Barriers to local-level, participatory ecosystem assessment and management in Brazil

One of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) challenges is to “develop procedures that can integrate local knowledge with data collected at the regional or global level and produce information that is salient, credible, and politically legitimate to the decision makers that are a major audience for the results of the MA” (Millennium Assessment 2002). This paper aims to contribute to such effort by capturing lessons from participatory local-level ecosystem assessment and resource management. Participatory resource management has the potential to document local ecological knowledge about resource and ecosystem conditions and to enable knowledge flow across scales. Natural resources and ecosystem management is often a product of institutional interactions across different political levels, and is directly affected by ecological interaction across space scales. For instance, any ecosystem is embedded in a larger one, being affected by and influencing dynamics at larger as well as smaller scale – the panarchy concept (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Within the social context, resource user livelihoods are affected by a myriad of local and higher-level institutions not necessarily related to resource management. That is, resource management systems can be seen as complex systems (Levin 1999) involving several stakeholders, with distinct levels of influences, source of power and interests (Brown 2003). Hence, any promising management arrangement to address the complexity of management interests and problems should focus on cross-scale institutional linkages (Berkes 2002), particularly on those enabling resource user participation in decision-making.