CONSERVACIÓN COMUNITARIA EN EL REFUGIO DE VIDA SILVESTRE GANDOCA- MANZANILLO ENTRE 1984-2007

Abstract

This article analyzes the implementation of the community conservation paradigm in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Shelter (RVS-GM ) between 1984-2007 from a political ecology framework, in order to establish the ties between this process and wider socio-political contexts. Along with semi-structured interviews to local and institutional actors, an analysis of institutional and organizations’ documents and newspapers was carried out. It is argued that more than reducing conflict between conservation and society, the community conservation policies in the RVS-GM represent State historical efforts to reaffirm sovereignty and insert the capitalist production mode in a historically isolated territory, in which dwellers are characterized for relatively autonomous lifestyles. Community conservation policies represent a specific temporal expression of those efforts within a neoliberal phase, which tried to reduce political and economic costs derived from controlling and transforming the shelter through co-opting conflict with promises of conservation and development, decision-making decentralization and the disguised anti-political State intervention without facing social and power inequality ended up reproducing the historical trajectory of exclusion and marginalization