Formal institutions, local arrangements and conflicts in Northern Bolivian communities after forest governance reforms

In the last decades, community forest management (CFM) has become an alternative to reach important objectives related to forests sustainability and the improvement of forest dwellers’ wellbeing. In many countries the recognition and development of specific CFM models has been closely related to social struggles for new rights or the recognition of traditional rights over land, which link it with the communitarian model. In order to understand the sequence of changes of CFM in the course of its recognition in Bolivia and particularly in the northern Bolivian Amazon, we considered three important social processes. The first social process relates to community devised distribution of land and forest resources in response to agricultural and forestry government reforms. The second social process relates to the debt-peonage system called “habilito” in the region, which barraca holders used to control their workforce, assure an adequate labor supply to exploit rubber and Brazil nuts, and to exercise influence over social relations and the local economy. The third process relates to the consequences of the dynamics triggered by the changes experienced by the first two, observed most of the time as different kind of conflicts, resulted from the difficulties of community members to adapt to the new social, political, normative and economic contexts. Related to the first social process, our findings suggest that within processes of changes of land property right and rights of forest use in favor or peasants and indigenous people, these actors needs to develop strategies to cope with the new legislation and new responsibilities, in which the principles of property and rights granted by the government might constitute themselves some kind of obstacle to people devising local principles of access and authority. Thus, the first step to community rule design, enforcement, and effective forest management is the opportunity to, and equity of, access to forest resources among members. The above changes carried out the rupture of the former dominant social relationships which is well observed within the negotiation of habilito. The study on habilito (second social process) suggests that after the above mentioned reforms, the habilito became a new instrument among the actors closely linked to forest resource use. To peasant and indigenous people habilito is a source of credit and goods, and to traders is an instrument to assure access to valuable forest resources. Within the process described above, when uncertainties and contradictions arise during the definition and application of new rules, conflicts emerge affecting individual and collective spheres. We called “conflict precursor” when individualistic behavior gives priority to individual goals, rather than collective goals. A conflict precursor becomes a “problem factor” when individual behavior represents an obstacle to reach collective agreements. This is the consequence of the different management and legal rules between livelihoods and valuable natural resources, and the confusion it represents for community members. Natural resource-based conflicts then, become a matter of who has the ability to use the resource in the most advantageous wa