Compilation of events and processes that have occurred over time allows us to understand changes in governance of infrastructure. The GIA project supported creation of timelines in four regions of the Amazon at our 2019 workshops with conservation partners in Loreto (Peru), the Upper Madera (Bolivia-Brazil), Southern Amazonas/Northern Rondonia (Brazil), and the Colombian Amazon (Colombia). In each workshop, participants identified and discussed key events relevant to governance and infrastructure. From the workshop timelines, the GIA team created analytical timelines in a common format and produced a report that looks at common themes, factors that facilitate or impede good governance, lessons learned, and emergent questions.
The analytical timelines focus on the period from 2000 to 2019. These timelines differentiate between events and processes operating on different scales, from the local to the international. They also differentiate among types of events and processes, including public policies, infrastructure projects, infrastructure impacts, environmental setbacks, and collective action.
We view timelines as a tool to stimulate reflection and discussion about governance of infrastructure in the Amazon. The timelines provide the basis for identification of factors that facilitate and impede environmental governance in the context of infrastructure.
Factors that facilitate governance include:
1) Recognition of common interests among stakeholders
2) Decentralized decision-making
3) Collaboration across scales among stakeholders
4) Supportive governmental agencies willing to work with other stakeholders
5) Collective management of natural resources
Factors that undermine governance include:
1) Lack of broad stakeholder participation
2) Inconsistency in national governmental policies from one election to another
3) Lack of transparency in decision-making
4) Politicians who are unsympathetic to social-environmental concerns
5) Stakeholders who react to conservation threats instead of planning ahead
Timelines for focal mosaics revealed distinct insights. In Colombia, the peace process has led to new threats to forests and indigenous peoples, but also to debate about green infrastructure.
In Southern Amazonas/Northern Rondonia, federal policies are crucial for both infrastructure planning and environmental governance, but governments have consistently favored the first and not the second.
In Loreto, Peru, decentralization and collaboration among regional stakeholders advanced environmental governance for several years, but those gains are now threatened due to governmental change.
In the Upper Madera, a bi-national frontier, governments have secured international agreements to build dams but have not provided for governance, which motivated grassroots organizing of social movements to resist.
Viewed together, the timelines permit more general conclusions. First, national governments consistently support infrastructure over time and across countries. Second, governmental concern about conservation has varied over time, undermining environmental governance. Third, conditions for effective environmental governance change over time, depending in large part on changes in governments. And fourth, horizontal as well as vertical (cross-scale) collaboration is a key strategy to advance environmental governance.
Finally, the timelines provide lessons for strategies to advance environmental governance of infrastructure.
Bottom-up approaches are more effective when:
- Investments in capacity building shift the balance of power among stakeholders
- Stakeholders identify shared interests
- Stakeholder interest in data for policy is supported by powerful constituencies
- Local and regional governments support other stakeholders
