MUNICIPAL FOREST MANAGEMENT IN LATIN AMERICA

Center for International Forestry Research
Jln. CIFOR, Situ Gede, Sindang Barang, Bogor Barat 16680, Indonesia

International Development Research Centre
Ottawa • Dakar • Cairo • Montevideo • Nairobi • New Delhi • Singapore

A co-publication of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a recovery system or transmitted in any way or by any medium, be it electronic, mechanical, photocopy or any other, without prior authorization from CIFOR and IDRC. The geographic names and the presentation of materials used in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion on the part of CIFOR or IDRC or of the different organizations that collaborated in developing this publication regarding the judicial condition of any country, territory or region or its authorities or with respect to the delimitation of its borders or limits. In addition, the opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of CIFOR, IDRC or its collaborators. Reference to the registered name does not constitute an endorsement of the product and is offered only for informational purposes.

Municipal Forest Management in Latin America = La Gestión Forestal Municipal en América Latina
Ed. by Lyès Ferroukhi.--Bogor, Indonesia: CIFOR, IDRC, 2003.
236 p.; 25 x 17,5 cm
ISBN 979-3361-05-0

1. Descentralización 2. Gobiernos Locales 3. Municipalidades 4. Comunidades locales 5. Manejo Forestal 6. Bolivia 7. Brasil 8. Costa Rica 9. Guatemala 10. Honduras 11. Nicaragua 12. América Latina I. Ferroukhi, Lyès II. CIFOR III. IDRC

1. Decentralization 2. Local Government 3. Municipalities 4. Communities 5. Forest Management 6. Bolivia 7. Brazil 8. Costa Rica 9. Guatemala 10. Honduras 11. Nicaragua 12. Latin America I. Ferroukhi, Lyès II. CIFOR III. IDRC

Layout, Printing and Binding: Mundo Creativo, San José, Costa Rica
Cover design: Douglas Calderón L.
Translation: Judy Butler
Technical editing: Elizabeth Mora
Printed in Costa Rica

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank all those who, in a great spirit of collaboration, shared their perceptions, knowledge and information with us to make the preparation of this book possible.

We especially thank those who were essential to organizing the project that culminated in the book: David Kaimowitz, Alexander Kastl, Daniel Buckles, Bill Carman, Manuel Paveri, Katherine Warner, Ivo Bockor, Gregor Fischenish, Ivan Angulo Chacon and Silvia Chaves Quesada.

We also appreciate the valuable contribution of all the institutions that financially supported or collaborated in the research that helped the authors prepare their chapters: the International Center for Forestry Research (CIFOR), the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the British Department for International Development (DfID), the Center for Environmental and Natural Resource Law (CEDARENA), the Sustainable Forest Management Project (BOLFOR), the Center of Labor and Agrarian Development Studies (CEDLA), the TIERRA Foundation, the Forest Superintendence of Bolivia (SF), the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), the Acre Research and Extension Group in Agro-forestry Systems (PESACRE), the Trans-Amazon Agro-ecological Laboratory (LAET), the Amazonia Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), the Peasant Forestry Development Program (DECAFOR), the FAO’s Forests, Trees and People’s Programme (FAO/FTPP), the Consultants for Sustainable Development (CODERSA), The Community and Municipal Forests Project (BOSCOM), the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty (FLACSO), the PROTIERRA Project of the Nicaraguan Institute of Municipal Promotion (INIFOM) and the Forestry Project of the Agricultural, Livestock and Forestry Ministry (PROFOR).

We would also like to thank all of the people who reviewed the different chapters and/or offered information that helped enrich the material presented in this book. In particular we thank the following for their support: Aroldo Santos Zelaya, Arnulfo Cruz Guerrero, Carlos Andrés Zelaya, Eduardo Bahr, Gustavo Morales Galindo, Juan Blas Zapata, Luis Torres Pérez, Konrad Uberhöl, Dennis Buteau, Edwin Mateo Molina, Martha Klein, Orfilia Pineda, Roberto Vallejo Larios, Gilbert Canet Brenes, Eugenia Wo Ching, Pascal Girot, Glenn Galloway, Jorge Rodrígez, Elizabeth Mora, Mynor Barrillas, Timoteo López, Olivier Dubois, Víctor Galvez, Silvel Elias, Krister Anderson, Clark Gibson, Hannah Whittman, Thelma Lizzeth Cabrera, Ove Faurby, Andrew Blackwell, René Mendoza, Juana Ortega, Erwin Aguilera, Rudy Guzmán, Arturo Moscoso, Ovidio Roca, Thelmo Muñoz, José Luis de Urioste, Carolina Almeida de Souza, José Clodoaldo Barbosa, Iliana Salgado, Carla Rocha, Magna Cunha, Guilhermina Cayres, Doerte Sagebart, Ana Cristina de Barros, Vilma Neves and Ivaneide da Silva.

We express our gratitude to the municipal authorities, representatives of community organizations, indigenous and peasant leaders, loggers, public officials and project technicians who one way or another contributed their knowledge to make the preparation of this book possible. We hope that all of them find information and ideas in it that help stimulate their reflections, enrich their knowledge and support the development of their proposals for improvements and new options to support municipal forest management.

PREFACE

Among the major political and economic trends that have been evolving in Latin America in recent years, the emergence of municipal governments as frontline actors stands out. This has been the result of a convergence of democratic and civic movements, as well as of the fiscal crisis, the central governments’ lack of legitimacy and the search for more efficient public service provision.

The strengthening of municipal governments has strong implications for forest management. Municipal governments are increasingly involved in forestry issues: they grant permits, charge taxes, administer their own forests, create parks, prohibit activities, plant trees and take sides in conflicts. Some of these activities form part of the municipal governments’ daily tasks, but in many other cases, the governments act in response to situations that crop up, such as conflicts, environmental crises and political events. They also implement non-forest activities that have a strong impact on forest resources, including road construction, the creation of agricultural credit programs and soil use planning.

Part of the municipal governments’ growing leadership role in forestry issues is an explicit product of national policies to decentralize natural resource management. Nonetheless, municipal governments in many places have taken the initiative without either the support or the blessing of the central government, sometimes even illegally. The fact that municipal governments now have more political power and greater financial and human resources — and in many countries are now elected rather than named by the central power — means a political capital that has allowed them to get involved in new spheres, including forestry and environmental issues, despite not always having a clear mandate to do so.

This book represents the first serious attempt to analyze recent experiences of municipal participation in forest management in Latin America. It is the product of a series of investigations in Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua in which more than 30 national and international researchers participated. It will unquestionably be required reading for anyone concerned with municipal administration and natural resource management.

The studies paint a very diverse reality since each municipality has its own particularities. In fact, it is to be expected that much more complex situations will occur if each municipal government can make important decisions regarding management of and access to the forests than with a single national policy. Although the reality is very diverse, however, it is not a random diversity. For example, municipalities with a very active civil society, with peasant, indigenous or environmental movements and/or many NGOs, usually take more measures to conserve the forest resources and democratize access to them. Municipalities with large urban centers generally have a more structured environmental administration. Those on the agricultural frontier have significant economic dynamism linked to logging and the expansion of livestock raising in forested areas. In such cases, municipal governments tend to give less support to sustainable forest management than in municipalities that have already lost a large part of their forests or make their living from extraction of the various forest resources.

The authors emphasize that if negative results have been obtained in some areas because the municipalities have become involved in forest management, it is not a consequence of democratic decentralization, but rather the very lack of it. In some countries, the national government has assigned the municipal governments new attributions regarding forest issues without the corresponding financial and human resources. Many national forestry agencies refuse to accept the municipal governments’ new role, since they see it as a threat to their own authority and budget. Many institutional and judicial mechanisms to ensure that municipal governments make transparent decisions that respond to the local population’s concerns and interests are also still lacking. Before abandoning the idea of decentralizing natural resource management, it must at least be tested more seriously and coherently than has been done so far.

In any event, the key question is not whether municipalities should or should not be involved in forestry issues. Everything indicates that they already are, and that the process will soon be irreversible. The more urgent question is how to improve municipal participation to make it advantageous for the local communities and the forests. This book offers many clues in that direction.

It has been a great pleasure and source of pride for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) to have had the opportunity to participate in these studies alongside other national research centers, independent researchers and technical and financial cooperation agencies. I would like to thank the authors for their work and to invite readers to enter a new world where mayors are responsible not just for constructing public plazas and collecting the garbage, and municipal officials are dedicated not only to issuing birth certificates. Ours is a world of conflicts, interests, innovations, successes and failures; it is full of loggers, cattle ranchers, miners, peasants, indigenous peoples and employees, all participants and all responsible for the sustainable management of our resources.

Introduction

Many governments in developing countries have implemented public policy reforms in the past decade, including the decentralizing of their state administrations. These reforms are the product of both internal political democratization processes and the influence of international agencies. Although the decentralization model varies from one country to the next, these initiatives generally respond to common concerns: reduction of the central government bureaucracy and public sector expenditures, liberalization of the economy and the need to respond to civil society’s demands for more participatory and democratic state management (Onibon et al. 1999, Fisher 1999).

The most common formal decentralization model emphasizes the provision of public services such as education or health. Nonetheless, many countries have begun to grant local governments greater rights and responsibilities regarding natural resource management, including forest resources. In fact, during the 1990s, municipal governments¹ in various Latin American countries took initiatives linked to logging, reforestation, protected area management, fire control and many other forestry-related activities with or without formal policies decentralizing forest management to them (Kaimowitz et al. 2000).

The main objective of this publication, then, is to evaluate the municipal government role in forest management, based on the experiences of six Latin American countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. The central questions we look at are:

The book is divided into three parts. i) This introduction analyzes the opportunities and threats offered by the decentralized forest management model and some of the most important challenges that have arisen in practice. It also summarizes the context in which this book is written and the main characteristics of the countries in which the case studies were undertaken. ii) This is followed by one chapter per country, which analyzes the municipal forest management experience. The order in which they appear corresponds to the degree of forest sector decentralization, starting with the most decentralized country. iii) The conclusion analyzes the main lessons learned from these processes.

Some conceptual clarifications about decentralization

Decentralization refers to the transfer of power from a central authority to lower levels in a political, administrative and territorial hierarchy (Crook and Manor 1998). This transfer can take different forms. Administrative decentralization, also known as deconcentration, refers to a transfer of powers from the central public bureaucracy to its own regional or local offices (Fisher 1999). This form of decentralization does not seek a real redistribution of authority and, according to Crook and Manor (1998), rather tends to extend the central authority to a territorial level through a simple relocation of its agents.

¹ Municipal government is used interchangeably here with local government to refer to elected local representatives and their legal territorial jurisdiction, which includes both urban centers and the surrounding rural territory. Similarly, municipality refers to this broader jurisdiction. (In the United States, the most similar equivalent would be county.)

Valverde (1999) holds that deconcentration seeks to transfer attributions or competencies to dependent bodies of the central administration, while “democratic decentralization” assumes a transfer of functions and competencies from the central administration to territorial, regional or local authorities to increase their autonomy, reduce their dependence on central administration and redistribute power. The decentralization that most interests us in this book is the latter: democratic decentralization. According to Ribot (2002), with whom we agree, decentralization demonstrates its greatest potential for improving efficiency and social equity only through democratic mechanisms.

To be democratic, decentralization requires that the territorial authorities be legally recognized and have certain decision-making autonomy and the power to make discretionary decisions (Crook and Manor 1998). It also requires that the authorities who receive these powers represent the population that elected them and be accountable for their actions to that population through transparent local administration (Manor 1999, Agrawal and Ribot 1999).

The World Bank sustains that decentralization should improve resource distribution, efficiency, accountability and equity (World Bank 1988).² Local governments know citizens’ needs and desires better than central governments do, and the population finds it easier to hold local representatives accountable (World Bank 2000). Decentralization also helps promote democracy by “bringing the state closer to the people” (World Bank 1997).

The goals of decentralization coincide with what many experts have proposed as the conditions necessary for sustainable natural resource management. For example, local people are more likely to identify and assign priority to their environmental problems accurately. Resource allocation should be more efficient and information costs lower, and local groups are likely to feel greater “ownership” of decisions made locally, such as rules for resource access and use. Marginal groups could have greater influence on local policies and access to the benefits of exploiting forest resources. Decentralization could also permit more effective and efficient coordination around local resource problems, as the formal and informal contacts among different people and institutions are likely to increase when they are working in the same locale (Carney 1995, Kaimowitz et al. 1998, Larson 2002, Margulis 1999).

With respect to natural resource management, and forest management in particular, numerous mechanisms exist for delegating or transferring functions in the name of decentralization, but not all of these constitute democratic decentralization. One common example is the transfer of central government functions to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for managing protected areas through various kinds of joint administration projects. As NGOs are not popularly elected or necessarily accountable to local populations, this type of decentralization rather constitutes a delegation of tasks, defined by the central government, to civil society organizations.

Competencies for administering protected areas have also been transferred directly to local communities. This may or may not constitute democratic decentralization, depending on the organization and leadership structures in the communities that receive the

responsibilities.³ In the past decade, governments and international funding agencies appear to have put greater emphasis on the transfer of natural resource management rights or responsibilities to communities than to local governments (Agrawal 2001). Nonetheless, community-based natural resource management experiences suggest that local governments, as elected and representative bodies, can and should play an important role (Ribot 1999, Carney and Farrington 1998). Ribot (2002) also notes that the majority of community-based management projects have been promoted, financed and controlled to a certain point by international donors and NGOs, which hinders their generalization and long-term sustainability.

As mentioned, the initial motivations for transferring rights and responsibilities regarding forest resources to the local level have been to reduce government bureaucracy, democratize decision-making about forest management, distribute the benefits obtained from forest resources more equitably and regulate forest management activities more efficiently (Ribot 2001). Nonetheless, these benefits have not always been evident in practice. The transfer of responsibilities to local governments, where this has actually occurred, has produced ambiguous results that sometimes contradict what policy promoters had in mind (Andersson 2002, Pacheco et al. 1998, Ribot 1999). This suggests that decentralization not only offers opportunities for better forest management but also entails potential dangers.

In practice, it has been seen that democratic decentralization faces two types of limitations and risks. The first relates to the very decentralization processes promoted by the central government. Despite the theoretical benefits of democratic decentralization, implementation of the model is highly limited, particularly with respect to natural resource management. The local governments’ sphere of autonomy is usually limited by having no real power to make significant decisions about resources. In general, the new competencies transferred are purely administrative, and even then are unaccompanied by the funds or clear operational mechanisms needed to assume them.

In fact, there is a danger in transferring responsibilities to municipal governments without simultaneously transferring the information, training and financing needed for them to carry out their new functions. Failure to do so could even discredit decentralization itself. In the Latin American context, many municipalities lack the necessary technical and administrative capacities to play an effective role in managing natural resources. When the needed training and support is unavailable or ineffective, as is often the case, it is difficult for many local governments to develop and implement natural resource management activities that are both efficient and of an acceptable quality (Pacheco et al. 1998).

The second type of danger is related to this local context. In addition to capacity problems, the greatest potential risks are those associated with both the threat of specific population sectors or elites monopolizing local power and the limited organizational capacity of other local groups to pressure for a representative and effective local administration. In such cases, decentralization could serve to strengthen the local elite (large farmers and ranchers, as well as logging interests) instead of local democracy. In fact, elite capture can weaken not only the democratization process itself but also local government legitimacy. The sustainability of forest resources could also be threatened if local elites promote irrational natural resource use.

³ This is often referred to as devolution. Nonetheless, this term has been used with such diverse meanings and intentions that we have chosen to avoid its use.

The challenge for the future is to promote decentralization processes that build municipal governments with real power that can be and is assumed both capably and responsibly. These governments, as local coordinators and leaders, should become catalysts of sustainable local development interests and policies in response to interests and policies defined at the central level. It is therefore essential to create decision-making and problem-solving mechanisms that permit a balance between national and local development interests and needs in a way that favors resource sustainability and equitable access to the benefits of natural resource management in each region. How to achieve that balance is one of the greatest challenges in designing and implementing decentralized forest management in Latin America.

The experience of forest management decentralization in Latin America

Highly centralized forestry administrations have achieved limited results in effectively regulating forest resources in almost all countries of the region, mainly due to a lack of funding, scant physical presence in the field, limited access to informal information flows and poorly motivated field personnel (Pacheco et al. 1998).

At the same time, municipal governments have played an increasingly important role in forest management and it is probable, given the past decade’s evidence and the growing importance of local governments in general, that this trend will continue. It is thus a priority to begin analyzing these municipal forest management experiences, to better understand the risks and opportunities and be able to support and promote incipient processes with a good chance of achieving positive results in the future.

So far, few studies have examined municipal forest resource management in any depth. In addition, most of these experiences are new, so it is not yet clear whether their results will be beneficial or harmful in the long run. This publication is part of a first effort to assess the outcomes and lessons learned to date about decentralizing forest management into the hands of Latin America’s municipal governments. It is the result of an initiative of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), in collaboration with the many different institutions mentioned in the acknowledgments, to analyze the evolution of municipal forest management in different regional, national and local contexts. The book’s general objective is to further the debate regarding the potential role of municipal governments in local forest management.

The six cases analyzed in this book were chosen based on two main criteria: the variety of forest sector decentralization policies among the countries and the dynamics observed in the municipalities themselves. Four of the chapters are based on research previously undertaken in Bolivia, Brazil, Nicaragua and Costa Rica by some of the institutions that contributed to this work. The Honduran and Guatemalan cases were incorporated because of the importance of recently promoted decentralization policies in those two countries.

Each country case study describes and analyzes the current municipal forest management situation as well as the opportunities and challenges these decentralization experiences

present. Each study analyzes the following issues: the national forestry context; the legal structure of decentralization in the forestry sector within the context of national decentralization policies in general; the experiences of municipal forest management, including different local initiatives and the relations of local governments with both central agencies and local stakeholders. Each chapter concludes with a final analysis and recommendations.

To place the reader in the general setting of the six countries, we present below a brief summary of the most salient characteristics of decentralization in each.

BOLIVIA

Since the mid-nineties, Bolivia has made important progress toward democratic decentralization to the municipalities as the result of a process associated with institutionalizing greater popular participation. At the same time, important efforts have been developed to decentralize forest management, although a significant portion of decision-making authority remains centralized. In other words, although municipal governments have become key protagonists in forest management, their powers and capacities to make discretionary decisions are still limited. Despite this, Bolivia is one of the Latin American countries that have decentralized functions to municipal governments to the greatest degree.

The decisive step for transferring forest responsibilities to the municipalities resulted from the approval of a new Forestry Law in 1996 that permits local governments to request and supervise up to 20% of the national forests within their jurisdiction. These Municipal Forest Reserve Areas (AFRM) must be turned over as forest concessions to what have been named “Local Social Associations” (ASL). In practice, that mechanism permits the formalization of rights to forest exploitation for small-scale loggers and other traditional forest users. The law also establishes that indigenous groups are the owners of the forest resources within their legally recognized territories.

These changes were motivated by both the central government’s interest in reducing illegal forest exploitation by local populations and the need to improve forest management control and oversight systems. There was also strong local and departmental pressure to rechannel fiscal revenue from forests to those levels. The Forestry Law granted 25% of forest exploitation license fees to the municipalities, earmarked to support the Municipal Forestry Unit (UFM) that each forested municipality must create. The UFMs are in charge of establishing the AFRMs and providing technical assistance to the ASLs. They must also inspect forest concessions and sawmills, oversee fulfillment of forest management plans, establish preventive measures for activities that endanger the forest, request the seizure of illegal products and establish registries of forest plantations and native forests.

The decentralization implemented under this law has redefined local power relations; in many cases, the local elite have gradually been forced to recognize the presence of groups that were previously marginalized and must now even negotiate with them. Decentralization has created some new opportunities for indigenous groups, settlers and small-scale loggers to access forest resources and somewhat weakened the position of concessionaires, hacienda

owners and absentee landowners living outside the municipality. Nonetheless, the complexity of local power dynamics makes it difficult to generalize about the benefits of decentralization for marginalized groups; indeed, there are clear cases where decentralization has instead helped strengthen certain local elites whose presence was already strong.

Bolivia’s municipal governments have responded to decentralization in diverse ways. Almost all municipalities with forests now have a UFM. These units have been quite active in delimiting municipal forest areas; many have become involved in forest management and the control of illegal felling or have promoted forestry projects. Despite the progress achieved, however, regulatory powers over forest resource use remain concentrated at the central level, and municipal governments have very little influence over these decisions.

HONDURAS

With the promulgation of the Law for the Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector (1992), the Municipalities Law (1990) and the General Environment Law (1993), private forest ownership was recognized in Honduras and the basis was established for decentralizing forest management. In particular, municipal governments became the owners of forests located on municipal lands, which are known as ejidos and account for some 28% of the country’s forests.

This situation is unique in Latin America, as it implies that municipal governments are de jure owners of important forested areas from which they could generate significant income. Management of ejidal forests is subject to the same conditions as any other forest property: the power to draft forestry norms and approve management plans for logging resides with the State Forestry Administration (AFE-COHDEFOR).

The transfer of ejidal property rights to the municipalities has helped strengthen the municipalities and improved coordination with COHDEFOR. Municipal governments also have responsibilities in controlling and reviewing management plans in national and private forested areas, although coordinating with COHDEFOR does not always work well in practice.

Despite the municipalities’ new responsibilities, their management skills are still generally very weak, their budgets are meager and there is little technical and institutional capacity to effectively handle the management and exploitation of municipal forest resources. More than a dozen international aid projects have invested resources to support municipal forest management via cooperation agreements with the Secretariat of Natural Resources (SERNA), COHDEFOR, municipal associations and the municipalities themselves.

GUATEMALA

The decentralization of forest management to municipal governments in Guatemala has been promoted through several specific mechanisms that foster local forestry activities. These include technical assistance and technology transfer programs to the municipal governments, as well as financial mechanisms such as the Forest Incentive Programs (PINFOR) and the transfer of 50% of the tax revenue on concessions and exploitation licenses. Strong international aid projects have provided essential support to these initiatives.

The Forestry Law establishes that the country’s 331 municipal governments must have municipal environmental offices whose main role is to support and collaborate with the forestry policies and strategies implemented by the National Institute of Forests (INAB). Municipal governments enjoy certain responsibilities related to controlling and overseeing forest resources as well as supporting reforestation and forest management; for example, the formulating, approving and implementing development plans for municipal forest resources as well as local tax collection.

Guatemala is the only country in which the central forestry agency is clearly leading the process of decentralizing forest management to municipal governments. One of the most important initiatives is the Municipal and Communal Forestry Strengthening Project (BOSCOM). This project, financed and administered by INAB, is aimed at improving the municipal governments’ technical, administrative and economic capacities so they can effectively assume their forestry-related responsibilities as well as improving rural communities’ opportunities to participate in local management of their resources. Various municipal environmental offices have been created through this project.

Despite this progress, the decentralization of forest management in Guatemala still faces important challenges. The municipal government offices have no real decision-making power over forest resources, as decentralization policies focus only on transferring the responsibility to coordinate with and support INAB. In addition, although Guatemala’s municipalities receive the highest percentage of national budget transfers in Central America, they still face serious economic limitations due to inherited debts.

Even with this, positive local trends can be noted. Various municipalities become involved in forest management initiatives, either because they receive support from outside projects or simply because municipal governments have been pressured by local populations to do so. In this regard, local governments are becoming increasingly involved in reforestation activities, fire control, provision of technical services, establishment of tree nurseries and conflict mediation.

NICARAGUA

Nicaragua’s local governments have significantly increased their power and authority since the first municipal elections in 1990. In particular, the reforms incorporated into the Municipalities Law in 1997 increased local government competencies and autonomy. Nonetheless, the real possibility for effective autonomy is limited by the extremely low budgets with which many of them must attempt to implement their mandates. In addition to the low percentage of central government budget transfers (approximately 1% in 2001, the lowest in Central America), many municipalities face serious limitations in being able to increase local income through taxes.

With respect to forest management, the Municipalities Law assigns local governments the responsibility to “develop, conserve and control the rational use of the environment and natural resources as the basis for the sustainable development of the municipality and the country. . . .” Despite this general mandate, however, Nicaragua’s forestry and environmental legislation promotes centralized management and relegates the municipal government

offices to a secondary role. Among the powers they do have are the following: to render an opinion on proposed logging contracts, receive 25% of the fiscal income generated by such contracts, establish municipal parks, organize fire prevention and control campaigns, promote environmental education and projects, participate in national park management and promote civic participation in environmental affairs.

Regarding the decentralization process, the municipalities feel that the central government has transferred the burden of environmental management but not the benefits in terms of either authority or income. Despite existing limitations, however, numerous municipalities have taken important initiatives: approving or objecting to logging contracts; granting domestic felling permits (on small volumes); promoting environmental, agroforestry and reforestation projects; organizing forest fire and pest control campaigns; developing environmental and land use plans; declaring protected areas; hiring technical personnel and forest rangers; approving ordinances to normalize forest and other resource use; charging taxes and fines for legal and illegal logging; and managing forestry funds. In addition, the majority of the country’s municipalities have established Municipal Environmental Commissions, which currently operate as the primary mechanism for local participation and inter-governmental coordination on environmental issues.

BRASIL

Of the six cases presented in this book, there is no doubt that Brazil’s municipal governments have far greater political, administrative and financial powers in the health and education sectors than those in other Latin American countries. In contrast, however, natural resource or environmental management has not specifically been decentralized to local governments, although they can and do have important indirect effects on forest resources because of the overall autonomy level they enjoy and their authority over other relevant decision-making arenas — for example, the development of municipal infrastructure and management of credit funds.

In general, Brazil’s current regulatory framework for forest management is inadequate and highly centralized. The state institute responsible for the environment and forests, IBAMA, has little political support, few resources and is in no capacity to exercise real control over logging or oversee the implementation of forest management plans. This situation is joined by the fact that the Brazilian municipalities receive important economic transfers from the federal government and thus are not always as motivated as other countries to get involved in forestry activities in the search for income.

In the Amazon region, many residents favor a development model that promotes reducing the forested area. For example, powerful local leaders, including some mayors, are frequently loggers or cattle ranchers and oppose the creation of protected areas or extractive reserves or the delimitation of indigenous territories. Even so, some municipalities have programs for forest fire prevention and control, environmental education, modernization of the timber industry and/or forestry and agroforestry promotion. The majority of local governments involved in such activities enjoy the support of nongovernmental organizations or central government projects. There are also municipal leaders who have promoted forest

certification and the consolidation of extractive reserves, especially where the extraction of non-timber products is important for the subsistence of local populations.

COSTA RICA

Of all the countries studied, Costa Rica represents the most centralized model with respect to administration of the country’s forest resources. This is explained by the state’s long centralist tradition, which has historically been relatively successful in Costa Rica, and the fact that both the population and the economic activity is largely concentrated in the central valley where the capital, San José, is located.

This country’s legal framework for forestry, which gives municipal governments only very general competencies, has a completely centralized structure that leaves them little space to play an active role. The state body responsible for forest management is the National Conservation Areas System (SINAC), which belongs to the Environment and Energy Ministry (MINAE). The State Forestry Administration’s decentralization policies are limited to deconcentrating SINAC through the creation of 11 conservation areas and regional and sub-regional offices in each area.

The municipal governments have no direct forest management responsibilities, but this has not always been the case. The 1996 Forestry Law established that municipal government offices were to grant felling permits for “trees in pastures." Nonetheless, this responsibility was transferred without any technical or administrative training to prepare the municipal governments to assume it. The problems that generated led to the re-transfer of the competence to the Regional Conservation Area Councils. In practice, however, SINAC now grants the permits because of problems that arose in the creation of those councils.

The existing legal framework establishes various kinds of collection mechanisms to transfer revenue generated by forest activity to the municipalities. In practice, however, local governments have come up against numerous political and legal obstacles when they have tried to take advantage of these mechanisms.

Despite limited authority and funds, there are several examples of municipalities that have undertaken important forest management activities and, in some cases, have even consolidated municipal environmental offices. In general, these initiatives have occurred when there is pressure from local civil society groups or a certain political stability within the municipal government, as well as a good working relationship between local government and the officials of SINAC’s sub-regional offices.

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Municipalities and local participation in forest management in Bolivia

Introduction

Decentralization is one of the public policy reforms that many governments have aggressively applied in recent years as part of domestic processes to democratize their country’s political system, or in response to pressure from international agencies or both. Although decentralization has focused mainly on the provision of social services, numerous countries have begun to give local governments more rights and responsibilities over their natural resources, including forests.

Some studies show that decentralization has diverse and sometimes contradictory results in practice, depending on variables such as the political economy of the municipalities, the composition of their government and the importance of forest resources to their economy, among others (Andersson 2002, Pacheco and Kaimowitz 1998, Ribot 2001). This suggests that decentralization is a process that brings with it both opportunities and threats. The important thing is to recognize both to make this process contribute more efficiently to improving the distribution of forest resources among the populations that subsist from them, facilitate more democratic decision-making and conserve the forests better.

This chapter identifies the opportunities and limitations of decentralizing forest management in Bolivia. To that end, it evaluates the country’s decentralization model and its implications, in association with other factors such as the system of civic participation and the existing forestry regulations within which municipalities carry out the forestry functions delegated to them in the mid-nineties.

Important steps have been taken to construct democratic decentralization in Bolivia as the result of a municipalization process associated with popular participation that got underway in 1994. At the same time, there have been important efforts to decentralize forest management, although many decisions about these resources are still made at the central level. In other words, the municipal governments’ functions and discretional decision-making capacity are still limited despite the leadership role they have acquired in forest management. This aside, Bolivia is one of the region’s countries that has made the greatest progress in deconcentrating forest management functions to municipal governments.

This analysis covers the lessons learned from decentralizing forest management in Bolivia’s lowland municipalities, where the bulk of the forests are found. Some of the reflections presented here are based on the results of research conducted by the Center for International Forest Research (CIFOR) in collaboration with the BOLFOR Project, the Center for Labor and Agrarian Development Studies (CEDLA) and TIERRA, with financial support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The information comes from interviews with key informants, particularly concentrated in nine lowlands municipalities, in three different periods between 1997 and 2001.

Following the introduction, the chapter is divided into five parts. The first briefly describes the lowland forests and the conditions under which the main social stakeholders have access to the forestland and its resources. The second describes the legal and institutional context of municipal forest management, as well as the decentralization model

promoted in Bolivia. The third recounts the municipalities’ forest management activities and the fourth indicates the results of decentralization and analyzes the factors that explain them. The last part contains final reflections, analyzes the elements of decentralization that are indeed functioning and proposes some activities that should be implemented to improve their results.

The forest context in Bolivia

Nearly 70% of Bolivia’s 1,098,581 km² of territory is less than 500 meters above sea level (Montes de Oca 1989). The departments of Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando comprise a large part of these lowlands (see map), which contain around 80% of the country’s 534,000 km² of forested area (48.6% of the national territory).

The lowland region’s main economic activities are agriculture and medium- and large-scale commercial livestock raising, small-scale agriculture by numerous settler families, coca production, the extraction of timber and some non-wood forestry products such as rubber, chestnuts and palm hearts, as well as mining and natural gas production.

A sizable part of the lowland forests has been selectively exploited, an activity that became important in the seventies and grew rapidly during the nineties. Only four tree species — mara (Swietenia macrophylla), cedar (cedrela sp.), oak (Amburana cearensis), and ochoó (Hura crepitans) represent 60% of the lumber produced between 1985 and 1996 (Quiroga and Salinas 1996). Exploited at rates that impeded their natural regeneration, these species are now the least abundant, so the lumber companies and small loggers have begun using those of lesser commercial value despite the less attractive market conditions for them (Dauber et al. 1999).

Most of the deforestation occurs in the lowlands and has tended to increase rapidly in the past decade. Deforestation for the country as a whole was around 80,000 ha per year during the eighties, increasing at an annual rate of 0.4% to 250,000 ha per year between the mid-eighties and mid-nineties (Steininger et al. 2000). That increase has been particularly due to the expansion of mechanized agriculture, mainly for soy production, one of the lowland’s principal agricultural export crops, and to a lesser extent the expansion of livestock and small-scale agriculture in the colonized areas of Santa Cruz, northern La Paz and Chapare (Pacheco 1998a).

The accelerated degradation of the forests as well as growing concern about conserving the biodiversity led the Bolivian government to implement an ecological zoning system accompanied by soil use plans and plans to extend the protected areas. Toward the end of the nineties, the three departments that cover the lower part of the lowlands already had a soil use plan (PLUS) and some soil use planning exercises were being initiated at the municipal level. In addition, the part of the lowlands incorporated into the National System of Protected Areas (SNAP), which became important in the mid-eighties, currently represents 17% of the national total, though only a small portion has an effective protection system (World Bank 2000).

By the mid-nineties, Bolivia’s lowlands had approximately two million inhabitants, of whom nearly 800,000 live in the rural areas, with a population density of less than one person per square kilometer. The indigenous population is between 180,000 and 200,000 and most of the rest are small farmers settled in colonization areas north of the city of Santa Cruz and in the higher valleys of Cochabamba and La Paz (Muñoz 1996). The region’s urban population (above all in the departmental capital of Santa Cruz and some intermediary urban centers) shows high growth rates. Improvements in the transport system have linked the lowland region more to other areas, sparking greater migration and increasing pressure on the forests.

The region has very heterogeneous land systems, ranging from private ownership systems to community systems in indigenous areas. The indigenous populations, small farmers or settlers and a diverse group of small-scale loggers as well as those who collect non-wood forestry products are the social groups that subsist to some degree on forest resources. Medium- and large-scale farmers and hacienda owners, as well as the forest concessionaires and sawmill owners who mainly reside in the region’s principal cities, form an influential group within rural society.

The information available on land tenure is not very reliable. Estimates based on official statistics are that around 23 million of the 76 million ha making up the region were provided to medium and large farmers or cattle ranchers (Pacheco 1998a). The indigenous groups have demanded that some 22.3 million ha be recognized as Original Community Lands (TCOs), of which only 5 million have forest potential (Stocks 1999). By the end of the nineties only 3 million ha had been titled as TCOs (Martínez 2001). In 1996, the lumber companies reduced the area they occupied as concessions from 20 million ha to 5.4 million and that in turn shrank to 4.9 million in 2001 due to the return of 8 concessions to state dominion. In addition, nearly one million ha were tagged for municipal forest reserves by 2000 (SF 2002).

The lowland settlers are organized into agrarian unions that form part of larger organizations at the departmental and national level. The indigenous peoples, in turn, are organized into traditional authority systems made up of extensive pan-regional organizations. Before the start of the decentralization process, both groups used to file their demands at the departmental and national levels, so paradoxically had little influence on ‘local politics,” which was dominated by local elite groups. This situation has changed substantially after decentralization, as will be analyzed below.

The decentralizing of forest management

This section discusses the characteristics of decentralization in Bolivia. It first presents the background to the broader decentralization process and then describes the main elements that motivated the decentralization of forest management. Following that it analyzes the main regulations growing out of the forest policy reforms of the mid-nineties, and finally describes the responsibilities and powers in forest management transferred to the municipal governments.

BACKGROUND TO THE PROCESS

Bolivia has a long tradition of centralized government. Before decentralization, decisions were made by the central government, which nominated “prefects,” the main political authority of the departments, or provinces. Mayors were also designated from above; their

responsibilities were confined to a limited range of services in the urban municipal seats and they answered to the prefects, by whom they had been elected to occupy their post.

Until the early sixties, given their minimal economic importance and scant population, the lowlands were marginalized by the national political center located in the capital city of La Paz. That situation changed with the expansion of oil and natural gas exploitation and the growth of commercial agriculture and logging, factors that encouraged the emergence of a new regional oligarchy, increased the region’s contribution to fiscal income and increased its importance in strategic development plans.

By the end of the seventies, in response to growing pressure from different regional groups, the government finally took the first significant step toward decentralization, establishing departmental development corporations to implement regional planning and invest in development projects. The income for these corporations originated in the royalties from oil, gas, minerals and timber, as well as national treasury revenues. Although sitting on the boards of these corporations offered the regional elite an opportunity to influence investment decisions, the process was one of administrative deconcentration rather than decentralization; the central government continued naming the corporation presidents, who also answered to the departmental prefects (Kaimowitz et al. 1999).

In 1985, a reform to the Municipalities Law instituted elections for the municipal governments. This reform, however, established no mechanism by which mayors and municipal councilors would be accountable to their constituency for their actions, and in practice they continued answering to the hierarchies of their respective political parties.

Not until the mid-nineties did decentralization take center stage on the public policy reform agenda, and then due mainly to growing pressure from groups in the regions to gain more control over their own affairs, although the general decentralization trend in neighboring countries and its increasing importance on the international aid agenda also had an influence (Kaimowitz et al. 1999). Decentralization was promoted through the Law of Popular Participation (No. 1551), and the Administrative Decentralization Law (No. 1654), both approved in 1994. The first modified the functions of the municipal governments and the second those of the prefectures or departmental governments.

The Law of Popular Participation expanded the municipal governments’ jurisdiction beyond the urban centers to all territory covered by the department’s sections that correspond to a municipal jurisdiction. It made municipal governments responsible for health and education services, highways and potable water. To finance these responsibilities, the national government assigned 20% of its budget to the municipal governments, distributed on the basis of their population size. This law also transferred management of the urban and rural cadastres to the municipal governments, together with the tax income on real estate and automotive vehicles.

Under this decentralization model, the municipal governments were put in charge of planning part of public investment, oriented by plans formulated with participation by the different local stakeholders under municipal government leadership. All social organizations, whether indigenous or peasant communities, agrarian unions or urban neighborhood

committees, are legally recognized under the category of Grassroots Territorial Organization (OTB), and acquire the right to participate in Oversight Committees, an entity created to monitor the use of municipal finances and the actions of the mayors and municipal councilors (SNPP 1994).

The Administrative Decentralization Law, in turn, abolished the regional development corporations and transferred their functions and most of their assets to the prefectures, which at that point became responsible for regional development planning. This law has not had effects as dramatic as those achieved by popular participation in a very short time, nor did it modify the fact that the central government still elects the prefects, which means they must still report their actions to the central level. Although councils have been created with the participation of departmental delegates, they are only consultative.

DECENTRALIZATION OF NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

The transfer of natural resource management responsibilities was partly an indirect consequence of the broader decentralization process, partly the result of regional struggles to ensure that forested regions would benefit from the lumber use and, to a lesser degree, a response to the growing international consensus favoring greater local participation in forest management (Kaimowitz et al. 2000).

Regarding the first aspect, although the Law of Popular Participation granted the municipal governments no new explicit function related to natural resource management, it indirectly helped some of them get more involved in natural resource issues through the greater authority they received from the central government. Such issues include the inspection of lumber transport within their municipalities and charging royalties on lumbering activities so as to retain part of the benefits for their municipalities. In addition, as the municipal governments became progressively more influential, the national government and international donors began to seek them out as partners in environmental projects.

As for the second aspect, the regional organizations fought for nearly forty years to gain greater participation in forestry policy formulation and the distribution of lumber royalties where this resource was extracted. Provincial civic committees, which grouped together diverse local civil society groups, had an active role in this ongoing battle. At the beginning of the eighties, they succeeded in getting an 11% lumber royalty established, to be used for regional development, although control of these funds was centralized in the departmental capital and the funds frequently did not make it to the producing areas. In 1993, it was approved that the companies would pay 80% of their royalties in kind directly to the provinces from which the lumber had been extracted (Kaimowitz et al. 2000).

In the mid-eighties, regional civic movements influenced the deconcentration of the national Forest Development Center (CDF) and demanded the creation of departmental forest policies. Deconcentrating the CDF and creating departmental services did not make the forestry service any more effective or efficient, but did contribute to the formulation of departmental forest policies. The institution maintained its reputation as corrupt and ineffective (Quiroga and Salinas 1996).

A third factor promoting the decentralization of forestry resource management was the international trend to promote greater community participation in resource management and administration of protected areas. Although this factor was less important than the others, it helped place decentralization on the agenda of reforms. In Bolivia, the aid agencies exerted no direct pressure to get it underway.

In 1996 the forestry legislation was reformulated through approval of a new Forestry Law (LF No. 1700), which replaced other legislation that had been in effect for 20 years but barely implemented due to political interference and high-level corruption.

The new Forestry Law assumes that sustainable forest management is possible through the implementation of appropriate management practices. To that end, a monitoring system was created for lumber management and extraction, together with some market regulations and tax reforms to make unsustainable and illegal forest operations less attractive. That same year the National Agrarian Reform Service Law (known as INRA Law No. 1715) was approved, aimed at clarifying the rights of agrarian ownership through a process of write-offs and titling; the creation of a rural property cadastre was also approved. The National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) is responsible for applying this process.

FOREST MANAGEMENT REGULATIONS

The new Forestry Law established what was called the “forestry regimen of the nation,” which is defined as “a set of norms that regulate the sustainable use and protection of forests and forestland, and the legal system that defines the rights of private individuals, clearly stipulating the defined rights and obligations ” (Forestry Law, art. 3e).

The public institutional system is made up of the Ministry of Sustainable Development and Planning (MDSP) as the normative entity, the Forestry Superintendence (SF) as the regulatory entity, and the Forest Development Fund (FONABOSQUE). The Forestry Law also created the Natural Resource Regulatory System (SIRENARE) to regulate and control natural resource use.¹ The SF is a key piece in the system given that it is in charge of assigning forest concessions, authorizing forestry permits, approving raw material management and provision plans, monitoring the transport of forest products and confiscating illegal lumber, as well as supervising forest management (SF 2000).

1) Public forests may be assigned to companies through a system of long-term concessions for a 40-year period, renewable every 5 years.

2) Small-scale loggers may apply for concessions within the areas to be declared municipal forest reserves, which correspond to up to 20% of the total public forests existing within each municipal jurisdiction, although to do so they must organize into what are called Local Social Associations (ASLs).

¹ Three sectoral regulatory systems have been created in Bolivia: 1) the Sectoral Regulation System (SIRESE); 2) the Financial Regulation System (SIREFI), covering the Superintendence of Banks, Pensions and Insurance and that of Hierarchical Resources, and 3) the Natural Resource Regulatory System (SIRENARE), on which the Forestry and Agrarian Superintendences depend.

3) Indigenous peoples have the exclusive right to use the forest resources within their territories.

4) Individual landowners acquire ownership rights to the forest resources on their property.

5) All above-mentioned forest users must pay a forest license fee (US$1 per hectare/year), which applies to all forested areas in the case of forest concessions, the area intervened in the case of private owners (including indigenous communities) and a combination of the two in the case of ASL concessions (see chart).²

² A bill titled Support to Sustainable Development, which among other aspects proposes a new method for calculating the registration fee applicable to forest concessions based only on the area intervened annually for forest management, is currently in the Bolivian Congress. Estimates suggest that introduction of this new calculation method would imply a 40% -60% reduction of the fees.

Source: Prepared by author based on Forestry Law No. 1700 and Forestry Law Regulations (DS. 24453).

According to the legislation, non-commercial use of forest resources does not require authorization, but all commercial operations to extract timber and other forest products require a management plan. In this second case, both forest concessionaires and private owners are obliged to design management plans (including forest inventories, species mapping and estimates of the forest potential) as the main regulatory instrument for logging. The management plans must follow technical criteria prepared for that purpose, of which the main ones are:

1) Forest management must respect a 20-year cutting cycle between operations in the same area.

The approach for non-timber products is quite similar to the logging norms, except that the user license fees are 30% lower than the forest fee (US$0.30 per hectare/year). Forest concessionaires may sign contracts with third parties for the use of non-timber products, but forest concessions for such products may only be recognized in areas where these resources predominate. Their exploitation must also respect management plans with annual targets.

Clearing forest areas also requires formal authorization, following the evaluation of annual clear-cutting plans that must be formulated based on plot-level land use plans known as POP. Forest clearing license fees are 15 times the value of the forest license fee (US$15 per hectare), plus the equivalent of 15% of the value of the timber cut. The clearing of up to five ha of land surface, considered cumulatively, is tax exempt .

Some of the conditions established in the Forestry Law and its regulations were hard to apply in practice. Although the forest concessions shifted gradually to the new system, that process was more conflictive when it involved small and medium rural owners and small loggers who up to then had engaged in their activities in an informal setting. To promote a more progressive adjustment by the forest users, particularly private owners and small-scale loggers, the Forestry Superintendence (SF) approved some additional measures as part of what was called a “system of exception.”

1) allowed the use of lumber on private properties equal to or under 200 ha in size without presenting the respective forest management plan, a measure extended to August 1998.

2) allowed small-scale loggers to exploit areas of under 3 ha without presenting a POP.

3) authorized temporary exploitation for groups of small-scale loggers without prior approval of a forest management plan in areas that would potentially be declared as municipal forest reserves.

THE FOREST MANAGEMENT ROLE ASSIGNED TO MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENTS

Different issues came up during the definition of the municipal government’s role under the new institutional forest sector framework. The most important were those linked to illegal exploitation in permanent forest reserves or protected areas by groups without formal access, the need to improve the forest management control and inspection systems with

local government participation and the proportion of forest fiscal income to be earmarked for benefiting the populations residing in the regions where these resources had been generated (Pavez and Bojanic 1998).

The decentralization process was already underway when the regulations were designed, and municipal authorities had earned greater authority within the national political system. During the reform process, the municipal governments assumed the regional demands that more of the income generated by forest resource exploitation be allocated to the departments and municipalities where the exploitation took place and spoke on behalf of small producers and loggers to improve their access and legalize their rights to forest use.

The institutional forestry system thus could not fail to consider the municipal governments as relevant stakeholders in the new system. In addition, shifting responsibilities to them could help resolve conflictive aspects related to forest use monitoring and include the local demands being generated regarding both legalization of the populations’ forest use rights and benefits from the income generated by forest exploitation. Furthermore, the central government was interested in controlling illegal logging in public forests, which could be achieved by recognizing the rights of groups that were informally pressuring for access to these areas and by involving the municipalities in the inspection.

While new functions were transferred to the municipalities, the central government retained for itself decision-making on assigning and distributing forest resources, formalizing of forest permits and defining forest management and use regulations. In this context, although the policies make local governments key actors in implementing the forestry system, they still have limited powers to make autonomous decisions about the forest resources within their jurisdiction and are usually viewed as implementing agencies for centrally defined policies.

Decentralization has involved transferring responsibilities and certain decision-making authority to the municipal governments regarding benefits from local forest resources. Nonetheless, the central level (read MDSP and SF) reserves for itself an important set of functions, among them decisions about assigning the bulk of the forest reserves and establishing the political and legal framework for resource management, as well as defining the technical norms for forest resource exploitation. The system for monitoring activities and controlling forest crime is also a central responsibility, albeit shared with the municipalities. Research activities as well technical assistance and support to local institutional development were delegated to the prefectures.

The funds from the forest use and clearing license fees provide the resources for implementing these functions. According to the Forestry Law (art. 38), use license fees are distributed as follows: 35% to the prefectures, 25% to the municipalities, 10% to FONABOSQUE and 30% to the SF. Of the fees for clearing licenses, 25% is earmarked for the prefectures, 25% for the municipalities and 50% for FONABOSQUE.

The following chart summarizes the forest management competencies transferred from the central level to the municipal governments and the capacities those governments could

require in theory to implement these new functions. Under the new Forest Law, municipalities may request and administer up to 20% of the total public forests under their jurisdiction, creating Municipal Reserve Forest Areas (AFRM) that must be turned over to the Local Social Associations (ASLs) as forestry concessions. In practice, this is the mechanism planned to formalize the small-scale loggers’ right, previously denied them, to operate legally. The term ASL covers a broad spectrum of local groups, such as chainsaw operators and informal workers.³

Classifying public forests as AFRMs starts with mapping and classifying all public forest land under the MDSP’s responsibility; to be declared public forests they must receive a “certificate of true availability” following INRA evaluation. In addition, the Municipal Council members recommend that groups of ASLs should receive a concession, a suggestion that must be approved by the Oversight Committee and ratified by the MDSP so the SF can formalize the concessions. Once the areas are approved, the respective municipal government must prepare a program of concessions for the ASLs.

In addition to delimiting the AFRMs, the municipal governments are supposed to inform the ASLs of their rights and duties and aid them in drawing up and implementing their forest management plans, using the resources to be consigned in their Municipal Development Plans (PDMs) for that purpose. Such resources should be used for forest and agroforest plantations, and for protecting native forests in coordination with local groupings. The municipalities are also responsible for protecting and conserving the AFRMs until they are conceded to the ASLs.

The Forestry Law transfers a broader set of oversight tasks and control of forest resource use to the municipalities, among them:

2) To inspect fulfillment of the terms and conditions established in the use of authorizations and clearing permits.

3) To have preventive measures of immediate compliance regarding activities that jeopardize the forestry norms.

4) To request from SF the preventive seizure of illegal products and means of perpetration.

6) To establish records of forest and agroforest plantations, native forests and seed plots on private holdings.

³ The ASLs may include “traditional users, peasant communities, indigenous peoples and others from the area that utilize forest resources” (LF, art. 1.II). To be considered as such, ASLs must follow a qualification process with the MDSP based on the proposal made by their respective municipal government (RLF, art. 82.b).

Source: Prepared by author based on Anderson (2001), forestry Law No. 1700 and Forestry Law Regulations (DS. 24453).

The municipalities receive 25% of the forest use and clearing license fees to develop these activities. These funds must be “distributed in accord with the use areas granted in their

respective jurisdictions for supporting and promoting sustainable forest resource use and implementing social works of local value, as long as the municipality complies with the objective of this contribution” (Forestry Law, art. 38b).

Within six months after receiving these funds, each municipal government or association of municipalities must establish a Municipal Forestry Unit (UFM), following the minimum implementation level determined by an SF Technical Directive (No. ITE-002/97). The SF is empowered to request that the National Senate withhold funds from the UFMs if they do not fulfill their functions and to assume the attributions of these units. Financial resources are required to effectively implement the functions transferred to the UFMs, particularly for the tasks of inspecting and controlling forest management and clear-cutting. In addition, the technical functions of supporting the local groups’ forest management demands certain knowledge of the forests’ bio-physical, socioeconomic and institutional characteristics in order to prepare the management plans, as well as a good relationship with the local populations and conflict negotiation skills. Skill in negotiating with private agents or aid agencies is no less an important requisite.

As already mentioned, the Forestry Law transferred 35% of the use license fees and 25% of those for clearing to the prefectures as forestry royalties. It also transferred new responsibilities associated with this revenue, among them the development of UFM support programs, as well as delegating forest research tasks and the design of development plans for the forest sector in their respective departments.

Municipal governments and forest management

This section discusses the municipal governments’ main forest management-related actions. In general, the forestry units have concentrated on classifying forest areas and supporting the formation of ASLs by local logging groups, as well as drawing up management and clearing plans. They have given less priority to activities such as controlling exploitation operations without forest permits and inspecting illegal clearing. The drafting of soil use plans is also less important to the municipal governments and their relationship to the protected areas has been ambiguous.

THE MUNICIPAL FOREST UNITS (UFMs)

Municipal governments began to receive revenue from forest licenses around the end of 1997. Nonetheless, the limited transfer of funds from the SF to the municipal governments before that did not prevent some from creating their UFMs or allocating funds to forest-related activities from their regular budgets and/or externally financed projects. Among these cases are the municipalities of Riberalta, Villa Tunari, Rurrenabaque and Ascención de Guarayos. The support they also received from forest projects or NGOs became a factor that stimulated getting these units underway.

The willingness of these municipalities to dedicate their own resources to forest management activities at least partly reflects a genuine interest in the issue, although it also resulted from their belief that spending money on such activities would help attract additional funds from outside agencies in the future. Some municipal governments are unwilling to spend their resources to cover the UFMs’ operating costs and are only willing to fulfill their minimal financial requirements, partly because they have limited financial resources and their priorities are not necessarily focused on the forest sector.

In certain cases, the UFM is the municipality’s only technical unit, particularly in outlying municipalities with small populations, such as those in the department of Pando and/or north of La Paz, many of which have important forest resources. Although this generates greater demand pressure on these units, it has also led to recognition of the value of the work many of them can do in the municipal public investment planning processes, formulation of development proposals and support to local groups. In some cases, creation of the UFMs has been a slow process, but a large part of the 109 municipalities that receive part of the forest license income have already established one.

Local governments have usually focused investment in urban development programs and projects, the majority of which are located in the municipal seats, and in constructing road infrastructure. They have gradually been paying more attention to investment in educational infrastructure and health programs and have made significant investments in the social field, but their support to the productive sectors is still quite weak. In general, local government investment in social welfare has followed a short-term logic focused on dealing with their municipality’s most urgent demands, in principle coming from the urban populations or the municipal seats, and only afterward on the rural communities (Pacheco and Kaimowitz 1998). All this makes them see the forestry sector as a very low priority for spending allocations.

The resources that municipal governments have received from forest license fees were greater in 1998, when a little over US$2 million came in, then dropped to nearly half that in the succeeding two years and by 2001 the resources effectively transferred amounted to just under US$460,000. This has largely been because the companies with forest concessions have not been complying with the payments for the forest use licenses, which means that those resources have dropped for the whole of the public forest system. Payment of the forestry license fees by the concessions was under discussion as of mid-2000.⁴

⁴ The forestry concessions’ non-payment of license fees is one cause for the return of these areas to state domain. The SF has opted to negotiate collection of the fees arguing that returning concession areas to the state would weaken the forest system as a whole. This raises doubts about whether the current system of financial underpinnings for the public forest system is the best, or whether it should in fact receive resources from outsi de the sector.

The amounts that municipal governments receive from forestry licenses are quite unequal. Between 1997 and 1999, only 30 municipal governments had received more than 80% of the total revenue due them. Consequently, a good part of the municipalities do not have enough resources to set up UFMs in optimum conditions and, as was mentioned, the municipal governments, with few exceptions, are unwilling to invest part of their own resources in them.⁵ In the cases of municipal governments that received more from the license fees earmarked all of it for the functioning of these units, given that other sectors have more urgent investment needs (Flores and Rider 2000, de Urioste 2000).

Source: Prepared by author based on the results of the SF survey of (1999/2000).

In many cases, the Municipal Forestry Units have no work plans or do not fulfill them even if drawn up. In addition, the work plans usually suffer severe budget cuts when they are

⁵ The implementation cost for a UFM, according to the SF directive, averages the equivalent of US$32,154, and even in 1998, the peak year in terms of receiving these resources, only 24 municipal governments received forestry license revenue greater than that amount (Gandarillas 1999:28).

included in the Annual Operational Plans. With few exceptions, the municipal governments only assign minimum resources to finance the personnel and most urgent operating expenses of their forestry units (Pacheco 2000).

Few UFMs are able to fulfill all the functions for which they were created because of other municipal investment priorities and above all the fact that not all municipalities receive enough income from the forestry license fees to be able to finance all the requirements of these units. Even when they do, only part of that money is allocated to the UFMs, mainly due to the municipal governments’ lack of political will (Flores and Ridder 2000, de Urioste 2000).

The municipal governments that have earmarked resources for hiring personnel and equipping their forestry units are those that, in general, received greater average income from the forestry license fees between 1997 and 2000, which to some degree reflects the importance of the economic activity of forests in those municipalities. Other factors that also influenced the municipal governments to support their UFMs were the municipal governments’ political will, the foreign aid available and the demands of local populations to start up these units (Flores and Ridder 2000, Pacheco and Kaimowitz 1998).

FOREST MANAGEMENT PROMOTION BY LOCAL GROUPS

The role of the UFMs has been essential to developing forestry operations by the Local Social Associations (ASLs), above all in the municipalities where informal logging by local groups was traditionally relevant (the cases of Rurrenabaque in the department of Beni, San Buenaventura in La Paz and the three municipalities of Velasco province in Santa Cruz).

The number of ASLs that presented their classification request to the Ministry of Sustainable Development and Planning (MDSP) totaled 41, of which the ministry qualified 20 between July 1999 and May 2000, while the rest had to complete their documentation (Pacheco 2000). In 2000, the municipal governments assigned 680,000 ha to be conceded to ASLs and the next year the SF granted 407,000 ha in concessions to 15 ASLs and approved the management plans for those areas (Guzmán 2001). In 1999, ocal small-scale logging groups had produced 16,000 m³ of lumber, which represented 5% of the authorized lumber production (Contreras and Vargas 2000).

From the request for legal standing through to their final qualification by the MDSP, the process of qualifying the ASLs has been characterized as particularly slow and bureaucratic. The main difficulty was the lack of clarity about the procedures to be followed by both the ASLs and the different MDSP entities.⁶ For the most part, the process for an ASL to be able to obtain its legal recognition took nearly a year, and one association had to wait some 20 months to get MDSP approval.

During the initial period of creating the ASLs, numerous leadership disputes flared up in the organizations (in some cases leading to internal splits) or conflicts linked to

⁶ In accord with the Forestry Law Regulations, ASLs must fulfill the following requisites to become legally recognized: 1) possess their own objective for existence, based on a socioeconomic function and/or common territory for their members, 2) a proven minimum five-year seniority up to the time of the request; 3) effective residence of the group’s members in the municipality, and 4) a minimum of 20 members (RLF, art. II).

discretionary financial resource management by their directors. These problems were aggravated by a lack of democracy within the associations and by the decision-making monopoly exercised by their founders. In general, these groups emerged with little clarity about the internal mechanisms to be used for decision-making, use of their resources and distribution of the benefits (Pacheco 2000). These problems were not irreparable and many ASLs took advantage of the lessons learned.

The forestry units collaborated actively with the ASLs in preparing the documentation required by the MDSP, providing information on the procedures and facilitating information to the Municipal Councils to streamline the initial steps for approving the associations. Although the UFMs had no control over the rest of the process, they became mediators between the MDSP and the ASLs in their jurisdictions.

The forestry units became responsible for delimiting the Municipal Forestry Reserve Areas (AFRM) as a prior step to qualifying and assigning concessions to ASLs that requested forest areas. This was also a long and complicated process and many municipal governments have not yet succeeded in defining their municipal forest areas. Despite the fact that many UFMs with potential areas to be declared municipal reserves received collaboration from forest projects, as was the case of the Bolivian Forestry project (BOLFOR),⁷ and from some NGOS for mapping and delimiting the areas, the real problem originated in the lack of clarity about property ownership rights in those areas.⁸

⁷ The BOLFOR Project originated in 1992 at the initiative of the Government of Bolivia and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), based on the priorities established in Bolivia’s Environmental Action Plan. An agreement between USAID and the Government of Bolivia’s Ministry of Sustainable Development and Planning for implementation of the project, financed by UAAID and PL-480, was signed on August 26, 1993.

⁸ A program underway in Bolivia to straighten out the agrarian property was initiated in 1996 by the National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA), which includes various indemnification modalities. This program has made very slow progress and not all areas with tenure conflicts have yet been provided guarantees. The MDSP’s declaration of municipal forest reserves must be backed by a report from INRA known as a “certificate of certain availability,” declaring the area to be free of third-party ownership rights. This makes the whole process depend on the progress of the indemnification.

Source: Author’s interviews with Luis Fessi G. and J. Guerrero, the respective directors of the UFMs of the municipalities of San Buenaventura and Rurrenabaque in June 2000.

The tenure conflicts and the local governments’ incomplete information about the real availability of public forests in their municipality were partially sorted out through municipal government requests for areas from “the account for greater expanse,” a resolution that opened the possibility of demanding areas over time to complete the 20% of public forests under their jurisdiction. Under the protection of that resolution, the UFMs moved forward in delimiting the municipal reserves and preparing forest concession programs for assignation to the ASLs (Pacheco 2000).

Barely three years after the Forestry Law was approved, the MDSP asked INRA to initiate the measures referring to “certification of certain availability” of the areas requested by the municipal governments based on prior INRA reports. During that lapse, strong pressure on the municipal governments by the ASLs was noted, particularly in northern La Paz, where the conflicts over the superimposition of use rights were strongest. In contrast, the identification of available public forests was easiest in the areas of “la chiquitanía cruceña”, forest concession areas that had been returned as part of their adjustment to the new forestry system, which led to sizable lags in implementing the law in some areas.

As of March 2000, 16 municipalities had filed requests with the MDSP to determine their AFRMs. Considering all these proceedings, the total land identified for municipal forest reserves reached 2,433,000 ha, of which 2,266,00 had been requested from INRA. By that same date, the MDSP had processed 1,156,000 ha (Pacheco 2000). Nearly two years later, toward the end of 2001, the steps had been concluded for an area of only 681,315 ha (see chart).

Following the approval of the AFRM, one of the major challenges to the UFMs was providing support to the local groups in preparing the forest management plans. The technicians of these units have generally been in no condition to assume these activities on their own. The progress in preparing these plans for almost all the ASLs that managed to get a forest concession was thanks to the collaboration of foreign aid projects, above all the BOLFOR Project, which in 1999 defined support to the forestry management initiatives of the ASLs as one of its priority lines of activity.

INSPECTION OF ILLEGAL FOREST ACTIVITIES

The UFMs’ response regarding the monitoring of forest resource use and conversion has been ambivalent. In general, the municipal governments have been more interested in controlling illegal clearing than inspecting informal forest activities because they receive no direct benefit from auctioning off confiscated lumber and because the municipal authorities have an ambiguous relationship with those engaged in illegal logging activities.

When the forestry units participate in controlling informal activities, they generally do so at the request of the Forestry Superintendence, rather than at their own initiative. They are more inclined to intervene in cases where illegal logging affects the interests of local groups and/or occurs within areas designated as municipal forest reserves, which are frequently threatened by illegal logging. In addition, the municipal governments have been more interested in inspection aimed at controlling lumber dealers from outside the municipalities.

The municipalities still have doubts about the SF’s effectiveness in controlling informal logging, and in some cases are afraid to make preventive confiscations due to the SF’s slow reaction capacity. The idea of delegating confiscations to the UFMs has not prospered either, because the SF does not think the UFM directors have a good technical profile for that, and above all because of the highly politicized municipal administration, which could affect the decisions to intervene or not to control the illegality.

Despite that, a few municipal governments have seized the machinery of lumber companies caught working outside their area, although such confiscations are not legally permitted. In addition, the governments are extremely critical of the auction system, which in their view only serves for the lawbreakers to buy back the lumber they illegally extracted and thus obtain legal rights over it at the low cost it usually goes for during the third auction, given the little competition.

The ambiguous UFM attitude toward illegal exploitation prevents the Superintendence from seriously considering these units in the inspection activities, or it tries to involve them just in cases in which it has to legitimate its own actions to the local populations. Nonetheless, there is growing interest within the SF to improve its relations with the UFMs in controlling and inspecting illegal logging, sparked in part by the desire to share costs with the municipalities, given its increasingly limited budget for such activities.

The municipal governments’ role in controlling illegal clearing is more active, in part due to the direct benefits that controlling unauthorized clearing, above all by medium- and

large-scale producers, bring to the municipal income. The municipal governments have not set up a control system for illegal clearing, and most often operate in response to accusations. The UFMs’ interest in controlling clearing is in some cases tripped up by the limited information flows between the UFMs and the SF, in that the latter is in charge of processing the requests and issuing the clearing authorizations.

Because the majority of producers did not fulfill the requisites for approval of a clearing plan, they tended to request a “certificate of possession” granted by the mayor’s office, to dispense with presenting a plot-level land use plan (POP) for clearing requests under three ha. The UFMs have been collaborating actively with small producers in the presentation of their clearing plans, together with the operational forest units of the Forestry Superintendence.⁹ Although doing so implies benefits for the municipal governments, it represents administrative costs that some UFMs cannot assume. In that regard, some NGOs are increasingly collaborating in the preparation of land use and community plans and clearing requests.

MUNICIPAL SOIL USE PLANS

Starting in 1995, an important push was given in Bolivia to the preparation of department-level soil use plans (PLUS) so all departments now have such a plan, executed under the leadership of the departmental prefectures. Nonetheless, the scale of these plans (1:250,000) makes them inappropriate for regulating soil use in greater detail at the municipal level. The decrees that accompanied the Popular Participation and Administrative Decentralization laws specifically declared that municipal governments must formulate soil use plans for their jurisdiction based on the departmental PLUS. These, in turn, should be taken into account so that rural property holders can prepare their POP (Andaluz 1998). In this framework, land use plans should be the main tool for classifying areas for forest use and those for other soil uses.

But the proposed system has not functioned in practice. Regional development planners rarely consult the PLUS for their department. It is also assumed that to be a useful instrument they should be appropriated at the municipal level, yet the majority of the municipalities lack the needed resources or the technical skills to produce their own plans and it is not even a high priority for the bulk of them. The preparation of POPs has made slow progress, although a good number of medium and large agricultural property owners already have one. This measure has not been easy to implement among small producers originally exempted from drafting such plans.¹⁰

The Santa Cruz Prefecture made the main effort to develop a municipal soil use plan in the mid-nineties with GTZ support in the northern portion of the Santa Rosa and San Carlos municipalities. This area was chosen for its multiple and long-lasting conflicts among

⁹ The regulations for clearing and controlled burning (Ministerial Resolution No. 131/97) indicate that the procedures for obtaining a clearing authorization must include three basic requisites: 1) the title that credits the applicant’s right, 2) the POP, and 3) a clearing work plan.

¹⁰ In 1999, the Agrarian Superintendence (SA) issued Resolution No. 046/99 allowing landowners to prepare their clearing plan for up to 3 ha without presenting the POP until the end of that same year. One of the demands to the government in an indigenous and peasant march held in June 2000 was the inclusion of a fund for preparing the POP. The government responded to that request, establishing in DS. No. 25847 that “the work plan for clearings . . . will not be required when the request is for areas under five ha in wooded areas” (art. 1.I). Only the dispositions for greater areas was maintained, in which the state would cover the cost of preparing the POPs through FONABOSQUE and the BOLFOR and PAFBOL projects (art. 1.III). In practice this support has only been declarative.

governmental agencies, settlers, lumber companies and oil companies. The effort, in addition to pulling together a lot of information on soil use, provided a negotiation forum for the diverse actors, generating a soil use proposal accompanied by an implementation plan. The mayoral offices did not head up the process but were key actors in it (Prefectura del Departamento de Santa Cruz – PRODISA – Consorcio IP/CES/KWC 1996).

That situation has not changed much, except for the work carried out by the Sustainable Natural Resource Management Project (MASRENA), an extension of the Micro-regional Development Program of the Ichilo and Sara Provinces (PPRODISA). Until 2001, MASRENA supported five municipalities — Cabezas, Yapacaní, Santa Rosa, San Carlos and Charagua — in formulating their Land Use Plans (PLOT). Only in the first two cases, however, was the entire territory of the municipal jurisdiction included.¹¹ The major objective of this work consisted of developing a methodology compatible with the National Territorial Planning Department’s norms, so that the Prefecture could then advise the rest of the department’s municipalities in preparing their PLOTs.

POSITIONS ON CONSERVING PROTECTED AREAS

The main way municipal governments get involved in managing protected areas is as members of the parks administration committees called “Management Committees,” created to promote the participation of local groups in administering the areas. The main functions of these committees are to discuss the management plan for the areas and collaborate in its implementation.

The municipal governments’ reaction to the establishment of protected areas has been contradictory. In some cases, establishing or expanding protected areas has restricted the preexisting activities, some of them quite old, of loggers, agricultural settlers and indigenous communities. For example, expansion of the Amboró Park and the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park (PNNKM) created serious conflicts with peasant communities located within the areas’ new limits. Other areas, such as the Pilón Lajas Biosphere-Indigenous Territory Reserve (RB-TI) and the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS), have been simultaneously declared indigenous areas and protected areas, thus generating conflicts between the parks administration and the populations over how these areas could be used.

In some protected areas, such as Pilón Lajas RB-TI and the Madidi National Park, both in northern La Paz, the situation was further complicated by the presence of informal chainsaw operators and loggers, for whom timber informal exploitation was an important income source that the administrators of the protected areas restricted. At the same time, these groups were competing for the wood with lumber companies that were also set up within the protected areas (Pávez 1998).

When such situations occur, the municipal governments usually seek to protect the interests of the groups negatively affected by the restrictions on their activities, either because the authorities directly represent these groups or are under pressure to respond to

¹¹ In Santa Rosa and San Carlos, the PLOT was prepared for the area declared as an Agroforestry Unit in the soil use plan of the department of Santa Cruz, located within the El Chore Forest Reserve. In Charagua, only the settlement area of the Guaraní captainships — Isoso, Charagua Norte and Parapitiguasu — was considered in the PLOT, together with the central zone where Mennonite colonies are found.

their interests. For example, the municipal governments involved usually supported the peasant federations in the Amboró Park, while in the PNNKM, the San Ignacio municipal government supported the land demands of communities whose tenure rights were threatened by the area’s expansion (Pacheco 1998b). The Rurrenabaque Municipal Council also pressed for the chainsaw operators to be allowed to operate in some parts of the Pilón Lajas RB-TI (Kaimowitz et al. 200), although their position became more neutral later given an administration less willing to negotiate.

This does not mean that municipal governments always have negative attitudes towards protected areas. With the consolidation of the National Protected Areas System (SNAP), municipal governments have found it difficult to turn around a reality that offers them some benefits through the possibility of attracting outside funds and technical cooperation. It is considered that the protected areas could stimulate tourism and limit the intrusion of outside groups. The mayors’ offices have actively backed the reactions of the area administrators in the Pilón Lajas RB-TI and the PNNKM parks to the presence and/or arrival of lumber and mining companies.

Still other municipal governments seem quite indifferent to the protected areas, especially when they do not involve fundamental conflicts or benefits. This applies, for example, to San Borja’s attitude regarding preservation of the Lajas RB-TI, the vision of San Ignacio de Moxos about the Isiboro-Sécure National Park and the relationship of Samaipata and Yapacani to the Amboró National Park (Flores 1998, Kaimowitz et al. 2000).

Sourse: Prepared by author based on interviews with ASTRAMAR founder J.D. Negrete (December 1996) and Pilón Lajas RB – TI director L. Marcus (July 2000), and Pavez (1998).

UFM RELATIONS WITH OTHER ENTITIES

The Forestry Superintendence has shown greater interest in the work of the UFMs over time, particularly regarding the tasks of controlling and inspecting the logging activity in their jurisdictions. This interest has been mainly motivated by the SF’s lack of sufficient resources to control the illegal logging themselves while the UFMs have financial resources assigned to collaborate in such tasks with that entity.

Despite the SF’s interest in generating greater collaboration with the UFMs, particularly in controlling and inspecting the forest activity, that interest does not always translate into concrete collaborative activities at the local level. In certain cases, the SF’s Operational Forest Unit (UOB-SF) has established good coordination relations with the UFMs based on the need to expand its operational capacity and legitimize its actions with the populations and municipal governments, to which end it has formally delegated functions to the UFMs. In other cases, the entities are quite cool to each other and there is no favorable attitude toward coordination, due to inadequate information flows, personal mistrust and previous experiences of unfulfilled functions, among other factors.

The SF has not yet requested the freezing of funds for any UFM despite having arguments to do so in some cases. The first of the two main reasons for this is that no system of following up evaluating the UFM’s performance has been put into affect and only partial tests were conducted aimed at implementing such a system. The second is that intervening the UFMs could be politically damaging to the SF given the environment of fragile political equilibrium in which this regulatory entity carries out its work.

The prefectures’ collaboration with the UFMs has been more limited, despite the fact that the Forestry Law transferred specific functions and resources to it to help strengthen the UFMs. The Santa Cruz prefecture, through its Municipal Forestry Strengthening Department (DFFM), is the only one that has developed a support program for municipal governments, which lasted until mid-2000.

In 1998, the DFFM emphasized support for the creation of UFMs in some municipal governments and the assignment of a part-time agronomy engineer, as well as concurrent funds to cover 40% of the costs of equipping 14 UFMs created in the department. Nonetheless, institutional changes in the prefecture the following year were accompanied by budget cuts and the virtual paralysis of work. Support from the other prefectures has been more limited given the low priority assigned to these tasks in the departmental budgets, in which the revenue from forest license fees was shifted to other activities.

The BOLFOR project also developed cooperation activities with the UFMs in support of the ASLs in 2000. BOLFOR has supported 19 municipalities in mapping to identify AFRMs with its Geography Information Systems (SIG) laboratory, and in training ASL members in procedures for preparing inventories and census, forest management practices and others. The respective workshops were coordinated with the UFMs and local NGOs. The three municipalities of the Velasco and Ixiamas provinces received the bulk of this support. Other municipalities that received some type of specific collaboration were Concepción, San José de Chiquitos, Roboré, Puerto Suárez and Yapacaní.

The BOLFOR project has helped 18 ASLs prepare their POAFs, mainly by providing technical personnel and financial resources representing 50% of the cost of the inventories and census. An agreement with the ASLs has been signed to this effect, in which both BOLFOR and the ASLs pledged to provide personnel, materials and equipment for conducting the inventory and censuses and pay part of the personnel participating in these activities. BOLFOR also pledged to provide technical assistance for the design of the forest management instruments, and to collaborate in commercialization of the products taken out.

In 1997, when the first UFMs began to be formed, the main collaboration initiatives with NGOs and forest projects were also just getting established. Early the following year it became clear that the UFMs that had done some work enjoyed the support of outside resources. Such was the case of Riberalta’s UFM, which, like Rurrenabaque’s UFM, got Dutch government financing. Others, received support from projects or NGOs such as the VSF in Rurrenabaque, the FAO’s forestry project in Chapare, the Forest Management Program of the Bolivian Amazon (PROMAB) and the Institute for Man, Agriculture and Ecology (IPHAE) in Riberalta and Pando (Pacheco and Kaimowitz 1998).

In addition to this institutional support, other public and private initiatives also existed in municipalities with forest resources. For example, the Rural Community Development Program (PDCR II), implemented by the Vice Ministry of Strategic Planning and Popular Participation (VPEPP), is supporting the creation of environmental units in some municipal governments, among them Rurrenabaque, Ixiamas, San Buenaventura, Reyes, San Borja and Santa Rosa, and will finance the pre-investment phase of a menu of projects they are developing. The majority of municipal governments are proposing at least one project linked to community agroforestry issues and/or the creation of nurseries.

Progress and difficulties

Decentralization has entailed important challenges for the municipal governments, many of which are not prepared to deal with them. It has also, however, unleashed an intense mobilization of resources and local capacities linked to forest management. The first part of this section analyzes the results of the overall political decentralization of the forest resources, and the second concentrates on the most direct impacts resulting from the transfer of forest management functions to municipal governments. The third part recounts the factors that limit greater devolution of powers to these governments.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE OVERALL DECENTRALIZATION PROCESS

The overall decentralization process has made the municipal arenas more democratic by improving civic participation in municipal elections and allowing peasant and indigenous leaders to opt for positions of authority. It has also opened the possibility for the population to take part in public investment planning processes in the municipalities and in monitoring spending. As a result, the traditional municipal elite must now negotiate with previously sidelined groups.

Civic participation has had better results in municipalities with a greater accumulation of social capital because the civil society organizations have increased their negotiating power in local politics. The strong peasant and indigenous organizations have succeeded in getting their best leaders elected as Municipal Council members and in a few cases as mayor. This has not always been possible and in some circumstances political parties have co-opted leaders and through that increased their volume of votes to elect traditional political leaders. In other organizations, grassroots leaders must “lend themselves” to the party initials, exchanging political favors in order to participate in the municipal elections.

In general, the municipalities have prioritized investing their resources in providing education and health services, and in basic infrastructure in the urban centers. To a lesser degree they have received investments to promote productive activities or those linked to natural resources. The social composition of the municipal governments thus has a relative influence on how these resources are spent. For example, municipalities influenced by peasant and indigenous organizations have oriented investment toward rural areas and the municipal governments have supported their broader demands. Some municipalities have supported indigenous territorial demands and other have actively defended and been important spokespeople for the demands of local groups wanting access to forested areas for logging.

Decentralization inevitably affects the balance of power among different groups involved in resource management, which in turn has important implications for resource conservation. For example, if the decentralization strengthens indigenous territorial rights and indigenous peoples conserve their resources more effectively, decentralization will have indirectly supported conservation, even when this was not the explicit goal. If on the other hand decentralization helps consolidate the local elite, whose interest lies on the side of non-sustainable logging, it could easily have the opposite effect. It is difficult to determine a priori what the results will be.

Municipal governments can do little about natural resource distribution or about altering the regulations to set norms for their use. They have only become a negotiating platform for the local groups to interpose their demands, either to the departmental or central government. Beyond that, the local government’s role is quite limited, because all these decisions continue to be concentrated at the central level. This suggests that municipal governments are seen as useful instruments for reducing the implementation costs of the inspection system for forest crimes, but their opinions are barely considered. In addition, the central government usually ignores or is unaware of the economic and social costs to both the municipal governments and local groups of fulfilling the norms.

IMPACTS OF DECENTRALIZATION ON FOREST MANAGEMENT

The reforms have opened new opportunities for the indigenous populations, at least on paper, in that these groups can now get use rights to the resources in their territories, although the effective delimiting and titling of them is very slow. In municipal governments

with important and increasingly influential indigenous participation in local politics, they have won a base for consolidating their demands.

Nonetheless, the indigenous groups that develop commercial foresting operations have been obliged to adjust their practices to the new set of regulations related to rotation cycles, cut log diameters and others issues. These groups tend to face great capital limitations to financing the preparation of their forest inventories and lack the abilities necessary to negotiate their production advantageously. It is currently thought that the indigenous communities could make better use of their resources by establishing agreements with logging companies and other private capital for use of their forest resources.

Allocating 20% of the public forests to small-scale loggers offers an interesting opportunity to these groups. Fifteen ASLs have now formally gained access to forest resources within municipal reserves, have management plans and are developing logging activities. Nonetheless, the process of delimiting and assigning municipal reserves has been quite slow and bureaucratic and some groups have not gotten access to these areas as expected, mainly due to the superimposition of rights in areas requested by the municipal governments.

An important number of ASLs lack the administrative and accounting skills needed to efficiently manage their groups and the producers belonging to them have no associative tradition, which could affect their chances of success. Part of these disadvantages have been compensated by the support programs implemented by the UFMs, but the latter do not have enough resources to provide the support these groups require to put their management plans into effect. Consequently, this scheme has been extremely dependent on the financial and technical assistance of international aid, forest projects and NGOs. Although these organizations tend to supplement the work of the UFMs over the long haul, that indirectly helps develop capacities among the local technicians.

The activities to control informal forest activities have made life difficult for the settlers and small loggers who subsisted from these activities, because they did not have all the requisites to adjust their activities to the new system, above all for approval of their clearing plans, which has been the preferred way to justify logging. The UFMs have become key actors supporting these producers in preparing and processing their clearing plans, partly helping these producers resolve their demands. After a negotiation process between the peasant organizations and the central government, small producers have benefited from greater flexibility in the regulations covering soil use. In addition, the UFMs have become involved in facilitating the application of alternative methods approved by the Forestry Superintendence to permit logging by small producers.

In synthesis, although UFMs receive limited resources that in some cases are insufficient to finance them, they have become actively involved in supporting the ASLs and facilitating forest exploitation by small producers, above all when those groups influence municipal government decisions. Municipal authorities have also been interested in controlling illegal clear-cutting, due to the benefits they receive from charging for license fees, while their responses have been more ambiguous regarding oversight of illegal logging. The reaction of local governments to the protected areas has also been ambiguous for various reasons. In

addition, initiatives related to soil use planning are still not considered relevant at the municipal level.

The forestry regulations and the responsibilities transferred to the municipalities have exaggerated the emphasis on controlling informality and forest crime. Few efforts have been made to promote an economic and institutional environment that favors sustainable forest management initiatives. Along those lines, very little has been done so far to improve user access to productive infrastructure, credit networks, market information, technology transfer and other aspects that could help increase the benefits of forest management. Although there is no doubt that this effort must be promoted mainly from the central and departmental levels, the municipal governments should be linchpins in supporting these initiatives.

It is relevant to note that in the current scheme, the municipal governments, through the UFMs, are seen as implementation agencies for the forest functions transferred from the central level and still have little room for decision-making. For example, they have little or no say in decisions about how forest use rights should be granted and to whom (the creation of municipal forest reserves has been an advance in this regard), or about the kinds of sanctions that should be imposed on illegal logging and the destination of these resources.

FACTORS THAT LIMIT THE TRANSFER OF POWERS

Three factors in the central government limit greater transfer of powers to local governments:

1) Given the local governments’ limited capacities, it is thought that they must be strengthened through high-cost initiatives operating from the central level.

2) The exaggerated politicization of the municipal governments, which could lead local authorities to protect the activities of groups (whether large-scale loggers, motosierristas or settlers) that do not manage the forests sustainably or to intervene in business activities for reasons outside of the technical sphere.

3) The central government’s interest in reserving for itself the allocation of public forests given the state income and indirect economic benefits that these resources could generate for the economy and society.

With respect to the first argument, the central government has invested significant resources in a long process of developing local administrative capacities with relative success since the approval of administrative decentralization, but developing specialized technical abilities is a much more complex process and depends on strong local investment in institutional development. The municipal governments do not invest more in natural resource management because those benefits are perceived as limited. It would be difficult to get the technical units to function at reasonable operational levels with the resources they receive from the license fees, while forest conservation offers no tangible results.

Politicization of the municipal governments has always been a factor that limits institutional development and favors the persistence of social patronage networks, whether by frequent changes in the priorities and lines of action given changes in the administrations

or by favoring small groups with special privileges. Nonetheless, politicization is not limited to municipal administrations; it is usually encouraged from above. In addition, various decisions by the superintendence on regulating resource use also respond to political pressures from influential power groups operating at the central level, making such politicization even more damaging to the interests of diverse local groups.

The final factor that makes the central government monopolize forest resource norm-setting and administration functions has to do with the potential income from forest resources for the national fiscal accounts. Along those lines, the forest policies, despite having helped improve local group access to forest resources, has favored forestry businesses as the main forest management agents, facilitating their conversion to the new system. Establishing limits to the extensions that municipal governments can demand as municipal forest reserves in the name of local groups forms part of that logic.

The three enunciated arguments have functioned to keep the Forestry Superintendence from granting greater functions to the UFMs (such as intervening illegal forest operations or seizing their machinery) or introducing more flexible forest use norms, among other things. Those arguments, not always verified in practice, are a strong excuse used by the central technocracy to limit the transfer of discretionary powers over resource use to the municipal governments, something that would help build a more democratic decentralization.

Conclusions and recommendations

It is quite difficult to separate the effects of decentralization from those that come from other processes, such as reforms to sector policy or changes in the economy. It is possible, however, to examine how the municipal governments’ role in forest management may be modifying the stakeholders’ role and the benefits they obtain from the forest resources. This is closely related to the powers and responsibilities that have been transferred to the local level and how they are applied in practice.

The experience analyzed shows that strengthening the municipal governments’ role in forest management can lead to more equitable access to forest resources, although it also reveals that these results are not ensured because the implementation process could lead to different results. The implications of decentralization with respect to sustainability are harder to determine because they require more long-term systematic evaluations.

The decentralization of forest management in Bolivia has involved some positive results, such as the transfer of forest income to the local level, submission of part of the forest resources to municipal administration and the possibility of local groups managing them, not to mention the municipal governments’ opportunity to oversee forest management. This has unquestionably opened up arenas for participation by previously marginalized groups.

Nonetheless, the decisions about standards remain concentrated at the national level and local governments still have little to do with decisions about natural resource use. There are still barriers that impede the transfer of greater discretionary power to local authorities.

The central level usually limits the transfer to local governments of more power to exercise greater resource management authority by arguing the latter’s limited capacity, the extreme politicization that could lead them to protect groups that do not manage the forests sustainably and the central government’s desire to reserve for itself decisions about the most valuable forest resources. So far, municipal governments have had a mainly instrumental role in implementing the forest system, whose benefits they do not clearly share.

Although it is impossible to evaluate the degree to which decentralization has contributed to resource conservation, experience indicates that more resources have been progressively allocated to forest and agroforest projects. In addition, municipal mayors have shown greater interest in protected areas because of the potential benefits they could generate in the future. In addition, the creation of forestry areas and the support provided to forest user groups doing sustainable forest management is an important advance in this regard.

RECOMMENDATIONS: PROPOSAL FOR AN AGENDA OF ADJUSTMENTS

Different activities can be undertaken in Bolivia to construct more democratically decentralized natural resource management, specifically forest management. Some of these are proposed below without order of priority in three different areas: the first of a legal nature, the second related to forest management and the third linked to the system of civic participation:

Although some of the suggested proposals do not directly relate to the area of competence of the mayor’s office, they refer to aspects that directly or indirectly affect the municipal government’s field of actions in forest management. Rethinking the forest norms or proposing greater civic participation in local policy are factors closely related to better municipal performance in forest management. Some of the proposed reforms have a political content, require agreements among the actors and could have a difficult maturation process, but others could be taken up and resolved more easily, above all those that demand few resources, technical skills and/or political agreements.

Abbreviations and acronyms

AFRM		Municipal Forestry Reserve Area
ASL		Local Social Association
ASTRAMAR		Association of Lumber Workers
BOLFOR		Bolivian Forestry Project
CDF Forest		Development Center
CIPTA		Indigenous Confederation of the Tacana Peoples
FAO United Nations		Food and Agriculture Organization
FONABOSQUE		National Forest Development Fund
INRA		National Agrarian Reform Institute
LF		Forestry Law
MASRENA		Sustainable Natural Resource Management Project
MDSP		Ministry of Sustainable Development and Planning
NGO		Nongovernmental Organization
PLOT		Municipal-level Land Use Plan
PLUS		Departmental-level Soil Use Plan
PNNKM		Noel Kempff Mercado National Park
POAF		Annual Forest Operational Plan
POP		Plot-Level Land Use Plan
PRODISA		Micro-regional Development Program of the Ichilo and Sara Provinces
PROMAB		Forest Management Program of the Bolivian Amazon
RLF		Forestry Law Regulations
SIRENARE		Natural Resource Regulatory System
SF		Forest Superintendence
SNAP		National Protected Areas System
TCO		Community Land of Origin
UFM		Municipal Forestry Unit
VSF		Veterinarians Without Borders

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Contreras, A.; M. T. Vargas. 2001. Social, Environmental and Economic Impacts of Forest Policy Reforms in Bolivia. Forest Trends / CIFOR. Washington, D.C. (unpublished draft).

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Municipal forest management: A new alternative for Honduras

Introduction

Municipalities in Honduras have participated very little in managing the forests and have obtained only meager benefits from the products derived from them, since forest resource management was totally centralized until only a few years ago. Starting in the nineties, however, a decentralization process was initiated that, at least in the legal sphere, has considerably increased municipal participation in administering the forests. Although the majority of Honduras’ municipalities have forested areas in their territories or at least areas best suited for forests, few have tried to use their new attributions to gain more control and greater benefits from management of their forests.

This chapter evaluates the progress in decentralizing Honduran forest management by analyzing the institutions and stakeholders involved, as well as the positive and negative experiences that have resulted. It also offers some conclusions and recommends certain actions to decentralize and democratize municipal forest management further.

The municipal and forest context

SITUATION OF THE FOREST RESOURCES

It is calculated that 87.7% of the country’s total area (112,498 km²) is best used for forest, but only half of that still has a forest cover. In 2000, it was estimated that pines of different species covered 2.5 million ha and broadleaf forest another 2.9 million (SAG 2002).

With respect to the ownership system, forested areas are classified into public and private. The first covers state and ejido, or municipal areas, and the second forests in private hands and areas ceded in trust to indigenous communities under state guardianship. Although the data are inexact, it is estimated that the legalized distribution of land into these categories is as follows: 36% national lands, 28% ejidal lands and 36% private domain (UNAT 1999). The titleholder of the domain also owns the forests it includes and is responsible for their management and administration.¹

In recent decades, deforestation has reached alarming heights, becoming Honduras’ main environmental problem. It is estimated that 108,000 ha of forest disappear each year (UNAT 1999). The main non-industrial forest problem is firewood, which produces 65-70% of the energy consumed in the country. Firewood is used by 29% of the urban population and 100% of the rural population (Jones 1993), and the value of the firewood sold is equivalent to 87,000 full-time jobs (FAO 1999).

Despite Honduras’ immense forest vocation, this sub-sector contributes barely 4% of the gross domestic product (SAG 1996) for various reasons: the statistics do not calculate all goods and services provided by the forest, the value added of forest products is low, there is excessive waste and the economic activity is not managed appropriately² (Valdivieso, pers. comm.).

¹ Although the majority of municipal lands have an ejidal tenure, some municipalities, such as Catacamas, have land that has been bought from individual owners and is thus designated as “municipal private land.”

²According to Manuel Valdivieso of the Honduran Forestry Development Corporation (COHDEFOR), his organization maintains accounts for incorporating forestry costs into the Central Bank’s national accounts only on the extracted lumber it receives through auction, which represents only 36% of the real market volume.

THE LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK OF FOREST MANAGEMENT

Existing legislation

Honduras has at least three important legal norms that refer to forestry aspects. The Forestry Law (Decree No. 85 of 1972) regulates all technical and administrative aspects of forestry and the functions of the State Forestry Administration (AFE). It also contains dispositions involving municipal governments, referring among other things to their role in declaring protected areas, protecting forests in cases of fire, pests or diseases and receiving income in ejido areas.

Decree Law 103 of 1974 created the Honduran Forestry Development Corporation (COHDEFOR) as the AFE’s representative institution. This law limited the general population’s access to the forests and put them under the administration of the state, which assumed the power to carry out all management activities: industrialization, transformation and marketing. In the wake of this reform, landowners, among them the municipal governments, became indirect beneficiaries of forest resources, with the right to receive a small devolution for use of their forest.

The Law for Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector (Decree 31-92 of 1992) returned the forest area to the landowners. The forests became part of the patrimony of individuals on private lands and of the municipal governments on ejido lands. The state’s role was limited to directly administering the national areas through COHDEFOR.

There are also at least 20 legal norms with dispositions applicable to forestry. These include constitutional articles, environmental laws, tourism laws, municipal laws, the Penal Code, the Civil Code, the Law of Concessions and the Law of Incentives for Renewable Energy Sources.

Bills linked to municipal forest management

It should be noted that Honduras’ set of forestry laws is extensive and dispersed and many of their dispositions are not very clear and are even obsolete. Some bills prepared to correct this situation are currently being debated in the National Congress, of which at least four are directly or indirectly related to municipal forest management: the Forestry Law, the Protected Areas and Wildlife Law, the Territorial Planning and Human Settlements for Sustainable Development Law and the General Water Law. All these bills are in the Findings Commission and have a good chance of passage.

The new Forestry bill and the one on Protected Areas and Wildlife are the most closely related to municipal forest management, since they contain management norms designed to strengthen local governments’ capacity to administer ejido Program of Support to the Small and Medium Producers of Olancho lands apt for forest. The Municipalities Association of Honduras (AMHON) and some municipal mayors participated in the project concertation phase, which began in 199 and has been facilitated by the forum titled “Honduran Forestry Agenda.”

One of the project’s main innovations is to provide funds to municipalities to finance forestry projects, so they can deal with the responsibility of managing the forests in their jurisdiction. The idea is that each municipal government can build its own fund with 30% of the value of the forest exploitation in municipal areas, 100 of the value of forestry fines and 10% of the income from exploitation conducted in state forests within the municipal sphere.

Main institutions linked to state forest resource management

The main public institutions involved in national forest administration are the Secretariat of Agriculture and Livestock (SAG), which has norm-setting functions and defines forestry policy; the Secretariat of Natural Resources and Environment,³ which sets policy on protected areas and wildlife; and COHDEFOR, responsible for implementing these policies and the National System of Protected Areas (SINAPH) structure.

COHDEFOR is a decentralized institution with legal status and its own patrimony. It is the agency that implements the state’s forest policy and its objective is to achieve optimum exploitation of the forest resources, ensuring their protection, improvement and conservation. It must also generate funds to finance state programs. In addition to its central offices, COHDEFOR has 12 regional offices, which are subdivided into Management Units and Sub-units, giving it a presence throughout the country that offers national, regional and local coverage.

Municipal government in forest management

THE ORIGINS OF DECENTRALIZATION

Honduras’ first Municipalities Law dates back to 1927, but a contraction of public administration in the fifties reduced municipal autonomy to a minimum and the Ministry of Government and Justice directly named mayors and district chiefs. Forest management became the responsibility of the Ministry of Natural Resources, with very little local participation. This situation changed significantly in 1990, with the new Municipalities Law, which returned autonomy to the municipalities and permitted decentralization of decision-making.

In 1992, local governments obtained greater leadership roles with the promulgation of the Law for Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector, as it allowed them to recover domain over ejidal forests. In 1993, the General Law of the Environment decentralized different environmental and natural resource protection actions to the municipalities and in 1994, the Executive Commission for State Decentralization was created to coordinate the National Decentralization and Municipal Development Program. This program was generated with the acceptance that territorial decentralization was fundamental to strengthening the municipalities and transferring responsibilities to them.

³ This environmental authority was created in 1993 as the Secretariat of the Environment (SEDA); three years later, by virtue of the State Modernization Program, it was converted into the Secretariat of National Resources and Environment (SERNA).

THE MUNICIPAL STRUCTURE AND DECISION-MAKING

Honduras is divided into 18 departments, which contain 298 autonomous municipalities. In addition to its seat, each municipality includes cities, villages and hamlets. A governor named by the executive branch exercises legal power in the departments, while the municipalities are administered by a popularly elected government known as a municipal corporation, and the mayor is charge of administering and legally representing the municipality.

The consultation mechanisms for adopting decisions in the local sphere are plebiscites and cabildos abiertos, or town hall forums. Many institutions and projects, such as the Honduran Social Investment Fund (FHIS) and National Local Development Program (PRONADEL), base their planning and allocate their resources in response to the decisions of community representatives. The planning phase of aid projects is also supported by the cabildos.

Another decentralization tool set up by Honduras’ legal framework are the agreements for delegating competencies. Municipal governments sign them together with the national authorities who administer natural resources and they can become indispensable decision-making mechanisms, as the consensus of both parties is required to decide on use of the municipality’s natural resources.

The Municipal Development Councils (CODEM) and the Local Councils of Protected Areas (COLAP) are two important pieces of the municipal structure linked to decision making in the local sphere. These councils involve the municipality’s leading forces in solving its problems.

THE MUNICIPALITIES’ ECONOMIC RESOURCES

The Municipalities Law groups municipal income sources into two categories: tributary, or taxes, tariffs, services and contributions; and non-tributary, made up of income received through sales, transfers, subsidies, inheritances, donations, fines, surcharges, interests and loans.

The General Income and Expenses Budget of the Republic earmarks 5% of the tax income⁴ to be shared among all municipalities in quarterly payments proportional to the number of their inhabitants as determined by the latest population census. There are various ways to obtain additional income from forest management, through taxes and transfers and through direct exploitation of the forest. In the case of the ejidal forests, municipalities may exploit them directly or sign an exploitation contract with a third party, obtaining earnings indirectly. If the forest is national, COHDEFOR must transfer 1% of the value of the direct exploitation to the municipality in which it is conducted; if the exploitation takes place through direct sale or auction, the municipality gets 10% of the income generated.⁵

Although municipal governments do not receive percentages of the exploitation of private forests, they can always benefit by charging factories, commerce and services, including

⁴ In practice, the municipalities do not always receive the corresponding amount, either because they do not take the necessary steps or because of central government disinterest.

⁵ This measure to strengthen the municipalities was taken in December 1998, right after Hurricane Mitch

forestry companies, for authorizations to function. In addition, the Municipalities Law allows them to tax natural resource extraction and exploitation within their territory, including the exploitation of timber and other forest products such as resin.

Municipalities also have the option of receiving income in the form of taxes for the service of firefighters. In the case of forest management, this applies if fire brigades are formed. They also receive income through the sale of urban lands⁶ and the usufruct of vacant ejidal land, which is more frequent in forest terrain.

THE MUNICIPAL ENVIRONMENTAL UNITS

Municipal Environmental Units (UMAs) are answerable to the municipal governments and support the Secretariat of Natural Resources and the Environment (SERNA) on different issues: the preparation of project terms of reference, environmental impact evaluations, environmental follow-up and control and the verification of fines for infractions of environmental and natural resource protection.

These units originated with the National Environmental Impact Evaluation System’s regulations. They are obligatory, but are generally formed according to the municipality’s development level. The formation process has been slow and gradual, beginning in 1995 with the incorporation of 20 municipal governments under the Environmental Development Program implemented by SERNA with financial support from the World Bank. Another 40 municipalities joined the process later, in the framework of diverse programs of the Municipal Development Foundation (FUNDEMUN).

According to data provided by SERNA’s General Environmental Management Division, there were 183 Municipal Environmental Units in 2001, representing 61% of the country’s municipalities. These units have different organizational levels, with some created very recently while others are fully consolidated and frequently enjoy the support of some outside project or program.

AMHON and FUNDEMUN have had a key role in forming the UMAs, the first by accompanying the process and the second by taking direct responsibility for forming units in 40 municipalities of 16 departments. In addition, several NGOs and a large number of projects linked to different international aid agencies give support to the UMAs.

Management capacity and functions of the UMAs

Municipal Environmental Units have the power to negotiate projects or implement forest management-related activities such as watershed management, forest management and administration, and to draw up lumber processing projects (for example, a municipal sawmill).

⁶ Municipal governments have a limited field of action, since in the urban areas, very small vacant lots are usually titled and in the rural ones the sale and titling corresponds to the National Agrarian Institute. Nonetheless, the municipal government receives direct income in the first case and indirect income in the second.

The forest administration functions that these units may develop, established in Decree 323-98 and in the UMA regulations, are presented in the following insert.

THE MUNICIPAL FORESTRY OFFICES

Some mayor’s offices have created Municipal Forestry Offices (OFM), which generally operate together with the UMAs. OFMs are responsible for drafting and following up on forestry management plans and coordinating the corresponding activities. In general, they receive technical support from the forestry projects working in the area, but as they become stronger, they operate autonomously, as is the case of the municipalities of Lepaterique and Yuscarán in the departments of Francisco Morazán and El Paraíso.

MECHANISMS AND MODALITIES OF PARTICIPATION

The decentralization processes and growing civic participation have generated different mechanisms for participating in municipal natural resource management, some of them oriented to forest management. The following box represents 11 of these mechanisms, the first 5 of which were created by law while the rest were encouraged by programs or municipal support projects, with participation by the municipal governments and local organizations.

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT FOREST RESOURCE MANAGEMENT COMPETENCIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Municipal management in ejidal forests

Honduras’ legal forestry framework establishes that municipal governments may grant resource exploitation contracts in cases of productive forests. Nonetheless, the Municipalities Law (article 11, numeral 13) states that when COHDEFOR has interests in the exploitation, the responsibilities and rights of each party must be defined. In practice, this disposition has been interpreted differently for national forests and ejidal ones. In the former, COHDEFOR does the management plan and markets the cut lumber; in the latter, the municipal government may directly exploit the ejidal forest or cede its rights to a third party through a contract, following the drafting of a management plan that COHDEFOR must approve.

In general, both the Municipalities Law and other judicial norms, especially the environmental and forestry legislation, grant diverse competencies that permit municipal governments to manage the forest resources in their jurisdiction. The following insert presents by thematic area the local governments’ main competencies for administering ejidal forests.

Competencies of the municipal governments in managing the ejidal forest areas

In addition to the competencies described in the box above, the Law of Incentives to Forestation, Reforestation and Forest Protection, approved in 1994, opens the possibility for municipal governments that administer ejidal forests to obtain incentives for that initiative. According to this law, the state must create a Forest Fund, contributing over US$600,000 in capital augmented with forest management resources, to be administered by COHDEFOR. Although the law establishes that the Fund should be regulated and applied within six months, this has not yet happened and the incentives system has not functioned. This indicates a lack of political interest in regulating the law and even less interest in creating the Forest Fund; furthermore, the access mechanisms for the incentives mentioned in the law are unclear.

Municipal management in national and individual forests and protected areas

Although municipal governments have no direct competencies in managing national and private forests, they are supposed to know about the exploitation being conducted in them and coordinate the forest management activities with COHDEFOR. For this, they must sign agreements delegating competencies or cooperation agreements.

Some of the municipal governments’ general competencies in the national and private forests are:

The competencies and coordination relationships are established in co-management agreements in which COHDEFOR, as the entity in charge of administering public protected areas, delegates its responsibilities to the municipal government (or some NGO) to implement the management either totally or partially. When the delegated function falls to an NGO, the mayor must endorse the agreement, as was done in Tela, La Ceiba, Trujillo, Guaymaca and other municipalities.

The National System of Protected Areas (SINAPH) structure has three administrative levels: strategic managerial and operational. AMHON participates in the first two and the municipal governments make up the third, acting as coordinators in the local sphere.

Municipal forest management experiences

EXPLOITATION IN THE EJIDAL FORESTS

As has been noted, municipal governments may administer and exploit ejidal forests, but they must prepare a management plan for approval by COHDEFOR. For example, in the Francisco Morazán Forestry Region, management plans prepared by the municipal governments of the jurisdiction are reviewed, and if they meet the requisites, are approved within 60 days (Fonseca, pers. comm).

In some cases, COHDEFOR, in addition to approving these plans, provides technical assistance in preparing them and providing follow-up. For example, the municipalities of Lepaterique and Yuscarán have received training and technical support from COHDEFOR and from development projects. Once the management plan is approved, the municipal

corporation decides what to do with the forest resource: either sell it to a sawmill or sign a contract with some organization to make use of it.

Municipal governments face many technical, administrative and economic limitations that reduce their possibilities of managing forest resources efficiently and make the exercise of their competencies for managing the ejidal forests irregular. The majority has failed to develop adequate norms for managing the forest resources, except when they have certain economic solvency and can contract technical advice or when projects operating in their jurisdiction include a forest or environmental component.

Despite their limitations, however, municipal governments have shown creativity in planning, coordinating and implementing activities oriented to forest resource management. Examples of this are the 92 agroforest cooperatives working in ejidal forests in coordination with the municipal governments, covering over 100,000 protected ha and generating close to 15,000 direct jobs. In Lepaterique, La Ceiba, Sabá and other sites, forest management funds have been established and the Puerto Cortés municipal government is implementing a project to manage the Río Tulián watershed.

Municipal governments that have succeeded in implementing a forest management system often suffer social conflicts linked to land tenure or to the communities’ relationship to companies that have exploitation contracts. Furthermore, the idea persists in many areas that the lead state entity exercises the true authority. For example, municipal government authorization to cut a tree within the urban perimeter in both Santa Rosa de Copán and Marcovia was invalidated and the municipal officials were threatened with lawsuits for abuse of authority (Cabrera and Umanzor, pers. comm).

MANAGEMENT OF THE FOREST AND PROTECTED AREAS

The most efficient mechanism for controlling forest activities is the management plan that each owner must present beforehand. The law establishes that municipal governments must be aware of management plans operating in their jurisdiction (their opinion is not binding) and ensure that the established limitations and technical prescriptions are respected. Because municipal governments often do not know about these plans and COHDEFOR takes little interest, the law is not obeyed and thus little control is exercised over such activities.

The UMAs have been appropriated to provide follow-up to municipal forest activities; in Marcovia, they control all activities related to mangroves and protected areas in the jurisdiction. The OFMs have also filled this function in the sites where they operate. The problem with the UMAs is their vulnerability to political changes. For example, in the country’s southern region, only 5 of the 14 people who were heading an UMA last year are still in their posts, probably for political reasons rather than lack of capacity.

Lepaterique’s Municipal Forest Fund is an interesting case. This municipality maintains a record of all forest products extracted, which has been a very useful control mechanism for forest activities. The municipalities could also use the COHDEFOR statistics system to control forest activities and charge taxes in their jurisdiction.

As for managing protected areas, the municipal governments could be said to have successfully exercised their competencies to create and administer protected areas and protect the watersheds. The municipal governments of San Marcos de Colón and Campamento, in the departments of Choluteca and Olancho, have created special protection zones or municipal micro-watersheds that have allowed them to seek outside support.

Nonetheless, municipal participation in forest management is still scant, and there is a real national demand for municipal governments to play a more direct role in managing both national and private forests. In many cases, local stakeholders (NGOs and producer organizations) who want to simplify the exploitation, transport or marketing procedures for forest products consider that greater municipal government participation could help speed up the procedures and improve the controls. Such is the case of the Mixed Reforesters Cooperative of the Southern Zone, which has been trying for some years to get a certificate to market the products obtained in plantations established as early as 1982. If these procedures were handled in the municipalities, the cooperative’s work would be much simpler and more profitable.

The communities themselves have demanded that municipal governments participate more actively in approving and following up on management plans. In 1995, COHDEFOR formally promised to send management plan documents to the respective municipal governments, but has not done so.

The Pro veda communal movement, made up of influential people (from boards of trustees, schools, churches, communal organizations) in at least 10 municipalities of the department of Olancho⁸ is an example of community interest in increasing local control of forest management. Its objective is for the National Congress to establish a total prohibition in the area as the only way to stop the depredation of the forests. It is demanding more control and equity in forest exploitation and requesting that local governments manage and grant the exploitation contracts. With this, it hopes to increase municipal income and ensure greater control over forest management

MANAGEMENT OF MUNICIPAL INCOME FROM FOREST ACTIVITIES

Honduras’ legal framework has opened spaces for municipalities to exploit their forests and generate income to be plowed back in locally. They can sell lumber by the running foot or become creditors paid for environmental services. The municipality of Lepaterique received 50-60% of its annual budget just through the sale of lumber (Fúnez, pers. comm). This municipality, like Yuscarán, Guaymaca and many others, receives important income through the exploitation of diverse forest products: lumber, pine resin and seeds.

The sale of cut lumber is an important source of income for 17 municipalities of Olancho. Supported by the Program of Support to the Small and Medium Producers of Olancho (PROLANCHO), they have a trusteeship with a Forestry Development Program that provides them with a reinvestment fund aimed at making the forest activity sustainable. Agroforestry

⁸ Despite their great forest wealth, these municipalities are among the country’s poorest, according to the 2001 Human Development Index.

cooperatives were formed in the municipality of San Isidro, in Intibucá, to manage a sector of the forest and pay the municipal coffers a percentage of the benefits obtained from the logging activities.

The majority of local governments, however, have not taken full advantage of the forest management potential as a development tool. In Olancho, the municipality of Guayape, which has approximately 12,000 ha of forest, only used 20% of its annual exploitation quota of 8,500 m³ for the 1996-2000 period⁹ before the management plan expired. The same thing is happening in La Unión, Jano and Yocón.

Cooperation projects are one of the main financing and technical assistance sources for developing municipal forest activities. One example is the Project of Support to Community Forestry (AFOCO),¹⁰ which supports the Yuscarán municipal government in implementing a sustainable exploitation system. Various projects promoted by the American Cooperative of Remittances Abroad (CARE) generated interesting management models in Belén and Yamaranguila, fostering municipal development through sustainable exploitation of the forest resources. These projects help increase the income of the rural populations and their municipalities.

As already mentioned, municipal governments can tax forest exploitation in their territory. The municipality of Guajiquiro charges for lumber exploitation permits for domestic use and for commercializing wild blackberries (Vallejo, pers. comm); the Yuscarán municipality, in the department of Paraíso, brings in important tax revenue for the extraction of pine resin and other forest products.

Some municipalities also impose fines for forest infractions, but this faculty is not well defined and gets confused with COHDEFOR’s competencies. One case that illustrates this confusion occurred in the municipality of Opatoro, department of La Paz, when a cattle rancher was accused of illegal logging and COHDEFOR imposed a fine of approximately $1,500. The infractor turned to the municipal government, which told him that the fine was really $60 and should be paid there; in the end, no fine at all was ever paid.

A theme closely linked to managing the economic resources generated by forest management is the existence of effective accountability systems. In Honduras, although municipal governments are subject to public administration control mechanisms, audits are not a common practice save in very large municipalities or those that handle many resources. Open town forums, consultative forestry councils and even UMAs themselves function as accountability mechanisms, however.

With respect to forests or protected areas, the agreements signed between COHDEFOR and the municipal governments have clauses making both sides responsible for the commitments contracted; there are also follow-up mechanisms. Nonetheless, mayors frequently concentrate the negotiating power and directly market the exploitable lumber quotas themselves, together with the loggers. Furthermore, although it is stipulated that the income from exploitation activity should be reinvested to protect the municipal ecosystem, the funds are used to cover any kind of need.

⁹ The Permissible Annual Quota is the total cubic meters that can be extracted from the forest each year and still ensure the resource’s perpetuity.

THE MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENTS AND FOREST CONFLICTS

Conflicts related to use or abuse of the forest are common all over the country and municipal governments are frequently the obligatory stakeholder of reference. Many of these conflicts are related to deforestation and illegal exploitation of forest products. The municipal government’s intervention could range from playing a relevant role in the negotiation to simply filing a charge with COHDEFOR, the Environmental Defense Attorney or some other public office.

In the cases of exploiting ejidal forests, conflicts linked to exploitation contracts are common, generally related to demands by those with usufruct rights or people settled on the land. The conflicts generate different kinds of problems and hinder the implementation of logging activities to the point of paralyzing them. In the municipality of Jano, a conflict with a sawmill has impeded logging for three years. In Yocón there has only been one exploitation in five years, due to serious problems linked to land tenure.

Both municipalities belong to the department of Olancho, where land use conflicts are very frequent, and the municipal governments are unable to achieve satisfactory arrangements that permit forest exploitation. With a surface of 23,905 km², mainly apt for forests, this department is the most extensive in El Salvador. It has a complex set of forestry problems, because in addition to its forest wealth, it is strongly pressured by the agricultural frontier. The following insert illustrates the conflicts over use (or abuse) of the department’s forestry resource.

Relationship between governmental and local actors

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE FOREST AUTHORITY

There is no official forestry management coordination policy between Honduras’ central agencies and municipal governments. In fact, the coordination that exists in preparing and approving the management plan and other issues tied to forest management responds more to the will of the officials involved than to an established policy. This fact is exemplified in the following testimony: “Efforts have been made to coordinate, but it has been difficult. In the municipalities we deal with, there was a desire to organize community fire prevention brigades, but despite the good will of COHDEFOR field technicians, nothing could be concretized due to indecision in the institution’s upper echelons” (Cabrera, pers. comm).

There have also been multiple and serious discrepancies between the State Forest Administration and local governments. Some municipal governments resent COHDEFOR imposing legal criteria to support decisions that frequently oppose local interests. For this reason, they often accuse the forestry authority of complicity in irrational forest resource exploitation. As these charges are not investigated, COHDEFOR has lost credibility and often appears as the main cause of forest depredation.

A case that illustrates this type of conflict occurred in La Campa, a small municipality in the department of Lempira. Due to presumed arbitrariness by COHDEFOR personnel in the area,¹¹ the community, with support from the mayor’s office, decided to expel the institution’s employees and prohibit timber and pine resin extraction in the municipality. Years later, during the 1995 Forest Campaigns with Local Governments, the mayor of La Campa invited the COHDEFOR general manager to visit the municipality and relations were reopened.

Despite these difficulties and the absence of clear policies, there are concrete experiences of coordination between COHDEFOR and municipal governments that have had good results both in forest management and exploitation and in administering protected areas. Through COHDEFOR’s delegation, municipal governments grant slash and burn permits to landowners who want to do controlled burning on their lands; together with the permit, they are given instructions to prevent forest fires. In some cases, as in the localities in the southern part of the department of Lempira, the municipal governments have helped eliminate this practice.¹²

The Forest Campaigns with Local Governments were held between 1994 and 1998, coordinated by COHDEFOR and financed by German cooperation (GTZ). These events, which represented a very important effort, had optimum results in the relations between municipal governments and the forest authority.

¹¹ In La Campa, COHDEFOR fined a carpenter the equivalent of $500.00 (his income for nearly two years) for cutting four pine trees. In contrast, the loggers were cited several times for serious violations, but never fined or closed (Tucker 1999).

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT RELATIONS WITH LOCAL STAKEHOLDERS

This section describes the local stakeholders involved in municipal control of forest management and discusses their perception of the local governments’ role. The relationship between municipal governments and local actors depends on various factors, such as the articulation of the existing social forces and the municipal government’s size and political and economic weight.

Local organizations

Patronatos, or civic patron boards, are local organizations through which citizens defend their common interests; they have had a leadership role in the forest issue. For example, in 1991, a sawmill was functioning in the municipality of La Iguala that the neighboring residents argued “brought no benefits, but a lot of problems.”¹³ The Pro-Municipal Development Patronato requested the mayor to close it, since the new Municipalities Law granted him the competence to do so. As the mayor did not welcome the request, the Patronato organized the residents, who went on strike and requested the departmental governor to suspend all municipal government members. The sawmill finally had to leave the municipality.

Women’s groups that organize to implement specific forest activities are another interesting actor in the local sphere. In El Cajón, for example, the Cajón Dam Watershed Management Program (PROCAJON) has promoted these associations to develop activities related to tree nurseries, given their proven capacity and willingness to do the work.

Associations of owners and users of forests and private reserves have gathered force in recent years and are struggling to gain spaces that allow them to obtain greater benefits from their areas in usufruct or under dominion. Such is the case of the National Association of Forest Area Owners (ANAPRAF), whose application for legal status is currently being processed and which aims to work through the municipal associations.

The different groupings linked to municipal governments or promoted by national institutions to administer resources or work in disaster prevention should also be mentioned among local actors. These include the Municipal Development Councils (CODEM), the Local Councils of Protected Areas (COLAP), the Local Watershed Councils and the Water Boards.

Political parties and churches

The political parties still have weight in the local sphere and some have led fights to preserve the forest resources. For example, two leaders who died defending the forests in Yoro and in Catacamas belonged to the Democratic Unification Party.

Other actors traditionally linked to forest management are the educational institutions and churches. Local churches often contribute to the forest management processes; for example, the Catholic Church in Gualapo coordinated Local Forest Forums. In the Mosquitia, the Moravian Church supported Miskito organizations in forest conservation.

¹³ Testimony of a neighbor of the municipality in the video, “La Iguala: rescate de un bosque” (COMUNICA 1992)

The private forestry sector

Other significant actors in the local sphere are logging companies, truckers and informal producers. This sector generates jobs and does important works such as roads, bridges and highways, which represents a benefit for the communities. In addition, the lumber manufacturers must pay rates or taxes for the activities they develop in the municipalities.

Even so, there are important conflicts between this sector and the communities, in which the populations often reject the companies’ industries in the belief that they only come to extract timber, damage the water sources and destroy the wildlife habitat. These conflicts directly affect the municipal government, above all when the companies exploit ejidal forests. The municipalities can sign exploitation contracts with the lumber companies and impose conditions that benefit them; in addition, the contracts are an important source of income for their budgets.

If the community opposes commercial use of the ejidal forests and the presence of lumber companies, the municipal governments find themselves forced to choose between the income generated by the logging contract and the political cost of confronting a population that is against the activity. In addition they expose themselves to a series of legal conflicts such as land tenure disputes, claims to rights of possession and even a refuting of the contact that could complicate their relationship with both the population and the lumber companies even more.

This situation, which has come up in several municipalities, at times with regrettable consequences, deserves special attention, as it threatens the possibility of forest management being a motor force of local development. The reasons the communities reject the lumber companies must be analyzed and the quota of responsibility in each case accepted so the problem does not grow, reducing the development options of municipalities that have important income potential in their forests.

Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)

The NGOs with an environmentalist orientation are also important because they support the municipalities with resources and technical capacity. The case of MOPAWI (Development of the Mosquitia) is very interesting, as it shows how an entire region can be supported by an NGO’s credibility and its managerial capacity to promote the region’s development; in fact, nearly all activities projected for the Mosquitia seek an alliance with MOPAWI. In general, given their structure, with agile administration and the legal capacity to process projects, NGOs can contribute not only technical aspects to the municipalities, but also planning, social aspects and other elements needed for a successful initiative.

Although NGOs tend to have a lot of weight, few of them work directly in the forestry field and fewer still coordinate their activities with the municipal governments. The majority of them do very low-scale reforestation, producing plants in their own nurseries that they share with the municipal government or using plants the municipal nurseries produce. In general, NGOs are valuable allies of the municipal governments and support them significantly so they

can improve their ability to co-manage protected areas, above all in the cases of agreements where both parties share rights and responsibilities.

There have been some cases of NGOs that use the local governments to obtain funds then twist their mandate, misappropriating the resources or using them for their own interests, which makes some municipal governments reluctant to relate to them. It is more common, however, for NGOs to be important municipal government allies, supporting them technically and guaranteeing follow-up to projects that could not be implemented without that support.

Ethnic Groups

Indigenous groups have gained space and become protagonists in local forest management. In 1995, some groups belonging to the Coordinating Body of Indigenous and Black Peoples of Honduras (COPIN), together with six municipal governments in the departments of La Paz and Intibucá, opposed the transporting of lumber products. They succeeded in getting a 10-year forest prohibition imposed to halt tree felling in the area by lumber companies using traditional exploitation techniques and leaving no benefits for the communities.

In general, these groups have their own statutes, which have more legal force than the Municipalities Law. The indigenous or Garífuna groups try to enforce the International Labor Organization’s International Convention 169,¹⁴ which gives them the faculty to use the natural resources on their communal lands under authority from their own ethnic group.

The relationship of these groups to local government depends on the proportion of the indigenous or black population existing in the municipality and the municipal government’s make-up. In the infrequent cases in which the municipal representatives are themselves from ethnic communities, they are respectful of these peoples’ customs even if they act in the name of the municipal government, as is the case in Guajiquiro. In these cases, the ethnic group can ally with the municipal government to solve community problems.

There are, however, municipalities such as Tela and Trujillo, with a numerous indigenous population that is inadequately represented in the local government. There the relations between the ethnic group and the municipal government are quite tense, above all due to land tenure conflicts. In these cases, the groups pressure for solutions to their problems through national mobilizations.

¹⁴ This convention on indigenous and tribal peoples in independent countries went into effect in Honduras in 1995.

Development projects¹⁵

Development projects implemented in the municipalities are one of the most important forces in Honduras’ local forest management scene. While there are many examples, the case of Lepaterique is one of the most representatives (see insert). In general, such development programs and projects significantly support the local governments’ forest initiatives, both those with an exclusive forest orientation and those that incorporate the forest component as part of their work plans.

These projects have promoted the design of different participation mechanisms that have been very successful. The Municipal Development Council in the municipality of Guajiquiro could be mentioned as an example. It has functioned for many years and has proven to be more effective than some legal mechanisms. The same is true of the local forest forums encouraged by the GTZ in various municipalities or the Forest Management Program supported by PROLANCHO.

In addition to short-term benefits, the projects amplify discussion around the forest issue. Municipalities that previously gave their forests no importance become reference points of forest management once the citizenry becomes more aware of this issue and access to new management technologies translates into more and better job opportunities.

¹⁵ It is difficult to enumerate all the projects linked to the forest sector, but a recent document established that 15 different projects were functioning in 2002 (ESNACIFOR 2002).

Analysis of the municipal forest management processes

THE DECENTRALIZATION PROCESS

An important decentralization process that began in Honduras in the nineties and was sketched out in various laws and general and specific policies aimed at strengthening the local governments has had an important impact on the country’s forest management. From the legal perspective, many competencies linked to forest activity were transferred to the municipal governments, direct management and administration policies for the ejidal forests were drawn up, assistance in implementing the national forestry policy was designed, and contracts, conventions and other elements related to management of the forests and protected areas were signed. This process has also opened spaces for strengthening municipal autonomy through the receipt of income generated by forest exploitation. It still must be further strengthened, however, if it is to fill the gaps it currently has deal with.

Coordination between COHDEFOR and the municipal governments

The central government, essentially through COHDEFOR, retains the majority of competencies linked to productive forest management in protected areas. In the case of ejidal forests, although the municipalities have been given more responsibilities, the majority of local governments have not assumed them or taken advantage of the opportunities these competencies could represent.

In addition, the mechanisms needed to permit local governments to assume the transferred competencies effectively have not been clearly defined. Those governments that have been able to implement their new responsibilities have had the support of cooperation projects or other outside actors such as NGOs. The majority of municipalities know very little about the new forest management competencies. In general, the mayor is the best informed, though there is an effort to train the UMA heads. Other municipal officials have little information on the subject, which leads them to commit errors, for example by adjudicating contracts to individuals or entering into competency conflicts with COHDEFOR.

Although COHDEFOR is the most important central agency on the forest issue, it has no policy for coordinating and transferring knowledge and technical capacity to the municipal governments. The limited coordination that has taken place has been due to the good will of the officials involved. In some cases, COHDEFOR officials stick to the hierarchical structures and try to impose their viewpoints, which has sparked conflicts with the municipal governments. In addition, COHDEFOR is dealing with internal problems that limit its advisory capacity and prevent it from assuming its function of collaborating with municipal governments in managing the forests with full responsibility.

The limitations in the forest management decentralization process are not due only to the central agencies’ policies and actions, however. The municipal governments have their own limitations, such as the fact that their officials change every four years, which makes the

continuity of forest management difficult over time. In addition, their activities depend heavily on the political interests of the local actors and in the majority of cases, the sustainability of the forest is not a priority.

The municipalities’ incentives and capacities

Probably the greatest element motivating municipal governments to get involved in forest management is the possibility of increasing their budget and improving the local economy through forest exploitation. A second mobilizing factor is the electoral constituency’s interest in the forest issue. In fact, this interest has generated changes in the campaign messages of mayoral races, which are now more oriented to protecting the forest, in many cases the municipality’s main resource.

The possibilities of pulling in income are abundant and varied, but do not fulfill the municipal government’s expectations. Sometimes central government transfers do not reach the obligatory legal percentage (5% of the national budget). The transfer of 1% of the real value of the forest resources exploited in municipal territory is a very low percentage. With respect to exploitation of the ejidal forests, which offer wide-ranging possibilities, the municipal governments’ lack of technical and economic capacities acts as an obstacle to their use.

In theory, municipal governments with more forest resources could significantly increase their budget by appropriately managing both the ejidal forests and the income they get from exploitation of national forests within their territory. The experiences have not been encouraging, however, and even those cases that have been successful, such as Lepaterique, have not proven to be sustainable.

Ignorance about the activity, traditionally linked to the private sector, could be one cause for the low forest income level. There are proven cases of inability to administer the resource efficiently. Municipalities with annual cutting quotas exceeding $60,000 have not managed to develop a basic capacity to manage and take advantage of the forest.

Another factor that influences low forest income is the lack of transparency in resource management in some municipalities. The excess power concentrated in the mayor, with no clear, obligatory and systematic accountability mechanisms, permits the flight of resources that should be going into the municipal coffers.

Municipal governments complain that the money from the fines imposed by COHDEFOR for forest infractions never get to the municipality where the infraction was committed. Indeed, they are not even collected, because COHDEFOR does not make the effort, thus encouraging impunity and lack of credibility in the system. The municipal governments think they could be more effective in dealing with infractions and invest the collected fines in local development.

Conclusions and recommendations

For nearly a century, centralized forest management in Honduras has not produced successful experiences and the current model is collapsing. Other formulas must be sought, and the recent participation of municipalities and communities, with defined roles and responsibilities and adequate control, is a gamble on sustainability.

A decade ago, the country lacked any real forest management capacity in the municipalities to complement the central government’s actions. Today, in addition to the strengths of local governments themselves, both a public and private institutionality exists that favors decentralization and offers an attractive alternative for improving forest management.

Decentralizing and fostering participation have helped the municipalities get more involved in their territory’s forest management and democratize information handling and access to resources. The following are some of the positive impacts of decentralization to the municipalities:

But even though important progress regarding decentralization and forest management can be pointed to, much remains to be done. A constant seems to be that the state forest authority still assumes many competencies and takes space away from emerging sectors that could help improve the condition of the country’s forests.

Most municipalities are poor and have no poverty mitigating strategy. There seems to be no awareness that promoting forest management within the community could be a way to reactivate the local economy and thus help overcome the poverty levels in the municipalities.

Although the local governments have not yet grasped the development potential implied in appropriate management of their forests, decentralization has triggered an intense process by these governments of mobilizing forest management-linked resources and capabilities and becoming the obligatory counterpart for the majority of environmental activities, programs and projects.

COHDEFOR is a key actor in the decentralization of forest management in Honduras. Nonetheless, centralization, the lags and loss of quality in the services provided by this institution have a negative effect on municipal governments because they do not get the advice needed to promote their own forest management. The main problem right now is lack of control over forest activities and inadequate coordination between COHDEFOR and the municipal governments to improve that control.

There are also processes underway that need to be strengthened, starting with decentralization itself. While decentralization has yet to demonstrate that it is the panacea some believe, it at least represents a different option that can breathe life into a relatively spent system. Although support to municipal strengthening has been a main focal point of national policies, the resources needed to implement that policy have been lacking.

Different municipal forest management experiences have been described in this chapter. In general, it can be stated that there is great potential for local forestry development in Honduras. Certain policies have to be improved, laws and regulations have to be changed or applied better and municipal officials have to be trained, but the municipalities as initiators of forest management are an alternative that must be seriously explored. Lastly, it should be noted that, due to the country’s strong centralist tradition, forest management decentralization is a process that is too recent to permit absolute conclusions about its results.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Improve the decentralization process

To be able to comply with the policies and laws designed to decentralize forest management, the current management system must be evaluated and the possibility considered that local governments should be the main recipients of the benefits generated by sustainable forest management in their municipality.

It is recommended that a base study be done in all municipalities to evaluate the socioeconomic and environmental effects and impacts of municipal forest management in various development alternatives that include the necessary investments.

2. Expedite municipal forest management

The formation of municipal and communal businesses must be promoted and the necessary technical and administrative advice, adapted to their needs, should be provided.

Ejidal forest management must have its own norms. Municipal governments and local stakeholders must have a preponderant role, respecting the principle of transparency and the right to information by the whole population and expediting the functioning of social audits with an accountability mechanism. The Forestry Law must permit specific norms for ejidal forests, just as for national and private forests.

Those involved have to get beyond the conventional exploitation of raw materials, seeking greater value-added transformation that uses the resources more efficiently and strengthens the local economy. Options such as eco-tourism, forest certification and projects based on clean development mechanisms need to be explored.

Land use planning and local development plans should include the forest aspect and ensure the availability of land for that use and the instruments to guarantee its permanence.

3. Validate and disseminate conflict resolution mechanisms

The State Forestry Administration and municipal governments must design, discuss, validate and put into practice an appropriate mechanism for resolving conflicts that come up in forest management. Some already available entity such as the local forest forums could be used and rules established for its organization and functioning, granting it official status as a conciliation body that can provide validity to its resolutions.

4. Improve relations between COHDEFOR and the municipal governments

A mutually beneficial strategic alliance must be hammered out to improve the collaboration levels between municipal governments and the forest authority. A framework agreement could be signed in which the general conditions for the behavior of both parties regarding ejidal forests could be laid out, remembering that local governments also have

competencies and responsibilities in the national and private areas. Specific agreements could also be reached between the mayor’s office and COHDEFOR that detail specific aspects such as advice and support levels.

Because these agreements must be equitable, they must be broadly discussed, incorporating the community to ensure their rights. They must be public documents that any interested citizen could consult, and have effective application mechanisms.

To assure compliance with the agreements, a follow-up strategy must be designed with precise objectives. In the municipal governments, the UMA could be the vehicle with forest authority, while in COHDEFOR a liaison office with the municipalities that has the infrastructure and resources needed to provide technical assistance, approve operational and management plans and exercise supervision and control functions could be created to handle issues related to ejidal forests.

5. Institutionalize Forest Campaigns with the municipal governments

COHDEFOR must provide effective and systematic technical assistance to strengthen the municipal governments’ forest management and administration. The Forest Campaigns with Local Governments must be reinstated, involving those governments in planning and development so their real needs and possible resources can be considered.

The campaigns are very costly, so joint financing mechanisms must be sought, in which the municipal governments assume the costs of their participants and COHDEFOR assumes the part corresponding to organization, personnel displacement, publication of memoirs and other aspects. Financing for this activity, which should be held at least every two years, could also be sought from other sources, such as the agencies that support decentralization or forest management.

6. Increase the municipal income derived from forest management

In cases in which there must be a legal reform, the municipal governments could prepare an advocacy strategy to convince the National Congress to support it. The bills on Forestry, and Protected Areas and Wildlife currently being discussed in Congress include some options like those mentioned.

7. Strengthen the municipal governments’ technical bodies

The UMAs and Municipal Forestry Offices are the municipal governments’ technical bodies; the first are institutionalized and the second operate only in a few municipalities. Strengthening them includes providing basic infrastructure and the technical capacity municipalities need to manage their forests well.

When the UMAs and OFMs operate simultaneously, it is necessary to clarify the differences in their mandates; it is thus recommended that the competencies be delimited between the two and a single model designed for responsibly organizing forest management in the municipality in a way that complements rather than substitutes the UMA.

An OFM is justified in municipalities with important forest resources, while the UMA must be able to manage and control areas with few exploitable forest resources. The UMAs must be depoliticized, ensuring labor stability for the assigned personnel. Perhaps a single selection and hiring system will have to be worked out based on preparation and professional merit, in which the municipal associations or foundations with national coverage and credibility could contribute. The technical and administrative capacity must also be improved using the income received through fines for forest infractions. Although the UMAs are fully accepted in the municipalities, there is a perception problem, since the majority of mayors see them as linked to SERNA and not within the municipal structure; this perception would have to be changed.

8. Mechanisms to improve credibility

To increase the credibility of the municipal governments’ forest management role, there should be a reliable mechanism to evaluate results from the technical and socioeconomic viewpoint; the local governments themselves must identify this mechanism.

The municipal governments could consider the public auction as a transparent procedure for selling ejidal forests and govern them by the norms of the State Contracting Law.

As an additional accountability mechanism, an audit could be recommended that functions on three levels to create more credibility: the mayor orders a duly accredited professional or firm to do the audit; the results are made known to the Municipal Corporation in full and, in the third instance, some community representatives are invited to examine them.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Bibliography

ANED, 1999. Reglamento de Unidades Ambientales Municipales. Offprint of the Consultancy’s Final Report. SERNA-PRODESAM/Banco Mundial. Tegucigalpa.

ASDI-BID, 2002. Mapeo y caracterización de la sociedad civil en Honduras. Informe Final. Tegucigalpa.

ESNACIFOR, 2002. Directrices para el Manejo Forestal Sustentable de Honduras. Consultancy financed by AID to support SERNA. Tegucigalpa.

FAO, 1999. Estudio de Consumo de Leña en el Sector Domiciliario de Honduras. Tegucigalpa.

Ferroukhi, L.; Aguilar, A.; Wo Ching, E. 2001. Gestión Forestal de los Recursos Naturales. Papel del MINAE de las Municipalidades. San José, Costa Rica.

PNUD, 2000. Índice de Desarrollo Humano de Honduras 2000. Tegucigalpa. Editorama, S.A.

SAG, 2002. Compendio Estadístico Agropecuario 2001. Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería. Tegucigalpa.

SAG, 1996. Características y perspectivas del Sector Agrícola Hondureño para el año 2000. Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería. Tegucigalpa.

Tucker, C., 1999. Manejo Forestal y Políticas Nacionales en La Campa. Mesoamérica No. 37. Vermont, USA.

UNAT, 1999. Plan Maestro de la Reconstrucción Nacional. Lineamientos del Sector Forestal. Unidad de Reconstrucción Nacional. Gabinete de la Reconstrucción, Tegucigalpa.

Vallejo, M., 1995. Guía de Legislación Ambiental Municipal. Preparada para la Fundación para el Desarrollo Municipal. Tegucigalpa.

Legal norms

Territorial Planning and Human Settlements for Sustainable Development bill (of April 2002)

Individuals interviewed

Veijailainen, Pertti. JAAKKO PÖYRI, Senior Consultant on Natural Resource Management

Decentralized forest management policies in Guatemala

Introduction

As a product of the 1996 peace negotiations that ended three decades of armed conflict, a new concept of nation began to emerge in Guatemala together with unprecedented arenas for social participation that have been slowly consolidating since then. Based on the country’s current Constitution, civil society, the financial sector and the political parties reached important consensus to promote economic and administrative decentralization to help promote the country’s regional development and to adopt the measures needed to conserve, develop and efficiently use its natural resources.

The Peace Accords¹ established the need to strengthen community participation in state management by decentralizing public administration and strengthening municipal government. The existing Municipal Code grants the mayors’ offices the faculty to develop their administration, including that of natural resources, autonomously.

Promulgation of the 1996 Forestry Law opened new possibilities for the country’s 331 municipal governments to participate more actively in forest resource management. New responsibilities were transferred to the municipalities and their capacities to support the central agencies in local management under the leadership of the State Forestry Administration were strengthened. These processes responded to the need to reduce the central government bureaucracy and more efficiently regulate forest management and control activities.

It has not been easy to evaluate the results of the decentralization policies in relation to local development, economic benefits, community participation and resource conservation, however. This chapter is an attempt to analyze the state policies geared to promoting municipal forest management, the municipalities’ own forest management capacity as such and the municipal governments’ role. It also discusses the efficiency of these policies and some of the limitations that must be considered in generating conditions for efficient municipal forest management.

The institutional forestry context

THE RESOURCE SITUATION

Guatemala’s territory covers 108,889 km², of which 30,176 km² are broadleaf forest, 2,282 km² are conifers, 1,270 km² are a mixture of the two, 174 km² are mangroves and 3,600 km² are secondary forests. Protected areas total 28,658 km². Despite this extension, the forestry sector contributes barely 2.5% of the Gross Domestic Product (INAB 2000).

The forestry sector’s main problems are a) the advance of the agricultural frontier, with the consequent loss of natural forest; b) excessive cutting of firewood, which exceeds both natural regeneration and the reforestation capacity; c) selective felling, which ultimately degrades the quality and regenerative capacity of the forest mass and d) the advance of urban zones and human settlements.

The advance of the agricultural frontier is the most extensive problem and has the greatest

¹ The Peace Accords, signed by the Government of the Republic and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) in December 1996 brought 36 years of internal war to an end.

negative impact on the forests. It has to do with a growing rural population that demands land to cultivate and firewood as the main energy source, given the lack of non-agricultural employment and income possibilities.

The policies to counteract deforestation have been designed strictly from a forestry perspective, without considering the socioeconomic factors linked to the advance of the agricultural frontier and increased rural poverty, rendering them unable to reverse the shrinkage of the forests. For the 1979-1999 period, the various reforestation projects and programs operating in the country only reforested 56,303 ha, well below the estimated 80,000 ha deforested each year (INAB 2000).

FOREST OWNERSHIP

Forest ownership in Guatemala is linked to that of the land: the landowner, whether individual or institutional, also owns the woodland, except in cases where the owner has ceded that right in some form of agreement. There is some confusion in the definition of tenure categories, which are quite complex; the most important ones are described below:

On ejidal lands the municipal government can only make use and management decisions, but it can exercise promotion, monitoring, control and coordination functions on the other tenure categories.

THE LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK

The legal framework directly related to forest activities includes the Forestry Law (Decree 101-96) and the Protected Areas Law (Decree 4-89 and its reforms: 18-89; 110-96; 117-97). CONAP is the agency responsible for administering protected areas. To administer forests outside of the protected areas, the 1996 Forestry Law created INAB, a decentralized

autonomous entity with its own legal identity, patrimony and administrative independence. INAB is present in 9 regions and 31 sub-regions around the country. The promulgation of Decree 101-96 allowed municipal government involvement in forest administration.

Representatives of the Ministry of Public Finances, the National Association of Municipal Governments (ANAM), the universities, the Central National Agriculture School, the Forest Guild and the Association of Nongovernmental Organizations Linked to Natural Resources and the Environment (ASOREMA) sit on INAB’s board of directors, which is coordinated by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food (MAGA).

The Forestry Law considers reforestation and forest conservation a national emergency and stresses collaboration with the municipal governments. It also establishes the conditions under which INAB defines its plans, programs and projects in accord with the strategic guidelines of the Forest Action Plan for Guatemala (PAF-G) initiated in 1992 (Martínez 2000). This plan, geared to conserving and developing the productive natural forests and forest plantations, includes regulatory instruments and incentives.

The municipality’s role in forest management

LEGAL COMPETENCIES

The Municipal Code (1999) establishes the following municipal functions: a) caring for its territorial integrity, strengthening the economic patrimony and preserving the natural and cultural patrimony, and b) promoting the inhabitants’ effective, voluntary and organized participation in resolving local problems.

Article 8 of the Forestry Law assigns the municipal governments the following powers: a) to support INAB in carrying out its functions; b) to contribute to the formulation and conducting of educational forest programs and c) to speak on behalf of the policies, strategies and programs that INAB designs. It also establishes municipal government participation in INAB’s management body through a representative of ANAM on its board.

Article 8 also establishes that municipal governments must collaborate with the state forestry administration in applying the law and thus must have environmental offices. The municipalities have various competencies related to forest management; for example, the formulation, approval and implementation of development plans for local forest resources. Article 58 of the Forestry Law establishes inspection systems to avoid illegal exploitation and obliges INAB to support this work and report to the local governments about authorized licenses and management plans in the municipality.

The following chart summarizes the municipal governments’ competencies and responsibilities regarding local forest management established in various laws: Forestry Law, Protected Areas Law, Municipal Code, Law of Environmental Protection and Improvement.

FINANCIAL MECHANISMS

Guatemala’s municipal governments have various mechanisms to help finance local forest management. Anyone granted an exploitation license must pay INAB a 10% tax on the value of the cut lumber, of which the municipal government has the right to 50%, to be used for control and inspection tasks and for reforestation projects. The local government also has the right to 50% of the amount obtained from concessions that INAB grants for national lands located within its jurisdiction. Article 71 of the Forestry Law allows the municipal governments access to the benefits of the Forestry Incentive Program (PINFOR), for which it must present reforestation or management plans approved by an authorized forester.

PINFOR is one of the best-known financial instruments, since some 18,000 ha have been reforested through it between 1998 and 2001. That very same amount of land was also reforested with previous programs, but it took 20 years and cost more (INAB 2000). INAB is in charge of administering PINFOR, which is financed with 1% of the state’s ordinary income budget. The program has a 20-year duration (it concludes in 2017) and its main objective is to foster sustainable forestry production in the country, stimulating investments in forestation, reforestation and natural forest management. The incentives are directed to independent producers or organized groups dedicated to reforestation and maintenance projects on lands apt for forests or to natural forest management.

Thanks to PINFOR, various municipal corporations have implemented their own reforestation or natural forest management projects. The beneficiaries of the incentives must invest their own resources to initiate the reforestation or forest management activities, with INAB technicians supervising and verifying fulfillment of the approved plan. At the end of the first year, after proving the quality of the works implemented, the beneficiaries receive a direct payment that covers their reforestation or management costs. According to the project’s characteristics, they receive economic compensation for maintenance in subsequent years up to a maximum of five.

INCOME SOURCES

The main municipal income sources are: a) ordinary revenue (real estate taxes, fines, rates for street cleaning, garbage collection, water distribution, marriage registry, etc.); b) central government transfers; c) loans and credits; d) income for forestry services and licenses and for reforestation projects through PINFOR; and e) contributions from international cooperation.

The transfers from the central government to the municipal governments are the highest in Central America: 10% of the national budget by constitutional mandate. Furthermore, the last fiscal reform created the Value-Added Tax for Peace (IVA-Paz) to bring in resources to finance social investments in the framework of the Peace Accords; a percentage of this tax, which exceeds the constitutional contribution, is earmarked to strengthen the municipal governments. For example, the transfers to the municipal governments were as follows in the first quarter of 2002:

Nonetheless, a constant in municipal governments throughout the country is their meager capacity to collect their own rates and taxes, leaving them highly dependent on the central government transfers. In addition, their indebtedness level has risen, above all due to spending on infrastructure and civic works. With respect to the Single Real Estate Property Tax (IUSI), there is no municipal cadastre or the needed technical and administrative capacity to collect the tax.

Some of the municipal revenue collection mechanisms established in the Forestry Law come from income generated by forestry activity. One of those is to tax the value of cut lumber, but the results are low compared to the central government transfers; between 1999 and 2001, only Q1,519,305 was transferred to the municipal governments annually through this tax. Another option is the incentives paid for reforesting or managing and exploiting their own forests. During the 1998-2001 period, the municipal governments obtained approximately Q7.1 million as forestry incentives, which they invested in reforestation and natural forest management programs. This figure represents 5.4% of the total PINFOR investment of Q132.2 million during this period (INAB 2000).

While the financial flow from forestry categories is generally low, however, there are exceptions: in one four-year period (1998-2001), the municipality of Sayaxché, Petén, succeeded in collecting Q2,182,323 for forestry activities (Carillo et al. 1998).

Municipal forest management

This section describes the dynamic observed in some municipalities based on analyzing ejido management and administration and presents the state-promoted efforts to support municipal forest management.

MANAGEMENT OF THE EJIDOS³

Ejidos represent an important land and forest area in several Guatemalan municipalities. The nature of the tenure is often confusing, since it is not known whether the land ownership is communal or municipal. In many cases, the only property title dates from the colonial period and municipal administrations rarely have a cadastre so cannot even offer exact information about the size of the communal and municipal areas.

Although no precise information could be found about the total extension of the ejidos, it is clear that they represent important areas under municipal administration;⁴ in the Petén, ejidal forests cover approximately 138 000 ha. Due to the scant growth of forest resources, local authorities are up against problems such as increased demographic pressure, the advance of the agricultural frontier, deforestation and market changes. The solutions have ranged between totally prohibiting the use of forest resources, directly managing them, co-management and privatization.

³ This section is largely based on the results of a research project conducted by the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty (FLACSO) in 2002. The project culminated with a study in 11 municipalities designed to better understand and systematize the conditions that have allowed the development of local arrangements for managing municipal ejidos. We especially thank FLACSO for its collaboration.

⁴ In Guatemala, the proportion of land under municipal administration is smaller than in Honduras.

The revenue municipalities obtain from forests on ejidal lands comes from logging permits, tariffs charged for gathering firewood, land rental and the sale of timber. This income is very low compared to municipal expenditures, although there are some exceptions such as the municipality of San Vicente de Pacaya, which has an administration and management agreement for the Pacaya Volcano National Park and in 2000 reported Q207,000 in income from the sale of entrance tickets into the park; 28% of municipal investments go for land management projects in the park itself.

Rural populations depend on forest resources in communal and municipal lands to satisfy their needs for firewood, lumber and other products for domestic use. There are no norms, written rules or procedures for managing these lands, however. The Forestry Law currently in effect is often applied in combination with locally established rules and control norms.

In general, community groups administer the communal forests and establish use norms for them based on custom. In some cases, however, the communities designate their mayor as the maximum authority on decisions regarding use of the forest resources; this is the case, for example, in San Antonio Ixchiguán and San José Ojetenam, in the western highlands department of San Marcos (Wittman 2001).

In the case of municipal forests, the mayor’s office has competency over use of their land and exercises it in response to community needs and for income generation. At times, this can endanger the forests, as when there is strong pressure to release lands for agricultural activities, as occurs in some municipalities of the department of San Marcos. Land conflicts, aggravated by the return of those displaced by the civil war, make many municipalities prefer to use their lands for infrastructure projects or agricultural production.

In many municipalities, however, the authorities cede responsibility for resource use and management to the community via local agreements. These accords can totally delegate responsibility to organized community groups for forest use, access and management or can take the form of co-management agreements. This has happened partly because the municipal governments are unable to administer their forests and partly because community leaders have pressured to use the forest resources to generate benefits for the whole community.

In the municipality of San Diego, department of Zacapa, an original formula was found for managing municipal lands. An agreement was reached with the communities in an effort to protect the forests and at the same time respond to local demands for agricultural land, in which one of the municipality’s forests was earmarked for agriculture and pasture for the community as a whole. This land, called “the common,” was divided into plots given to the residents in usufruct, for which they pay the mayor’s office a fixed amount in rent. Each community has leaders who keep an accounting of the users and inform the municipal government.

The municipal government of San Juan Ostuncalco, in Quetzaltenango, signed an agreement with the “users committee” that establishes restrictions on land use for

agricultural activities in order to protect the forest. Only dry branches and dry or sick trees can be used for firewood. Users are obliged to let the committee or the auxiliary mayor know if they plan to engage in any non-programmed exploitation. The municipal government establishes the harvest time for forest products, the amount that may be harvested, who can do it, the kind of use authorized for these products and the sanctions for anyone who violates the rules. In the municipality of Tecpán each family is only permitted to use three trees or 10 m³ of lumber per year, and then only if it is demonstrated that it is for domestic use.

Sometimes these local norms include informal arrangements with INAB. For example, when users want to extract timber from the forest of Finca el Chilar, in Escuintla, they have to request an endorsement from the board of the indigenous community that administers the forest. If the board approves the request, it grants permission that INAB recognizes as valid, as long as the exploitation does not exceed five trees.

Due to the degradation of the municipal forests and the need for firewood and non-timber products, the municipal government of Concepción de Chiquirichapa has organized local committees to share management responsibilities for the municipal forests and ensure compliance with the use norms. Forest resource management is governed by traditional rules and not by formal operational norms. Municipal forest rangers monitor fulfillment of the established dispositions with support from users’ representatives. Trees can be felled only with municipal authorization and for community use such as building schools, churches, health centers and community halls.

In some cases, when the transgressions fall within the sphere of the Forestry Law, an effort is made to apply the sanctions contained in it, but when community norms are violated, the punishments are established locally. In the municipality of Palín, one can lose one’s community membership; in San Vicente Pacaya, a verbal admonishment is accompanied by seizure of the inadmissibly exploited product and a report is sent to INAB; and in San Diego, Patzicia and Chiquirichapa, fines are applied, the concession is suspended and payment for damages is required.

STATE POLICIES SUPPORT MUNICIPAL FOREST MANAGEMENT

State policies have promoted the strengthening of municipal management capabilities, local dissemination of the national forest policy and support to INAB in managing forest resources. Actions have been promoted in different areas of the country through the following projects and programs: the Sustainable Management Project for the Natural Resources of the Petén (PMS), The Verapaces Program (PLV), the Municipal Forestry Management Plan in Huehuetenango, PROBOSQUES in Totonicapán, Zunil and San Martín Chile Verde in Quetzaltenango, the Regional Rural Development Project in the Quiché (PRODEQ) and INAB’s Municipal and Community Forestry Strengthening Project (BOSCOM), which has national coverage. Other projects operating in the departments of Izabal, Escuintla, Retalhuleu, Suchitepéquez, Totonicapán, San Marcos and Huehuetenango have adopted similar approaches.

These initiatives are attempting to offer a solution to certain structural limitations that are appearing in the country’s decentralization processes. In particular, they expect to improve the municipal government’s technical, administrative and economic capacity so they can more efficiently assume their competencies and improve the opportunities for the rural communities to participate in local resource management.

Among the different international aid initiatives, one of the most outstanding is the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ), which supports economic and social development through aid to self-sustainability in the departments of Petén, El Quiché, Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz. Those departments contain the bulk of the country’s forest mass and have serious forest degradation problems. The GTZ projects have developed a municipal forest management model that includes the creation of Municipal Forestry Offices (OFM) to increase the municipal governments’ technical capacity.

BOSCOM, which is financed and administered by INAB, represents a unique state forestry administration initiative in Central America. Based on the GTZ experiences, this project combines municipal and communal components to support the municipal governments in their forest resource management.

One of BOSCOM’s strategies has been to support the implementation of OFMs in over 32 municipalities. The project helps with the creation of the offices and finances part of their functioning for the first year with its own funds. The mayor’s office must assume 50% of the office costs during the first year, 75% the second year and 100% the third with resources generated by forest activity. At the same time, BOSCOM provides technical support, advice and training for the OFM technicians and the municipal corporation councilors.

So far, BOSCOM and other cooperation projects have attended over 90 municipal governments. The latest data indicate that 30 of the OFMs cover their budget exclusively on municipal funds, 29 are co-financed by the municipal government and the projects and 31 are financed only by projects. At least 27 municipal governments have formulated and declared their forestry policy with support from the projects, which allows them to revitalize their participatory assessment and planning processes to implement programs and projects that respond to the needs of the different interest groups (INAB 2000).

The following inserts offer two examples of the creation and functioning of municipal forestry offices.

The work of the OFMs has helped improve the municipal governments’ intervention in natural resource and forest management. These offices have also functioned as an information source and agent to INAB, generally communicating the forest norms and policies to their communities in the simplest language, and they are trained to provide services through the foresters to small loggers, community groups and private owners.

In the case of national forests, INAB officials are usually directly responsible for administration and management. There are exceptions, such as the case of the Florencia forest in Sacatepec, where the municipal government collaborates with INAB management to protect it as an ecological park in a high watershed refill area. A similar situation is occurring with the San Jerónimo municipal government. These collaborative activities do not result from formal agreements with INAB and municipal governments participate in managing national forests in very few cases.

The services the OFMs provide to local users include support in drawing up management plans, technical findings and forest supervisions. The presence of a forester has helped improve the efficiency of tax collection on cut lumber. Various municipal governments that have consolidated OFMs have been able to increase their income by providing forestry services (Charts 1 and 2). Some forest expansion campaigns have been carried out with mayors and community leaders and arenas for dialogue and debate have been opened. In some municipalities, it has been possible to promote community participation in control and inspection and there has been a major mobilization of OFMs to promote the creation of municipal nurseries and develop forest fire prevention strategies.

Chart 1. Income (Q) from tax on the value of cut lumber and forestry technical services in four municipalities of Guatemala

Chart 2. Income from forestry services in the municipalities of Sayaxché and San Francisco, Guatemala (1997-1999)

Despite what has been obtained with programs supporting municipal-level forest management, there are still weaknesses that limit the technicians’ work and the scope of the central policies. The main problem facing the OFMs is the scarcity of resources for dealing with forestry issues. Even in municipalities where the sector generates income through taxes, sale of services or incentives, it is not always reinvested in forestry or environmental activities.

For example, Gualán’s OFM officials report that the municipal government is applying approximately 44% of its budget to pay on debts inherited from previous administrations. The problem of municipal indebtedness is significant in Guatemala and is a major reason the resources generated by forest activities are not invested in resource management projects.

Another reason is that the income obtained through this effort is generally very low relative to the municipal government’s general expenses. In addition, the central government does not punctually transfer the funds corresponding to 10% of the national budget earmarked for the municipalities. In an interview conducted in the municipality of Cubulco, Baja Verapaz, local officials said that it was necessary to seek support from outside institutions and international aid agencies to develop forestry and environmental projects in the municipal ejidos (FLACSO 2002).

Many municipal governments, including those with OFMs, have problems meeting their Annual Operational Plans. The control, evaluation and follow-up for plans and programs is weak. The OFM’s work plans often suffer budget cuts and must function with very limited resources that barely cover the forester’s salary.

In such conditions, not all OFMs can assume the responsibilities and fulfill the functions that the Forestry Law assigns them, respecting the set priorities. It should also be pointed out that their initiatives are affected not only by the viability of resources but also by the socio-cultural context, community demands and pressure from certain local elite. The kinds of activities implemented are often defined in response to these realities and the informal and traditional rules that govern decision-making in the local sphere.

Projects usually do poorly in cost/benefit evaluations of their activities, in which weight is given to the investment in financial, physical and human resources and the results obtained. Even the achievements reported, such as hiring of foresters, are relative since in many cases the work contract is very brief. The changes in municipal administration, which occur every four years, also affect the continuity of the process.

Evaluation of the cumulative experience

Due to the raid degradation of the country’s forest resources and the central government’s inability to deal with this problem directly and efficiently, an effort has been made to construct a decentralized forest management model. The legal and administrative reforms of the nineties substantially changed the forestry institutions and adjudicated a key role to municipal governments as direct state interlocutors in environmental resource management.

The central administration’s incapacity led many municipalities with forest cover and no institutional presence to assume a leadership role in forest management. In some cases, this has helped put order in the administration of forests that provide sustenance for poor populations or has facilitated exploitation by communities that depend heavily on the resource.

The lack of clarity about norms for use and exploitation of the ejidal forests has obliged municipal governments not only to deal with the conflicts generated but also to design systems and implement informal agreements to define the use rules. Many municipalities have had to resolve the weaknesses of the centralized forestry management system because they represent the closest authority and are a natural interlocutor for the local populations.

The decentralization policies have had very positive and interesting effects, such as the creation of environmental offices, INAB’s increased closeness with the municipalities, the creation of financial mechanisms and local promotion of the forestry issue. In some cases, the municipal governments have been able to use this dynamic to promote forestry activities that have had a major impact on the community and the municipality itself. The OFMs often propitiate greater closeness with the local population and act as intermediaries between it and INAB.

Notable progress has clearly been made in improving forestry management, largely thanks to the decentralization strategy. Nonetheless, while the process to improve the forestry sector’s decentralization policies initiated in Guatemala has unique particularities in the region and has achieved positive results, there are limitations that should be analyzed closely.

A brief evaluation of the cumulative experience is presented below. It analyzes some of the limitations that create important bottlenecks and prevent the attainment of a more efficiently decentralized forest sector that could provide the municipalities a more active role in managing their resources. This analysis revolves around four key aspects: state policy, the forest sector’s importance in municipal economic development, the incentives that could motivate municipal officials to get involved in forest activities, and the reality of the local setting.

STATE POLICY

The competencies delegated to the municipal governments have permitted them some influence on local forest resource management, especially in areas where investments have been made to create municipal offices or where pressure for the local government to get involved in forest management has been strong.

Nonetheless, an analysis of the municipal government’s competencies detects some ambiguity. On the one hand, the norms circumscribe its role in the forestry sphere: to support INAB in fulfilling its functions, cooperate in conducting education programs and speak on behalf of state forest policies. On the other hand, the Municipal Code, the Law of Environmental Protection and Improvement and the Peace Accords grant it the faculty to participate more actively in its territorial sphere.

In theory, municipalities have the authority to administer and define the development policies in their jurisdictions and participate in managing the natural resources. In practice, however, they do not have genuine decision-making power over management of these resources, and are frequently relegated to a secondary role since they have no real autonomy on this issue.

The legal framework tends to favor municipal government influence in two major areas: inspection and control activities, and reforestation. In this regard, decentralization of the forest sector seems more one of deconcentration and delegation of responsibilities that the central agencies cannot assume without the cooperation of local stakeholders.

Not enough effort has been made to delegate functions and responsibilities that would help generate a favorable environment for promoting sustainable forest management initiatives. In some cases, the municipal governments must follow centrally defined norms that are difficult to apply because the standards are too demanding for the local population and do not consider their socio-cultural reality.

The role of the OFMs has been essential to opening spaces and providing local actors access to certain forestry services. The forester functions as an interlocutor who facilitates local coordination internally and between INAB and the community stakeholders, but this process still suffers structural weaknesses and economic limitations that force it to depend largely on outside support.

THE FOREST SECTOR’S IMPORTANCE IN MUNICIPAL DEVELOPMENT

For the majority of Guatemala’s municipalities, forestry activity is not an important source of income and nothing seems to indicate that this will change any time soon. Many municipalities are indebted, which negatively affects their capacity to invest in sustainable management of their resources. In 2000, the indebtedness of the 331 municipalities exceeded 500 million quetzals, and included commitments to different agents: the National Institute of Municipal Promotion (INFOM), private banks, suppliers, builders, service payments, social security contributions and other categories.

In general, locally generated income does not even cover the costs of running the municipal government, so the majority of the municipalities do not have enough financial and technical resources to invest in forest activities. Forestry activity does not represent a significant enough income source to motivate the local governments to reinvest these funds in forest planning and management. There are some exceptions, such as the municipalities of San Vicente Pacaya and Sayaxché in the Petén, which have important forest cover and the support of various projects.

The study of 11 municipalities conducted by the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty (FLACSO 2002) shows that municipal ejidos can generate income through selling lumber, leasing land, charging exploitation permits, etc. In general, however, income from these sources is insufficient to cover the costs required to administer the forest resources.

Consequently, funds are not budgeted for forest resource management, even in municipalities that have environmental offices and technical units.

Making use of incentive mechanisms such as PINFOR still shows insignificant figures relative to the amounts assigned to the private sector or to the potential they could reach, but some municipal governments have been able to use these incentives with very positive results. San Pedro Pinula, in the department Jalapa, incorporated 36 ha of reforestation with support from INFOR, benefiting 156 families with small plots in the municipal forest, and the El Chilar de Palín community in Escuintla incorporated 1,400 ha of communal land for protection purposes.

There are other examples of municipal governments that have implemented reforestation and forest management projects with PINFOR support but, in general, use of this incentive has been minimal. In the 1998-2001 period, only 885 ha were reforested, which represents only 4.9% of the 18,000 ha reforested through this program. Some indigenous communities that administer communal forests as well as many municipal governments find it difficult to get access to PINFOR because they must prove that they are the legal owners of the lands in which they want to set up reforestation and management programs. Many communities and municipalities end up outside the program, given the great uncertainty about existing property rights in the country.

THE MOTIVATION OF THE MUNICIPAL OFFICIALS

The decentralization policies for Guatemala’s forestry sector do not yet offer sufficient incentives for municipal officials to invest in management activities. A survey of 100 mayors regarding the importance they give to forestry compared to other sectors revealed their priorities: of the 10 sectors mentioned (water, education, electrification, health, infrastructure, etc.), forestry ended up in last place (Gibson et al. 2002).

Due to the lack of incentives, municipal officials only initiate forestry activities when they perceive political or economic advantages. According to Gibson et al. (2002), mayors and council members invest in forest activities when a) there is strong demand and pressure from local actors, above all those who depend on forestry resources for survival; b) the activities offer important economic benefits; or c) there is external financial support through state contributions or cooperation projects.

FLACSO (2002) confirms this. Its studies of municipalities discovered limited support to forestry management activities (reforestation, granting of permits, equipping of forest rangers, mediation in decision-making) because they do not represent a sufficient income source to motivate the formulation of clear policies and the drafting of investment plans geared to resource management and protection. The importance of forestry resources is defined more in relation to the services they provide to poor communities (water, food, firewood, non-timber products, agriculture, pasture) than to direct financial benefits for the municipality.

Even in municipalities that have technical units, such as San Diego, Río Hondo, Concepción Chiquirichapa, San Juan Ostuncalco and Gualán, there are no projects for managing and conserving municipal lands and community and ejidal forests. In San Vicente Pacaya, however, where the municipal government receives important income from administering the Pacaya Volcano National Park, there is a clear tendency to give priority to managing the parklands and various initiatives of work with the communities in development plans for the wooded area. The study also reveals the importance of the forest’s cultural value, which introduces another criterion that affects the adoption of decisions. When local culture and organizations agree with environmental values, this influences the demands for greater municipal government participation in forest management.

THE LOCAL SETTING

Many peasant and indigenous communities in Guatemala depend on natural resources for their subsistence. In a context in which the existing legal and institutional framework is very weak regarding management of these resources and there is uncertainty about land tenure rights, some local communities have developed their own institutional mechanisms and informal natural resource monitoring, management and access. These are frequently based on traditional values and local cultures and have often created a balance between the need to access forest products and the condition and management of the forest (Katz 2000).

The existing legal forestry framework and decentralization policies have failed to consider such complex local realities. A decentralization that does not consider historic management relationships or the different local socioeconomic and political contexts could find many obstacles to being efficient and equitable and ultimately achieving the results expected. Studies in the western highlands reveal that instead of decentralizing power, the current policies have reinforced and deconcentrated the state’s traditional power, excluding the rural communities, risking the sustainability of traditional forest resource management mechanisms and even penalizing successful local forest governance structures in various municipalities (Wittman 2001, 2002)

This situation has been initiated when the municipal governments assume their new competencies under INAB supervision and try to impose new norms for the use of and access to the natural resources under their authority, snatching decision-making away from the indigenous and peasant leaders who traditionally held that power. In an historically tense context between state institutions and traditional government structures, with clear resistance by indigenous communities to state regulations and resource extraction by outside actors, it is not surprising that the delegation of new forest responsibilities to the municipal governments has been received very reticently at the local level. Problems have cropped up especially when municipal governments try to extend their authority to the communal forests with the argument that these forests are within its municipal jurisdiction and thus responsibility for decisions on use and access must fall to them.

This has led to cases that reveal strong contradictions, in which use forms traditionally regulated by community authorities are penalized or prohibited without reducing the problems of illegal felling and unsustainable logging (Wittman 2002). In other cases, communities that depend on their access to communal forests for subsistence are required

to apply for use licenses and submit management plans. The communities generally cannot finance the preparation of these formalities, and such procedures require a land tenure certificate that few possess in any case. In such a complex context as this, the traditional forest management systems have been damaged, as has the relationship between rural communities and state authorities and even the sustainability of the forest itself.

In contrast, when municipal officials have adapted existing state regulations to local reality, or included autochthonous authorities (indigenous mayors, local user committees) in the municipal decision-making systems related to resource use and management, and agreements have been reached to maintain the traditional use systems, local relationships have improved visibly and there is more efficient coordination among the stakeholders. Such is the case of the municipal governments of San Pablo (Whittman 2002), San Diego and San Juan Ostuncalco (FLACSO 2002).

Such major differences in the local realities clearly highlight the limitations of decentralization policies focused on a strict delegation of authority to the municipal governments without considering traditional management systems and the specific conditions of each place. When municipal authority clashes with traditional local authority, especially around community forest management, grave problems emerge. Instead of improving the sustainability of the resource and ensuring equitable and fair access for the communities that depend on it, decentralization produces actions that endanger historically efficient management systems (Secaira 2000) and generate more conflicts that put the very sustainability of the resource into question.

Conclusions and recommendations

The decentralization process has been consolidating in Guatemala. The state policies and central government transfers confirm the will to support deconcentration of natural resource management and decision-making. In the forestry sector, the existing political, legal and institutional frameworks promote certain conditions allowing the municipal governments to help manage their resources. In this context, the central agency has assumed unquestionable leadership. To support these processes, strong mechanisms to foster forest activity have been developed through economic incentives, technical assistance and technology transfer to local governments.

Despite these efforts, however, the processes promoted have been insufficient to cede greater space to the municipal governments. The main directives, policy definition, implementation of strategies and assignation of resources are all still centralized. The competencies delegated to municipal governments are ambiguous because the Forestry Law assigns them a support role to complement INAB’s functions, which are very focused on control and reforestation.

Without genuine autonomy and with few political and economic incentives, investing in forestry activities is not a priority for many municipal governments. That makes it important to understand that their response to forest management decentralization processes obeys very precise factors, such as the availability of officials to apply the forest regulations, local pressure and income generating possibilities. The commitment to the forest sector and the decisions that are made frequently respond to the need to facilitate access to goods and services that the forests can offer to the poorest communities. In many municipalities, informal rules based on tradition and custom have been incorporated and coexist with the formal norms.

The municipal forest management processes assumed by the country’s municipal governments and promoted through INAB and international cooperation projects have had positive results in strengthening the local governments’ capacities. Their results are limited, however, when the criteria are the reforested areas and limited management of them, the leasing of lands and the income from the sale of timber. Their impact in these aspects can only be appreciated in a few municipal governments.

Although models based on OFMs have represented advances since they increase the municipalities’ forest management capacities, these achievements have involved high costs in many cases. There is also the risk that they will lose strength and disappear when the outside support stops, which is a real possibility because the municipal corporations’ priority agendas do not usually include the forest issue and their budgets are generally in the red.

The financial mechanisms that have produced results and influenced the valuing of the resources include the PINFOR forest incentives and the transfer of 50% of the tax on cut lumber. In some cases, these mechanisms are a source of alternative income to stimulate conservation and sustained forest resource management, but the use of such mechanisms is not very significant at the municipal level relative to the amounts assigned to the private sector or the potential that the municipal governments could exploit.

Even with that, the decentralization of forest management to the municipalities is a positive process if compared to the totally centralized previous models; the results attained indicate that decentralization must be maintained and strengthened. There are still important obstacles that make it impossible to speak of a truly efficient and equitable decentralization and any policy to support municipal forest management must take the limitations cited into account.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Abbreviations and acronyms

Bibliography

Carillo, A.; Ordoñez W. 1998. Modelo municipal para el manejo sostenible de los recursos naturales en Petén. GTZ. Guatemala,.

FLACSO. 2002. Tierras municipales en Guatemala: un desafío para el desarrollo local sostenible. Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales. Ciudad de Guatemala.

Gibson, C.; Lehoucq, F.E. 2002. The Local Politics of Decentralized Environmental Policy. 2002 International Studies Association Meetings. New Orleans.

INAB. 2000. Boletín de estadísticas forestales 2000. Instituto Nacional de Bosques. www.inab.gob.gt

Katz E.G. 2000. Social Capital and Natural Capital: A Comparative Analysis of Land Tenure and Natural Resource Management in Guatemala. Land Economics 76(1):114-132.

Martínez, H.A. 2000. La administración municipal en el manejo de los recursos naturales renovables en Guatemala. INAB, Guatemala.

Secaira E. 2000. La conservación de la naturaleza, el pueblo y movimiento Maya y la espiritualidad en Guatemala: Implicaciones para conservacionistas. PROARCA/CAPA/USAID/UICN/FCG/The Nature Conservancy. Guatemala

Wittman, H. 2001. Fragmentación y manejo de terrenos comunales y municipales en el altiplano occidental de Guatemala: Experiencias de las municipalidades de San José Ojetenam y Ixchiguán, San Marcos. CARE.

Wittman, H. 2002. Negotiating Locality: Decentralization and Communal Forest Management in the Guatemalan Highlands. Faculty of the Graduate School. Cornell University, New York.

Legal norms

Individuals interviewed

Municipal forest managementin Nicaragua: Decentralized burdens,centralized benefits?

Introduction¹

Important advances have been made in the decentralization process in Nicaragua, particularly with respect to the legal framework and local administration, despite the fact that it began as recently as 1988. Municipalities now have elected leaders who hold important responsibilities in municipal planning and administration, and other local stakeholders recognize and are increasingly taking advantage of this authority. The result has been the creation of a new arena of local governance that has its own life and dynamic and of a civil society movement that, while still weak, is struggling to ensure the conditions for effective municipal administration.

These accomplishments notwithstanding, the process has faced numerous obstacles, particularly regarding forest management. The central government has turned more responsibilities over to the municipal governments, but a lack of financing to be able to carry them out has undercut their authority and the possibility of building genuine municipal autonomy. In the environmental and natural resource sector, the laws themselves are contradictory, areas of responsibility overlap among various bodies or the law requires “coordination” between the local and central governments without establishing mechanisms for doing so, which in practice leaves power in the hands of the state entity.

Although the law gives municipalities the responsibility for “developing, conserving and controlling the rational use of the environment and natural resources,” they do not decide on resource exploitation contracts and their consent is not even needed for granting permits and concessions (Comisión Sectorial para la Descentralización 2001). The municipal governments thus complain that the central government has turned over the “burden” of taking care of the environment but not the benefits derived from the use of its resources.

The problems associated with decentralization do not come just from the central government, however. In many municipalities, technical capacities, tax collection and skills in administering both resources and projects are still below par. Local political party representatives tend to promote paternalist, party-boss relations and political divisions influence relations with constituents and the central government. Some local leaders, if they had the chance, would encourage the clear-cutting of the whole forest to bring in funds for their administration, or their own pocket. Furthermore, local government is conceived of as a “service provider,” and medium- and long-term natural resource planning and management often does not form part of that vision.

Given these serious political and practical limitations on decentralized forest management in Nicaragua, this study cannot present the results of an advanced, well formulated and financed democratic decentralization. What it can do is demonstrate that this process, despite the many contradictions and limitations, offers important opportunities. It shows that decentralization represents not only a formal transfer of power from central government but also, and perhaps more importantly, a bottom-up process whereby municipalities have begun to assume new responsibility and authority — with significant progress and many positive results despite the obstacles. But for Nicaragua’s decentralization to achieve real and consistent improvements in efficiency, equity and democracy in forest management, much remains to be done.

¹ I would like to thank Andrew Blackwell, Ove Faurby, Lyes Ferroukhi, Glenn Galloway, René Mendoza and Juana Ortega for their comments on a prior version of this chapter.

The forestry context

Nicaragua has approximately 57,000 km² of forest cover, which equals nearly 48% of the national territory, including closed canopy forests (with 70% or more coverage) and open ones (with a coverage of from 10% to 70%).² The effective forest area, which only includes the closed pine and broadleaf forests, represents some 33,000 km², or 27% of the territory, about half of what it occupied in 1950. Nearly all of these forests are located in the three regions of Nicaragua’s Caribbean side.³ In the nineties, the annual deforestation rate was some 150,000 ha, but today it is estimated at only 50,000 ha.

According to data of the Agricultural, Livestock and Forestry Ministry (MAGFOR), 71.9% of the territory (8,700,000 ha) is land considered most apt for forest, either for production or conservation. A fourth of it could be used for wooded pasture or a combination of agriculture and wooded pasture, but almost half of this land has no forest due to the advance of the agricultural frontier or the conversion of the forests into virtually treeless ranches for extensive cattle grazing.⁴

Nearly 19,000 km² (some 1,880,000 ha) of the country’s forests are located in protected areas, under the National System of Protected Areas (SINAP). Only 7 of the 75 protected areas, however, are currently under active management and another 11 are considered under “minimum management” (Plan Ambiental de Nicaragua 2001-2005). The two largest reserves are found in the forests on the Caribbean side (the Bosawas Reserve in the north and the Indio-Maíz Reserve in the south).

The forest sector is important to the national economy, although it is difficult to obtain exact figures. Logging represents less than 1% of the GDP (some US$4 million) and the industrial sector of lumber and furniture makes up 2.1% of the total value of the country’s industrial production (1998 BCN data). Forest-related exports rose from US$1 million in 1992 to US$25 million in 2000 (MARENA 2002).

Firewood represents 52% of the country’s overall energy consumption (Martínez 2001) and around 70% of residential energy consumption (Miranda 2002, pers. comm.). A large part of both lumber and firewood is extracted illegally. Of an annual felling estimated at 500,000 m³, the National Forestry Institute⁵ (INAFOR), which is in charge of issuing forestry permits, only controls 30% (Argüello 2002, pers. comm.).⁶

By law, INAFOR is responsible for granting lumber and firewood extraction permits on private lands, while the Ministry of Promotion, Industry and Commerce (MIFIC) grants concessions on national lands.⁷

³ North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN), South Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAS) and the department of Río San Juan.

⁴ Other studies report different data. For example, Kleinn (2000) estimates the area apt for forest that has no forest at 2,500,000 ha.

⁶ The forest sector faces many other problems in addition to illegality and corruption: commercialization problems, ignorance of market opportunities, lack of administrative capacity of the lumber dealers and of INAFOR, insecurity, technical weaknesses, lack of investment resources, weakness in the grassroots organizations for community forestry (Galloway 2002, pers. comm.).

⁷ The indigenous territories do not currently have a legal framework and there is no registry of the national lands. The only concession in effect in 2000 was that of indigenous territories, through an agreement between the national government and the indigenous community.

The Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARENA) has authority over protected areas.⁸

The procedure for obtaining a logging permit is the same for private lands with or without forest; the difference depends rather on the amount to be logged. Only a domestic permit is required for small amounts (a total of trees or cubic meters defined by INAFOR at the departmental level); a management plan is required for greater amounts.

Illegal logging takes many forms, from loggers who never request any permit to those who use the same one in additional areas not included in the authorization. To avoid developing a management plan, there is also abuse of the domestic permits, which should only be granted for household and not commercial use. Some 75% of the timber currently coming into the country’s sawmills has been cut with domestic permits (Tijerino 2002, pers. comm.). INAFOR’s policy is to “legalize” the wood cut illegally through fines and auctions. In addition, much of the timber cut in the Caribbean forests is transported by rivers through very isolated areas, far from any registry post. The lumber dealers who take their haul in trucks to Managua report that they pay around C$2,000 (US$140) in bribes to get from the eastern side of the country to the capital. It is worth noting that they claim they pay always, whether or not their papers are in order.

Many argue that these illegal practices are the result of excessive controls on the forestry sector and an inefficient bureaucracy, both of which significantly raise costs and waste valuable time. One important problem is that neither national policy nor the sector’s institutions promote a comprehensive vision of the forest. On the one hand is a strong environmentalist movement that defends the total prohibition of logging, not only in protected areas but also, at times, outside of them. On the other hand is what as known as the “timber mafia,” located above all in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) and famed for its deep-rooted and dangerous corruption. This reality leads to positions that are seriously at odds with each other, and makes the search for intermediary solutions of sustainable production very difficult.

This bipolarity is also represented in the central government institutions. MARENA is in charge of the environment and INAFOR of forest exploitation; the majority of projects and NGOs work with MARENA but not with INAFOR, and there has been very little coordination and cooperation between these two entities. Consequently, when one speaks of natural resource decentralization, one is alluding to two totally separated entities in legal and institutional terms. It is essential to recognize this fact to understand the discourse and the reality that municipal governments must deal with regarding environmental and natural resource issues.

Decentralization and municipal forest management responsibilities

In Nicaragua, the institutional basis for the current decentralization process began to be established under Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government, with approval of the 1987

⁸ The first pilot programs for the sale of environmental services are barely getting underway and there is still no legal framework for this type of disposition.

Constitution, which is still in effect. This Constitution reestablished the legal concept of municipal autonomy, eliminated by the 1939 Constitution, and initiated direct election of local authorities. In 1988, the Municipalities Law created Municipal Councils and turned over some responsibilities to local governments. Municipal elections were held in the majority of the country in 1990 and in the two autonomous regions as well by the elections of 1996 and 2000.

As of 1990, the government of Violeta Chamorro (1990-1996) began implementing structural adjustment policies that included, among other things, an important transformation of the state. Although the reform contemplated decentralization, it was not well defined and seems to have been “more for international consumption than for internal effects” (Ortega 1997). The result was a diverse and often contradictory series of initiatives, but little decentralization. That situation changed little under the government of Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2001), other than that the municipalities received even smaller budget transfers from the central government.

Nonetheless, local governments, mainly thanks to efforts of the Association of Municipalities of Nicaragua (AMUNIC), did obtain additional responsibilities and authority.⁹ For this, they had the help of important central government allies, particularly in the National Assembly, who supported their efforts to promote genuine decentralization. In 1997, reforms to the Municipalities Law considerably increased the faculties of local governments and strengthened their political and administrative autonomy.

At this time, Nicaragua has 151 municipalities, each with a mayor and vice-mayor and either four or nine Municipal Council members¹⁰ (determined by population size) elected through party slates presented in the local elections. The Municipal Council is made up of the mayor or vice-mayor and council members. The law establishes that the mayor is the “maximum executive authority” of the municipal government; it falls to him or her to implement local government decisions, which must be defined and approved by the Council.

The main source of municipal government income is a local sales tax (IV), which was cut from 2% in 1997 to 1% in 2000. This loss of revenue would supposedly be replaced by increasing the collection of property taxes (IBI), but this income is much smaller than the IV (Bravo 2002, pers. comm.). National budget transfers have been minimal: 0.9% in 2000 and 1.2% in 2001, the lowest percentages in Central America.¹¹ In the municipalities that have forest resources, various types of taxes (legal and illegal) have been levied that, in some cases, constitute a significant source of income.

In 1997, the new version of the Municipalities Law granted local governments important control over their territory and natural resources:

“The Municipal Governments have competency in all aspects pertaining to the socioeconomic development and environmental and natural resource conservation of their territorial circumscription. . . . [The Municipal Government is responsible for] developing, conserving and controlling the rational use of the environment and natural resources as a basis for the sustainable development of the Municipality and the country. . . .”¹²

Other laws, however, such as the General Law of the Environment and Natural Resources (No. 217) and the Regulation of Protected Areas, give much more authority to the national

⁹ AMUNIC is a national association representing all of Nicaragua’s municipal governments.

¹⁰ The exception is the municipality of Managua, where 25% of the nation’s population lives; its Council has 20 members.

¹¹ Its highest level since 1990 was 1.8%, during the Chamorro government. That percentage includes direct transfers and ministerial projects and investments (Ortega 2002, pers. comm.).

ministries and minimize the municipal governments’ role in environmental administration. Furthermore, Article 102 of the Constitution establishes that:

“Preservation of the environment and the conservation, development and rational exploitation of natural resources correspond to the State; it may enter into contracts for the rational exploitation of these resources when this is in the national interest.”

As mentioned earlier, decisions about logging contracts correspond to INAFOR on private lands and MIFIC on national lands. Approval of these contacts by the local government is not even an obligatory requisite for them to be issued. ¹³ It is important to stress, however, that the municipal natural resource responsibilities established in the Municipalities Law have begun to function as a legal basis for making claims and addressing contradictions with the central government.

The legal corpus grants certain specific attributes to municipal governments (see chart on legal competencies), including their right to issue an opinion on exploitation contracts, receive 25% of tax income from these contracts, establish municipal parks and organize committees for the control of forest fires. In addition, they may, in coordination with the corresponding state entity, authorize the transport of felled logs, participate in the evaluation of environmental impact studies, draw up land use plans and make recommendations on protected area management plans.

The Municipalities Law gives local governments some specific tools that can be used to promote their role as natural resource administrators, such as resolutions and ordinances. Both are administrative instruments, but an ordinance is broader and specifies norms for general application to issues of local interest. It must be subjected to two discussions in the Municipal Council plenary and then be published by the mayor.¹⁴ Many mayoral offices have begun to use ordinances to address issues related to natural resource management.

Municipal governments are also authorized to create arenas for civil society participation in natural resource management, the most important being the Municipal Environmental Commissions (CAM) promoted by MARENA, AMUNIC and various donor projects supporting institutional development. By 2001, some 85 CAMs had been established (Blackwell 2002, pers. comm.).

Almost all of the municipal forestry responsibilities require coordinated action with the respective ministries, which have the primary authority. It is assumed that this coordination will take place on the ground, with the pertinent delegate, but no specific mechanism has been officially established to make this a reality so far. In 2002, however, MARENA was circulating the draft of a proposal that made the CAMs the official coordination mechanism (STCSD et al. 2002). For now, in practice, it depends on the willingness of each delegate and each municipal government.

At a departmental level, there are neither official mechanisms nor a legal framework for governmental coordination.¹⁵ Nonetheless, municipal governments in several departments have formed associations to address common problems, including environmental and forestry concerns. The MARENA proposal mentioned above suggested the creation of Departmental or Regional Environmental Commissions to coordinate the CAMs (STCSD et al. 2002).

¹³ Approval of an entity that is not from the central government is only a requisite in the two autonomous regions, where the regional government (not the municipal one) has this authority.

¹⁴ The resolution specifies norms “of particular application” and must only be approved by the Council (without two discussions).

¹⁵ The departments have a Delegate of the Presidency, but that person’s role relative to the other state entities and the municipal governments is still being discussed. [As this volume was going to press, the budget for these offices was cut for economic reasons, and all the delegation offices were closed.

Forest management and the municipal arena ¹⁶

Municipal environmental and forest management should be seen as part of a learning process that involves a change in the conception of the local government’s role. Nicaragua’s legal framework recognizes natural resources as the basis for the nation’s sustainable development and sees local governments as important participants in that development, but the very term development is still fundamentally associated with access to clean water, electricity and roads, rather than with natural resources per se. Citizens view the primary role of their local governments as providing greater access to these services and infrastructure. Natural resources are a “new” area of concern. Planning for their future requires a long-term vision, whereas political horizons tend to be short-term. This learning process is thus as much for local governments as for citizens.

At the same time, the persistence of a conceptual and institutional polarization between resource conservation and extraction means that few municipal initiatives are related to environmental protection. These are more often promoted by NGOs or environmental projects, or respond to the municipal government’s interest in obtaining funds through sanctions and fines. This results in administrative initiatives toward renewable resource management that are skewed by short-term economic interests and needs.

Nonetheless, important initiatives indicate that a well-oriented learning process is underway. In the five years since the 1997 reforms to the Municipalities Law, there is a perceptible difference in the coherence of local initiatives. Although there are still many dispersed actions, some of the more advanced municipalities demonstrate greater planning, coordination and integration in environmental management. One of the best examples is the municipality of Bonanza, to which an insert is dedicated below.

This section has been divided into three parts. The first describes local forest management experiences and initiatives in which municipal governments have played an important role; the second reviews relations between local governments and central government delegates, particularly those of INAFOR and MARENA; and the third examines relations between municipal governments and local stakeholders.

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT ADMINISTRATION

Either at their own initiative or at the urging of a project or NGO, a ministry, AMUNIC or their constituents, municipal governments have begun to fulfill many of the responsibilities the laws have assigned them; they have also taken initiatives for which they have been given no specific authority. Nearly all of them issue their opinion on logging contracts, and some have even gone so far as to completely prohibit extraction. Some have organized fire prevention and control committees and issued ordinances in the face of a possible forest fire crisis. Others have begun to prepare land use and environmental plans at the insistence of aid projects. And many municipalities are learning to use ordinances as a legal tool to set standards for the use of the resources in their territory.

¹⁶ The information presented here is based on various municipal and regional studies done between 1998 and 2000 (Barahona and Mendoza 1999, Fauné and Kaimowitz 1999, Fauné and Martínez 1999, Fauné and Mendoza 1998, Larson 2001, Larson and Barahona 1999a, Larson and Barahona 1999b, Martínez and Rocha 1999, Martínez and Rocha 1999, Mendoza and Artola 1999, Mendoza and Martínez 1999, Parrilli 2000, Rocha and Barahona 1999) and on additional interviews done in 2001 and 2002. It is important to mention that there were municipal elections at the end of 2000, with new mayors and municipal councilors inaugurated at the start of 2001, and presidential elections were held at the end of 2001, with the change of President and ministers in January 2002.

Logging permits

According to the law, INAFOR grants permits for logging or firewood extraction and the mayor’s office must give its opinion before the permit is issued.¹⁷ Almost all the country’s municipalities participate in this process in some way, although there are often more illegal extractors than authorized ones.

The process varies from place to place. In each department, the INAFOR delegate determines (by number of trees or in cubic meters) the maximum amount allowable to be considered “for domestic use.” In some municipalities, INAFOR has then transferred to the municipal government the right to grant these permits without having to be consulted.¹⁸

In some cases, the municipalities have an assigned official — who may not be a trained forester — to review the permit applications and issue a more informed opinion.¹⁹ This official should visit the site to confirm that the applicant is the landowner, that the trees to be cut are not too close to a water source, etc. Nonetheless, not all municipalities have the resources or the initiative to make these trips, above all to very outlying communities. Both this situation and pressure from communities themselves has led some municipalities to require that a representative from the community where the trees will be logged also approve the permit.²⁰ This person could be the alcaldito (the mayor’s representative in each district or community, known as “little mayor” )²¹ or a delegate of the local development committee.

Although infrequently, some municipalities have mayors who grant permits without consulting INAFOR²²; conversely, other municipal governments have complained that INAFOR gives out permits without consulting them. It should also be recognized that local governments do not always have their own criteria for reviewing logging requests. For example, a council member in El Castillo argued that “INAFOR would only approve a permit if it were sustainable” (Larson 1999). Sometimes, what determines the criteria is economic necessity (given that the municipal government charges for the permits) (Somarriba 2002, pers. comm.). The poorest, most outlying rural municipalities are often those most in need of a forester yet least able to finance one. If there are technical personnel in these municipalities, it is nearly always because they are financed, at least partially, by aid projects.²³

In contrast with rural municipalities, urban ones such as Chinandega, León and Estelí have resources to finance environmental offices, forest rangers and/or agronomists, foresters or environmental specialists. These personnel do not necessarily participate directly in the permitting process, but they do provide assistance in other activities related to forestry, such as reforestation or agricultural diversification projects.

¹⁷ The forestry concessions under MIFIC’s charge are not discussed because there are none at present.

¹⁸ In the November 2001 version of the new forestry bill, this responsibility would be definitively transferred to the municipal governments.

¹⁹ Of the 31 municipalities of the western and southern regions, 8 have a staff person in charge of the environment (INIFOM 2001).

²⁰ In El Sauce, the government approved an ordinance that delegates the granting of permits to district committees after a protest in which peasants blocked the roads to prevent the passage of trucks carrying trunks obtained in the municipality.

²¹ This varies in practice. The alcaldito can be selected by the mayor or elected by the community. In some cases, there are two local leaders: the alcaldito and the representative of the development committee or other district committee with a similar name.

²² One example is Yalagüina, in the department of Madriz (García 2002, pers. comm.).

²³ El Castillo, one of the poorest and most rural municipalities in the country, has six technicians financed by DANIDA, who also help the peasants in agricultural diversification and agroforestry (Holt 2002, pers. comm.).

It is important to underscore that a few municipalities have succeeded in increasing their power with respect to logging permits. In 2002, four municipalities of León (El Sauce, Achuapa, Santa Rosa del Peñón and El Jicaral) reached an unprecedented agreement with INAFOR, after threatening to prohibit all logging in their jurisdictions: it made the municipal government’s endorsement binding rather than just consultative. That is, INAFOR has agreed not to approve permits without the municipality’s favorable opinion (Saborío and García 2002, pers. comm.).

Fees for resource extraction and related activities

At the end of the nineties, many municipalities began to charge for logging and other resource use. The charge could be a tariff paid when a logging permit is processed, a road toll, a fine for unauthorized logging or a fee paid to register a chainsaw. The problem is that the majority of these charges are illegal.

Bonanza established fees for obligatory chainsaw registration, payment for a commercial logging license and a logging tax by cubic meter, as well as fines for transporting illegally cut lumber. In 1999, the municipalities of Cúa-Bocay, Waslala and Dipilto charged transport tariffs, and Puerto Morazán was considering an ordinance to tax individuals and machinery dedicated to several different kinds of natural resource extraction.

Taxes on the lumber industry can provide an important portion of local government budgets in Nicaragua. For example, taxes on logging and sawmills represented 35% of Dipilto’s budget in 1998, and the following year resource use fees (90% of which are for logging) amounted to an estimated 42% of El Castillo’s ordinary income.

Although all these efforts reveal a concern for natural resources, they are primarily aimed at collecting revenue, mainly from logging. Some municipalities are still charging these fees, but two separate processes have begun to counteract the illegal ones. One of them is that in mid-2001 INAFOR began to turn over to the local governments 25% of the income from forestry permits, as the law establishes. Part of the justification for some of the previous charges was that the central government was not fulfilling this obligation, and municipalities argued that they had the right to obtain income from the resources under their jurisdiction.

The other process has been the government’s establishment of Environmental Attorney’s Offices in 1998-99 to deal with environment-related crimes. In 2002, there were five such offices and plans to open three more, with funds from Denmark and the World Bank. These offices have helped some municipalities rewrite their municipal ordinances, negotiate with state entities and establish legal norms and charges (García 2002, pers. comm.).

Monitoring and control of extraction

There are many ways to monitor extraction, and up to now it can be said that few have been resounding successes. Some municipalities have established registration points to control illegal logging, but the majority have been organized by the Bosawas Reserve administrators (SETAB-MARENA) and the NGO Centro Humboldt, with support from the German aid agency (GTZ) and are located at key points within the territory of the reserve. They cannot, however, control the loads of lumber sent out through the rivers or by bribing truckers (Mendoza 2002, pers. comm.). Furthermore, due to the high maintenance costs, only two control posts were in operation in 2002 (Campos 2002, pers. comm.).

Chinandega, León and Estelí are able to hire their own park rangers, while El Castillo’s park rangers, for example, are financed by DANIDA. Their role is to keep watch over the forest in protected areas. Outside of these areas, municipal foresters — where they exist — usually participate in some way in monitoring logging. At times, municipal environmental commissions or the municipal government’s environmental office receive and investigate accusations of illegal activity.

Given the cost and technical requirements for good monitoring plus the existence of a large gray area between the responsibilities of local government and those of INAFOR, it has been easier for municipal governments to prohibit logging than to allow and control it. Various municipalities have established prohibitions or temporary limits on logging or the transport of timber. Waslala passed a decree prohibiting the removal of wood from the municipality. Jalapa issued an ordinance prohibiting the removal of unprocessed logs. San Carlos’ Municipal Council approved a resolution prohibiting the granting of commercial permits for two years.²⁴ Bonanza has not prohibited logging, but imposed so many requirements that it is virtually impossible to obtain a permit (Mendoza 2002, pers. comm.).

What has begun to happen in practice is the approval of municipal ordinances that regulate the use and handling of forests as well as other natural resources. Jinotepe approved an ordinance that included regulations and prohibitions on fishing, trade in fauna and care of the local watershed and the seven other municipalities of the department of Carazo were preparing drafts of their own ordinances on these same issues with advisory services from AMUNIC and environmental consultants (Blackwell 2002, pers. comm.). Achuapa approved an ordinance on natural resources that is considered a model for integrating norms on the use of water, soil, forests and fauna. In most of these cases, the mechanisms through which the municipality may implement and monitor these ordinances and ensure compliance with them are not made clear.

²⁴ INAFOR has fought against these prohibitions. The Environmental Attorney’s Office sustains that they are legal, because the law grants municipalities the right to establish their own standards on the condition that they not be less strict than the national norms (García 2002, pers. comm.).

Forest fire control

Many municipalities have forest fire brigades, especially after mammoth fires raged through Central America between March and May 1998, causing serious respiratory problems from Nicaragua all the way to Texas. The government established fines for burning without a permit and for causing fires, intentionally or not, in state or private agricultural or wooded lands, deploring the “horrible and asphyxiating fires that wiped out forests and obscured the sky. . . .”.²⁵ Although with limited funds, MARENA launched a national forest fire prevention and control campaign with the support of various international agencies.

In 2002, the preoccupation with fire prevention increased again due to the expectation of a major drought combined with a plague of weevils that had affected nearly 31,000 ha of pines (49% of the total pine forest area in Nicaragua). Studies estimated that there were nearly four million cubic meters of fallen or still-standing dry timber, which is an immense amount of very flammable material (Centro Humboldt/AMUNSE 2002). On that occasion, several municipal governments headed up campaigns against forest fires and requested support, above all from the central government. Local organizations and mayors in the Association of Municipalities of the Segovias (AMUNSE) wrote to the Human Rights Attorney’s Office arguing that “this problem has not been given the importance and priority it requires at the national level.”

According to the Centro Humboldt/AMUNSE report, 72% of Dipilto’s population was at high risk to the possibility of forest fires. Jalapa’s municipal government decreed a state of red alert, and many other local governments from the region prohibited the traditional burning of agricultural fields (LP 7-2-2002). When a fire gathered force in Dipilto on April 10, 2002, Ocotal’s mayor arrived with a pick-up truck full of water and the mayor of Mozonte sent 50 brigade members to support those already fighting the fire.

In the department of León, municipal governments established agreements with MAGFOR to apply administrative and penal sanctions against anyone who started a forest fire (LP 14- 4-2002). In some municipalities of Estelí, Jinotega and Matagalpa, new procedures intended to guarantee better control were defined for granting burning permits (García 2002, pers. comm.). The permits are not given out in the departmental capital, but through district committees previously trained by MAGFOR.²⁶ Although MAGFOR has the power to levy fines for fires, these municipalities succeeded in establishing their own fines, since the Environmental Attorney’s Office determined that MAGFOR’s legal responsibility regarding sanctions is applicable to forest fires but not agricultural burning, despite the practice of treating both as a single entity.

Protected areas

Not all municipal governments have shown a real interest in the protected areas within their territories. Some would prefer that they not exist and some have even actively spoken against them. This could be partly because prohibitions on logging in some forested areas,

²⁶ Up to now, many other areas of the country have seen burning permits more as an administrative requirement than as the definition of clear technical directives to guarantee safe burning. This has led to a debate among different NGOs about the prudence of granting permits. Some think that granting the permit legitimizes burning without improving how it is done, while others argue that it improves the safety of the burning.

such as the Caribbean regions, represent a loss of income for both the governments and local communities.

The governments of the six municipalities that share the Bosawas Reserve have participated in many meetings, but only Bonanza has shown consistent and genuine interest in protecting and managing it.²⁷ This is one of few municipalities on the agricultural frontier that have taken the initiative to establish their own reserve (Cerro Cola Blanca, in this case), as permitted by law.²⁸

The municipal governments’ interest in protected areas seems to be greater in the more degraded and urban Central and Pacific regions.²⁹ Some of them have tourist potential, and there are serious concerns about water scarcity and about natural disasters as well. The Pikín Guerrero project, located in the Pacific plains, involved various municipalities in managing the protected areas of the volcanic chain, but it ended in 1998. That same year, Hurricane Mitch and the mudslide of Casita volcano, which killed 3,000 people, awakened some awareness about the effects of deforestation on the hillsides.³⁰

Land use and environmental planning

Land use planning can be considered a first step to the creation of a framework for development, with natural resources as the base and the municipal government as a pillar. Participatory strategic planning, for example, could promote an important learning process and turn the municipal government into an essential participant. In addition, it could help guide the initiatives of NGOs and other projects in the municipality.

The General Law on the Environment clearly establishes that municipal authorities have the mandate to formulate land use plans,³¹ although other laws give this same faculty to MAGFOR, MARENA and/or INETER (Nicaraguan Institute of Territorial Studies).³² Very few municipal governments have such a plan and at times they are nothing more than lists of infrastructure projects. León appears to be the municipality most experienced in this field, with a land use planning study approved by the Council in 1993 and a master plan (municipal development assessment and strategy) approved in 1996. It also has a short-term municipal development plan and a municipal investment plan.

In El Castillo, a land use plan prepared with grassroots participation was ignored for over a year because the new mayor was from a different political party. In 1999, San Carlos had two land use plans and a project for yet another, but they had been done by outside

²⁷ It seems, however, that interest is growing over time. When this book was in the editing stage, six mayors from the North Atlantic Autonomous Region denounced illegal clear-cutting in the protected areas of their municipalities and, according to them, INAFOR’s role in legalizing it (La Prensa Nov. 15 and 16, 2002).

²⁸ After a Municipal Park is established, MARENA is responsible for setting norms, regulating its use and preparing and approving the terms of reference for the management plan (Reglamento de Áreas Protegidas Decreto No. 14-99). This could also serve as a disincentive for promoting protected areas as some municipalities fear losing control of their area. In addition, although some have tried following the procedures to obtain MARENA approval, none have succeeded so far.

²⁹ A recent study of 45 municipalities found that 10 had declared some type of municipal reserve, only one of which was in the Caribbean region (Nitlapán 2002).

³⁰ Nonetheless, it must be recognized that environmental consciousness is frequently underpinned with myths and simplifications (Kaimowitz 2001).

³¹ Art. 16. “The preparation and implementation of land use plans will be the responsibility of the municipal authorities. . . .”

consultants and filed away in a bureaucrat’s office, so no one even knew they existed. Many efforts at municipal planning have failed because they emphasize technical solutions rather than participatory processes to resolve municipal problems.

Aid projects are now putting serious emphasis on the need to draw up environmental plans in a participatory manner. For example, DANIDA, through its PASMA program, supported MARENA’s delegations and Territorial Coordinating Office to hold municipal, departmental and regional meetings during the preparation of the Environmental Policy and Plan for Nicaragua (PANic). In these meetings, environmental plans were sketched out for the country’s 151 municipalities, which permitted the identification of environmental problems and the design of projects to address them. Although these “plans” were put forward more as a list of problems, they could serve as the basis for formulating other more realistic ones. A current Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) project is requiring municipalities to have an environmental management plan and a municipal environmental unit in order to gain access to its resources (Suazo 2002, pers. comm.).

Forest and environmental projects

In general, when municipal governments are asked about projects related to natural resources, the first thing they think about is reforestation. Due to growing national awareness of the problems with deforestation and to a setting in which international financing is available for related initiatives, many municipalities have developed at least one reforestation project or have established a municipal tree nursery.³³

Wiwilí’s municipal government, for example, promoted a project to reforest 56 ha. The municipal government of Villanueva established a nursery with 16,000 plants, which it then distributed to be used in protecting water sources and reforesting urban streets. In 1997, Chinandega won a prize for having the best municipal nursery in Nicaragua, which was producing 100,000 trees per year. After Hurricane Mitch, Posoltega established a nursery with World Bank funds that had 130,000 trees of native species, as well as fruit and ornamental trees.

MARENA’s Small Projects Fund (FPP) has financed more than 50 municipal projects with DANIDA funding. Although the majority of them included at least one reforestation component, there are also projects for management of solid waste, sewage and other production waste such as the gummy residue (aguas mieles) from coffee processing. The majority of the projects were financed at the request not of the municipal governments but other local organizations, but all required approval by the CAM or the Municipal Council (FPP 2001). Local governments themselves tend to have a more urban approach, presenting projects on landfills and municipal clean-up or parks (Meyrat 2002, pers. comm.).

Municipal associations

There have been various initiatives to coordinate activities among municipalities. The oldest municipal government associations are AMUNSE in the Segovias and AMURS in Río San Juan, but they now exist in various departments. Although their main concern is usually municipal institutionality, they also have an agenda on natural resources.

³³ It must be mentioned, however, that there are many doubts about the effectiveness of traditional reforestation programs.

AMURS has coordinated a series of important initiatives: it established a documentation center in San Carlos and participated in formulating and developing numerous projects. It also serves as a technical support team for the municipal governments, has organized several forums to discuss municipal problems and headed up the formation of the Departmental Sustainable Development Council of Río San Juan (CODESO RSJ).

Forestry investments

Despite all these efforts, there is little investment in the forestry sector. Although some municipalities have received income from natural resource exploitation through the 25% from INAFOR or local charges, there is no evidence that this income is being reinvested in the sector in the majority of cases. One reason could be that the control of logging (and therefore of the benefits of some investments) is in central government hands, but this is not the only problem. In general, municipal governments have an urban bias and invest little in rural areas.

Nonetheless, pressure is increasing from some rural communities, CAMs and NGOs to reinvest at least a fraction of the funds that come from forest activities in the same sector, or at least in the communities in which logging occurred. In forested and rural municipalities, these efforts are coming up against the reality of governments with annual budgets of $1 to $4 per capita (Larson 2001), but resources are also rarely invested in forests or the environment in the Pacific, where the discourse of many municipal governments is quite conservationist (Somarriba 2002, pers. comm.).

COORDINATION BETWEEN MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENTS AND CENTRAL AGENCIES

Municipal governments have only partially fulfilled the responsibilities granted them by law when these responsibilities require coordinating actions with national authorities. Coordination with INAFOR, MAGFOR and MARENA has fundamentally depended on the willingness of the departmental delegate and the municipal government to negotiate. And even when this will is present, the lack of resources has at times affected the delegates’ possibility of visiting the different municipalities in the department.

The two problems mentioned most often regarding this coordination³⁴are the little respect shown by delegates and technical personnel to local elected leaders, who usually have a lower level of former education, and the tendency of some central government officials to control information and impose unnecessary bureaucratic procedures. There have, however, been important efforts to overcome these problems at the national and local level. In 2001, AMUNIC invited the MARENA delegates to the first meetings of newly elected mayors in the departments and autonomous regions, and all attended. MARENA explained the importance of the municipal environmental plans and the need to have an environmental office and a CAM in each municipality. This sparked an interesting exchange and demonstrated MARENA’s willingness to work with local governments (Blackwell 2002, pers. comm.).

MARENA and others sectors interested in natural resources see the CAMs as the best mechanism for discussing, hammering out consensus and organizing participation around environmental problems and plans in the municipalities (STCSD et al. 2002). Although each CAM is different, they are generally made up of representatives of state institutions and civil society, with a local government representative as president. At times, the INAFOR delegate also participates. Although there are CAMs in over half of the country’s municipalities, however, they do not always function in practice.³⁵

As for INAFOR, the period of greatest coordination with local governments was between mid-2000 and October 2001, when INAFOR’s director began to implement a deconcentration and decentralization plan. She was very open to the complaints and suggestions coming from the municipalities and tried to put a stop to internal corruption. One of her most important actions was to negotiate the payment of 25% of logging permit fees to local governments, since she understood that these governments would only begin to take the legal framework on forest management seriously if INAFOR fulfilled its own obligations. She promoted meetings between INAFOR and municipal leaders, in which INAFOR provided all available information on logging and forest industries in each municipality. She also won the support of agroforestry organizations by simplifying the process for obtaining permits and delegating many functions to departmental offices.³⁶

³⁴ There are also other problems, such as when the mayor and the delegate are from different political parties.

³⁵ Where the CAMs are very effective, as in León, Estelí and Bonanza, they offer an important forum for local stakeholders to coordinate on environmental and forestry issues. In addition, they facilitate communication and negotiation with private industry, supervise agreements through field visits, propose ordinances to the Municipal Council and promote projects such as watershed management, protection of slopes and others.

³⁶ In a national forum on Community Forestry, the leader of a project for pine grove owners in Santa Clara said the costs and inconvenience of the bureaucracies had diminished thanks to the INAFOR director’s initiatives (Rivera 2001).

Between October 2001 and March 2002, successive changes were made in INAFOR’s management. The first new director recentralized control over permits, while the second decided to return to the deconcentration and decentralization plan, although progress has been very slow (Saborío 2002, pers. comm.).³⁷ These contradictions, however, show that it is imperative to have a defined decentralization policy, so that it not depend on the initiative and good will of a single official.

MARENA is three years into its deconcentration process, but it is considered one of the ministries with the least internal communication and coordination. Some documents and studies published by one office are unknown and unconsulted in others. There is also no coordination between MARENA and INAFOR, but rather conflicts over control of some territories such as the Bosawas Reserve’s buffer zone.³⁸

In the forestry sector, the balance of powers between the municipalities and the central government leans clearly toward the ministries, although there are important efforts to achieve a better equilibrium. The central government’s official viewpoint is that power has to be turned over to the local governments gradually, as they accumulate capacities. This policy sounds reasonable, but it must be recognized that it facilitates resistance to decentralization and could encourage manipulation of the process. It is difficult to acquire capacities if one does not face the need to do so and lacks the authority to exercise them.

DECENTRALIZATION AND LOCAL ACTORS

The local arena is complex and each municipality is different, but even so, strengthening municipal power has opened new opportunities for many local actors. Are the elite the only ones being strengthened, or are opportunities for participation opening for marginalized sectors too? In some places the loggers, including the above-mentioned “timber mafia,” predominate. In other cases, those previously marginalized have grabbed the reins. The most outstanding case is Bonanza, where indigenous people control the majority of the Municipal Council and there is a Mayangna mayor for the first time in the country’s history.

This section analyzes official mechanisms and opportunities for civic participation in municipal government decision-making and discusses the most relevant local stakeholders in the forestry sector and their relation to local government.

Official opportunities for civic participation

³⁷ The plan is not exactly the one previously formulated, but there are few changes (Saborío 2002, pers. comm.). The previous director, for example, had considered liberalizing the transport of logs so that INAFOR could focus more on territorial control (Tijerino 2001, Saborío and Flores 2002, pers. comm.). The new deputy director argues that the first step is deconcentration and that there are capacity problems not only among municipal governments but also some INAFOR delegations. In an interview, he stated his vew that municipal governments own their resources and thus should be the ones to analyze the requests and grant the permits, while INAFOR’s role should be to standardize and supervise the process (Saborío 2002, pers. comm.). Nonetheless, many officials, particularly at the middle and lower levels, oppose deconcentration and/or decentralization (Flores 2002, pers. comm.).

³⁸ Due to a lack of legal definition of the buffer zone, it was not included in the Protected Area until December 2001; until then, the land had been under INAFOR’s jurisdiction. With the new law, promoted by the Bosawas Technical Secretariat, the buffer zone became part of the Reserve and was transferred to MARENA’s jurisdiction. In early 2002, this law was in dispute, as indigenous communities filed a claim of unconstitutionality because they were not consulted (Campos 2002, pers. comm.).

The Municipalities Law establishes that the municipal governments “will promote and stimulate civic participation in local administration.” The only mechanism required, however, is the cabildo, which it defines as “assemblies made up of the residents of each municipality”— a sort of town hall forum. According to Article 36, the municipal government must hold two cabildos a year to present and discuss the budget both before and after its implementation, although both the Municipal Council and the citizens can call extraordinary cabildos.

The law authorizes local governments to create other participatory forums and residents’ associations. The Municipal Environmental Commission (CAM) is one such forum that operates more uniformly than a few years ago.³⁹ In addition, many municipalities have alcalditos to maintain contact between the local government and rural communities. At times, these or other community leaders directly participate in resource management concerns, such as by endorsing forestry or agricultural burning permits.

The recently approved Municipal Budgetary System Law obliges municipal governments to formulate their annual budgets with community participation.⁴⁰ The Council must create a special commission, with its schedule of consultation meetings, and respond to the population’s suggestions before the cabildo, where the results are then presented. The law also establishes that a citizen may demand that the budget be declared null if the municipal government fails to carry out this participatory process (Bravo 2002, pers. comm.).

These mechanisms of participation and interchange between local government and civil society should improve government accountability, which up to now has been somewhat weak. Little by little, the judicial system is beginning to act. Waspán’s former mayor was accused of administrative and penal responsibility for irregularities involving over half a million dollars; mainly for authorizing logging endorsements for which the funds, paid by the Región Autónoma Atlántico Norte Industrial S.A. (RAANISA), were never reported to the mayor’s office (LP 18-Apr-2002). A more effective judicial system would be an incentive for transparency and legal actions and a disincentive for corruption.

Civil society’s relations with municipal government

In addition to the municipal governments, the most relevant local stakeholders regarding forest resources are indigenous peoples, NGOs and other projects, peasants (farmers, agroforesters or firewood sellers) and the logging companies.

In general, the indigenous peoples on the Caribbean side of the country have strong NGO allies but, with the exception of Bonanza, they tend to see local governments as representatives of the mestizos— the non-indigenous population with whom they have had serious conflicts as landless peasants from other regions of the country have begun to

³⁹ Before, each NGO, project or ministry supported the type of entity that suited its purposes. There are now increasing efforts linked into the vision of the CAMs.

colonize their territories. Some mayors have indeed taken the peasants’ side, as happened in Siuna between 1996 and 2000. In Bonanza, however, where indigenous communities have chosen to participate in and won election to municipal government, their interests are clearly represented in the municipal agenda.

Logistical problems also make relations between the indigenous peoples and municipal governments difficult, since indigenous territories frequently cover more than one municipality, and, at times, even more than one department. Furthermore, a good part of these territories is found in the Bosawas Reserve, which is more under MARENA’s jurisdiction than that of the municipal governments. In this case, although the indigenous communities could benefit from a good relation with the municipal governments, they probably consider their relation with MARENA to be a greater priority.

Although many projects and NGOs themselves ignored the municipal governments until the mid-nineties, the situation began to change toward the end of the decade. Previously, they did not take local governments as seriously because they had little power, meager budgets and very limited capacity. With the decentralization boom as a globally recognized process to strengthen democracy and institutionality and the increased powers and growing legitimacy of Nicaragua’s municipal governments, NGOs were obliged to recognize, negotiate with and even include them in their plans and projects.

Tensions still exist, some because of the high salaries and budgets that the NGOs usually enjoy and others because some projects still undermine local government authority, above all when there are poor relations or personal and political rifts. At the same time, NGOs can exert pressure to influence municipal decisions by mobilizing the population and the media, threatening to withdraw aid or technical support or cultivating a positive relationship of exchange, institutional support and negotiation with the municipal government. All of these have been important in promoting municipal government initiatives around environmental concerns.

NGOs have also been essential in promoting the formation of horizontal support networks, such as the Remario project in Río San Juan, which groups together various NGOs, private sector institutions, producers, universities, technical schools and government representatives around forestry problems. Good coordination among these groups and with the region’s municipal governments might considerably increase the administrative capacity not only of the government, but also of local stakeholders.

Few local governments have chosen to foster the development of community foresters or other small-scale forest producers. Also, because permits were centralized, these producers had

little relationship with municipal governments, save when the latter wanted to tax them. When INAFOR began to decentralize, however, at least one agroforestry association lauded this initiative by its director, because it led to important savings in time and travel (Rivera 2001).

Some mayors have pledged to protect the rights of these small-scale forest owners, who are often the ones who lose most from logging contracts.⁴¹ Firewood collectors and merchants, almost all of whom operate illegally, also see advantages in local governments being in charge rather than INAFOR. Among other things, this would facilitate their legalization and help change the bad image that the sector has among environmentalists and the authorities (Carneiro 1999, 1998).⁴²

The logging companies have had both successes and failures in their relations with the local governments. In some cases, they have managed to convince or even bribe both the municipal governments and the populations to achieve their aims.⁴³ The RAAN is the worst example, where corruption is so entrenched that the Environmental Attorney’s Office chose to close its office there due to death threats and other types of pressure (García 2002, pers. comm.). Even where the local government has joined efforts with the NGOs and MARENA to stop all logging in the municipality (Bonanza), many loggers still operate illegally. In other cases, however, particularly where local organization is strong (thanks to certain NGOs, indigenous groups or peasant associations), the protest level has prevented logging or mining companies from being able to manage their concessions or use their forestry permits.⁴⁴

In summary, the strengthening of municipal governments has had different effects in the local arena. Perhaps the most important is that there is a new authority, closer to the citizenry, with which to negotiate natural resource management. And if negotiation is impossible, there are other ways to have influence, through the pressure of projects or social mobilization. Even when the national government has granted unwanted exploitation contracts, this pressure has forced some of them to be cancelled, particularly when those heading up the mobilization had the local government’s support.

Tensions between centralization and decentralization

According to Agrawal and Ribot (1999), for there to be a democratic decentralization, local governments need to have significant autonomous decision-making powers and must be accountable to the citizenry rather than only to the central government. In analyzing

⁴¹ A Though landowners have to approve the sale of their wood, they often have little protection from or recourse for logging company abuses.

⁴² Firewood dealers currently have little incentive to legalize. Taxes are very high, as are the costs of developing management plans and the bureaucracy for all the steps required. Around 90% of the sector operates illegally. (Carneiro 1999, 1998).

⁴³ The Renaustra mining company succeeded in reversing the Municipal Council of Cuá-Bocay’s decision to reject its application for a concession.

⁴⁴ This is the case of the timber company SOLCARSA and of various mining companies, such as Nycon in Bonanza and Placer Dome in San Carlos and El Castillo.

the issue of “powers” in the decentralization of forestry administration in Nicaragua, three different but very related spheres must be considered: the municipalization process per se, environmental conservation and protection, and production, or the use and control of income-generating natural resources.

With respect to municipalization itself, the importance of the process developed in Nicaragua over the past 12 years cannot be denied; it has opened a sphere of local governance that did not exist before. Regarding environmental conservation and protection, municipal governments have more influence than before, although there are still many areas in which they must coordinate with a state entity, which establishes norms and has the last word. It is with respect to control over natural resources with economic value, such as forest resources, that there has been very little decentralization of powers and responsibilities. If local governments have been able to have some impact in this regard, it has been thanks to their environmental responsibilities and to the possibility of issuing ordinances with some authority.

In addition to limitations on decision-making power, another factor affects municipal autonomy: lack of economic resources. The Technical Secretariat of the Sectoral Commission for Decentralization (STCSD), the lead entity for the central government’s decentralization policy, itself warned that the lack of a budget “undermines the financial sufficiency of the local entities, and thus of municipal autonomy” (Comisión Sectorial para la Descentralización 2001).

Regarding the second requisite for decentralization mentioned by Agrawal and Ribot (transparency and accountability to the citizenry), it can be said that the election of local leaders starting in 1990 marked a watershed with the past. Nonetheless, elections alone are often not enough. In Nicaragua, political parties choose the candidates and the population is seldom consulted. At voting time, the electors choose among slates of candidates presented by the party, not particular individuals.⁴⁵ For this reason, those elected usually answer more to their party bosses than to their constituents. In addition, when they do attend to the local population’s needs, they tend to favor those from their same political group. It has thus been necessary to turn to other methods to demand accountability, such as local campaigns, mobilizations and denunciations in the media.⁴⁶

PROBLEMS WITH THE CURRENT SYSTEM

INAFOR itself recognizes that the current (centralized) administration of forestry resources is inadequate (Saborío 2002, pers. comm.). The institute lacks the economic resources necessary to deploy enough people to the countryside to provide better management and follow-up to forestry activities. It has also been unable to eliminate corruption either from the countryside or from within the institution. According to its own (unofficial) calculations, 70% of current logging is done without a legal permit, in other words without any control by INAFOR. Furthermore, the institute’s income depends on the permits it grants and the fines it levies, which could lead it to take a merely financial interest in logging.

⁴⁵ It was not always strictly party based, however. In 2000, as the result of a pact between the Liberal Party and the FSLN, the Electoral Law was changed to eliminate the participation of candidates for municipal office chosen by local non-party associations and endorsed by popular petition. In addition, the requisites to establish or maintain a political party were changed, effectively creating a two-party system.

⁴⁶ Participation in the formulation of the municipal budget may also prove to be an important step.

The central government has also failed to protect the environment. Nothing indicates that logging is being done sustainably in the country’s forests; instead, the data indicate a strong tendency to high-grading⁴⁷ as well as a deforestation level of over 50,000 ha per year. MARENA has only been effective in protecting the environment in those areas where close coordination exists with the local stakeholders.

Access to forest resources has not been equitable. During the past decade, loggers with greater economic resources and/or links to the government have had the best access, to the detriment of smaller companies, forest owners, agroforesters and firewood merchants who live in the forested territories. Also, the cost and complexity of the bureaucratic paperwork and the forms of payment for resource access discriminate against these groups. And at times, INAFOR has been reluctant to share the economic benefits of logging, although the law requires it to do so.

In the areas where there are serious problems of corruption, as in the RAAN, both local and national leaders have been implicated. To fight it, neither the central nor the local government can act alone. Furthermore, the legal framework for forestry does not provide incentives for good management. This problem needs to be resolved, independent of whether forest management is centralized or decentralized.

MUNICIPAL BUDGET AND CAPACITY

Although many believe that municipal government participation in forest management could help resolve some of the current problems, it is important to recognize that some local governments still have limited capacity. This is precisely the argument most often heard to justify the failure to approve greater central government transfers during the annual discussion of the national budget in the National Assembly.⁴⁸ The central government has argued that the principal of gradualness must be adopted in the transfer of funds, as municipal capacity increases. Nonetheless, the legislature only increased the percentage granted to the municipal governments by 0.2% for 2002. This argument is like the chicken and egg problem: if there are no funds, how does capacity to manage them increase? And how can skilled personnel be obtained, since they demand better salaries?⁴⁹

In reality, it is not clear that capacity is or has been the primary concern regarding government transfers. In fact, it has been pointed out that central funding became totally discretionary during the government of Arnoldo Alemán, with municipal funds and projects being used to reward or punish members of the governing party (M. Ortega 2002, pers. comm.). During the last year of his government, a direct transfer of 1% was approved, which is insufficient. Many municipal governments are genuinely interested in dealing with their constituents’ problems, but are unable to do so for lack of funds. This lack of financing thus undermines local government authority and legitimacy.

⁴⁷ Taking the best trees without concern for the regeneration of the species or the quality of regeneration.

⁴⁸ Shortly before this book went to press, the National Assembly voted to transfer a record (for Nicaragua) 3.2% of the national budget to municipal governments. As of late 2002, many legislators had finally begun to fight in favor of the municipalities for several reasons that are not possible to address in this chapter. It is highly unlikely, however, that this transfer will remain in the final version of the budget. Rather than “lack of capacity,” however, the problems now are economic and political.

⁴⁹Although the government of Nicaragua is poor, it is not true that there are no additional funds for the municipalities. Funds have been budgeted for institutions such as the Emergency Social Investment Fund (FISE), the Rural Development Institute (IDR) and the Presidency of the Republic that are earmarked for projects within municipal competency (Baltodano 2002). The legislators also have their own funds for municipal projects.

The lack of budget affects forest management as well. An analysis of Nicaragua’s municipalities shows a clear correlation between the amount of economic resources (which increases with the percentage of urban population and shrinks with the level of urban poor) and the number of local forest management initiatives (Larson 2001). This is particularly due to the ability to contract personnel dedicated specifically to the administration of environmental issues. It should be noted here that, unfortunately, there are fewer resources to hire such personnel precisely where there are more forest resources and the forests are more fragile (in the most outlying, rural and poor regions).

In general terms, local government capacity has clearly improved in the past 10 years (M. Ortega 2002, Bravo 2002, pers. comm.). Aspects that virtually did not even exist in most municipalities before then, such as the capacity to plan, promote local participation, manage finances, coordinate with other entities and make informed decisions are now being consolidated. There is a new municipal culture (M. Ortega 2001). A World Bank study found that internal financial controls are “adequate” or “very adequate” in 10 of the 13 municipalities of Chinandega (Donkin and Argüello 2001), and that what they need are funds to carry out their mandate.

The reduction of the local sales tax from 2% to 1% has jeopardized municipal budgets, and the real estate tax (IBI) has been unable to make up the losses.⁵⁰ The lack of updated property registry data, together with the distance of many rural properties from local government offices, makes it difficult to enforce. The tax plan is out of date and does not respond to local government needs, since the 1997 reform to the Municipalities Law considerably increased their competencies relative to the original 1988 law (Bravo 2002, pers. comm.).

The municipalities’ economic needs, combined with the central government’s failure to comply with the payment of 25% on resource exploitation contracts,⁵¹ triggered the creation of other charges on natural resources. Although the Constitution establishes that only the National Assembly can create taxes,⁵²many of these municipal government charges, though not called taxes, are just that.

There are also problems with fines that local governments have imposed for failure to obey certain local norms, such as those established with respect to forest fires and agricultural burning. The main problems occur when:

⁵⁰ The central government and some bilateral projects believe that local governments have to seek their own financing through taxes such as the IBI. They argue that many municipalities are pressuring for national budget transfers to avoid charging their own residents, thus promoting paternalistic relations. This is true in some cases, but it must also be recognized that there are logistical problems with charging the IBI, not to mention high poverty levels in some areas that greatly limit its income generating potential.

⁵¹ Although it seems that the problem in forestry has been resolved, this has not been the case for other resources.

⁵² At present, each year the National Assembly must approve the tax plans for every municipality. A proposal to reform the Municipal Tax Code suggests the establishment of minimum and maximum rates, allowing the municipalities to choose their rates within those limits (Bravo, 2002, M. Ortega 2002, pers. comm.).

Municipal governments can, however, charge for their services, and there are fines that are indeed legal. But in practice the lack of clarity due not only to ignorance of the laws but also to different interpretations of them generates confusion. As one lawyer said, “Each municipality is its own republic!” (J. Ortega 2002, pers. comm.).

In summary, on top of their fully justified claims regarding lack of financing, some municipalities will have to address difficulties in charging and managing funds, as well as legal problems.

CENTRAL GOVERNMENT RESISTANCE

Why has decentralization not gone further? To round out the answer to this question, it is important to analyze not only the central government’s stated reasons but also the responsibilities that it reserves for itself in practice. With respect to natural resource management, the government again argues that the problem is lack of local capacity, just as it does with financial management.⁵³ But two other factors may better explain the resistance to decentralizing forest management. First, Forestry Institute officials, and particularly lower-level staff, resist ceding responsibilities and sharing knowledge and information, because doing so means ceding power and could even make their jobs obsolete. Second, Nicaragua’s forest resources generate income that the Institute and its staff claim for themselves, through both legal and illegal means; not only do they resist ceding income, but again the power that accompanies economic control.

The promotion of formal decentralization depends a lot on leadership; when there has been political will and strong leadership, decentralization has moved forward. But it is not good for this process to depend on the will of a single person, as can be appreciated in the case of the change of directors in INAFOR in 2001. The rollback that a single individual can provoke, even in a few short months, underscores the importance of establishing a clear policy on decentralization of forest management.

Decentralization also progresses when there is social pressure from below. Nicaragua’s mayors have gotten attention for their demands, despite resistance from the central level, when they have been able to organize among themselves and their constituency and make those demands felt. In addition, as decentralization advances, national political leaders’ perception that the mayors are essential to mobilizing grassroots support is strengthened, and they, in turn, become more likely to push forward the formal legal process.

On the other hand, even if top-level central government officials are committed to promoting real decentralization, they face important resistance from their subordinates. For example, in some territories, control over information and resources is seen as a source of power and authority in the “coordination” between the municipal governments and MARENA and INAFOR delegates. But even where there is political will to coordinate, the

⁵³ Although little is said about technical capacity, it is not clear to what degree highly skilled personnel are needed in municipal government to foster good forest management. In fact, current needs are largely related to the complexity of the forms and requisites that INAFOR has established, but the process need not be like that. In addition, it is not the municipal governments but rather local communities and logging companies that manage the forest. There are also important debates about the benefits of scientific forestry vs. management based on local knowledge or a combination of the two through adaptive management (Klooster 2001).

necessary policies and mechanisms must be established to facilitate this process, and recourse mechanisms should exist for all stakeholders to be able to demand that they function when they do not.

LOCAL DEMOCRACY

TFormal mechanisms are also needed to promote local democracy. The ability of citizens to influence municipal government decisions and the level of coordination between the government and local stakeholders depend both on local actors’ mobilization capacity and on the receptivity of their elected officials; in other words, it depends on the municipality’s political and social context.

When the government is closed and shuns transparency, there is more space for corruption and a greater probability that it is committed to particular interests. A transparent and communicative government tends to be more receptive, open to different ideas and to debating them. Similarly, well-organized and/or economically influential groups can gain ground to influence local government decisions. A municipality with historic experience in local organizing or with well-organized marginalized groups can foster a more democratic decision-making environment.

The formal mechanism for citizen participation in decision-making on natural resources is the Municipal Environmental Commission (CAM). Not all of these commissions, however, are representative or democratic, and frequently peasants are not represented. Many are dominated by NGOs or by representatives of state institutions, some of whom may have a good line about civic participation and democracy but really only care about getting the municipal government to adopt their own vision of environmental management.

All things considered, however, NGO participation can be very important to improving local government capacity for managing environmental problems. In the municipalities with positive and respectful relationships between projects or NGOs and local government, there is also greater management capacity, either because the project finances technical posts in the government or assumes certain responsibilities itself. In the best of cases, the relationship between the projects, the municipal government and the population will build a process whereby the local government will come to assume responsibility for the environment and natural resources as its own challenge and obligation.⁵⁴

MUNICIPAL FOREST MANAGEMENT

To better understand the type and scope of the municipal governments’ forest-related initiatives, it is important to examine their origin. What was the impetus behind them? Was the municipal government internally motivated, or did it respond to pressure or incentives? Was its initiative fleeting or long-lasting? Did it respond to a full-fledged understanding of the municipality’s environmental problems and to its commitment to resolve them?

In Nicaragua’s municipalities, four main motivations can be identified (see also Larson 2001a, 2001b):

It is clear from the nature and quantity of initiatives that many municipal governments are interested in generating revenue from their forest resources. In other cases, a crisis or conflict forces the local government to intervene and take new initiative.⁵⁵ Local governments also respond to pressure from civil society — from local citizens, organized groups and often NGOs. This pressure may take the form of campaigns, protests, incentives or simple influence and negotiation. These three factors often play a complementary role as part of a learning process that may lead to the fourth: greater recognition and understanding of environmental problems.

In the majority of cases, however, initiatives are not aimed at providing integral solutions to the many problems or conflicts that exist around natural resources. More often initiatives arise in response to immediate needs, rather than being planned or integrated into a local development concept. If development planning itself is treated as another tool in the learning process with broad municipal debate and not just as the drafting of a document, it could lead to better comprehension of the problem and more integral solutions.

The planning process should be taken advantage of to expand the local government’s vision to the medium and long term, and to avoid using natural resources as a source of income to resolve short-term economic crises. But this also means resolving the municipal budget crisis. If not, municipal governments will always have a strong incentive to see forests as a source of cash, even if they would prefer not to.

Conclusions and recommendations

Decentralization in Nicaragua has made important progress. There is a new dynamic sphere of local governance that did not previously exist and, despite the poverty and lack of experience of many local governments, citizens have begun to turn to and engage with their elected leaders. Decentralization has its own grassroots momentum, and thanks to important alliances between the local and central levels, a certain legal framework has been hammered out that permits the fight for genuine democratic decentralization to keep advancing.

⁵⁵ In El Sauce, for example, a local protest resulted in a municipal ordinance aimed at better controlling logging companies from neighboring municipalities. The crisis of Hurricane Mitch had a decisive role in the emphasis that Posoltega began to put on watershed protection. The weevil plague sparked the declaration of a state of alert in the Segovias and extensive local organizing to prevent forest fires.

Nonetheless, decentralization has faced many obstacles: budget problems that hinder fulfillment of local mandates and undermine the autonomy and legitimacy of local governments; lack of authority over logging and the use of forest resources; centralist and bureaucratic national government tendencies and the lack of skills and experience of many municipal governments.

The central government that took office at the beginning of 2002 appeared more committed to decentralization than its predecessor did. Under President Bolaños, a draft national decentralization policy was finally circulated for discussion. MARENA has pledged itself to its deconcentration process and demonstrated willingness to work with local governments through mechanisms such as the CAMs. INAFOR as well has promised to get back on the deconcentration and decentralization path.

Even at that, local governments are still not taken very seriously. Despite the political will of some key central government officials, there is strong resistance to decentralization. If the political aspect of decentralization is not supported, the process will continue to stagnate. To promote the necessary formal changes, there has to be strong pressure from below; this implies strengthening local organizational capacity as the basis for decentralization and grassroots democracy.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The policies and initiatives listed below could contribute to a decentralized forest management that is more efficient, equitable, democratic and sustainable.

Central and local governments

⁵⁶ These include the Municipal Tax Code, the Property Registry Law, a new Contracts Law, the Law of Municipal Solvency and the Urbanization Law.

Forest management

The citizenry

⁵⁷ In other words, the country’s environmental, forestry, productive and macroeconomic policies should be harmonized. This was one of the primary conclusions of a workshop on the forestry law sponsored by Nitlapán-UCA, June 21, 2002.

Abbreviations and acronyms

Bibliography

Agrawal, A.; Ribot, J. 1999. Accountability in Decentralization: A Framework with South Asian and West African Cases. The Journal of Developing Areas No. 33: 473-502.

Arguello, A. 2002. Taller Fundación Ford-Nitlapán-UCA. PROFOR, Managua, Nicaragua, June 18.

Baltodano, M. 2002. Cambiar esquemas en manejo de recursos. Municipalidades 2(9), enero.

Barahona, T.; R. Mendoza. Chinandega: El manejo de una reserva natural en un mundo de agricultores. Nitlapán-UCA/ CIFOR/ PROTIERRA. El papel de los gobiernos municipales en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Managua, Nicaragua.

Carneiro de Miranda, R. 1999. Diagnóstico del sector leñero comercial del Pacífico de Nicaragua. CATIE-Proleña, Managua, Nicaragua.

Carneiro de Miranda, R. 1998. Propuesta de un programa de control e incentivos para la reposición forestal del consumo dendroenergético de Managua y León. ESMAP/Banco Mundial, Managua, Nicaragua.

Centro Humboldt-AMUNSE. 2002. Tercer informe sobre el estado del desastre ambiental ocasionado por la plaga del gorgojo (Dendroctonus frontalis) en el departamento de Nueva Segovia.

Comisión Sectorial para la Descentralización. 2001. Página Web. http://www.csd.gob.ni

Donkin; Argüello, A. 2001. Evaluación del control interno. Departamento de Chinandega.

Fauné, A.; Kaimowitz, D. 1999. Posoltega: La necesidad de articular esfuerzos y recursos en torno a la reforestación. Nitlapán-UCA/ CIFOR/ PROTIERRA. El papel de los gobiernos municipales en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Managua, Nicaragua.

Fauné, A.; Martínez, T. 1999. Achuapa: Capacidades locales para la gestión de los recursos naturales. Nitlapán-UCA/ CIFOR/ PROTIERRA. El papel de los gobiernos municipales en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Managua, Nicaragua.

Fauné, A.; Mendoza, R. 1998. Bosawas: La gestión de los recursos naturales en el territorio:

INIFOM. 2002. Informe de traspaso de gobierno 1997-2001. División de Cooperación y Coordinación Interinstitucional. Managua, Nicaragua.

Kaimowitz, D. 2001. Cuatro medio verdades: la relación bosques y agua en Centroamérica. CATIE, Turrialba, Costa Rica. Revista Forestal Centroamericana 33: 6-10.

Kleinn, C. 2000. Bibliografía comentada: cambios en la cobertura forestal de Nicaragua. FAO/CA TIE, Rome, Italy. www.fao. org/forestry/fo/fra/docs/ Wp34_spa. pdf

Klooster, D. 2001. Towards Adaptive Community Forest Management: Integrating Local Forest Knowledge with Scientific Forestry. Economic Geography.

Larson, A. 2001. Recursos forestales y gobiernos municipales en Nicaragua: hacia una gestión efectiva. CIFOR/Nitlapán-UCA, Managua, Nicaragua.

Larson, A.; Barahona, T. 1999. El Castillo: La colonización y las empresas madereras en una zona de amortiguamiento. Nitlapán-UCA/CIFOR/PROTIERRA. El papel de los gobiernos municipales en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Managua, Nicaragua.

Larson, A.; Barahona, T. 1999. San Carlos: ¿Una oportunidad despreciada? Nitlapán-UCA/ CIFOR/ PROTIERRA. El papel de los gobiernos municipales en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Managua, Nicaragua.

MARENA. 2002. II Informe nacional de la República de Nicaragua sobre la implementación de la Convención de las Naciones Unidas de Lucha contra la Desertificación y la Sequía (UNCCD). Dirección General de Biodiversidad y Recursos Naturales. Managua, Nicaragua. www.unccd.int/cop/reports/lac/ national/2002/nicaragua-spa.pdf

Martínez, H. 2001. Coordinadora del Programa de Modernización del Sector Dendroenergético de Nicaragua. Acciones de la Comisión Nacional de Energía. Presentación. I Foro Nacional de Forestería Comunitaria. Managua, Nicaragua.

Martínez, T.; Rocha, J.L. 1999. El Sauce: La organización comunitaria como base para el desarrollo. Nitlapán-UCA/ CIFOR/ PROTIERRA. El papel de los gobiernos municipales en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Managua, Nicaragua.

Martínez, T.; Mendoza, R. 1999. Somotillo: La gestión de cuencas una necesidad impostergable. Nitlapán-UCA/ CIFOR/ PROTIERRA. El papel de los gobiernos municipales en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Managua, Nicaragua.

Mendoza, R.; Artola, N. 1999. León: Dilemas en la gestión del bosque seco y del área manglar. Nitlapán-UCA/ CIFOR/ PROTIERRA. El papel de los gobiernos municipales en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Managua, Nicaragua.

Mendoza, R.; Martínez, T. 1999. Villanueva: Los recursos naturales en un municipio empobrecido. Nitlapán-UCA/ CIFOR/ PROTIERRA. El papel de los gobiernos municipales en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Managua, Nicaragua.

Nitlapán-UCA. 2002. Las alcaldías y la administración de los recursos naturales. Draft.

Ortega, M. 1997. Nicaragua: Políticas de descentralización y capacidades de gestión administrativa y financiera de las municipalidades. FLACSO, San Salvador, El Salvador.

Ortega, M. 2001. Cultura política, gobierno local y descentralización V: Nicaragua. FLACSO, San Salvador, El Salvador.

Parrilli, M.D. 2000. Reactivando la cadena de los pinares en Las Segovias: Análisis de conclusiones a partir de la gira de estudio realizada en Dipilto, Santa Clara, Jalapa, Ocotal y Estelí en mayo del 2000. CIFOR/Nitlapán-UCA. Managua, Nicaragua.

Rivera, C. 2001. Experiencias del Proyecto Manejo Forestal de Pino Integrado a la Industria Forestal. PROFOR. Presentation, I National Forum on Community Forestry. Managua, Nicaragua.

Rocha, J.L.; Barahona, T. 1999. Puerto Morazán; La camaronicultura: ¿un espejismo en tierra salada? Nitlapán-UCA/ CIFOR/ PROTIERRA. El papel de los gobiernos municipales en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Managua, Nicaragua.

STCSD, MARENA, CRAAN, CRAAS, AMUNIC, AMURACAN. 2002. Propuesta de marco conceptual para la modernización de la gestión ambiental en Nicaragua. Managua, Nicaragua.

Legal norms

- Law 217, General Law of the Environment and Natural Resources and its Regulations (Decree 9-96)

- Law 290, Law of Organization, Competence and Procedures of the Executive Branch

- Ordinance on Natural Resource Management in the Municipality of Achuapa (12-08-99)

- Findings on the Forestry Law bill presented by the president of the National Assembly (11-01)

Individuals interviewed

- García, J. L., National Assistant Defense Attorney, Environmental Attorney’s Office, 12-Apr-02.

Forest Management in Brazil’s Amazonian Municipalities

Introduction¹

Brazil has a history of successive periods of political centralization and decentralization. In 1988, with the passage of the current political Constitution, the country entered a period of decentralization that reversed the centralist tendency of the military regime in power between 1964 and 1984. Because of this process, the states and municipalities have been financially strengthened due to the direct transfer of responsibilities and economic resources from the federal government to these two government levels.

Decentralization has advanced very effectively in policies related to the provision of social services such as health and education, reaching the majority of Brazil’s municipalities through the approval of specific laws and the creation of administrative mechanisms for devolving competencies. In the area of forest and environmental management, however, there is still no normative framework to determine a similar decentralization process. Nonetheless, Brazil’s environmental legislation does permit states and municipalities to participate in managing their territories and natural resources.

The decentralization of natural resource management is incipient in Brazil; only in recent years have the Amazonian municipalities taken any interest in assuming greater responsibilities in this field. Some federal government programs, as well as those of nongovernmental organizations and international cooperation, have stimulated the municipal governments to get involved in managing their natural resources. It is interesting to note that although the legal framework and incentives for decentralization are common to all municipalities of the Amazonia (some state policies and laws vary), some municipal governments have played a more distinguished role than others in managing their forest resources.

This chapter analyses forest management decentralization within the general context of decentralizing natural resource management in Brazil based on specific research conducted in eight municipalities of two states of the Brazilian Amazonia: Mâncio Lima and Xapuri in the state of Acre; and Altamira, Moju, Paragominas, Porto de Moz, Uruará and Santarém in the state of Pará. The research team involved did interviews in the eight municipalities and the state capitals (Rio Branco and Belém, respectively) in early 2001.

The text is made up of five sections. The first presents general data about the Brazilian Amazonia and its forest sector, since this region is where the majority of the country’s tropical timber is exploited. The second describes the capacities and specific competencies of the municipal governments, emphasizing tax collection mechanisms and resource transfers to the municipalities from the federal and state governments. The third presents the country’s institutional framework for forest resource management, analyzing the main federal laws that determine the distribution of competencies among the federal, state and municipal governments and the role of the main central environmental management bodies.

¹ This chapter synthesizes some of the results of the Municipalities and Forest Management Project in the Brazilian Amazonia, a study financed by the British government’s Department for International Development (DfID). It was developed together with the Center for International Forest Research (CIFOR), the Federal University of Rio Grande North (UFRN), the Acre Research and Extension Group in Agroforestry Systems (PESACRE), the Trans-Amazonic Agro-ecological Laboratory (LAET) and the Amazonia Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). The participating researchers were David Kaimowitz, Carolina Almeida de Souza, José Clodoaldo Barbosa, Iliana Salgado, Carla Rocha, Magna Cunha, Guilhermina Cayres, Doerte Sagebart, Ana Cristina de Barros and Fabiano Toni.

The fourth section describes concrete experiences showing how municipal governments link up with a series of stakeholders including business owners, nongovernmental organizations and state and federal government programs and agencies to implement local activities that directly and indirectly affect the forest resources. The final section analyses the current decentralization situation in the forest sector, the activities in which local governments are involved, the factors motivating them and the impact these activities are having on the forest and on local stakeholders. In addition, it offers some final considerations and public policy recommendations that could promote the process in the most democratic and sustainable way possible.

The Amazonia and its forestry sector

The Brazilian Amazonia covers nearly all of nine of the country’s states: Roraima, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, Maranhão, Acre, Rondônia, Mato Grosso and Tocantins. Although the region occupies 59.8% of the national territory (5.1 million km²), only 12.4% of the country’s 21 million inhabitants lives there, which is a demographic density of 4.13 inhabitants/km². In some parts of the area, however, land occupation is very dense, since 68.2% of that population lives in medium and large cities.

The Amazonia is the region with the greatest forest wealth, but Brazil has been losing an average of approximately 17,000-18,000 km² of the forested area (0.5%) annually since the early nineties, with the most intense deforestation in the states of Pará, Mato Grosso and Rondônia. In general, logging in this region is uncontrolled and extremely aggressive. Sawmills are set up in areas with large volumes of precious woods and once those trees are gone, a second cycle begins with species of a slightly lower value. The most valuable species in the region is the mogno (Switenia macrophylla), whose extraction was prohibited due to the risk of extinction given the rapid exploitation rate. Two other valuable species still being exploited are cedar (Cedrela odorata) andl ipê (Tabebuia sp). The group of less valuable species includes jatobá (Hymenea coubaril), freijó (Cordia sagoti), cumaru (Dipteryx odorata) and maçaranduba (Manilkara sp). Exploitation intensifies in the second round, reaching up to 5-10 trees per hectare, which corresponds to 40-50 m³ in some cases.²

Timber production in the Amazonia was 28 million m³ in 1997, of which 86% is consumed within the country with the wealthiest regions — those in the south and southeast — consuming two thirds. The state of São Paulo alone consumes 20% of the total. These numbers suffice to show that Brazil is the world’s large consumer of tropical wood.

The bulk of the Amazon’s timber comes from 75 “logging poles”— municipalities in which production exceeds 100,000 m³ of logs per year. The companies are attracted to these municipalities due to the availability of raw material, infrastructure such as roads, electricity and banking services, and labor (Smeraldi and Veríssimo 1999). The major producing states are Pará and Mato Grosso, which supply over 75% of the region’s production, with Rondônia in third place.

Federalism and decentralization

BACKGROUND

Brazil is a federation of 26 states, a federal district and the 5,561 municipalities into which they are subdivided. Each government level has its own executive and legislative branch. At the federal level, the executive branch includes the President and ministers, while the bicameral legislative branch is made up of the Chamber of Deputies (representatives of the population) and the Senate of the Republic (representatives of the states). The state executive is made up of the governor, the governor’s cabinet and the state secretariats, while the municipal one is made up of the mayor, the mayor’s cabinet and municipal secretariats. Both the state and municipal legislative branches have only one chamber: respectively the Legislative Assembly made up of deputies, and the Municipal Chamber whose members are called vereadores, or councilors. The legislators at all three levels as well as the heads of their executive branches (president, governors and mayors) are directly elected by popular vote.

Brazil’s political history is marked by recurrent changes in the relations between these three government levels, which at times have promoted decentralization and at others centralization (Nickson 1995). In general, the periods of loss of municipal power and autonomy correspond to the interruption of the democratic system, such as the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship (1937-1945) and the military regime (1964-1984).

In 1988, a new Constitution was promulgated that reestablished a series of mechanisms granting autonomy to the municipalities and began a cycle of decentralization toward these government structures. In fact, one of the main demands put to the 1988 constituent assembly was precisely to guarantee increased resource transfers from the federal government to the municipal ones.³ As a result, a new fiscal system was established that strongly favors the municipalities (Shah 1991).

The 1988 Constitution also conferred a unique situation on Brazil, in that the municipalities are considered federation members together with the states and the federal district. With this, the municipalities gain self-organizing power to draft and approve their organizational laws, which are equivalent to a municipal Constitution.

Although the fiscal decentralization strengthened the municipalities, the administrative responsibilities of each level of power were not clearly defined, creating a seriously abnormal situation in which the municipalities have few clearly defined constitutional obligations. This is particularly problematic in the area of forest management, as few mayors are interested in the municipality assuming responsibilities tied to natural resource management because doing so could affect important economic interests and, according to the local view, depress the municipality’s economy.

³ The municipalities’ interests were well represented in the constituent assembly, given that municipal leaders together with pro-municipal organizations directly lobbied the elected representatives in their geographic area of influence.

THE MUNICIPALITIES’ POLITICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE

The mayor heads the municipal executive branch and names his/her secretaries and advisers. Both the mayor and the municipal councilors (whose numbers are proportional to the municipality’s population) are elected for a four-year term. The Municipal Chamber must draft municipal laws, approve and amend the budget drawn up by the executive and monitor its execution.

In addition to the legislative branch, municipalities can create councils of popular participation to democratize public policy design; this is a fundamental concept of political decentralization. Various councils have been created at the three government levels with watchdog and deliberative powers. In areas such as health, education, children’s rights and social assistance, the states and municipalities are obliged to institute these councils in order to receive resources from the federal government’s decentralization programs.

By constitutional requisite, there must be secretariats of health, education and social assistance in the municipal executive power structure. The great majority of municipalities also have a secretariat of agriculture, which deals directly with problems related to agricultural production, and in the largest municipalities, these secretariats have agronomic engineers and agricultural technicians.

Only a few municipalities have a secretariat exclusively dedicated to the environment; more typically there is an environmental coordinating office within one of the other secretariats, normally that of agriculture or health. In recent years, however, this picture has begun to change. Due to the growing importance of the environmental issue in the municipal agendas and to technical and financial support programs sponsored by the federal government, international agencies and cooperation agreements, increasing numbers of municipalities now have environmental secretariats as well as foresters.

MUNICIPAL TAX COLLECTION

In general, Brazil’s municipalities enjoy a relatively comfortable fiscal situation, as the majority of their resources come from state and federal funds and tax transfers. This, plus the political cost of creating a local tax system, acts as a disincentive to the municipal governments to collect local taxes or to regulate, inspect and charge the forest/timber sector. This is the reigning situation in small, poor municipalities, which describes the majority of those in the Amazonia.

The two main sources of municipal income, then, are the transfers received from the state and federal governments and municipal tax collection. Among the various institutions responsible for transferring funds to the municipalities is the Fund for Municipal Participation (FPM),⁴ which functions at a federal level. In 1992, nearly 35% of Brazil’s municipalities received over half of their financial resources from the FPM; in the small municipalities, the proportion reached 60%. The second source of resource transfers is the tax on products and services known as inter-state and inter-municipal transport and communication (ICMS), which functions at a state level.⁵ By its nature and form as a subsidy, however, this tax is much more significant for the large municipalities (those with over 50,000 inhabitants) that have more developed economies (Bremaeker 1994).⁶

Some states use the ICMS transfer mechanism to benefit municipalities that have environmental conservation areas. Although these transfers (commonly known as ecological ICMS or green ICMS) have only been implemented in a few states (in the Amazonia, the states of Rondonia and Mato Grosso have recently adopted the mechanism), others are now discussing their creation. More important is the interest demonstrated in the issue by some municipal leaders. In some cases, mayors and secretaries are interested in the ecological ICMS mainly because it represents an income source that could be reinvested in the forestry sector itself. The municipality of Uruará⁷ is an exemplary case, since the mayor and advisers want to create a municipal forest reserve that would be managed to produce timber and other forest products to benefit the municipality and local population. As the municipality has no resources to do this, it is applying for the ecological ICMS to finance creation of the reserve.

⁴ The FPM has the following composition: 22.5% of federal profit and income taxes of any nature and 22.5% of federal tax on industrialized products. In addition, 70% of their federal tax on credit, exchange and insurance operations or those related to stocks and bonds and gold appurtenances (IOF-oro) is transferred.

⁵ The states transfer to the municipalities 25% of their state tax on merchandise circulation and provision of ICMS and 50% of the state automotive vehicle ownership tax (IPVA).

⁶ Research on municipal tax collection reveals a major imbalance between their own tax collection and the transfers, which leads the municipalities to depend heavily on other units of the federation. According to Bremaeker (1994), no Brazilian municipality generated 50% or more of its recourses in 1992 and barely 0.35% of the municipalities managed to generate 40%. Close to three quarters of them generated under 10% of their total budget. Due to development disparities, this problem is much greater in the small municipalities, in which nearly 90% of those with fewer than 100,000 inhabits did not generate even 10% of their budget in 1992.

⁷ Uruará is a municipality of the state of Pará, situated on the agricultural frontier and mainly occupied by settlers who survive from small-scale agriculture and livestock

Institutional forest management framework

As the municipalities have a relatively high degree of autonomy from the state and federal governments, Brazil’s institutional framework favors decentralization of forest management in legal terms. Despite being so unclear, the environmental legislation grants the municipal governments some specific forest management competencies and opens possibilities for the different government levels to transfer responsibilities to the municipalities. Nonetheless, the latter have few incentives to assume them and, as was mentioned previously, Brazil’s fiscal scheme does not stimulate the municipal governments to assume an active role in taxing and regulating the forest activity within its territories. Forest management power and decision-making are largely concentrated in federal government hands, and the distance between the federal authorities and local reality explains why forest management is not very efficient.

JUDICIAL FRAMEWORK

In the 1988 Constitution, the environmental issue was placed in the sphere of common and convergent competencies among the federal, state and municipal governments. This means that none of the three has exclusive power to legislate or implement environmental policy. The Constitution specifically establishes that all three levels have the duty of preserving “an ecologically balanced environment,” which explicitly includes forests.⁸

In addition to the Constitution, Law No. 9985, of July 18, 2000, creates the National System of Nature Conservation Units (SNUC), and mentions the participation of the municipalities in forest resource management. The SNUC covers all public conservation units, be they federal, state or municipal. According to the law, the three different government levels may create both Integral Protection Units, in which natural resource exploitation is totally prohibited, and Sustainable Use Units, which can be exploited in accord with a management plan.⁹

The most common Integral Protection Units are parks, mainly national parks. Many states have delimited state parks, which are usually smaller than the national ones; there are very few municipal parks in the Amazonia. The most common Sustainable Use Units are the federal extractive reserves.

The most important law related to forest management is the 1965 Forest Code (Law No. 4771), a set of laws regulating soil use in public and private areas that has been reformed numerous times. The most conservative sectors of Brazilian society view this code as abusive state interference into private property use rights.

⁸ Article 23 of the Constitution lists as state duties the protection of sites of scenic beauty and archeological sites (point III); environmental protection and the fight against contamination (point VI); preservation of the forests, fauna and flora (point VII); and the registry, follow up and inspection of water and mineral resources (point XI). Article 24 deals with urban planning rights (point I); forests, hunting, fishing, fauna, natural conservation, defense of the soil and natural resources, environmental protection and control of contamination (point VII); landscape patrimony (point VII) and responsibility for damage to the environment (point VIII).

⁹ By law, the group of Integral Protection Units is made up of the following conservation unit categories: I – Ecological Station; II – Biological Reserve; III – National Park (state or municipal); IV – Natural Monument; and V – Wildlife Refuge. The Group of Sustainable Use Units is made up of the following conservation unit categories: I – Environmental Protection Area; II – Area of Relevant Ecological Interest; III – National Woods (state or municipal); IV – Extractive Reserve; V – Fauna Reserve; VI – Sustainable Development Reserve and VII – Private National Patrimony Reserve.

The code established the possibility of creating parks, reserves and public forests, and introduced the concepts of permanent conservation area and legal reserve. The code thus established the obligation of owners to conserve at least 50% of the forest cover on their properties as legal reserves. To reduce the alarming rate of deforestation in the Amazonia, the federal government published a provisional measure in 1996 that sought to increase the proportion of legal reserves from 50% to 80% of the property. Another innovation of the code was to make forest management obligatory for timber extraction in native tropical forests. Nonetheless, 21 years had to pass before the law was promulgated and forest management norms were established that regulated what was laid out in the code. In practice, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) did not begin to require forest exploitation plans until 1995.

ORGANIZATIONAL FRAMEWORK: THE ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT ENTITIES

IBAMA is the main federal environmental management body. It was formed through the fusion of four entities working in the environmental field: the Secretariat of the Environment (SEMA), the Superintendence of Rubber (SUDHEVEA), the Superintendence of Fishing (SUDEPE) and the Brazilian Institute of Forestry Development (IBDF).¹⁰ Although IBAMA’s formation was an advance in environmental management terms, it also represents a very clear example of centralized power in a single governmental agency.

IBAMA’s main function is to coordinate and implement national environment policy as established in the Forestry Code and Law No. 9985. In addition, it must oversee the conservation and rational uses of the country’s renewable natural resources. In the concrete case of the Amazonia’s municipalities, IBAMA’s main tasks are environmental inspection, review and approval of forest management plans, felling authorizations and administration of parks, national forests and extractive reserves. The institute must also inspect and apply sanctions to those engaged in illegal logging.

IBAMA establishes the technical norms for forest exploitation for the country as a whole, but does not have the capacity in practice to monitor fulfillment of the management plans, which often overestimate the amount of timber that can be extracted from a given area or are simply not respected at all.¹¹ Charges of fraud and corruption in the forest exploitation inspection system are thus made constantly.

The creation and administration of all federal conservation units is also IBAMA’s responsibility. Managing these areas alone represents an immense task for the institute, given that there are 29 Federal Environmental Protection Areas in the country, plus 25 Extractive Reserves, 29 Biological Reserves, 47 Ecological Stations, 50 National Forests, 9 Ecological Reserves, 22 Areas of Relevant Ecological Interest and 47 National Parks.¹² To administer these areas, which cover close to 21 million ha, IBAMA has fewer than 1,500 technicians, of whom barely 150 have more than a high school education. In the Amazonia, IBAMA administers 12 extractive reserves that it created to ensure a means of subsistence

¹⁰ IBAMA was initially linked to the Secretariat of the Environment of the Presidency of the Republic (SEMAM). After the UN Conference on Environment and Development, better known as Río-92, the Brazilian government raised the rank of environmental policy by creating the Ministry of the Environment, to which IBAMA now belongs.

for the populations who make their living from gathering non-timber forest products, mainly rubber and chestnuts.

One alternative to help IBAMA increase its resources and at the same time stimulate sustainable forest management in the Amazonia is to draw up management plans for the public forests. Making use of these areas could represent a significant source of income for the municipal, state and federal governments (see following insert). At present, however, of all 23 existing public forests, only 5,000 of the 600,000 ha comprising the Tapajós National Forest in the Amazonia are being exploited.

Another factor that must be considered is that the majority of the Amazonia’s protected lands are outside of IBAMA’s direct control, as they are indigenous lands administered by the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI). In 2002, there were 580 indigenous territories in Brazil: 441 of them legalized and 139 being studied. The legalized ones cover 98,954,654 ha, which is 11.5% of Brazil’s territory, and the bulk of them are in the Amazonia. Although IBAMA does not have direct control of these lands, it is responsible for inspecting them, issuing felling authorizations and approving forest management plans.

The state governments also have competencies over the forests. As determined by the Constitution, the state environmental secretariats are co-responsible for applying the environmental laws. Their functioning, however, depends largely on the political orientation of each state government. Generally speaking, the federal government administers the forests and is responsible for controlling timber exploitation, felling and controlled burning. Although such areas can be transferred to the state governments through competency transfer agreements with IBAMA, this seldom happens in practice, due either to the state government’s disinterest in assuming these responsibilities or to IBAMA’s in decentralizing

them. In addition, the state directly grants operating permits to the sawmills and has general responsibility for projects that have a potential environmental impact.

The competency of local governments to draw up and implement environmental policies in their territories is guaranteed by the nature of Brazilian federalism, according to which the federative entities are autonomous; in other words, subordinated hierarchically not to the central government but to the Constitution (Chart 1).

Chart 1. Division of competencies among the three government levels in Brazil

Local experiences

This section presents diverse municipal initiatives that have directly or indirectly had an impact on forest resource use. In most cases, these initiatives involve other actors, mainly nongovernmental organizations, international aid agencies, and state and federal government agencies. The local governments’ activities respond to the municipality’s sociopolitical reality and the interaction of different interest groups competing for access to and control of the natural resources. To better understand the municipal governments’ role, it is thus necessary to know about some of the main stakeholders present in the Amazonian municipalities.

River dwellers. They inhabit the areas adjacent to the rivers and survive on subsistence fishing and agriculture; in some areas, they sell fish on a small scale. Generally, they are actors with little social organization.

Settlers. They are mainly dedicated to small-scale agriculture and livestock. Some of those in the Amazonia were attracted to the region by induced colonization projects sponsored by the federal government; others spontaneously occupied the land (‘posseiros’) or bought it from third parties. Many have property titles granted by the federal or state government, although a significant number do not. The size of the properties varies; at the initiation of the colonization, the federal government distributed lots of approximately 100 ha, but in many colonization and settlement areas the lots are approximately 50 ha.

Extractors. They make their living harvesting non-timber forest products, mainly chestnuts and rubber, and practice small-scale subsistence agriculture. They traditionally exploit large forest areas that could exceed 1,000 ha, but do not formally possess the land. With IBAMA’s support, the most organized groups have guaranteed their rights through the formation of extractive reserves.

The three above groups create broader associations called Rural Workers’ Unions (STR) of the Amazonia, which actively defend the rights of the most fragile social groups.

The indigenous peoples are another sector fighting to defend their access rights to the land and forests. Although these groups do not always share the same interests, they usually work in alliance with sectors of the Catholic Church such as the Land Mission Pastoral (CPT) and the Missionary Indigenous Council (CIMI).

The relationship of each group of actors to the forest resources varies greatly. Indigenous communities, extractors and river dwellers have much less impact on the forests than settlers, who need to clear areas to ensure agricultural production and commercial livestock raising and often sell the timber from their properties, or trade it to the loggers in exchange for milled lumber or small tractor services for opening roads or building small dams.

Historically, the fight of these marginalized groups has been against the cattle ranchers, lumber dealers and miners, who have greater political and economic power based on possession and control of huge areas of Amazon forest. As these actors have received

government incentives to develop their activities over a long time, it is common to find ranches ranging from 50,000 to 100,000 ha and even greater areas of timber exploitation.

The Amazonia has a significant presence of very diverse nongovernmental organizations. Some provide direct organizational and political advice to the weakest groups. Others develop research and development projects with communities and organizations representing these groups. There are also NGOs with profiles that are more technical and scientific, which act regionally in issues related to low-impact forest exploitation, forest certification, agroforestry systems, conservation of flora and fauna, fire prevention and others.

STATE FOREST MANAGEMENT POLICIES AND INCENTIVES AND THE ROLE OF MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENTS

The experiences described below are based on studies done in eight municipalities of the Amazon region that have a very diverse composition and balance of power among the different stakeholders. It is important to stress, however, that local policy is not the only determinant of the kind of environmental management adopted in each municipality. Other important factors also exist, such as the presence of cooperation programs and the personal interest of each mayor, as well as his/her relationship with other government levels.

In a federated system such as Brazil’s, state policies are particularly important and vary greatly.¹³ It is interesting to note that the states analyzed in this chapter have completely different development policies and territorial occupation. While the government of Acre has a policy of valuing its forest resources, the government of Pará puts its priority on agricultural development.

Acre’s state administration calls itself the “Government of the forest” and is led by the Workers’ Party (PT), which has been in power there since 1998. The government strategy for developing the state is based on investing in the development of the interior rural zones and avoiding migrations. The state government directly implements part of this policy while part is implemented in association with the municipal governments, according to their specific needs.

The state government is also trying to reorganize the state structure so that forest activity will be the basis of Acre’s economy. The idea is to take advantage of the abundance of forested areas (90% of the state’s territory) to generate wealth. This strategy produces medium- and long-term results and is comparable to the occupation model based on substituting forest for pasture or agriculture, which gives it an innovative and controversial nature. This policy triggered many criticisms from groups that traditionally benefited from a more immediate model based on livestock, agriculture and logging.

¹³In general terms, the central south region’s wealthiest states have a more developed infrastructure and environmental and forestry regulation framework than the Amazonian states. Some states, for example, were pioneers in introducing physical mechanisms for motivating the municipalities to use their prerogatives of creating protected areas such as the ecological ICMS experience presented above. Neither of the two states in the Amazonia in which the studies analyzed in this chapter were conducted has adopted this mechanism.

Acre’s government is working on some fundamental points to make its proposal viable: investment in research on sustainable forest exploitation to determine the forest’s potential and diversify production; support to political-administrative decentralization with the strengthening of and commitment to diverse social groups in forest resource management; and attraction of industries from other states interested in sustainable forest production. One of the most important measures for benefiting the forest sector — which had major social impact — was the policy of valuing extractivism and paying direct subsidies to chestnut and rubber producers, which guarantees a significant increase in profits for the extractive workers.

With respect to decentralization, the Acre Environmental Institute (IMAC) established an agreement with IBAMA to assume some of its responsibilities, the main one being to grant authorizations for felling and controlled burning in areas of up to 3 ha and thus facilitate the work of producer owners who lack the means to legalize their activities with IBAMA. IMAC also trained municipal government and cooperative technicians so they could help producers complete the authorization requests.

In the state of Pará, the government’s main objective is to modernize agriculture, not rationalize forest exploitation. This objective is totally in line with some of the federal government’s own development policies, particularly the development of cargo transport infrastructure and the introduction of soy into the state. Pará has three soy production centers located in the southern part of the state and in the municipalities of Santarém and Paragominas.¹⁴ Although now the main crop in these areas, soy is cultivated together with other grains such as maize and rice in crop rotation systems. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Enterprise (EMBRAPA), a federal government body, has had a very important role in developing soy in Pará.

Developing and modernizing access roads and highways is the second pillar of Pará’s development strategy. This policy is directly related to grain production in the municipality of Santarém, at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazonas rivers. Together with the port of Santarém, the government is building a grain storage and embarkation center. In addition, the Cuiabá-Santarém highway is being asphalted to facilitate transport of the soy produced in Mato Grosso and Pará. In the Paragominas region, the government is building the Capim waterway, which will link the municipality to the port at Barcarena. This route will serve to transport the lumber and soy production.

The Pará government began to take an interest in environmental management in 1998, with the Integrated Environmental Management Project (PGAI) that is part of the Tropical Forests Pilot Program (PPG-7). During this program’s first year, various planning workshops were held to implement environmental actions in nine municipalities within the area of action; with that, some progress was made in decentralizing environmental management. In addition, public debates, thematic seminars and courses on the administrative and legal basis of environmental management were held in the municipalities covered by the project, and the State Environmental Information System was created.

¹⁴ Santarém and Paragominas are two important cities of the state of Pará. Paragominas has a well-developed lumber industry and is a cattle center. Santarém is a very urbanized municipality, with an economy centered on the services sector; it has a public forest and an extractive reserve, both under federal government control.

AID PROGRAMS THAT PROMOTE LOCAL FOREST MANAGEMENT

The coexistence of municipal governments and state and federal bodies is not necessarily negative. Organized municipal governments can act in coordination with other bodies and get the most out of this relationship. Some federal programs and international aid projects in Brazil provide forest management assistance to municipal governments. The main bodies that have fostered this type of coordination are the sub-programs developed by the PPG-7 and the National Environment Program.

The Pilot Program is an international aid activity between Brazil, the G-7 countries and the Government of Holland to conserve Brazil’s tropical forests and is organized into 4 sub-programs and 27 projects. The PPG-7 component that is having the greatest influence on the decentralization of forest policies is the Natural Resource Policies Sub-program (SPRN), aimed at helping the Amazonian states and some municipalities get training in managing their natural resources. This work includes drafting policies and strengthening public institutions. The sub-program’s main action has been implementation of the Integrated Environmental Management Project (PGAI). Each state implements the PGAI according to its environmental plan, in which the problems and priorities are established. The PGAI transfers resources so that the states will invest in training technicians and in infrastructure for the environmental bodies.

Another component of the PG-7 that has had a relative impact on the municipalities is the demonstration programs, in collaboration with nongovernmental organizations. Demonstration projects are small alternative development projects whose main aim, as the name suggests, is to serve as an example for other organized groups and municipalities. Municipalities with strong organizations such as Rural Workers’ Unions (STR) have the greatest success in attracting this kind of funding. Another sub-program, Project to Support Amazonian Forest Management (PROMANEJO), is geared to developing sustainable forest management practices.

The Ministry of the Environment maintains a finance line through the National Environmental Program (PNMA) for alternative development and natural resource use projects known as Decentralized Implementation Projects (PED). One of the PED’s main goals is to stimulate adoption of new strategies in Brazil’s diverse regions to deal with environmental problems in collaboration with the state and municipal governments, private sector and civil society. The PED allows municipal governments and civil society groups to implement development projects either separately or jointly.

The response to incentives generated by programs like the PED and the demonstration projects has been quite positive. With support from the state government, the extractive cooperative, a regional NGO and the municipal government in Xapuri, a municipality in the state of Acre, drew up a project for extracting, refining and marketing oil from the copaiba tree, a relatively abundant species in the region with high commercial value. This project links civil society to different government levels and seeks to sustainably exploit a natural resource well known by the local population. Furthermore, it has revealed some of the existing technical and bureaucratic obstacles to forest management of non-timber products. The project financing was approved in 1999, but the project is not yet underway due to the

lack of a management plan for the species, because one of its proponents was unwilling to assume the cost of preparing the plan.

The demonstration projects are one of the rare opportunities for social organizations to implement their projects even if they lack support from municipal or state government. The projects submitted by rural workers from the municipality of Uruará, Pará, are a good example. A local association drew up a project to recover degraded areas by reforesting with native species with an extractive potential, which was approved in 2000; in principle, it will finance the recovery of one hectare for each of the 30 participating farmers. A local foundation submitted a second project, whose objective is to raise fish in captivity and recover the springs in an area around a town located 20 km from the municipal seat. Rural workers submitted a third project to implement a forest management plan and start extracting oils and producing seeds of forest species in an area west of the municipal seat.

All three projects were prepared, submitted and approved during a period in which the Uruará municipal administration had no interest whatever in collaborating with the rural workers much less implementing conservation and sustainable use projects for the municipality’s forests. Despite the difficulties they encountered, the rural workers were successful thanks to incentives that allow decentralization “beyond the municipal government.”

Nevertheless, municipal support is important so that social movements can benefit from opportunities such as the PEDs and demonstration projects. The municipal government normally has human and material resources (computers, faxes and telephone lines) that are fundamental in preparing such proposals. Few municipal governments provide this type of support to grassroots organizations, however. The surest allies are the NGOs, which have trained personnel and some material resources.

Not all local initiatives depend on programs such as the PED and the demonstration projects. Sometimes municipal governments manage to get budgeted resources from the state and federal governments to support their own projects. A very successful example is the Center for Agroforest Products, which the Xapuri municipal government implemented with support from the state and federal governments.¹⁵ The center’s objective is to develop industries to process and add value to timber and non-timber products extracted from local forests. By 2001, a series of small carpentry shops, a chestnut-processing operation, a latex factory and a factory using certified lumber for high-quality furniture native to the southeast part of the country had all been installed in the center, and the municipal and state governments grant fiscal incentives to business start-ups there. The state government also provides technical assistance for production of certified lumber, while the federal government financed construction of the installations and the purchase of machines for the center.

The Xapuri municipal government also coordinates with state and federal bodies to support communities living in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve. This is the largest such reserve in the country, with 976,570 ha and 9,500 inhabitants; it covers part of seven municipalities, whose governments help maintain, expand and improve the roads crossing

¹⁵ In 2000, the municipality of Xapuri had a population of 11,952 inhabitants in an area of 4705 km², with 50.12% of the inhabitants living in the urban zone and 49.88% in the rural zone. (IBGE Senso Demográfico 2000 - http://www1.ibge.gov.br/censo/default.php). The primary sector, mainly extraction of chestnuts and latex, forms the basis of the local economy.

the reserve and providing access to the cities and main highways. In addition, they provide health and education services in collaboration with the central government. Xapuri is one of the municipal governments that most supports the reserve, as it has good relations with IBAMA and with the associations that administer the reserve.

RELATIONS BETWEEN THE MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT AND ITS CITIZENS: POPULAR PARTICIPATION

In addition to supporting municipal development projects and policies, the federal government also seeks to stimulate municipal governments to encourage popular participation in the preparation of their public policies. The most important tool is the Active Community Program, whose objective is to stimulate the population’s participation in fighting poverty. The main strategy for achieving this is to conduct popular forums in the municipalities so the population can draw up its Sustainable Local Development Plan (PDLIS), which, at least in theory, has the support of the three spheres of government.¹⁶ As of the beginning of 2002, barely 157 municipalities, 36 of them in Pará and all 22 in Acre, were part of the program. The Acre government had support from the Inter-American Institute of Cooperation for Agriculture (IICA) to train seven technicians who would present and discuss the PDLIS proposal with the local organizations of the municipalities. This process began with public meetings in November 1999.

The program’s results are timid so far, and their functioning is clearly heavily dependent on local leadership quality and the strength of the social movements. For example, a popular assembly met in Xapuri and succeeded in designing the PDLIS, which served as the basis for the mayor’s government program. This process functioned in Xapuri thanks to three main factors: 1) the local social movements are well organized and are interested in putting together this type of program; 2) the mayor broadly promotes social participation in municipal government decisions; and 3) the mayor and governor have a good relationship, which contributes greatly to the successful policy coordination.

In the municipality of Mâncio Lima,¹⁷ also in Acre, representatives of rural and urban workers’ unions, producers’ associations and other organizations (church and pastoral) totaling 20 local entities drew up the PDLIS, with the state and local executive branch also participating in the popular assembly meetings. After drafting the documents, however, the assembly was dissolved; and a year later nothing concrete had been done. The PDLIS failed to consolidate an ongoing municipal discussion group as had been contemplated at the outset. Some leaders of social movements revived interest in this forum following the municipal elections of 2000, as an attempt to counterpoise the newly elected mayor’s policies and reactivate the municipal councils, which the mayor had begun to boycott. Unlike Xapuri, Mâncio Lima’s social movements are weak and the mayor elected in 2000 is not very open to popular participation and does not get on well with the governor of the state.

The program was only implemented in some of the municipalities studied in Pará, and the results were quite modest. There was no strong social articulation in the preparation of the

¹⁶ The federal government invested in training the participants of these discussion groups (and later the actors who will implement the actions decided on in the plan), coordinates the policies between the three government spheres and directs its programs for the implementation of the local agenda.

¹⁷ Mâncio Lima is a small, poor municipality in the eastern part of the state of Acre whose rural population lives by agriculture and the production of manioc flour. There are two indigenous reserves and a large national park in the municipality.

document in these municipalities or any real desire by the mayors to begin democratizing the decision-making mechanisms.

It is not always necessary to have a program such as PDLIS for the local population to participate, or try to participate, in local policy decisions. In Uruará, for example, the population itself organized in the mid-nineties to draw up Uruará’s Overall Municipal Development Plan, which included a series of actions directed to developing the forestry sector (see the following insert). The municipal government supported the plan at the beginning, but with the change of mayor in 1997, it was completely abandoned. A new mayor was elected in 2000, and he adopted it as the government plan with support from the group that had drawn it up.

Similar to what happened in Uruará, organized sectors of the municipality of Porto de Moz¹⁸ met in a participatory forum to discuss problems related to forest and fishing issues as well as land tenure in the municipality. A committee made up of representatives of certain grassroots organizations was formed to work on proposals. The function of these organizations was to work with the communities on activities aimed at improving natural resource management and use and to serve as an interlocutor with the local public bodies (Municipal Chamber and mayor’s office) and those of the state. The committee met periodically with the rural communities to involve them in the design of their proposals, but the municipal government never got involved in the process. The relations between the municipal government and society became particularly conflictive with the presentation of a proposal to create an Extractive Reserve in the municipality. The mayor, in alliance with large hacienda owners and lumber dealers in the region, started a movement against the proposal that included distributing pamphlets in the municipality and lobbying the state government officials to pressure the environmental ministry to deny permission to create the reserve.

Porto de Moz’s example of centralization and authoritarianism is not unique. In Altamira,¹⁹ the mayor also opposed society’s most organized sectors by ignoring local mobilization in favor of ecological/economic zoning for the municipality. Instead of listening to the groups that had already organized and initiated the discussions, the mayor sent the Municipal Chamber a project drafted in his offices with no popular participation that barely included the theme of urban environment.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENTS AND PRIVATE ACTORS

One of the main ways of getting municipal governments to invest in the forest sector is via cooperation agreements with the private sector. Generally, NGOs are more open to working with the municipal governments, providing advisory services to alternative development projects, environmental education activities and technical training for municipal officials. Private companies may also show interest in this type of cooperation, as long as it means profit opportunities. In fact, some municipal governments develop reforestation projects and implement agroforestry systems with private lumber companies.

All of the municipalities studied have NGOs that are doing research or development projects. In general, these organizations have good relations with the state and federal governments as they have the main competencies around forest issues. For research purposes, the NGOs commonly associate with federal research entities such as universities and EMBRAPA, or even with international agencies and foreign universities. The NGOs usually support the municipal governments and local organizations such as unions and rural producer associations in drafting fundraising proposals for demonstration projects and the PED.

An important contribution of the NGOs has to do with fire control. The Live, Produce, Preserve Foundation (FVPP) developed a fire prevention project in the Trans-Amazon Highway region in partnership with the Ministry of the Environment. A similar program, called “Chronic Emergency Fire,” coordinated by the municipal government in association with the

¹⁸ Situated in the state of Pará, the municipality of Porto de Moz has a large rural population that lives by small-scale forest extraction and agriculture. The local lumber industry is extremely predatory and the municipality has serious land possession disputes

¹⁹ Altamira is Brazil’s largest municipality, with an area of nearly 160, 000 km². Its territory is a mosaic of parks, national forests and indigenous territories. The region around the municipal seat has enormous cattle ranches. The municipality has to deal with numerous conflicts over land possession, invasions of protected areas and illegal logging.

NGO Friends of the Earth, was implemented in Xapuri. In many municipal governments, NGOs develop environmental education projects in collaboration with local governments. Such collaborations are relatively easy to establish as they require few resources and there is no resistance from local interest groups.

The mayor’s office of Moju,²⁰ in the state of Pará, has worked actively in reforesting watersheds and promoting agroforestry systems geared to small producers, as well as introducing forest species. In 2000, the municipal government, in association with a lumber company and Great Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID), held two seminars for small producers to stimulate the implementation of agroforestry systems. The first seminar was on seed and seedling production technology and the second on reforestation practices with native forest species. Following the seminars, the municipal government began producing seedlings of native forest species in nurseries and later distribute them.

The Moju municipal government also established partnerships with lumber companies to reforest small properties. Curiously, one of these partnerships, in association with local business leaders, failed because IBAMA did not authorize the project for lack of a management plan. The companies refused to take on the costs of doing the plan, alleging that it was not fair to have to pay to provide a public service.

In the mid-nineties, the Uruará municipal government, in collaboration with one of the large lumber companies and a cooperative of small farmers, initiated reforestation activities on small properties. The objective of this project was to ensure the long-term supply of timber with high commercial value, increase the value of the small farmers’ properties and increase their earnings. The municipal government provided the labor and material for installing a nursery; the local cooperative supplied the land and covered the operational costs for producing nearly 80,000 mogno (S. macrophylla) seedlings. The sawmill ended up with half of the seedlings and the municipal government distributed the rest among the small farmers.

In these two cases of cooperation between municipal governments and private enterprise, the municipal governments’ lack of capacity to deal with the technical, commercial and institutional aspects of reforestation programs and the implementation of agroforestry systems was evident. Neither government has technicians trained to handle management programs and both have a very limited vision of their importance. The logging companies, on the other hand, have a very clear idea of what they want and what they can achieve with these projects. In addition, they are inserted in the lumber production chain and have the means to market their products with good earnings. Since the individual farmers’ limited knowledge of the market and small scale of production are serious obstacles to the success of such projects, the private companies always come out ahead in such alliances.

The majority of municipalities in the Amazonia have an accentuated lack of technical capacity in the forest area. Moju’s municipal government is an exception, given that it works in collaboration with EMBRAPA and DfID through the research and technology transfer

²⁰ Moju is relatively close to Belém, the state capital. The municipality has an important logging sector, and a large area of coconut and palm plantations for the extraction of oil (dendé). Family subsistence agriculture is very important in the municipality

project “Participatory Natural Resource Management at the Municipal Level.” The objective of this project, which was initiated in 1994, is to develop participatory forest resource management by rural farm communities.

The municipal government of Paragominas, also in the state of Pará, is an interesting case that differs from Moju and Uruará. Paragominas is one of the most important lumber producing zones in the country and has nearly 80 sawmills, the majority of which are organized into a union that maintains close relations with the municipal government (the mayor is a lumberman and union member). The union and the municipal government work together to attract new investments and modernize the forestry sector. The union acts in four strategic areas: review of the legislation and follow-up to suits against IBAMA, search for new areas to supply the industry, personnel training with support from the Tropical Forest Foundation, and labor legislation that includes the supply of medical services and counseling on occupational safety.

The mayor’s office helps the union politically by fighting for legislative reforms to favor the sector and acting together with IBAMA and the Secretariat of Science, Technology and Environment (SECTAM), the state environmental body, in granting authorizations. Both the municipal government and the union have a very critical view of how the environmental bodies, particularly IBAMA, function. From their perspective, and that of all loggers in the Amazonia, the sector’s development is hampered by the excessively bureaucratic and centralized system for obtaining extraction and industrialization permits.

Despite such common complaints throughout the lumber sector and the fact that business owners always seek the easiest road to making a profit, Paragominas has some relatively well-developed industries that have invested in new technologies and markets. In May 2001, a local company was awarded the first certification in the state of Pará, according to Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards, and with 140,658 ha it had the greatest area of certified forest in the Amazonia (the previous record was 137,445 ha). Its annual ex

Acknowledgements		4
Preface David Kaimowitz		5
Introduction Lyès Ferroukhi, Anne Larson, Pablo Pacheco		7
Municipalities and local participation in forest management in Bolivia Pablo Pacheco		19
Municipal forest management: A new alternative for Honduras Mario Vallejo Larios		57
Decentralized forest management policies in Guatemala Lyès Ferroukhi and Ronald Echeverría		89
Municipal forest management in Nicaragua: Decentralized burdens, centralized benefits? Anne M. Larson		113
Forest management in Brazil’s Amazonian municipalities Fabiano Toni		145
Progress and challenges of municipal forest management in Costa Rica Lyès Ferroukhi and Alejandra Aguilar Schramm		179
Conclusions Anne M. Larson and Lyès Ferroukhi		213
About the authors		234

10% constitutional contribution:	Q173 595 836²
IVA-PAZ:	Q217 792 892

	*Center for International Forestry Research* P.O. Box 6596 JKPWB, Jakarta 10065, Indonesia cifor@cgiar.org / http://www.cifor.cgiar.org ISBN 979-3361-05-0 *International Development Research Centre* PO Box 8500, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1G 3H9 info@idrc.ca / http://www.idrc.ca ISBN 1-55250-131-0 *IDRC Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean* Avda. Brasil 2655, Casilla de Correos 6379, Montevideo, Uruguay lacroinf@idrc.org.uy / http://ww.idrc.ca/lacro

AFE		State Forestry Administration
AMHON		Association of Municipalities of Honduras
ANED		National Development Advisers
CARE		American Cooperative of Remittances Abroad
CIDA		Canadian International Cooperation Agency
CODEM		Municipal Development Council
COHDEFOR		Honduran Forestry Development Corporation
COLAP		Local Protected Areas Council
ESNACIFOR		National School of Forestry Sciences
FAO		United National Food and Agriculture Organization
FHIS		Honduran Social Investment Fund
FUNDEMUN		Municipal Development Foundation
GTZ		German Technical Cooperation Agency
ILO		International Labor Organization
INDUMALSA		Industria Maderera Lepaterique S. A.
IDB		Inter-American Development Bank
MAFOR		Sustainable Forest Management of the Conifer Forests
MOPAWI		Development of the Mosquitia
NGO		Nongovernmental Organization
OFM		Municipal Forestry Office
PDBL		Broadleaf Forest Development Project
PROLANCHO		Program of Support to the Small and Medium Producers of Olancho
SAG		Secretariat of Agriculture and Livestock
SERNA		Secretariat of Natural Resources and Environment
SINAPH		National System of Protected Areas
UMA		Municipal Environmental Unit

ANAM		National Association of Municipal Governments
BOSCOM		Municipal and Communal Forestry Strengthening Project
CONAP		National Council of Protected Areas
FLACSO		Latin American Social Sciences Faculty
GTZ		German Technical Cooperation Agency
INAB		National Forest Institute
INFOM		National Institute of Municipal Promotion
IVA		Value-Added Tax
MAGA		Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food
MARN		Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources
NGO		Nongovernmental organization
OFM		Municipal Forestry Office
PINFOR		Forestry Incentive Program (INAB)
PMS		Sustainable Management Project for the Natural Resources of the Petén
SARN		Agriculture and Natural Resources Section

AMUNIC		Association of Municipalities of Nicaragua
AMUNSE		Association of Municipalities of the Segovias
AMURS		Association of Municipalities of Río San Juan
BCN		Central Bank of Nicaragua
CAM		Municipal Environmental Commission
CSD		Sectoral Commission for Decentralization
DANIDA		Danish Aid Agency
FSLN		Sandinista National Liberation Front
IBI		National real estate tax
INAFOR		National Forestry Institute
INIFOM		Nicaraguan Municipal Promotion Institute
MAGFOR		Agricultural, Livestock and Forestry Ministry
MARENA		Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources
MIFIC		Ministry of Industry, Finances and Commerce
RAAN		North Atlantic Autonomous Region
RAAS		South Atlantic Autonomous Region
SINAP		National System of Protected Areas
STCSD		Technical Secretariat of the CSD

MUNICIPAL FOREST MANAGEMENT IN LATIN AMERICA

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

Introduction

Some conceptual clarifications about decentralization

The experience of forest management decentralization in Latin America

BOLIVIA

HONDURAS

GUATEMALA

NICARAGUA

BRASIL

COSTA RICA

Bibliography

Municipalities and local participation in forest management in Bolivia

Introduction

The forest context in Bolivia

The decentralizing of forest management

BACKGROUND TO THE PROCESS

DECENTRALIZATION OF NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

FOREST MANAGEMENT REGULATIONS

THE FOREST MANAGEMENT ROLE ASSIGNED TO MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENTS

Municipal governments and forest management

THE MUNICIPAL FOREST UNITS (UFMs)

FOREST MANAGEMENT PROMOTION BY LOCAL GROUPS

INSPECTION OF ILLEGAL FOREST ACTIVITIES

MUNICIPAL SOIL USE PLANS

POSITIONS ON CONSERVING PROTECTED AREAS

UFM RELATIONS WITH OTHER ENTITIES

Progress and difficulties

IMPLICATIONS OF THE OVERALL DECENTRALIZATION PROCESS

IMPACTS OF DECENTRALIZATION ON FOREST MANAGEMENT

FACTORS THAT LIMIT THE TRANSFER OF POWERS

Conclusions and recommendations

RECOMMENDATIONS: PROPOSAL FOR AN AGENDA OF ADJUSTMENTS

Abbreviations and acronyms

Bibliography

Municipal forest management: A new alternative for Honduras

Introduction

The municipal and forest context

SITUATION OF THE FOREST RESOURCES

THE LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK OF FOREST MANAGEMENT

Existing legislation

Bills linked to municipal forest management

Main institutions linked to state forest resource management

Municipal government in forest management

THE ORIGINS OF DECENTRALIZATION

THE MUNICIPAL STRUCTURE AND DECISION-MAKING

THE MUNICIPALITIES’ ECONOMIC RESOURCES

THE MUNICIPAL ENVIRONMENTAL UNITS

Management capacity and functions of the UMAs

THE MUNICIPAL FORESTRY OFFICES

MECHANISMS AND MODALITIES OF PARTICIPATION

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT FOREST RESOURCE MANAGEMENT COMPETENCIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Municipal management in ejidal forests

Municipal management in national and individual forests and protected areas

Municipal forest management experiences

EXPLOITATION IN THE EJIDAL FORESTS

MANAGEMENT OF THE FOREST AND PROTECTED AREAS

MANAGEMENT OF MUNICIPAL INCOME FROM FOREST ACTIVITIES

THE MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENTS AND FOREST CONFLICTS

Relationship between governmental and local actors

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE FOREST AUTHORITY

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT RELATIONS WITH LOCAL STAKEHOLDERS

Local organizations

Political parties and churches

The private forestry sector

Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)

Ethnic Groups

Development projects15

Analysis of the municipal forest management processes

THE DECENTRALIZATION PROCESS

Coordination between COHDEFOR and the municipal governments

The municipalities’ incentives and capacities

Conclusions and recommendations

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Improve the decentralization process

2. Expedite municipal forest management

3. Validate and disseminate conflict resolution mechanisms

4. Improve relations between COHDEFOR and the municipal governments

**EXPLOITATION IN THE EJIDAL FORESTS**

Development projects¹⁵

MANAGEMENT OF THE EJIDOS³

Introduction¹

Forest management and the municipal arena ¹⁶

Introduction¹