PS 24-75 - Land Use Planning Perspectives: A proposed framework for participatory planning in developing countries

Abstract: New policies have been developed and enforced worldwide to promote sustainable approaches that can lead to the conservation of ecosystems. However, ecosystems are still degraded and overexploited. One challenge is the misalignment between policies and real-world context that results from top-down decision-making. Moreover, policies most often do not incorporate local and traditional knowledge. Moving towards more effective policy implementation requires specific enabling conditions and institutional capacity and increased participation of stakeholders to address sustainability. Land use planning is one component that will benefit from the involvement of stakeholders. Numerous land-use conflicts can arise among stakeholders causing disagreements over land uses. Hence, it is important to understand the different stakeholders’ perspectives to develop and implement feasible frameworks for bottom-up participatory land-use plans. To address this, we explore the perspectives of stakeholders, decision-makers, and technical teams on land-use planning policies using the Pantanal and Chaco ecoregions in Paraguay as our illustrative cases. We use a mixed-method participatory research approach to collect data and build our framework: surveys with stakeholders, a focus group with the planning technical team, and interviews with land use planning experts from Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
Our results suggest a lack of knowledge about land-use planning processes from the surveys conducted with stakeholders. This finding aligns with the challenges faced by Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador in addressing the sustainability of ecosystems. We also identified how to improve these processes with the majority (74%) stating that there should be better stakeholder participation. Indigenous communities mentioned the importance of translating these plans into Indigenous languages to improve understanding. We found commonalities within the context of other Latin American countries that could improve land-use planning development and implementation in these ecoregions. These include having political support and adequate legislation and frameworks, having local technical capacities, using an integrated approach to land-use planning, securing funds, emphasizing communication strategies, and involving Indigenous communities. We propose a bottom-up framework consisting of four stages. The key elements are the prior consent of the Indigenous communities, the integration of ecosystem services, and cross-cutting processes such as capacity building/strengthening and socialization/communication of the processes. It is essential to apply more inclusive methodologies in order to integrate varied knowledge and make these processes more accessible to all cultures in order to achieve more equitable, inclusive, sustainable, and participatory results.