Fernando Garcia, Rare’s Manager, Ecotourism Promotion, reports on his teaching stint at the Fisheries Fellows program in Baja California Sur.
I spent a week at the Fisheries Fellows training course, teaching site assessment, a personal passion. We talked about a basic question: How can we improve small-scale fisheries and at the same time promote marine biodiversity conservation? During this process I was thinking about similar questions, like “Can well planned ecotourism do something to preserve a valued threatened species? What is the major threat for it?” Complexity, uncertainty, and limited resources are common obstacles to respond to those questions and reflect the underlying difficulties of many environmental challenges.
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But in the rich menu of Rare’s tools developed to support local conservationists, site assessment is fascinating for me. Well, it is more that a tool, it is a process that involves several methodologies and tools. During the week I was teaching it to the fellows, they all had different ways of seeing how it could help them.
For Dulce it meant: “The site assessment consists of identifying the roots of the problems and describing its causes. This is the starting point to describe the kind of actions that are needed and what our role will be. It means to first understand the site and then propose an action.”
For Pablo: “It is a dynamic that enables different actors to create a collective vision about the overall goal of the project and how to pursue it. It is a good tool to engage local actors.”
For Adriana: “If creating a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bounded goal is hard for an individual, it’s even harder for a group of people. That is the magic of this process. I have to say that with it I’m building a little trick-magic box to use in the community.”
While this tool seems useful for conservationist, local people will decide how valuable it is. We all visited four México, where Adriana will be working. We conducted a vision workshop there and came with an interesting concept model that shows what factors affect the threatened sea cucumber.
At the end, a local fisher, Maria Elena, approached us and said, “I’m very glad that the cooperatives in our community are agreed about the more important things to address. I think that working with Adriana, we can make some progress here. Thank you for coming and explaining this to us.”
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