Description:
ICCARE: Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas for social-ecological Resilience.
There is a strong and growing scientific and political awareness that Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) can be a positive regime vis-à-vis environmental conservation, local peoples’ well-being and global sustainability (e.g. CBD, IUCN, UNEP, UNDP). Nevertheless, there is scarce empiric research on the resilience capacity of pastoral ICCAs. This International Research Network aims at testing this hypothesis. For this, we will focus on 3 contiguous pastoral commons / ICCAs in Andalusia’s north-eastern mountains (Castril, Santiago and Pontones; hereafter CSP) with almost identical bio-physical conditions but with differentiated levels of communal governance (e.g. pastoralists’ participation, type and number of communal management rules, factual applicability of these rules and collective cohesion) making this site an interesting one for the comparative study of pastoral pastoral commons and their conservation and livelihoods potentials. Our main objective is to contribute, based on empirical data, to the current debates on the interests, limits and potentialities of ICCAs for the governance of natural resources in the contemporary context of global change and the necessary ecological transitions around the notion of socio-ecological heritage and multi-sectoral dynamics. In such context, the specific objectives are:
- To analyze the collective management and decision-making process in each one of these three pastoral commons, along with their dynamics in terms of livelihoods.
- To study the impacts in terms of floristic composition (richness and diversity), plant structure (cover) and phytomass production (kg DM/ha) of the 3 different levels of communal governance, as well as of long distance vs short distance transhumance, being the latter associated in CSP to a lesser commonality.
- To evaluate the positive and negative impacts of these governance systems, both on the pastures and on the pastoral societies that govern them.
- Complementarily we will aim at developing a larger Horizon Europe comparative proposal at the Mediterranean scale.
Location:
Region of Andalucía, Spain.
Project Duration:
2021-2024
Key Concepts:
Rural communities, heritage, nature conservation.
Funded by:
Institut Méditerranéen pour la Transition Environnementale
piccahers.org 