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12. Scaling Up from the Grassroots: NGO Networks and the Challenges of Organizational Maintenance in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula
- State University of New York Press
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Most discussions of community-based conservation emphasize the importance of providing incentives for ecologically beneficial local development but tend to overlook the importance of strong organizational arrangements in sustaining these activities over the long term. Effective organizing for conservation and development can be particularly challenging in contexts characterized by authoritarian rule within both rural agrarian communities and the ranks of state agencies. Mexico, which is the focus of this chapter, presents a rural political environment that has been largely inhospitable to grassroots organizing. Despite its history of agrarian reform, peasant organizing, and, more recently, community management of forests, the country presents an institutional legacy of state control of resources, domination by local and regional bosses (caciques), and community dependence on state subsidies. Within the context of Mexico’s economic apertura beginning in the mid1980s , the number of large-scale, state-run rural development programs decreased. As a result new opportunities emerged for actors operating outside the state’s domain to pursue initiatives focused on community development, environmental protection, and, in some cases, political opposition (Fox and Hernández 1992). 195 Chapter Twelve Scaling Up from the Grassroots NGO Networks and the Challenges of Organizational Maintenance in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula PETER R. WILSHUSEN, RAÚL E. MURGUÍA This chapter explores an ongoing initiative to build and maintain an organizational network for conservation and sustainable development in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Unlike many programs that attempt to join conservation and development, participants in the Yucatán experience have explicitly accounted for organizational arrangements and decision-making processes that promote grassroots democracy. This effort was legally constituted in February 1997 when representatives of twelve small and mediumsized nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) operating in the region formed the Sustainable Development Network or ROSDESAC (as it is known in Mexico by its Spanish acronym).1 The network seeks to scale up efforts aimed at strengthening community-level organizations, generating alternative economic income opportunities, promoting environmental protection , and encouraging rapidly disappearing cultural practices, particularly among Mayan communities. ROSDESAC emerged out of a small grants program administered by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with funds from the Global Environment Facility (GEF)2 and has grown from an informal support group of five NGOs to an independent network of fifteen NGOs working across the Yucatán Peninsula. The ROSDESAC case is important for three reasons. First, it suggests that a wide spectrum of participants can “scale up” or expand communitybased conservation and development efforts to the regional level by crafting organizational arrangements and consensual decision-making processes (Brown and Ashman 1998; Fox 1996; Uvin 1995; Uvin et al. 2000). Second, the case presents evidence that international conservation and development organizations such as the GEF and UNDP can play an important role in this scaling-up process through small-grants programs. Third, ROSDESAC’s experience to date illustrates several challenges that proponents of conservation and social justice face in maintaining such a network within a largely unsupportive political and economic environment. In order to expand on each of these points, this chapter proceeds along three lines of discussion. First, it recounts how ROSDESAC formed, placing special emphasis on key institutional changes that favored increased participation by local NGOs in rural development. The second part of the chapter analyzes ROSDESAC’s institutional structure, considering in particular the role of power sharing as a means of counteracting conventional relationships of domination between rural and coastal producer organizations on one side and NGOs, international donor organizations, and state agencies on the other. The chapter’s final section presents a discussion of some of the factors that underlie the network’s qualified success at generating democratic structures and social process. It also explores several organizational challenges that participants have faced in maintaining the network by presenting an initial appraisal of organizational efficiency, stability, commitment and community representation of several member groups. 196 WILSHUSEN, MURGUÍA [3.82.2.112] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:07 GMT) EXPANDING POLITICAL SPACE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY: THE EMERGENCE OF ROSDESAC ROSDESAC appeared in the mid-1990s in the midst of key social, political, and economic reforms in Mexico. Under President Carlos Salinas de Gotari (1988–1994), Mexico experienced a shift away from state-led development toward neoliberal economic policies that stressed reduced government involvement, privatization, and free trade. The country’s entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986 and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 were accompanied by a largescale reorganization of many government...