How are institutions included in Integrated Conservation and Development Projects? Developing and testing a diagnostic approach on the World Bank’s Forest and Community project in Salta, Argentina
开发了一种诊断方法，通过分析项目信息流、资产流和规则流来评估综合保护与发展项目中的制度距离和集体决策机会，并应用于世界银行在阿根廷的一个案例，发现仅靠设计指南不足以实现参与式目标。
The opportunities and challenges of ensuring participation and success of Integrated Conservation and\nDevelopment Projects (ICDPs) have been fairly studied. However, it is not often well-established which\ninstitutional mechanisms explain the failure in meeting participatory and project goals. To fill this gap,\nwe develop a telecoupling-inspired diagnostic approach to assess the level of institutional distance and\nopportunity for collective decision-making in ICDPs by looking at project information flows, project asset\nflows, and rules and regulation flows between project actors. We construct three management arche-\ntypes based on the direction and directness of such flows: decoupled management, telecoupled manage-\nment and collaborative management. The archetypes are applied to a case study of a World Bank-\nfinanced ICDP in Argentina, drawing on qualitative data collected from individual interviews with project\nactors. Our findings challenge the notion that a project becomes participatory if the project design pro-\nvides guidelines for participatory implementation. We find that our diagnostic approach helps to con-\ncretize the call for inclusion of local project actors across the project cycle, which is needed to make\nprojects collaborative, relevant, and socially just. Finally, we advocate future project assessments to build\non this approach and map the practical institutional relationships between project actors to provide\ntransparency on the de facto level of project collaboration. This article is relevant for both academics\nand practitioners designing and implementing conservation and development projects.