Community-Based Planning with the Bora Tribe of Peru's Amazon Basin

Village Earth team member, Raul Paz Pastrana faciliating planning workshop with the Bora. (photo by Ralf Kracke-Berndorff)

In November 2006, a team from Village Earth journeyed to Peru's Amazon to work with indigenous communities along the Rio Tigre, a tributary of the Amazon. While in the port town of Iquitos we encountered a small tribe five miles northwest of Iquitos, Peru called the Bora. We happened upon this group by chance while waiting for a boat to go up the Amazon to the Rio Tigre. After explaining what we were doing in the area one of their leaders asked us to facilitate a participatory planning session in their community of San Andres. While this wasn't in our original plans, we accepted their invitation, in the hope that we might be able to help through the planning as well as to raise awareness and support for their community.

Above: The community of San Andres located in northeast Peru.

The next day, the Jefe of the community met us in Iquitos and led us back to their community in a small boat (below). We left the northern port of Iquitos up a small tributary of Amazon and then up a small winding quebrada (small stream) . [Click here to download Google Earth .KMZ file]

Above: the community of San Andres

(photo by Ralf Kracke-Berndorff)

San Andres is set back in the jungle about 500 yards from the quebrada but there's a nice concrete path the entire distance.

(photo by Ralf Kracke-Berndorff)

Like many of the communities we visited in the Amazon basin, San Andres has a number of stilted, palm thatched houses, school and community building organized around a large soccer field.

From our discussion the day prior, we learned from the Jefe that the Bora of San Andres originally lived in Columbia north of the Putumayo River but a few families were brought to the Iquitos area 60 years ago by a North American company to perform dances for tourists during rubber boom in Iquitos during the 1940s. The Bora continue to perform for tourists but have chosen to do this at a location a mile down river towards Iquitos, to keep the influence of the tourists away from their community.

(photo by Ralf Kracke-Berndorff)

Among other things, the Bora identified the following Vision for their community:

• Greater employment opportunities
• Enhanced organization with other tribes in their region
• Culturally-based schools
• Clean water
• Increased development of their tourism business

Sustainable development is dead! Long live sustainable development!

Reposted from: International Institute for Environment and Development

“Our biggest challenge in this new century is to take an idea that

seems abstract – sustainable development – and turn it into a

daily reality for all the world’s people.”
Kofi Annan

A 20-year international effort to put the planet on a path to sustainable development has been woefully inadequate and will need a radical rethink if it is to achieve its aims, says a report published today by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

The report was written by Steve Bass, a senior fellow at IIED and former chief environment advisor at the UK government's Department for International Development. It is being released to mark the 20th anniversary of the influential Brundtland Commission’s report Our Common Future, which first put sustainable development on the mainstream political agenda.

The IIED report calls for:

• Traditional, local and non-Western approaches to play a major role in a new, globally constructed and globally shared drive towards genuine sustainable development.
• A shift from the inviolability of economic growth to the inviolability of human well-being and environmental limits.
• Governments to account for the economic and social benefits that natural resources provide and the costs of mismanaging these environmental assets.

The Brundtland Commission's 1987 report defined sustainable development as: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Since then, twenty years of international summitry has produced an incoherent set of commitments, plans, tools and agreements. Yet development remains far from sustainable. The IIED report looks forward 20 years to identify future challenges and ways that sustainable development can be turned from a planner's dream into a tangible reality in the everyday lives of people and businesses.

"Three UN-commissioned reports from 2005 show clearly that development has not yet become sustainable," says Bass

The Millennium Project confirmed that progress in reducing poverty was too slow. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that 16 out of 25 services that ecosystems provide humanity were being critically degraded. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change clearly demonstrated one aspect of unsustainable development and its likely impacts.

"Sustainable development is never going to materialise as a result of edicts from New York or Geneva," says Bass. "It needs to be constructed, shared and implemented in a truly global way that takes account of traditional, local and non-Western approaches."

"Instead of top-down plans and wish-lists, we need to look from the bottom up," he says. "Linking the many approaches that actually work – wiring together new systems, not rehashing plans – is the key to shaping a new era in sustainable development."

"We need to challenge the notion that environmental resources are there for the taking, that Nature provides a free lunch," says Bass. "The mismanagement of these resources carries a cost that we are only just beginning to appreciate."

"We are borrowing from the future, and leaving the next generation with an environmental overdraft. We need policy to shift from viewing economic growth as inviolable to seeing that environmental limits and people’s rights are more important."IIED wants to spark a debate among different sectors and stakeholders about what sustainable development really means — and how to achieve it. "It is high time for new questions to be asked," says Bass. "Getting the answers will mean engaging a much wider range of people and perspectives than have been heard in international summit halls to date."

Link to the full report

For more information