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- increasing incentives for political stabilization: Considering the political unsteadiness of Honduras, it may be worth recommending that donor funds should not be allocated to unstable governments, therefore adding incentives to national governments to stabilize in order to receive funding. The potential effectiveness of this approach is elaborated in William Easterly’s Book “The White Man’s Burden”, in which he explains how funding bad, corrupt, or unstable governments does not result in development. His critique outlines the history of World Bank and IMF loans and graphs their developmental ineffectiveness with unstable governments, many of which experience total state failure after repeated donor support (Easterly 218, 229).
- modeling successful projects and researching critical feedback: Although the Corazón TBR project has admirable goals, it lacks effective implementation. Successfully implemented regional conservation initiatives should be analyzed for their implementation techniques, such as the Natura 2000 project, which has effectively used “aggressive conservation” and the concept of “eminent domain” to “already encompass 15% of the land surface of Europe” (Carr III 38). These models must be adapted for the Third World context. Project planners should also consult critical feedback on transboundary projects from around the globe, perhaps best articulated by geographers, political scientists, and anthropologists who work with transfrontier issues.
- managing the established network of conserved land: The Corazón TBR project has a clear advantage over other transfrontier projects in that there is an existing network of national parks in the region. Project planners should prioritize working with officials who oversee these parks and expanding their borders so that they may connect. Map representations illustrate that these parks are currently connected, but there has been great oversight and misrepresentation in that it is not the reality on the ground (see “Mapping the Corazon” for more information on these [mis]representations). Project planners must recognize these destructive assumptions and create an agenda for working with existing structures in each park and adapting them if necessary.
- maintaining a clear division between environmental and developmental projects: There must be separate initiatives for environmental and developmental goals, managed by different but partner institutions. These plans should be complementary and not comprehensive, making the management and implementation of both sets of goals more feasible for planning at the ground level. This process has been particularly convoluted in the Central American case, in which “the global conservation movement has been muddled” by developmentalist agendas, thereby placing “poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation” in ambiguity, and creating a “disservice to the public and to nature” (Carr III 40). In order to curb mission drift and negative donor-driven development, donors should provide environment or development-specific funding opportunities that stick to their intended mission. Project planners on the regional and local level must be consistent in proposing environmental or developmental plans to respective donor pools. Although these areas easily intersect and certainly require mutual knowledge and engagement with one another, developmental and environmental projects should not easily be one and the same.
- balancing the local and the global: National governments must challenge donor conditions that require radical changes to the country’s sociopolitical structure. However, this sense of national resistance can only work within stable governments that are not corrupt and are truly interested in the progressive development of their country. Otherwise, a sort of green imperialism is enabled, in which the “global’ does not represent a universal human interest, but rather serves the particular, local, and parochial agenda of Northern, industrialized countries”– a process that can also be attributed to urban intellectuals and institutions in the Third World, who seek to manipulate the local (Sletto 184). Considering that the Corazón requires a rebordering process, balancing the global and the local may be even more difficult. Sletto warns that the rebordering of areas may create a global locality, which is a “bounded space imbued with the rhetoric and interests of powerful actors”– a space that is created by an “act of power embedded within a discourse of environmental geopolitics” (Sletto 205, 183). If donors were to prioritize real development, they would strive to only work with government officials who respect and understand the local. Donors would then make better use of their funds, which would be properly managed and well-received by local communities. Successful programs can lead to successful loan paybacks, therefore providing an incentive for donors to investigate local solutions through investing in trustworthy governments. Refer to the first recommended strategy on this page, “increasing incentives for political stabilization”, which address how to better ensure the creation of more stable and effective governments.
- providing opportunities for “scaling up”: Project planners on the ground should be looking out for opportunities to engage local groups of all types. As Perreault describes, “subaltern groups…are largely confined to localized, often disarticulated patterns of action and resistance” (Perreault 99). Meeting with villages and communities in their traditional manner would be ideal. Some communities may not respond to formal development-focused presentations, so project planners must be attentive to local processes and leadership structures in order to engage in effective project planning with local groups.
- enhancing local participation through improved ground-level funding: These environmental “mega-projects spend so much time and money on consultants, reports, maps, and administration that there is often little left over for on-the-ground work with communities” (Stocks 2010). If adequate funds are not able to trickle down to the ground level, then local communities lose out on the ability to effectively participate because of a lack of institutional guidance and structure.