Incentivos institucionais no manejo participativo: o caso do programa “quelônio do Uatumã”

Abstract

In Brazil, the institutional incentives are focused on the intensive management of wild animals (captive intensive farming); there are a few extensive management initiatives in natural environments. The fresh water Podocnemididae turtles are resources of great importance for the Amazon households. The turtle conservation programs in sustainable use protected areas increased in the Amazonas since the 1990s and 2000s. The participatory local management assumes that the administrative decentralization of conservation actions is an alternative for recovering of the threatened stocks. The Uatumã chelonian program (PQU) operates in the Uatumã Sustainable Development Reserve (RDSU) for sixteen years in the reproductive monitoring of turtles in partnership with riverine villages (communities) and external institutions, along the Uatumã river, in the municipalities of São Sebastião do Uatumã, Itapiranga and Presidente Figueiredo. This research was a comparative study case between six PQU partners communities with different degree of participation to foster the monitoring of turtles reproduction trying to determine the set of institutional incentives that may encourage voluntary participation by users of the resource "turtles" in conservation and management actions and under what conditions these initiatives may turn out to be successful. The results suggest that successful participation in the management initiatives was higher in communities that implemented restrictive practices on resource usage with formal and informal collective agreements, supported by material and monetary incentives received from external institutions and aware of the need to protect their common use territories (lakes and beaches). Those actions ensure the exclusive use of those resources by their households, those that received such benefit by adhering to the PQU proposal compared to other ones. For the other hand, communities from where turtles resource were less abundant and breeding sites were rarer, were most dependent from these resources and less participative.