Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Christmassy Nicaragua

We weren’t dreaming of a white Christmas, as we kind of realised that it would be in vain. However, the Christmas decorations that have been visible everywhere in Nicaragua since we arrived here mid-november are definitely helping to get some of the Christmassy feeling. We have been doing some shopping and Laura made a wonderful traditional roast diner on Friday, which we had with Pierre and Xitlali. There was some exchanging of gifts already, as Pierre, Xitlali and Mathías will be in León this week; and we’re happy to help them out by looking after the dogs (Puma and Idéfix; and we'll be acting as nurse for one of them who had to go to the vet's today with a wound on his back) as well as the house for that time. 

Christmas eve was spent with some of my (Frédéric) Nicaraguan 'family', and the 25th we went to the monkey hut again with some friends. 


X-mas decorations in the house; with the angels bringing the gifts (in Nicaragua, it is not santa but 'el niño dios' who brings the gifts). 
Preparing apple crumble for Christmas dinner. (I (Frédéric) must admit I wasn't really as involved as it looks here.... Thanks again Laura for a great roast!) 

Cringe! :) 

Fieldwork (Frédéric)


With this entire blog referring to the ‘touristy’ things we’ve been doing so far, people might wonder if I have forgotten that I came here with the main objective to conduct research. Actually it’s time to tell most of you a bit more about what I’m doing here (as well as last year, and the three years to come). I’m not sure I’ll manage to do it in just a few sentences and in a comprehensible way, but what follows is an attempt to write a short introduction to my research topic. 

I will be working in a sub-part of the biosphere reserve Bosawás in Nicaragua, where there are a number of regulations/projects going on to try to limit the pressure on the forest. A number of people and organisations are interested in preserving this forest, because it holds a lot of biodiversity, stocks a lot of carbon and – most importantly for the local people – has a role in the regulation of the microclimate and the water quantity and quality of the region. What I will be focusing on, is the decision-making of the local farmers (what crops do they produce, what is the economic and social aspect of the different trade-offs, and how much do they take the impact on nature into account). The aim is to understand better the impact of some of the regulations and policies that have been implemented to try to conserve the nature – with a specific focus on a popular policy instrument (Payments for Environmental Services) – through their impact on the decision-making of the key actors.  

A slightly more elaborate version goes as follows: (note: if you already felt bored reading the previous paragraph, you can also just skip to the part with the pictures; no hard feelings :))

Since October last year I’ve been a PhD student in Development Studies at the Institute of Development Policy and Management from the University of Antwerp. The title of my research project is “Green microfinance and payments for environmental services: from market-based panaceas towards an integrated approach to sustainable  rural development. Case studies from Nicaragua”; but that might not make much sense until I’ve explained a few of the key elements of that title. 

First, I assume you might already have heard of the idea of ‘sustainable development’. The concept became most popular in a big international conference of the United Nations in Río de Janeiro in 1992; of which the 20th anniversary was ‘celebrated’ this year with the United Nations Conference on Sustainable development, also called ‘Rio+20’ (www.uncsd2012.org). The most cited definition of sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (this definition was made at an earlier conference, which is sometimes considered the cradle of the ‘sustainable development’ term, the WCED in 1987). This concept of development comes from the confrontation with our past and current ways of seeking development, which seem to fail to deliver in terms of the reduction of poverty and inequality, and which are absolutely overshooting the limits set by the global and local ecosystems we live in.

So to do something about it, all sorts of organisations and governments are searching for and implementing policies and governance structures that are expected to change the current course of action. One of the most popular suggestions of the moment is to have ‘Payments for Ecosystem Services’ (PES). The ‘ecosystem services’ refer to benefits that people obtain from nature. This can go from services that we know quite well – such as agricultural produce – to e.g. the regulation of water quantity and quality by forests. In the context in which I’ll be working, the idea underlying the payments is twofold: 
i) as people obtain benefits of those services, they are willing to pay for it to safeguard their supply  
ii) if farmers are paid money when they apply the land uses that help provide these services (such as shade coffee, primary or secondary forests,…) they’ll adopt the environmentally more beneficial practices instead of the degrading activities that were affecting the environment and reduced the environmental services.

So you can see there is the idea of ‘putting a price on nature’, making it exchangeable on a market (you might have heard from the carbon market e.g.). The policy instrument of Payments for Ecosystem Services is very widespread, and links to the wider idea of ‘the Green Economy’. In microfinance (where small loans are given to people with no access to credit or financial services), the idea has started to come in gradually, with e.g. programmes where the interest rates are lowered when some environmental conditions are being fulfilled by the farmer (what I call ‘green microfinance’ in the title). 

The policy is very popular, but actually there is very little proof that it is really as efficient and effective as so often proclaimed. More and more researchers, citizens, farmers organisations,… are starting to question the idea of PES. You can do so on a huge number of fronts: in terms of fairness (how are the payments locally distributed? who gets the benefits and who bears the costs?), unequal development (is it a way for the developed countries to just continue to consume and pollute?), the natural science element of it (can you really measure the services that you trade?), and so on. I think I should say I mostly focus on the idea of effectiveness, which I relate in part to fairness. More precisely, I will look more closely at the assumption that you can solve the problem by merely changing some monetary trade-off in the economic decision-making of individual farmers. 

I believe that Payments for Environmental Services and the underlying economics are overlooking the importance of context in which the policies are implemented. Whether or not the policy can be successful, depends on the interaction of the payments or the conditions of the microfinance with the decision-making of the individual actors. These people are in turn influenced by and influence their social, ecological and economic environment. 

To make it slightly more tangible, I’ll say a bit more about the specific case study I’m working on for the moment, and how I’ll be trying to analyse it. There’s a project in Nicaragua that is called ‘Proyecto Cambio’. It is a line of credit that (some) farmers can access, and they get a premium (a percentage of the loan) as a payment if they comply with some of the set conditions. I will be taking a look at who gets what payment for what, and how that changes their own practices as well as that of their neighbours. I will then look at it in the light of the more general resource management structures of the area, to consider whether it is making or can make significant contributions to the conservation of the natural resources in the area. 

In a nutshell, that’s it…

Picture time


Pictures from a workshop


Meeting from the municipal environmental commission
 
Research area

My first ever coffee harvest
An interesting way to cross the river to a cocoa plantation 

Learning about coffee farming with Don Marcial

On our way to Bartola, a community ecotourism project in Bartola, Río San Juan, part of Pierre's research area

Talking to a community member of Bilampí, Rio Blanco; yet another zone which taught me a lot about different projects and different settings
Signs of slash and burn techniques on the top of the hills


Sunday, December 23, 2012

León and Las Peñitas



We went to León on the 7th to attend the ‘Gritería’, which is a tradition in honour of the holy Virgin María’s ‘concepción’. Technically comparable to a halloween ‘trick or treat’, or the singing of ‘drie koningen’ on the 6th of January in Belgium, people of all ages and classes run around in the streets. They go from door to door, ‘shouting’ (gritar) at the houses where there are altars: “Quién causa tanta alegría?”; which gets the reply from inside: “La concepción de María!” and then a handful of treats comes your way. It can be anything: sweets, soap, pens, salt, beans, cake, fruit,… We don’t have any pictures as we had been warned more than once about the masses in the streets, and how the event does not only attract people with good intentions. With hindsight it was less crowded than expected; but after all the saying goes ‘better safe than sorry…’
To give you an idea of the activity, we've included some pictures from the internet. The source is mentioned.


http://simonrach.blogspot.com/2010/01/griteria-in-leon.html


http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/260849

People construct the altars in their living rooms and open the doors, leaving the bars closed, and hand the gifts out through the bars. Some of them are really amazing, with fairy lights, flowers, curtains, and are as high as the ceiling. There's also fireworks at 6pm and midnight, but the attitude to health and safety doesn't really exist.. going back to our hostel at midnight we had to wait because men were setting them off in the street just by lighting them in their hands and throwing them up in the air! They were going all over the place, sideways, up and down. We didn't see anybody get hurt so they must have some skills or just be very lucky!



Las Peñitas

The next day we went to the Pacific coast which is only 20 minutes from León. We ate fresh, delicious fish and had a dip in the sea while the sun went down. The water is the perfect temperature and the colours at sunset were beautiful. The only downer was the black clams which didn't agree with me and meant that Frédéric had to eat tea on his own, but the next day we had to be up early for a trip so we needed an early night anyway. 





The trip was a tour by boat of the protected reserve of the Isla de San Venado, which is an area around a river which runs parallel to the sea and has mangrove habitat on either side. We saw so many different birds that I can't even remember them all but there were the royal heron, white heron, blue heron, tricolour heron, ibis, kingfishers and vultures. Also, a big green iguana resting on a log, and crocodiles which we had given up seeing and only just saw on the way back. First a baby one, then an older one and they stood their ground for a while posing for photos before they slipped into the water! 

Blue heron


The mangroves


Royal heron
Vulture



Kingfisher



Our guide was brilliant, he was a local fisherman with no shoes on who was really enthusiastic and spotted things that blended into the background that we never would have noticed. We were out for 4 1/2 hours on a tour that was supposed to be only 3 hours. That's also my excuse as to why my sunburn was so bad as anyone who saw me (Laura) on skype after will understand.

He took us to the beach at one point to look at a nest a crocodile had used to lay her eggs and then to a turtle hatching project, where baby turtles had just hatched that morning and were waiting to go off into the big wide ocean at night. A bucket full of baby turtles.. SO CUTE! 





The area on the beach where they re-bury the eggs after digging them up from where the turtles lay them. They do this because racoons, dogs and sometimes people eat them. They are experimenting with using the bags full of sand in the picture because they can put several lots in one bag and they seem to have a better rate of hatching in those.



So we'll probably being seeing Felipe again, he told us about a trip on the ocean we could do, spear fishing and then cooking the fish on a fire on the beach, I think it's got your name written all over it dad! 

Felipe strolling casually over thorns that went through Frédéric's flip-flop to show us the crocodile's nest





Tuesday, December 4, 2012

The Monkey Hut

The Monkey Hut 

On the 24th we spent the day at the hostel that Frederic's Belgian friend Gert and his Nicaraguan wife Virginia own. It's on the Laguna de Apoyo and is basically the lakeside version of a tropical beach.  It's where we'll be spending three nights over New Year with no other guests just us, Gert, Virginia, Pierre and Xitlali and their kids. YAY!


Entertaining Jonatan while Gert and Virginia were getting ready. I knew enough Dutch to understand that I had to pretend to be asleep (SLAPEN! SLAPEN!) so he could run and jump on me while yelling. I've discovered children aren't so bad after all, unless its the end of the day and they're tired and then they are not so much fun. 







A Nicaraguan Christmas tree

Defo going to be buying a few decorations and squeezing them in my suitcase when we come back.


And my favourite lunch: fish, rice, courgette-type vegetable, beans, lime and tortillas with freshly made juice. It's not always like this, but rice and beans are very often involved..