ABSTRACT
A crucial step for communities learning to maintain functional forest management plans is the definition and use of collective monitoring to generate basic information for decision making. This case explores our experiences assisting two Guarayo indigenous villages in Bolivia to implement community forestry management projects (Figure 5-1). It illustrates how we worked with these communities to develop simple systems to monitor their projects’ distribution of benefits. The systems focused on the collection, presentation, and discussion of information that would allow the villagers to control wage payments to residents who had invested labor in the project. Although there is still room for improvement in the system, village residents are now able to track the flow of benefits transparently and have avoided major conflicts.
