Adaptive Management in Action: Sinchi Roca, Peru

Sinchi Roca, Peru is on the northwestern edge of one of the largest undeveloped areas in the Amazon. Several hours by car, plus another four by boat, this small Indigenous community exists between worlds. Literally, Sinchi Roca lies at the junction between Peru’s agricultural frontier and the largely roadless Purús/Manu complex. 

The village is isolated and off the grid, yet it faces daily pressure from modern threats, including both the legal and illegal/unregulated clearing of the forests for agriculture. Socially and culturally, Sinchi Roca is also in transition, integrating their Kakataibo Indigenous identity and traditional ecological cosmology with contemporary science and Western environmental conservation—not to mention worldly temptations like internet, processed foods, and the local evangelical Christian missionary’s spiritual (and material) promises. 

In spite of these competing forces, Sinchi Roca is more unified than many frontline Indigenous communities in southeastern Peru. Its people are clear about the personal, communal, and global value of their land, and they are working hard to protect their forests by engaging men, women, and children in many interrelated activities geared toward achieving both sustainability and abundance.

—Jason Houston

Since 2019, USAID’s Forest Alliance activity has worked with local implementing partner AIDER in Peru to support seven Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon, including Sinchi Roca, in developing a model of community-led conservation. Since the activity’s inception, adaptive management has been a focus, beginning with a startup workshop in 2019, followed by several “pause and reflect” workshops in subsequent years to gauge progress and adapt strategy as needed.

Early on, stakeholders identified the key threat to the forest as invasion by outsiders, who illegally cut timber to cultivate coca, often for use in the drug trade. To improve community engagement and capacity to reduce this threat, the activity focused on three main strategic approaches—sustainable forest management, improved livelihoods for Indigenous communities based on use of forest resources, and community patrols for illegal activity. 

Forest Alliance leverages investments from a private sector partner, Althelia Climate Fund, to support Indigenous communities in conserving and sustainably managing forested lands. The partnership is grounded in a community forest management model that is designed to contribute to a verified greenhouse gas emissions reduction target and carbon investment program. 

In 2020, USAID hosted a pause and reflect workshop—a commonly used adaptive management practice that enables all stakeholders to reunite, review their original assumptions, and adapt based on any new information. 

At the workshop, participants noted considerable progress. Under Forest Alliance, AIDER and its partners had trained and supported seven Indigenous communities in sustainably producing timber and agricultural products; conducting communal governance and business management; establishing market linkages and commercial agreements; complying with regulations; patrolling and reporting illegal activities; and obtaining communal land and forest tenure. 

However, challenges remained. Threats from drug cartels had escalated, along with violence toward native community leaders who voiced their opposition. Community members noted how government authorities were slow to respond to reports of illegal activities. Regional governments continuously postponed registering Indigenous territories in the public registry using georeferenced boundaries as required by the latest laws, weakening the community’s ability and motivation to effect change.

Amao Perez Fernandez, a community member, said, “The drug cartels have murdered our leaders. There has not been justice for native communities. If we make a report of an illegal activity, the government doesn’t do anything. When the community members ask questions and pressure the government to take action, then they are murdered. The defenders of the forest are the most vulnerable …. The regional government has made commitments to register our territory in the public registry. If they don’t register, there will be more invasions and land trafficking. Having the land registered gives us motivation to monitor and report illegal invasions.”

Marioldy Sanchez, Chief of Party for Forest Alliance, reported that the activity made adjustments in the face of these challenges. “New information informed a change in our strategy when it came to working with communities to report land invasions to government authorities. When we reviewed our approach during the 2020 pause and reflect session, we discussed that the intensity of land invasions was increasing even more because of the COVID pandemic. We had been supporting communities in their efforts to report illegal activity to the authorities, but there was an even lower response from the government during COVID. To improve our success, we turned our focus toward partnering with organizations that have experience advocating for native communities to attain government support for their rights and for conservation of their territories. These advocacy organizations are now more engaged in supporting the communities where we work and continue to advocate for greater government support.”

Additional pause and reflect workshops were held in 2021 and 2022 to review progress and discuss next steps among key stakeholders. A key theme was the need to scale the effective aspects of the program in order to tackle threats that existed far beyond the communities supported to date. 

According to AIDER’s Sandra Lazo, other donors and investors are interested in supporting the community-led conservation model, and partners have been strategizing how best to scale the model. Lazo said, “Key to our scaling approach is mentoring community leaders who will become our new technical advisors, not only within their communities, but also to other communities…. We identify individuals who are most interested in conservation activities and support them to become leaders within their communities in teaching others to apply the conservation practices…. They are now the ones explaining and showing others in neighboring communities how to implement the practices instead of our staff. We will now have a more intensive training of those community members to build their capacity to train others. It is very helpful that they can do the training in their own native language with their own examples.” 

In the most recent pause and reflect workshop, Alvaro Gaillour, Contracting Officer’s Representative for Forest Alliance, said, “Government inaction and corruption are a huge issue for communities to effectively manage their territories. Without Indigenous communities having the ability to control illegal deforestation and benefit from their efforts, it's challenging to create that virtuous cycle, where they are motivated to continue their activities and share with others the community-led model of conservation. We have learned that the private sector and non-government organizations have a key role to play because they won’t wait for the government to support communities, but instead they find ways to support communities directly. But this isn’t an issue that one organization can solve, much less one USAID office, or even one donor agency.… For example, reducing carbon emissions through avoided deforestation, supporting Indigenous groups, and localization are cross-cutting goals across USAID and other agencies. Therefore, getting the Peruvian government to support Indigenous communities who are on the frontline of conserving forest is an objective we know we will need to work on together, share, and learn along the way.”

“USAID recognizes that we need to ‘get out of our individual cubicles, corridors, and even buildings’ and better coordinate and build alliances and even large coalitions.”

Sanchez emphasized that the team will continue to take an evidence-based approach to understanding if the community-led model is effective at reducing deforestation as it scales to other communities. One promising innovation is around tracking and reporting deforestation. Forest Alliance is supporting communities in using an early warning system that combines remote monitoring through satellite images and community-based monitoring. Sanchez said, “We provide information to the community using remote sensing on where there is a change in forest cover. In this way, the communities can patrol the area and verify the causes of deforestation. Now that the community members have access to the internet and are more familiar with the use of smartphones, they can quickly upload the information using an application. We are beginning to imagine how the communities, especially younger members, can analyze the satellite images themselves in the communities and no longer need us to provide this service.” 

“Being able to identify and report illegal deforestation in real-time will be a big advance, but government response is still required and the biggest barrier to scaling community-led conservation. This barrier seems that it is beyond any one organization to help solve and will take a strong coalition.”