COMET-LA was a project coordinated by the University of Cordoba and funded under the European Commission Framework Programme 7. The acronym stands for “COmmunity-based Management of EnvironmenTal challenges in Latin America”. The objective of the project was to “identify community-based governance models for the management of natural resources that could be used in different socio-ecological systems in the context of climate change and increasing competition over resources”. The project ran from January 2012 - January 2015.
Central to the project was civil society – scientific partnership: the ethos of the project was very much about working with and for communities to co-construct understandings of local natural resource management, likely future challenges and potential responses. This project worked with partners and local communities in sites across three countries: Colombia, Mexico and Argentina. This was an 'action research' project: we aimed to help these local communities to identify locally-owned solutions to resource management challenges, and also help contribute to the literature on community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), to provide insights into common challenges and useful strategies for resource management and governance.
The James Hutton Institute leads Work Package 5 (WP) and contributes to the other WPs of the project. Our work within COMET-LA focused on helping communities build scenarios of future change, and exploring how this could help them identify and respond to future challenges for natural resource management. This occurred in 2014, in the final year of the project.
Our Youtube video on Scenario-planning for environmental management [5] has proved extremely popular (viewed over 1500 times as of February 2016).
For more information about the project, please contact Kirsty Blackstock [12] or Kerry Waylen [13]
Links:
[1] http://www.comet-la.eu/
[2] https://www.hutton.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/projects/20140522%20Update%20on%20scenario%20work%20for%20COMETLA%20for%20newsletter.pdf
[3] https://www.hutton.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/p95-97_COMET_LA.PDF
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-RFyH8FIeA
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxHfA4P0kl0
[6] https://www.hutton.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/projects/COMET-LA%20scenario%20method.pdf
[7] http://www.comet-la.eu/index.php/en/publications.html
[8] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10113-015-0898-7
[9] http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol20/iss4/art28/
[10] http://www.revistasbolivianas.org.bo/scielo.php?pid=S1995-10782014000100006&script=sci_arttext
[11] http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-07985-200432
[12] https://www.hutton.ac.uk/staff/kirsty-blackstock
[13] mailto:Kerry.Waylen@hutton.ac.uk?subject=COMET-LA
[14] https://www.hutton.ac.uk/staff/kerry-waylen
[15] https://www.hutton.ac.uk/research/departments/social-economic-and-geographical-sciences
[16] https://www.hutton.ac.uk/research/segs-active-projects
[17] https://www.hutton.ac.uk/research/segs-archived-projects