Infrastructure projects are crucial for regional development, but they also bring negative social impacts such as land conflicts, as well as ecological impacts such as deforestation along with carbon emissions and loss of biodiversity. A reason for these negative impacts is that large-scale infrastructure projects lack a process to incorporate public participation. The result is marginalised communities, and consequent degradation of the ecosystems on which these communities depend.

To address this problem we organized participatory workshops with stakeholders in municipalities along the Inter-Oceanic Highway in the southwestern Amazon. This area is a biodiversity ‘hotspot’ and the Andes-Amazon interface has particularly high species diversity. Approximately 30 indigenous groups are located along the Inter- Oceanic Highway, as well as rubber tappers, castaña (‘Brazil nut’) collectors, and other groups who have long managed local natural resources.

The Inter-Oceanic Highway passes through the trinational ‘MAP’ frontier, where Madre de Dios (Peru), Acre (Brazil) and Pando (Bolivia) meet. Concerns about cross-border impacts of the Inter-Oceanic Highway stimulated the emergence of the MAP Initiative, a grassroots movement that integrates stakeholders on all three sides of the MAP region (www.map-amazonia.net). Since 2000, the MAP Initiative has organised tri-national meetings for dialogue and planning activities, which are open to the public. Imperative in this process is the need to work with local communities. Workshops provide a means for communities to receive information about potential changes as well as to articulate their preferences about possible futures. The Scenarios programme of the NGO, IPAM (the Institute for Amazon Environmental Research), features public workshops that incorporate the perceptions of local peoples into planning for road corridors receiving new infrastructure investments (www.ipam.org.br).

We adapted the IPAM Scenarios workshop process to the case of communities along the Inter-Oceanic Highway in the southwestern Amazon. This allows for comparisons of stakeholder perspectives among the three sides of the MAP frontier. This is especially important, for the Inter- Oceanic Highway has been paved in Brazil, allowing Peruvians and Bolivians to see what problems Brazilians face after road paving.

We conducted workshops in 18 municipalities in the MAP region through which the Inter- Oceanic Highway passes. In each municipality, 25 to 30 local leaders participated, including municipal government representatives, local representatives of national environmental agencies, and diverse community leaders.

We asked participants to list concerns regarding infrastructure, social problems, environmental damage, economic difficulties, and local politics. Tabulations of concerns showed which problems were mentioned most often. We also asked participants to rank the problems they mentioned. Such rankings showed which problems were considered the most serious, and provided a means for prioritizing planning around specific concerns. In addition, the multi-stakeholder workshops included a participatory mapping exercise. This allowed participants to identify locations where they expected problems due to paving of the Inter-Oceanic Highway.

Data from workshops in Brazil demonstrated that not all problems are resolved by road improvements, and, in fact, new social, environmental, and economic problems (drugs, alcoholism, and violence; deforestation and water pollution; and land-ownership turnover) can arise in the wake of road paving. In addition, participatory maps of municipalities revealed specific locations where participants felt problems would be most likely to arise.

Information from these workshops can be joined with information from other sources to support development of future scenarios in dynamic simulation models. These scenarios provide visual representations of possible future changes as mapped over a landscape. Because the models are based, in part, on local stakeholder input, they can inform local planning and improve local environmental governance, thereby avoiding negative outcomes of road paving.

Originally published as:
Mendoza, E., S. Perz, M. Schmink and D. Nepstad. 2007. Participatory Stakeholder Workshops to Mitigate
Impacts of Road Paving in the Southwestern Amazon. Conservation and Society 5(3):382-407.