Communities are making historically unprecedented gains worldwide in forest resource access and management rights. In Latin America, this impressive shift in responsibility for managing forest resources is propelled in part by the growing importance of forest-based social movements promoting community resource rights. The shift is also being produced by greater recognition by governments and international conservation institutions that conventional conservation approaches that exclude community participation have not been effective in protecting highly threatened tropical biodiversity. Today a new conservation actor, the forest steward community, is emerging to become an effective collaborator in forest conservation in the region. How best to...

The Grassroots Assistance Project aimed to develop a collaborative research approach combining skills and perspectives of both professional and local researchers in Central America. Involving community members in data collection and analysis is not entirely new, of course, but builds on nearly 30 years of experience with participatory research and capability-building approaches and tools. These approaches and methods have aimed to enable local people to ‘share, enhance and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act’ (Chambers 1983, 1994, 1997; Bunch 1985).

Most participatory research and capacity building approaches have emerged from agricultural contexts and have...

The Grassroots Assistance Project’s participatory research activities start from the recognition that organizational strengthening is one of the most urgent needs articulated by forest social movements in the region. The discussion below of experiences in the Petén and Siuna draws on context studies by Gómez and Méndez (2005) and Cuellar and Kandel (2005). These experiences underscore the fact that one of the greatest challenges facing forest social movements and their allies is how to ensure effective external support which also promotes the progressive assumption of new management responsibilities by communities themselves. For communities to embark on a process of continual...

The Grassroots Assistance Project’s methodology developed an integrated response to two related problems: the lack of systematic and in-depth understanding of the communities’ experiences with forest management from their own perspective, and the need for technical assistance strategies which more effectively build community capabilities to manage for conservation and development.

The project’s research methodology sought to combine the perspectives and skills of forest community members and external professional researchers to develop a comprehensive account of the grassroots forestry organizations’ experiences. Its multimethod research approach (Brewer and Hunter 1989) combined ethnographic techniques of observation, in-depth individual and group interviews and document...

The project’s collaborative research aimed to combine the skills and perspectives of both professional researchers and local people in order to develop the most comprehensive analyses possible of community-based forest management experiences. The project’s differently trained and uniquely located sets of researchers brought distinct but complementary analytical frameworks to their research. While this paper focuses mainly on the experience with the community self-systematization studies (see Cronkleton et al. 2008) for discussion of the regional context studies), there were instructive differences in the foci and frameworks employed by professional and community-based researchers.

For example, the context study researchers adopted an analytical...

A principal objective of the Grassroots Assistance Project and its participatory research activities was to document the forest communities’ experiences with technical assistance and to help develop new approaches which might better build local capabilities. Below, the communities’ experiences both with traditional technical assistance and an emerging alternative model of ‘accompaniment’ are briefly discussed.

The external support received by the Association of Forest Communities of the Petén (ACOFOP) and Farmer-to-Farmer Programme (PCaC) has varied in both type and approach through what Gómez and Méndez (2005) called ‘official’ and ‘pro-community’ models of technical assistance. Rather than necessarily competing, these two models...

The experiences of the Association of Forest Communities of the Petén (ACOFOP) and the Farmer-to-Farmer Programme (PCaC) suggest that a new social actor has begun to emerge in the governance of protected forests in Central America, the forest steward community. These forest steward communities have attained significant legal and customary access and rights over forest resources. They are poised to become integral partners in broad-based efforts to sustainably manage natural resources for conservation and development.

An important question for government policy makers, international donors and development agencies, international conservation organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other stakeholders in Latin America’s threatened...