All posts by René Mendoza

Coordination and collective action to mitigate the impact of climate change: the case of the regional project CamBIO

Coordination and collective action to mitigate the impact of climate change: the case of the regional project CamBIO

René Mendoza Vidaurre

 “if you think one year ahead, you will plant a seed…if you think 10 years ahead, you will plant a tree “. Chinese poet, 500 AC

 In response to the question about what practices contribute to the climate, in the previous article “Coordination and collective action to mitigate climate change” we listed the recommendations laid out by different studies and organizations for forestry and agriculture. Then we pondered the implementation within the coordination between science, conservation and economics through the case of the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador. Now we will study the CamBIO project (Central American Markets for Biodiversity) within this same framework.

This project (2007-2013) was a tripartite GEF initiative (Global Environment Fund)-UNDP United Nations Program for Development with the financial support of the GEF (Global Environmental Facility), and the CABEI (Central American Bank for Economic Integration). This project sought to ”ensure that the micro, small and medium enterprises of Central America increase their contribution to sustainable development and environmental protection, incorporating biodiversity in their businesses, products and services” (http://www.bcie.org/spanish/banca-inversion-desarrollo/desarrollo-competitividad/cambio.php). This project was implemented by CABEI through intermediary financial institutions (IFIs) in Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador. In Nicaragua CABEI worked with the LDF (Local Development Fund), Lafise-Bancentro, the 20th of May Cooperative and FUNDESER.

According to the report of the UNDP-GEF-CABEI 2011 the most innovative case was that done by the LDF and the Research and Development Institute, Nitlapan in Nicaragua. As such, this case was systematized among the most innovative experiences of Latin America (see: Mendoza, Dávila, Fonseca y Cheaz, 2011, “Modelo de Adaptación al Cambio Climático a través de la Reconversión Productiva y transformación territorial, Proyecto CAMBio en Nicaragua”, en RIMISP, http://www.rimisp.org/wp-content/files_mf/1365017537sistcambio.pdf). The LDF and Nitlapan promoted four systems: silvo-pastoral, agroforestry, sustainable tourism and sustainable wood system in 22 municipalities in the buffer zones of interconnected protected areas: San Cristóbal, Tisay, Quiabú, Miraflores, Cerro Yalí, Kilambé, Peñas Blancas, Bosawás; Cerro Colorado, Quiragua, Musún; Juan Venado, Casitas; La Flor, Mombacho, Guatusos, and Indio Maiz. The rules were: the LDF provided credit to its best clients, and Nitlapan provided them with technical assistance; a contract was signed with the producer who chose a system (e.g. silvo-pastoral system) and chose an indicator (e.g. “establish native trees on pasture lands”, “riverbank forests”, “native foraging bushes” or “living fences with native species”). Then they defined the area to be reforested in a year, and at the end of the year CABEI would verify whether the producer complied. If he did, the producer paid only 86% of the amount of the loan, with the policies on term and interest rates remaining the same. This compliance enabled the LDF to claim 6% of the loan given to that producer, and Nitlapan 10% of the amount lent in the portfolio to cover the costs of technical assistance.

Looking at the environmental projects that generally failed in Central America, the results of this case were commendable for slightly more than 1500 producers with around 2,500 hectares reforested, springs (and creeks) recovered or protected, living fences and honey waters decontaminated. What explains this innovation? There is a shared vision among the actors: if the producers with a good credit record transform their farms, their success generates a “snowball effect” of economic and environmental improvement. Then the innovative part is that what the families do and know gets recognized, correspondingly the technical assistance has a systems-approach and not a crop-approach (trees); the myth is broken that the agricultural frontier is advancing felling the trees, they can transform their farms; a credit institutional setup that rewards the good payer with an environmental sense of responsibility; and an approach of combining ecology and economics from the perspective of  “farm trees” instead of forest plantations or compact forests. These innovations remind us of Heraclitus some 2500 years ago: “when there is no sun we can see the stars at night”. The stars in this case are the innovations, while the sun is the approach of an ecology divorced from the economy, reduced to the economy, or seen only as compact forests, a vision of credit and technical assistance that only responds to the market from the logic of crops…

The sun moves, and also can keep us from seeing the most important stars in the CamBIO project: the collective action. Part of it comes from the coordination between financial institutions (LDF, CABEI), technical assistance (NITLAPAN) and production (producer families), within a framework of incentives contributing to environmental and economic sustainability, but this is not enough. Another part of the collective action is left truncated, because of the need for science and collaboration with local organizations. The limited research that there was came from other organizations; it was assumed that those who are doing credit and technical assistance “already knew” the reality. Forcella (2012, Payments for Environmental Services and Microfinance: Proyecto Cambio in Nicaragua, Belgium), studying the project, found that the largest clients with the most cattle tended to invest the difference of the credit more in activities at odds with the environment (purchase of cattle, pastureland without trees, …), while the smaller ones tended to invest the different of the loan more in environmentally friendly activities (shaded cacao and coffee, etc.), which in addition shows that places and organizations are political arenas, that no policy is implemented as planned. The project ignored the local organizations, under the assumption that the producers are isolated individuals, thus losing opportunities to multiply the positive externalities, and undermining in part the sustainability of the project post-2013. This mutual exclusion between institutions that provide services and local organizations tends to be a common pattern, likewise the execution of projects without research. The country lost the opportunity to see more stars, and maybe more interesting stars.

In conclusion: the synergy between ecological, economic and scientific communities within an institutional framework of coordination with incentives is a key path for reducing the crisis of climate change. Science makes a difference, but in CamBIO, CABEI-UNDP-GEF they fell into the mistake of other projects, not studying their own experiences in the region in a comparative manner. Rather they adhered to the custom of providing resources and forgetting about the impact of their actions. The participation of local organizations is essential in any measure to reduce the crisis of climate change; if the local organization is weak and “coopt able”, it has to be strengthened, so that it might be an autonomous counterpart and capable of negotiating, representing the interests of the families. The individual farm is not the motor of change, but the entire local and global infrastructure. Instead of believing that “more market is better for the environment” and “there are only trees in the forest”, we should turn our attention to the reality of the country: there are more trees on farms than in protected areas! The ones who can contribute more to the climate are the small producers!

A producer of San José del Bocay said: “If I take care of a tree from the time it was planted, I will think twice before cutting it down.” If we recognize this, if the financial institutions and technical service organizations expand on these capacities, if the state and the international organizations support this infrastructure, we would understand that the success of the entire chain of institutions passes through the success of the producer families, who, with social, economic and political incentives, can think 10 years ahead and plant a tree, and can think 100 years ahead and take care of that tree. That would make a difference.

* René Mendoza V. (rmvidaurre@gmail.com) has a PhD in development studies and is a collaborator of the Winds of Peace Foundation (www.peacewinds.org)

 

Coordination and collective action for mitigating the impact of climate change: the case of the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador

Coordination and collective action for mitigating the impact of climate change: the case of the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador

René Mendoza V. *

 

What practices contribute to the climate given the crisis of climate change? Apart from measures concerning the use and supply of energy related to construction, transport and industry, and the elimination of solid waste from garbage dumps, in what follows we list some measures recommended by different studies and organizations on forestry and agriculture. For the former, decrease deforestation, regeneration and repopulation of the forests and agro-silviculture, and carbon capturing. For the latter, change the management of water, intensification and agricultural technological innovation including value adding in a sustainable manner, less and more efficient use of nitrogen fertilizers, no-till agricultural technology, increase in soil capacity, improvement of rice technology, better management of ruminant animals (sheep, goats, larger livestock), and better use of manure in combination with agriculture.

To try to implement these measures we propose a framework of synergy between science, conservation, economics and coordination. In the first section of the first article (“The importance of peasant agriculture for Climate Change”), we looked at the big contribution of science on climate change, the progress of international coordination in the United Nations, the indifference of the economy to the climate, and its effect on environmental deterioration. In the second section of the same article, we saw that science, to the extent that it requires knowledge more specific to different geographies, contributes less; other actors like the FAO and IICA raise their voice without any progress on coordination, maintaining the separation between economy and ecology. To illustrate alternatives to this challenge, this article and the following ones will show cases about how synergy happens or does not happen between science, economics, ecology and coordination. We start with the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador that has mostly aquatic biodiversity.

The Galapagos islands, known worldwide because it was the basis for Darwin to develop his theory of natural evolution by natural selection, were designated in 1934 as a Wildlife Sanctuary, in 1959 97% of its territory was declared a National Park, in 1978 they were declared the Natural Patrimony of Humanity and in 1984 a Biosphere Reserve, in 1986 the Marine Reserve of Galapagos was created, in 1998 the Special Law for the Galapagos Islands was passed, and in 2001 the Marine Reserve was declared the Natural Patrimony of Humanity. The islands have attracted the immigration of Ecuadorian families and tourism; between 1960 and 2007 tourism increased from around 2,000 to 160,000 visitors per year. This growth and the associated economic opportunities created tensions between ecology and economics, the local citizens and the foreigners. How have they been resolving them?

What follows is based on a conversation with the biologist Milton Yacelga, who stayed on the Galapagos Islands for years as part of his scientific work. The accompanying Figure illustrates the solution framework that three communities implemented: scientific community (square shape), the community of the local inhabitants (circle shape) and the community of the tourists (triangle shape).  The management plan involved the three communities: 1) to know what to conserve you have to know what there is, likewise science has to identify which species are in danger and how to manage them; 2) the local inhabitants fish to feed their families and sell to tourists, for that reason they learn from science what species to use, at what ages, and what sex (2-1=0 “if you eliminate the female you have done away with the species”), in which places and at what times (e.g. not in the prolific moment for the fish; 3) the tourists need to feed themselves from the fish, contribute to their conservation, walk around and learn.

The challenge has been the three actors coordinating in the midst of their conflicts; the same figure above shows how difficult their combination can be, between something square, triangular and round. There were times in which the local inhabitants rejected the findings of science, arguing that there always had fish and that the number of fish had never gone down, that the foreigners with science were affecting the traditional culture of Ecuador; certainly in times of low demand for fish, the fishing was less, but with the increase in tourism and the growing demand for fish, the fish population changed. The tensions with the tourists increased, and because they had to follow rules agreed upon by the scientific community and the local community (restaurants, hotels, tourist guides, transportation) that meant knowing at what moments which places could be visited, how to treat the animals and how to connect with the local population. These tensions revealed differences between economics and ecology. In the end the three communities agreed upon experimenting on one island, whose results would allow them to recognize one another and reach a framework for agreement, even with tensions within each community, like the growing exclusion of small businesses, the debate between traditional ecology and new ecology (see Mendoza, 2002, “Nicaragua: ¿Cómo salvar el bosque? Haciendo fincas, cortando árboles,” en: Revista Envío, http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/1166), the type of tourism and its effects on the human and aquatic populations.

This agreement allowed the fish and tourism to increase, the ecology and economy to understand one another, and consequently they were able to draw up a Management Plan that provided institutionality to the coordination. Within this framework, for example, corridors were defined so that the species can migrate and immigrate, preventing them from falling into genetic degeneration from reproducing among themselves in isolated patches; they worked because there are various trails so that the tourists rotate their use without overburdening any trail, scaring away animals and birds, which in the long run would also affect tourism itself; and they agreed upon mechanisms for protecting  collective rights like water (“the water is for everyone”) in contrast to the logic of the large businesses and private tourism (“the water is mine”).

From this unique experience we can get some inspiration for the country. Having a long term perspective is the basis for seeking synergy between the economy and the ecology, while the control  of one group affects the other. It makes a big difference to produce crops, cattle and biodiversity as the basis for life, while the degradation of one affects everyone. A common effect of dispossession processes is doing away with the humus (layer of leaves) of the soil and move to where there is humus. When a management plan results from the coordination of the affected actors, it tends to be an effective framework for coordinating and resolving conflicts. If the science functions like the scientific community, outside the control of the elites, it contributes; if it is complemented by the wisdom of the population (e.g. in order to discern the impact of climate change by zones, following up on the amphibians that are indicators of global warming because of their sensitive and humid skin that in the face of heat gets filled with fungi that kills them, and the snakes that decrease in number with the deterioration of the forest and human superstition – “if the worker kills a snake he gets the day off” says the large estate owner), and responds to the actors in the territories (instead of responding only to international aid), its contribution makes a difference.

Each community if fundamental to solving the crisis of climate change. Even more fundamental is the synergy among the communities: the most important knowledge is not knowing that 1+2=3, but understanding what “+” means. And even more so if that synergy is the basis for building lasting alliances within an institutional framework of coordination between ecology, economy and science, so 1+2 is more than 3.

* René Mendoza V. (rmvidaurre@gmail.com) has a PhD in development studies, and is a collaborator of the Winds of Peace Foundation (www.peacewinds.org).

 

The importance of peasant agriculture for Climate Change

The importance of peasant agriculture for Climate Change

René Mendoza V. *

 Francisco Cruz, a small scale producer from the community of Peñas Blancas (in the municipality of El Cua) said: “Coffee is taking more time to ripen, it is now January 5th and the rainy season continues here.” INETER announced at the end of last May that when the rainy season began the rains would be less, and that El Niño is coming (drought) between the months of July and August. Climate change is a worldwide concern. When the United States (Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds) and Europe (Global Trends 2030: Citizens in an Interconnected and Polycentric World), followed by China, Brazil, Russia and Korea, study world tendencies to refine their development strategies, they coincide on six tendencies, among them the scarcity of natural resources (water, food, energy and minerals, technological innovation) and climate change. J Sachs (Consultant to the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals-MDG) announced that after the MDG (2000-2015) a new post 2015 agreement is coming with Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). (See: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/jeffrey-d–sachs-proposes-a-new-curriculum-for-a-new-era).

 This global concern is a great opportunity that is not risk-free. Let us recall that in the second Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002, capital crushed science, breaking the agreements of the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. With this precedent, starting in 2016 the northern countries are proposing to “adapt us” to climate change through the SDGs, mediated by asymmetrical north-south power relations, and in this way the SDGs could end up stillborn. To keep this from happening, and instead enable the SDGs to become a great opportunity for humanity, countries like Nicaragua should influence the United Nations demonstrating innovative practices that benefit the climate. In this and the next 3 articles we are going to show this route. Here we begin by understanding what climate change is, the importance of agriculture in this issue, and the importance of peasant agriculture for the SDGs to become an expression of the sustainability of natural resources and sustainable development.

The origins of climate change

Climate change occurs through the interaction between the atmosphere and the oceans due to natural and human factors. Historically the climate has affected humanity, but in recent times the climate is changing more through human influence: “Climate change is understood as a change in climate directly or indirectly attributable to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and that is added to the natural variability of the climate observed during comparable periods” (United Nations, 1992, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change). The atmosphere is affected by the greenhouse gas emissions (GHE) caused by the growing and massive dependency of humanity on fuels.  The greenhouse effect is the infrared radiation (heat) from the sun rays that are captured within the atmosphere so that the earth maintains its heat. What has happened is that this greenhouse effect has been intensified because of gas emissions, principally 72% carbon dioxide (CO2), 18%  methane (CH4) and 9% nitrogen oxide (N2O), which has generated global warming, making the average surface temperature of the earth increase by 1 degree Fahrenheit in this last century.

The greatest source of carbon dioxide is the use of fossil fuels (96.5%), because carbon dioxide is generated when the combustion of fossil fuels happens (carbon, natural gas and oil), through which the carbon content is almost completely returned as carbon dioxide. Methane comes from garbage dumps, fossil fuels, mining and livestock. And the sources of nitrogen oxide are artificial fertilizers and stationary fossil fuels. These sources have been increasing in the last 150 years with the industrial revolution which required the combustion of organic products (among them, oil by-products), and with deforestation; likewise, first the so called developed countries caused climate change, then, in recent decades were added the so called emerging countries like China, India and Brazil, and in general we are all part of the problem with the pre-eminence of the economy above evertything else: “In terms of the politics of climate change, the crude reality is that no country will be willing to sacrifice their economy to solve the problem” (Tony Blair, First Minister of Britain 1997-2007).

The influence of agriculture on climate change and its impact on agriculture

Agriculture has an impact on climate change. According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2008) agriculture generated a fifth of the foreseen effects of anthropogenic thermo active gases, in particular deforestation, desertification and fossil fuels, and affects climate change through the production and liberation of GHE (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen oxide). This impact could increase with the growing demand for products of animal origins, which, according to Acosta and Diaz (2013, Policy guidelines for the sustainable development of the livestock sector; FAO) could mean an additional increase of 32% in grazing areas by 2030, which would contribute to a larger emission of carbon dioxide because of the change in the use of soil from forests to pastures. Rice growing, according to the IPCC (2008) releases methane because the organic matter decomposes without oxygen,  like enteric fermentation (which occurs in the stomach) and the decomposition of cattle manure and garbage dumps (garbage out in the open full of organic material that decomposes under anaerobic conditions – without oxygen). In turn the application of fertilizers releases nitrogen oxide. These processes constitute 54% of methane emissions, 80% of the emissions of nitrous oxide , and almost all the emissions of carbon dioxide connected to the use of the soil.

The impact of climate change, according to Lobell, Burke, Tebaldi, Mastrandrea, Falcon and Naylor (2008, Prioritizing climate change adaptation needs for food security in 2030, Science Vol. 319, No. 5863), is global, but differentiated, with the poor countries ending up being more affected, because they are more vulnerable to the changes. For example, South Africa in 2030 could lose more than 30% of its principal harvest which is corn; southern Asia would have losses of basic regional foods like rice and corn. According to the IPCC (2008) production would drop in tropical and subtropical regions due to the reduced availability of water, and new incidences of pests and insects. In addition in Africa and Latin America many crops are close to their maximum temperature tolerance, which is why their yields could drop with small changes in the climate through which the farm productivity  could fall by up to 30%. Stern (2006, What is the economics of climate change? World Economics, Vol. 7.2) thinks that poor countries would have crop losses and a change in soil use with droughts, flooding, storms and a rise in the sea level. Colombia showed in a documentary video how some zones that 10 years ago were coffee areas now with global warming are changing their soil use, some to cassava, bananas and pineapple, and others to livestock, while coffee is pushed into even higher areas. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnSlwyRk_s0). In Central America, according to Villalobos (director of the Interamerican Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, IICA), water tables are being affected by climate change, which has an enormous impact on agriculture, because “to produce a kilo of corn today on average a thousand liters of water is needed, to produce a kilo of meat we need a thousand liters of water…agriculture is using 70% of the water tables in the world” (La Prensa, 27-06-2012).

Peasant agriculture, a practice with high potential for mitigating the impact of climate change and at the same time reducing GHE.

Even though the predictions in the tendencies of these studies are hypothetical, their impact in the country is evident, as Francisco Cruz from Peñas Blancas says as well as INETER, and as we have seen in the proliferation of coffee rust and increasing agricultural vulnerability. It is clear that the pattern of agricultural growth followed so far is a generator of GHE and of many injustices. This pattern is the large estate system based on deforestation and mono-cropping (e.g. extensive systems like ranching, and intensive systems like sugar cane, peanuts, rice, soybeans, unshaded coffee…), excessive use of water and soils, mechanized technology and the indiscriminate use of chemical inputs; it is a system that systematically dispossesses the peasant and indigenous families of their land and their organizations (see Borras, Franco, Kay and Spoor, 2011 The Hoarding of Land in Latin America and the Caribbean seen from a broader perspective; FAO); it is an economic-focused system supported by a chain of actors and national and international policies; and it is a system that, because of its high level  influence on public and private institutions, will translate the SDG to favor their own interests.

In the face of this system that is moving like a 50 meter high tsunami, peasant agriculture, that according to the Censuses constitutes the largest number in the country, is fighting like a cat on its back. They do it based on diversified production systems, crop association, with trees on the farm, rescuing their water springs, with less use of chemical inputs; it is a system with the potential for better production perspectives, for reducing the generation of the GHE and for mitigating the impact of climate change. This peasant agriculture, nevertheless, has persisted in spite of being excluded and ignored: the financial institutions see them with large estate-monocropping lens and not as families with their diversified farms; research institutions describe them as destined to “extensive technology” without realizing that the strategy of these families is diversification, and that from their logic, productivity should be understood combined with the reduction in the generation of GHE. How different the reality would be if the peasant-farmer path were supported!

In the face of the increase in world population, which in the coming years will demand twice the production of our times, this increase in production should, at the same time, bring about a significant reduction of GHE. How can this challenge be met? Given the reality of the country, the paradigm of the “green revolution” (see Altieri, M.A. and Nicholls, C.I., 2012, “Agroecology Scaling Up for Food Sovereignty and Resiliency” in: E. Lichtfouse (ed.), Sustainable Agriculture Reviews 11), accompanied by the monocropping, extractive and dispossessing large estate system, should be left in the past. An agriculture compatible with the sustainability of natural resources and within a framework of sustainable development should come in to take its place, accompanied by transformed institutions; and Nicaragua, having these new practices, should have an impact on international bodies to help the SDG serve humanity and our planet earth.

* René Mendoza V. (rmvidaurre@gmail.com) has a Phd in development studies, and is a collaborator of the Winds of Peace Foundation (www.peacewinds.org).

Collective and Shared Leadership: Antidote for a society dependent on bosses and patrons

                          

                               Collective and Shared Leadership

Antidote for a society dependent on bosses and patrons

René Mendoza V.[1], rmvidaurre@gmail.com

 

Leadership is a choice, not a position. Stephen R. Covey, 2012: xiv

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. A. Eistein

 

The patron-client relationship (owner-fieldhand, manager-subordinates) has persisted behind the great works, be they the construction of a cathedral, gold mine, the organization of the Army, the structure of the Roman Catholic Church or the large estates. With the boom of organizations there is more talk of managers-subordinates, directors-technicians and presidents-members, which could be called a leader-follower relationship. This approach (the historical patron-client and the leader-follower) was created in a time that depended on human physical force and where the skill of the leader (boss or manager) was believed to be necessary. In this article we argue that the principal obstacle to rural development is the persistance of the “marriage” of both relationships, that of patron-client and that of leader-follower, in a context where we increasingly depend more on cognitive work (knowledge) than human physical work. Correspondingly, and along the lines of the phrase of Einstein quoted above, we propose an approach of  collective and shared leadership where the people – from organizations, communities and value chains – free up their energies and become visionary leaders in each area of life, thus helping any form of social organization to be more effective and full of life.

 

Introduction

 

“Let what the owner says be done,” “the gurus will save us,” “I am not in charge,” “I am waiting for the orders to come down,”… are phrases that express the patron-client relationship of tacit forms of organization that built cathedrals, estates, cooperatives, businesses, universities, hospitals, armies, insurrections against dictatorships, and families. In some cases this social relationship has been radicalized, particularly in organizations of state security and criminal organizations or the mafia; the sense of loyalty even to commit crimes or carry out executions have only required the order of one voice behind the telephone that they recognize as the voice of the “boss”- see TV programs and movies like “The Name of the Rose”, “The Godfather” or “The House of the Spirits”. Known in the military arena, for example, is the influence of the Leninist structure on parties, and the intelligence apparatus of the guerrillas that then became governments, and it is also known that secret organizations seek inspiration in the ancient structure of the Catholic Church that has been capable of surviving for now nearly 2000 years. In the case of Nicaragua in the war in the 80s, the Nicaraguan Resistance military gave rank to the farmers who joined them with their entire social network. All this shows the influence of social structures on organizations throughout time.

 

With the boom of organizations after the Second World War, this patron-client relationship was precluded, with the appearance of the relationship of the “leader-follower”, a perspective that divided up the world between a small group of leaders and the large mass of followers (Marquet, 2012). It is an approach, including that of the patron-client, created in a time that depended on human physical force and where the skill of the leaders (“knowing how to give orders”) – the warrior king, the patron, the inquisitor, the colonizer, the commandant, the pioneer, the lead weeder, the man as head of the family – was necessary to mobilize (oblige, order, send, convince) the masses to provide their physical labor. This context has included the etching of this social relationship into the human mind, its naturalization and divinization, and consequently the erasing of the tangential human awareness: “leaders are born”, “we always need the patron”, “the fieldhand does not speak in front of the owner”, “the patron is sent by God.” That vertical structure is sustained by the entire society, even by those brandishing participatory methods and horizontal relationships who oppose it: “the boss did not tell me to, that is why I am not doing it.” They reject the verticality, but the structure lives on in them: “the leader does not consult about his decisions,” they criticize, while they yearn for a favor or order from the leader. The paradox is that being leaders they feel like “followers”, the patron-client structure speaks through this criticism, yearning and corpse-like obedience.

 

The current context, nevertheless, depends more on cognitive work than physical work. In Nicaragua the end of the agricultural frontier and of the “extensive path” (increasing production by incorporating more area), that required more of the physical labor, of planting, weeding and harvesting, is around the corner, now that the agricultural frontier has reached the ocean, which is why this route has ceased to be economically profitable[2]. Then the economy of extraction (exploitation of natural resources – forests, minerals and hydrocarbons – without much industrialization) also is facing problems, the wood is being used up, there are more and more objections in the world over the type of mining that is damaging to the environment, and they are the expressions of models of economic enclaves that are even economically, socially and environmentally counterproductive for the country. Then there are the challenges that climate change and the market instability have on agricultural products. All of this, the urgency for an agriculture that makes intensive use of land, the need for increased value added to the products and the natural resources, the climatic variability with its effects on agricultural diseases, the price variation that pressures us to search for market niches, tells us that we are living in a more complex world where each actors needs more knowledge. And even more so when note that the supply of technical assistance in Nicaragua has dropped because of the reduction of resources from international aid, and the supply of rural-agricultural credit is much less due to the crisis of the No Payers Movement (Bastiaensen et al 2013).

 

In this article we argue that the principal obstacle to rural development is the persistance of the “marriage” of the “leader-follower” model and the patron-client relationship within a context where knowledge is urgently needed about the challenges just mentioned, and about forms of technological and social innovation that would allow society to use the markets as means instead of being subjugated to them. We also argue that these patron-client and leader-follower relationships regardless of their effects on rural development, as such are degrading, undesirable relationships of subordination, that need to be transformed. We recognize that these institutionalized social structures have become hardened on the human mind itself, that they have made it possible that in spite of the change of context centralized structures persist that are limiting human capacity and potential.  We take note of innovative experiences that are ahead of their time, for example the case of the Apache populations in New Mexico in the US, based on a decentralized style of their leaders, resisted for five centuries the Spanish Army of Cortez, the Mexican and US armies (Nevins, 2004); the case of  AA (alcoholics anonymous) founded by Bill Wilson in 1935 where there are no bosses; that of the peasantry that persevered through the industrial revolution, that of the socialism of the USSR, Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua of the 80s[3], and the capitalisms of the present time. In the last two decades the decentralized structure of Al Qaeda stands out (Brafman and Beckstrom, 2007) and the case of Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia, quickly accessible by the public, that received written contributions and editions in a decentalized form (Jiles, 2005).

 

We propose a new approach, coherent with the current context of change, of collective and shared leadership that emerges from a change in social relations in the organizations and in the rural-urban communities, where there is no place for followers that work “at half gas” and that are “freed from thinking.” Given the hardness of the old social structure, we point out basic elements for the new approach, of a leadership that is made, that covers all areas of life, and that makes any organization more effective, and gives meaning to the only life that each person has.

 

1. Conceptual framework

 

1.1 The importance of cognitive work

 

Box 1. Myths dressed up as truths in the rural population

 

ü The wise have everything they need

ü Innovation is for those who are educated

ü The illiterate do not think

ü Peasants do not have diplomas and that is why they do not create ideas

ü Peasants use the machete, never the head

ü He who was born for the mallet does not get beyond the corridor

ü Women do not inherit land because they do not work

ü Work is on the farm

ü The head of the family is the man, the Lord said this

ü I am a small producer, that is why I do not have a voice

ü There is a set number of wealthy people, and the number of poor are increasing

ü The worst thing of the poor is to not have someone to exploit them

ü God made the poor and the rich, and he made me poor

ü God will provide; and if he does not provide, it is his will

Source: workshops with youth and coop members, 2011-13

 

Source: workshops with youth and cooperatives, 2011-13

Covey (2012) states that “we are in the midst of the most profound changes in the history of humanity, where the primary work is moving from the Industrial era of “control”· to the Knowledge Worker era of “release”.[4] This statement can appear inappropriate for the so-called “developing countries” whose industrialization is not very advanced; in the case of Nicaragua, we would say it is moving from the era of extensive agriculture toward the work of  knowledge. Here we describe that reality of extensive agriculture “married” to a form of organization of rural families, value chains, and organizations supplying services, pulled by the force of the market, that are preventing them from taking advantage of the changes in the context, and then we will sketch out the framework that we think can help us to take advantage of this context of change.

 

In the decade of the 1940s the agricultural frontier extended to the northern interior part of the country, and since 1990 it has extended to the two regions of the Caribbean Coast (the North Atlantic Autonomous Region and the South Atlantic Autonomous Region) to such an extent that 40% of the current livestock, and the extraction of most of the wood and mining, are in those regions. This expansion and extraction has happened based on an expansion of area, under conditions of poor infrastructure (roads, highways); and to the extent that the extraction of natural resources grows hand in hand with large and emerging enterprises, and within a “mining economy” logic, which is taking maximum advantage before the government changes, new laws are passed or environmental pressure grows. In this way the extensive and expansive path, instead of being the path of greater productivity and industrial value-added, have been profitable in the country due to the low costs of labor, fertile soil that has not required much fertilizer or chemical inputs, and due to the abundance of natural resources.

 

This situation is similar to countries like Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, with Venezuela appearing to have a risky future because of what in economics is called the “Dutch Disease”. This is when a country exploits natural resources that in the short term bring in large amounts of income, but it affects the rest of the sectors of the economy; in other words the large amounts of income from oil makes the local currency rise in value, making the national industry less competitive. In the case of Nicaragua, we draw up the following hypothesis: the combination of the “extensive path” and the “extractive path”, due to the fact that they have been profitable based on the abundance of labor and natural resources, has made the productivity of the  country be low and that there has not been much investment in knowledge in the different sectors of the economy of the country.

 

Figure 1. Stagnation framework

This extensive and extractive model is a result of the patron-client social relations, a framework that has coincided with the “leader-follower” model of businesses, organizations and institutions. The patron-client relationship has authoritarianism as the distinctive factor (or patriachal relationships) that concentrates resources and has control over the social structure which sustains the extensive path of the agricultural enterprises.[5] This same relationship happens in the extractive model, which in addition is located in agricultural frontier areas with “enclave economies” (in the case of mining) and mafia-like organization (when illegal extraction of wood predominates). Different institutions are found linked to this type of organization, including the state and multinational enterprises, based generally on relationships that have nothing to do with transparency.

Extensive agriculture and the promotion of the extractive path

 

Patrón-cliente approach (rural communities and value chains)

 

Leader-follower approach (organizaciones)

 

 

 

Market

Box 1[6] contains phrases that underly both models: the wise and the wealthy are a set number, the poor are poor by fate and are worse off if they do not have an exploiter; the illiterate do not think and are disqualified from innovating; women do not have value, hands that are worth something on the farm. This mentality and social structure generally prevail in families and their organizations (cooperatives, associations), and in the institutions that provide them rural development and training services: NGOs, donors, Churches, Universities, technical institutes, research institutes, businesses.

 

This “marriage” of the patron-client and leader-follower models, and the combination of both of them with the extensive and extractive reality, has been profitable, supported by international aid, and demanded by the markets[7] (see Figure 1). In other words, the force of the market is behind this route, which is socially constructed and regulated by elites in alliance with local gatekeepers creating inequities (Mendoza, 2012a). Given this force, it has also been capable of sweeping along with it agendas like “sustainable development”, “gender equity”, “poverty reduction”, “food security” and “governance”, as well as institutions of the “rule of law” and support from people, all expressed in policies, projects and programs. Their effects, expressed in data on deforestation, land concentration, inequality and poverty, reveal the problem behind this model.

 

Because of the effects of this “marriage” and its basis on subordination, this model was made for times when the importance of physical work prevailed. The current context is different. First,  change is evident in the structural conditions of the country; since around 2010 the end of the agricultural frontier has begun to be felt, accompanied by an increase in conflicts with the indigenous populations, reduction of remaining forests, increase in the value of the land along with  decreasing soil fertility and increasing diseases for farm crops (Mendoza, 2013a). This means that there is no other path other than productivity and better competitiveness in the different value chains, which implies investment in knowledge, generating technological, social, political and economic changes.

 

Secondly, under the Ortega government, there has been an improvement in the infrastructure of the country, expressed in rural road repair and construction, as well as the establishment of agroindustry like slaughterhouses, milk collection centers and corn processors, located more and more in the interior of the country; investments that increase the value of the land, energize trade and increase the flow of information, which constitute opportunities for intensifying agricultural and non agricultural activities.

 

Third, human and social capital is growing; the number of children of producers with higher studies is growing, to such an extent that today there is almost no rural community that does not have technicians in the family who can contribute to the improvement of their family farms. The country also has thousands of cooperatives, when in the 70s their number was no more than two digits, and they are not only growing in number but the cooperatives are scaling up into forms of second and third tier organizations, including their decisive influence on products (and chains) like coffee through fair trade, milk products and cacao (Mendoza 2012b).

 

 

Fourth, the “cascade effect” of land concentration and accumulation along with large estate type farms is on the rise in the country, be they around wood and energy trees, African palm, bamboo, peanuts, sugar cane, cacao, rural tourism, coffee or ranching[8]. This system is dispossessing peasant families of their land, is not absorbing this uneducated, “freed up” labor, but rather is expelling them from the country (migration[9]), and coopts and subordinates the peasant organizations to an economic logic that works for the elite. This means that the elite from the old model, now transnationalized, are appropriating the natural resources and the opportunities from public investments and the growing world demand for agricultural and forestry products[10], while at the same time blocking the possibility of the old model being transformed and the path of intensification of production being made viable.

 

Finally, there is a growing number of value chains for different crops which are getting to different markets, but most of the producer families, even while adding value to their products, are not able to take advantage of the benefits that participating in these chains imply, in good measure due to the fact that those chains require greater knowledge, expressed in better quality products and compliance with agreed upon quantities and delivery times.

 

Why should change be generated in the disastrous marriage of Figure 1? For the five reasons that we summarize here again: 1) end of the agricultural frontier, opening the door to productivity and competitiveness that requires knowledge (cognitive work); 2) improvement of investments in infrastructure; 3) emergence of more human capital and peasant organizations that can take on this challenge of knowledge; 4) force of the elites preventing the country from taking advantage of this human capital and peasant organization; and 5) because of the existence of the value chains that under the old marriage of Figure 1 are not providing benefits to the families of the small producers.

 

This new context, the urgent need for an environmentally and socially sustainable intensive agriculture, requires then another form of social organization. The signs that we are observing are that the old model is adapting to the times without moving one inch on the model of the marriage with these social relationships. For example, the plantations (of cacao, african palm and forests) that are emerging are “estate type” with the difference being the use of intensive and mechanized technology, like the case of “open pit mining”. Peasant families with daughters and sons who have studied, who are pressuring instead of cooperating – the son who arrives like the “wiseman” to change the farm, and the father who responds that he is in charge of the farm until he dies – because the “pig sheds his lard only after he dies”, versus “the illiterate who does not think.” The cooperatives respond to the fair trade organizations with formalities- filling out official minutes to show that their administrative council is meeting every month, like the NGOs reporting what the donors want to hear, without their staff reading nor writing in their search to understand the new context. These social relations have instead become transnationalized, many times the “patron” is outside the country – be they aid agencies, markets, academic institutions, transnational states. The new material conditions described, in contrast to the old Marxist theory, do not seem to determine new forms of organization and new attitudes. What model of leadership does this new context require and how can it be generated?

 

1.2 Approaches

 

The first approach, and the most dominant, is the neoliberal one. Under the notion of “global governance” this approach thinks that through the de-regulation of the State, privatization and decentralized forms of organization (businesses and NGOs) the traditional forms of domination are transformed and individual freedom is achieved. Through the different organizations the goal of neoliberalism is to reduce the state to a minimum; control no longer comes from the state, but from businesses, and organization is reduced to the private sector. With this vision, neoliberalism is thought to be incompatible with democracy, because that is the door that the masses use to take advantage of the common good (Boudon, 1981). They see that these masses are distorting the system, which is why the elites react with what Marx called “original accumulation”. In other words, if the masses have control from below, it is assumed that they will make a poor use of the common good (e.g. the market), which is why a minority needs to control the masses or privatize, subordinating the masses to the markets.

 

The most inspiring source of neoliberalism is F.A. Hayek, who proposed the free price system for sharing and synchronizing personal and local knowledge, which – according to him – would allow the members of society to pursue different and complicated purposes through the principle of “spontaneous self organization” (Hayek, 1944). Hayek (1988) argued that everthing had to be left to the market, that the function of the state was to protect the market, that the free market price system was, like the words used, the result of human action but not designed by human beings. The contradiction in Hayek is that society cannot be planned by human beings, but that the market guides and does everything. “Self organization” appears equivalent to “spontaneous order”, and this is different from organizations, it is free networks, they are not created, controlled nor controlable by anyone, while organizations are hierarchical networks, created and controlled by human beings. It is not the concern of Hayek whether the state be democratic or not, because he prefered “liberal dictatorships to democratic governments lacking liberalism” (Farrant, McPahil and Berger, 2012:513), in refering to the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile.

 

The second approach is that of the hierarchical, patron-client and leader-follower organization that we have already refered to in previous pages. This perspective makes us divide the world up between leaders and followers, it has to do with controlling people; it is the structure that came to mind when we read in school the Illiad, Beowulf and the Odessey, and permeates movies like Master and Commander, where the leaders are individual heroes. Under this structure pyramids, empires and factories of the industrial revolution were built, wealth has been created, and that is why it is difficult that for it to give way. It was created in a time that depended on physical force  to optimize the extraction of human physical work; while currently the most important work is cognitive, which is why this structure is no longer optimal. The problem with this approach is that the people treated as followers act as such, and have the expectations of followers, with limited decisions and unmotivated to provide their energy, passion and intelligence. The success of an enterprise is linked to the skill of the leader.

 

The third approach, and what we propose as a perspective that can revolutionize the lives of people and their organizations, is that of the “leader-leader”. Marquet (2012) experienced it in a nuclear submarine, and brought it up because a nuclear submarine is very closed system and under strict military rules, so that if this can be changed even in this type of organization, then is it not possible to create changes in less closed and less strict organizations than a nuclear submarine? This “leader-leader” approach is where all can be leaders and use their leadership skills in each aspect of life; leadership is not a mystical quality of some, leaders are not born, they are made. Marquet talks about 3 elements to this approach: having control (making decisions and interaction for solving problems in each area of the organization, bypassing vertical procedures), walking on two feet, competencies (specific knowledge, deliberate thought before actions, and learning instead of being trained); and clarity (knowing the purpose of the organization and the criteria for decision making).

 

In turning toward the reality of the country, this “leader-leader” approach needs to be adapted through four elements. First, while Marquet was able to explain what underlies the “leader-follower” approach incrusted in the military organization and enclosed in a submarine, in our case the beliefs and myths derived from the patron-client social relationship (e.g. myths of Figure 1) and leader-follower are reproduced both inside and outside the organizations. Second, the control mechanisms, competencies and clarity could be worked on precisely because they were closed up in a submarine for prolonged periods of time, while in a cooperative their members and leaders see one another sporadically, in an NGO or state institution the officials spend more time outside of their organizations, which is why their beliefs and systems of reasoning that are nourished by society are instilled in their organizations. Third, all the staff of the submarine had high levels of schooling and training, while here we are working with families with low academic levels and with knowledge that comes from their experiences transmitted through their families, and more than knowledge, the families are mediated by institutions like “patriarchy”.[11] Fourth, inside the submarine the political aspect, understood as “the awareness of human contingency”, for example, that they can run the submarine, had been dormant due to a type of vertical leadership absorbed by the internal military procedures (regulations); that dormancy is found in the expression “I do what they have told me to do”, but in a matter of days all the personnel began to change and to participate in the real leadership of the submarine; while the dormancy (alienation) in our societies is the accumulation of centuries, as can be appreciated in Figure 1, where the naturalized idea prevails that the source of social change is God, not human beings.[12]

 

Even though these four points express the specificity of the context of developing countries, like the case of Nicaragua, we also note that this change in “organizational culture” has not just happened within a submarine, but also in different types of businesses, hospitals and schools who have creatively applied the fundamentals of “open book management.” This approach, “The Great Game of Business”, that started in businesses, has the potential of changing any organization and the lives of the people themselves. This perspective (Stack, 1992) is composed of three elements: 1) knowing and teaching the rules of an organization to all its members or personnel, because to play the game of the organization everyone needs to know the rules, and because only together can they win; 2) Keeping good score of the results of an organization, be that in terms of the amount of production, product quality, total income, earnings, contributions, or in the good impact that the actions of an organization are causing, and getting every member of the organization to  follow up on the activities that allow those results to be achieved; 3) having voice and agency in the organization, which is achieved with the commitment of each member of the organization so that the things that achieve success in the organization get done. It is a sense of ownership and a sense that in achieving success the benefits will accrue to everyone.

 

Intensive agriculture and promotion of the industrial path and value  chains

 

Leader-leader approach (rural communities and  value chains)

 

Leader-leader approach (organizations)

 

Markets

 

Figure 2. Collective and Shared Leadership Framework

The “leader-leader” approach, with its control mechanisms, competencies and clarity, including the four societal elements in its application (un-learning, interaction, sources of learning, contingency), expands into an approach of “collective and shared leadership”, of human interaction and connection between families, communities and value chains that go toward transforming their patron-client social relationship, and organizations that also are transforming their leader-follower social relationships, and both to the extent that they respond to the momentum of the new context of change in the country, from the extensive path to other forms of societal organization interacting with different markets (see Figure 2). From here our hypothesis is that this new context of change that the country is experiencing with the same patron-client and leader-follower structure of relationships will continue producing more poverty, dispossession and social exclusion; while the new approach of collective and shared leadership responding to the current situation of a context of change, could contribute decisively to the transformation of the country. With this approach, the following two sections work on the three elements proposed by Marquet, control, competencies and clarity, preceded by the identification of myths as underlying ideologies in interaction with society and its organizations connected to the new context.

 

2. In the cooperative organizations

 

In 2010 there were 8,282 cooperatives in Central America, of which 3,410 or 41% were in Nicaragua (data from INFOCOOP for 2010). Out of these 3,410 cooperatives, 821 are agricultural cooperatives, a number that could be larger if we take into consideration that many “agroindustrial”, “savings and loan”, “multifunctional”, “multisectoral” and “multiservice” cooperatives are also agricultural. In addition to the first tier cooperatives, the second and third tier cooperatives are also growing. Correspondingly, the cooperatives have been incorporating production, processing and export, as well as credit and technical assistance services. The paradox is that to the extent that the cooperative movement has scaled up organizationally, from first to second and third tier, each new tier has absorbed the functions of the previous tier, has concentrated the resources and has centralized the services, turning themselves into “big headed dwarfs”: high investments in the head (second tier cooperatives) and with feet of clay (first tier cooperatives)(Mendoza et al, 2012); and the more the cooperatives have scaled up the value chain, taking on, for example, the processing and commercialization of products, the more they tend to impoverish their members (CIPRES, 2008). On the other hand, the peasant-producer families, in the face of these mechanism to control them and take away their autonomy, slip away, diversify their markets and strengthen their family strategies, but are losing the means (instrument) which has been their organization to scale up economically and improve their standard of living as a family (see footnote No. 3).

 

Figure 2. Myths in the Cooperatives

ü Leader can only be the someone who has studied

ü Since I have a title I can jump over the rules

ü Being boss means knowing how to give orders

ü The president has to do everything

ü The board is above the members

ü We always need a patron

ü I am a private, let the boss speak

ü The manager will save us; what he does is good

ü That what he says be done (even if he is dead or lives outside the country)

ü (Manager): If I leave, I give this cooperative two months before it goes broke

ü Waiting for the projects, the roofing, the bonus… being leader is waiting for the order.

ü The stronger the parents are (second tier cooperatives) the strong will be the children (first tier cooperatives)

ü Our leader is now a Cabinet Minister, we are in power.

 

Source: Workshops with cooperative leaders, 2011-13

How is this paradox of “getting worse while improving” possible?[13] The force of the market is absorbing the cooperative movement. In scaling up to agroindustry and commercialization services (exporting) the apparatus is privatized, replaces the organization and becomes a company, the cooperatives are turned into private cooperatives; in doing so the wealth gets concentrated, the manager replaces the society and the members get impoverished (conversation with O. Núñez, September 26, 2013). This market is rooted in the social power structures; so centuries of patron-client relationships have been interiorized by the peasant families and the intermediation structures, including the leaders and professionals; the myths in Figure 2 are assumed as truths that guide and govern human actions. How can a member – and leaders – change their belief that they are “privates” (soldier), that the leaders are “heroes”, “fathers”, “educated” gods, “irreplaceable”, and with the right to bypass the “rules” of their organization? How can a member move above their “fieldhand” soul and become a leader? How can a woman leader discover herself as such instead of seeing herself as a “follower” and “waiting”?

 

The challenge is not just learning certain techniques, but learning in such a way as to change, which is possible if that learning is combined with “awakening”: certain truths are like “demons” that keep us in a trance, but in becoming aware of the spell – in religious language, “in being exorcized” – these truths appear as myths, and in that moment we discover our capacities and the potential of our abilities. On rare occasions this step is enough to “never stop walking”[14]; in most cases it is not enough. How can the cooperatives contribute to this “awakening” and sustain the transformation of their members, instead of reinforcing the spell and impoverishing them?

 

The cooperatives are forms of organization invented by human beings, and therefore changeable and able to be improved. Consistent with this contingent awareness, in order to ensure that the cooperatives might be a means in the service of the member families, it is fundamental that their members participate in the decisions about the functioning and direction of their organization. How can they be part of the decision making? See Figure 3. First, the Bible says that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be.” Each member should have contributions in their organization so that they have equity, from which it can provide credit to its own members with low interest rates. A member with contributions in their organization will be more demanding with their board members, because their resources (“treasure”) are in play[15]; a grassroots cooperative with their own equity will have more autonomy, more friendships (connections), and will keep their second tier organization from becoming a concentrating and centralizing entity. In that sense, their rule, in contrast to what is indicated in Figure 2, will be: “the stronger the children are, the stronger the parents will be;” and because of the active role of each member (and the pressure of their own family), due to the fact that each one will also have interest in taking care of their own “treasure” (their contributions), each member will be exercising the role of leadership even without having any title.

 

Secondly, the cooperative law and the statutes of each cooperative indicate a path that, if followed, would make any cooperative successful and therefby would make each member into a leader– be they women or men. The biggest problem of the cooperatives of the country is that this path is obstructed because of the force of the “rules of the game”, where the correlation of forces is strongly influenced by the rules of the family, the Party and the market, and consequently the cooperatives are constantly falling into crises, incurring administrative problems, cooperatives privatized by their managers, or controlled by businesses, with complaining and impotent members that can only protest. The biggest challenge is generating changes in the correlation of forces, that include formal and informal rules that could provide the members of the cooperatives with greater voice.

 

Some good leaders of grassroots cooperatives are pressured and discredited, and grotesquely so when those leaders are women, by second-tier cooperative managers and board members; these good leaders need the administrative council to function and the number of general assemblies be multiplied in order to discuss and reach agreements-decisions, and thus be supported and keep themselves from being controlled or forced to resign. The presidents – and board members – that receive stipends work to be re-elected indefinitely, and for that purpose – using informal rules of patriarchy – get some leaders into debt who oppose them, or try to benefit them with projects, which affects the development of leadership in the cooperative, but that could be remedied if the oversight board, for example, assumed their functions that include applying the statutes and the cooperative law that indicate that the board members can only be re-elected once. The managers tend to take the place of the board members, have general power of attorney, and in the assemblies have more influence than any board member, when the statutes indicate that only the members and not the employees should participate, and that the strategic decisions are the responsibility of the board members, while the operational part, that of executing those decisions, is the job of the management and the rest of the technical administrative staff. A good part of the cooperatives have a credit committee that generally is left out, the president or the manager end up making the decisions about who, how much and when a loan is made, and that is why the board members and their clientele end up generally indebted with the highest amounts – they think that being a board member or manager (informal rule) allows them to “pass over” the (formal) rules of the cooperative. In many cooperatives the minutes are written by the managers themselves, and not by the secretary. In some cooperatives they even write up minutes without having a meeting of the administrative council, minutes that later the technicians take to the house of each board member for their signature. They are minutes with manipulated content, when the statutes indicate that it is the person named by the assembly who has to write the notes and duly keep them, given that the notes are the historic memory of the accumulated knowledge of an organization. The statutes themselves lay out the path for turning a cooperative into a school of leadership, and contain the norms appropriate for an organization to be successful, which requires changes in the correlation of forces that would allow the rules and principles of cooperativism to be used in a better way.

 

If each member has contributed their quota (“treasure”) they will be looking to ensure that their organization follows the path indicated by their statutes, and to the extent that the cooperative follows that path (contribution+compliance with the rules), it encourages each member to redouble their efforts to contribute more capital, and to have greater participation in the different organs of their organization[16] –or instead of beginning with contributions, have rules for intensifying the agriculture and organizing themselves effectively to carry it out[17]. This effective interest could be nourished through exchanges with other organizations; each cooperative in a deliberative fashion organizes visits to other organizations; in a deliberate way means that they identify their concerns and difficulties in order to learn how other organizations have responded to these concerns and resolved those difficulties; and at the same time contribute to their self esteem, sharing their successes that could be useful for other organizations. Looking at oneself in the “mirror of the other” makes you rediscover your own “birthmarks” and how valuable your own “footprints” are.

 

Thirdly, each member needs to be clear that the cooperative is a means, whose purpose is to provide them services and to be a school for the formation of leaders for making the peasant-farmer route viable in the case of the rural cooperatives. Having these two previously mentioned points, the cooperative needs to be transparent with the owners of the organization; transparency means that the information of each service gets to the members, that they are on flipchart paper stuck on the walls of the offices of the cooperative and/or are printed to be given to each member permanently. What information? Principle: whoever produces information should know that information. For example, a coffee cooperative that provides credit services should publish the following information: coffee area of each member, qq of coffee turned in, yield of that coffee in the dry mill, price that it was sold at, business that bought the coffee, total value, export costs and administrative costs, total value paid; amount of credit given to each member, interest rate, debt, debt paid; amount of credit received by the cooperative from external sources, interest rates, distribution by member. The very fact that each member has open access to that information, without any restriction, allows them to question, learn, connect to one another and govern their organization.

 

An organization where its members comply with the agreed upon rules (be they for contributions or for the management of the coffee farms), participate in the decisions of their organization following the path indicated in their own statutes, deliberately seek to share their lessons and learn from other organizations, and are transparent and informed about what their organization is seeking and where it is going, constitutes a successful organization. This cooperative will not fall into despotism, it will avoid the future of the “bigheaded dwarf”, will resist being absorbed by the market and will not be co-opted by elites. This type of organization is a means that will contribute to expanding the ancient human capacity of being peasant-indigenous. But, will they be able to do it alone? Here is the importance of strategic alliances among organizations with a leadership approach that we are proposing. The following section elaborates on this point.

 

3. In the organizations that provide services

 

Even though in this section we focus on NGOs, with the proper adaptations, what is said here is applicable to the situation of financial institutions, fair trade organizations, schools (universities, technical institutes), research centers and state institutions. Rocha (2011), quoting the Directory of NGOs in Nicaragua for 1999-2000, stated that in the year 2000 there were 322 NGOs, 6% of them emerged prior to 1980, 22% in the decade of the 80s, and 72% in the 90s. Bodan (2000), based on MINGOB (Ministry of the Interior), stated that in 2000 there were 1,861 NGOs. Rocha also refers to the fact that MINGOB stated that there were 4,360 non profit associations in Nicaragua. Certainly there has been a boom of organizations in the last 30 years, specifically NGOs, in Nicaragua as well as in Latin America. Rocha (2011) does an assessment of the NGOs in Nicaragua as well as Latin America:

 

“During the decades that followed the armed conflicts the NGOs have developed many praiseworthy works. Alongside that, their short termed view, their tendency toward depoliticization, their submissive dependency on funds from the North should be questioned. And principally their contribution to the decline in wage labor and job security. Something very serious in this reign of unemployment which today is Central America”

 

What has happened with the NGOs and organizations in general? Petras and Veltmeyer (2005) state that the NGOs served as agents of international organizations to calm people down and prevent possible rebellions in reaction to the neoliberal policies. Hale (2002) notes that the cultural policies of neoliberalism are even more serious that the assimiliation policies of the previous era, and that the indigenous movements were bureaucratized or turned into NGOs in this period through policies and resources that created a dicotomy between the “obedient indian”, who they promoted, and the “rebelllious indian” who they excluded and discredited. So, in contrast to the case of the cooperatives, here we find ourselves facing an adverse situation, it is not the informal rules that pass over the formal rules and affect the autonomy of the organizations, but rather the submission to formal rules that respond to the market which has contributed to the extensive agricultural model of development.

 

Figure 4. Myths within NGOs

ü There is no development without money

ü The market is a sea of pirates

ü The people in the countryside are poor to be pitied

ü We believe in the poor

ü The communities do not change: like the roads and  the rivers

ü A community changes with the arrival of a project

ü We technicians arrive to change the producer´s farm

ü The formal is what has value, the informal does not work

ü We know, that is why we are giving technical assistance

ü Justice is applying the law of the Republic

ü Alliances are a waste of time

ü The producers do not know anything

ü The bosses are right and are those who decide

ü The guru saves the organization and is a great visionary

ü Civil society are the NGOs

ü The leader empowers

ü The NGOs are participatory from below

 

Fuente: Talleres con personal de ONGs, 2013

Figure 4 shows the “myth of the superiority” of the NGOs (national and international); on the one hand, they know the needs of the people, they are right, they decide, provide light, change the lives of the people and their farms, make it so the communities have a history; and on the other hand they think that the producers “do not know anything”, “do not change”  and that they are “poor to be pitied”, which fits with the mentality of the people expressed in Figures 1 and 2. For the NGOs the communities are sources of knowledge, which is why they turn their gaze toward the real source – donors, market and academia, leaders, gurus, directors, technicians – in order to from there “serve”, “assist”, “finance”, “empower”, “sensitize” and “raise their awareness”. The NGOs are champions in promoting “bottom up” processes through participatory methods, while in practice they have defined their rules (policies) to implement their resources[18]. The naturalization of these practices is so profound that the organizations wield the myth of empowerment: the leader empowers his follower, a process which  assumes that whoever has power empowers, and the one is empowered lacks power.

 

This empowerment which dis-empowers is complemented by the myth of the great “guru”, the savior leader and great visionary. It is believed that only a leader makes an organization.[19] Its impact in an organization makes the followers feel like leaders before their communities, and that is why they “assist”… and facing the structure of their organization they feel like followers, the NGO is seen as a follower before the donors…and feels like a leader before the communities to “assist” them…The idea of leader comes from having followers. It is an asymmetrical relationship where both are left as “tethered hens”: the leader, biased by the leader-follower relationship, sees his second in command (the next highest official) generally as his competitor, or the president of a university sees the directors of the different schools and institutes in this way; in this way an old social rule of survival in power structures gets reinforced. Those second in command are there to support, never to stand out or they will be denigrated or fired, or those next in line precisely because of their mentality that underlies the leader-follower relationship  will behave as “followers”, be it to be submissive or to rebel, making themselves the “follower” of another higher level boss. This is what it means to be “tethered”; without much movement to jump, something that many times is justified as “not much but good”, but that damages both and the effectiveness of the organization as a whole.

 

The trap is in the leader-follower social relations of the NGO, married to the patron-client social relations of the population. This marriage cemented over centuries fits comfortably in the context of the “extensive culture” that has produced dispossession, inequality and poverty, which explains why projects in favor of environmental sustainability, gender equity, credit and technical assistance in favor of productivity…have not worked. It is easy for being in relatively isolated areas, convenient for a type of extractive trade based on the crop lien system of capitalism that combines market with lending along the lines of patronage relationships. As we said before, this marriage is not only convenient, but keeps the context of change in which the agricultural world finds itself from being taken advantage of.

 

Figure 5. Mechanisms of transformation

ü Control: Shared decisions based on emancipation processes

ü Competency: insertion, immersion, writing and dialogue

ü Clarity: Making alliances, co-producing knowledge

How can the intellectuals of organizations overcome their “inner-follower” and become leaders, and with that contribute to the transformation of the patron-client relationship in the communities? Like with the cooperatives, waking up through un-learning is the starting point; in fact, the fact that organizations are able to recognize themselves in Figure 4 is a starting point, that awakening implies that they should turn their gaze back on the communities with whom they manage knowledge-understood as discerning and produce it. This step, nevertheless, is not enough; many organizations are pleased to be self critical, but stay within the leader-follower structure; they are like popular demonstrations that shout slogans against some policy, but that lack alternative thinking, or who become part of the government and nothing happens (see Figure 2: “our leader is now the Cabinet Minister, we are in power”) – they are like dogs in a rural community who come out barking loudly behind a car going by, and when they finally reach the car, do not do anything, return with their tail between their legs, and on encountering another dog, chew them out for keeping “their head down” (not joining in on the barking). Waking up – in other words perceiving the limitations of this relationship, realizing that this assymetry that leaves us “tethered” -is a good step, but without overcoming the leader-follower way of thinking, the love for the patron-client relationship will reappear.

 

What mechanisms would help to overcome this structure, and make that starting point of “awakening”, turning the gaze back on the communities, be sustainable? Figure 5 summarizes those mechanisms. First, instead of empowering, emancipating: freeing up the energy, initiatives, imagination and creativity of each person within a framework of group and collective reflection sessions. The actors of the organizations, communities and the value chains need to discern their realities and in this way recognize themselves as leaders looking beyond those realities.  Demonstrating the myths wakes them up, they un-learn, they are freed from their “demons” (myths, beliefs) and there are flashes of change. But these “demons” tend to return, how can you say goodby to them and fill the void with transformative knowledge?

 

Figure 3: Path for creating competency

Contrary to the tendency of the leader-follower social relationship to separate the four elements of  Figure 3, making immersion only for students from the north, insertion only for directors-presidents-managers, writing only for academics from the north, and dialogue only for technicians on terrain “guided” by the market (capitalism with mechanized and intensive technology), and following practices “guided “ by the myth of empowerment, here within the framework of collective and shared leadership we are proposing freeing ourselves of these ties. How?

 

Figure 3 shows us the path of interaction of the 4 elements around learning[20] that each intellectual should develop within a collective and shared framework – instead of responding only to a type of market controlled by multinationals, we want to turn “the inverted gaze”  back on the communities – societies and their markets. The first element is insertion, having a long term perspective (criticism of and alternative to the context, narrative and counter-narrative) with a sense of mission (political struggle), through building alliances with the families, their communities and organizations. The second is immersion, which is taking off our shoes and putting ourselves in the shoes of the impoverished and impoverishing families in order to understand the reality from their worlds, literally allowing ourselves to be “taken” by the reality of the “other”; this immersion gives content to the insertion and makes it concrete; if the insertion is theory, the immersion is method. The third element is writing, taking notes of each conversation, observation and readings that emanate from the insertion and immersion, and conceptualizing them as ideas and meanings.  And the last element is dialogue, which is the free flow of ideas in groups, that start from recognizing the existence of the other person, and that revolve around the spoken word. Insertion without immersion is empty, immersion without insertion is blind, the two without writing turn into “prisoner talk”, and the three without group dialogue lack collective social transformation. This is metanoia: learning that emancipates and transforms, and that builds visionary organizations.

 

Finally, each person who works in the organizations needs to produce and share knowledge through human interaction, interacting in groups to seek solutions to specific problems and to take advantage of concrete opportunities. Being open to audits and evaluation missions that are privileged opportunities for the personnel to talk about their problems and their doubts to benefit from advice and ideas about how other organizations have faced similar problems. Organizing reflection sessions with visiting and local researchers, as well as inviting people from other organizations, reflections where the ideas flow. Writing one or two page articles about multiple and different topics, and publishing them. The greatest challenge is reading, not the lack of bibliography; it is writing, not the lack of information, and it is daring to recognize your own skills. These are the mechanisms that are coherent with emancipation, that come from teams that decide, that make their talents work, that expand their human capacities.

 

Conclusions

 

The “patron-client” social relationship has been married to the “leader-follower” relationship, expressed in formal and informal forms of organization, which in turn have responded to a country context that in the rural area has been characterized by the “extensive and extractive culture”  which has been translated into the expansion of the agricultural frontier, the systematic expulsion of the poorest families, environmental degradation and dispossession. Nevertheless, this context is changing, the agricultural frontier has already reached the ocean, it is rare to find families in the central interior area of the country doing rotating between its farming areas and its areas at rest, climate change is being felt in more crop diseases, the soils need to be nourished, the multiplication of the population and their increasing levels of schooling  is a reality, and the differentiation of products (e.g. organic coffee, specialty coffee, milk derivatives, vegetables) through reorganized value chains is more and more important. The challenge of generating and clarifying knowledge is a challenge for all social sectors, from the peasant families to the technicians and researchers; a studious producer who observes and analyzes his farm, technicians who do research to support their technical advice, researchers who do immersion…this is the future of the country.

 

This context of change, of voracious capitalism combined with the crop lien system and the party blanket of “compañero”, shows us that the most valuable thing today is cognitive work and not human physical work, as has been the context of “extensive and extractive culture” with its consistent marriage betwen patron-client and leader-follower. Organizations (cooperatives, NGOs, research centers, microfinance organizations) have created their own walls responding to their “leader-follower” way of thinking, with their gaze directed in the opposite direction of the communities – they seek to be more standardized, professionalized and large. Even with the differences between cooperatives and communities and value chains, where the weight of informal rules shapes behaviors and results, and in the case of organizations (NGOs, microfinance organizations…) that instead are seen to be prisoners of formal rules, all are moved by the forces of the market. The new context of change, nevertheless, runs the risk not so much of not being taken advantage of due to the power of the marriage of the patron-client and leader-follower approach, and the neoliberal approach, but of being taken advantage of by a transnational elite capable of manipulating both approaches, generating even more inequality and dispossession in the country.

 

In this article we have proposed an approach of “collective and shared leadership” that disrupts the social relationship of the “marriage” and the neoliberal ideology. For that reason we have taken note of mechanisms that would allow the organizations (cooperatives, NGOs, microfinance organizations, research centers) “to redirect their gaze”, question their own origins, and turn their organizations into visionary schools of learning wedded to the actors in the communities and the value chains, expressing routes that go “beyond development.” This is possible if the organizations are studying the communities and are studying themselves in order to find what Brafman and Beckstrom (2007) call “the hardball stage”[21]: finding the appropriate point between centralization and decentralization, depending on their specific processes. In the long term, the organization is what counts; that organization that overcomes the “leader-follower” relationship, and does it in alliance with the communities that are overcoming the “patron-client” relationship, finding “ the hardball stage” will be the organizations that persist and that will really contribute to societal transformation.

 

Will your organization persist in the long term, contributing to societal transformation? The response is in the hands of each member of your organization. If you respond from a leader-follower framework, even being a leader you are a follower, which is why we will have already lost the race before starting. If you respond from a leader-leader framework, there is hope, because we now have won a leader – whether that person is a woman or a man.

 

References

 

Bastiaensen, J., Marchetti, P., Mendoza, R. y Pérez, F., 2013, “Las paradójicas secuelas del ‘Movimiento No Pago’ en las microfinanzas agropecuarias en Nicaragua” en: ENCUENTRO 95. Managua: UCA

 

Baumeister, E., 2010, “El caso de Nicaragua” en: Proyecto Dinámica de la Tierra en América Latina y el Caribe. Mimeo.

 

Baumeister, E. y Fernández, E, 2007, Sobre las migraciones regionales de los nicaragüenses. Managua: INCIDES

 

Bodan, O., 2000, “ONGs-gobierno: matrimonio por conveniencia” en: Confidencial 233. http://www.confidencial.com.ni/archivo/2000-233/actualidad.html

 

Brafman, O. and Beckstrom, R., 2006, The Starfish and the Spider: the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, Portfolio.

 

Boudon, R., 1981, The Logic of Social Action: An Introduction to Sociological Analysis. Routledge & Kegan Paul

 

CIPRES, 2008, Las Cooperativas Agroindustriales en Nicaragua. Análisis  socioeconómico de 10 organizaciones que integran a 171 cooperativas. Managua: CIPRES, UNAG, CCS.

 

Collins, J. y Porras, J.I., 1994, Built to Last. Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. New York: HarperBusiness

 

Covey, S., 2012, “Foreword” in: Marquet, L.D., 2012, Turn The Ship Around! How to Create Leadership at Every Level. Texas: Greenleaf Book Group Press

 

Farrant, A., Mcpahil, E., Berger, S., 2012, Preventing the “Abuses” of Democracy: Hayek, the “Military Usurper” and Transitional Dictatorship in Chile? American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 71, No. 3 (July, 2012). http://coreyrobin.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/hayekchile.pdf

 

Fernández, E., 2013, El patriarcado. Nicaragua. Mimeo

 

Hale, Ch., 2002, Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala” in: Journal of Latin American Studies 34.3 pp. 485-524

 

Hayek, F.A., 1944, The Road to Serfdom. Inglaterra: Routledge Press.

Hayek, F.A, 1988, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. EEUU: The University of Chicago Press.

 

Jiles, J., “internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head” en: Nature 438. Pp. 900-901 http://www.u.arizona.edu/~trevors/nature_15dec2005_wikipedia.pdf

 

Marquet, L.D., 2012, Turn The Ship Around! How to Create Leadership at Every Level. Texas: Greenleaf Book Group Press

 

Mendoza, R., 1990, “Costos del verticalismo: un FSLN sin rostro campesino” en: ENVIO 107. http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/640

 

Mendoza, R., 2012a, Gatekeeping and the struggle over development in the Nicaraguan Segovias. Tesis doctoral. Bélgica: University of Antwerp-IOB.

 

Mendoza, R, 2012b, “Nicaragua – 33 ANIVERSARIO DE LA REVOLUCIÓN: Café con aroma de cooperativas” en: Revista ENVIO No. 364. Managua: UCA http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/4548

 

Mendoza, R., 2013a, “Nicaragua: el café en los tiempos de la roya” en: ENVIO 372. http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/4653

 

Mendoza, R., 2013b, Inmersión, inserción, Escritura y Diálogo. Una Ruta para el Aprendizaje. Managua: Nitlapán. Mimeo

 

Mendoza, R., Gutiérrez, M.E., Preza, M. y Fernández, E., 2012, “Las cooperativas de café de Nicaragua: ¿Disputando el capital del café a las grandes empresas?” en: Observatorio Social, Cuadernillo 13. http://observatoriosocial.com.ar/dev/pub_cuadernos.html

 

Myers, N., 1981, The Hamburger Connection: How Central America’s Forests Become North America’s Hamburgers, en: AMBIO 10(1) pp. 3-8

 

Nevins, T., 2004, “Introduction” en: Ingstad, H., The Apache Indians: In Search of the Missing Tribe. EEUU: University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

 

Pérez Baltodano, 2003, Entre el Estado Conquistador y el Estado Nación: Providencialismo, pensamiento político y estructuras de poder en el desarrollo histórico de Nicaragua. Nicaragua: IHNCA-UCA.

 

Petras, P., y Veltmeyer, H., 2005, Movimientos sociales y poder estatal: Argentina, Brasil, Bolivia y Ecuador. México D.F.: Lumen

 

Rocha, J.L, 2011, “Los Jinetes del desarrollo en tiempos neoliberales (3): Segundo jinete: las ONG” en: ENVIO 354. http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/4400

 

Stack, J., 1992, The great Game of Business. New York: Crown Business

 



[1] This article comes from the experience of directing the Research and Development Institute Nitlapan-UCA between 2012 and 2013, and of working with coffee cooperatives and youth innovators since 2010. The issue in question has been, nevertheless, of personal interests since 1988 when I began to do immersions in the communities of El Arenal of Masatepe every weekend, while at the same time as part of the staff of Nitlapán I was studying Wiwilí –see Mendoza (1990). I am grateful to J. Bastiaensen, S. Shepard and M. Lester for their comments and continuous support.

[2] In the case of coffee, Mendoza (2013) shows that this extensive path facilitated the propagation of the coffee rust, and was the sign that that route was no longer viable in the northern part of the country.

[3] The peasant-indigenous population reproduces itself even in adversity. The peasant-indigenous are like starfish, who when one of their five arms are cut off, create a new one; if it is cut in half, it becomes two; they are not like the spider that dies when you crush their head (Brafman y Beckstrom, 2007:41). The peasant-indigenous is decentralized, and even when they are given a “head” (board dependent on the Party, centralist board, state socialism or capitalism), they slip away.

[4] “We are in the middle of one of the most profound shifts in human history, where the primary work of mankind is moving from the Industrial Age of ‘control’ to the Knowledge Worker Age of ‘release’” (Covey 2012: xiii).Covey is a recognized scholar of leadership, one of his books in particular: 7 Habits of Highly effective People.

[5] In contrast to this description, we could find other societies in the same country that are more egalitarian, communities with at least 60% of the families that have stayed with more intensive and sustainable production systems, and that generally have more inclusive and diverse forms of organization.

[6] Box 1 and 2 have been the result of workshops organized with cooperatives, workshops that we have facilitated jointly with E. Fernández.

[7] For example, the big demand for “fast food” from US consumers made the fast food industry demand cheap meat, which found a response in the Central American countries, particularly Nicaragua, at the cost of deforestation with the expansion of ranching. See Myers (1981).

[8] For an overview of the data on land ownership up to  2010, see Baumeister (2010)

[9] The migration flow has increased, with temporary migration during coffee harvest times to El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica standing out, because these countries pay the harvesters better (Baumeister and Fernández, 2007)

[10] The growth of world population (in year 0 we were 300 million people, in 1900 we were 1.7 billion, in 2000 we were 5.7 billion and in 2100 we will be 11.2 billion) and the increase in the income of the population of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South África) constitute a sustained and growing demand for food, which for Nicaragua means greater demand for meat and milk (ranching), coffee, basic grains… and demand for more and more differentiated products.

[11] E. Fernández (2013) has studied patriarchy from the Precolombine times to the present. He reveals how this institution has permeated political, religious and economic systems, and how today it molds the organization of the cooperatives.

[12] Pérez Baltodano (2003) argues that Nicaraguan society expresses a providential mentality, a resigned pragmatism with an indifferent elite.

[13] Studies on added value of cacao and beans, carried out as a Masters thesis, show that participating in better chains is not of interest to the producers, and practically all the additional value added is captured by other links of the chain.

[14] Kate Choping wrote a novel called The Awakening in 1899 in the United States. That novel was so harshly criticized at that time that the author never wrote again. A century later the novel was recognized and considered a classic. The novel deals with a woman named Edna Pontellier, who awoke from her role as spouse and mother, and from making sure that the domestic help did their work, and that her marriage out of convenience and not out of love appeared to function in the eyes of the society of that time. She wakes up when she learns to swim in the ocean, and in that act she realizes that she can achieve what she proposes for herself, which makes her feel strange as she discovers that the life she is leading is not the one she wanted. So Edna recovers her passion for painting, sells her paintings and generates her own income, leaves her house, takes a trip and falls in love, violating the norms of the society at that time that – obviously – condemned her. I am grateful to J. Estrada for introducing me to this novel and for this summary.

[15] A principle of cooperativism is “one member, one vote”. Without changing this formal principle, here we are proposing that a member with contributions (“treasure”) will have even more interest in having “voice” and “vote.”

[16] The José Alfredo Zeledón Cooperative (JAZ), located in San Juan del Río Coco, overcame the crop lien system through putting together a loan portfolio on the basis of the savings/contributions of their members from the very year of their founding in 1995. This rule of making contributions has already become a custom, and is no longer resisted, because the members see the benefits: they have credit, and in addition they have lowered the cost of that money. Consequently, that organization has diversified their friendships and has cultivated greater autonomy; nevertheless, it still is working on moving from a “leader-follower” model to an organization with collective and shared leadership, and of influencing their members to move from extensive agriculture to an intensive one. (Mendoza, 2012b)

[17] The Solidarity Cooperative of the community of Aranjuez was able to increase the productive yield of the coffee of its members, breaking the myth of the biannual nature of coffee, coordinating with their second tier organization CECOCAFEN so that it might provide them with coffee processing services, and negotiate directly with the buyers of quality coffee. It is the only cooperative that was able to stop the coffee rust. How did they do it? They agreed upon rules to intensify their coffee fields: using the fair trade premium to invest in coffee, doing it under agreed upon rules, with the direct supervision of the technician, and providing the premium not in cash but in inputs – rules that their members fully comply with. And like the JAZ cooperative they have diversified their friendships and built their autonomy; they are moving toward a collective and shared leadership. Their limitation is that they do not have a culture of savings-contributions. (Mendoza 2013a)

[18] In the case of the microfinance organizations we should note that many of them began as rotating and revolving funds, organizing solidarity groups – pretty decentralized, organizing savings and loan circles. In the beginning they also emphasized studying the communities and their families. Over time they were professionalized, their policies became standardized, they were more and more absorbed by formal legislation, focused on individuals instead of circles, quit studying the communities and their families, and responded more and more to the markets; they turned toward getting scale, earnings, and they went more to a commercial and (peri) urban portfolio. The communities quit being the source of knowledge for the microfinance organizations. The more institutionalization, the more distance from the communities, and therefore the gap was greater between the central management and the management of the branch office, and the credit promoters – who know the communities better, and more and more have to hide their knowledge to respond to the policies of their organization.

[19] Collins and Porras (1994:31-34) find that there is no correlation between great and charismatic visionary leaders and visionary companies.

[20] This figure with the 4 elements comes from (Mendoza 2013b). What is described here was promoted in the Nitlapán-UCA Institute. In this text I retrieve it as figure as the fundamental elements from the angle of “collective and shared leadership”. The experience in Nitlapan shows that the importance and appropriateness of this proposal is understood, but the institutionality mentioned, that of responding to markets (projects, financial profitability without environmental and social profitability) is very hard to change. One lesson that came out of this is that change needs to be worked on in a parallel and simultaneous fashion with institutions like Nitlapan, with the communities-territories where the work is being done, and also with allied international organizations. Another lesson that came out of this is that the change toward collective and shared leadership requires more rotation and renovation of leadership in any institution, no one is irreplaceable.

[21] Reference to candy making, hard ball stage is when sugar syrups are heated to the point that after dropping them in a pan of cool water they will maintain their shape.

Innovation leads to productivity, the greatest challenge in the era of sustainable development: The experience of the “sandal clad innnovators”

Innovation leads to productivity, the greatest challenge in the era of sustainable development

The experience of the “sandal clad innnovators”[1]

René Mendoza V. and Edgar Fernández[2]

 

Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth. Archimedes (287-212 ac)

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. Albert Einstein

 

The economy of the country is growing, but it shows its fragility because of the weight of external factors in the growth, like remittances, the international prices for raw materials and international aid. The importance of productivity underlies the economy as the motor for sustainable development; nevertheless, Nicaragua is behind the countries of the region in practically every product. In this situation of productive stagnation within a context of a slow economy and the increasing importance of the climate change factor, that affects and is affected, innovation is fundamental for raising productivity, more than offers of services and equipment in line with the “green revolution.” But Nicaragua, according to world ratings, is one of the countries with the least amount of innovation. How can innovation then be generated? In this article we reflect on this question from the experiences of innovation with youth and cooperative organizations.

 

Introduction

 

Nicaragua´s economy has been growing in a sustained fashion since 1992 (3.8%), as has its exports (34.5% coefficient as % of GDP)  and investments (26.1% as % of GDP), accompanied by low inflation. It is a growth that goes along with that of the region. But it is a slow growth: between 1950 and 1977 the economy grew by 6%, and with just an investment rate of 17% and 3.1% annual population growth, it had a 2.9% per capita GDP; while between 1992 and 2011, in spite of high investment and low annual population growth of 1.6%, we are achieving only 2.2% per capita GDP, accompanied by the highest poverty in Central America (42.7% with less than US$2/day in 2012, according to FIDEG) and since 1993 only dropping 1% every two years.

 

What explains this slow growth, low per capita GDP and relative persistance of poverty? Acevedo (2013) thinks that the investment is concentrated in higher  capital intensity sectors and greater comparative productivity, like energy, mines, transportation and communications, which generate only a fraction of jobs, while the agricultural, commercial and service sectors generate 76.7% of jobs; that those sectors where there is more investment have less linkages to the rest of the economy, which is why there are not positive externalities; and that the internal demand has expanded on the basis of imports (54.7% coefficient as % of GDP) of non durable goods (from 6.3 as % of GDP in 1994 to 18.4% in 2011), which means that instead of absorbing the national production, the remittances are demanding more imported products.

 

The key is in the agricultural and commerce sectors where most of employment is concentrated. They are low technology sectors that generate little learning, demand low quality and low remunerated labor, that result in low productivity, and that consequently lower the productivity of the economy overall. In reviewing the agricultural technology we find that between 1961 and 2011 the farm area of Nicaragua, in contrast to the rest of the countries of the region, has increased, revealing the historical pattern that the production has increased on the basis of adding area instead of technology; there is less use of farm machinery, 450 tractors/100 has in 1979 to 200 in 1999, while fertilizers/ha, from 0.22 grams in 1983 to 0.7 grams in 2000, and farm and industrial credit has been reduced since 1978. There is then consensus in the need to increase the productivity and the competitiveness of the agricultural and commerce sectors; but what are the determining factors of productivity? The first perspective, the conventional one (e.g. Acevedo 2013) assumes that it is through an increase in mechanized technology, greater use of agrochemicals, infrastructure, increase in credit for investments, and technical assistance, let us say, in line with the “green revolution”, ignoring climate change, for example, that is already a structural factor that cannot easily be avoided (Mendoza, 2014).

 

The second perspective is that of Nuñez (2012) who thinks that the low yields in products like corn, beans, and livestock raising “are affected progressively by the agro-ecological environment as well as by climate change” and proposes a formal modality of “corporative associativity for each crop”, that includes “indicative and programatic state and private planning, associativity and the industrialization of the agricultural production.” Then he clarifies what that model is: “By associativity we understand it to be the horizontal integration of the producers and vertical integration of the value chains, be they at the national or local level, in such a way that it allows public and private leadership to indicatively plan, in other words, voluntarily and democratically plan the performance of a programatically determined product: diagnose and forecast the situation of the crop, bring producers together, design and indicate concrete policies, techniques and practices, follow up on results, movement of levers that would facilitate access to the inputs and information, price and local and Central American market stabilization. A good example of corporative associativity are the agricultural roundtables where the principal institutions connected to a crop come together with the principal aassociations around those crops.” In other words, the government and the business sector would direct (and plan) the productivity of each crop, connecting themselves with leaders of organizations through the agricultural roundtables.

 

Both perspectives ignore three structural factors. First, in the present, climate change is not only affecting agriculture but also agriculture is having an impact on climate change, which is why, at least rationally, it is not possible to increase a productivity that at the same time is contributing to the generation of the green house gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrious oxide); this means rethinking the productive matrix in accordance with the specificities of the territories. Secondly, the technocratic measures of suggesting certain packages of services, ignoring the assymetry of the power relations within which our societies move, end up implicitly supporting the return of what we have called the “modern hacienda” – land concentration, practices of monocropping and plantation systems, accompanied by technology intensiveness in agrochemicals – and in the legitimization of the relations of domination between organizations and those who make up those organizations (Mendoza 2014). And thirdly, both perspectives ignore that productivity requires more than supplies, but innovation on the part of the rural families themselves, accompanied by services with high knowledge generation components. The following sections focus on the issue of innovation, taking into account the role of agriculture in climate change, the asymmetry of power in which the rural societies find themselves immersed in their different spheres – that of the family, the social networks, the organizations and the territories – and in the need that any formal coordination (“roundtables”, “commissions”) might have the rural families as actors and might respond to the specific contexts of the territories, strengthening the autonomy of the grassroots organizations.

 

  1. 1.     Innovation, the motor of productivity

 

Even though innovation is increasingly recognized as the path to development, let us start recognizing that Nicaragua is practically at the tail end of countries in this aspect. In The Global Innovation Index 2013: The Local Dynamics of Innovation Are Well at Play, based on entry indicators (institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market and business sophistication) and on results (knowledge and technology, and creativity) out of 142 countries, Nicaragua is in position 115, while in 2012 it was at 105, it dropped by 10 points, putting itself in last place among the countries of Latin America, while Costa Rica displaced Chile for first place. In the World Bank study (Lederman, Messina, Pienknagura, and Rigolini, 2013, Entrepreneurism in Latin America: Many Businesses and not much Innovation), refering to the 2006-2010 period out of 57 countries evaluated, Nicaragua is in position 52; the study expressed serious doubts about the sustainability of growth in Latin America, t due more to the rebound in the prices of raw materials, and concludes that the emergence of many businesses in Latin America (high entrepreneurism compared with other regions), regardless of their size, show a deficit of innovation expressed in their investment in R+D, patents, introduction of new products and management practices. With these results it seems that the country is touching bottom. What are the conditions for generating innovation? In this section we summarize what is suggested by the two international organizations, and then what a good part of the large innovators are teaching us.

 

1.1  Conditions that can contribute to innovation

 

Let us start from the two international works that refer to innovation, that of the World Bank which is in line with conventional thought, and then with that of the Global Index to get the more micro part. Lederman, et al (2013) think that the growth of the economhy in Latin America is slow because of the lack of innovation on the part of the small and large enterprises, including the Latin American multinationals and the multinationals that operate in Latin America. This is shown in the fact that businesses are introducing new products less frequently, invest little in R+D, their activity in patents is low, the businesses hire people with lower levels of university studies. This World Bank study suggests that in order to have an impact on innovation, in addition to listing aspects like legal rights, transparency, policies refering to industry and commerce, the quality of the human capital and policies for supporting R+D, also needed are policies aimed at increasing competitiveness and addressing the gap in human capital. The former, because entrepreneurial enterprises react better to crises, along the line of the saying that “necessity is the mother of invention”; and the latter, to have an impact on the quality of education, above all on the training of engineers and scientists instead of sociologists and macro-economists that have predominated – according to the study mentioned – in Latin America.

 

This study starts by looking at the work of Schumpeter (1911), taking into consideration that “the successful entrepreneurs are individuals who turn ideas into profitable initiatives,” and adopts a definition of “entrepreneurship that emphasizes innovations for the market”, coherent with the conventional approach of the economy promoted by the World Bank, of freeing up markets in protected sectors – they call it “increasing competition” – conceiving of the private sector as the motor of innovation. In their recommendation on the need for more engineers and scientists, Graph 5[3] shows for Nicaragua the predominance of majors linked to business (economics and business administration – marketing, finance, tourism), engineering and architecture (computers, technology, engineering and general and applied architecture) along with arts and humanities (social sciences, education, esthetics, communication, languages), followed by legal sciences, medicine (biology, chemistry, medicine, nursing) and agriculture.

 

Under the same tent of the free market, liberalization policies and investment climates for promoting innovation, the Global Innovation Index 2013 (GII-2013) focuses on the micro environment of the 142 countries, and recognizing that innovation is no longer restricted to the R+D laboratories and to the publication of scientific articles, but includes social and business innovation, takes on the definition provided by the Oslo Manual (OECD, 2005): “An innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), a new process, a new marketing method, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace organization, or external relations.” If before innovations were carried out by experts in closed, internal and localized places, now GII 2013 thinks that the capacity for innovation is seen more as the ability to exploit new technological combinations, and that it is incremental innovation “without research”.

 

Along these lines, GII 2013 works on the following ideas: 1) innovation centers under the leadership of the large corporations that are the local “champions”, with the participation of the government, businesses, academics and society, developing capacities for innovation in clusters, inter-regional networks and value chains; 2) these “champions” support the innovations with capital and connections, facilitating the creation of knowledge and bridges to the commercialization of ideas; 3) the importance of government policies to attract these “champion businesses” to invest in businesses and ensure the participation of experts; 4) the importance of the tacit knowledge that prevails in local spheres, and that does not respond so much to the parameters of R+D, patents or publications, but to the pysche of individuals, groups and society; 5) connectivity, in this era of communications, it has become a basic human right, because it makes the world smaller interacting and accessing information and knowledge; 6) and the democratization of the innovation to free up the real potential for value creation.

 

From here GII 2013 develops a broad vision for local innovation, encouraging high technology, creative knowledge or industry, building excellence in research, attracting global companies, and stimulating spinoffs. Its approach, coinciding with that of the World Bank (Lederman et al, 2013) in the neoliberal policies, is aimed at local innovation that comes from the confluence of the new growth theory, focused on the intensity of knowledge, and the cluster approach. The importance of leadership stands out in the local innovations, which they assign to the large enterprises that they consider to be “the champions” .

 

1.2  Elements that define innovation

 

From Archimedes to Florence, where a generation of geniuses were concentrated thanks to the Medici brothers, up to Steve Jobs and James Dyson, a lot of water of inventions and innovations has passed under the bridge of humanity. The invention of the wheel in prehistory shortened the distance between places, the telephone reduced our dependency on the wheel, internet eliminated geographic borders and connects people around the world, shortening the innovation cycle and reducing the barriers to innovation. Most of the great findings are inventions, that “did not exist before”, is something unique or a new mechanism, method, composition or process (Wikipedia).

 

The invention is a phase of the concretization of an idea, while innovation is a phase that includes the use of the innovation, the transformation of a production process, and is more incremental implying a change in the status quo. For Schumpeter (1911) innovation is not just a discovery but “the emergence of a technical or organizational novelty in the production process”; for him an innovator is a “business person creator” that promotes the process of “creative destruction” (transformation process that accompanies the innovation) motivated by having temporary monopoly rent before the innovation gets disseminated, that is, for example, the high productivity that an innovation (product, methods, new forms of business organization, new markets and new sources of raw materials) causes.  Along these lines OECD (2005) refers to innovation as the introduction of a new – or improved – product (good or service), process, commercialization or organizational methods inside an organization (company) or in the exterior relations. And to add to this array of expressions of innovation, Drucker (2002) introduced the idea that businesses are no longer competing with products, but with business models that spring from innovation.

 

Under this framework the promotion of innovation moves from the challenge to the status quo, the vision, a different perspective of  the world, high purpose and trust in your own brand. Innovations emerge challenging the status quo, appear as highly technical but respond to a larger context of challenging what is conventional, intolerant and logical: “ If at the beginning, an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it” (Albert Einstein). It is not creating something new out of nothing, but combining existing things: “Creativity is just connecting things.” (Steve Jobs). Innovation is vision and passion, vision which is having a different perspective of the world (that no one else sees in this way), and having the desire to live in this world in a different way, and passion, “the genesis of genius” (Anthony Robbins) is the emotional gasoline that drives the vision, of doing the different things clashing with other ways of being different. In a Harvard University study (Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen, 2009) they discovered that the DNA of the largest innovative business managers included five skills: making associations, questioning, observing, experimenting and creating networks, and that in order to think different you have to act different: “In nearly every case the innovators described their behavior before achieving the idea: Something that they saw, someone who they spoke with, some experiment that they did, or questions that they asked. That behavior was what catalyzed the idea.” This vision and passion has a strong source of inspiration which, according to the designer Philippe Starck, comes from creating something that improves your life: “A good product is one that helps you to improve your life.” Innovation is also having aspirations: “The most dangerous thing is not setting our goal very high and failing, but setting our goal very low and achieving it.” (Michelangelo). Innovation is believing in onself, as Steve Jobs recommended: “ Each person represents the most important brand of all – yourself: How you talk, walk, act and think reflects this brand,” making your way, with courage, like the expression of Albert Einstein at the beginning of this article. Innovation is that an entire complexity becomes something simple.

 

There are different types of innovation. The painter and sculpter Picasso (1881-1973) tells how he created the “bull´s head” (see attached photo): “One day I found amidst of ton of scrap an old bicycle seat and alongside it an old set of rusted handlebars. Immediately I associated the two parts in my imagination. The idea of the bull´s head came to mind without reflecting on it. I just had to solder them (…) maybe I should have thrown out the bull´s head. Throw it in the street, in the ravine, anywhere, but throw it out. Then a worker would have passed by and would have picked it up. Maybe he would have realized that with that bull´s head he could make a seat and handlebars. And he would have done so. It would have been extraordinary.”

 

Ron Rivera, a Nica-North American, invented Filtron (ceramic filter for potable water), which is for treating water in the home at low cost, that makes contaminated water potable, inactivates the bacteria, stores water at the family level, gets rid of the cloudiness of the water and with collodial silver disinfects by deactivating the bacterias that can pass through its micropores, the water is then deposited in a receptable and the water is extracted through a spicket. Inside the Filtron is a filter that can be made by local potters with local materials, under conditions that do not require electricity; this invented product is the “most globalized and famous product of the Nica brand, more than the rum, the coffee or the hammocks” (Lopez, 2009), it is the “design for the other 90%”.

 

In addition to technologies, forms of resistance are also innovations. While different cultures fell before the invaders, the Apaches resisted for centuries, and yet in a few years their resistance was eroded (Brafman and Beckstrom, 2006). Concerning the resistance, the Spanish tried to dominate the Apache tribes, so did the Mexicans and the North Americans… All failed. The Apaches had the nant’an as their leaders, they were very decentralized, they functioned in circles. Their adversaries, like they did with the Aztecs and the Incas, believing that the key was to do away with their leaders in order to control their peoples, did away with the nant’an, who were the leaders of the Apaches, but in contrast to the Aztecs and the Incas, the Apaches did not fall, immediately another nant’an  would emerge, they moved in circles and in a very decentralized form. But in the end they fell. What took apart the Apache society? After centuries of resistance, the North Americans gave cattle to the nant’an; given that the cattle was scarce, the nant’an turned into chiefs with the power to distribute them, and thus their power ceased being symbolic and became material. So everyone wanted to be nant’an, the centralization had begun. The power structure, that had been egalitarian, become hierarchical, and power got concentrated at the top.

 

Also innovative are organizations that have lasted over time. Bill Wilson (1895-1971), an alcoholic, created Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in 1935. He realized that every time that he would go (or was taken) to an expert, he would drink more. He recognized that on his own he could not fight his alcoholism, that it was very easy to rebel against the psychologist, but more difficult to rebel against those who were in the same situation as he was, so getting together with other alcoholics, they met and overcame their alcoholism. Their rules included complete voluntary attendance, you can enter and leave whenever you wanted, the commitment was not to drink for 24 hours, no one and everyone was in charge of the organization.. See: Brafman and Beckstrom (2006).

 

Likewise the revolution of the automobile. In the decade of the 80s the revolution of the automobile was at its height. The successful giant General Motors (GM) began to have problems, and produce poor quality cars; while Toyota was producing the best cars. Some were saying that it was because of the strong unions in GM, and others because of the Japanese culture at Toyota. Surprisingly, Toyota said that with their methodology GM could also reach the quality levels of Toyota. GM had closed the Fremont Plant in California for producing the worst cars due to their internal tensions, absenteeism and inefficiency, so GM told Toyota to test that out in this plant, but using the same personnel. Toyota accepted and introduced its mechanisms (team work, incentives for quality, and ongoing search for the break-even point between centralization and decentralization). Three years later that plant had become one of the most efficient plants of GM. In other words, with the same personnel, the processes can improve and the results flourish. See Drucker (1946) and Brafman and Beckstrom (2006).

 

Finally an innovation observed by Steve Wiggins in a family in Paysandú, Uruguay, as part of a group that was trying to get into the milk market in Sao Paolo. To do so they had to lower their costs based on innovation. One of those innovations is as follows.  A number of families were facing the problem of the theft of their barbed wire, so began to think about how to prevent the theft. If they hired a security guard or made the fencing electrified, their costs would go up instead of down. In the end they came to understand that the buyers of the wire would buy a roll of wire off the thieves, but they were not interested in only 2-3 meter long pieces of wire. So they cut the wire at the length between two posts, and then stapled it to each post. The thieves, when they realized the change made, quit stealing it, because there was no market for the cut wire. Is it just that? More than “cutting wire” it is competitiveness, it is improving the quality of life of the consumers and ranchers, it is a family innovating constantly to lower costs and improve the quality of the milk.

 

Completing this framework, let us remember that we are working in a country that, according to GII-2013 and Lederman et al (2013), is in last place in terms of innovation. The context that we have presented in the introduction tells us that we have had an economy based on natural resources and cheap labor, which is partly why, I think that investing in silver 2016 is going to be a decisive year, but not in the sectors of agriculture and commerce where 7 out of every 10 jobs come from, which has put the breaks on innovation[4]. Nevertheless, Mendoza (2013) shows that the country is entering into a context where there is no more agricultural frontier, which is why the extensive path is now reaching its end, where the advantages of the demographic dividend that began in the 90s will only last until 2035, where there is a pressing need that productivity be coherent with the reduction of the impact of greenhouse gases, and where external factors like international prices for raw materials are in the best of cases uncertain due to the low world economic growth rates predicted. This context could favor innovation. In the face of the historical reality of the country and the new context, what is most urgent in the country is generating innovation and doing so in the rural area. The following sections, based on the experiences of innovation promoted in the rural area between 2012 and 2013, present a summary of innovations that reveal a different way of thinking, then an analysis of the conditions that are blocking and facilitating the innovation processes, and finally policy suggestions.

 

  1. 2.     Innovation in the rural environment

 

In this section we talk about the innovations done, or being done, by “sandal-clad” innovators, in other words, done by the rural families themselves, producers and youth who are sons and daughters of producers. We talk about the innovations that we have been finding and of innovations that we are currently accompanying.

 

2.1  Innovations found

 

In addition to Ron Rivera´s filtron, there are many innovations in the country. Let us mention some of them. The coffee depulper in Matagalpa. According to Kühl (2004:158) in the Pacific zone “coffee was not washed, but they left the ripe cherries to dry in the sun and then they would hull them”, while in Matagalpa in 1880, because of the abundance of water, the process of depulping and washing of coffee was considered, like what was being done in Guatemala, and there were a number of attempts to do so. According to Vogl (1977), Luis Elster made the first try without success, and on that basis Otto Kühl in 1891 was able to make the depulper, including in it some round wooden cylinders with metal staples inserted in its surface which removed the pulp. And Vogl himself says that they accidentally discovered that leaving the gelatinous parchment coffee to ferment for one day made it much easier to remove the sticky honey by washing it with water.

 

Another innovation in 2003 is the grass mincer of Julio Rodríguez Madriz (El Cua), a small rancher. It is a mincer made out of local material, wood and other pieces of vehicles and tools like a machete; it is manually operated. The mincer has the capacity to cut 300 lbs of taiwan grass per hour. It is a very low cost innovation and appropriate for small scale ranchers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A third innovation is the generation of electricity with the flow of water from creek in 2010 by

Concepción Blandón Ferrufino (“Conchito”). Concepción was affected by polio. His neighbors remember, “he would go to school in a little wooden truck that he invented.” Years later he worked on producing energy; he took a broken tape-recorder, adapted the motor and made it possible to receive energy. Then he got his grinder (for sharpening machetes) to function moved by water. Then for the generation of energy: using a hose and a discarded dynamo, which he fixed, he used an old pot that he put a hole in, and the floor to a latrine, completing his work with the “capacitor” (what makes the energy be released), and thus generated electric energy for his family and his brother´s family.

 

Diagram 1.organizational chart

 

Box 1: Vision, action and vision

  • In 1993 I saw that the peasants were making bad deals with the coyote to sell their coffee, and I saw that we could get around the coyote organizing as a cooperative; so we formed this cooperative.
  • Then I saw that the interest we were paying was getting away from us, so with our contributions and other loans we organized credit.
  • Then I saw that even though we were getting good money for the coffee, those earnings were going outside in clothing and food, so we organized a store.
  • Now we see that we need to learn how to invest …

Edmundo López, President

Now we have cooperatives with organizational and technological innovations. Mendoza (2013) tells about an organizational innovation in Guatemala. The Cooperative La Voz que Clama en el Desierto, located in the municipality of San Juan del Atitlán, Guatemala, with very high rates of illiteracy and poverty, achieved a complete success: the children of their members go to study in the universities; all the mayors of the municipality in the last 25 years were members of the cooperative, except once when they did not win. This was possible because the cooperative produced and sold organic coffee to the United States, had good yields and high quality coffee. And how was this possible? The novelty was in their rules (see Diagram 1): in order to be president of the cooperative you had to first have been a member of the Leadership Council; to be a member of the leadership council, you had to first have been a member of the administration commission; to be a member of the administrative commission you have to first have been a member of the health or education commission; you could only be president for two terms, and each period was only 1 year, and the posts in the commissions were for 2 years; each board member was responsible for 6 members. Studying the history of the organization, there was only one president who was re-elected for a second term, it was a cooperative where most of its members had already been president for one term.

 

The José Alfredo Zeledón Cooperative from the municipality of San Juan del Río Coco, Nicaragua, is a first tier organization, autonomous in practice, that has credit services, technical assistance and commercialization (products for its members) , thanks to a strict policy in favor of savings and contributions on the part of its members, and the visionary stubborness of its president, who, in contrast to the cooperative in Guatemala, has continued in that post since the founding of the cooperative. That vision (see Box 1), connected to a zone of peasant resistance, and the strong leadership for implementing the savings and contribution policies, has resulted in this innovation.

 

The Solidaridad Cooperative overcame the bi-annual nature of the coffee harvest and immunized itself against the attack of the coffee rust and anthracnose (Mendoza, 2013a). How was it able to do it? Since 2010 they had combined technical assistance and the on time purchase and application of inputs, credit and organizational policies. From an agreement of the assembly of the cooperatives, the members pruned and cut back a fifth of their total coffee plants each year, so they no longer suffered the myth of “one year coffee is good and the next year it is bad”, they have stable harvests year after year. As a grassroots cooperative they export quality coffee to market niches, get credit from international financial institutions, and have agreements with businesses that sell chemical inputs with two months grace period to pay. In the application of the inputs, the cooperative provides them in kind to its members as the $5 per quintal that fair trade assigns for productivity, and they do it in the precise moment when their coffee fields need it, an action that is supervised directly by the technician of the cooperative.

 

What is the common element in these five innovations? All of them respond  to real and urgent needs, the innovators are persistent, they do not give up, and are characterized by becoming indeependent of the ideas of others, seeking their own ideas. They are innovators in different positions in life, skills, places and use of local resources. In the case of the wire, depulper and water filter, there is a network demanding that innovation, the coffee growers, the ranchers and millions of people. In the case of the mincer and electric energy, they are innovations that respond to family needs and production needs. Behind the innovations are networks and organizations that also are overcoming what in the literature is known as “the dilemma of collective action.”

 

2.2  Innovations of youth and cooperative organizations with external facilitation

 

We present here the innovations that are in process within a framework of product chains and territories on the part of youth and cooperative organizations for the municipalities of El Cua and San Juan del Rio Coco[5]. In both places the accompaniment by way of modules on innovation was similar, but the innovations have taken on a differentiated dynamic, not just in terms of the type of innovations, but in their organization and their content. Territorial factors weight in and the promotion that the youth innovation facilitators themselves provide.

 

2.21 Innovations in Peñas Blancas, El Cuá

 

Most of the innovations are concentrated in the community of Peñas Blancas, and for that reason have a certain emphasis on “community tourism”, followed by coffee, vegetables, citrus, and services like credit. See. Table 1.

 

Table 1. Innovations in Peñas Blancas

Innovation

Network of innovations

Innovators

1.Community tourism
  • Lodging and food
  • Cattle, bananas… to provide food
  • Tourist guide, “La Niña” waterfall…
  • Julia and Francisca Cruz
  • Francisco Cruz
  • Francisco Cruz
  • Lodging
  • Naranjilla
  • Vegetables
  • Orlando Cruz
  • Orlando, Henry
  • Orlando, Henry, Arturo
  • Tourist guide “bird whisperer”, knowledge about birds, and lodging.
  • Abraham Cruz
  • Lodging, food
  • Marcial Gámez… others
  • Lodging, food, auditorium
  • Cooperativa GARBO
2. Eco-diner
  • Diner for tourists and bus passengers, and is market for products from Peñas Blancas
  • Diana Escorcia
  • Ornamental Plants
  • Marisela Cruz
  • Bread and nacatamals, hens and eggs
  • Noema Manzanares
  • Fruit
  • Isabel Manzanares
  • Cream
  • Javier Gadea –from outside of PB
  • Vegetables
  • Abraham, Arturo, Virgilio and Orlando Cruz
  • Coffee
  • Orlando Cruz
  • crafts
  • Martha
Credit for women
  • Seed capital provided by Fondeagro. Credit service to the community.
Pavona Arriba Women´s group

Peñas Blancas Women´s group

3. Credit
  • Pre-microfinance entity: Credit and savings.

 

  • Credit for women (basis: seed capital from Fondeagro, credit service for the community)
  • Diana Escorcia, Orlando Cruz y Francisco Rodríguez
  • Women´s group in  Pavona Arriba and Peñas Blancas
4. Intercultural communications center
  • Knowledge of Peñas Blancas in its different aspects. Communicating in Spanish and English. Musical guide: CREA, Fco-Mandolina, families that play at celebrations
  • Bird guide
  • Farm guide
  • Animal guide
  • Guide to Peñas Blancas cliffs, waterfalls…
  • Medicinal plant guide
  • Luis Carlos García
 

 

 

  • Abraham
  • Inés
  • Francisco Cruz
  • Marisela
5. Coffee roasting
  • Sale of roasted coffee in Peñas Blancas and Matagalpa
Orlando Cruz, Diana Escorcia and Francisco Rodríguez
6. Productivity
  • Increase yields
Bosawas Cooperative
  • Make use of discarded resource for coffee nurseries and other products
Maudilio Zeledon

 

Even though initially doing individual innovations was promoted, in the process networked innovations began emerging, not in a collective form, but individual innovations within a network framework – see for example the list in the second column of various innovations that as a whole form a network of innovators around the diner, community tourism, intercultural communication…This happened with innovative youth and families, while other innovations taken on  as cooperatives continued within this framework. What moves them to do so in networks? The context is pushing them in this direction, like the case of community tourism, which gets stronger by the increase in tourism and its demand for lodging and desires to climb to the top of Peñas Blancas, the farms, the cliff, the birds, the animals: it is also the tourism that is making the youth think about learning English to communicate the reality of their communities and their natural resources. In the case of the diner and its networt of providers, it is the tourism as well as the daily movement of the population by public transportation that has increased in recent years, as well as the coffee crisis since 2012 that is leading them to  value the importance of diversification. In the case of coffee, there is growing pressure to save costs and increase productivity, it is an imperative that can be assumed by the Bosawas Cooperative due to the fact that within it there are families with a coffee growing tradition and the spirit to improve their fields.

 

What are the visions behind these innovations? The virtue of the innovators is their different perspective of the world, of seeing beyond the common view. What have they seen? See Table 2.

 

Table 2. Visions behind the innovations

Innovations

Vision

1. Community tourism Greater world concern for climate change will contribute to there being more tourism to places like Peñas Blancas because of the cliff. Simple forest tourism will be captured by CEN. A tourism that seeks to know animals, birds, farms and having personalized attention in a family environment, is also going to increase. CEN and CREA are investing for the first type of tourism.

Key: what is most important will not be compact and large forests, but corridors between patches of forest; community tourism will be needed that lives with nature and shares its experience of life, supplying itself from its own production and local resources; that is not there so much for the money as to expressing their lifestyle.

 

2. Center for intercultural communication Short term: Tourism, accompanied by concentration of land, is going to increase in Peñas Blancas, to the detriment of the local population of Peñas Blancas; homogenization of the culture to conservation, hiding the privatization.

Long term: Tourism is going to fall due to the exclusion of the local population, whose participation is key for the environmental sustainability of Peñas Blancas.

Key: Recreate the identity of Peñas Blancas through communicating cultures – the local, scientific, art and tourism. The interculturality will continue being the greatest wealth of humanity, and now also including nature

 

3. Diner and network of food providers Food will be scarce to the extent that Peñas Blancas gets privatized and tourism increases. That scarcity will mean that there will be less production and less diversity of production. Tourism will feed off the products that are brought in from outside of Peñas Blancas. Water is going to increase but in a privatized fashion.

This will happen because the producer families will react individually, without impacting the markets and the diners will depend on products from outside of PB.

The most scarce foods will be food that depends on local products, be it diversified (including organic products) and well prepared, done for different publics – tourists, bus passengers, local population. This food can only be produced in networks, people connected among themsevles and to different markets, with an awareness that we are part of something larger than ourselves.

 

4. Credit Short term: The privatization of Peñas Blancas and their control over the environmental issue makes the financial institutions distance themselves from Peñas Blancas, in particular credit for low income families.

Long term: what will be most valuable will be economic diversification compatible with the environment; and Peñas Blancas will have more and more relevance within the contecxt of climate change. External resources will come in through the “environmental” door.

Key: the financial institution that gets close to the people, finances the economic diversification, with climate change as its central focus, that it be sustainable based on local resources, that will win.

 

5. Roasted Coffee Roasted coffee is growing in the country, but roasted coffee of a coffee “that my grandmother used to make” and that comes from the Peñas Blancas cliff – Bosawas, is a coffee with its own brand for the population and for the tourists.

 

6. coffee productivity There is no other option than productivity, but one that at the same time as it increases, addresses climate change, will be the most appropriate. The families with a coffee growing tradition and more innovative spirit, will respond to this demand.

 

 

These 6 networks bringing together various dozens of innovators reveal a general vision for El Cua and specifically for the Peñas Blancas territory. What is that vision? In a context of the increase in tourism, of scarce resources from international aid and of the pressing need to preserve resources like water, the concentration of land and the privatization of the environment in order to capture income from tourism (and the population) is going to get worse, and given the primacy of the environmental discourse on the part of those sectors trying to control the Peñas Blancas cliff and control the tourism, the financial institutions will leave the Peñas Blancas zone, affecting the rural families in their perspectives of increasing their productivity and overall sustainability: consequently, helped also by the coffee crisis caused by the rust and the low prices since 2012, the families will be decapitalizing, migrating, becoming farm workers and selling their land, and with that the food produced in the area itself will get scarce. This perspective, in the long term, is not good for anyone, because with the social erosing the security of the zone itself will be affected.

 

In the face of this reality that is coming, the different innovations and entrepreneurial initiatives end up counteracting it. The rural families can be maintained and even progress through “intelligent” community tourism (that provide lodging and a family environment, knowledge about the ecology and advocacy – with experimentation with biological corridors for birds and animals- favorable to ecology), productive and economic diversification, and alternative financing; doing all these initiatives under the modality of networks – or informal coalitions – among rural families connnected to tourism and the population of the municipality that gets around in public transportation, that revitalizes the cooperatives themselves, and proposes an inclusive perspective of collaboration with even the large income families that present themselves in the area as tourist organizations and even as “non profits” and “protectors of the environment.”

 

 

2.22 Innovations in San Juan del Río Coco

 

Most of the innovations are concentrated in the communities of San Lucas and in Sanmarcanda.

 

Table  3. Innovations in  SJRC

Principal innovations Other innovations in the path of the principal innovation Innovators
Production of more and better honey and ecology in the municipality Overcoming the seasonal migration of bees Yeris Lanzas and family
Better hives so that the bees produce more
Combination of crops with flowers for rainy season (cítrus, granadilla) that at the same time benefits polinization
Honey with different flavors depending on times of the year
Social organization for responding to the demand for scale
Chile that adds more to life Chile sauce producing vinegar from farm products Everth A. Gonzales and family
Garden where the ingredients for the chile sauce are produced, also in the dry season: e.g. drip irrigation gathering coke bottles (with piece of cloth so that the water drips out
Versions of the ingredients for the chile sauce to get into the middle and upper classes, because currently chile sauce is a popular food of the “lower” classes. Make the chile attractive to the eyes: have special types, colorful and good flavor.
Possibility of producing it in ceramic containers.
Honey wine for the majorities Wine made from honey to bring the family together around a meal each weekend. A wine for no longer getting drunk. Darwin Lanzas and family
A honey subproduct, that you experiment with including other organic products to adapt it to healthy eating.
Chile: A new crop and pickled product (conserved) Introduction of new crop to the municipality Rubén Gonzáles and family
Pickled chile (conserved) in containers of up to 5 months to get better prices
Make the jump from parcel owner to farmer
Chocolate Cacao productivity (farm) With Mom and Dad
Collection, drying of cacao
Experimentation in chocolate and subproducts like cajetas for the local market (storefronts and schools)
Organic fertilizer for attacking infestations (bore ) in beans Carlos J. Dávila Matey
Hair cutting-barber shop In addition to copying famous haircuts, seek to propose haircuts depending on the face of your clients. Provide them with advice Olman Cruz
Create an environment (cool place with plants, and messages referring to hair) to have an impact on the mentality of your clients.
Economic autonomy as cooperative and as member families Coop. José Alfredo Zeledón
Organziational change in the cooperative Coop. Caja Rural
Inheritance and farm diversification, winning over markets Coop. Reynerio Tijerino
Commercialization of bananas and generation of technical-organizational consultancies Coop. Carlos Núñez
Generation of income through collecting coffee, administration of credit and intermediation of beans Coop. Che Guevara
Composition of songs Song 1:

Song 2:

Song 3:

Song 4: Innovators

Freddy
Corn degrainer (in initial process). Innovators: Didier Alegría, Norman Elías Tercero, Dora Nelly Moreno  
  • Innovation: Handmade decorations based on tree waste. This innovation stopped due to the fact that the innovator Yuri found work as a domestic worker in SJRC
  • Innovation: Sewing embroidering. This innovation stopped because its innovator Arline got married and went to Chontales
  • Innovation: Cultivating on five levels. This innovation stopped because its innovator Iveth left for Managua

 

In contrast with El Cua-Peñas Blancas, the innovations did not turn into networks but to multiple innovations in the path of ONE innovation, a good part of them with a high technical component. Some have a territorial impact (bees, seasonal migration), others impacts on family networks (chile sauce, chile plants, wine), on neighborhood networks (honey, chocolate) and on organizational changes (cooperatives). Some, like the flower inventory, are contributing to science, something also part of the case of the birds in Peñas Blancas. There is a strong move into processing, be it with chocolate, chile sauce, chiles or wine, and from that phase they are expanding backward in the chain into innovations in the production phase: from chocolate to cacao production, to corn for posol and to the small bananas, from the chile sauce to the family garden, from wine to other products, from the honey-flowers to granadilla, corn…There is concern for health, for introducing nutritional elements be they in the wine, the chile sauce or in the chocolate. These innovations help to revalue what many times gets lost in the kitchen and in the farms, like tomatoes, to reassessing the yard space or the “garbage” like the bottles. Some innovations are a response to seasons of the year, like the flowers in the rainy season or the garden in the dry season when water gets scarce. And there are innovations like the composition of songs or the barber shop that, even though they may appear to be outside of what we are looking for, respond to the initiative of the youth, to the need to grow from their realities and skills, and to the urgency to contribute to the change in their communities.

 

The innovations in the cooperatives are characterized by being more collective actions and their novelty is that they are expanding their areas from coffee toward other crops, working on how to generate their own funds, decisively enter and win over markets, and innovate organizationally.

 

This type of innovations do not emerge by chance, but respond to the reality and challenges of their territory, of SJRC. See the following table.

 

Table 4. Vision behind the innovations

Innovation Vision
1. Production of more and better honey and ecology in the municipality Honey generates income in “dead times” in SJRC that depends on income from coffee between Nov and Feb, and contributes to the environment through their polinization. Many organizations promoted the production of honey; but due to the fact that the bees do not have food in the rainy season, they are transferred to another municipality, with all its costs, the low production and the discouragment that this implies. In the face of this situaiton, innovation will resolve the problem of food during this time contributing to the economy of the municipality- through the income, through contributing to coffee in its struggle against the rust, through raising the productivity of the honey (and other products through polinization), through improving the quality of the honey with different flavors (honey with a coffee flavor between Nov and Feb, citrus flavor in Oct, guagua in May… and through contribuing toward rethinking the farm, e.g. the fence will sustain flowers and fruit, not just wire. The flowers and the bees generate a lot of life
2. Chile that adds more  to life The high dependency on one crop is also expressed on the plate: the diet has been reduced to few ingredients, and chile sauce is disappearing in the country, in addition to the fact that its quality has gone down. Between Feb and July food is even less diverse because there is no garden due to the scarcity of water, there is even no chile production at this time. Getting diversification to become a concern in each home means resolving the diet, making it more diverse and nutritional. This innovation wants to make even a plate with only one ingredient on it respond to what the body needs, with the addition to the chile: “With this chile sauce the beans are even richer.” With the flavor provide a high nutrition substance (food security) and medicinal component, which would lead to revaluing “my Mom´s green thumb” (garden), to intensifying the farm, to test and experiment, and to generate a change in attitude. Any food, with this chile sauce, is more tasty and healthy.
3. Honey wine for the majorities Alcoholism is a serious problem, in addition to the erosion of the families without a space to communicate with one another. Running from this reality and expressing it with machism, getting drunk, has been a path mostly for the poor. Honey wine is organic, it is not like “cane” (rum) with chemicals: more than  “organic liquor” it is a pleasure of the population, health, an inducement for the families to communicate with one another and that they confront their realities and their futures jointly. Honey wine seeks to recover the original objective of drink, which is not to get drunk, but to communicate.
4. Chile: a new and pickled crop (conserved) Depending on just one crop is counterproductive, coming from a family who were fieldhands and now are peasants defines life. Chile is an attempt to introduce a new crop to a zone dominated by the “coffee king”, the novelty is in the attempt to pickle it (conserve, bottle it), above all the innovator seeks to take another step in the life of his family: from fieldhand to plot owners that his parents gave him, he want to take the leap from plot owners to a farmer who diversifies the production and enters into the processing phase.
5. Chocolate In other zones the families produce and sell dry cacao, while in other areas where cacao cooperatives predominate, the families produce cacao and the cooperatives process it (dry it). In SJRC cacao is moving in slowly (18mzs), the families sell dry cacao. There is a space for innovating in production, processing and commercialization. In the part of the processing the innovator is seeking to produce a chocolate with a health impact (diabetes) and aimed at children, as well as subproducts like cajeta and pinol recovering the use of corn for posol (a variety that is being lost in the country), at the same time thinking about how to innovate in the collection of cacao. From plot owner to farmer who goes from processing into production.
6. Hair cutting barbershop The young people want to look like Cristiano Ronaldo (player of real Madrid), Neymar (player of Barcelona). It is haircutting according to style and how famous people wear their hair. The novelty is in studying the forms of your clients faces and advising them on the haircut that will make them most handsome, and that in addition to a barbershop that is be a creative and welcoming space, with sayings that have to do with hair and barbershops. A barbershop that would inspire San Lucas. Sayings: “there is no bald man who is not important.” “he does have one hair of a fool on his head,” “shaved I am someone else” “rejuvenated”; riddles: “black like the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love” = cup of coffee. You get  a haircut and you leave thinking.
7. Innovations of the coops The dependency of the coops on coffee has made them the easy prey of domination. Part of their autonomy passes through the financial part, and above all, of responding to the diversity of products and markets. The cooperatives that respond to that diversity will achieve sustainability and will contribute to the transformation of the municipality.
8. Composition of music From a place like Sanmarcanda where you might least expect to find a songwriter, the innovator is fighting against heaven and earth to write songs. Sanmarcanda is not just a place for coffee, but something unthinkable can be born and grow: a songwriter. Sanmarcanda smells of coffee and is made itself heard through a musical beat.

 

 

What visions do these innovations reveal? The dependency of SJRC on coffee has caused counterproductive effects for them, even for the environment now with the rust and with the reaction of most of the producers, changing from the caturra variety to catimor, a variety that requires less trees (liberation of carbon dioxide). This dependency has to do with the history of the “coffee estate” in the municipality, and with the fact that most of the international organizations have prescribed diversification without generating innovation[6], so the honey combs are falling apart becaue they did not solve the problem of bee migration, the promotion of the family gardens without solving the water situation in the dry season, the push toward productive diversification without solving the market problems. This situation tends to make the concentration of land, the growing primacy of commercial intermediation combined with usury interest rates, and the impoverishment of the families all worse. This latter element is expressed in a high indebtedness of the families from a variety of sources[7]; in the reduction in the diet[8] implying that “my Mom´s green thumb” (garden) has almost been lost over time and the farm is less diversified, particularly between the months of Feb and July when the diet is almost just beans and bananas; and in the alcoholism with its consequences including the erosion of the institutional family.

 

Box 1. Myths that put a stop to innovation

 

  1. You cannot innovate without money
  2. We were born to plant coffee
  3. One person cannot make a difference
  4. Curiosity killed the cat.
  5. Innovation is for learned people
  6. We do not have the DNA of an innovator
  7. Producers do not know anything
  8. Peasants do not have any degrees and therefore do not create ideas
  9. The technicians know it all
  10. The illterate person cannot think
  11. The wise have everything they need
  12. He is right, because he is family
  13. Productivity is a problem of low schooling
  14. Peasant to your machete, never uses his head
  15. These are my oxen and that is what I am going to plow with
  16. What is old and known is worth more than what is new to learn
  17. In any event tomorrow I am going to die
  18. When I die I am taking nothing with me
  19. God made the clever and the stupid, so the clever can live off the stupid
  20. If you are born to be a corncob, it doesn´t matter whether the rainy season was good or bad
  21. If you were born a planter, you won´t leave the corridor
  22. Everything is made up
  23. Be content with little
  24. Only God can create (innovate)
  25. Peasant learns to read (miyth expressed in a song)
  26. Whoever studies and goes back to their community is a failure

The different innovations seek to find the root of the problem and experiment with ways of diversifying the production (farm and garden), processing (pickling-conserving, subproducts of honey, chocolate) and commercialization (bottling, packaging) and seek forms of organization in their families (e.g. the wine that provides spaces for family communication) and neighbors for questioning themselves about the scale of their actions in light of the possible markets. This search is connected to the discovery of the footprints in the history of the families themselves, that were diversified and self sufficient, and that different factors made them “forget” those footprints. The vision that is revealed is that the municipality can change with horizontal diversification (production) and vertical diversification, connected to their own footprints, turning the plot owners into farmers along with “my Mom´s green thumb” (gardens) with multiple effects in terms of productivity and the quality of the products, and of contributing to the environment along the lines of reducing climate change. Rethinking the farm and the municipality, precisely in order to innovate; drawing it differently to the extent that the footprints (and with it the awareness) re-appear; have the diversification enter in through the table and the plate, not as something imported but the result of endogenous innovation. The visions reveal a municipality without “dead times” (months without money and joy), that stagger their income with different products, an environmentally sustainable municipality, with technical innovations that express social changes, a municipality with farms that express production, processing and commercialization. A municipality with families that are not “loitering and falling down” (see footnote no. 7), that make a leap in economic, social and environmental terms, with innovations that free them from debt.

 

This vision could be possible if the innovations promoted by the cooperative and the youth are more and more combined, this has the potential of generating synergies that would transform the municipality.

 

  1. 3.     Institutionality that shapes and inspiration that awakens innovation

 

There is an institutionality that limits and facilitates innnovations. For example, the myths (see Box 1) are an incredible force that puts the breaks on innovation; if a person believes that he “was born stupid” and “is stupid” by nature, then how can he create ideas and innovation? If the so-called scholars believe that the peasant families are ignorant, what innovations can be expected on the part of the peasant families? A first and MONUMENTAL step is un-learning, and this implies dialogue with the myths, understanding the context in which they emerged and evaluating them in the light of the evidence; from there demonstrating the innovations like those presented in section 2.1 are a mental “shock” that makes one discover that the myths are only myths.

 

In this section we reflect on other factors, also institutional, and at the same time we ask ourselves about how to awaken this “worm” of an innovative spirit that each person carries within themselves and in the footprints of their families.

 

3.1  The harshness of the institutional reality

 

The first limiting factor is the economic environment in the territories that, in turn, is connected to the international environment. In SJRC as well as in Peñas Blancas the financial institutions have been pulling out, making credit more expensive, for different reasons; in the case of SJRC because of the economic crisis that is being experienced, because of the systematic corruption of some cooperatives, the over-indebtedness of the families, and because of the number of lawsuits over debt to now defunct Interbank (a bank that went broke at the end of the 90s, where 300 people from SJRC appear as debtors) and because of the weight of the No Payer movement in the municipality; and in the case of Peñas Blancas because of the environmental policies that make it difficult for productive activities to be financed. This situation is connected to international organizations; the environmental policies are global and national, backed by t state institutions and international organizations; and the break up of the cooperatives is due to internal factors of these organizations as well as the support of international organizations (financial and fair trade) for elites that everyone knows are acting behind the backs of the grassroots cooperatives and their members, violating their statutes and the cooperative law[9].

 

This economic crisis in the case of SJRC has to do with the dependency on the coffee crop; and in the case of Peñas Blancas with the primacy of a traditional environmentalism that priortizes large forest areas causing a rift with peasant agroforestry, but coherent with the interests of the tourism industry, and in part also to the relative importance of coffee as “the biggest generator of income.” In the face of this situaiton, when the families feel that coffee is falling into crisis because of the rust and the low prices, they perceive that their organizations are falling into corruption and they are losing their land in the face of the concentration of land in the name of “progress” (SJRC) and in the name of “environmentalism” (Peñas Blancas), the hopelessness increases, the weight of religions grows, conformism builds a nest and the innovators begin to wobble.

 

The dependency on coffee has even the potential of stagnating innovations for diversification. By the fact of receiving C$25,000 for 10 loads of coffee from one manzana in the month of December, it seems to them that it is a crop which really “provides a lot of money”, compared with bananas that each month could provide them C$640 (40 bunches in that same manzana at C$16), or C$7,680 a year, which seems so small to them that it paralizes their energy to sell those plaintains. And if the technicians do the addition for a year, without revealing that C$100 in the month of May is worth 10 times more because of the scarcity of money at that time, than C$100 in December which is the month of coffee, the paralizing effect is even greater. In some innovations like chile and the chile sauce, coffee stopped them: “The chile was there, but because the coffee harvest came, I had to leave the chile.” The belief that “having coffee is having money” is overwhelming. We could say that “it really is the limit for the small producer to bet on only one crop”, and believing that that crop is equal to money, forgetting his food security and his family labor during the entire year; the effect of this is that their social networks get reduced because they are only connected to those who are committed to that crop, they have a market reduced to that crop and their own cooperative organization is reduced to this crop and consequently only to the financial part[10]. It is like extractive activities in Latin America that bet on extracting natural resources and that blocks the innovation for the entire country (cf. The Dutch disease).

 

The mentality one has weighs more than a load of coffee. “Be happy with the little you have”, goes the myth. There are producers that dream about “not being like my father, the fieldhand” and then after jumping over a small mound, stay on that hill. “I learned commerce from my Mom, and then I remained a small farmer.” He did not continue combining commerce with the farming, the mentality of “farmer” separates production and commerce (See also footnote 10). The idea of accumulating under a large-estate-extensive-technology culture predominates, the new elite are constituted with the idea “the more land I have the more power I have”, where productivity does not appear; the peasant families, for their part, are prisoners of that very institutionality, they do not take on the challenge of productivity and prefer to wait for projects, credit, rent land or temporarily migrate to neighboring countries, they end up going into debt and come close to selling their lands. This dynamic is indirectly but effectively supported by the microfinance institutions and by the large export companies, when they provide credit to harvest collectors that give crop lien loans to the peasants and end up dispossessing them of their land.  The mentality of SJRC continues the same pattern since 1935 which was extensive agriculture with a company store on the estate and usury, and concentration of land; under this practice the institutionality has been “making the people go broke and hoarding the land.” The enormous challenge of the innovators is to break with this mentality.

 

Another aspect of the mentality is the combination of the patriarch and his children with formal education where the distance between the peasant who can even read and write and the so-called “scholars” gets even greater. It is common to hear the technicians say that there are no changes in the cooperatives “because the members of the cooperatives have low levels of schooling” and on the peasant´s side hear them repeating  “I don´t have much schooling”, and among the peasants themselves murmurring that “the scholar, the person who had studied is quicker than we are, with practice they can write very fast, add quickly, and we who do not practice, when are we going to be able to grasp and copy everything? They just do it, grab the whiteboard, put a bunch of numbers on it and get you all mixed up.” This distance is evident in the assemblies where people are afraid to question the scholar, and “everyone moves their heads like garrobos.” This situation is reinforced by the dominant model of technical assistance that ignores local knowledge and focuses on crops without contributing to changes that would allow the productivity to improve. Under this institutionality they self-exclude themselves from positions of leadership and to working on innovative processes.

 

The weight of tradition is decisive, which is the reason for the lack of search for new alternatives to deal with the crisis. For the coffee rust everyone says that cutting back in block provides the best results, but they do not do it; in basic grains everyone complains about the low yields, but they continue cultivating them in the same way. In general the producers do not believe in alternative ways of cultivating (organic agriculture, agroecology), because the attempts that existed did not work: e.g. the tomatoes planted by Orlando Cruz were affected by the lack of spraying. The heads of the families (fathers, elders) decide what it going to be planted on the farm, even though some allow their children to experiment and test new things (e.g. Don Chico let his sons grow vegetables even though he did not get involved); an experience of an agroecological crop which has been started is from someone (Matute the musisian) who is not from Peñas Blancas and was able to demonstrate that it was sustainable. He was able to introduce a change in the way of producing, showing that other practices are possible. In the case of Peñas Blancas, El Cua the development projects and studies of CEN and of master degree students, because of lack of rootedness, help to create an aura in the producers about the scholars; and the producers talk about how important the work in common in the cooperative is, but in practice they work individually or as a family, to the extreme that in GARBO they only participate if there is financing.

 

In terms of attitude, we pay attention to the institution of the family. Many young people have to fight with their own family, which can be a powerful obstacle, or a tremendous facilitator; if a member of the family is an alcoholic, is a jealous husband[11] or a father with a lot of lovers, the innovative person tends to lose perspective and be marked by the effects of this family situation; on the other hand, if the family is healthy and values the activity of the person innovating, the entire family fights so that that person might continue innovating, even when that person gets tired. In the case of most of the youth, the institutionality of the inheritance is a strong conditioning factor either in favor or against; in the families where the inheritance is getting set with clarity while their parents are still alive[12], they have conditions favorable for innovation; in families where that definition is delayed and confusing, that situation affects the entire family, it is a disincentive to make efforts on that which might not be yours, and above all, because in many cases the parents block certain innovations thinking that they are losing the power to control their family. In cases where the father is an alcoholic, unconsciously this marks the lifestyle of the family, it fashions in the person a short term, 24 hour mentality, of making the rest live with the uncertainty of “tomorrow he will quit drinking” or “maybe tomorrow he will start drinking again”. In cases where the father of the innovator has lovers, it accentuates the institutionalized myth that “a man who does not drink and does not have lovers does not exist.”

 

The networks have been an interesting response in the case of Peñas Blancas and in general in the cooperatives. Nevertheless, the internal tensions are difficult and shaped by history, at times tensions between families for many years, and other times because of the yearning of some of them to earn money quickly, or the tensions increase when the group is composed of people with too many differences –e.g. in the credit group in Peñas Blancas an external member was desperate to achieve earnings while the other two members were going step by step. In the cooperatives the same thing happens, for example in the GARBO cooperative in each election of the administrative council nearly their entire board has been changed, who then come in with their own accountant, which is why there is no continuity in the organization; in other cases, like for example the José Alfredo Zeledón Cooperative, the permanence of its president since its very founding can, in the long term, end up affecting the growth of the organization, not just because of the dependency on this leadership, but because a cooperative with various services developed and a certain volume of coffee needs a larger number of leaders and needs the rules and policies of cooperativism to be functioning.

 

The territories also have an impact, either in favor or against innovation. SJRC was a coffee estate area, this marked the entire life of the municipality: for being a coffee estate, the indigenous and peasant families who in their past would diversify, accepted and gave in to coffee and, in the beginning, to work as collective cooperatives at the service of the war in the decade of the 80s. Later on and up to now they have continued in the service of coffee and of the new patrons that appear with new discourses, and in addition blessed by national and international institutions. Another zone that was not an estate in the same municipality, like San José de Ojoche, Las Vegas, Matapalo and San Antonio, zones of small farmers and peasant families, have greater autonomy and a better cooperative. History plays an important role in the lives of people. They also have the potential of bringing about change, for example in Peñas Blancas the increase in tourism and the entry of groups like CREA (musical group), including their own studio, makes the place even more attractive for tourism, generating greater opportunities for the community, which can be provoke a response of greater innovation on the part of the local population.

 

Finally, we have run into the myth that “the small producer is not profitable” because of their scale of production. Some innovations that are making the transition into entrepreneurial initiatives require a certain scale (volume) to take larger leaps, so this myth stops and discourages them. Nevertheless, the problem is the slanted approach about volume (or scale) that this myth reveals, as if one family alone would have to produce large volumes, when this large volume can be brought together from various small producers and thus be profitable. A second problem is that the market sees each of them alone and the people respond to the market individually, and everyone believes that you have to produce ONLY for the market. The market can be responded to with volume from various producers – this is the case of the bananas in Sanmarcanda (SJRC), for example, the buyer requires 600 bunches for a truck, which can be reached by 10 producers that have 60 bunches each. So the challenge of innovating emerges in how to collaborate among various producers for a common benefit, under what rules to do so, how to coordinate in time and place. And not forgetting that it is not just something technical, it is looking for the footprints to give strength to this innovation. Francisco Cruz from Peñas Blancas attests to the fact that throughout his life he has worked in collaboration with neighbors to have lard in those times (from 1950-70) when his community was pretty isolated from the cities. Each family had to have 15 pigs a year to have lard throughout the year, so among various neighbors they had the rule of “what I give you, you give back to me in another time”, so everyone had lard during the entire year.  Others testified to the same, even now, for example with the boar (male pig), in order to always have two pigs all the time you do not need to have your own boar, so the one that has one, charges for the mounting: “for each mounting of the boar you receive one piglet.” So it is that we are finding hundred year institutions like the “mano vuelta” (you give me a hand when I need it and I give you a hand when you need it), or sharecropping…Another form of resolving the problem of scale has been organizing into cooperatives. The innovators are there at the moment of thinking about that problem of scale and organization: a chile sauce requires a lot of ingredients, which can be resolved through the extended family or through a network of neighbors. The strength of the innovation comes from the fact that we look for the footprints in our history, that we understand the new context, and that we make progress in the innovations of “together, but not scrambled” to respond to the market and to solve common problems.

 

3.2  What inspires these innovations?

 

Finally we ask ourselves about the origins of our inspiration, what inspires an innovator? Said in another way, what is the ideology of the innovators? For those who profess a religion, this gives them the passion or the “emotional gasoline” to dedicate themselves to the task of evangelization or work with the base communities, be that to “win souls” in favor of their religion or because they believe that helping people makes you more Christian. In politics, in the case of the guerrillas of Latin America, the perspective of the “new man” and the construction of socialism has motivated them; or in the case of capitalism, the possibility of earning profits.

 

The great innovators say that the power to contribute to humanity motivates them, and probably for many of them also the possibility of earning capital, particularly in the innovators since the XX Century. In the case of the youth with whom we have worked, there has been great initial enthusiasm and after a time only about 30% have remained working on it. What do some go and some stay? The culture of waiting and believing that projects are coming (donations) is so accentuated in the country that it has become an obstacle that feeds into the initial enthusiasm and then, given that the donations do not come, they quit. But deeper than this, it has a lot to do with the points of the previous section.

 

One general motivation is the desire to “quit being poor” and to not be like their father or mother[13], this desire results later in becoming aware about what is “being poor” and above all in understanding that that situation of “being poor” is not natural nor divine, but social, and that therefore it is possible to change; the youth, having as their source of inspiration the reality of their own communities, who are experiencing this process and above all the awareness that it can be changed, tend to persist. In some cases the fact of getting to know their own history gives them an even deeper dream, for example, in realizing that their parents were fieldhands and now are  owners of small plots of land, this fact makes them see that their obligation now is to move from being a small plot owner to being a farmer. But what type of farmer? Not the type of farmer who stays on their farm and progresses based on expanding area, but a farmer who progresses through agricultural intensification and connected to markets, and that includes various levels of processing. The trap is dreaming of being a large estate owner under the myth that “the estate provides while the small plot takes”, that progresses through extensive technology and stays only in production. The new model that inspires would be an intelligent, farming family that cultivates and processes, and does it within a framework of networking, where the “farm provides while the estate and the small plot takes.”

 

Another motivation is the self recognition and the recognition of their family, their friends and their community for the innovation that they are carrying out. When they see results to their experiments, even though they may be small successes, this animates them. “I have great news for you, I have seen two quetzals; I could have been mistaken in December when I saw one quetzal; but now, no, I need to find out what they eat, where they make their nests… … (A. Cruz, January 25, 2014); “The bee comes to me in my dreams”. If the fact that their families and communities recognize their work, this added to their own self recognition means then they are on a path that they will not likely abandon; it is the step where the initial criticisms received in their own community take a turn and become “social recognition.”

 

Finally, why do some innovators progress more than others? It will be important to reflect more with the innovators, but now some initial thoughts. The innovators are differentiated by their origins. Ever, Ruben, Freddy and others from Sanmarcanda are the children of fieldhands that became owners of small plots through the agrarian reform, and now are becoming small farmers. Yeris, Darwin, Abraham, Orlando and Maudilio are sons of established small farmers, three of them also have university training, and two continue working on the family farm (Yeris, Darwin), one (Maudilio) combines work in the cooperative with work on the farm. Diana is the daughter of a failed farmer. Probably these footprints mark differences in the growth of them as innovators.

 

Yeris and Abraham stand out, two youth that were born and raised in the same place, and in having the talks and innovator guide discovered things that others do not see. Abraham sees hummingbirds that he can live with on his plot, creating the necessary habitat, which he sees as generating resources for him; he is motivated, provides follow up, observes, systematizes and investigates. In San Lucas everyone see flowers, but Yeris see more than that, he sees food for his bees and deepens his knowledge, does an inventory of the flowers in his farm, then in his community, then in the municipality, and thus discovers that there are flowers with different shapes and notes down how he could domesticate them on his farm. What is most relevant in this case is that the exercise of doing the inventory moved from being an individual task to a family, neighborhood and even community one; the neighboring youth began to observe the flowers around them: “These are the flowers Yeris is looking for.” Orlando and Darwin are inspired by what they have seen (Orlando) or have learned in the University (Darwin), they have the idea that innovation is entrepreneurship of making money quickly, one producing alcohol from any fruit that can be fermented and the other from any activity that generates income, so it is difficult for them to be systematic in observing and investigating.

 

Another group (Ever, Ruben and others who have been inclined to do innovation in crops), because of their technical formation, tends to repeat things already tested (hens, insecticides, etc…). Diana, the daughter of a failed farmer, the result of the alcoholism of her father, seeks to generate income quickly, but clashes with the reality that is harsh,  where innovation needs patient constancy and the cultivation of a long term perspective. Fredy wants to be a great artist, he has the character to attempt it, his challenge is identifying what could really make him different and working on it in the long term.

 

By way of conclusion

 

Productivity in agriculture, commerce, and informal services is fundamental for raising national productivity and making the country grow with equity. Productivity is going to be raised on the basis of innovation. But the country is in last place in terms of innovation, at least among the countries of Latin America. This text talks about an innovation process that we have committed ourselves to.The young innovators and cooperative leaders have shown that, in addition to the 5 DNA elements of the innovator, making associations, questioning, observing, experimenting and creating networks, the DNA is needed of desperately trying to quit being poor and of overcoming the oral culture. These innovators, in contrast with the “creator business person” of Schumpeter, motivated by the monopoly of the initial income, are transformers of their communities, motivated by improving the lives of their families and neighbors.

 

Part of the conditions for these innovation processes are emphasizing the work in certain territories, cluster-like, so that they mutually infect one another; including research to understand the importance of the territories and of the different crops; that any innovation that is begun be experimented with and depend more on endogenous factors; that the innovators have this “innovative worm”; that these innovations be presented at the community, municipality and national levels, precisely to feed into the recognition of the innovators.

 

This year we are going to continue with the innovations, which will be more and more focused on agriculture, the integration of agriculture and ranching, including innovations in the vertical chain of each crop – at the same time maintaining our support for innovations that are outside of this sphere, like music, hair cutting or other innovations, that in the long term also find connections with the producer families[14]. We will continue committed to the grassroots cooperatives as the focus for re-inventing cooperativism; and to the innovative youth, because, in addition, they are the ones who will take on the leadership in the long term in their municipalities.

 

 


 

Bibliography

 

Brafman, O. y Beckstrom, R., 2006, La araña / la estrela de mar: La fuerza imparable de las organizaciones sin mandos.  Barcelona: Urano SA

 

Drucker, P., 2002, Managing in the Next Society

 

Dyer, J., Gregersen, H.B. y Christensen, C., 2009, The innovator’s DNA. Harvard Business Review

 

Külh, E., 2004, Nicaragua y su café. Managua: Hispamer.

 

López, M., 2009, “El Alfarero Fiel” en: Envío, 328. Managua: UCA. http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/3989

 

Mendoza, R., 2003, Análisis de Capacidades Locales para nuevas iniciativas en comercio justo. Guatemala: Universidad Rafael Landívar

 

Mendoza, R., 2013a, “Nicaragua: El café en los tiempos de la roya,” en: Envío 372. Managua: UCA. http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/4653

 

Mendoza, R., 2014, análisis de contexto y de oportunidades para el país. (En fase de escribirse).

 

OECD, 2005, Oslo Manual: Guidelines for collecting and interpreting innovation data. Europa: OECD & EUROSTAT. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/OSLO/EN/OSLO-EN.PDF

 

Schumpeter, J., 1911, The Theory of Economic Development: An inquiry into profits, capital, credit, interest and the business cycle

 

Vogl, A., 1977, Nicaragua con Amor y Humor. Managua: GARCO

 

 



[1] We have been promoting innovation processes for two years in the north central part of the country. This text talks about this process and reflects on the scope and difficulties of the innovation.

[2] Collaborators and co-authors of this article are dozens of youth and cooperative leaders, particularly Abraham and Orlando Cruz, Diana Escorcia, Yeris and Darwin Lanzas, Evert Gonzales, Hulda and Eliseo Miranda.

[3] This graph is based on www.pronicaragua.org which in turn gathers information from 37 of the 56  university members of the CNU. Total registered students (new registrants and active students), 151,096; graduates without diplomas, 19,751; and graduates with diplomas 15,116. I am thankful to Jorge Alvarado for helping me get this information.

[4] In Latin America where extraction has been increasing in recent years, there are studies warning that this factor in contrast stops innovation. Iván Finot (“Is sustainable development possible in Bolivia?” in: La Razón, 29-12-2013) thinks that the Bolivians had the luck that a high economic cycle accompanied them when they faced racism and regionalism, writing it later into the new Constitution. Within this framework Finot states that what is typical of an extractive institutionality is privilege, and that puts a break on innovation, while what is characteristic of an inclusive society is situating everyone in equal opportunities in order to progress on the basis of their own efforts. Finot thinks that extractivism still reigns in Bolivia where some struggle to maintain old privileges and others to achieve new ones. How can one be freed from extractivism and achieve a sustainable economy so that all can live well without depending on the natural resources? 1) what is decisive for development is no longer industrialization but the capacity to innovate industries for the Third World, 2) the greatest advances in innovation and productivity happen in local environments and only later irradiate into the respective country and the world. For that reason, Finot concludes: what is fundamental is having inclusive institutions, knowledge and decentralization towards the local level.

 

[5] We have also begun to work in Waslala and La Dalia, which will be developed in the coming year.

[6] Unfortunately most of the organizations do not study the reality where they intervene. Currently Heifer is promoting the raising-fattening of pigs, in some communities it is going better than in others. Why? This experience falls into the mistakes of many other pig projects, that do not take into account the suggestion of the local populations; “We told them that instead of white pigs that we would buy native pigs from here, but they said that their pigs were better, and look, they died very quickly” (leader of Sanmarcanda). A lot of the success of these projects is not due to the supply of the type of pigs, but to the type of communities where they go; and much of the failure of these projects has to do with the mentality of the organizations that believe that “contributing” is bringing in something from “outside”, that what comes in from outside is always better, without concerning themselves with what different contexts have. This point about the pigs is applicable to other diversification projects that exist in the zone.

[7] The expression that summarizes the life of most of the rural families of SJRC is that they have a logic of “hanging out and falling down”, which means they have money, pay their loans and again go into debt; they are not able to breathe a life without debts. How to innovate so that each family is freed from debts?

[8] Baseline data done by Soynica, Heifer and Green Coffee Mountain at the end of 2013 showed that 55% of the children of SJRC are malnourished. This figure reflects the effects of the dependency of the municipality on coffee and its consequences, in years of low production and low prices for coffee, this gets expressed in the levels of malnourishment of the children: http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2013/12/09/departamentales/173619

[9] This effect of the organizations is when they only see their interests-objectives without prior research about the context in which they are operating, and when they do carry out studies and audits, only give those reports to the managers and presidents of the second tier organizations, so they have complete liberty to keep the first tier cooperatives from knowing about them. In micro, this is the case of any project, full of good intentions, that without research walks around blind, and in the worst of cases creates counterproductive effects of conformism and dependency. One of the innovators, for example, received support from a garden that fit with the innovation that he was carrying out. The garden would work during the rainy season, and when the dry season came it would quit, because our innovator was waiting on the project to resolve the water problem, unconsciously this project made him “stop”, to “wait”, it blocked his thinking, and made him forget that making the garden work in all seasons was in his hands, like his mother and his grandmother had done in the past.

 

[10] One of the innovators stopped in the first phase in seeing that he could earn money with this product, without finishing the innovation he was working on. There is no problem staying in a phase, but there is a problem when this phase has a counterproductive effect from the objective of the innovation, which is contributing to the improvement in the lives of the families. The power of money and the possibility of earning it quickly is blinding and keeps us only in the short term perspective.

 

[11] The institution of marriage is capable of erasing the innovative nature of people. Mostly the women innovators have left the innovative processes that they were committed to on getting married or living with someone. The pretexts (“my husband is jealous”, “I am pregnant, I need to take care of myself”, “I no longer have time”) only make the weight of that institutionality of marriage heavier, which is expressed in a very unequal way, in favor of the men and against the women.

 

[12] Clarity in that the parents set what the inheritance is going to be for the sons and daughters, as well as when they are not going to leave them anything. We have known of many experiences where the inheritance is defined and given to the sons and daughters, and the lives of everyone has improved; we have also known of some cases where the inheritance is not given, but there is clarity about that: “My parents live from the rental of their land, we as sons and daughters were clear that we had to make our own lives without the inheritance of our parents, so we are not protected, so each one has made their own lives” (Esperanza, President Carlos Núñez Cooperative).

[13] Expressions like the following are common: “At the age of 13 I was clear that I did not want to be like my father, I did not want to be a field hand;” “My father would say to me over and over, study son, so that you might be better than me;” “If the tears of my Mother stopped me I was going to end up being a fieldhand like my father.”

 

[14] In the case of the musician we have been supporting him with guitar courses and currently we have connected him to the CREA group, who will support him in a possible recording of a CD. For the case of the innovator of chocolate we are looking for an internship in a chocolate factory that would provide him with experience and motivation.

The image of indigenous peoples: Beyond development?

The image of indigenous peoples: Beyond development?

René Mendoza V. and Edgar Fernández

 

Today is loaded with yesterday, yesterday with the day before, and tomorrow with today

Mayan Thought

 

The day they have poisoned the last river, cut down the last tree, and murdered the last animal, they will realize that money cannot be eaten.
Indigenous Proverb

 

The indigenous and Afrodescendent peoples of the north and south Atlantic of the country have benefitted from an Autonomy Statute since 1987, which was followed by the marking and titling of most of their territories; nevertheless, those territories have been the object of extractive policies and the growing migration of mestizo population who now make up more than 75% of the total population in both regions. How can this situation be understood, when we all want to conserve the Bosawas biosphere, respect the rights of the indigenous peoples to their territories and to exercising their autonomy, and at the same time in practice the Bosawas biosphere is being degraded and the indigenous peoples are being left with only the legal formality of their lands? In this article we seek out two responses, one in the international framework, and another in the light of another municipality outside of the Caribbean Coast.

 

Internationally

 

The history of the United States shows us a first model, of how conventional development with its investments in infrastructure, financial and trade institutions, and mechanized agriculture corralled the indigenous peoples onto “reservations” on the worst land in the country (The Oxford history of the American West, edited por Milner, O’Connor and Sandweiss) , and that at the same time these peoples have been capable of defending themselves and their land and animals in order to survive, of adapting to the times, turning what is new into part of their identity, of prospering, even expanding their territories on the basis of new agreements with their government, and respecting the old ways and continuing in the new day (Diné: A history of the Navajos, by P. Iverson). Countries like Costa Rica and Panama replicated that model of “indian reservations.” A second model has been establishing protected areas including the indigenous populations that inhabit them. This is the case of Brazil with the Amazon and Nicaragua with Bosawas, areas systematically pressured by conventional development. A third model has emerged in the last 10 years in countries like Bolivia and Ecuador where the indigenous movement were able to get leftist governments that promoted the refounding of their republics with new constitutions ensuring their plurinational character; nevertheless, once the euphoria passed, those governments launched extractive policies – this is the case of the TIPNIS (Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park) that the government of Bolivia wants to cut a highway through, and the case of Yasuni where the CONAIE (Federation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) are confronting their government.

 

What similarities do we find in these three models? The conventional development approach underlies them all (“progress is unstoppable, the agricultural frontier will reach the ocean”), what is new is that the extractive policies stopped by the social movements are re-launched by their governments – “big business is achieving what it could not do with governments on the right.” The governments justify it, arguing that in order to reduce poverty money is needed that comes from extracting natural resources (forests, mines and hydrocarbons). This argument expresses the conventional development model that they said they were fighting, and it is the opposite of the indigenous proverb cited above. Secondly, the indigenous peoples are advancing, like the Navajos in the United States, and are resisting like the Guaraníes in Bolivia and the Quechuas in Ecuador. Thirdly, the “reservations”, be they indigenous reservations or natural reserves, are mechanisms that extinguish or are points of support, depending on the capacities of the agency of the peoples. Can the peoples of the Caribbean Coast see themselves in one of these images?

 

The interior image of an indigenous municipality

 

Now let us go into San José de Cusmapa, located 1200 meters high and 248 kms from Managua, let us describe their situation, let us seek to explain it and reveal their paths of life. Cusmapa, according to data from the INEC 2005 Population Census, is a municipality with 95.3% of the population who self identify as indigenous, lacks their own language and a municipality with 87% of its population in poverty and 64.6% in extreme poverty; they have a Royal Title (from the King of Spain) over all the area of the municipality and more, but in practice close to half of their land is already in non-indigenous hands, with a very unequal land ownership where 49.6% of the indigenous families are owners of areas less than 10 mzas in size, while 44% of indigenous and non-indigenous families are owners of areas between 10-50 mzas in size, and 6.5% of non indigenous families have land between 50-500 mzas in size, and with a high level of indigenous migration both inside and outside the country; with a soil use where ranching by non-indigenous hands is increasing, and the forest area was reduced from 32.7% in 1963 to 5.5% in 2001. How is it possible that the population of Cusmapa, having a royal land title backed by the Constitution of the country, has gotten so impoverished, lost their own language, been corralled into mini plots of land, is migrating, having lost control over close to half of their land area, and is suffering the reduction of their forests?

 

The response is that the indigenous families have been pushed to the phase of production that creates the smallest amount of value, and their indigenous philosophy is in conflict with the institutionality of conventional development, which is why year after year they are losing what they most value: land, forests and their production. First, the trade in products that come out of – and arrive into – Cusmapa is centralized in non-indigneous families, who also control the finances for lending money in cash or in kind in exchange for products and/or future labor; given that the indigenous lands formally cannot be impounded, there is no financial institution that is providing them with credit, and given that any product has to pass through the markets, the indigenous families have to respond to the social sector that is centralizing the markets for products and capital. Secondly, the systematic loss of control over their lands and forest began in 1963 when, in order to obtain their recognition as a municipality, they lost land area indicated in their Royal Title. Then since 1972 the ranching families of the neighboring municipality of San Francisco, accompanied by cattle rustling and the indifference of the local judges and the National Guard, moved into the area acquiring land. Then starting in 1990 they lost control of their forest with the passage of environmental laws, and finally the loss of their soil fertility makes it more and more difficult to ensure their own consumption needs, and makes them more dependent on the markets. Thirdly, the fragility of their organization and the harshness of their family institution around inheritance has contributed to their process of dispossession; their indigenous organization is reduced to the defense of the territory based on the Royal Title, while the reality of the possession of the land and the forest is taking a different path; and the institution of land inheritance that in the name of “protecting” the land excludes daughters, restricting even more the capacity and human energy of the families. Fourth, the indigenous life strategies, their idea of reciprocity instead of hoarding and commercializing, of taking advantage of the forest and ensuring its sustainability, and of defending the extended family as the basis of their social organization, does not have the backing of the conventional development institutions.

 

In spite of the fact that these points show that in Cusmapa the indigenous are not in control, behind these processes of dispossession, like the Navajo people, the inhabitants of Cusmapa are resisting and moving forward. Their strategy of productive diversification they have expanded to crafts based on pine needles and to other forms of organization – cooperative and association, in addition to the Indigenous People and the institution of the municipal government. The women, accompanied in many cases by their husbands, have burst into artesanry, and have assumed the leadership of the different institutions and organizations that exist in the municipality: the Municipal Government, the cooperative of women craftmakers, the Indigenous People´s organization, and the association for community development that is providing credit services even though at a very small scale. And even with the great spacial variability, including migration toward other municipalities in the country and outside the country, the old instituiton of the extended family as a common space of formation is maintained and is recreated with the changes of globalization (technology, international aid, remittances).

 

Beyond conventional development?

 

Let us return to the question at the beginning of the article, referring to the dilemma of collective action, of intending one thing and then doing the opposite, of advancing on the formal level but going backwards in reality. The view on the international level and then delving into the reality of San José de Cusmapa allowed us to propose new questions for ourselves. Is Cusmapa, in its dispossession and progress, a reflection of the present and/or future for the peoples of the Caribbean Coast? Are the institutional models an image also for the population of Cusmapa?

 

Two things are left clear for us. What happens in the country, and in any of its regions and municipalities, is not unconnected to what is happening in the world, which is why it is important that we locate ourselves in the light of the multiple images. Conventional development is not the only path, there are paths beyond that development; and within this framework cultural diversity “has an intrinsic value for development as well as for social cohesion and peace,” according to the Universal Declaration of UNESCO on Cultural Diversity in 2001. The development vision of indigenous peoples and conventional development should complement one another, and as such be assumed with their consequences.

 

From all of this, the financial institutions need to innovate with their collateral systems so that, responding to the different development models, they might provide a type of credit that at the same time protects the indigenous lands, gives them decisive points of support in order to make their paths viable; the same with the product markets so that commercial intermediation might make the indigenous products viable for better markets. That the environmental policies might recognize that the remnants of the forests are there thanks to the indigenous peoples who produced them, which is why their management should be passed over to local hands in coherence with the indigenous philosophy about nature understood as a living being. That the indigenous organizations need to open their eyes to the reality that they are not governing their territories, starting from the fact that the properties have superimposed land titles, to the importance of working on the institutionality of the markets to make their paths viable. That the women might  be subjects of inheritances and that the notion of work as a right to inheritance be re-conceptualized, to include work in the home, in the garden, in the farm and in human reproduction. And paraphrasing the Pope in relation to Cuba, the indigenous peoples need to open themselves up to the world and at the same time the world needs to open itself up to indigenous peoples.

 

Taking a look at the history of the indigenous peoples is an image of dispossession that is shameful for humanity. Overcoming this shame, we find images of resistance, of other ways of life and vision, like Mayan thought and the indigenous proverbs quoted in the beginning, that enrich humanity. Like the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory, each small change in our learning that goes beyond development can have a big impact in the long term and in the depth of history. Let us remember, “the flapping of the wings of a butterfly can be felt on the other side of the world” (Chinese proverb).

 

 



 

Immersion, Insertion, Writing and Dialogue A Path for Learning for Territorial Development

René Mendoza V.[1]

 

Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead

 

Why do institutions like NITLAPAN exist? What is the purpose of the people working in such institutions? Why do people go to institutions of higher education? Beyond the apparently obvious responses to these questions, I address these reasons and reflect on them in this essay.

 

In doing so I find that teaching has been reduced to the classroom and to status, and with it, the gap between people with professional education and the rest of society is growing. Formation is giving way to education, and learning to teaching, and knowledge to status. In contrast to the period between 1950 and 1985, where there were less people with higher education and more thinking in Latin America, e.g. the dependency theory, liberation theology and the pedagogy of the oppressed – the paradox of the last 25 years is that there are more people with higher education and less thinking – or only repetition of the neoliberal approach.

 

In this text I examine university education, and I reflect on the experience of the Research and Development  Institute (NITLAPAN)[2]. On this basis, I introduce immersion, insertion, writing and dialogue as fundamental elements for working on territorial development, which leads to personal change and change in thinking, that have the potential to imprint meaning on the synergy of research, learning and development actions, that in turn might contribute to the formation of human skills for transforming our societies.

 

 

  1. 1.     Logic of university education

 

In this section I lay out part of the university rationale on teaching in the last 30 years, I point out some structural causes that are reinforcing this logic, sketch out tendencies in some universities around “international accreditation”, and finally I attempt a critical reflection on this way of thinking and proceeding.

 

“Did you finish high school?”, I asked Ariel Cruz, an 18 year old young man from Peñas Blancas (in the municipality of El Cuá). I did not have to wait for his response, “The thing is we are not interested in studying, because the people who have studied are there without work, and with nothing; they are worse off than I am.” In terms of numbers, there is a multitud of professionals; there is almost no community in the country that does not have young graduates of Universities and technical schools. In spite of what young Ariel told me, on Saturdays the buses are full of young people leaving their communities, interested in studying. In terms of quality, multiple voices say that “that is where the problem is”; some signs in this direction are the fact that people talk about “garage universities”, that seek more to accumulate capital than to train people; the growing competition for students, which has led to multiple majors and degrees depending on the market demand (linked to business administration, law and agronomy), and not so much on the demand of society or on the type of society that we want to build; majors that graduate with a very expensive “additional course” instead of requiring research expressed in a thesis; majors that prioritize diplomas over education, and therefore Universities interested in organizing devalued doctorates; doing consultancies instead of research; having teaching staff practically without publications (and without doctorates). All these practices make it seem that the end (formation) has become the means, and the means (administration, status and a job)  an end in itself.

 

In the midst of this reality, in 2012 the CNU (National Council of Universities) decided that the universities of the country should have international accreditation. This means that the universities have to have teaching staff at the level of masters degrees and especially doctorates, quality teaching by being combined with research, which is shown through academic publications, and that the physical and technology investments have to be adequate, etc. How are the universities going to deal with this challenge? International accreditation is a great opportunity for the universities to take a leap in terms of their quality, and for education to really be its purpose.

 

Nevertheless, other signs are joining the ones already mentioned. P. Marchetti, advisor to the Rafael Landivar University in Guatemala, evaluated the state of the universities: “The Masters programs in the Universities of Central America are a good last year of the licentiate or engineering degrees[3].” His opinion is not unique, we found it in various studies that were carried out within the framework of CLACSO (Latin American Social Science Council). Now with international accreditation it seems that the universities want to pass without improving, thus they are multiplying masters programs without really being masters, they are getting involved in organizing doctoral programs in order to have teachers with doctorates however they can, and some universitites are embracing “University Social Responsibility” – following the style of the private enterprises that camoflauge their thirst for capital by embracing Business Social Responsibility – which is promoting “social service” so that the students might “put into practice what they have learned.”  On the other hand, the international accreditation industry, to a certain extent, is facilitating or legitimizing that attitude of passing without improving, because this industry is done by companies-institutions that are competing with one another to find markets (Universities with an interest in getting accredited), not so much to make the universities improve, a practice that would coincide with to the universities´ strategy of passing with formal and cosmetic changes.

 

Why is this opportunity not taken advantage of in order to really change? The members of the Society of Jesus with universities and high schools tend to say: “ we are forming the leaders of these countries,” meaning that the academic level is very high. But this perspective is countered by: “seeing the type of governments that we have, what kind of leaders have you formed!” A different perspective was provided in 1993 by the then President of the UCA in Managua, X. Gorostiaga and the then director of Nitlapan, P. Marchetti, both Jesuit priests, who asked themselves, “What are we teaching in the universities?” They themselves responded: we are teaching from imported manuals, distancing the students from their own reality; in business administration we are teaching about the realities of large businesses, when most of the businesses in this country are small enterprises[4]; Gorostiaga (1993) placed these facts within the global context where neoliberalism was coopting the Universities.[5] It was a self critique of the UCAs of Central America and of the Society of Jesus itself. That reflection underlies the separation between research, learning and development actions, a separation that has gotten even worse today. Other scholars go beyond this, stating that there is no research, that what exists are consultancies where the donors define the very questions. Aware of these explanations, in the following section I reflect on a part of the experience of Nitlapan.

 

  1. 2.     Nitlapan, a privileged space for questioning the focuses on learning, research and development

 

Nitlapan was founded due to the impossibility of combining ressearch, develop,ent and learning in the schools of the UCA, as P. Marchetti remembered in his speech on the 25th Anniversary of Nitlapan and the 20th Anniversary of the Local Development Fund (FDL):

 

On day in August of 1988, Fr. Cesar Jerez and Fr. Otilio Miranda called me into the office of the President. César, in his direct style, said: “Well, Peter, this your bus stop. Your team mixed in with the teachers is not going to work. They are like oil and water. Too much tension. I think that your people have a great future for the UCA, but with a lot of autonomy in terms of the UCA teachers. I am going to give you general power of attorney over a research and peasant action institute that you should start right now.” (…) Feeling like a failure in my attempts to change the UCA, I left without knowing what to do.

 

25 years later, “each time I come to Nitlapan, I find it reviewing its actions in a self critical manner,” said L. Baez, a member of the Advisory Council of Nitlapan, in a workshop in the beginning of 2013. With this spirit in the origins of Nitlapan and its openness to self-critique, we note down our tensions in this section.

 

The connection between research and development, and between the legal aspect and development actions, is strong in discourse, but diluted in practice, or strong in some periods and weak in others. When high quality teaching-learning is added to this, the results at the institutional level reveal the weaknesses: researchers and development promoters of Nitlapan that teach classes in different majors, do it as individuals, which in general is a praiseworthy contribution, but something that could be even better for Nitlapan, for the quality of the teaching, as well as for the students. Why is the UCA, its schools and institutions like Nitlapan, not able to create conditions that would facilitate the research-teaching (learning) combination in such a way that the students would benefit, the teachers would learn more, and the programs of institutions like Nitlapan might improve? This question seems to be simple when we think about the fact that Nitlapan, like the different schools, are part of the same university, but it happens that this has not been resolved for decades. Structures really do have a lot of weight: there are walls that separate research, development and learning, walls that extend beyond the good intentions of having a “research university”; market forces like a magnet are influencing the selection of majors and their content, attracting the soul of the staff who will not do research nor teach if it is not through a consultancy, and set the prices of the majors in such as way that if there is a financial deficit, they will apply the increase in tuition, a measure that excludes low income social sectors; and like the markets, the status of their titles makes the people in those positions repeat phrases that the ancient institutions of the Roman Catholic Church say: “we are the ones who move, the rest should respect us (obey).”

 

Nitlapan has a strategic plan that mandates doing territorial development, to combine research and development. What then prevents it from being a learning organization? There are some who believe that it is because of the power relationships, that the directors of the programs in the Institute are resistant to change, because they are managing resources, or have made the institution their “modus vivendi.” There are others who think it is the lack of a clear definition in the territorial development approaches. And there are others that say, “Nitlapan has no direction”, with that they mean that Nitlapan lacks vision (we would say insertion). Between 2012 and 2013 Nitlapan has made changes in internal organization, rotation of directors, including the strengthening of intermediate leaders as territorial coordinators in 7 territories, which responds to the argument of “power relationships”. Also work has also been done on a territorial development approach through various workshops and studies, which was the beginning of a response to the argument of knowledge. There is movement in Nitlapan and in the territories, but do these movements express changes in Nitlapan? We have doubts about that. What are those doubts based on?

 

“I am a technician, not a researcher,” said a member of Nitlapan when we asked him to tell us about the reality of the municipality where he was working; the research-action duality governs our minds. In pressuring to have the staff move forward with more thought, one of the coordinators responded; “we have a plan, everything is clear, we only have to do, do and do”. It reminded me of what a teacher had told me was her secret to teaching: “ each year I grab the same papers and repeat the same class, and if someone asks me a different question, I play with it, “an old rooster can kill with its wing”. It is not the reality that is teaching, according to what they are telling us, but the pre-defined plan (of technical assistance or teaching) that rules. In the midst of these tensions, one of the directors reflected: “we have never asked our technicians to think, even at one time it was said that you had to hire ‘ignorant technicians’ to be more efficient, who execute exactly as asked, that they would not waste time asking or reading “how do you want us to think now?” – he ended, questioning me . The mentality of the large estate owners where they are looking  for “ignorant” workers who only execute (“respect”) what the foreman tells them, without thinking, had also penetrated the institution. [6] The reality appears more obstinate, and the institution of “not thinking” more ingrained than imagined.

 

Crossing over from the Pacific to the Caribbean Coast, another type of institutionality hits us, “If you are not from the Coast, you do not understand the Coast, unless you are white.” In our institutions social differences count, and so do ethnic differences; when staff with certain resources are better educated, then the staff with less resources, instead of making an effort to learn from them, and the better educated, instead of reducing their arrogance, they end up creating tension. When the ethnic differences are added to the social differences, the situation is more complicated, the challenge of interculturality is really a big challenge in the communities of the Coast, and in any corner of the world, and it also exists among intellectuals, the discrimination is both ways – from the Pacific to the Coast, and viceversa, even though clearly it is a different degree of discrimination.[7] The population of the Coast has observed and experienced how those from “the Pacific country” believe that there is only one Nicaragua and only one country, “that when they are in the Coast they are in their country”, and that if things do not work out the way they think they should, they think it is because the people of the Coast are “backward”, and they are not recognizing the depth of the historical, cultural, productive, ecological, religious and ideological differences between the three countries – the Pacific, the Interior and the Atlantic, and between the two Nicaraguas. This arrogant attitude in line with the modernization theory[8] of the Pacific, contributes to the fact that the staff from the Coast and those from the Pacific are not able to create spaces for mutual learning, and end up covering over their own deficiencies.

 

These attitudes and perspectives can also be observed when research is done in any indigenous community in the Caribbean Coast. Because of a tradition imposed by German aid since the beginning of the 90s, the people interviewed or who participate in a workshop are paid, because “they are losing their time and that is why they have to be paid,” and because “the research and the trainings are not useful for the communities.”[9] Contextualizing this situation, D. Kaimowitz observed that this idea of payment is related to an economic model where what prevails are the projects/transfers, and not the productive economy, which is why one form of accumulating is accessing those transfers, and not improving production; E. Fernández, after studying the community of Mukuswas in 2004, observed: “they live so far from the municipal capital of Bonanza and since they produce only for their own consumption, the only way of getting cash is that some go out to sell wild boars, and the leaders charge the consultants and the organizations for “training them.” The challenge remains intact: the research and other project activities need to be useful for the communities, something that will happen if the relations between the indigenous population and the researchers improve.

 

More dramatic is listening to the peasant families with whom Nitlapan began its work at the end of the 80s: “Nitlapan has changed, before they used to walk in, sleep in our homes, ride on mules; now they come in big SUVs with their windows closed, they get out for the workshop and then they get back in their car, leaving us in the dust.” (leader from San Ignacio, Matiguás). M Naira, a territorial coordinator of Nitlapan, also heard a similar story in Somotillo where the people of Nitlapan are known as “the people of the Prado”, in reference to the brand of one of the SUVs. It surely is not a matter of changing from a vehicle to a mule necessarily, but these words reveal the distance and the wall that has grown between Nitlapan and the families with whom we work. And that wall or distance is repeated with a different nuance inside the Institute, in being concerned about the formation of young researchers, we were questioned by one of the directors: “ you are out of date, those times when the director sat down to review the work of the youth is over with, now we are decentralized and we are involved in 2 to 3 works at one time; there is no time to be forming people.” Each new element that we add makes us see the reality that structures count: it is not just a matter of “ignorant technicians” and of “Dons” (the way the technicians refer to the directors of Nitlapan), but also institutional conditions (distance, walls, absence of mentored formation) that are turning its back on the human potential of new professionals that are joining Nitalapan.

 

That distance is accentuated also on the side of those who are “educated.” In a workshop in El Salvador as part of the facilitating team, I committed the “sin” of recognizing that I had doubts about the approach and methodology that we were proposing; doubt is key in the social sciences, while in disciplines like economics and law there are no doubts, the categories and laws are clear. In the face of the “sin”, immediately an international consultant said that he had to rework that topic again, because the facilitator himself had “doubts”. Later on my colleague with whom I was facilitating, in a tone of scolding said to me, “if you are the facilitator, it’s because even if you don’t know, you do; if you ask a question, that shows that you do not know; the people hired you to tell them clearly how and where to go, and not to be questioning; if you express doubts, they’re not even going to pay you.” From that logic, getting in and out of an SUV is coherent with the status of “the one who knows”. Appearance matters, not what is under the iceberg. Another colleague told me about her experience with a microfinance institution; “we were giving technical assistance to their clients, later we would write out “in peasant language” (simple language) the receipt so that one copy would stay with the producer family, and another copy would go to the microfinance entity, but the latter rejected the receipt, saying that it showed that we didn’t know how to do it, that we should write in appropriate language, in other words using technical language.” In a workshop on the effects of the coffee rust with peasant families in San Juan del Río Coco in March 2013, an agronomist said that the producers do not pay attention to the technical recommendations, and immediately a producer reacted, “and how am I going to pay attention if you did not even come to see my farm.” The Universities teach to teach and not to learn, not to listen to and learn from the producers, not to take notes from them. “I left my community for the University, because in the University you learn, while in the community there is nothing to learn” – educated people tend to say.

 

If we enter into the life of a faculty and the majors they offer we are going to face also a large amount of tensions that touch on the institutionality  of the hard mdrive– paid-by-the-hour professors, use of manuals, teaching without research, professors without publications, banking pedagogy, ideology of teaching, the more responsibility one has the less immersion and more distance from the students[10], etc. And behind these practices we will find myths, hard institutions and the force of power relationships. So when we talk about connections between research, teaching – learning and development, we can stay on the level of appearances and say that we are changing, or we can pay attention to the fact that we are on territories where things are getting difficult, and where the challenges of changing and taking advantage of opportunities to improve are doubly complicated. How can we change? We are interested in real changes; so the following two sections sketch out four elements that, if put into practice, have the potential of challenging the status quo of our reality, and helping us to change gradually and progressively. See the attached diagram with the four elements moved by learning.

 

  1. 3.     Immersion and insertion,  political perspective and practice

 

P. Marchetti used to tell us that living with peasant families in Matiguas, sleeping in beds made of sticks, and bitten by flees during the night, he understood the harshness of being forgotten, which is worse than being excluded, that social apartheid in which peasant society found itself[11]; it was the decade of the 80s where thousands of young people went out to do literacy training, lived with the families where they were treated as sons and daughters – that experience that even today thousands of people remember as something that changed their lives[12]. The immersion – used a lot by anthropologists and as part of the method of participant observation – is a powerful way of experiencing the lives of other people, it is direct experience that, as P. Senge (1990)[13] says, provides the opportunity of “re-perceiving  the world and our relationship to that world,” and that helps organizations´ policies and strategies to make a difference, as R. Eyben (2004)[14] says, “it provides the type of learning that helps the agencies (organizations in general) respond intelligently in different and unpredictable circumstances.”

 

Immersion produces ideas because it has a personal transformative impact. S. Sheppard, the director of the Winds of Peace Foundation, told about what caught his attention in arriving at the Managua airport: “I saw a young woman hugging a Nicaraguan woman, both were crying, I understood that they were saying goodbye to one another; I’m sure that both of them will never forget that moment, in fact their lives changed with that experience of sharing life for a time. Formation is that, it’s as simple as that.” Yes, so simple, but we are not doing it in the universities of Central America, and I do not know of any organization whose staff does immersion, something that some of the personnel  did in the beginning of Nitlapan, and that stopped being done – something that the peasant of San Ignacio (Matiguas)  testified to in the previous section.

 

In the middle of the 80s, P. Marchetti, who later on would found Nitlapan, told us about his own experience in an informal conversation that we had in March 2013:

 

I was in Midinra and CIERA and I realized that Midinra  did not know what the peasantry was about. In August 1980 I published in a IFAD report that the Popular Sandinista Revolution was letting the possibility of the peasant worker alliance slip away. There was no direct contact with the Nicaraguan peasantry. I told myself: I cannot continue working in MIDINRA and CIERA, because they do not know the peasantry. On the weekends I would go to live in El Arenal, one of the first places of rural organization of the FSLN, where the nomeclatura would go to celebrate Pikin Guerrero without any idea about what was happening in the lives of the peasants of El Arenal after 1979. I did not do it because I was a Jesuit, nor for the ideals of insertion of the Society of Jesus. I did it for professional and political reasons. I brought that practice from Chile, there we took over land, breaking the law; I would spend the night with the peasants, talked all night, there we formed an alliance, and we took the land. It is a political action. If you don’t sleep and get up with the peasantry at 4 in the morning, and you begin to talk with the women who are making the food, you cannot understand what is really happening in the countryside.

 

When I went to Matiguas, a territory liberated from the contras in 1984, from the immersion I came upon the discourse of the Contras, the macro, meso  and micro factors behind the insurrection of the peasantry against the FSLN, as well as the fissures between the discourse and the action of the Contras. At times I would stay one week with some family to understand in depth what was happening to the family production systems in the war. Without passing the night in the homes of the leaders, I never would have been able to talk with them about the faults of the Contras. When these leaders forced the Contras to move the war 40 kms east or lose two thousand of their combatants, I was surprised because I never would have thought such a thing could happen.

 

Immersion is a key element in all the alliances between the peasantry and the urban intellectuals that I know of in Latin America. You cannot insert yourself into the peasant political mobilization without having gone through immersion. Political insertion is the normal extension of immersion, and the fundamental reason to opt for an immersed style in the first place. The human quality of the insertion is only tested in the insertion in the struggles of the peasantry.

 

A. Grigsby, also a founder of Nitlapan along with P. Marchetti, while he was introducing me to the zone of Carazo in 1990 told me about his immersion at the end of the 70s:

 

In those communities of Francia and San Ignacio I was immersed with the peasantry for years, combining it with my studies in the Central America Colegio. I lived with them, and helped them in their work. One day, before 1979, Edgardo García showed up, a leader of the ATC, and he found me carrying bags of coffee with the peasants to a truck. He told me that he recognized my commitment, but that it was urgent that we join the insurrection. We had similar ideals about change, but also strong differences: for me the most strategic thing was the alliance with the peasantry, for him it was joining the armed struggle.

 

From both of them it is important to locate the context that these experiences refer to, a context of insurrection and revolution that both leaders are contributing to by “swimming against the current.”[15] Later we make a distinction between what is immersion and insertion. Immersion is living, taking our own shoes off completely to be with the excluded who are in struggle (e.g. for land and for territory, for their dignity, for being peasants and farm owners, for their identity, for managing markets and value chains). Here insertion happens in so far as we build alliances with the excluded families – and without alliances territorial development is not possible, for example. Insertion is political struggle  and long term perspective, and immersion makes it concrete, gives it meaning, and opens up understanding.[16]. Insertion is inducing a process (political struggle), while immersion is allowing oneself “to be taken” by the reality of “the other”. Insertion is perspective (theory) and immersion is path (method).Immersion makes the insertion concrete and gives it content, and it in turn provides meaning and perspective to the immersion.

 

Because of a mixture of the influence of the leadership of Nitlapan, sympathies with the revolution and pesonal commitment, a part of a group of young professionals in the first phase of Nitlapan did immersion and insertion. As a result Nitlapan contributed to the country with a peasant-farmer perspective that challenged the policies at the end of the 80s and the first half of the 90s[17], and worked on a concrete alternative like the micro finance institution known as the Local Development Fund (LDF), and provided proposals for change within the very being of the Universities – like the inaugural lecture of 1993 prepared by the President Gorostiaga and the leadership of the Nitlapan. It sought what their adjective at that time indicated: “alternative.” In that first phase a good part of its staff did this practice of immersion. There were two expressions that summarized this practice: “putting ourselves in the shoes of the poor families” and “throwing ourselves into the water without knowing how to swim.” The first expression indicated the need of locating ourselves in the situation of the families in order to try to understand them; in the second, the need of not waiting “to learn how to swim” outside of the “water”, that you have to just dare to do it. And how do you dare to do it? This is where a third expression fit well: “let the wind blow and take you where it wills.” This is a biblical phrase that repeated in our context, told us to allow the people to matter to us, let the reality of the people to take us. And combined with “allowing ourselves to be taken by the wind”, encouraged us to learn to the extent that we were working with the families, that led to the parable of “kicking the dog”, which we present in the attached box.

 

Over the years this situation changed, to such an extent that up until 2012 there was no immersion – and maybe no insertion either- in Nitlapan nor in the universities of Central America. When there is no immersion, the second, third and fourth expressions just mentioned do not make sense, they can be used in discourse but they are void of content. Not only is there no immersion, but nor is the insertion obvious: the sense of commitment of seeking something alternative, that it is “time to sow” has disappeared – in fact the very adjective “alternative” was left out and Nitlapan appeared as just the “Research and Development Institute”. In becoming aware of this situation, one of the directors, A. Ruíz, reflected: “Before we had a commitment and awareness of changing, we would go to the countryside and we would stay with the families, now the youth do not have that passion. Nitlapan has become a job. What has happened?”

 

A first response is that we tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the other people, without first taking off the shoes we had on, so our understanding of the families was left truncated[18]. A second response is that this begins to happen from before the professional joins Nitlapan, the universities are educating by making us take off our “shoes of the people”, and making us put on the shoes of “the know-it-all”. A third response an engineer provided: “what did I study for? Don´t tell me to learn from the people. I came from there  and went to the university to learn!” A fourth response E. Fernández provided, co-founder of Nitlapan: “the youth that were part of the founding group have aged physically and mentally; this leadership is not doing immersion, which is why they are not inspiring anyone; in contrast, the first group of youth were inspired by the leadership of that time who did immersion.” A fifth response is that the logic of projects penetrated so deeply into Nitlapan that it made it abandon the thinking about the political, it de-politicized it, the immersion was devalued and insertion was replaced by international dependency, a logic that induces you to respond to donors instead of responding to the population who are seen as “beneficiaries”;[19]if the logic is that you learn to swim outside the “water”, then why do immersion in the water? A sixth response A. Ruíz explained, “Nitlapan became an enterprise, it provided services, as a business we see clients, we look for clients where-ever they may be, without caring whether we are generating development or not, it is business, that is why the sense of forming, of generating ideas and of inspiring no longer fit.”[20]A seventh response P. Marchetti expressed: “Credit made us get out of this; there was a moment when we said that we cannot work with the leaders, that was an option against immersion; and look now, we are trying to go back to those roots, because we see that the communal bank method with women is growing.” From these responses I deduce how an institution turns its purpose (changes in society, development) into means, and the means (bureaucracy that administers resources, culture of implementation, of doing planning) into the end, how we define the leaders and subjects as beneficiaries, and then as clients, and how we intellectuals are turning ourselves into technocrats, depoliticizing ourselves and making ourselves comfortable on the basis of distancing ourselves ever more from the population with whom we are working, and building walls between the families of the countryside and those of the city, and the intelligensia garrisoned in organizations.

 

These facts have become institutionalized, they are now givens (taken for granted), so natural that not even the international allies that do immersion are able to awaken us: Antwerp University has been an ally of Nitlapan – UCA for 25 years, and every two years Belgian students come from that university to do immersion in the country, a fact that Nitlapan as well as other institutions of the UCA help them with, but they do not get infected. What type of alliance is this that is not able to be contagious with the most prized part of education that immersion is? Maybe this is due to the fact that Antwerp University and other Universities do immersion, but without political insertion – even though immersion in itself has great formative value – and maybe because the leaders and teachers from both institutions (Antwerp, Nitlapan-UCA) do not do the immersion under the idea that “immersion is for the students, not for the professors, directors, presidents.”

 

Yes, immersion is learning. To learn from people we provide ourselves with instruments that facilitate understanding the people, observing, listening and asking – without questions there are no answers, the wisdom is in knowing how to ask[21]. This is the dimension of understanding. There will be no change of anything if we are not able to confront the dimension of understanding, and one of the most stimulating ways to do so is immersion. The more we cross over to the other sidewalk, the better we will understand the social apartheid and their paths to development. In doing it we will be able to learn, like one who observes, moves closer, and dares to ask, like in the next parable about the “milk producers limit.” (see Box).

 

This immersion, even though it is a monumental challenge and something that we should be a part of, needs to be two-way: that youth and community leaders have the possibility of immersion in the homes of presidents, directors, technicians, facilitators, administrators, researchers and development promoters. Why not for a week? This two way street will allow us to understand one another, will lead us to not just understand the paths to development, but to be part of it, to close the distance between intellectuals and rural-urban actors, but above all to lead us to work for development alternatives[22]– and with that we are already into insertion.

 

  1. 4.     The writing, what makes us think

 

W. Armstrong, manager of Aldea Global (coffee and tuber export organization, that works with cooperatives and producers organized into groups), explained that one of the great problems is the “oral culture” of the peasant families, and therefore the importance  of the “written culture”. He is refering to coffee: “the producers complain about the weight, but because they don´t write down each step, they forget; we have a format for noting down each step, at the moment of receiving the parchment coffee, at the moment of transporting that coffee, at the moment of turning it in to the dry mill, each day that the coffee goes out to the patio for drying…” If the processes are written, and there are complaints, you can see where the problems are, while there is no way of following up on what is just oral. What happens with coffee and the tensions that emerge because of the absence of the “written culture” happens in other contexts, processes and organizations. The technicians, facilitators, researchers, professors, directors, deans, Presidents, development promoters…when they talk with the rural and urban families, with the students or with their staff, they are not accustomed to take notes, and with that they are communicating that there is nothing to learn from their counterparts, and if they gather data as an obligation of their work (e.g. technicians who record data on the organic coffee for the coffee certifiers, facilitators who fill out forms with farm assessments) they do not process it, they do not analyze it at the end of their day, and they do not reflect on it with the families where they gathered that data. And if we pressure them to write, some respond, “only secretaries write!”

 

Where does such an institutionalized oral culture come from, capable of being a wall to thought and learning? This oral culture has been maintained for centuries! History tells us that one of the elements of the domination of the Spaniards over the indigenous peoples was writing. The indigenous could not explain how the pieces of paper were able to “talk” over long distances, about how a message could be sent through the little pieces of paper. From there comes the expression in Spanish in our times that “papers talk.” In spite of the fact that they “talk”, the sons and daughters of that indigenous culture and of mestizo families for centuries have not developed this written culture. Even today, though more people have studied less is written down. Why don’t we write? Because we are not reflecting on our notes, because we are not taking notes, because we think that there’s nothing to learn from the families that we are talking with. That is why notes aren’t taken. Let’s remember: “if you aska question, you are going to show that you don’t know,” so the more you study, the more you have to appear that you know, so you can´t take notes. Here is the tragedy that leads us to ignorance in the midst of the 21st century!

 

Again, why are we not able to write? I am not so interested in the technical reasons like “learning to write”, but beyond that. Without insertion we lack a sense of commitment, and without immersion we are left with discourse, and not having either we do not have the passion for writing (organizing new ideas) to be able to then go back to speak with our counterparts and to talk with ourselves – be self-reflective and to “think by talking.”[23] Observing our colleagues I realize that we do not get up early desperately seeking to write (think), we get out of bed with the peace of mind that we have goals, formats to fill out, courses to teach and that we repeat that for years, and our desperation is that the days go by slowly and we want to get back home and sit down in front of the television god. We criticize the producers for being “harvesters” instead of being producers, of not getting up early to study their coffee field and their cattle, while we who call ourselves intellectuals are worse – we don´t even take a book to read in our backpacks.

 

How can we write? E. Yojcom, co-author of the book “The dream of the North in Yalambojoch,” written along with R. Fallas SJ, guides us. She tells how Fallas, her teacher,  pushed her to write: “The insistance of the teacher with his student etched in me his beautiful words, ´but not just with the tape recorder, but with your memory, and write, write like crazy.´ This is what the young man did who left us the Popol Wuj, like crazy he wrote down all the poems, and there was no electric then, much less computers…” Writing like crazy! She did it because she was immersed and inserted in the returned indigenous families. And in our case it could be following the chain of asking, listening, taking notes, at the end of the day analyzing the notes (“ruminating”), and writing – writing like crazy, but remembering Tolstoy, who at the end of a long letter wrote: “forgive me for writing you such a long letter, but it’s because I didn’t have time.” It is that chain of thinking that rejects the mentality of the large estate owners that see humanity as patrons (thinkers) and workers (“ignorant”, without thought).

 

In writing the tacit becomes explicit. I have seen this with the territorial coordinators of Nitlapan, who when they explain their own process followed in their family, in the university, and in each task that they have had in Nitlapan, discover their own learning, what they know, but was silenced, they discover their own gold mine in identifying their own steps. Literally they are surprised to see on paper (or a power point slide) how much they know about their reality, fleeing from it toward imported ideas in order to avoid looking at the mine of ideas that they have within them- and at times they are so surprised that they say “I feel lost!” They are surprised because “the ignorant” evaporates, and with it the comfortableness of the appearance that “I only know that I know”, and they realize that thinking is uncomfortable and uncertain, because “I only know that I don´t know anything.” When they begin to write they discover that they can do it. A.J. García, a Nitlapan technician, said, “I feel happy…before it never occured to me and I had no idea about how to express it, while writing, I thought about the young man who wrote the Popol Wuj, and so I wrote like crazy!”

 

Writing allows us to discover ourselves, it is thinking, and thinking is reflecting closely connected to social practice, or as Marx would say, thinking is praxis – it is political action to make the existing practice explicit and conscious. Writing is close to insertion because in writing one is persuaded. Writing requires, obviously, reading. As J. Bastiaensen would suggest: first you have to read, secondly you have to read, and thirdly… you have to read!

 

5. Dialogue

 

“After the change in government in 1990, came reconciliation; demobilized fighters from both sides showed up in Río Blanco full of their pain and resentment, they had so many differences that in order for them to talk face to face we even had a round table made” remembered E. Fernández, who as part of the PRODERBO project was part of the team that helped the demobilized fighters with their reinsertion. This is dialogue, from the Greek dia-logos (dia=through, and logos= the word), free flow of ideas in groups, part of recognizing the existence of the other person, it revolves around the word and creates collective thinking in the face of challenges. Dialogue can happen between two or more people  with the only agreement to be in disagreement, no one imposes their thinking, all contribute to building a context of thought, more than finding solutions it is delving into the genesis (or problematic) of each thought, learning to think collectively: “when the roots of the thought are observed, that same thought is improved” (Bohm, 1995) ;[24]in this context it is not important to get to either a decision nor a plan, each participant understands what he/she has to do (Senge, 2011)[25].

 

De Bono (1999) )[26] distinguishes between western argumentative thinking, Plato´s dialectic of opposing two rational discourses to arrive at the truth, where the idea that prevails is the decision that gets adopted, and eastern thinking of seeking data and data until the decision emerges with clarity – like a puzzle of a thousand pieces, where it is enough to find some key pieces to be able to imagine the image it depicts.

 

Understanding different forms of dialogue, it is important to develop spaces for conversation within organizations, between organizations, inside the communities and between communities and the organizations. Generating spaces for dialogue through the exchange of thought can help us to find people who inspire us and make the collective space itself a source of inspiration. Recall the words of Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” So insertion without immersion is empty, immersion without insertion is blind, the two without writing turn into “prison talk”, and the three without group dialogue lack collective social transformation. These four elements constitute  metanoia: learning that emancipates and transforms, and that builds visionary organizations.

 

 

 

By way of conclusion

 

The great Cuban geographer, A. Nuñez, recommended that you should always take 3 things with you: a notebook, a pen and a camera. Each conversation and observation is an event in our lives, and an event can be full of meaning. For that reason we need to develop the culture of writing (and of reading), as a way of thinking. This thinking is nourished by the “two way” immersion. And both respond to the insertion which is the meaning of the political aspect of territorial development, of the social and technological changes that we are seeking to promote, of the forms of alliances that we want to work on.[27] Insertion provides us the perspective, immersion the content, writing the thinking, and dialogue the word in movement. Can there be territorial development without these four elements? The resounding answer is NO. The territories are global/local spaces in movement, political arenas where diverse interests and perspectives, as local as they are transnational, are in contention, routes and trajectories prevail and emerge depending on the correlation of forces that are achieved in each moment and specific context.

 

These powerful tectonic plates are capable of moving our realities, of shaking the wall that separates the producer families and the strata of professionals, of making uncomfortable the “culture of teaching” that turns its back on its source of learning, of challenging ourselves about our own “extensive” culture (fleeing from our own learning) as intellectuals, of re-defining our counterparts from being beneficiaries and clients to being an actor that is a collective subject and that makes decisions, and of transforming ourselves as society as well as institutions. All this could lead us to confront the paradox of “more educated people but less thinking”, given that our competitive advantages are precisely in the reading we get by incorporating the angles of the actors, and in this way make the Universities recover their purpose of forming people capable of transforming their realities.

 

This process, nevertheless, requires certain conditions which organizations can provide: showing a leadership that preaches with its practice – immersion, insertion, writing and dialogue. That is, presidents and directors should ask themselves what is their insertion, their immersion and their publications, to then respond to the question about why they are in university institutions, what type of institutions they are leading, and for what type of societies. On this basis we could rethink our alliances between universities of Central America and those of the US and Europe,  precisely through strengthening insertion, the culture of writing and immersion.

 

 

 

 



[1] M. Lester, director of the Winds of Peace Foundation in Nicaragua, asked me to reflect on a concept paper of WPF that is seeking an alliance with US universities for formation. This awoke in me a topic that I had been thinking about for some time during my visits to territories with the territorial coordinators of Nitlapan-UCA, with youth innovators in El Cua, San Juan del Río Coco and La Dalia, and from reflecting with leaders of coffee cooperatives in the central northern area of the country.

[2] The name of the Institute in the beginning included the word “alternative”. Probably in the mid 90s that word disappeared. It is worth mentioning it, because Nitlapan started with the idea of seeking a type of development that was not conventional, nor the “imported” models, but an “alternative” one.

[3] The distinction made between Licentiate or Engineering (learning tools and applying them), masters degree (level of expertise in an area, which is being a master in a certain area) and Phd-doctorate (contributing with new knowledge) probably tends to get diluted, so that the masters is like a licentiate and a doctorate like a masters degree. This discussion is also present in Europe where they are working to homogenize the quality of the different degrees, a process in which, for example, the doctorates in Spain are considered low level, and in spite of so many years of progress, apparently still have not been able to reach the same level.

[4] Gorostiaga, X., 1993, La Nueva Generación Centroamericana, la UCA hacia el 2000. Lección Inaugural 1993. Managua: UCA

[5] Gorostiaga (1993:30) “Today in Latin America the dominant Neoliberal model brings with it a project for society and the University. In this project, the University should serve “the demands of the market” without state interference, “academic nor ethical.” The “demands of the market” result in a merchantilization of the university product at the service of the large enterprises, and a privatization of the university in favor of the more privileged classes. In such a project, the university character disappears and the University becomes a branch of the wealthy companies that require professionals for their operations. What would we say now in these times?

[6] Remember fordism and taylorism, where the managers “think” and the rest “operate”; businesses where there is a small group of experts that use their heads and plan, while the great masses, separated from the experts, use their hands to execute the plan; in a certain context of mass production and consumption this model was successful. But in a society of greater competition like that experienced starting in the decade of the 80s it was no longer appropriate: Toyota with the post fordist “flexible specialization” tore fordism to pieces. See Best (1990), The New Competition. Institutions of industrial restructuring. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

[7] I am grateful to D. Kaimowitz in helping me to understand the differences in perspective between the Coast and the Pacific and the historical roots that it has.

[8] Notice that this is similar to the theory of modernization – an academically dead theory but underlying many donor policies – where the European countries and the US see themselves as developed and see the rest of the countries as under-developed; in other words, many from the North see us as their past, and they, our future, that they have already seen and there is nothing more to learn;  or missions (consultants) who arrive and their approach is looking for problems without a minimal effort in having a historical perspective and identifying the changes. And now in terms of the Coast, the country of the Pacific tends to see itself as “the developed ones”.

[9] S. García, anthropologist and scholar of the Caribbean Coast, observing this fact, said: “One day Coke was doing a survey, and they told me they would pay me  for 10 minutes of my time to respond to their survey; what they are doing on the Coast is something similar; Coca Cola pays because it is in their interest, while one would assume that research seeks to contribute to the communities, or no?” One would assume so!

[10] The criticism of Nitlapan being “the people of the Prado” happens in the territories where we go, but in those territories they do not even see the deans, directors and presidents of the University. The paradox is that the more “responsibility” one has, the more distance there is with the student body (“the fish”) and their territories (“the water”), it is like in religion that confuses Church with the building, and believing that they are going to church to seek God and end up praying in the temples and chapels.

[11] Marchetti, P., 1985. Dos pasos atrás y dos y medio adelante: Reflexiones sobre la política agraria, comercial y militar de la EPS. Managua: Comisión de Defensa y Producción, FSLN

[12] In asking in a workshop about what events in their lives had really changed them, A. Delgado, a development promoter of Nitlapan, told his experience: “I went out to teach to read and write in 1981, and I lived with a family in the countryside; I could not understand how those people could live, they were so poor, so poor…” That experience changed his life forever. See also references to these experiences in: S. Ramírez, 1999, Adios muchachos, una memoria de la Revolución Sandinista, Mexico: Aguilar.

[13] Senge, P., 1990, The fifth discipline. The art and practice of the learning organization. EEUU: Doubleday

[14] Eyben, R. (2004), Immersions for Policy and Personal Change, in IDS Policy Briefing 22.

[15] Different reflections from the 80s in terms of immersion converged around the fact that the Sandinista Revolution did not accept the concept of the immersion of the technicians, that prevailed in the Cuban and Soviet visions of “teaching” from the top down, and the classism of the Sandinistas that came from the oligarchy. J. Bonilla, a Sandinista from the decade of the 80s who collaborated with the Supreme Electoral Council in 1989, remembered the night that the Sandinistas lost the elections: “there were youth from rich families who were Sandinistas, and in seeing that we lost the elections, angrily exclaimed, “Those ignorant peasants, we taught them to read, we brought them vacinnations, we harvested their coffee, and they pay us back by voting against us, ingrates! On hearing that I realized that we had gone out together to do literacy work and vacinnate, but we had such different mentalities. That is where I woke up.”

[16] We understand the reality of the other person by sharing their life, talking, and at the same time interpreting their words in the place where they are. So, first you have to “let yourself be taken” by the world of that family, then interpret the words and what we are observing, and then reflect jointly about those interpretations. This is how content is given to the perspective that is now insertion, which gives meaning to the alliance that is being constructed. For example, what did the peasant family from San Ignacio-Matiguas mean to say, which was quoted on page 4 (last paragraph), in observing the change in Nitlapan? Responding to this question is interpreting those words in the context of the one saying it: Why did he say what he said?

[17] Marchetti, P. y Maldidier, C., 1996, El Campesino-Finquero y el potencial económico del campesinado nicaragüense. Managua: Nitlapan-UCA.

[18] This is similar to the parable of the “mental cup”. Our mind is like a cup full of tea, that when you continue to pour more tea into it, nothing more goes into the cup, because it is full. In other words, to add more tea you first have to empty something out of the cup. The same thing happens with our minds, to learn first you have to un-learn old “demons” (approaches and ideologies) that have made their nests in our minds.

[19] D. Kaimowitz expands on this point: “with the electoral defeat and the collapse of the [Berlin] wall and the growing neoliberal hegemony, the vision that you studied in order to earn more and have more status was even more widely accepted. If knowledge was not compatible with maintaining the status, then what must be sacrificed was the former, not the latter. Social mystique and commitment was…a dead letter – what really had legitimacy was where you had your house, what car you drove and what restaurants you ate in.”

[20] Within the Institute this logic is expressed in this way: one area gets external resources, then if there is a demand to train staff from another area, there is resistance: “my salary I got with such and such an agency, why am I going to subsidize (train) other people in the Institute?” Others say, “I already got my salary negotiating a project with such and such an agency, the only thing that the directors of Nitlapan have to do is formalize it.”

[21]We visited the community of Matumbak in Rosita, arriving in the community we talked with a Mayangna family, and in a few minutes they asked us, “this is an interview, how much are you going to pay us?” C. Maldidier responded, “if you are going to charge me for responding, then I am going to charge you for asking, asking questions is harder than responding.” We laughed, talked, learned and no one charged anyone anything. While studying English in Saint Louis, Missouri, I heard an interview on television, and in order to get me to pay more attention to it,  a US priest told me that the journalist that was doing the interview was one of the best in the US. The journalist asked the expert in the mythology of different cultures if he believed in God. The person interviewed turned the question back on him, “and do you believe in God?” The journalist responded, “I believe in the question, the question that leads me to learn, and that opens the path for me to things about life  that I do not know.”

 

[22] Providing the way to do immersion is beyond this text. But we make our own the route that Eyben (2004) proposes of moving from having the reflective experience  to the exchange, from there in dialogue to the evaluation  of the experience, and from there to conclude in changes, which in turn feed into the experience.

[23] Or as M. Lester, WPF Director in Nicaragua says, “I think by talking, and then, yes, I think by writing.” (March 2013).

[24] Bohm, D. (1995) Unfolding memory. EEUU: Foundation House.

[25] Senge, P. (2011), La quinta disciplina en la práctica. Estrategias y herramientas para construir la organización abierta al aprendizaje. Argentina: Granica SA

[26] De Bono, E. (1999) Seis Sombreros para Pensar. Argentina: Granica SA

[27] It is not an alliance with NGOs, because then, as Faune said in a workshop in February 2013, “if a network of NGOs is created, what actors can enter there? What network is that? That isn´t anything!”

The gravitational force of ideas and the force at our feet?

“Business women? They are storefront owners, cookie makers, and beauticians, they are not business women,”stated the Mayor. The woman business leader responded, “If nacatamales do not work, they do tortillas filled with cheese, and if that doesn´t, they do something else, they search carefully, they are business women!

Note that the Mayor uses the concept of business to discriminate, and the woman leader to extol the storefront owners… but both read them and interpret them from a certain approach of what business is better, and boxed in by this concept alone they do not see the wealth of the activities and logics that the women can have with their businesses. What is the gravitational force that pulls us toward a certain understanding, preventing us from seeing other realities? In this article we discern the force of ideas, the irruption of new forms of organization, and the need to rethink even in opposition to the pull of gravity.

“There is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women, and there are families” said M. Thatcher in 1987, coinciding with the Reagan era, a time in which the world was marked with the “brand” of neoliberal ideas: the “invisible hand” of the market, that previously was only attributed to God, governed the economy, and democracy was derived from it. Private enteprises gave shape to that market. The “carrot” and the “stick”  backed these ideas that penetrated our minds. So those in the past who cried out against the IMF and the World Bank, now seek them out, and if they antagonized large private enterprise now they are eating together. It happens on all levels; for example, a good part of the cooperatives dream of looking like a company, seek to be a “cooperative enterprise”; the microfinance institutions that started so that the producer families excluded from the private banks might scale up, say that “there is no mission without (financial) sustainability.” All rivers lead to the sea: the organizations, whatever their origins and nature, seek to be an enterprise lowering their costs, seeking subsidies, seeing only individuals, and at any cost. This is the angle from which situations are seen, like the storefronts.

Another force is the “aid industry” or international aid, begun to provide a “human face” to the neoliberal policies. So the Rio Convention in 1992 or the Paris Declarion of 2005 put their “brand” on how to achieve development. Apart from the discourse, in practice they revived the theory of modernization: the developed countries are presented as the road that the rest should follow. From here they see that those of us from the south are “their past” which is why they now know what we should do. This road inverts the focus: the processors, the merchants and the consumers focus on the peasant product, while in the aid chain (aid agencies, intermediate and beneficiary organizations) their focus is outside, from where “the treasure” is coming. Consequently, the organizations and institutions adapt their discourse and talk about adaptation to climate change, gender, governance, food security – with the S of sovereignty if they are seeking resources from ALBA, and without the S with other international organizations.  So, while the size of the state was being reduced to the song of neoliberalism, the NGOs were emerging and the organizations were creating their technocratic “bureaucracy” based on engineers and college graduate experts in negotiating external resources.

Silently another wave is approaching, it is the approach of the solidarity social economy (SSE). It starts “swimming against the current.” Ethical banks, fair trade organizations, networks of small producers, self managed workshops, progressive churches, networks of solidarity economies, solidarity cooperatives, women entrepreneurs, associations, informal collectives, exchange clubs, rotating funds, communal banks, supra-family collectives, landless workers movement are emerging. They are moving into production, service provision, commercialization, finance, consumption, asset  use and exchanges. This movement seeks to reconceptualize business and the economy including self management, cooperation, solidarity, sustainability and community commitment. Also in the US, in reaction to the C type Corporations reduced to profit, and “trickle down” through “Corporate Social Responsibility”, B-corporations are emerging, B for benefits; they are businesses that recover a public purpose, of having financial profits and at the same time being vigilant that their decisions contribute to their workers, communities and the environment. The strength of this wave is now making SSE a part of the legislation in Latin America, and the B-corporations are already in the laws of 13 states in the USA.

Neoliberalism cast our minds in the mold of the economic element and an individualistic vision, so we lit a candle to business. “Aid” persuaded us to be governed by a technocracy, and we changed our focus without a future of our own. The SSE “shook the ground” beneath us. Not everything should be seen with the lens of “business”, nor from the “developed” box seats; B-corporation is a recreation of another “enterprise” with a public purpose. The economy moves in a social space – incrusted in society. More than individuals, there are networks that are “walking uphill.” Re-conceptualizing these processes is not on the official agenda, but it is the challenge, we feel it like when you walk into the ocean, while our eyes and hands are on the waves, another current of water is pulling at our feet. Maybe it is time to pay attention to our feet.