Natural resource-related conflicts can be extremely destructive and undermine environmental protection. Since the 1990s co-management schemes, whereby the management of resources is shared by public and/or private sector stakeholders, have been a main strategy for reducing these conflicts worldwide. Despite initial high hopes, in recent years co-management has been perceived as falling short of expectations. However, systematic assessments of its role in conflict prevention or mitigation are non-existent. Interviews with 584 residents from ten protected areas in Colombia revealed that co-management can be successful in reducing conflict at grassroots level, as long as some critical enabling conditions, such as effective participation in the co-management process, are fulfilled not only on paper but also by praxis. We hope these findings will re-incentivize global efforts to make co-management work in protected areas and other common pool resource contexts, such as fisheries, agriculture, forestry and water management.

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This document presents the concept of the Main Agroecological Structure of agroecosystems (MAS) from the perspective of environmental thinking (ecosystem-culture relationships) and considered as a dissipative cultural structure. It discusses the possible applications of this concept (resilience, production, diversity) both inside and outside the farms. The potential MAS can be useful in the planning processes of the farms because it allows the quantification of the internal and external corridors, including natural vegetation. At the same time, it can be an important tool in the context of landscape management because it shows a series of cultural relations (economic, social, symbolic and technological) that are normally overlooked by the partial analysis of landscape ecology.

It were analyzed the agricultural practices and the living conditions of the community from the rural district El Bosque, located in Los Nevados National Park, Colombia. It were applied various tools such as participant observation, semistructured interviews, timelines, maps per rural district and farms, agricultural calendars, activity schedule by gender and structured questionnaires. It was determined that potato crops and livestock are developed as a survival strategy and they are part of the paramo cultural heritage: practices learned from the Green Revolution and the traditional knowledge. These agricultural practices have generated conflicts between ecosystem conservation and improving the quality of life of its inhabitants. From the research it is proposed to implement community management plans, agroecological models, biocultural memory rescue and transformation in the agrarian structure.

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