Improved management for Peru’s communal reserves
“This tool guides us toward good and effective performance in an intercultural governance process for communal reserves that strengthens co-management.”
Peru adopts new ‘How are we doing?’ tool for co-managed protected areas
Popular tool adapted to help Peru’s national government co-manage its 10 communal reserves with Indigenous communities
CIFOR-ICRAF’s How Are We Doing? method, first launched in 2020, helps people to carry out participatory, reflexive, and adaptive learning in multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs). Such learning processes are critical for MSPs to bring about equitable and effective outcomes.
A new version of the tool, entitled ¿Cómo vamos? in Spanish, is the fifth and most recent adaptation of the method. It’s designed specifically to help the Peruvian government and its Indigenous counterparts co-manage the nation’s 10 communal reserves.
“This tool guides us toward good and effective performance in an intercultural governance process for communal reserves that strengthens co-management,” said Fermín Chimatani, president of the National Association of Executors of Administration Contracts of the Peruvian Amazon (ANECAP).
Peru’s National Service for Natural Protected Areas (SERNANP) – which forms part of its Ministry of Environment – began using a tool co-designed with CIFOR-ICRAF and based on the ‘How Are We Doing? method in 2020 to support participatory governance processes in all of its protected areas.
Photo caption
In 2024, a separate version of the tool, targeted specifically at communal reserves, was launched thanks to research from CIFOR-ICRAF’s Governance, Equity and Wellbeing (GEW) team, which worked through the Global Comparative Study on REDD+ (GCS REDD+) to collaborate with SERNANP and ANECAP. The initiative was supported by partnerships with the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
The 10 communal reserves in Peru are all located in the Amazon Basin and represent a category of protected area that is co-managed by the Indigenous communities that live in their buffer zone and SERNANP. Communal reserves recognize both Indigenous men and women’s contributions to Peru’s wider climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation goals (its NDCs and NBSAPs), and their right to participate in the management of the land and resources in their ancestral territories. The tool helps users identify emerging issues within the framework of participatory, equitable and effective co-management based on reflection and consensus. These reflections are important, given the often competing ideals and interests of people in those contexts, as well as the inherent value of the land – culturally, ecologically, biologically and economically. A reflexive method allows the co-management partners to learn from their work, and set annual action plans detailing how they will continue with their good practices and address those that they have decided need to change.
“With the How Are We Doing? tool, the interests, knowledge, and practices of partner communities are integrated with conservation models, strengthening the alliance between Indigenous Peoples and the state,” said Werhner Atoche Montoya, from SERNANP’s Participatory Governance Unit.
In December of 2024, SERNANP adopted the new version as an official tool for each of the communal reserves to use annually. CIFOR-ICRAF continues to support SERNANP with capacity development workshops and materials linked to both tools, and is currently working on the second edition of the 2020 tool.