 2000 project document retrospectively is highly instructive. The
document highlights issues of ownership, property right transfers, contract enforce-
ment, exclusion, welfare, production costs, competition, value creation and regulation,
which are still informing the group’s business practices 10 years on. The fact that
Ecoforest’s main proposal then consisted of a programme of reforestation of degraded
agricultural and pasture land with native tree species is all the more interesting when it
is compared with the type of projects now promoted by the group. As I shall discuss
below, the group, which is today involved in harvest agreements with indigenous
482 L. Rival

communities, promotes community-based forestry management and green certification

for wood products extracted from primary rain forest areas.
Ecoforest 2000 was a US$12.8 million reforestation project, for which the timber
group solicited a US$5 million loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC),
the private arm of the World Bank, to: (1) purchase 3143 h of land that had been
partially used for cattle ranching and agricultural production from farmers and poor
colonists; (2) selectively reforest the degraded forest land with native timber species;
and (3) cover part of the costs of developing 2975 h of previously established planta-
tions. The group was also applying for a US$2 million grant from GEF to initiate a
programme of silviculture, forest ecology research and community forestry extension,
and an additional US$500 000 to contract independent international NGOs to monitor
the social and environmental impact of the plantations until the first harvest projected
for 2010. A private foundation5 created in 1978 to develop the group’s plantations and
undertake silviculture research, and now an integral part of the group, was to execute
the project.
The IFC loan request was justified on the ground that “this tropical forestry activity
will reduce the deforestation of primary tropical rain forests and demonstrate the
commercial viability of sustainable plantation-based tropical forestry using primarily
indigenous species and enhanced plantation biodiversity”.6 The project was found to
comply with the World Bank’s forestry policy paper (1991) since it did not involve
commercial logging in primary tropical rain forest,7 and did not appear to cause further
land colonization or the destruction of primary rain forest by displaced colonists. It was
also found to comply with the World Bank’s operational directive on involuntary
resettlement (1990), for the land to be purchased to establish the group’s new
plantations would be freely sold under open land market conditions, at an average price
of US$509 ha ⫺ 1, by farmers with alternative, urban-focused, economic objectives.
The application for GEF funding was argued on three fronts. First, 610 ha of
mature, non-degraded forest corresponding to 10% of the total surface of the pur-
chased land would be added to the already existing 370 ha of untouched forest to be
kept as ecological reserves, hence contributing to GEF’s biodiversity conservation
objectives. In addition, the replanting of native hardwood species on degraded forest
land would also contribute to biodiversity conservation.8 Second, reforestation of
abandoned agricultural lands would favour high levels of carbon sequestration, hence
contributing to offset the adverse effects of climate change and global warming.9 Third,
the group reiterated its commitment to sustainable economic development, demon-
strated by its use of modern technology in its processing plants, which allows for
rational use and minimal waste of raw material. In addition, the group had purchased
special equipment allowing for the processing of slim plantation logs. Finally, the group
had decided to terminate its current practice of using wood cut from natural forest (an
average of 4000 ha of primary forest harvested per year) and realize self-sufficiency by
sourcing 100% of its wood requirements from its own plantations (“just over 400 ha of
plantation forests per year”) by year 2010. However, to satisfy GEF requirements, and
indeed, the World Bank’s Forest Policy Paper, the project needed to respond to larger
social issues, such as poverty alleviation and rural development concerns. The project
document attempts to address such social concerns, but a close reading reveals
inconsistencies, contradictions and a general lack of elaboration. For instance, the
document specifies that the plantations will generate an additional “1 million man-days
of local employment over twenty years” (p. 6), but later, when discussing the benign
effects of purchasing land from colonists, it goes on to explain that land-selling farmers
will choose to move to more productive enterprises in urban areas, rather than accept
 Forest Governance 483
hard and underpaid work on the plantations (Annex 2, p. 3).10 In several places (e.g.
p. 6), the document mentions that the group will offer assistance to local people
interested in adopting agroforestry practices, or will develop “community forestry
extension” activities (p. 2), or will encourage local farmers living around the plantation
to plant fast-growing timber species such as laurel (Cordia alliodora) in their pasture
lands (Annex 2, p. 6). There is also mention of future economic support to small
farmers contracted under tree farming arrangements, or “alternative utilization ap-
proaches” (Schedule B, p. 1). But these social forestry elements remain ill-defined and
vague; they are thought of as forming part of a general commitment to educate the
public, raise awareness about good forestry practices and publicize results from silvicul-
ture research. In contrast with environmental goals, which are clearly specified, social
goals are not prioritized or laid out in great detail, although there is some indication that
social responsibility will translate into good-will and expert interaction with small-scale
colonists settled around the plantation. However, social and environmental goals are
not linked to form a single project for sustainable development.

2.2 The GEF, Regulating Through Funding

In my continued effort to unravel the interplay between local and translocal forest
conservation political will, I now propose to read Ecoforest 2000 side by side with the
international policy documents to which it stands as a tender offer.
Once the first scientific studies sponsored by the US government, the EC and
UNDP identified tropical deforestation as a major world environmental problem, a
large number of technical experts, international civil servants, consultants, multilateral
organizations and private research centres began to identify the causes of deforestation
and started proposing solutions. Two proposals which came out in 1985, the FAO’s
Tropical Action Plan, and a report from the WRI (World Resource Institute), were
merged in 1987 to form the Tropical Forest Action Plan (TFAP). The responsibility of
implementing the TFAP was given to the FAO. Five priority action programmes were
identified: (1) the integration of forestry into agricultural systems (i.e. agroforestry) for
a more rational use of land; (2) the promotion of appropriate forest-based industries
through technological improvement of timber extraction, wood processing and wood
products trade; (3) the restoration of fuelwood supplies through national wood energy
programmes; (4) the conservation of tropical forest ecosystems through the sustainable
management of natural forests and the development of national protected areas sys-
tems; and (5) the strengthening of public forest administrations and pro-conservation
policy reforms.11
In her reconstruction of attempts at designing an international environmental policy
for the sustainable management of tropical rain forests, Smouts (2001, pp. 53–77)
stated that the plan’s main objective, reflected in the first action programme, was to
reduce deforestation by curtailing shifting cultivation and forest clearing by poor
farmers, then understood to be the primary cause of tropical deforestation. Inter-
national aid to the forest sector in tropical countries followed, with a substantial
increase in funding and investment. In fact, aid doubled between 1985 and 1990, when
it reached US$1.3 billion. Smouts adds that the plan, designed and implemented by
foresters, gave rise to a multitude of forest management plans directed towards more
efficient timber production and industrial development based on rational and long-term
management of forest areas earmarked for a single and specialized use: forestry. This
techno-scientific focus was highly criticized by international environmental NGOs such
484 L. Rival

as the World Rainforest Movement (WRM), leading to a “legitimacy crisis” of TFAP

in 1990 (Humphreys, 1996, pp. 42–45).
There are significant similarities between Ecoforest 2000 and the international
action programmes to curtail tropical deforestation. While identifying with the objec-
tives of the FAO, the wood-processing group sponsoring Ecoforest 2000 dissociates
itself from national government agricultural policies, which it sees as playing a negative
role by encouraging tropical deforestation.12 The group presents itself as a promoter of
forest conservation. It uses appropriate wood-processing industrial technology involv-
ing relatively high levels of wood recovery, which corresponds to TFAP’s second
priority. It has also taken private initiative for the conservation of biological diversity by
investing in native tree species plantations and in forest ecology research, and by
maintaining untouched patches of primary rainforest uneconomic to exploit, which are
now reimagined as “ecological reserves”. This corresponds to TFAP’s fourth objective.
The group therefore presents Ecoforest 2000 as an effort to secure international
financial aid with the aim of achieving self-sufficiency in raw material by establishing
plantations large enough to end its dependency on wood extracted from natural forests.
This is presented as moving from “ecosystem mining” to “renewable natural resource
management” (Southgate & Whitaker, 1994, p. 44). Serious deficiencies in national
public policy and development strategy have pushed the group to turn to international
aid to fulfil this ultimate tropical forest conservation goal. This argument implicitly
builds on TFAP’s fifth action programme, which links deforestation to inadequate
public policy on the environment.
The project document acknowledges the government’s partial effort to promote
reforestation and afforestation through tax relief and low-interest loans during the
1980s, which aided the group to establish 2300 ha of forest.13 In interviews, company
managers have recognized (albeit somewhat more reluctantly than in reports) the
advantages derived from being exempted from paying property taxes on reforested land,
and the benefit of being exempted from paying income taxes on wood products
produced on plantations. But the government subsidies derived through the policy of
import substitution and industrialization which held down the prices of commodities,
in particular the timber bought by wood-processing companies, are never mentioned.
Nor is the fact that government tax on timber extracted from national forests is
ridiculously low and largely evaded (Southgate & Whitaker, 1994, p. 44). The fact that
the wood products industry has benefited enormously from a ban on log exports
designed to keep the prices of its raw material low (Salazar et al., 1998) is also
underplayed. However, in its will to legitimize its own effort to constitute a vast,
private, semi-planted and semi-natural forest estate, the group fundamentally criticizes
the notion of forest proprietorship that underpins the government’s forest and agricul-
tural policy. Its main grievance, in alliance with a number of experts who advised the
FAO, World Bank, WRI and other international bodies actively involved in global
forest governance, is with governmental land reform policies which have promoted
pioneer small-scale farming and ranching in national forests. As the project document
states (Annex 3, p. 2), the process of agrarian reform that took place in Ecuador
between 1963 and 1975 with the creation of the Land Reform Institute (IERAC) and
the promulgation of the Unoccupied Lands and Colonization Act promoted the
distribution of government-held forest land to colonists, which resulted in the loss of
forest concessions to logging companies.14 Field research confirms that Ecuador’s wood
industry feels disadvantaged by government policies that prioritize the allocation of
state land and credits to the development of agriculture and livestock, rather than to the
promotion of forestry. To them, for instance, the conflicting overlap in a region like
 Forest Governance 485
Northwest Ecuador between the government office in charge of forest management15
which has legal jurisdiction over national forest lands, and the Land Reform Institute
in charge of allocating “empty, unproductive lands” (tierras baldías) to migrants willing
to convert the forest into cattle pasture or cultivated plots, is detrimental to both natural
forest conservation and the development of sound forest management.
Some of the company managers are aware that forest proprietorship is at the core
of an enormous literature16 on the importance of security of tenure for conservation,
which converges in arguing that secure property rights have to be vested in those who
use and manage natural resources. The timber group under discussion could not agree
more with this conclusion, even if the type of users they have in mind are far from being
local communities; they consider themselves to be the proper repository of forest
proprietorship.
To summarize the argument so far, in the formative period covering the decade of
the 1980s, efforts were directed at reforming the forestry sector in order to mitigate the
destruction of natural forests. As far as logging companies were concerned, these
reforms were, on the whole, modelled on voluntary self-regulation initiatives such as the
International Tropical Timber Agreement (ITTA), or on “regulation through funding”
with aid programmes targeted to encourage technical and institutional change. To
facilitate a loan to an Ecuadorian private wood-processing group for the purchase of
land that had previously been partially and inefficiently developed for agriculture and
livestock and for the establishment of tree plantations entirely corresponds to such aid
objectives. To grant GEF money to the same group to support its promotion of
sustainable forest management through monitoring and forest extension activities is
similarly in line with the ITTA mission.17 However, and this is a fascinating aspect of
the case study discussed here, the funding of Ecoforest 2000 was suddenly withdrawn
after having been informally approved. All parties interviewed agree that the reason for
this last-minute decision reversal was entirely political. The World Bank did not fund
Ecoforest 2000 because of the vehement protestation staged by environmental NGOs
inflamed at the idea that funding for forest protection would go to the culprits of
deforestation. If the company wanted to reforest, it was argued, it had to do so using
its own capital, accumulated through years of “ecosystem mining”.

2.3 The NGO Protest

Let us start with the version of events offered by the timber group.18 Interviewed
company managers, in particular the director of the private foundation in charge of
silviculture who actually wrote Ecoforest 2000 in close collaboration with experts from
USAID and the World Bank, feel that both their ideas and the Sustainable Forestry
Management (SFM) initiative were “robbed” from them by radical ecologists, in
particular Acción Ecológica, who first heard about Ecoforest 2000 at a public meeting
in 1991. The relationship between the group and the radical environmental NGO has
been extremely confrontational, especially since their joint participation in a debate
organized during the industrial fair Feria Madexpo 89. Ecuadorian environmental
NGOs lobbied the international aid community involved in funding and implementing
Ecuador’s TFAP (PAFE, Plan Forestal para el Ecuador) to reject projects from the
private sector which lacked, they felt, any sustainable development vision. They also
demanded financial support for local development projects presented by traditional
communities struggling to move away from total dependence on logging.19 Their
lobbying effort was successful. Ecoforest 2000 was finally turned down for IFC and
GEF funding, and the World Bank asked an umbrella organization of NGOs to submit
486 L. Rival

to INEFAN (the Ecuadorian government counterpart to the World Bank for the
administration of GEF funding) an alternative proposal for development and conser-
vation in Esmeraldas, which became the 35th project funded by GEF in Ecuador. The
sponsors of Ecoforest 2000 are still embittered about this. To their mind, not only is
“Activity 35” a clone of their own proposal, but sustainable forestry programmes
should be executed by technically competent professionals like themselves, not by
conservation NGOs.
The version of the events from the NGO sector is more difficult to patch together,
as points of view are more varied. On the basis of the interviews I have been able to
conduct so far, Ecuadorian environmentalists tend to present the non-funding of the
timber group’s reforestation project by the World Bank as a domestic victory of the
environmental movement against the private sector, which, in a sense, is congruent with
the timber group’s analysis. Environmental NGOs led by the radical Acción Ecológica
launched a protracted international campaign against this project, seen as environmen-
tally damaging and highly detrimental to the rights of Esmeraldas’ native peoples. The
campaign resulted in the World Bank, initially favourable to Ecoforest 2000, deciding
not to fund the private forestry project, and allocating instead US$350 000.00 to a
consortium of five NGOs20 to plan and develop the sustainable management of
AfroEcuadorian and Chachi community forests. Their objectives were to: (1) obtain
the legalization of communal land; (2) strengthen second-level and province-wide
organizations to represent Esmeraldas’ AfroEcuadorian population; (3) implement
agroforestry programmes; (4) encourage community-based forest management; and (5)
rationalize land use in each community through “zoning” plans (in Spanish, planes de
ordenamiento). In addition to working on a common policy based on these five objec-
tives, the consortium was also actively involved in a regional initiative promoted by the
German co-operation agency GTZ to define a plan for the sustainable development of
the Province of Esmeraldas.
Robalino’s (1997, pp. 363–366) written account of the events gives a slightly
different version, as he stresses the alliance between the environmental movement
and the indigenous peoples’ movement. According to him, the public protest orches-
trated against the World Bank and the logging companies, and the denunciation of
the cultural, social and environmental impacts of Ecoforest 2000, were supported by
the Chachi and AfroEcuadorian communities of the River Santiago and its tribu-
taries, and by Ecuador’s main indigenous organizations. Leaders of the FECCHE
(Federación de los Centros Chachis del Ecuador) sent a protest letter to the director
of the IFC Office for Latin America and the Caribbean in February 1993, denounc-
ing the possible cultural, social and environmental impacts of Ecoforest 2000. They
pointed out that the project would exclusively benefit the private logging group,
increase the risk of colonization of indigenous land and lack sustainability (Robalino,
1997, p. 365). As a result, the World Bank decided to retract funding from the
project, ostensibly because it did not take into consideration its Operational Directive
4.20 on indigenous people.
In any case, through its decision, the World Bank explicitly acknowledged that it
entrusted the NGO sector with biodiversity conservation projects. However, a number
of decision-makers and activists, both Ecuadorians and North Americans, still thought
that it was essential to involve the industrial sector in development efforts for deceler-
ating deforestation in Esmeraldas. But the general sentiment was that logging compa-
nies now committed to sustainability had to use their own economic resources to
reform previous, unsustainable, practices.
 Forest Governance 487
2.4 ‘Activity 35’
Let us now examine in greater detail the content of ‘Activity 35’ to see whether it is
really a clone of Ecoforest 2000. A consultant who carried out a special mission for the
World Bank in 1998 has a more nuanced understanding of the facts. She explains that
the World Bank, in line with its policy to contract NGOs for consultancy work and
other services, was very keen to involve local NGOs in the execution of this GEF
project. It was considered to be a novel experiment in government and civil society
working together for a common objective with the financial participation of a multilat-
eral funding agency (Bigio, 1998, p. 3). The main objective of Activity 35 was to
develop a strategy for the sustainable management of the buffer zone around the RECC
(Reserva Ecológica Cotacachi-Cayapas), including 25 community management plans.
As a matter of fact (cf. Rival, forthcoming), if Activity 35 is a clone of anything, it is Q1
of the SUBIR-CARE large and ambitious programme of integrated conservation and
development conceived for exactly the same region, and officially launched in 1991, i.e.
the year when the World Bank Forestry Paper was published, the year when the
Ecoforest 2000 project document was prepared and a year before the official launch of
the World Bank’s brand new pilot funding mechanism for environmental conventions,
the GEF.
I would therefore contend that what undermined the wood-processing group’s
legitimacy to access GEF funding is not primarily a victory of “civil society” over the
“private sector”, but, more fundamentally, a shift in “global” understanding of what the
most efficient policy frameworks are to combat deforestation. As we saw in the first
section of this paper, in the 1980s and under the leadership of the FAO, it was thought
that the best way of combating unsustainable forest use was to discourage the logging
of natural forests and to invest in timber plantation development. According to many
foresters, it is only in plantations that sustainable forestry management can really take
place (Ferguson, 1996). By the early 1990s, however, and under the influence of
ecological activism, a curious combination of ideas took shape and a new paradigm
emerged, which promoted the creation of conservation enclaves and surrounding buffer
zones. Conservation areas such as parks and reserves were to satisfy the demand of
conservation biologists and deep ecologists. Surrounding buffer zones in which sustain-
able development activities could take place through community-based natural re-
source management were to satisfy the demands of indigenous rights and social
development NGOs. Conservation and participation were thus spatially delineated.
As recent work (cf. Smouts, 2001; Humphreys, 1996) shows, environmental move-
ments successfully pressured international bodies and aid donors to cease sponsoring
government and industry reforestation schemes, as well as forestry action plans. They
argued that many of these programmes of immediate action against deforestation were
the wrong measures, in fact accelerating the very damage they were supposed to end.
Another powerful argument used by environmental and indigenous rights movements
was that if aid money was going to be spent on conservation, it should benefit
communities of users and civil society at large, not the commercial, private interests of
a few. These two arguments combined quickly led to the third argument that local users
were more effective managers of forest resources than national agencies or commercial
operators (cf. Stone & d’Andrea, 2001).
I still do not know exactly how these “global” ideas spread to Ecuador and shaped
the specific GEF activities defined for Esmeraldas, the province which contains the
Choco forest, one of the world’s “hotspots of biodiversity” (Gentry, 1986; Myers,
1988; Myers et al., 2000). All this occurred only 12 years ago, but the collective
488 L. Rival

memory has faded. A new generation of activists and NGO workers is now in charge
of protecting the Choco. The main players of 12 years ago have gone on to other
projects and activities. It is difficult to locate them and interview them, and when
interviewed, their accounts reveal the extent to which memories have blurred. Many
reports have been lost, forgotten or so well archived that they are not accessible for
research or for public consultation. What all these fragments put together tell us is that
intense discussions took place between Ecuadorian company managers, NGO activists,
scientists and consultants (that is, between aid donors and potential aid receivers), as
to what projects should be funded for promoting the sustainable use of the remaining
Choco forest. In this case, as in many similar instances throughout the world, commer-
cial logging was identified as the main cause of deforestation. Consequently, two
projects integrating conservation and development were funded and implemented,
SUBIR (Sustainable Use of Biological Resources), funded by USAID and implemented
by a consortium of NGOs led by CARE-Ecuador, and ‘Activity 35’, funded by GEF
and implemented by a consortium of NGOs subcontracted by INEFAN, Ecuador’s
government agency for protected areas and wildlife. As for the wood-processing group,
it swallowed its short-term defeat and adopted instead the prevailing model, com-
munity-based resource management (CBRM). Still faced with the same productive
imperative of securing its long-term wood supply, with the new ITTO directive that all
tropical timber traded after 2000 should come from sustainable sources, and with the
growing commercial requirement for green certification, the group initiated a new
partnership with local communities.

3. The Recycling of Ecoforest 2000 into Harvest Agreements with Indigenous

Communities
The wood-processing group extracts wood mostly from Esmeraldas and, increasingly,
from the Amazon region. As explained earlier, the group developed an ambitious plan
of plantations and reforestation in the early 1990s; but the failure to secure GEF
funding for its reforestation project (Ecoforest 2000) led to the development of an
alternative model of extraction, by which the logging of natural forests owned by
indigenous communities was added to the purchase of wood from intermediaries and
to the direct logging of company land, land owned by independent farmers, and
holdings controlled by legal or illegal colonists.21
Although the group would prefer, if given the choice, to acquire more private land
and operate in forest concessions owned by the state, it finds the signing of long-term
agreements with indigenous communities to be a satisfactory solution. As mentioned
earlier, company managers explain the group’s heavy dependence on communally
owned natural forests in terms of conditions specific to Ecuador, for instance, the fact
that the state has promoted an agrarian reform that has resulted in the allocation of
forested lands to rural communities under a communal land tenure regime.
The group is partly driven, like the NGO sector, by the will to act effectively to
decelerate the rate of deforestation in Esmeraldas while reducing the level of poverty,
identified as one of the main factors of environmental degradation in a region where
cash is, on the whole, generated through selling wood from the forest. As I show later,
like the NGO sector, it has adopted the Quintana Roo22 participatory community forest
management model to achieve sustainable development of forestry operations.
According to this new private sector/community partnership, communities commit
themselves to granting the group exclusive access to their communally held harvestable
 Forest Governance 489
timber.23 In exchange, the wood-processing group pays for the elaboration of a forest
management plan, developed by the group’s private non-profit organization, which
prepared Ecoforest 2000. The logging company executes the various components of a
“zoning” process in collaboration with the community. The forest is inventoried and
the community territory is divided into communal and family-owned areas, as well as
into areas for agriculture, timber harvesting and reforestation. Protective forest reserves
are also created. In addition, the logging company promotes agricultural development
and supports a number of community development projects aimed at providing basic
education and health services.
Three timber harvest agreements were signed in 1993 between the timber group
and three Chachi communities. One year after these agreements were signed, Funda-
ción Natura, Ecuador’s largest environmental NGO, accepted joining the project’s
executive committee. Its mandate was to monitor the execution of the agreements and
to strengthen the Chachi communities’ ability to negotiate and monitor timber extrac-
tion, reforestation activities and participatory forestry activities.
These legally binding agreements contain seven parts. The first part specifies the
legal status of the community, defines what is meant by sustainable forest management
and stipulates the reasons why the two parties have come to a timber harvest agree-
ment. The second part comprises the management plan. The third part indicates the
conditions for timber harvesting, and the fourth part touches on the various prices and
payments. The fifth part indicates what reforestation activities must take place under
the harvest agreement and the sixth part discusses what social development activities
will be supported by the company. Finally, the seventh part clarifies various legal issues.
The particular harvest contract outlined in Table 1 (column A) contains four parts:
(1) what the company commits itself to; (2) what the community commits itself to; (3)
what both parties commit themselves to jointly; and (4) the legal aspects of the
contract. In the first part, it is stated that the company will purchase timber, pay for
forest management and give 5% of the sale revenues to the Chachi federation (FEC-
CHE). Moreover, it will fund community projects, offer job opportunities, develop the
community infrastructure (particularly roads), support forest management activities,
help with land legalization and develop agricultural activities. It also stipulates that the
community will grant exclusive access to its softwood to the timber group, let the
logging company build the necessary roads, ensure that no cattle graze in the com-
munity productive forest, establish clear demarcations between family land and the
community productive forest, and manage community funds fairly and rationally. The
company and the community will jointly decide which species to use in reforestation,
co-participate in the sustainable management of the community forest and look for
external funding to realise community projects. Finally, it is stipulated that a Chachi
co-ordinator will be elected to ensure that the contract is duly respected, that a
committee of vigilance will be constituted and that the contract will last 20 years in the
first instance.
These formal and legal harvest agreements are the exception, however, not the
norm. In addition to the contract described above, the timber group practises a whole
range of other timber extraction agreements (see Table 1, column B). These agree-
ments, however, need to be seen as forming a continuum. In both types of agreement,
there is the continued use of intermediaries and the provision of some community
services. In this sense, current harvest agreements are not unlike less formalized
versions of similar types of asymmetrical reciprocal exchange. In fact, the majority of
the sale transactions taking place between the wood-processing group and rural produc-
ers are contractually informal and very similar to the arrangements practised in column
490 L. Rival

Table 1. Range of community agreements between the timber group and local producers

Chachi community Colonist settlement

Status: experimental model (A) Status: current practice (B)

Secure the legalization of the community’s Land already owned, or pre-co-operative

land
Execute a forest management plan, and
harvest in productive forest only
Carry out reforestation activities in most
degraded forest (which was intensively
harvested for eight consecutive years by a
large intermediary selling to the group)
Demarcate family agricultural lands, upgrade
agricultural lands and cocoa and coffee
plantations and employ an agricultural
extensionist to help families develop cash
cropping through short, interest-free loan
schemes
Help the community map its reserve and
define protective measures
Create community funds for reforestation,
harvest fund and community fund for
contingencies
Build a health centre
Education: upgrade school building, pay for
teachers’ training and nine studentships for
college education in Esmeraldas; help the
community to get a college for training in
agroforestry
Development projects with women:
handicrafts and soya gardens
status
No forest management plan, no control of
where the wood comes from
Tree planting—obligatory under the Forest
Law as of 1997—subcontracted to a local
forester
Pay agricultural extensionist (shared with
several other communities) to encourage
small farmers to develop agroforestry
instead of cattle ranching
No reserve, but encourage farmers to keep
part of their plots forested
No communal funds
No health provision, but foresters transport
the sick if they are in the area with a car or a
canoe
Pay the wages of two primary school
teachers
None

B. Although not as elaborate, formalized or long term, these informal contracts always
consist of the timber sellers agreeing to sell their wood exclusively to the timber
company at an agreed price, in exchange for some kind of “communal” service.24
Finally, the formal harvest agreements need to be analysed dynamically, as they
have evolved substantially over the last 10 years due to internal and external pressures,
such as the growing bargaining skills in the communities, changes in community
leadership, political pressure exercised by environmental NGOs, evolving environmen-
tal discourse, evolving models of community-based forestry, evolving business condi-
tions and institutional changes to name but a few. As communities gain confidence and
bargaining power, the terms of these contracts are continuously challenged, reinter-
preted and renegotiated. The legally binding aspect of these formal contracts is
particularly fascinating, as both parties are continuously testing the boundaries of trust
and risk, and as the company is perfectly aware (perhaps more than the communities
themselves) of the weak legal protection that these contracts offer. As they cannot be
legally enforced in practice, both parties must rely on mutual trust and good will (cf.
Rival, forthcoming).
To summarize, SFM is seen as the responsibility of the logging company. The
group is increasingly working with indigenous communities for the promotion of their
land tenure system because the law discourages timber companies from purchasing
 Forest Governance 491
timber from intermediaries. However, the company continues to develop management
plans (far less complete than the pilot programmes and experimental models used for
Chachi communities) for very different types of forests owned by AfroEcuadorians and
small farmers (50 ha plots). It also continues to purchase large quantities of wood from
intermediaries.
South American plywood companies produce mainly for export, and have, there-
fore, a particular interest in abiding by the new international legislation on tropical
timber. Given the volume of wood it extracts and processes, the wood-processing group
is particularly targeted by the country’s new conservation and sustainable logging
legislation. It had to adjust its production targets and extractive activities to the
conditions created by, on the one hand, wood scarcity and land conflicts in Esmeraldas
and, on the other, he new international and institutional environment. Having to cope
with the increased difficulty in accessing cheap and good quality timber, with the
INEFAN legislation, with the ongoing constraints of international competition and
profit-making and finally, with the need to green its image through more sustainable
logging practices, the group has adopted what seems to be the most effective solution:
sign timber harvest agreements with local indigenous communities.

4. Sustainable Forest Management in Esmeraldas

The Provincial Government of Esmeraldas, INEFAN and PPF25 signed a co-operation
agreement with several NGOs, government institutions, international aid programmes
and professional organizations representing the timber industry in October 1996,
leading to the development of a regional strategy and emergency plan for the sustain-
able development of Esmeraldas. The goal of this agreement was to promote regional
sustainability through sustainable forestry management and the efficient administration
of the Cotacachi-Cayapas, Awa and Cayapas-Mataje protected areas. The overall
objective was to combine a programme for the management of ecosystems and natural
resources with a programme for the social development and strengthening of local
organizations. The emergency action plan aimed to rationalize land use in the province
(in Spanish, ordenamiento territorial forestal), develop conservation programmes and
sustainable development in protected areas, regulate land tenure and strengthen com-
munity institutions. The Co-ordination Unit has also asked the provincial government
to institute a legislative agenda to allow for the provision of funds for forest manage-
ment and reforestation plans and to support groups belonging to the community
forestry network with infrastructure works such as roads, community centres and
schools.
International donors involved in Esmeraldas have broadly agreed that local com-
munities, particularly indigenous communities, must participate in sustainable forestry,
and that such policies will reduce poverty while achieving conservation goals. There is,
therefore, consensus at the level of policy design, and even, to a certain extent, at the
level of policy implementation. There is a convergence of awareness that timber is the
region’s main economic resource and that forests are presently cut at a rate that is too
fast, and in a way that does not allow for optimum and continued exploitation. It is also
broadly agreed that previous development policies and former practices have had a
negative effect on the environment, and that poverty is increasing. However, conflicts
of interests and views do arise, particularly when it comes to deciding what concrete
measures are needed to raise the standard of living of local families in the short term.
There is no conflict in Esmeraldas about the necessity for participatory community
forest management. What we have, rather, is a contest about who is the
492 L. Rival

best implementing agent of the SFM policy; who is the best partner in sustainable
development for the Chachi and AfroEcuadorian communities. Moreover, different
international donors have given priority to different parts of the vast programme of
development in Esmeraldas. GTZ, for example, has concentrated most of its effort on
legal reforms and capacity-building at the national and regional government level.
USAID has co-ordinated its funding with the World Bank through GEF fund alloca-
tions to the NGO sector for conservation and poverty alleviation actions at the
grassroots level. DFID (ODA), by contrast, has supported the private sector’s effort to
promote sustainable logging and the adoption of ITTO directives.
The irony of the situation in Esmeraldas in the 1990s is that despite such co-ordi-
nated efforts, two adversary camps emerged, with the NGO sector receiving a much
greater share of international aid than the private sector. Both camps agreed that the
present situation was unsustainable and that policies and practices had to be introduced
rapidly to promote a more rational and sustainable use of forest resources, the
strengthening of local organization and bargaining skills, and better socio-economic
conditions. The national timber private sector defended its demand for more inter-
national aid by saying that it had more professional expertise than the NGO sector and
was more interested in developing sustainable forestry. Furthermore, this sector
claimed that it was using its own capital, not charity money (which is always limited to
the duration of a particular project anyway), and that it had experience in forest
management. It therefore claimed greater legitimacy. Particular emphasis was put on
professionalism, organizational and administrative skills, and experience in applied
silviculture research. Because logging and processing wood is its business, the group
argued, it could sustain SFM projects for much longer than the NGO sector.
On its part, the NGO sector claimed that it alone could truly implement participa-
tory community forestry, because its actions were not tainted with paternalism, and it
had no vested interest in “buying off” community support. Given its ultimate goal of
helping communities to be entirely self-sufficient and capable of managing their forestry
projects through communal efforts, it had a greater interest in skill transfer. Because it
was not directly subjected to market forces, it could really defend the interests of the
communities; and because its primary goal was not to secure a regular supply of timber
at all cost, its interest in conservation was genuine. Finally, it alone could comply with
the ultimate objective of boosting community organizational and bargaining capacity,
and ensure that local people would ultimately manage their own resources. This could
not be in the private sector’s interest because of its profit motivation. I explain
elsewhere (Rival, forthcoming) how this acrimonious competition between two devel-
opment agents, the environmental NGOs and a large wood-processing company, has
evolved in the last 3 or 4 years, and how their respective arguments have changed. The
NGOs are no longer fiercely opposed to the timber industry’s involvement in forestry
projects with communities. I also analyse local communities’ understanding of this
evolving policy debate.
For a number of development actors, community-based and participatory forest
management projects in Esmeraldas are to be understood as experiences in public/pri-
vate partnerships. They are increasingly seen as applications of the Washington Con-
sensus-led policy of reducing state spending for health services, education and social
security. In Ecuador, as in other Latin American countries, the World Bank, in
collaboration with other multilateral and bilateral donors, has funded social investment
funds (SIFs) as compensatory programmes to mitigate the impact of aggressive market
policies and structural adjustment on the poor. Monique Segarra (1997) has shown
that international aid policies promoting the growth of the Ecuadorian NGO sector as
 Forest Governance 493
a technical strategy for relieving the overburdened state in fiscal crisis and for privatiz-
ing state-run social programmes have led to the emergence of a new type of NGO.
These NGOs have gained a prominent role in social policy design and national
development programmes. She details how, in the late 1980s, a new development
model based on public–private collaboration united key actors in the Ecuadorian NGO
community and within the state around the identification, design and negotiation
process of a major Ecuadorian poverty alleviation programme, the Emergency Social
Investment Fund (FISE). This initiative, reinforced by the strategic planning and
training provided by the World Bank, stimulated the development of a new type of
NGO professional identity, has encouraged key NGOs to access state resources and has
influenced state poverty programmes.
In the 1990s, these NGOs have actively worked to organize and generate a
consensus among the wider NGO community and the public over issues of state reform
and alternative models of development. Furthermore, they have, along with inter-
national organizations and the state, elaborated new discourses about markets and
governance, and moved beyond the dichotomy of private versus public power. These
NGOs conceive social service and welfare provision as a means to reform the state and
open new institutional spaces where the interests of Ecuador’s popular sectors can be
formulated and considered. It is in this sense that participatory forestry in Esmeraldas
opens a new era of private–public collaboration, one in which “private” stands not so
much for “non-governmental”, but for “profit-making”. International aid donors are
now collaborating with Ecuadorian timber companies, local communities and environ-
mental organizations in order to foster a form of economic development that promotes
natural resource conservation and poverty alleviation, the two goals of sustainable
development.
“Global forest governance” has stimulated debates and initiatives for the long-term
protection of Esmeraldas’ forests. Conflicts, alliances and opportunities have emerged
from new partnerships between international aid donors, international conservation
NGOs, logging companies, Ecuadorian environmental and human rights organizations,
local communities, and local, regional and national government agencies. Some initia-
tives have been short-lived, others have been sustained over 15 years. There is no space
here to analyse thoroughly and compare systematically: (1) the plan for the sustainable
development of Esmeraldas, promoted by GTZ with a clear focus on government
decentralization and popular participation in the spirit of Agenda 21; (2) the large
programme for integrated conservation and development sponsored by USAID (Subir-
Care) and closely following policy recommendations of WWF, the Nature Conserv-
ancy, and Conservation International; and (3) the more diffuse and diverse attempts at
co-ordinating local wood producers to strengthen their position in the local timber
market. All these initiatives include institutional reforms, propose new regulatory
regimes and attempt to redefine the value of Esmeraldas forests and forest products.
Forest governance in Esmeraldas has been a very dynamic field, evolving rapidly
over the last decade. It is essential to understand why some institutionalization pro-
cesses and attempts at regulation have been successful while others have failed and are
even forgotten today. These issues in turn need to be linked to the fast-changing
institutional and legislative context that characterize the emergence of national forest
policies in Ecuador. A new forest law has been written, and abandoned; a second one,
written in its place, is yet to be debated and voted on in parliament. INEFAN has been
dissolved and replaced by the Ministry of the Environment. Following public unrest
and popular violence, the application of new forestry regulations (la directiva) has been
postponed several times. The Ministry of the Environment is not yet 10 years old,
494 L. Rival

but it has already had seven ministers and has been threatened with dissolution at least
once. The task of regulating the mining and oil sectors has been reassigned to the
Ministry of Energy and Mining, and the logging industry is actively lobbying the
government to revert all responsibility for the forestry sector to the Ministry of
Agriculture. New laws for the protection of biodiversity have been passed. In short,
Ecuador, like many South American countries rich in untapped natural resources, has
seen the turbulent introduction of major institutional changes in the 1990s to address
the issues of natural resource conservation, reforestation, poverty alleviation and
sustainability. Major debates are taking place on green certification, on the question of
who should bear the cost of reforestation and road building, and who should bear the
cost of social development.

5. Visions of Sustainability and Governance

Social anthropologists have recently started to address the issues of power and govern-
ment that a new generation of powerful political agents have chosen to call
“governance”. Working from the ethnographies of forms of governance, anthropolo-
gists are engaged in deconstructing an abstraction which is acquiring a life of its own
(cf. Miller, 2003). The World Bank document on governance and development defines
governance as the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a
country’s economic and social resources for development (World Bank, 1992, p. 3).
This definition is normative: governance is a short-hand for good management as
opposed to bad management. Good management here implies the partnership of state,
private sector and civil society. Governance is about ways of administering and
managing economic activities. It implies that social activities, such as the delivery of
public services (infrastructure, transport, health and education), are conceptualized as
economic activities. It also often implies institutional change, that is, a transformation
of the way in which the social activities are carried out to maximize their efficiency.
Another implicit understanding is that the way in which the private sector is organized,
managed and geared to produce certain “outputs” is the best model; it should be
applied to all social activities. Public goods should be administered and delivered in
exactly the same way as private, marketed goods. Efficiency and welfare are thus seen
as a “natural” outcome of well-functioning markets.
Markets function well when they are able to evolve without the interference of
non-market institutions, when information is freely available and infrastructure (trans-
port, communication, power and land) is in place. According to this form of reasoning,
the next logical step is to dissolve non-market institutions and absorb them entirely
within efficient markets. A direct outcome of this is to propose that government
regulation should be replaced with auto-regulation. In other words, it should become
impossible to differentiate economic management from political government. All social
units should be structured and should operate as businesses. This new fusion of
economics and politics is predicated on the ground of efficient administration. The
most rational (efficient) way of organizing any contemporary social unit is the firm,
which sustains itself through generating sufficient income through selling what it
produces.
By analysing the business strategy of a large wood-processing group over the last 20
years, I have attempted to show that good governance for the group relates to the
eco-efficiency of its industrial operations, and to find a solution to its major productive
constraint, which is to secure regular and cheap supplies of wood in a region where the
most accessible timber has already been cut, and where the agricultural frontier has
 Forest Governance 495
been stabilized. The business strategy of this group suggests that the firm, an institution
designed for maximizing short-term efficiency, takes nature as a limitless given. For the
timber group, good management is a tool for profit maximization. It has, for example,
invested capital in technological improvements which have resulted in considerably less
wood being wasted during processing. Such technological improvements, however, do
not solve the major source of waste, which originates with indigenous wood-cutters in
the forest; but the wood-cutters’ actions are an intrinsic part of the process by which
wood is supplied cheaply to the group. Its main focus is supplying itself with cheap
wood. Its business strategy is shaped by a continuous search for economic incentives
and the evasion of externally imposed regulations. Sustainability is interpreted as
efficiency: “rational economic management”, “achievement-oriented competition”,
“economic specialization to achieve optimal participation in the global market place”
(cf. Emmerij, 1997).
The question of governance here involves the use of nature. So governance is not
simply an issue of redistribution or provision of services and goods, but also an issue of
managing the natural environment to protect the forest and the biodiversity it contains.
Forestry becomes an issue of governance because the argument quickly turns from
holding logging companies responsible for unsustainable harvests and the waste of
resources, to holding governments and policies responsible for actions that promote
deforestation through agricultural development in the tropical regions of the world.
Good governance is about designing the right development policies and making the
most efficient use of natural resources. Whereas national governments are asked to stop
subsidizing the agricultural colonization of tropical rain forests and requested to design
better policies and regulations that no longer promote the destruction of raw resources
or biodiversity, logging companies are given incentives to auto-regulate themselves. It
is in their own private interest to make efficient use of scarce raw resources. With so
much stress put on the devolution of land property rights from national governments
to local communities,26 the issue of proactive regulation, the use of licences and the
criminalization of offences get side-tracked to the point of being forgotten. Efficiency
based on secure property rights takes precedence over public regulation (Howarth,
1998).
I have also attempted to demonstrate that the notion that everything must be
produced, exchanged and consumed under market conditions creates the conditions for
the supremacy of the firm model of organization. For this, I have described how an
Ecuadorian wood-processing group has self-regulated its activities in response to the
new political conjuncture created by “global forest governance”. I have explained how
it has allied with an NGO to carry out a community-based sustainable forestry, which
by definition includes social development components. While the timber company has
incorporated NGO rural development functions within its objectives, the conservation
NGOs have scaled up their integrated conservation and development programmes to
include the creation of a network and trade co-operative, which they hope will develop
into a full-blown timber company run by qualified local producers. I note in both cases
the similar use of financial channels and of management models to develop identical
socio-economic activities, all leading to a similar blurring of what is “public” and what
is “private”. The state is no longer perceived as necessary in provisioning the local
communities with health care, education, water sanitation, electricity or transportation.
The community, it is believed, will generate sufficient revenues to self-provision itself
through forestry.
Although so much of the literature on social forestry and sustainable forest manage-
ment emphasizes the progressive nature of the shift from government ownership to
496 L. Rival

community ownership of forest land (Stone & d’Andrea, 2001), the shift from govern-
ment to community ownership is not necessarily progressive in and of itself. If new
resource management institutions at various scales have yet to be successfully built, a
major shift in forest tenure systems has nevertheless been achieved. In many countries,
large tracks of forest previously owned and controlled by national governments are now
owned, or in the process of being owned, by local communities. A recent survey by
Forest Trends (White & Martin, 2002) illustrates the growing importance of com-
munity forest ownership. The case under study confirms this world-wide trend, which,
according to the authors of this report, started in Latin America, where national
governments began to recognize the traditional claims of indigenous communities to
their ancestral lands during the 1970s. The authors correctly differentiate Latin Amer-
ican land tenure regimes, in which the communities really own their community land,
from the South Asian ones, which grant to local communities no more than a right of
use and access under joint forest management programmes. However, to look at the
shift from state forest ownership to state-recognized local community ownership in the
abstract can be extremely misleading.
What is significant in Esmeraldas is not so much the fact that forest land has been
devolved from national government to the local communities, but the context in which
such devolution has taken place. Forty years ago, most of the province’s land was virgin
forest nominally owned by the national government, which used it as an agricultural
frontier to release the pressure on the fertile lands of the Andean region and the
rice-producing coastal region, and to expand cattle ranching and tropical agriculture.
Any individual could claim a piece of Esmeraldas forest by deforesting it and legalizing
the land title for a modest survey and registration fee. The acquisition of land in
practice was, however, less random or individualized. The best land in terms of location
and soil was acquired by organized groups closely related to the government, in
particular the military, which were governing the country at the time, and civil servants
working for the agrarian reform institute, the various national agriculture research
institutes and the ministry of agriculture. Poor colonists were organized as well; they
formed agricultural co-operatives to facilitate the legalization of their landholdings.
Finally, land speculators played an important role in organizing the transfer of land
from the state to private owners. As a result, many plots registered with the agrarian
reform institute were effectively occupied and exploited by individuals who were not
their formal owners. Overlapping ownership claims and use rights was common.
Although the large timber companies may have preferred to obtain concessions from
the state to exploit public forests, concessions were not a good option for them in a
region ear-marked for agricultural development. Timber companies could not enforce
their exclusive use rights to government-owned forests. Moreover, invading colonists
needed the timber companies to build roads and buy the trees they had to fell as part
of claiming ownership to their plots of land. This resulted in a symbiotic relationship
between logging companies and colonists, and an accelerated rate of deforestation.
Today, private property is consolidated in most parts of the province, in particular
in the south, where agricultural development has been more advanced. Shrinking
public forests have been progressively devolved to the indigenous and AfroEcuadorian
communities under the Ley de comunas, a communal property rights regime. This
process of land devolution has been directly facilitated by large timber companies and
by conservation NGOs who have undertaken the lengthy and expensive procedure of
legalizing communal land titles to the remaining primary forests of the region. Only
protected areas and nature reserves are now publicly owned and under direct govern-
ment control. Although timber companies are buying degraded forest land
 Forest Governance 497
from poor colonists to develop SFM projects, most recent land purchases have been by
palmicultorists, who have acquired 30 000 ha of primary forest and degraded forest
land at the border with Colombia to plant African palm. Again, there is a clear
symbiosis between these land developers, who also built important new roads, and
logging companies.
The Ecuadorian case illustrates that developing plantations on privately owned land
is costly both in terms of growing the trees and of protecting them from illegal logging.
In the short and middle term, access rights to virgin forests, such as those granted under
harvest agreements with indigenous communities, is an attractive option for logging
companies in need of regular and cheap supplies of wood. The private ownership of
forest land is not an absolute necessity for them.27 Although public ownership of forests
is often presented as a colonial relic to which private logging companies had to adapt
(Colchester & Lohmann, 1993), I see a clear business continuity between operating in
government forest concessions and through company/community joint ventures. In
both cases, logging companies with no economic interest in forest ownership secure
exclusive rights of access to relatively cheap timber. Although I do not have the space
to develop this argument fully, I would contend that devolution through community
land ownership in Esmeraldas has not really increased local benefits and income, for the
same reasons that many land reform packages did not solve the problem of rural
poverty and underdevelopment. Land ownership does not automatically translate into
effective sustainable forest management.
The relative value of secure communal tenure rights must be reflected upon.
Officially recognized ownership and use rights have in fact increased the rural com-
munities’ responsibilities and burden of social development. They pay indirectly for the
development of the region, which they subsidize through the low price of the wood
products they sell. They have to cover a greater share of the costs of SFM (management
plans, inspections, and so forth) than the large producers. Moreover, all these devol-
ution reforms occur at a time in which government-provided health and education
services, which were already so minimal and inadequate in the region, are being further
curtailed and privatized. Rather than receiving subsidies as owners of primary forest
with unique biodiversity, these communities are indirectly subsidizing the region’s
development through the exploitation of their labour force and the low cost of their
products.

Notes
1. World Wildlife Fund, recently renamed Worldwide Fund for Nature
2. Several authors have noted that the political importance accorded to tropical forests in
international environmental treaties is directly related to the Framework Convention on
Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which conceptualize the new potential world trade
in carbon emissions around the potential role of forests as carbon sinks. This policy
proposition is highly contested on two grounds. First, growing forests in plantations and
reforested areas would capture more carbon than mature primary forests, therefore such a
policy cannot act as an incentive against primary forest degradation or the removal of its most
valuable trees. Second, it puts the burden of carbon relief on developing countries with
remaining forest cover, not on developed countries, which are the main polluters, hence
relieving the latter from the responsibility of actually reducing their carbon emissions. The
term “carbon sink” is fascinating from an anthropological point of view, as it reveals the
imaginary world of policy-making. Sinks, like forests, regulate flows of water; but, according
to my Oxford Dictionary of Current English, sink also means “cesspool”, that is, a filthy tank
in which sewage is drained, as well as “a place where evil people and evil practices collect”.
In the policy-makers’ collective, unconscious imagination, forests become the place where,
498 L. Rival

and the agent by which, the waste and filth of industry are recycled into productive and
diverse biological life.
3. Fundación Natura (FN) was created in 1979 under the influence of WWF-USA, from which
it received initial funds and support to implement debt-swaps for nature. Throughout the
1980s, FN acted mainly as a public awareness raising organization, focusing on environmen-
tal education activities in urban areas. It also worked on the design of a national system of
protected areas, parks and natural reserves, in close collaboration with the government. FN
organized the first Ecuadorian Congress for the Environment in 1987 (Varea et al., 1997, p.
145–163). Work with communities started much later, in the 1990s. Acción Ecologica (AE)
was created in the early 1980s, as part of the Ecuadorian Ecological Movement. AE has been
primarily concerned with oil development in the Amazon region. It is a radical, direct-action
organization, which models itself after Green Peace, has close links with RAN (Rainforest
Action Network) and hosts Oil Watch.
4. See web site http:/www.gefweb.org., which stipulates that the GEF “was established to forge
international cooperation and finance actions to address four critical threats to the global
environment: biodiversity loss, climate change, degradation of international waters, and
ozone depletion … Launched in 1991 as an experimental facility, GEF was restructured after
the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to serve the environmental interests of people in all parts
of the world. The facility that emerged after restructuring was more strategic, effective,
transparent, and participatory”. See Chatterjee & Finger (1994, pp. 151–57) for a political
analysis of the GEF.
5. Described in the document as a “private non-profit organization created by and affiliated
with the group”. The foundation was established to manage and develop the group’s
plantations, and promote forestry development in Ecuador through silviculture research and
the sustainable management of both natural forests and plantations. Experiments in the
management of naturally regenerating secondary forest started in 1981. Since 1990,
13 000 ha in both the highlands and the lowlands of Ecuador have been reforested, and a
programme of applied research in the domestication of 60 native species has been developed.
6. Ecoforest 2000 (1992, Annex 3, p. 1), my translation.
7. “It is against World Bank policy to finance commercial logging in primary tropical moist
forest, and therefore the project is restricted to supporting plantation establishment” (Eco-
forest 2000, 1992, p. 5).
8. We can read in p. 8 of Annex 3: “The managed multi-species plantations could ultimately
provide an important corridor connecting the remnant ecological reserves”.
9. The document gives the following precision (my translation): “Although the true value of
carbon sequestration will need to be assessed within a global perspective, the project will
clearly provide a model for structuring future forestry related activities aimed at helping to
resolve the global warming problem.”
10. “People who sell their land can find employment in the local region, for labor is in short
supply. Local people are said to feel that work on the tree plantations … is too arduous and
underpaid compared with other wage labor jobs. As a result, the … group gets most of its
unskilled labor through contractors who recruit from coastal areas. These men live and work
on the plantations for several weeks before returning to their communities of origin. Few
laborers from the coast are said to settle or colonize land in the region. The region has a labor
scarcity and ample opportunities exist for wage labor employment. There was no evidence
that land purchases have resulted in former landowners becoming part of the region’s
unskilled labor force.” This explanation fails to convey the nature of the labour market in the
area, where wages and prices for cash crops are so depressed that small-scale farmers cannot
operate efficiently, and rural labourers cannot sustain their families. See Redclift (1978) for
rice producers in the Guayas region.
11. The 1985 FAO report emphasizes the importance of forestry, including forest ecology
research and education, and forest-based industrial development. Humphreys (1996, p. 34)
argued that the 1987 TFAP offers a compromise between the FAO’s and the WRI’s reports.
12. Southgate and Whitaker, who have undertaken numerous missions in Ecuador for USAID
and the World Bank, similarly argue that “Ecuador’s deforestation is a classic example of
renewable resource depletion brought about by bad public policy” (Southgate & Whitaker,
1994).
13. Nine hundred hectares of pacheco and laurel in the lowlands, and 1400 ha of pine and
eucalyptus in the highlands. The National Fund for Reforestation (FONAFOR), created in
1984, subsidized reforestation with income derived froma government set-aside programme
 Forest Governance 499
tied to oil export revenues. The fund, managed by the Forestry Subsecretariat (SUFOREN),
was suspended in February 1989 because of a lack of funds and administrative problems.
14. For analyses of the Ecuadorian Agrarian Reform, see, among others, Redclift (1978), Collin
Delavaud (1980), Preston (1980), de Janvry (1981) and Uquillas (1984). For analyses of the
effect of land reform and colonization on deforestation see Rudel (1993), Southgate &
Whitaker (1994), Sierra (1994) and Wunder (2000).
15. Until the recent creation of the Ministry of the Environment (1996), the Sub-Secretariat for
Forestry and Renewable Resources (SUFOREN), formerly the National Forestry Office
(DINAF), was part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG). Internal conflict
arose in 1981 with the creation of INEFAN (Instituto Ecuatoriano Forestal de Areas
Naturales y Vida Silvestre) and the promulgation of the Forestry and Conservation of
Natural Areas and Wildlife Act, because of conflicting objectives between productive use
(forestry) and conservation of national forests. Now that the former INEFAN forms the core
of the Ministry of the Environment, which is in charge of formulating and implementing the
new forest law, the conflict has increased. The forestry sector, represented by its corporate
organization COMAFORS (Corporación de Manejo Forestal Sustentable), is currently
lobbying the government for the National Forestry Office to be moved back to the Ministry
of Agriculture. The Environment Ministry would be left with the sole responsibility of the
national protected areas system. COMAFORS favours the total devolution of state-con-
trolled forests on the ground that the state does not have the means to exercise effective
control over publicly-owned forest resources (see also Southgate & Whitaker, 1994, p. 43).
16. See, e.g. Gibson et al. (2000) and also Asher (1995), Arnold (1998), Berkes (1989), Bromley
(1992), Bruce (1998), Caldecott & Ernst (1996), McCay & Acheson (1987) and Vira
(1997).
17. See the web site quoted earlier.
18. Based on interviews in 1997 and in 2001.
19. Ecuador’s TFAP is known as Plan Forestal para el Ecuador, or PAFE. On PAFE, see Varea
et al. (1997, p. 121).
20. Consortio BIDA (Biodiversidad, Investigación, Desarrollo, Ambiente, in English: Biodiver-
sity, Research Development and Environment), constitued of: CIDESA, FUNDEAL (Fun-
dación para el Desarrollo Alternativo), Fundación Natura (the only ENGO officially
affiliated to WWF in Ecuador), Pájaro Carpintero and CCD (Corporación de Conservación
y Desarrollo). This consortium executes the 35th activity of the GEF-INEFAN programme
for the protection of biodiversity.
21. The total volume of direct and indirect monthly extraction amounts to approximately
100 000 m3.
22. Good projects become generic models. This is very true of Esmeraldas, where forestry
projects are based on the experience of the Mayan communities of Quintana Roo in the
Yucatan Peninsula of Southeast Mexico. Representatives of indigenous communities, AfroE-
cuadorian communities, INEFAN and environmental NGOs have all travelled to Mexico to
meet Quintana Roo community leaders and foresters, and Quintana Roo foresters have
visited Esmeraldas’ community forestry projects on several occasions. These mutual visits,
initially arranged by GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit), were
subsequently organized by a variety of social actors, including some by logging companies
interested in signing harvest agreements with local communities. The shortcomings and
dangers of using the Quintana Roo model of community forestry in Esmeraldas, given the
great ecological, climatic, institutional, economic, social and cultural differences between the
two regions, are obvious. The use of the Quintana Roo model in Ecuador well illustrates
Peter Brosius’s (2000) argument that the promotion of community-based resource manage-
ment programmes, policies and projects makes use of “icons”.
23. Essentially soft wood species such as sande (Brosium utile), coco (Virola sp), jigua (Nectandra
app), cuángare (Otoba sp), laguno (Vochysia cacrophylla) and calade (Nectandra sp).
24. For instance, paying the teacher’s wages, building a new section of road, paying toward the
construction or repair of a public building (a school, a health centre, or a community hall),
or paying for the professional training of a community member, which is always presented as
a collective, not a private, good.
25. Proyecto Política Forestal, a project supported by the German development co-operation
agency GTZ
26. Interestingly enough, community-based property rights are defined as “private community
ownership” by White & Martin (2002, p. 13), to differentiate them from joint management
500 L. Rival

programmes in which local communities gain access and use rights, but in which govern-
ments retain land ownership. In my view, White and Martin fudge the issue of ownership by
failing to recognize that the gap between formal ownership and effective authority exists at
all levels, not just in the case of government ownership (p. 2). Their dangerous argument is
de facto privatizing community ownership in the sense that local groups would then gain the
right “to sell or otherwise alienate land through mortgages or other financial instruments”
(White & Martin, 2002, p. 4).
27. This is clearly expressed in a recent policy paper promoting commercial forest market
development as the best way forward for conservation and poverty alleviation: “Strategic
business partnerships can benefit both private industry and local producers … Through these
arrangements, industrial firms can access wood fiber and non-wood products at a competi-
tive cost, along with forest asset protection, local ecosystem expertise and social branding
opportunities” (Scherr et al., 2002, p. 9).

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