Public Participation and Socioecological Resilience
The following lyrics by the old Costa Rican calypso singer Walter “Gavitt” Ferguson express with wonderful Caribbean irony and wit the feelings toward politicians and conservation agency personnel when the areas that people live in become the object of of
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Public Participation and Socioecological Resilience Javier Escalera Reyes
Social Participation, Collective Identification, and Socioecological Resilience The following lyrics by the old Costa Rican calypso singer Walter “Gavitt” Ferguson express with wonderful Caribbean irony and wit the feelings toward politicians and conservation agency personnel when the areas that people live in become the object of official protection because of their “natural” value: National Parkers are going around into my farm they sit and walk telling everybody all around the town “This is National Park.” They want get full details “How long I owned this piece of land?” No tell no lie or you going to jail! That’s what they made me understand. Walter “Gavitt” Ferguson
This is particularly true of areas that boast such natural value precisely because of the relationship the local population has maintained with the land for generations, making such lands “national park material” or eligible for other types of protected status. Local residents’ feelings of exclusion and even alienation from a territory that had been their world until it was declared a protected space are a logical consequence of the ways in which politicians, civil servants, scientists, and technicians typically view the “human element” of these areas (see chaps. 18, 19, 20, this volume, for more discussion of this phenomenon). Even today, many of these agents continue to perceive the local population as a problem if not an outright hindrance. Many still believe that the best way of conserving important spaces is to keep people as separate from them as possible, based on the assumption that people are not aware of the heritage value of the space in which they live and to which they belong. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that areas of high environmental value cannot be properly D. Egan (eds.), Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture, 79 The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-039-2_6, © Island Press 2011
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pa r t i c i pa ti o n : c o lla b o r a t i o n
conserved, or sustainable socioeconomic development achieved, without the effective participation of the local population in management and decision making. Public engagement and active participation are even more important in ecologically and environmentally degraded areas in which attempts at restoration or regeneration are under way. Without the active involvement of the local population, it might be possible to achieve a superficial level of restoration, for example, by conducting a cleanup of contamination, mitigating visible physical impacts, or reintroducing native plant and wildlife species, but a complete and comprehensive regeneration of the ecosystem as a whole will never be achieved. Even if scientists, technicians, and politicians were to accept the need for social participation, this participation does not occur automatically without the existence of political resolve to foster it. Participation is not an instin
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