As recounted by Adriana Molina Garzon, part of the AGENTS project team.

The AGENTS project is working with its Peruvian partner, Centro Bartolome de las Casas (CBC), to
document and analyze the conditions that support effective forest governance in the Peruvian Amazon.

The team are conducting research via virtual fora due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Every two weeks,
a group of 20-25 Peruvian NGOs working on forest governance issues in the Peruvian Amazon gather on
Zoom to learn about each of these organization’s intervention strategies to support forest governance.

These activities were initiated in August 2020, and will continue until it is possible to return to safe in-person meetings. So far, a total of 22 initiatives have been presented and discussed (by a total of 10 different organizations). For each of these initiatives, the team systematically documents 80-100 different variables that are linked to their theoretical expectations about the enabling factors for effective forest governance interventions. The resulting database will allow for testing the explanatory power of the team’s theories/hypotheses, using both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques. In addition, a doctoral student at CU-Boulder (Molina-Garzón) will complement these data with an original online survey with a large number of NGOs and local government representatives in Peru. Using the survey data, the study will investigate the origins and consequences of collaborative ties between NGOs and governmental organizations in the Peruvian Amazon.

Photo: Roaming the Planet via Flickr.