Reflections on the social learning process for community work in rural areas of Mexico

Abstract

This paper reflects on the principal lessons from ten years of work with rural communities on natural resource management, carried out through a non-governmental organization, Programa de Acción Forestal Tropical. The community work experiences originate from 24 small projects in 14 small communities in seven states of southern Mexico. The work emphasized a holistic and integral approach, known as social learning. Two elements required for community work were analysed: theoretical concepts and practical applications. The theoretical concepts are: dialogue, empowerment, plurality, validity of local knowledge and co-responsibility. The practical applications are: diversification of activities in projects, training, monitoring and feedback. Analysis revealed the need to pay attention to the above social elements in the community to achieve resource management, and emphasized the social learning process. The analysis was the result of observations on the development of each project and interchanges between researchers, technicians and the local population. The entire experience was non-conventional and anthropological in nature, designed by the local population and the technical team using a converging intervention model to achieve self-developing community processes and shared responsibility in actions.