The everyday activities of individuals and communities are generally channeled and limited by decisions about resource allocation and regulation that are taken beyond the local level. These decisions may or may not be contested and the .beneficiaries. of those decisions may or may not be aware of them. Further, these decisions are made not only by governments, but also by corporations and non-governmental organizations. Information is always used to justify those decisions, but it is often sought after the decision to validate the course taken rather than before the decision to inform it. In our research in the Andes, we work with community-level decision makers to identify the key issues around which decisions concerning natural resource allocation and regulation are made. Then we identify key institutional market, state, and civil society actors engaged in those issues. We can identify key decision points and critical information used at decision making junctures by analyzing each institution?s desired future conditions, mental causal models of how to achieve those conditions, and then clustering institutions around different aspects of these conditions and causal models.
SANREM, which funds this research, is a program that has as its goal the betterment of natural resource management. One aspect of improved natural resource management has to do with the decisions made by institutions and actors at a ground level that are encompassed and enclosed in a policy framework determined by multiple levels. By working with local communities, sharing our data in the case of Cotacachi, Ecuador, and working with community members to gather the data in the case of Colpar, Peru, we are designing appropriate decision-support tools that link levels and sectors in ways that improve local sustainability and address issues such as the economy, the environment, and equity.
