Root Causes

(Matrix)

Inadequate Planning and Management

Although MINAE and MARENA are both trying to promote integrated watershed management using the legal mechanisms provided within each country through their own environmental legislation, there is no watershed planning and administration capacity in place. There have been no mechanisms for coordinating management and control across the international border and, thus, no ongoing institutional approach to water resources management in the SJRB. The lack of comprehensive up-to-date data on the SJRB–how it is structured, how it works, what its socioeconomic dynamics are, how information is managed at the local level–makes it impossible to proceed with the minimum certainty needed.

Weak Institutions

Although both countries have quite comprehensive legislation on environmental management and the sustainable use of natural resources that could be implemented locally, a paucity of financial and human resources on the local level and the poverty in which most of the population lives makes compliance difficult.

Insufficient human and institutional capacity

Natural resource management is inefficient and it will not be possible to strengthen environmental command-and-control mechanisms without first creating local economic foundations and training people.

Limited Stakeholder Participation

There is currently limited participation by stakeholders in sustainable development due to centralization of decision-making, which the governments are currently trying to change. This situation, added to reductions in the size of government, has hampered local action. This project recognizes the need to promote and strengthen civil society organizations, increase the participation of women, and involve more people in decision-making on the sustainable development of the SJRB. The initial steps toward enhancing stakeholder participation have been already taken during the execution of the Block B program and through other actions of MINAE and MARENA. These steps now need to be reinforced and further developed through programs to educate people about sustainable development and adopting sustainable production practices and lifestyles within a comprehensive watershed management approach that does not yet exist.

Extreme Poverty

Extreme poverty, combined with high population growth, low incomes and a subsistence economy, poor sanitation conditions, and a relative imbalance in employment and income-generating opportunities between the two countries, characterizes the current level of economic development in the SJRB. Uncontrolled migration exacerbates the situation, by exceeding the capacity of existing institutions to meet all the sanitation, health, and educational needs created. The economic conditions force the inhabitants to move to the mountainsides and practice slash-and-burn agriculture just to survive. These reactions contribute to the environmental degradation being experienced in the SJRB, but can be addressed, in part, through building institutional capacities and creating economic instruments, neither now existing, to address such problems.

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