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Paper submitted for the 9thBiennial Conference of the IASCP: “The Commons in the
Age of Globalization” Author: Sofia Doloutskaia, 1styear PhD student Nicholas
School of the Environment and Earth Sciences Duke University, Box 90328 Durham,
NC 27708, USA Tel: (1)(919) 613-8051, fax: (1) (919) 684-8741 Email: sid2@duke.eduTitle:
The impact of international tourism on community-based development in Baja
California Sur, Mexico. Introduction According to Article 27 of the current
Mexican Constitution, adopted in 1917, the federal government is the owner of
the country’s natural resources, both terrestrial and marine. Thus the legal
responsibility to manage these resources lies primarily with the national
government, not with the resource-using communities. Ever since their emergence
in 1920s-1930s the fishing communities of the Baja California peninsula have
been no exception to this general rule. Their use of marine resources has been
contingent on the government-issued harvest permits, and the decisions about
their future were made by federal officials in the far-away national capital
(Simon, 1997b; Young, 1999a; Dedina, 2000). While it was intended to serve as a
safeguard against both foreign encroachment on and domestic abuse of natural
resources, this top-down management strategy ultimately proved unsuccessful: by
the end of 1990s the majority of commercial fisheries in Baja California became
overexploited (Young, 1999b; García-Martínez, 2000pc). In the case of sea
turtles, commercial fishery has so depleted the populations that by the 1980s
all the five species found in Mexican coastal waters became endangered. In 1990
the federal government declared a complete ban on sea turtle capture and harvest
(DOF, 1990). However, this ban has proved ineffective, because it never had much
legitimacy in the eyes of the local population. Although their capacity for
resistance and independent decisionmaking have been quite limited, the coastal
communities of Baja California have not passively accepted the marginal role in
natural resource management, given to them by the federal government. During
1990s several fishing towns in the southern state of the peninsula, Baja
California Sur (BCS), have attempted to increase their decisionmaking power by
launching community-based conservation initiatives (Graber, 2001; STCNC, 2001).
However, the potential of these initiatives to change the balance of power in
favor of the resource-dependent communities is still unclear, for they emerged
in communities that are very heterogeneous and have little or no organizational
experience (Young, 1999a&b; Doloutskaia, 2001). In addition, the federal
government has recently reasserted its authority by initiating “Escalera Nautica”
(Nautical Route), a tourism megaproject that will cover the entire Baja
California peninsula with large hotels, golf courses, and marinas. The residents
of local communities were not consulted when this decision was being taken,
although 1
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it is likely to have a significant effect on them and on the ecosystems, on
which their livelihoods have so far depended (Aridjis, 2001). What can local
communities do to increase their bargaining power vis-à-vis national state and
international market forces, when they are “marginalized from a
center-driven…process and divided from within” (Young, 1999a:378)? This question
applies to many domains, in which national governments and local communities
interact. This paper provides a possible answer to it in the sphere of natural
resource management. I concentrate on the story of one community, the town of
Puerto San Carlos, located on the Pacific Coast of BCS, on the shores of Bahía
Magdalena (Magdalena Bay). This community is typical for the region in terms of
its origins, composition, and the way it has exploited its natural resources. It
was, however, the first community in the region to simultaneously address the
issues of sustainable resource management and endangered species conservation.
In August 2000 representatives of nine fishing cooperatives of Puerto San Carlos
(PSC) established the Committee for Sea Turtle Protection – the first of its
kind in Baja California and in Mexico. While the name of the Committee
emphasized protection of an endangered animal, the Committee has also listed
sustainable natural resource use, promotion of ecotourism and scientific
research, and environmental education as its main goals. This paper evaluates
the potential of this new community-based organization (CBO) to mobilize the
residents of the community and to increase their decisionmaking power. Since it
is currently unclear, what development option the residents of PSC would prefer,
this paper does not attempt to make the choice for them, but rather lays out and
evaluates several options that became available since the initiation of Escalera
Nautica in February 2001. Acknowledgements The Puerto San Carlos case study in
this paper is the result of my coursework at the Center of Coastal Studies in
PSC in the summer of 2000, which included interviews with fishermen and
community residents, observation of community meetings, and discussions with the
researchers at the Center for Coastal Studies. In February 2001 I participated
in the regional conference of Sea Turtle Conservation Network of the Americas
in Loreto, Mexico, which brought together activists, community members,
government officials, and researchers from Baja California and the US.
Throughout 2001 I have also been surveying research papers, newspaper articles
(both US and Mexican), and radio broadcasts on this and related topics. This
paper builds on and updates my undergraduate thesis, completed at the Department
of Environmental Science and Public Policy at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
in March 2001. I would like to thank Wallace J. Nichols from Wildcoast, Salvador
García-Martínez from the Center for Coastal Studies, and Hernán Ramírez-Aguirre
from the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur for letting me use their
published and unpublished data. I am also very grateful to Prof. Anirudh
Krishna, Prof. Robert Healy, and Frederick Mulenga from Duke University for
their comments and criticisms. Puerto San Carlos before the advent of
megatourism: marine resource exploitation and beginnings of community-based
conservation Puerto San Carlos is a young community even by the standards of
Baja California Sur. The oldest fishing towns in the region date from 1920s and
1930s and were created by migrants 2
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from the ranches located in the interior of the peninsula (Young, 1999a:369).
PSC was founded in the 1960s, when the second wave of settlers came to BCS from
impoverished rural areas on the Mexican mainland. This migration was encouraged
by the federal government that saw rich and then largely unexploited fishing
grounds of Baja California as a solution to economic problems and the resulting
political tensions in other parts of Mexico (Young, 1999b). The government
continued the policy of encouraging expansion of Baja’s inshore fisheries
through the 1970s and 1980s, which resulted in a population boom and a rapid
increase in the rate of harvesting of the marine resources. By mid-1990s the
harvests of most crustacean and mollusk species had significantly declined.1The
history of sea turtle fishing in Baja California is not much different from that
of other commercial fisheries.2The period of commercial sea turtle harvest began
around 1930s and the harvest levels increased drastically after World War II due
to the introduction of new fishing equipment: gillnets and motor boats. The
federal government first intervened in early 1970s, when the signs of population
decline were already visible. It attempted to manage the fishery through a
combination of temporary bans and harvest quotas. However, this strategy proved
to be flawed, because quotas were not enforced and illegal harvesting was
rampant. The government managers were aware of the illegal harvesting, but chose
to ignore it both in order to save the reputation of those in charge of
enforcement and because the magnitude of the illegal take was hard even to
estimate. This blind-eye policy resulted in legal quotas that were way above the
sustainable harvest level, and in 1990 the government was forced by conservation
biologists to implement a complete ban on all sea turtle harvest. During the
1990s the government passed further regulations that were meant to ensure the
legal protection of sea turtles and began enforcing them. In Baja California the
sea turtle ban shared the usual fate of top-down regulations in peripheral
regions:3the federal agencies lacked necessary resources and personnel to
enforce it, while the local communities ignored the ban, because they were not
included in the rulemaking process that lead to its adoption. The ban ran
counter to a very deeply rooted regional tradition of sea turtle consumption.
While it is not the main source of protein, sea turtle meat is an important part
of festive meals. In addition, sea turtle blood is often used as medicine, while
skin and shell are used for crafts (Nichols et al., 2000). Annual human
consumption estimates for the Baja California peninsula range from 10,000 to
30,000 turtles (Nichols, 2000pc, Barrera et al., 2001; Niiler, 2001a) – a much
higher mortality level than the population can currently support. Yet, the
fishers do not see the connection between their accidental consumption of sea
turtles and the general population decline (Nichols, 2000pc). The main reason
for it is that thanks to the successful efforts to protect nesting beaches the
number of young sea turtles, who come to Baja California to feed and grow, has
not decreased. However, many of them never return to reproduce as mature adults,
because they are caught, both incidentally and deliberately, near the coasts of
Baja California (Graber, 2001; STCNC, 2001). The sea turtle case is part of a
larger problem: the current patterns of marine resource harvesting in Baja
California are hardly sustainable, and many valuable commercial species could
follow sea turtles’ path in the near future. The situation in Puerto San Carlos
provides a good illustration of where the fishers in Baja California stand on
this issue. Many fishers are 1The evidence for this decline comes both from the
government statistics (See Young 1999a:372) and fromfishermen’s own observations
(see Young, 1999b; García Martínez, 2000pc). 2See Cantú and Sanchez, 1999 for a
detailed discussion, which is summarized in this paragraph. 3See Krishna,
2001:7-8 for a case study from Rajastan, India. 3
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already aware that their resource base is deteriorating (Young 1999b,
Rangel-Acevedo, 2000pc, González-Domíngez, 2000pc), but this awareness has so
far not translated into any kind of collective action to address the problem.
This lack of collective action is partly due to the heterogeneity of the fisher
communities. As described above, the population of Puerto San Carlos is composed
of immigrants from just about every mainland state of Mexico with very different
residence times in PSC and a “short collective history” (Young, 1999a:373). The
situation is rendered more complicated by the presence of transitory fishers (pescadores
libres). They depend on the permit holders, based in La Paz – the capital of the
BCS state – and operate from temporary fishing camps. Since they do not fish in
the same place all the time, they have less incentive to worry about the
long-term sustainability of the harvested species. Moreover, most of them sell
their harvest to intermediaries at very low prices, which further pushes them to
catch as much as possible and to maximize short-term gains from fishing Young,
1999a:373). Transitory fishers increase the competition for marine resources in
PSC and make it harder for local fishers to concentrate on long-term resource
conservation. While fisheries in other Mexican coastal states are regionalized
and thus closed to out-of-state fishers (Rangel-Acevedo, 2001), the fisheries of
Baja California, which have a shorter exploitation history, are more of an
open-access resource. Thus local fishers are not secure in their property rights
and do not have strong incentives to ensure long-term viability of their
resource base. The fisher cooperatives could in principle provide the
much-needed focus for collective action. However, these have traditionally been
dependent on the state for fishing permits, which has led to competition between
individual cooperatives for the most lucrative concessions. Abuses of the system
by cooperative leaders and government officials have been all too frequent, and
this has greatly undermined the fishers’ faith that any “formal mechanism” can
lead to sustainable management of marine resources (Young, 1999b). Competition
between cooperatives and the perceived unfairness of fishing permit
distribution, carried out by officials in La Paz and Mexico City (Young, 1999b),
give each fisher community strong incentives not to trust other fishers and to
harvest as much as possible, which often results in overexploitation of the
stocks. The Californian spiny lobster fishery constitutes an important exception
– it is the only shellfish species that has not been on decline in Bahía
Magdalena. The rights to harvest it belong exclusively to the fishing
cooperative of Puerto Magdalena, a fishing town that is about 30 years older
than PSC (García-Martínes, 2000pc). The lobster cooperative members have been
quite effective in protecting their concession against poachers, and their
experience is an important asset for new resource conservation initiatives. As
unlikely as it might seem, given the collective action problems the residents of
PSC face, this town has recently become the regional pioneer in sea turtle
conservation. The establishment of the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) – a
US-based field school – in 1996 and the arrival of Wallace J. Nichols, an
American sea turtle biologist, around the same time have catalyzed the creation
of the Committee for Sea Turtle Protection in PSC. It took a team of US and
Mexican researchers from CCS four years of observation, discussions, and
fieldwork to get to know the residents of PSC and to establish mutual trust
needed to tackle the harvesting of sea turtles, an activity made illegal by the
1990 ban. In the summer 2000, nearly 100 fishermen (out of the total population
of about 3000) came together to create the Committee, whose aim was to establish
a sea turtle sanctuary in one of the mangrove channels of Bahía Magdalena. The
Committee members were to protect the sanctuary against poachers and to become
the owners of an aquaculture concession on its territory. Their income would
thus come from selling farm-grown oysters and from taking tourists to see sea
turtles in their natural habitat. Fishers not 4
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belonging to the Committee would be allowed to fish in the sanctuary, but only
using the methods that would not harm the turtles. By combining of aquaculture,
ecotourism, limited fishing, and scientific research as the sanctuary’s
objectives the founding Committee members and the CCS researchers hoped to
create a protected area that benefited both the local people and the endangered
species. Today, almost a year and a half since the establishment of the
Committee, the sanctuary is still in the design stage, and it is unclear, when
the full-scale implementation will start. Meanwhile the illegal harvest of sea
turtles continues (Niiler, 2001a). The creation of the sanctuary is proceeding
slowly for several reasons. While the Committee members include someof the most
environmentally conscious residents of PSC, it is unclear, how strongly the
other residents support the idea of sea turtle conservation. The public meeting
at which the Committee laid out its objectives was poorly attended by the
residents, and an active, inclusive discussion of the project’s likely costs and
benefits never took place. The lack of resident endorsement can greatly limit
the Committee’s ability to accomplish its objectives, especially that of
poaching control, once the project goes into the implementation phase. Since
many of the poached and incidentally captured turtles are locally consumed, a
conscious refusal of the majority ofresidents to break a strong tradition of sea
turtle consumption is needed to make poaching an unattractive occupation. The
second major hurdle is the reluctance of various relevant government agencies to
provide necessary help with sanctuary enforcement. Three agencies are currently
in charge of enforcing the turtle ban: the Mexican Navy, Federal Attorney
General’s Office of Environmental Protection (PROFEPA), and the PSC harbor
authorities. While all three of them have been asked for help with sanctuary
enforcement and supported the initiative in principle, so far they have been
reluctant to get actively involved (Rangel-Acevedo, 2001). Finally, the regional
black market for sea turtle products and the recently discovered connections
between poachers and drug dealers near the northern border of the state (Young,
1999a:374; Niiler, 2001b) make sanctuary enforcement even more challenging,
especially in the absence of active resident and government support. Given these
obstacles, it will be no easy task even to get the initiative off the ground.
Maintaining it involves further problems, such as searching for funding
(currently all the Committee member work as volunteers), ensuring transparency
and accountability of the Committee both to its own members and to the residents
at large (all the current Committee members were self-appointed, the community
did not elect them), and handling resource competition with other users of the
sanctuary. Nevertheless, the Committee has significant sources of support on
regional, national, and international levels. Mexican and US researchers and
students from CCS are a major asset for the new CBO, because they continue to
help to mobilize and educate the community and to disseminate the information
about PSC in Mexico and abroad. There are at least three other communities in
BCS that are attempting similar projects,4and many more have information and
experiences to share about natural resource problems common to the whole region.
These communities come together at the annual meetings of the Sea Turtle
Conservation Network of the Americas (STCNC), an informal organization that
includes Baja California residents, conservation activists, researchers, and
government officials from both Mexico and the US. The data from scientific
studies conducted in Bahía Magdalena is published in major Mexican and US
research journals and available on the Internet through Wildcoast, a
California-based NGO, co-founded by Wallace J. Nichols. The case of Baja’s sea
turtles has also been advocated by 4These are Punta Abreojos, Laguna San
Ignacio, and Bahía de los Angeles (see STCNC, 2001 and Young, 1999a for
details). 5
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Grupo de los Cien (Group of 100), the most active of Mexican environmental NGOs,
headed by poet and writer Homero Aridjis (Dedina, 2000). Finally, the Committee
of PSC sends representatives to the annual meetings of International Symposium
on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation, a network that includes researchers,
activists, government officials, and NGOs from almost all the countries in the
world, in whose waters sea turtles are found. While these wider networks of
support cannot fully substitute for either community-wide mobilization, or
greater support from various levels of Mexican government, they have recently
become very important as the international tourism entered the scene in the form
of government-promoted megaproject, Escalera Nautica. The Nautical Route project
in the context of Mexican tourism policies and its likely impacts on Baja
California Sur At the end of February 2001, the newly elected President of
Mexico, Vicente Fox, announced that he was preparing to launch Escalera Nautica
(Nautical Route, literally, Nautical Staircase) – a project that would open up
the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific coast of Baja California to international
marine tourism. A network of 22 tourist ports is to be set up and linked to new
highways and airports to induce American owners of private vessels to come to
Baja California for recreation and follow its multi-stop coastal tourism route.
In addition, the project includes construction of large hotels, marinas, and
golf courses (Aridjis, 2001; AP, 2001). This announcement came as a complete
surprise to the most impacted stakeholders – the residents of the Baja
California peninsula. In order to pacify the opposition from NGOs, researchers,
and community groups that has flared immediately after Fox’s announcement, the
proponents of the project – the federal ministries of Environment (SEMARNAT) and
Tourism(SECTUR) – are using the vocabulary of sustainable development. They
describe Escalera Nautica (EN) as a “very expensive [for the tourists] and very
much ecotourism [oriented project],” which also generates employment and income
for the local residents, living “in extreme poverty” (AP, 2001). Both in its
essence and presentation EN is very similar to the Mexican tourist megaprojects
of 1970s and 1980s: Cancún, Ixtapa, Cabo San Lucas, and Bahías de Huatulco
(Healy, 1997). They aim at constructing “an ideal city” with high-quality
services and no “urban blight and third-world chaos” in a location, where little
development has taken place before (Simon, 1997a:180). These self-contained
tourist utopias promise benefits for everybody: excellent vacation destination
for tourists, jobs and social mobility for local residents, and preservation of
the unique natural environment (Simon, 1997a; FONATUR, 1993). The ecotourism
rhetoric is a recent addition to this framework. In the mid-1990s widespread
disenchantment with “sun and sand” resorts – the same regardless of the country
they are in – has led the Mexican Tourism Ministry (SECTUR) to shift its
rhetoric from tourism based on standard beach resorts to the exploration of the
country’s rich and diverse cultural, archaeological and environmental heritage
(Healy, 1997, Honey, 1999a). Is the recent addition of ecotourism and
sustainable development to the list of objectives of the Mexican tourism policy
anything more than a rhetorical device, aimed at quieting down the opposition to
the projects like Escalera Nautica? Current criticisms of the project include
absence of environmental impact assessment, possible overestimation of the US
demand for the marine resorts of the kind EN includes, and violation of the
existing environmental laws, since parts of the project are to be located in
biosphere reserves, where development is legally 6
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forbidden.5While thorough environmental, social, and economic impact assessments
are urgently needed and not yet available, and the emotions on both sides of the
debate are running high, it is very hard to give an accurate picture of what the
EN project means for the future of marine turtles and the fishermen of BCS.
According to the Ecotourism Society, genuine ecotourism is defined as
“responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and sustains
the well-being of local people” (Healy, 1997:5). Does Escalera Nautica pass this
test? It is very likely that the construction of marinas and increases in boat
traffic and pollution will damage sea turtle habitat, while better roads and
port facilities will facilitate turtle poaching (Doloutskaia, 2001). The project
is also likely to have negative effects on the aquatic habitats of commercially
exploited species,6further increasing the stress on already depleted
invertebrate and fish populations. Finally, it is unclear, whether such a
project will truly benefit the poorest resident groups, and whether the kinds of
employment it offers will generate sustainable patterns of growth in the region.
Past problems with tourist megaprojects in Mexico have included relocation of
residents into squatter settlements with subsequent overcrowding,
infrastructure, and sewage disposal problems, as well as the leakage of profits
from international hotel chains out of Mexico (Simon, 1997a). Robert Healy
(1997:7) warns that “because ecotourism … [has] a definite appeal to today’s
tourists,” this term is “frequently used as a marketing strategy, irrespective
of the actual content of the tourism.” Martha Honey (1999a:9) further cautions
that “much of what … the tourism industry sells as green tourism is known as
‘ecotourism lite’ – minor environmentally friendly cost saving measures” that
are not paralleled by strong commitment to environmental conservation in the way
the project is implemented and operated. If Escalera Nautica turns out to be at
best “ecotourism lite,” Could the non-governmental stakeholders in Baja
California make the Fox administration stand up to its declarations and to
better match its deeds and words?Ultimately the fate of Escalera Nautica will
depend on whether the objects of this development – the residents of Baja
California – can make their opinions count with the national government and the
tourism industry. It is very characteristic that the attitude of the local
population is currently one of the biggest unknowns in the whole equation –
their opinions have not carried much weight with the government in the past. It
is hard to predict, what the residents will do, when they can no longer derive
their income from harvesting and processing sea products. The reaction will
certainly vary from place to place, depending on the precise nature of changes
that EN might entail in a given community. Construction and service sector jobs,
provided by the project, might be an attractive option to many residents,
especially to women. While I do not have such information for other fishing
towns, many women in Puerto San Carlos told me during meetings and interviews
that they would like to see more business come to their town, because there is
currently not enough employment for women. On the other hand, there are
indications that not all fishers would agree to give up their current
occupation. Adan Hernandez, a nature guide and a resident of Puerto San Carlos
might be speaking for quite a number of his fishermen friends and relations,
when he says that “people here don’t want to give up their lives as fishermen to
become waiters or janitors” (Associated Press, 2001). Since inshore fisheries
are likely to be further degraded once the implementation of EN begins, those,
who choose to remain fishermen, will either have to find work in the high seas
shrimp and tuna fleet, or to move to some other part of Mexico, where
small-scale fishery is still possible. By choosing the first 5See Aridjis, 2001,
Lindsay 2001a&b, AP, 2001, Martínez-Delgado, 2001pc. 6Especially if maintaining
marinas on the Pacific Coast indeed requires constant dredging of the ocean
bottom, as Aridjis (2001) claims. 7
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option, fishermen surrender their independence, which many of them value highly
(Gonzalez-Domíngez, 2000pc). The second option might not even be available,
given that Baja California is the last major coastal fishing “frontier,” while
other regional fisheries in Mexico are either too depleted or regionalized and
thus inaccessible to the residents of BCS (García-Martínez, 2000pc;
Rangel-Acevedo, 2001pc). If the majority of fishermen choose to remain in BCS
and switch to construction and service sector jobs, they will have to deal with
the consequences of explosive population growth in what is a very fragile desert
environment. The labor requirements for the envisioned road, hotel, and marina
construction are unlikely to be satisfied locally, so a new wave of migration
mainland Mexico is to be expected. Accommodating these new residents as well as
the increased flow of tourists will require significant expansion of existing
physical infrastructure and result in great increases of water consumption,
which will be hard to satisfy sustainably in a desert area. While careful
planning could, in principle, mitigate many of these growth problems, it is
beyond question that EN will greatly change the ways, by which people in BCS
obtain their livelihood. While the residents of Baja California must choose for
themselves, what they want their future to be, the rest of this paper discusses
some options that they might consider. Where to go and how to get there:
community organization and activism in Puerto San Carlos As Emily Young
(1999a:379) points out, the criterion of sustainable development is too vague
and can lead to disaster if used in situations, where “local communities are
poorly organized.” Before the residents of Puerto San Carlos start acting, they
need to create an inclusive forum to discuss their priorities. Creating a
community-wide (not just community-based!) organization is one way to initiate
such discussion. It is up to the community members to decide, whether they could
use the Sea Turtle Protection Committee as a basis for such an organization, or
whether it is better to start anew. In any case, there are several design
principles that they should keep in mind. These principles are well outlined in
Granger’s and Als’ case study of the TOCO foundation in Trinidad and Tobago
(Granger and Als, 2000). The situation encountered by the founders of TOCO was
in principle quite similar to that of Puerto San Carlos. They confronted
unorganized communities in a “peripheral” region that has been remained largely
aloof from development, until it recently opened to domestic and international
tourism. The community organization began with a three-year long discussion
period, during which the outsiders got to know the community enough to begin
helping it to organize. At the end of this preliminary, but very important
period, the TOCO foundation was established as a civil organization with its
main principles recorded in a constitution and a series of interrelated projects
planned out. Since the national government has not responded to TOCO’s requests
for funding, the organization had to turn to external donor agencies. It was
careful to negotiate grant and loan agreements that we consistent with its
principles and appropriate for its projects. In order to keep the organization
transparent and accountable, all its members were required to contribute both
money and labor to the projects that they would benefit from. Throughout its
existence TOCO foundation placed great emphasis on training programs and
communication. These were intended to teach the members new skills, to build the
sense of self-confidence and achievement, and to facilitate the exchange of
experience and information between different communities involved in similar
projects. While the optimal design of a community organization depends greatly
on the local context, the residents of PSC would do well to keep in mind the
guiding principles of the TOCO foundation: inclusive initial discussion 8
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of priorities, ability to locate alternative sources of support, if state
support is unavailable, transparency and accountability of the organization both
to its members and to the donors, and investment in training and communication.
What are some options for future development that the community of Puerto San
Carlos could consider? They could try to preserve the status quo and resist any
kind of large-scale development, the Escalera Nautica in particular. This
strategy is, however, unlikely to be supported by the entire community, since
many of them might find that the status quo is not worth preserving and that EN
could be a beneficial change for them. Moreover, even if the entire community
agreed to resist this development, it would probably not succeed, given the
strength, with which this project is backed by both federal and state
government. The residents of PSC, and of BCS in general, currently lack the
necessary political leverage on the national level to freeze a project of such
magnitude. Another option would be to acquiesce and to accept the Escalera
Nautica in its present form. This would be by far the easiest road to follow,
but its costs and benefits are unclear, and, given the magnitude of the project,
the stakes are simply too high to take a risk without some prior weighing of
alternatives. Finally, PSC could choose some kind of middle way. It could join
in league with other communities, demanding that the government does not allow
the implementation to begin until a thorough, independent review of the project
is conducted, its results are made public, and the local communities are
included into the decisionmaking process. Depending on the results ofsuch an
assessment, the community could either accept the project or require it to be
modified so as to minimize its negative impacts on society and environment, in
line with the government’s declaration of its commitment to the principles of
sustainable development. The community might choose a development strategy that
allows for a mixture of income-generation strategies. The exact nature of this
mixture is best determined through experimentation, but its components could
include tourism (albeit likely of a scale smaller than that envisioned by the
government), a variety of community-run businesses, management of protected
areas, ecotourism, research, and certain kinds of fishing and aquaculture. Such
mixture would allow the community to diversify the risks and not become
dependent on one particular kind of project that could prove unviable in the
future.7A note of caution must be sounded about ecotourism. Emily Young (1999b),
a US researcher who conducted extensive studies of fishing communities in the
northern part of BCS, points out that unless the community’s access rights to
land, water, the ecotourism target species, and tourists themselves are secure,
ecotourism might suffer from the same problems as fisheries. Young has found
that the government has monopolized the gray whale ecotourism permits in the
same way it monopolized the fishing permits earlier, while the conflicts over
access to natural resources and the distribution of benefits have intensified as
a result of ecotourism development. The income benefits of ecotourism have
proved to be insufficiently large to reduce the pressure on other fishery
resources, and the intensified conflicts over access contributed to the
near-sightedness and lack of trust among resource users. Foreign travel agencies
have been able to exploit this situation to their advantage and reap most of the
benefits, because communities were divided and unable to defend their rights of
access to natural resources. Thus, if ecotourism is to become part of a
sustainable development strategy, it must be accompanied by community
7Unfortunately, there are indications that tourist megaprojects might prove to
be a very risky investment for the local communities. The case in point is that
of Puerto Escondido, a small town on the Gulf Coast of the Baja California
peninsula that the government decided to transform into a megaresort in the
1970s and then abandoned, half-finished, shortly afterwards (Lindsay, 2001a). 9
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organization and empowerment, ultimately resulting in a community that can stand
united and secure its rights to the resources it uses to generate its income.
Given the geographical proximity of Young’s case to PSC, its residents should
take its lessons very seriously. Finally, it might be possible for the residents
of PSC and other communities of BCS to use the controversy that arose over the
Escalera Nautica project in order to establish themselves as stakeholders to be
reckoned with in national development debates. This might be a good opportunity
for the local communities to end their marginalized status, but they have to be
very careful in their choice of strategy. Calling for a comprehensive impact
assessment of the project might be a good way to start this process of
incorporation: if a commission in charge of producing the impact statement
included community representatives, not only would it result in a more accurate
assessment, but it would also lend more credibility to its results. In other
words, the communities and their allies might be able to use the process of
gathering information, necessary for decisionmaking, as a way of “bounding
conflict” and establishing a common ground.8The move from establishing
community-based organizations and multiple-use marine protected areas to
demanding more decisionmaking power in tourism and development projects is an
inherently political move. As Keck and Sikkink (1998:133) point out, “linkages
between environment and development issues are inherently political; they
involve property relations, profitability of investments … and distribution of
income and wealth, as well as access to and power over institutions.” Is such
politicization of community-based conservation initiatives a desirable thing?
After all it all started with trying to protect sea turtles – will they not get
lost in this other fight?Influential scholars and practitioners in
community-based development (CBD), such as Esman and Uphoff are somewhat
ambiguous on the issue of whether CBOs should get actively involved in the
political process. On the one hand, they state that CBOs “cannot be treated as …
politically neutral [and are] a target of influence or control by outsiders” (Esman
and Uphoff, 1984:30). They also emphasize the importance of taking the CBOs to
the national level through the creation of CBO “federations” (Kiriwandeniya,
1997:66; Parmesh Shah, 2001; Agrawal and Gibson, 1999:639). Yet, at the same
time they recognize that political involvement is a double-edged sword.
Kiriwandeniya, for example, emphasizes the importance of political neutrality
ofthe rural credit movement that he founded in Sri Lanka (1997:70), while Uphoff
(2001pc), speaking from his experience with irrigation in the same country,
cautions that CBOs should keep away from politics, if they want to be effective
service providers. While it is clear that the degree of a CBO’s political
involvement greatly depends both on its mission and on the context, in which it
operates, the tension between soliciting wider support through political
activism and preventing the organization’s agenda to shift away from addressing
the needs of its rank-and-file members remains one of the greatest challenges.
In her study of urban CBOs in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Rebecca Abers (1998)
proposes a potential solution to this predicament. In her view, the benefits to
the communities frompoliticizing their cause depend on the general political
climate in the country and on the kind of 8The concept of “bounded political
conflict” belongs to Kai Lee. Lee uses an example of Northwestern Power Planning
Council as an information gathering /consensus building agency in the US Pacific
Northwest salmon debate. See Chapter 4 of Kai N. Lee, 1993. Compass and
Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment, Washington,
D.C.: Island Press. For an example from the European Union’s struggle to resolve
the issue of acid rain see Marc A. Levy, 1994. “European Acid Rain: The Power of
Tote-Board Diplomacy,” chapter 3 in Peter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohane, and Marc
A. Levy, eds., Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International
Environmental Protection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; pp.75-132. 10
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politicians communities choose as their allies. For the relationship between
communities and political actors to be mutually beneficial, the politicians must
see the votes of local communities as relevant and important and have to be
committed to gaining community support through empowerment, rather than
clientelism. It is not clear, whether this is the case for the potential
political allies of Baja’s communities – the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD)
that is a prominent opponent of unrestrained neoliberal development strategies
and already enjoys significant popularity with the voters of BCS, and the
Mexican Green Party (PVEM), a new actor in Mexican politics. Either or both
alliances could be very beneficial, especially since both parties have
established a presence in the national capital, which is relatively remote and
inaccessible for the majority of the peninsula’s residents. The state of BCS
with its small and largely rural population has so far played a marginal role in
Mexican electoral politics, but that does not mean this could not change in the
future. Ultimately, the issue that the communities of Baja California are trying
to resolve is that of blocked communication channels between them and the high
levels of government. Keck and Sikkink (1998:12-13) point to the “transnational
advocacy networks” (TANs) as one possible way of resolving this problem. They
describe the “boomerang pattern” of advocacy, by which civil society groups of a
particular country, who are unable to reach their state directly, act through
civil society groups abroad, who pressure their own governments that in turn
pressure the government of the country in question. The communities of BCS
definitely have resources at home and abroad that allow them to engage in that
kind of activity, if needed. However, this strategy must not be used
indiscriminately, because it does not work equally well with all types of
issues, and because there is an inherent risk that actors outside BCS will
modify or misinterpret the original campaign message to achieve other goals.
Once again, for the right message to get across through TANs, communities must
be organized and speak with a unified voice. Conclusions The issues of
sustainable use of natural resources by communities are unlikely to be resolved,
while local communities do not have secure rights of access to these resources
and to the market and state institutions that make decisions about their use
(Honey, 1999a:9; Young, 1999b; Keck and Sikkink, 1998:161). In the case of
Puerto San Carlos and other fishing communities of BCS the issue who controls
access to natural resources is currently being contested in many different
arenas – from local conflicts between fishermen cooperatives, ecotourism guides,
and poachers to national and international debates about tourismmegaprojects.
Can communities with little organizational experience, “divided from within” and
marginalized from without (Young, 1999a:378), mobilize in defense of their own
rights against actors with much more power and experience – the national state
and international tourismcorporations? The trouble is that communities often do
not yet know what they want, and when they finally establish their priorities,
they might find that it necessary to fight several battles at once. Do the
communities have enough commitment and capacity to simultaneously tackle issues
as diverse as endangered species conservation, sustainable fisheries management,
political empowerment, and community mobilization? Each of these issues
separately requires a lot oftime and concentration to be resolved properly, but
the predicament is that none of them can wait: species go extinct, fisheries get
depleted, projects promoted by external actors are built in the name of
communities that do not even know whether they want them or not. 11
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The good news is that communities do not have to tackle these complex issues on
their own. As Young (1999a:383) and many other researchers have pointed out, the
“hollow middle” between communities and the state can and is often filled by
intermediary organizations – domestic and international NGOs, labor unions,
church and community groups – that can provide channels of communication and
create spaces for conflict resolution. While many different kinds of actors can
in principle perform this role, it is essential that they remain accountable to
the community and accurately relay its message to the larger levels of the
system. Training and education for all the stakeholders become essential in this
context. The researchers and residents of Baja California need to raise the
environmental and social awareness of regional city dwellers – potential sea
turtle consumers, as well as that of domestic and international tourists. There
is also a great need to train community leaders and state officials in matters
pertaining to community organization and development. Martha Honey (1999:22)
lists building environmental awareness as one of the key principles of genuine
ecotourism. The communities of Baja California can enlist the help of their
“transnational advocacy network” – Sea Turtle Conservation Network of the
Americas, Group of 100, Wildcoast, and the participants of the International
Symposia on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation – to inform the potential
international tourists about the issues of environmental conservation and
community-based development in BCS. Increasing the number of “socially
conscientious and informed travelers” (Honey, 1999a:31) would make it harder for
the international tourism industry to market environmentally and socially
damaging tourism projects. 12
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