Browsing by Autor "Elsa Mendoza"

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Crossing boundaries for environmental science and management: combining interdisciplinary, interorganizational and international collaboration
(Cambridge University Press, 2010) Stephen G. Perz; Silvia Brilhante; Foster Brown; Andrea Chávez Michaelsen; Elsa Mendoza; Veronica Passos; Raul Pinedo; Juan Fernando Reyes; Daniel Rojas; Galia Selaya
SUMMARY Literature on environmental science and management endorses crossing boundaries between disciplines, types of organizations and countries for environmental conservation. A literature review on interdisciplinarity, interorganizational networks and international cooperation highlights their justifying rationales and strategic practices. Crossing boundaries implies substantial challenges to managing collaboration itself, notably politics and uncertainty. Challenges to collaboration become compounded when crossing multiple boundaries simultaneously, here illustrated using the case of three projects in the south-western Amazon. Strategic practices such as net brokering and organizational courtships are highly important when crossing multiple boundaries. There are important commonalities in strategic practices for crossing different boundaries, such as recognizing grievances to manage politics, constituting functional redundancies in networks to manage uncertainty and non-aligned collaboration to manage both difficulties.
Participatory Action Research for Conservation and Development: Experiences from the Amazon
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021) Stephen G. Perz; Marliz Arteaga; Andrea Baudoin Farah; Foster Brown; Elsa Mendoza; Yara Araújo Pereira de Paula; Leonor Mercedes Perales Yabar; Alan dos Santos Pimentel; Sabina Cerruto Ribeiro; Guillermo Rioja-Ballivián
Research that features participation and action orientation, such as participatory action research (PAR), is especially valuable in contexts where there is rapid change, high social inequality, and great uncertainty about the future, which drives stakeholder demands for information to support their goals. The Amazon offers such a context, for it is a region where diverse stakeholders engage in contestation over environmental governance to address issues such as climate change to achieve conservation and sustainable development. Stakeholder mobilization has changed the terms by which research is conducted, from the definition of priority topics to the application of findings. Due to stakeholder mobilization, more and more research in the Amazon is now necessarily participatory, for stakeholders routinely issue demands about how the research will be conducted and for what purpose. In this paper, we provide an overview of several experiences of implementing methods such as PAR by different teams or networks, focusing on the complementary contributions of outside researchers and local stakeholders. The heart of the paper reports on three broad types of experiences focusing on conservation and development in the Amazon: (1) participatory data collection for co-production of knowledge for environmental governance, (2) inclusive environmental monitoring systems, and (3) innovative models of knowledge exchange to facilitate collective action. Within each type, we report multiple experiences with distinct approaches to participation and action in research. These experiences constitute models that can be replicated in other places for broader impact to support conservation and development.
Road building, land use and climate change: prospects for environmental governance in the Amazon
(Royal Society, 2008) Stephen G. Perz; Silvia Brilhante; Foster Brown; Marcellus M. Caldas; Santos Ikeda; Elsa Mendoza; Christine Overdevest; Vera Reis; Juan Fernando Reyes; Daniel Rojas
Some coupled land-climate models predict a dieback of Amazon forest during the twenty-first century due to climate change, but human land use in the region has already reduced the forest cover. The causation behind land use is complex, and includes economic, institutional, political and demographic factors. Pre-eminent among these factors is road building, which facilitates human access to natural resources that beget forest fragmentation. While official government road projects have received considerable attention, unofficial road building by interest groups is expanding more rapidly, especially where official roads are being paved, yielding highly fragmented forest mosaics. Effective governance of natural resources in the Amazon requires a combination of state oversight and community participation in a 'hybrid' model of governance. The MAP Initiative in the southwestern Amazon provides an example of an innovative hybrid approach to environmental governance. It embodies a polycentric structure that includes government agencies, NGOs, universities and communities in a planning process that links scientific data to public deliberations in order to mitigate the effects of new infrastructure and climate change.