Pando (Bolivia)

The objective of the field-testing in Palma Real, a community in the Bolivian Amazon, was to make MLA tools more participatory and accessible to community stakeholders and facilitate the adoption of forest monitoring techniques and findings. Participatory landscape mapping in particular illustrates how adapting the approach to a local context can increase interest and produce secondary impacts on later management decisions.

Palma Real is located in Bolivia’s northern department of Pando, on the Madre de Dios River. When the MLA work began CIFOR already had a collaborative arrangement with the local government and had good relations with the community. As a relatively remote community that had not received much technical assistance, the Palma Real families expressed great interest when CIFOR and the municipal government approached them about participating in the MLA field test.

The families in Palma Real collect Brazil nuts (Bertholletia excelsa), which provides them with a relatively high cash income by Bolivian rural standards, and forms the basis for rural livelihood in the region. The community is in the process of obtaining communal title for approximately 8,000 ha of land. Families work individually to gather Brazil nuts within a customary system of property rights.

While Brazil nut production has been sustained for decades, Palma Real livelihoods are threatened by loggers, ranchers and migrant colonists and the related deforestation and forest fires they bring. High Brazil nut prices in recent years have also raised competition among families and brought interlopers who violate customary practices to gather nuts. As a result communities report increased levels of conflict and are plagued by a growing sense of insecurity.

The original plan for the participatory landscape mapping had been to illustrate the principal ecosystems recognised by the community and the uses of each by the community. During initial planning, however, the community made it clear that they were interested in addressing their concerns with Brazil nut theft and conflicts that had appeared during the previous harvest. They wanted to use the mapping techniques to document their customary forest property rights. The CIFOR team decided to adapt the methods to respond to this demand.

Rather than simply drawing a rough estimation of their territory, the approach generated a geo-referenced sketch map illustrating key reference points, landmarks and boundaries. Although the map was drawn by hand, it was to scale and accurately depicted the territory, closely approximating official maps, but also including locally relevant information. The CIFOR team organised a training course that taught people to use a global positioning system (GPS) device and record coordinates in notebooks to later plot them manually onto scaled grid paper. With this approach participants recognised the relationship between the points they geo-referenced in the forest and the image they began to create on the sketch map. The training took one morning.

In the week after the training men and women in the community formed brigades and mapped landmarks within the territory. They plotted trails, Brazil nut storage points, key reference points like trail crossings, property datum points and the outer limits of the forest areas they traditionally used. As points were plotted onto the map, community members filled in gaps and added the names of trails and landmarks.

The resulting map showed the detailed knowledge Palma Real residents have of their territory and illustrated the relative position of traditional property claims. The sketch map indicated that the forest areas used by some families were outside of the boundaries being negotiated with the state. Based on this new insight and using the results from this exercise, the community petitioned an adjustment of their territorial boundaries.

The Palma Real residents believed that the geo-referenced sketch mapping contributed to mediating Brazil nut conflicts. They also realised that more detailed information was needed to fully document customary forest property rights. At their request, CIFOR and the municipal government have since provided the needed additional training and accompanied the mapping of Brazil nut groves. As a result, the community members were able to map approximately 11,000 ha of forest that corresponded to the area they traditionally used. In the process they also conducted a census of Brazil nut trees, tagging 8,366 trees and distributing unclaimed trees to families that controlled small groves.