San Rafael reserve, Paraguay: Key social stakeholders and sustainability scenarios through environmental governance approaches

Abstract

San Rafael Conservation Area is one of the greatest conservation challenges in Paraguay, as it is an area of historical socio-environmental conflicts, dating back to the Rio Summit in 1992 when the area was proposed. It has a relict fragment of Atlantic Forest, representative of the Alto Parana ecoregion combined with natural pastures. These ecosystems are considered as areas of high biodiversity and numerous ecosystem services (the Guarani aquifer, a world reserve of freshwater). From a social point of view, the area includes large private estates, small communities or colonies, and ancestral-indigenous communities (The Mbya Guarani). They use the ecosystems and their services, including biodiversity, for various purposes: productive uses on a large scale (agriculture, livestock), conservation, subsistence (hunting and gathering), illegal extraction (wood and firewood), and also constituting part of the identity of ancestral-indigenous groups. In this chapter, we analyze the importance of the role of local and national social actors, their interests, use of ecosystem services and biodiversity, as well as their characteristics (influence-importance). The central idea is to conceive and accept this area as a socio-ecosystem of multiple uses and to propose a new approach to conservation that considers social, economic, and ecological aspects.