Overview

Tropical forest degradation remains a worldwide problem that constitutes a security risk--as well as a severe environmental hazard--for many nations and regions.  By treating these forests less as biological resources or human habitats than as commodities, governments, several branches of industry, and international development agencies have all contributed to the problem.

Among many remedies being attempted, an especially promising one is the empowerment of tribal and indigenous forest dwellers in many lands who benefit not from the forest's destruction but from its survival and regeneration. In many developing countries, community forestry projects have yielded encouraging results at a low cost.

With a three-year grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, SDI has worked:

• to highlight these positive examples in the global policy making communities, and
• to emphasize among aid donors and lenders the gap between their new policies with regard to community participation in forest projects, and what is actually happening in practice.

The Environment, Non-Government Organizations and Latin America, Council on Foreign Relations

Roger D. Stone
September 1998

NOTE: Not currently available

Prepared for the Council on Foreign Relations, this report examined the important roles and new levels of participation by NGO's in Latin America.

Once available on the Council's web-site, we are in the process of obtaining and re-publishing their files.

Acknowledgments

In large measure, this paper reflects thoughts expressed by a diverse, multinational group of participants during a one-day workshop convened at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in October 1997. Present were representatives of international NGOs and NGOs from within Latin America; public and private aid donor organizations; and generalists concerned with international affairs. Subsequent correspondence with members of this group also helped shape the broad ideas that follow, and provided added useful increments of detail. (Errors in fact or judgment are, of course, solely the author’s responsibility.)

Introduction

Thirty years ago, much of Latin America and the Carribean was mired in a statist authoritarianism that offered little space for citizens to interact with the ruling elite. The ruling generals had little use for advice from beyond the palace walls. More recently, as more democratic political systems have replaced dictatorships throughout the region, a new spirit of openness and freedom of interaction has arisen between governments and the societies they govern.

Evidence of this dramatic swing is found in the growing size and effectiveness of the grass-roots environmental movements in both Latin America and the Caribbean. While some individuals in the region were expressing concern about environmental degradation as early as the 1930s, as late as the 1970s there was virtually no organized opposition to the accelerating decline that was resulting from the policies and practices of governments, aid donors, and unregulated private industries. Today, thousands of citizen-led environmental organizations are operating throughout the region. And they are not just protesting: They are helping to make and change national laws and policies, sitting with government representatives on official delegations to national meetings, and actively working to change the system. These groups have constructively blurred the lines between environmental concern and concern for human welfare and economic development. According to former World Resources Institute official Aaron Zazueta, there is an “emerging paradigm . . . [that] links environmental management, human well-being, and democratic processes”

The international environmental community has also changed the style and the substance of its work in the region. For more than a century, the Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation reported, the “chief strategy” of international conservationists in Latin America was “exclusionary and implicitly misanthropic.”  Foreign scientists and environmentalists, usually working in sparsely populated rainforest areas, paid less attention to people than to plants and animals. To this day, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are accused of placing excessive emphasis on animals, indigenous people, and the rural sector in a region where 75 percent of the population lives in cities with pressing and largely unaddressed environmental problems. To function at all in the face of increasing hostility, the international NGOs had to change.

They did so, starting in the 1980s and at an accelerating rate during the current decade. Most international NGOs now working in Latin America and the Caribbean regard attention to human needs as an essential component of efforts to preserve wildlife and wildlands. They are addressing “brown” as well as “green” issues in the region. Partnerships with local citizen groups have become more the rule than the exception. And if relations between home-grown NGOs and large international groups are not always warm, they are in most instances effective and workable.

Bilateral and multilateral aid donors and lenders have also changed the way they do business. In the old days “economic growth” dominated as the paramount objective, and there was little examination of how its pursuit affected the broader society. Today, equity and the environment are central concerns in most forms of bilateral and multilateral development assistance to the region. And at the policy level, local participation has become an organizing principle. “The message is clear,” wrote Andrew Steer, former director of the Environment Department at the World Bank. “Participation works.”  The World Bank has discovered the virtues of shifting from a trickle-down, growth-based approach to one in which civil society beneficiaries are intended to be fully involved in planning and implementing ecologically sensitive projects.

This paper follows the evolution of the environmental NGO movement in Latin America and the Caribbean?from its first stirrings three decades ago to the position of relative prominence and prestige it now enjoys?and offers examples of how fully integrated into the making and implementation of policies these organizations have become. It summarizes the extent to which these improvements have resulted in real progress on the ground and compares Latin America’s record with that of the United States. Finally, the paper considers steps needed to increase the effectiveness of NGOs in reversing the region’s continuing environmental decline.

Transition in Latin America

During the 1960s, influential scholars, led by Raul Prebisch, blamed Latin America’s economic troubles on inequitable terms of international trade and prescribed a shift from raw materials exports to selling manufactured goods produced by sheltered domestic industries. Program loans from the World Bank and other multilateral agencies were designed primarily to advance an import substitution model rather than achieve social development. The pursuit of growth reigned supreme, and strategies adopted toward this goal did not reflect environmental consequences.

Development planning for the Brazilian Amazon during the 1960s underscores all these points. The succession of generals who ruled Brazil seldom wavered from nationalistic economic development strategies, some of which were based on advice of dubious environmental quality received from the American megaplanner and nuclear strategist Herman Kahn. Amazonian hydropower would electrify the entire nation, providing energy for new industries that would operate without the inconvenience of pollution controls. Once cleared, the land under the rainforest would trigger a vast wave of agricultural development that would bring prosperity to Brazil and help feed the world, while also strengthening Brazilian control of its northern frontier. To provide access to “land without men for men without land,” said President Emilio Garrastazu Medici during a 1970 visit to the impoverished Brazilian Northeast, a Trans-Amazon Highway would spearhead his “Program of National Integration.” Other roads?northwest to the territory (now state) of Rondonia and toward Peru, north to Venezuela?would also help “open up” empty Amazonia to migration, thus relieving social pressures on cities in the nation’s South.

While “progress” was fast replacing Latin America’s rainforests with unproductive colonization and ranching ventures, the combination of rapid industrialization and population growth brought environmental and social nightmares to many of the region’s cities. Torrents of air and water pollution began to emanate from such new industrial sites as the “Valley of Death” in Cubatao on the Brazilian coast near São Paulo, where too many chemical plants had been built in close proximity to one another. Smog blanketed Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Chile’s Santiago, causing severe outbreaks of respiratory illness among hapless residents. For the urban poor living in mushrooming and crime-ridden slums, drinkable water and sewage treatment facilities were luxuries to which few had access.

During the politically repressive 1960s and 1970s, opposition to environmentally destructive governmental actions was muted in most Latin American countries. Fear of reprisal was one reason; another was an absence of environmental activism. In Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Costa Rica, resident expatriate communities established bird-watching societies whose concerns sometimes encompassed the protection of habitats for threatened plant and animal species but seldom reached farther.

The 1970s saw the first hints of change. In several countries, citizens began to confront hard-line governments on human rights issues, sometimes using the environment as cover. Brazilian politician Fabio Feldman, a future environment secretary in powerful Sao Paulo State, initiated legal actions that ultimately resulted in major improvements at the Cubatao chemical complex. In southern Brazil, where agribusiness ventures were fast replacing the traditional meat-and-wheat economy, the outspoken environmental leader Jose Lutzenberger followed the example of Rachel Carson in campaigning against excessive use of pesticides. In Mexico City, NGO leader Manuel Guerra infuriated entrenched politicians by arranging for air quality readings to be broadcast on local radio stations. Rafael Asenjo took on powerful and heavily polluting copper-mining interests in General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. Although these individuals’ actions were difficult and dangerous, as in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, they drove wedges into ruling dictatorships and resulted in government action and forward movement.

Local citizens’ groups began to emerge. The Fundacion Vida Silvestre Argentina, led by Miguel Reynal, stirred humane passions by protesting against a penguin-canning and glove-manufacturing project in the remote town of Puerto Madryn. In many of Latin America’s festering slums, neighborhood associations and church-oriented groups began to protest the appallingly poor circumstances under which people were compelled to live. In Brazil, wrote the political scientist Andrew Hurrell, such emerging NGOs “were not self-consciously ‘ecological’ but their demands were a direct reaction against the ecological degradation of Brazil’s urban environment: the lack of clean water and sanitation, the uncontrolled industrial pollution, and the lack of housing and basic amenities.”

Interest in Latin America among international environmentalists also grew during the 1970s. Up to the mid-1960s, the principal transnational actor in this field had been the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), an awkward coalition of governmental and nongovernmental scientists and nature lovers who, like their Latin American predecessors, directed their attention largely to plant and animal species facing extinction. IUCN’s impact was limited. Its leaders, said Max Nicholson, one of the movement’s founders, “had no contact with heads of government or important ministers. And they had no money. A lot of them were quite hopeless about anything practical.”  In 1962 the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was founded as a high-profile fund-raising adjunct to the IUCN and later began conducting its own conservation activities.

Until the mid-1970s, the WWF was far more vigorous in Europe and Africa than in Latin America. But then the biologist Thomas Lovejoy, who had done his doctoral work on Amazonian birds, became program director of the then tiny WWF-U.S. and with great energy turned the organization’s attention to Latin American and especially Amazonian issues. Almost single-handedly, Lovejoy campaigned in Brasilia and elsewhere to save the rainforest and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Over time, he formed partnerships with fledgling local institutions?the Fundacao Brasileira para a Conservacao da Natureza in Rio de Janeiro, Fundación Natura in Quito, FUDENA in Caracas?that later made their own contributions to the environmental movement in their countries.

In those early days, much of the international effort was concentrated on “green” rather than on “brown” environmental issues, and particularly in two sectors of green activity. One was the designation of national parks and protected areas to preserve biological diversity that, in Latin America as elsewhere, was being lost to reckless development of the forests and the fragile coastal zone. Successes during this period included the Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica, a vast expansion of the Brazilian national parks system, and the creation of several major parks in the tropical Andes. WWF and others fought with limited success to get governments and international donors to provide for the proper management of these areas, lest they fall prey to loggers, miners, migrant farmers, and other destructive forces. “Ecosystem management” became a popular rallying cry during this period.

At the same time, conservationists sought adequate national and international funding to study the complex workings of tropical ecosystems, especially the rainforest, while they were still relatively intact. Brazil’s National Amazon Research Institute in Manaus and the Goeldi Museum in Belem, near the Amazon’s mouth, were beneficiaries. So was the complex of scientific and agricultural research institutions in Costa Rica, which were then beginning to exert the leadership they still maintain. Lovejoy himself launched the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, a benchmark 20-year scientific study of the relationship between Amazon deforestation and species attrition. In Costa Rica, ecologist Daniel Janzen embarked on an equally prominent effort to study forest regeneration in the arid region of Guanacaste.

After the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment advanced the idea that economic and environmental progress could be achieved together, the international environmental community started to address human concerns as well as protection for other species. In the early 1980s, the World Wildlife Fund launched a program, Wildlands and Human Needs, to explore the balance between development and conservation. This program sponsored activities involving indigenous people, with varying degrees of success, on the southeast coast of St. Lucia, the Caribbean shore of Costa Rica, and the Peruvian Amazon. Although fund-raisers worried that helping poor people in addition to plants and animals would muddle the WWF message, and evaluators worried that WWF biologists would not necessarily be good social engineers, the principles of local participation and concern for human well-being have thrived–indeed become gospel—at WWF and elsewhere.

By the mid-1980s, a growing number of other U.S.-based environmental NGOs?the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, the World Resources Institute, the National Wildlife Federation, the National Audubon Society, and the Natural Resources Defense Council among them?were active in Latin America. Although motivated primarily by a shared determination to halt environmental decline and strengthen the region’s system of parks and protected areas, these organizations had to compete with one another for the attention of donors and the public. In some instances, the partnerships that they forged with local NGOs seemed designed more for public relations purposes at home than to strengthen environmental movements in target countries.

U.S. and International NGOs in Latin America

During the same period, a more rapidly progressing environmental movement in the United States increased official awareness of international environmental issues. In 1969, the U.S. Congress created a small and innovative development assistance agency, the Inter-American Foundation (IAF). While not overtly “environmental,” the IAF appreciated the virtues of participatory activities and consultation with intended beneficiaries. They Know How was the title of one of its early publications. The IAF also broke new ground by working directly with cooperative movements and other groups in recipient countries and by distributing money in grants of $200,000 or less. Much of the IAF program took on the aspects of what later became known as “sustainable development.”

Still, the IAF’s practices were the exception in the unreconstructed development assistance community. Although activists such as Robert McNamara and Robert Goodland prodded the World Bank to hire a handful of environmental officers and acknowledge the importance of equity and basic human needs, in the 1980s the World Bank was still conducting most of its business without much regard for environmental consequences. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) was even less attentive. The shortsightedness of these two organizations drove the domestic and international wings of the environmental NGOs?with vital support from the foundation community?to join forces to stop the multilateral development banks (MDBs) from underwriting gross forms of environmental violation.

In 1983, in Washington a coalition of membership organizations (such as the National Wildlife Federation) and newer environmental research and action groups (such as the Natural Resources Defense Council) began a campaign to force MDBs to change the way they made and implemented lending decisions.  Once again, foundations made this activism possible. The NGOs initially targeted Central American loans for “hamburger connection” cattle ranching that turned forests into scrub land and MDB support for an Amazonian development scheme called Polonoroeste. The World Bank admitted errors and pledged reform. A later target was IDB financing for the extension of the highway in the Brazilian Amazon’s far west that led to an upsurge in burning of the rainforest.

What was noteworthy about these efforts was that U.S. and Latin American NGOs cooperated on all of them. Local NGOs initially guided U.S. counterparts to trouble spots and provided eyewitnesses to testify before the U.S. Congress. Later they generated media coverage in their own countries that led to international media attention. In the Amazonian highway dispute, Chico Mendes, the late Brazilian rubber-tapper leader, and Stephan Schwartzman, an anthropologist with the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund, jointly lobbied in Washington and in Miami (at an annual meeting of the IDB) and helped persuade the bank to suspend its loan for the road?the first time the IDB took an action explicitly on environmental grounds. In Acre, where Mendes lived until he was assassinated by immigrant ranchers, the creation of extractive reserves for local rubber tappers was directly attributable to his long struggle and the national and international NGOs who helped make it a global issue.

Latin American Environmental NGOs

Perhaps more striking than this transnational cooperation was the proliferation of indigenous environmental groups in Latin America. According to one conservative estimate, the WWF said, the number of environmental NGOs in Latin America had grown from nearly zero in the mid-1970s to more than 230 by 1988. The WWF declared that
 

“a new conservation movement has come of age over the course of the past decade. Private nonprofit conservation organizations (NGOs) in Latin America . . . have proliferated and have now begun to contribute in crucial ways to sustaining the natural environment of their regions. Evolving in social and economic settings unlike those in which U.S. and European conservation groups arose, these nongovernmental organizations are pioneers. They have broken new ground in their form and style of commitment to conservation.”

During the 1990s the growth trend has accelerated. The declaration made at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio that equity and human rights are indispensable components of sustainable development represented a major step forward. The number of local NGOs has continued to grow, due in large part to a more nuanced approach?and greater funding?by international donors and NGOs. Fourteen hundred of them made it to the 1992 Earth Summit to participate in the lively NGO Forum that paralleled the official proceedings. Today, over 500 local groups are concerned with Brazil’s Atlantic Forest alone.

In political terms, Latin America has turned away from authoritarianism toward more democratic and participatory systems. “Civil society” has been enlisted as a necessary component in dealing with socioeconomic problems. In 1995, Brazil’s First Lady Ruth Cardoso told the Inter-American Development Bank that the very “future of development in Brazil lies in partnerships between state and civil society.” Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said that his country could not escape its economic crisis “without enlisting civil society in the effort.” Countries began to “mainstream” the process by building NGO participation into plans submitted to international donors. Charles Reilly, adviser on civil society at the Inter-American Development Bank, observed: “Partnerships with government at the national and sub-national level, mobilization of resources from entrepreneurs and the poor themselves, and the decline of state-civil society antagonism is the trend line throughout the region.”

Moving Ahead

Latin American NGOs have matched their growth in size and number with better professional skills, giving them greater influence over national and international decision making. Their leaders are learning to work with governments as well as in opposition, and governments rely to a greater extent on their expertise and research.

Although the former antagonists do not always forge smooth partnerships, the new NGO-government relationships have allowed environmental groups to boost their clout. For example, in advance of a 1996 summit meeting in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the Bolivian government invited environmental NGOs to participate in the planning for the official agenda. Many Latin American delegations at the December 1997 Kyoto conference of the parties to the Global Climate Convention included NGO representatives as well as government officials. Although the U.S. delegation was composed solely of government officials, the US reports that the NGOs present in Kyoto influenced the U.S. position.

At the national level, NGOs are involved to an ever greater extent in planning and policymaking. They have moved from criticism to cooperation with government. Within most countries in the region, national environmental planning efforts were launched even before the 1992 Earth Summit, with the impetus usually coming from NGOs. In a number of countries, NGOs that began by addressing strictly environmental questions have begun to take on mainstream economic issues with environmental implications; in Costa Rica, Peru, and Ecuador, the Rainforest Alliance and local NGO partners are deeply engaged in planning for environmentally sound production of such important crops as coffee and bananas.

In some countries, NGOs have begun managing as well as planning. Costa Rica’s National Parks Department has defied long-standing practice by delegating to NGOs important park-management responsibilities. Bolivia and Belize are making similar shifts. And, as has long been the case in the United States, more and more Latin American NGO leaders are moving into high-ranking government jobs. In a switch that mirrored William K. Reilly’s move from the World Wildlife Fund to the Bush administration’s top environmental job, Brazil’s Eduardo de Souza Martins in 1996 left WWF-Brazil to become head of the government’s Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA). While some Brazilian environmentalists complain that de Souza Martins sold out, others note that he wields far more power in his current position.

William Partridge, a World Bank environmental official, has documented cases in which governments have learned that NGO participation pays off. Two examples:
 

• In Grenada, a draft environmental assessment (EA) of a landfill project was presented for comment at a public meeting. A representative of a local NGO organization noted that the designated site would threaten the dwindling habitat of the endangered Grenada dove—a point that others, including those who prepared the EA, had overlooked. The landfill was relocated.
• In Colombia, private individuals and NGOs were given an opportunity to comment on the draft of a five-year energy development plan for the entire country. Their input led to a substantial modification of the plan and the incorporation of a far stronger environmental management system than had originally been contemplated.

The NGOs are also encouraging governments to include representatives of local communities in planning for development. The potential of such community involvement is vast. In Ecuador’s Chimborazo province, the Inter-American Foundation and the Swiss government each gave $60,000 to a tiny federation of workers in seven communities. Over five years, these workers contributed 700 days of unpaid community development work per family, at an opportunity cost of $1.5 million. In many countries of the region, NGOs invoke traditions of communal work in local communities as a cost-effective alternative to government involvement.

To make solutions like community participation possible?and to add to their political leverage?Latin American NGOs have made increasing public awareness of environmental issues a priority. Many groups have followed the lead of their international counterparts by recruiting members to enhance their grass-roots strength. They have enthusiastically embraced the new computer technologies to gather and disseminate information. The “Action Alert,” an Internet appeal, has become a frequently used device in Latin America. Throughout the region, NGOs have been winning legal battles over access to information, public participation, and the right to complain. Brazil’s Instituto Socio-Ambiental, for one, operates a freewheeling website that disseminates information on subjects ranging from land rights for indigenous people to legal responsibility for environmental crimes.

Having done much to influence the policies and practices of aid donors, the NGOs and local communities also began to work more closely with them. NGOs have worked hard to inculcate “participation” as a mantra of bilateral and multilateral official development assistance and seek to ensure that donor representatives working in the field follow policies promulgated at headquarters. Mexican NGOs joined U.S. groups in championing environmental side agreements during the negotiations leading to the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); Nadbank, a small MDB, is now financing environmental projects along the U.S.-Mexico border. NAFTA also has a second binational participatory mechanism, the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission.

Washington-based NGOs have new influence at the World Bank and especially its recently added adjunct, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a fund that the bank manages in partnership with the U.N. Environment Program and the U.N. Development Program. To be sure, many NGOs leaders feel that the process of reform within the World Bank is incomplete. Commenting on a recent independent analysis of the GEF, economist Korinna Horta of the Environmental Defense Fund asserted:

The Bank continues to prepare detailed development strategies for entire countries without consideration of their environmental implications. Worse, the evaluation finds that in many cases the GEF may represent a perverse incentive. It quotes a leading World Bank official, who states that regular financial assistance for investments in renewable energy and conservation may have actually declined, since Bank staff now look to the GEF to deal with such matters.

Rather than sit on the sidelines and take potshots at the World Bank, however, skeptics in the NGO community also try to work with bank officials. Much of their effort is aimed at making the GEF more effective. Currently, NGOs work within the bank to press not only for mid-sized grants through the GEF but also for changes in the bank’s financial management procedures?designed for large loans to governments?that would expedite the flow of GEF funds to small environmental projects. The NGO community is lobbying for replenishment of the GEF, even though it has been something of a disappointment to date.

NGO representatives the world over are deeply involved in the World Bank’s current effort to review its entire forest sector strategy, last modified in 1991. Recently, the bank and the World Wildlife Fund formed an ambitious “Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use,” whose goals are to add substantially to the global network of forest protected areas and bring the concept of “sustainability” to the harvesting of trees. In 1998, World Bank president James Wolfensohn convened an ad hoc panel of leading private sector industrialists to seek ways to bring sustainable management to the forests they control; significantly, NGO leaders were invited to participate in the panel’s initial meeting. Biologist Thomas Lovejoy, for many years a fixture at the World Wildlife Fund and later at the Smithsonian Institution, has been named as a principal environmental adviser to Wolfensohn.

A striking economic innovation in the region is the creation of many national environmental funds (NEFs). About 100 have been formed or are being formed. These NEFs have sprung up from a number of different sources. Some result from debt-for-nature conversions in which lenders forgive debts in return for government obligations to support environmental projects in local currencies. Some depend on local tourist taxes. Some are hybrids with inputs from all these sources and boosts from the U.S. Agency for International Development and multilateral aid donors such as the Global Environment Facility. Each seeks to accumulate capital, spend only interest earnings, and become a permanent pro-environment presence. The NEFs have a mixed record, but the more successful of them, such as Mexico’s $45 million Fondo Mexicano para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (FMCN), have solid accomplishments. Only one government official, the environment minister, sits on FMCN’s 20-member board of directors.

While improving relations with official aid givers, the Latin American NGOs have recognized the central role of private corporations in regional development. Between 1990 and 1995, countries shifted from statist to free market strategies. Official development assistance to the region increased only slightly in real terms, but private capital flows soared.  The new challenge for environmental activists, equivalent to that posed by the MDBs during the 1980s, is to push corporations to improve their own environmental standards—and to persuade their managers that better environmental stewardship pays off in the long run. Fortunately, many Latin American business leaders have already moved in this direction, as evidenced by the growth and vigor of the Latin American Business Council on Sustainable Development. The group’s Argentinean chapter has 50 leading corporations as members; the board of the Brazilian chapter includes members that represent 65 percent of the nation’s gross national product.

The corporations and NGOs have crossed paths on a number of fronts. The concept of “joint implementation,” a carbon sequestration scheme in which companies acquire the right to emit carbon dioxide if they help save forests that store carbon, emerged from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The Nature Conservancy, together with local partners, has sought to broker such trades with U.S. firms. The NGOs reserve the right to judge whether the site to be protected contains sufficient biodiversity to make the grade. The Mexico-based Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a leader in pressing forest products companies to commit themselves to environmentally responsible wood-harvesting methods. Along with “buyers’ groups” in a number of countries, the FSC seeks to build consumer demand for products from well-managed forests.

As tax collection improves in Latin America, NGOs have begun to agitate in favor of tax incentives. A new law in Bolivia establishes corporate tax deductions for donations to NGOs. NGOs have successfully imported the conservation easement into Latin America (starting with Mexico and Costa Rica). The conservation easement is a sophisticated U.S. legal provision that enables private landowners to assure protection for their properties in exchange for tax benefits. In Colombia, environmentalists helped persuade a venerable institution called FES, which is both a financiera (investment bank) and grant maker to social welfare organizations, to turn to environmental grant making.

Likewise, Latin American NGOs have engaged their cousins in the United States on issues of common concern. Overharvesting of shrimp, the second most popular seafood in the United States, is one example. Shrimp farming causes major environmental degradation in coastal areas of such countries as Ecuador and Honduras. Protective laws on the books are not enforced, and the gulf between environmentalists and the shrimp industry is so vast that no official mechanism for conflict resolution seems capable of constructive intervention. The New York–based Natural Resources Defense Council, with local partners, is involved in the quest for solutions. Already, Ecuador’s Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano has scored one gain: After intervening in a standoff between banana growers and shrimp farmers in a watershed where pesticide residues were killing shrimp larvae, the Fundación helped broker an agreement to manage the area?and for the World Bank to help underwrite the settlement.

This type of cooperation has allowed “Northern” and “Southern” NGOs to better relate to one another. Local NGOs educate Northern counterparts as to Latin American needs and realities. The domestic NGOs enhance the credibility of internationally run projects and improve access to government and private sector leaders. International NGOs, for their part, supply scientific expertise, training, planning, communications, and management skills and help put grant proposals into formats that MDBs will accept.

Differences between local and international NGOs do remain, however. Disagreements often arise over the allocation of scarce funds. Local NGOs prefer direct support, rather than money channeled through international intermediaries. International NGOs, on the other hand, claim that they still have a large role providing expertise and skills and using their field staff to help donors select local partners and grantees. An equilibrium is emerging between local and international NGOs in which each side builds on the strengths of the other. For example:
 

• COICA, a federation of NGOs from all nine Amazon nations, invited Northern NGOs to help found the Washington-based Amazon Coalition to work jointly on Amazonian issues within and beyond the region.
• In Paraguay, the leading local private conservation organization, the Fundacion Moises Bertoni, joined forces with the Washington-based Nature Conservancy and the AES Corporation to acquire a small but undisturbed and biologically important tract of forest land. Money to save the property, called the Mbaracayu Forest Reserve, came from diverse sources, including local donors, and, thanks to an intervention by the Nature Conservancy, the World Bank–affiliated International Finance Corporation.
• Latin American NGO membership in the World Conservation Union (IUCN) is growing faster than anywhere in the world.

There is ample evidence, then, of the rising influence of both domestic and international NGOs in Latin America. The real question is what this institutional change has meant in terms of arresting the region’s environmental decline.

The Proof of the Pudding

In his book A Fierce Green Fire (1993), the journalist Philip Shabecoff chronicles the “environmental revolution” that began in the United States in the late 1960s when “the federal government, which frequently moves at a glacial pace in dealing with social problems, responded . . . with surprising speed to the rising concern over the deterioration of the environment.”  Largely in response to outpourings of public sentiment like the original 1970 Earth Day, the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations endorsed a legislative and regulatory blizzard obliging the government to take responsibility for its own environmental performance and the nation to clean up its air and its water. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded, and the massive pollution control industry born. The legal framework surrounding these issues grew so fast that environmental lawyers quickly surpassed labor lawyers in number. “In a relatively few years,” Shabecoff declared, “the environment will be one of the top two issues that will decide a presidential election.”

Other observers fault the U.S. environmental movement for remaining generally elitist in its approach, neglecting blue-collar workers, the poor, and the powerless?those who often feel the most immediate effects of environmental degradation. Journalist Mark Dowie chastises the movement for having launched during the 1990s “a relatively fruitless and hopefully brief attempt to find a harmonious (‘win-win’) conciliation between conservative environmentalists and corporate polluters.”

Still, it is hard to disagree with Shabecoff’s perception of overall progress. The United States does have cleaner air and water, broadly higher environmental standards, and the beginnings of a corporate ethic that regards pollution as waste. Civil society was the main force behind these improvements.

How has the Latin American environment fared over the same period? Overall, not well. The Latin American environmental movement can take credit for few major victories. However, political breakthroughs of the sort now ordinary in the United States are rare in Latin America. In the light of constraints that the U.S. movement did not have to face, Latin American environmentalists can claim limited accomplishments. Possibly their main success is creating an array of organizations to promote environmental goals.

These organizations have their work cut out for them. Smog still blankets Mexico City, São Paulo, and Santiago. Nutrient and toxic pollution engulfs Rio de Janiero’s Guanabara Bay and many other rivers and estuaries in South America. Only pockets of Brazil’s once verdant Atlantic forest remain. Migratory cut-and-run loggers, many based in Asia, relentlessly strip the forests of Guyana and Suriname, and the entire Amazon is under stress as never before.

There is some good news. Conservationists recently persuaded the hard-pressed government of Suriname to set aside fully one-tenth of the country as a reserve.

But while the cutting and burning in Brazil eased a few years ago when the entire Brazilian economy suffered a recession, with better times the assault has resumed. Early in 1998, the Brazilian government issued figures showing that Amazonian deforestation had almost tripled between 1991 and 1995. This devastation of the forest has started a vicious circle: As the forest vanishes, the region becomes drier, enabling fires (like those in northern Brazil in 1997–98) to further threaten forests and their inhabitants. Associated problems crossed the U.S. border in May 1998, when dense smoke from out-of-control fires in formerly forested areas of Mexico and Central America blanketed parts of Texas and affected local climates as far north as Wisconsin.

Miners are also responsible for major damage. Roving bands of gold prospectors devastate rivers by blasting their banks with high-powered hoses, then poisoning them with mercury. A representative of the MineWatch organization testified to the independent World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development concerning mining’s toll on the Latin American environment:

In 1996 alone, foreign mining investments in Latin America reached almost $1 billion. This level of investment implies the development of vast stretches of forest land. The Network of Organizations of Black Communities estimates that up to 80,000 hectares of Colombia’s rainforests are being destroyed every year due to industrial gold mining. Zamuteba Mining, a Brazilian company, secured over half a million hectares in the central, forested Potaro-Siparuni region of Guyana. In Venezuela’s Bolívar state, which has a size roughly that of the United Kingdom, there are more than 400 mining concessions. Gold exploration and extraction has caused substantial forest and other environmental damage and the violent displacement of local populations. The extent of the damage is estimated to be about 4 million hectares.

Lightly regulated oil exploration and drilling operations are also endangering parts of Amazonia. For example, during 20 years of extracting oil from the Ecuadorean Amazon, Texaco and its partner Petroecuador (Ecuador’s state-owned oil company) spilled 17 million barrels?half again as much as the Exxon Valdez dumped into Alaskan waters?and dumped 30 billion gallons of toxic wastes into the region. The New York Times offered this graphic description of the affected area:

Open flames roar out of pipes jutting over murky pools, burning off gas to separate water from the crude oil. The soil is covered with a salty crust and is green and yellow in places. Its surface crumbles when poked with a stick, releasing the heavy odor of petroleum. Clouds of steam rise in this hellish, strangely lunar slice of the Amazon. The trees near the pools are leafless, their branches brittle.

The Texaco story graphically illustrates the depth of Latin America’s environmental problems. But it also shows how the affected citizens and NGOs in the region have begun to take counterinitiatives. The 30,000 people who live in the affected area are seeking compensation from Texaco for dead animals, lost crops, and health problems. They are working with NGOs and lawyers in Ecuador and in the United States to press their case.

The issue, the Times stated,
 

"highlights an intriguing transformation in a region riddled with deeply flawed democracies, political corruption and the lingering reflexes of former military dictatorships. It suggests that pliable governments, which may once have been a possible advantage for foreign investors, could actually prove a liability, as citizens take on the companies directly."

Evidence that direct citizen intervention can favorably influence government and corporate behavior comes from Camisea in the Peruvian Amazon, where Shell’s natural gas production facility has become environmentally sensitive. Popular pressure has persuaded Shell to fly in drilling equipment by helicopter rather than build roads that would further disrupt the local ecosystem.

In short, the stage is now set for an era of better environmental protection in Latin America. Newly forceful and effective coalitions of NGOs, working with more responsive governments and international institutions, can hope to secure lasting environmental gains.

Bilateral and multilateral donors have accepted the wisdom of incorporating environmental considerations into their planning and financing decisions. Environmental protection, along with equity and human rights, have become cornerstones of economic and development strategy across much of the hemisphere. The NGO movement, more professional and more powerful than ever, has been a catalyst for change. The question now is: What modifications could best help NGOs attain their environmental goals?

Recommended Actions

The environmental movement in Latin America will be able to achieve its goals only when NGOs and community groups are fully established as players in the relevant policy process. Their role in national planning and policymaking should come as part of a broader push for Latin American countries to decentralize and democratize. Absent major shifts in attitude and policy, there is no overestimating the extreme difficulty that civil society will encounter in its quest to gain further influence?on environmental policy and more generally. What follows is a catalogue of ideas that seem conducive to progress. Some of the proposed actions can be accomplished only at the national level; some require the involvement of the international community. Many can benefit from activity at both levels. The ideas are presented thematically rather than by political level in the categories that follow.

Property Rights and Legal Arrangements

Developing more equitable and participatory societies depends on basic questions of who owns, controls, and has the rights to use land and property. Prior to the colonial era, local communities in Latin America, as in Asia and Africa, usually managed the lands around them. Starting in the 16th century, Spain and Portugal divided ownership of the entire region between them. Thereafter, land tenure patterns and government policy almost everywhere discriminated heavily against indigenous communities. Only in recent years has the long-established latifundio system at last started to give way. The empowerment of the indigenous communities has brought some local participation in managing rural lands and resources. But persistently tight government control of forests and other kinds of natural wealth has impeded Latin American civil society. Strengthening civil society involves the devolution of ownership and management responsibilities to the local level. User rights should apply not only to land but also to trees and other resources. Land titling for local or indigenous communities often will pay dividends for the landscape as well as local people.

Support for individual small landholder rights is another strong plank on the agenda for sustainable development. Although their contributions are not always counted in official statistics, small-scale farmers and agroforesters can help stabilize watersheds and ecosystems?as long as effective local management systems and controls and positive incentives to protect the forest and other natural resources are also in place.

Countries may have to pursue legal and even constitutional changes if land tenure systems are to undergo major changes. Only national governments have the ability to make such changes—and local NGOs should pressure governments to do so.

International donors, for their part, can help by supporting the formation of community land trusts when they offer a better alternative. They can back national-level research and policy advocacy efforts to create legal incentives for sustainable community-based land management.

Education and Training

The future vitality of NGOs and local groups is tied to local improvements in education and training. Community-based management would benefit from useful new technologies and procedures ranging from mapping techniques to field assessments. Mastering these skills requires technical training. Administration, financial management, and consensus-building skills are also crucial.

Training centers can bridge the gaps between NGOs, government officials, and communities. The Regional Community Forestry Training Center (RECOFTC) at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand, which not only trains community leaders but also sensitizes government officials, has established a solid reputation for improving relations between government agencies and NGOs. It is a model that merits replication in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Federal University of Minas Gerais and INPA in Brazil, the University of the Andes and Tadeo Lozano University in Bogota, CATIE in Costa Rica, and the University of the West Indies in Barbados are institutions capable of broadening their programs to embrace the RECOFTC model.

Both international and local NGOs also need to strengthen their own ability to act as bridges—between local communities, national governments, international agencies, and nonenvironmental NGOs. Environmental NGOs based in the United States and Europe still send out field biologists to organize complex social engineering projects without adequate sensitivity to local cultures.

As regional NGOs grow larger and more sophisticated, they will need greater expertise in the unfamiliar realms of economics and business administration. One worthy effort to help in this area is the World Resources Institute’s Management, Environment, and Business (MEB) Program, which introduces the concepts of sustainable development and eco-efficiency to professors at universities in Latin America. Argentina’s Fundación Vida Silvestre has helped organize MEB workshops in Brazil, Uruguay, and Costa Rica.

To a considerable extent, the growth in size and influence of the domestic environmental movement in many Latin American countries reflects an increase in public awareness. Further gains in environmental literacy?especially among the younger generations?are of paramount importance. For many years, pollution problems festered simply because people failed to perceive the connection between human health and a clean environment. While this awareness deficit is slowly receding, countries need to educate their citizens better about environmental issues through their schools and their political systems.

Communications

Communications skills are an important determinant of influence. As the costs of computer and telecommunications technology decline, and the benefits of reaching a larger audience increase, donors should help community NGOs obtain the requisite communications skills and hardware. For grass-roots organizations, a computer is more valuable than a small tract of marginal land.

Adequate communications resources will also help prevent wasteful duplication of effort. Too often, knowledge, once acquired, remains confined where it originated. Strengthening research and training centers, with an emphasis on communications, will lead to greater interaction and information sharing between governments, donors, NGOs, and international researchers.

Donor Policies

Until the 1990s, international aid donors and lenders channeled their funds almost exclusively through national and state governments, whose dam, highway, and agricultural projects often caused serious environmental damage. Even though local participation and environmental concern have more recently become guiding principles at aid donor headquarters, the new policies and practices are not automatically observed in the field. Donors thus need to monitor better the local and regional consequences of their investments. Specifically, donors should:
 

• Avoid microplanning at local levels. Such tasks are best left to community-based institutions, intermediary NGOs, or government institutions (if available). These smaller agencies should participate in bottom-up planning and modeling exercises. Communities should play the leading role in planning their own future rather than watch while others design it for them.
• Favor beneficiary priorities when planning projects. Donors need to be far more supportive, flexible, and responsive to local needs. In practice, this translates to working at a smaller scale and in smaller grant increments. Since it will take longer for plans to develop through participatory and transparent processes, donors should take their time before making grants.
• Shift their emphasis from projects with large, intricately designed field requirements to less expensive and longer-run programs. These programs should emphasize investment in education, training, and communications skills.
• Monitor their task managers - those entrusted with implementing specific projects?on compliance with institutional policies regarding local participation. In addition, donors should assess whether the policies are followed in practice once the money reaches the field.
• Support sustainable, community-based commercial activities. Experimental mechanisms?such as the Small Grants Program at the U.N. Development Program?and expanded microcredit arrangements are two existing programs that use this approach. The well-known Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which makes very small loans to women that almost always get repaid, is a model that could be applied widely in Latin America.
• Seek reports from NGOs and national governments as to the environmental impact of structural adjustment reforms before including them as loan conditions. In many cases, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposes structural adjustment requirements without regard for environmental consequences. Instead, donors and their partners should help local communities develop and present information about local impacts.

Conclusion

The world will not bestow increments of power on environmental NGOs in Latin America unless they continue to apply pressure. These organizations must push harder to get their proposed ideas implemented and must use their grass-roots influence to move their societies toward democratic pluralism. Industrial nations, for their part, can shape and improve the international environment to encourage and reward balanced development in Latin American countries.

Many Latin American governments, and many within the international community, will continue to advocate heedless, anti-environmental “growth.” Nevertheless, a fundamental power shift has occurred in the region. Latin America’s NGOs will continue to grow in number and in influence as expanded freedoms fuel greater participation and accountability. The NGO movement has helped to slow the region’s environmental decline. It is now ready to launch a new era of environmentally sound economic progress.