Community-based Management of Environmental challenges in Latin America

The ethos of the project is very much about working with and for communities to co-construct understandings of local natural resource management, likely future challenges and potential responses.

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.

News

• The project issued regular newsletters: visit http://www.comet-la.eu/ [1]to find out more.  Some of these newsletters discuss the work of the James Hutton Institute - for example, this document is an excerpt from the spring 2014 COMET-LA newsletter, that discusses our partners' progress in the work.  PDF file: COMET-LA newsletter article on scenario-planning (190KB) [2]
• In late 2012 the project was described in an interview with the co-ordinator (Professor Maria del Mar Delgado) in the 'International Innovation' magazine published by Research Media EU  PDF file: International Innovation article (855 KB) [3]
• COMET-LA's work in Bahia Blanca, Argentina, was featured on a Argentinian television programme - Click here to view the film on Youtube [4].

• Our Youtube video on Scenario-planning for environmental management [5] has proved extremely popular (viewed over 1500 times as of February 2016).

Outputs

• Waylen, K., Martin-Ortega, J., Blackstock, K. and Brown, I. (2013). The common scenario-planning methodology for COMET-LA. Working document produced for EU FP7 COMET-LA Project Community-Based Management Of Environmental Challenges In Latin America.  Click here to download the methodology [6] (Pdf file; 742KB)
• Waylen, K.A., Martin-Ortega, J., Blackstock, K.L., Brown, I. (2015) Locally-adapted scenario building: evaluation of methods. Deliverable 1.3 of the COMET-LA project. [7]
• Blackstock, K.L., Waylen, K.A., Martin-Ortega, J., Brown, I. (2015) COMET-LA Implications for multi-level resource governance in the future. COMET-LA Policy Briefing, Deliverable 5.2. [7]
• Martin-Ortega, J., Waylen, K.A., Martin-del-Molino, J.P., Blackstock, K.L., Brown, I. (2015) Synthesised scenarios: Summary and comparison of the scenario building processes and outcomes in the three case studies. Participatory Report on Synthesised Scenarios, Deliverable 5.1. [7]
• Brown, I.; Martin-Ortega, J.; Waylen, K.A.; Blackstock, K.L. (2016) Participatory scenario planning for developing innovation in community adaptation responses: three contrasting examples from Latin America. [8] Regional Environmental Change. DOI 10.1007/s10113-015-0898-7
• Waylen, K.A.; Martin-Ortega, J.; Blackstock, K.L.; Brown, I.; Uribe, B.E.A.; Hernandez, S.B.; Bertoni, M.B.; Bustos, M.L.; Bayer, A.X.C.; Semerena, R.I.E.; Quijano, M.A.F.; Ferrelli, F.; Fidalgo, G.L.; Lopez, I.H.; Cisneros, M.A.H.; London, S.; Maya Velez, D.L.; Ocampo-Diaz, N.; Ortiz-Guerrero, C.E.; Pascale, J.C.; Perillo, G.M.E.; Piccolo, M.C.; Pinzon Martinez, L.N.; Rojas, M.L.; Scordo, F.; Vitale, V.; Zilio, M.I. (2015) Can scenario-planning support community based natural resource management? Experiences from three countries in Latin America. [9] Ecology and Society, 20, Article No.28.
• Martin-del-Molino Fernandez J., Martin-Ortega J, Waylen K, Blackstock K and Brown I (2014) El uso de escenarios en la gestión comunitaria de los recursos naturales [10] in Revista Virtual REDESMA 7 (1).
• The COMET-LA scenario planning processes was also featured in the following paper Oteros-Rozas, E., Martín-López, B., Daw, T. M., Bohensky, E. L., Butler, J. R. A., Hill, R., Martin-Ortega, J., Quinlan, A., Ravera, F., Ruiz-Mallén, I., Thyresson, M., Mistry, J., Palomo, I., Peterson, G. D., Plieninger, T., Waylen, K.A., Beach, D. M., Bohnet, I. C., Hamann, M., Hanspach, J., Hubacek, K., Lavorel, S. and Vilardy, S. P. (2015). Participatory scenario planning in place-based social-ecological research: insights and experiences from 23 case studies [11], Ecology & Society, 20(4): 32.

For more information about the project, please contact Kirsty Blackstock [12] or Kerry Waylen [13]