Economic displacement and local attitude towards protected area establishment in the Peruvian Amazon

This article examines socioeconomic factors linked to different local attitudes towards the establishment in 2004 of the Allpahuayo-Mishana National Reserve, Peruvian Amazon. Semistructured interviews were conducted in 2006 and 2007 with leaders (N = 16) and household heads (N = 102) of smallholder communities in the reserve and its buffer zone. Complementary qualitative and quantitative analyses of interview data reveal that household head attitude towards the reserve is primarily associated with loss or gain of resource use rights: there is a significant difference in attitude between the household heads interviewed in the reserve and those in the buffer zone. Communities in the region used to share certain lands and floodplains, especially for the extraction of fish, poletimber, and thatch palm. With the reserve's establishment, only those who lived within the reserve were allowed to continue using previously shared resources, while the access of neighboring communities, now in the buffer zone, was banned from most of the reserve. A linear predictive model reveals that attitude towards the reserve also relates to location and household demographic variables, hypothesized to influence the household's capacity to respond to losses in income sources and subsistence means. Comparisons of leaders' and residents' responses suggest that although involuntary economic displacement has affected many locals, government authorities have not addressed the issue satisfactorily, at least from the perspective of those displaced, thus obscuring the conservation-related exclusion that occurred. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.