Community Monitoring

Governance solutions from the forest

The future of the world’s forests is intimately tied to the success of forest-dependent indigenous and local communities’ struggles to secure forest access rights and to participate in governance processes at all scales. These communities are on the front lines of illegal logging, large-scale clearing for agribusiness and other threats to forests. EIA and our partners are creating bottom-up approaches to documenting these threats and abuses and improving capacity to get the word out to interested publics such as enforcement officials, journalists and companies that want to source legal and sustainable products.

Steps forward in Peru

Since 2010, EIA has been a key partner supporting the establishment and growth of the Veeduría Forestal program within Peru’s primary association representing the indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon, AIDESEP (La Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana), with technical support from Peruvian NGO, ECO REDD. At a regional level in Peru, the Veeduría Forestal is training indigenous monitors to know their rights and obligations and oversee the logging on their lands. By documenting and reporting problems, indigenous monitors are reducing the fines or fraud that communities often face due to the influence of outsiders in their forests.

Impact and Results

• The Veeduría Forestal, or “Forest Observatory” has significantly increased the Peruvian indigenous movement’s ability to analyze and respond to forest-related policies during a crucial period of reform in Peru.

• Five of AIDESEP’s nine regional member federations now have a Veeduría program.

• By partnering with Peruvian organizations ECO REDD and AIDESEP, EIA has supported training for over 200 community monitors in Peru.

• EIA conducted training in audiovisual documentation and video editing with community and youth organizations in northern Peru, providing them with the skills to produce and disseminate simple multimedia stories about pressing local environmental and social problems. This work built on the efforts of EIA-UK colleagues to train local partners on documentation skills for advocacy in Indonesia and Tanzania.