Browsing by Subject "Ecuador"
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Item An analysis of forest change : a case study of the Chocó-Andean conservation corridor in the Upper Guayllabamba Watershed, Ecuador(2010-05) Gordon, Jessica Danielle; Young, Kenneth R.; Richardson, Richard H.Deforestation in the tropics is considered to be a primary cause for worldwide loss of biological diversity. Future land use decisions have the potential to escalate or ameliorate this global problem. The goal of this research is to present a case study of an analysis of forest change within the Chocó-Andean Conservation Corridor in the Upper Guayllabamba Watershed in Northwestern Ecuador. Fieldwork, remote sensing, and a Geographic Information System (GIS) were used to analyze land use/land cover changes within the corridor. Change detection from 1986 to 2001 using Landsat imagery confirmed that forests were rapidly being converted to other land covers, but patterns of deforestation rates varied dramatically for different types of forests. The average annual rate of overall loss of forest was 2.7% for lower montane forest, 1.7% for mid-slope cloud forest 2.1% for upper montane forest, and 2.0% for riparian forests. The patterns of deforestation also varied based on scales of analysis. For example, the overall loss of forest within the southern portion of the Chocó-Andean Conservation Corridor occurred at an average rate of 1.3% per year, while the overall annual rate of forest loss within particular sub-watersheds varied from 0.2%-3.1% and the annual average rate of overall forest loss surrounding particular communities ranged from 0.3%-3.3%. Fifty interviews were conducted in 2003 in seven communities within the conservation corridor to determine local perspectives of current land use practices, past land use trends, and future land use goals; regional changes in the forest; and opinions of local conservation projects. An intriguing finding of the study is that remote sensing in isolation of fieldwork would have provided incomplete or misleading results. For example, the community that had the most deforestation between 1986 and 2001 was the community where the conservation projects were actually the most successful, based upon local resident opinion. This report asserts that a holistic approach to conservation is needed to reconcile environmental and socio-cultural needs in order to maintain and improve forest habitat and hydrologic connectivity at multiple spatial scales (including community-level, watershed, and regional) by extending conservation efforts beyond protected areas and utilizing a basin-scale perspective to make land use decisions that maintain biodiversity and promote watershed protection.Item Assessment of estuarine habitats for resident and estuarine-dependent species: tools for conservation and management(2009-05-15) Shervette, Virginia RheaMy research in coastal Ecuador and the northern Gulf of Mexico (GOM) elucidated differences in value of shallow estuarine habitats for fishes and invertebrates. I focused on mangrove and tidal river habitats in Ecuador, and oyster reef, vegetated marsh edge, and nonvegetated bottom habitats in the GOM. Coastal Ecuador has lost 20-30% of mangrove wetlands over the past 30 years. Such habitat loss can impair the ecological functions of wetlands. In this study I identified the fish community of the remaining mangrove wetland in Rio Palmar, Ecuador. For comparison, an adjacent tidal river without mangroves, Rio Javita, was also sampled. I found that although Rios Palmar and Javita are characterized by relatively low fish-species richness compared to other tropical estuarine systems, they appear to provide important habitat for several economically- and ecologically-valued species. In the GOM, I examined the fish and invertebrate communities of adjacent oyster reef (oyster), vegetated marsh edge (VME), and nonvegetated bottom (NVB) habitats. Three main relationships emerged: 1) Oyster and VME provide habitat for significantly more species (as a measure of richness) relative to NVB; 2) Oyster and VME provide habitat for uncommon and rare species; and 3) Many of the species collected in multiple habitats occurred at higher abundances in oyster or VME habitat. Contrary to the current low value ranking of oyster habitat relative to other estuarine and salt marsh habitats, oyster provides high quality habitat for many species. Understanding how key species utilize estuarine habitats is critical for future conservation and management efforts. My research indicated that VME habitat may provide better foraging options for juvenile pinfish (Lagodon rhomboides), and together with corroborating evidence from other studies, suggest that VME provides a critical nursery function for juvenile pinfish, especially in estuaries where seagrass habitat is sparse or nonexistent. Additionally, I documented that juvenile white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus) select for oyster habitat because of higher food availability and not because of refuge needs from predation by blue crabs. Oyster habitat appears to provide a nursery function for juvenile white shrimp. Overall, my research demonstrated that structurally complex habitats, such as mangroves, VME, and oyster provide essential habitat at the community, population, and individual levels.Item Constructing hydropower : labor control in Chinese transnational hydroelectric projects in Ecuador(2015-05) Peng, Ruijie; Auyero, Javier; Knapp, GregoryThis thesis explores an important question concerning Chinese transnational development projects in Ecuador: How have Chinese transnational capital and modernization projects in Ecuador effectively enforced workplace control? In order to answer the question, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a large hydro-electric power plant a Chinese construction company is building in Ecuador. I focused my attention on employees’ labor process to examine the process by which labor control unfolds. Particularly, I delve into discourses and practices about divisions and differences and argue that they objectively structure Chinese and Ecuadorian employees’ labor process and thereby shape strategies for labor control. In this thesis, I shall explore the particularities of labor control that Chinese transnational construction company has set up in Ecuador to examine how it manages to achieve consent with workers. Borrowing from Michael Burawoy’s definition and analysis of labor process and labor control, I identified three categories, namely, professional ranking, nationality and gender as especially relevant in terms of structuring both the labor process and labor rights provisions at the camp. Applying this analytical framework, I show that the structured and structuring interactions between objective structural relations can ensure and sustain labor control on one hand, and Chinese and Ecuadorian employees’ subjective experiences with labor rights regimes and workplace control can reinforce such control, on the other hand. I argue that Chinese transnational development projects in Ecuador have developed unique practical logics which help to achieve labor control among Chinese and Ecuadorian employees whose subjectivities presuppose their labor process.Item Constructing notions of development : an analysis of the experiences of Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers and the Peace Corps in Latin America and their interaction with indigenous communities in Ecuadorian Highlands(2013-08) Kawachi, Kumiko; Wade, Maria de Fátima, 1948-; Roberts, Bryan R., 1939-Post-development theorist, Arturo Escobar's influential work, Encountering Development as well as other post-development academic works discussed the concept and delivery of "development" based on known antecedents--Western countries as practitioners and non-Western countries as beneficiaries. Even though cultural sensibility has become a significant issue in development today, there is little research that analyzes the construction of non-Western donors' discourse such as those of the Japanese governmental aid agency, Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers. Moreover, non-Western aid donors and practitioners' engagement with indigenous development in Latin America has not been discussed. This dissertation aims to answer the following questions: How do Western and non-Western governmental donor agencies construct and deliver 'development' to 'non-developed' countries in Latin America, particularly to countries with large indigenous populations? How do these donor agencies' volunteer practitioners implement development projects in the field? What are the differences in the aims and delivery of development projects between Western and non-Western donors and their volunteer practitioners, especially in those projects aimed at indigenous populations? A corollary to those questions was to attempt to discover how the agencies and their volunteers negotiated notions of development with indigenous peoples as well as how agencies and volunteers perceived and addressed ethnic differences in the aid recipients' countries. To answer these questions I compared and contrasted two governmental agencies that are the most prominent and with the longest record of volunteer aid in Latin America: the United States Peace Corps and the Japanese agency, Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV). Although the U.S. Peace Corps and its notion of development were models of "development" for the JOCV program, JOCV's discourse of development and its development practices are not the same as the Peace Corps. Both agencies' cross-cultural policies for their volunteers as well as the development practices the agencies adopted likely reflect how the Japanese and United States understand their own societies in general cultural terms, as well as in terms of moral and religious preferences, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The Peace Corps and JOCV volunteers' experiences with indigenous populations showed several limitations to their programs and provided suggestions for the future particularly in the area of indigenous development.Item Discourse forms and social categorization in Cha'palaa(2010-05) Floyd, Simeon Isaac; Epps, Patience, 1973-; Sherzer, Joel; Hale, Charles R.; Pierre, Jemima; England, NoraThis dissertation is an ethnographic study of race and other forms of social categorization as approached through the discourse of the indigenous Chachi people of northwestern lowland Ecuador and their Afro-descendant neighbors. It combines the ethnographic methods of social anthropology with the methods of descriptive linguistics, letting social questions about racial formation guide linguistic inquiry. It provides new information about the largely unstudied indigenous South American language Cha’palaa, and connects that information about linguistic form to problems of the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Individual descriptive chapters address how the Cha’palaa number system is based on collectivity rather than plurality according to an animacy hierarchy that codes only human and human-like social collectivities, how a nominal set of ethnonyms linked to Chachi oral history become the recipients of collective marking as human collectivities, how those collectivities are co-referentially linked to speech participants through the deployment of the pronominal system, and how the multi-modal resource of gesture adds to these rich resources supplied by the spoken language for the expression of social realities like race. The final chapters address Chachi and Afro-descendant discourses in dialogue with each other and examine naturally occurring speech data to show how the linguistic forms described in previous chapters are used in social interaction. The central argument advances a position that takes the socially constructed status of race seriously and considers that for such constructions to exist as more abstract macro-categories they must be constituted by instances of social interaction, where elements of the social order are observable at the micro-level. In this way localized articulations of social categories become vehicles for the broader circulation of discourses structured by a history of racialized social inequality, revealing the extreme depth of racialization in human social conditioning. This dissertation represents a contribution to the field of linguistic anthropology as well as to descriptive linguistics of South American languages and to critical approaches to race and ethnicity in Latin America.Item Going green : sustainable mining, water, and the remaking of social protest in post-neoliberal Ecuador(2012-12) Velásquez, Teresa Angélica; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Ghosh, Kaushik; Sawyer, Suzana; Speed, Shannon; Vargas, Joao HThis dissertation examines the reconfiguration of popular environmental politics in the context of so-called sustainable mining development in Ecuador. Progressive governments in Latin America herald sustainable mining initiatives as the lynchpin to development capable of generating revenues to finance social welfare programs and protecting the environment. If this is so, my dissertation asks, then why has a proposed sustainable gold mine provoked such bitter opposition from dairy farmers in the parish of Victoria del Portete? My dissertation follows a group of indigenous and mestizo dairy farmers in the southern Ecuadorian Andes to understand why they oppose gold mining in their watershed and traces the cultural and political transformations that followed from their activism. I make four key arguments in this dissertation. First, I argue that sustainable mining plans place a premium on local water resources and have the effect of rearticulating local water disputes. Whereas owners of small and large dairy farms have historically disputed local access to water resources now they have created a unified movement against the proposed gold mine project. Second, I argue that knowledge practices and political discourses enabled farmers with varying claims to ethnic ancestry and socio-economic standing to establish connections with each other and with national indigenous leaders, Catholic priests, artists, and urban ecologists. Together they have formed a movement in defense of life. My analysis extends common understandings of the nature of human agency and political life by examining the role that non-human entities play in shaping contemporary environmental politics. Third, as a result of the mobilizations, new socio-environmental formations have emerged. The watershed has become a sacred place called Kimsacocha, which is venerated by farmers through new cultural practices as the source of life. Finally, the mobilizations in defense of life have re-centered indigeneity in unexpected ways. Farmers with and without indigenous ancestry as well as their urban allies are now claiming an indigenous identity. Unlike previous understandings of identity in the region, indigeneity does not denote a shared racial, cultural, or class position but refers to a particular way of understanding and relation to the environment.Item Heritage tourism in Latin America : cultural routes and the legacy of Simón Bolívar in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela(2011-05) McQueen, George Genung; Sletto, Bjørn; Holleran, MichaelHeritage tourism is one of the fastest growing sub-categories of the tourism industry, which is arguably the largest industry in the world. When communities and regions compete for a greater share of the heritage tourism market, the authenticity and integrity of a heritage can be compromised by the way it is represented. One way to represent heritage is a “cultural route,” which has recently been added to definition of “cultural heritage” in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention. The interpretation of a “cultural route,” however, continues to evolve, especially in Latin America. In anticipation of the bicentennial celebration of independence from Spain, two cultural routes were separately inaugurated in 2009: the Ruta del Libertador in Ecuador and Venezuela, and the Ruta Libertadora in Colombia. After providing an overview of the historical, political and cultural contexts that surround these routes, this paper draws upon a website content analysis to explores how national identity, cultural heritage and the legacy of Simón Bolívar are represented by the governments of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. These observations and analyses show that while both routes represent a shared heritage, the differences in their representations straddle the definitions of “authenticity” and “cultural heritage,” as the Ruta Libertadora in Colombia is a “cultural route” and the Ruta del Libertador in Ecuador and Venezuela is a “cultural tourism route.” However, when considered together, the Ruta del Libertador and Ruta Libertadora are a cultural route that more accurately represents a crucial moment in Latin American history: the liberation of South America from Spain, led by Simón Bolívar, “El Libertador.”Item Local Representation in the Context of Decentralization: Mayors, Citizens, and Local Governance in Latin America(2014-06-06) Shockley, Bethany LRepresentation is a basic component of democracy and yet scientific understanding of how it works has been limited to the national level of government, especially in the developing world. This research develops and tests theories regarding two key aspects of local representation: government responsiveness and procedural inclusiveness. I examine local representation in the context of decentralization because local officials and citizens interact according to the set of decentralization policies that define the local political sphere. I find that both contextual factors and individual-level factors are important determinants of local representation. This study takes three approaches to studying the relationship between local representation and decentralization. First, it uses formal theory to explore the impact of electoral competition on local representation in the dimensions of sector and scope. Decentralization and local capacity are found to constrain the behavior of the mayor. Next, it takes an in-depth look at the representational orientations of mayors, using data collected during fieldwork in Ecuador. It predicts the emergence of attitudes of political openness and administrative responsibility using both individual-level and county-level covariates. Lastly, I consider representation from the citizen?s point of view. Using data from 18 countries in Latin America and two samples of counties in Ecuador, I test the impact of participation on citizen evaluations of local government. I find that participation in general has a limited impact on citizen evaluations, with the exception of direct contact with government.Item Maintaining the empire: diplomacy and education in U.S.-Ecuadorian relations, 1933-1963(2009-05) Epps, William Thayer; Lawrence, Mark AtwoodHistorians today continue to explore the maintenance of the U.S. Empire in the Third World. Some argue that coercion was the driving force. Others suggest that consent played a role. Settling this debate is difficult given the unbalanced state of the historiography, which is overloaded with analyses of interventions. Analyzing U.S.-Ecuadorian relations offers an instructive addition to the literature. Negotiation and compromise, not coercion, were central to these interactions. The Ecuadorians who shaped these relations the most typically shared some core assumptions with their U.S. counterparts. Policymakers in Washington therefore developed educational exchange programs to expand this pool of pro-U.S. Latin Americans. Using documents from archives in the United States and Ecuador, this study explores how policymakers used diplomacy and education to maintain the U.S. Empire in the Third World from 1933 to 1963. This process began with the Roosevelt Administration’s Good Neighbor Policy. Ecuadorian threats to nationalize U.S. businesses operating in Ecuador, however, challenged the rhetoric of cooperation championed by Roosevelt. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor halted these challenges. Two days after the attack, policymakers in Washington accepted Ecuadorian offers to establish bases in Ecuador. This marked the solidification of hemispheric solidarity, and a more robust U.S. hegemony in Latin America. A growing number of Ecuadorian students and intellectuals studying in the United States under scholarships awarded by their government strengthened this solidarity. The U.S. government soon began funding both these exchanges as well as American Schools throughout Latin America in the hopes of maintaining this unity in the future. Beginning in 1950, disputes over fisheries threatened the wartime cohesion. Ecuador attempted to force Washington to accept a 200-mile limit on territorial waters. Negotiations failed to resolve the issue. The discontent evident throughout Latin America continued to build, until, in 1962, President John F. Kennedy discovered that the government of Ecuador would not support his administration’s plan to exclude Cuba from the Organization of American States. Despite these setbacks, policymakers continued to promote educational exchange through the Foreign Leader Program and the Fulbright Program. They hoped above all else to expand consent to U.S. hegemony.Item Politicizing food in Quito : food sovereignty and the Canasta Comunitaria Ciudad Viva(2012-05) Hervas, Liana Stela; Dietz, Henry A.; Sletto, BjornFood sovereignty is a multi-faceted proposal for the politicization of the agro-food sector. Advocated by the international farmers’ movement, Vía Campesina, food sovereignty recognizes the importance of consumption while it focuses on production. By looking at the implementation of the food sovereignty proposal in Ecuador in the 2008 Constitution and on the legal level, the organizational level, and the level of individual consumers, I suggest approaches to consumers and consumption within the food sovereignty framework. In addition to discussing the ambiguity of the State’s position on food sovereignty, I show that social organizations working on food sovereignty tend to see consumers as self-centered, solely motivated by individual concerns about price and health, meaning that they are not seen as critical actors in the agro-food system. By focusing on members of the Canasta Comunitaria Ciudad Viva, a collective food purchase model in south Quito, I show that while consumers reproduce individualized logics that privilege health and savings, they also mobilize alternative, relational logics that should be the base for consumer-based articulation within the food sovereignty framework. These conclusions support the significance of seeing consumers as political actors as well as the importance of valuing the daily practices of urban inhabitants as the bases for the further politicization of consumption. La soberanía alimentaria es una propuesta multidimensional para la politización del sector agroalimentario. Desde la concepción de Vía Campesina, un movimiento internacional de agricultores, soberanía alimentaria reconoce la importancia del consumo, centrándose en la producción. A partir de analizar la aplicación de la propuesta de soberanía alimentaria en la Constitución de 2008, en el plano jurídico, en el trabajo de organizaciones sociales y al nivel de consumidores individuales en Quito, Ecuador, propongo una aproximación a los roles del consumo y los consumidores, en el marco de soberanía alimentaria. A la vez de indagar en la ambigüedad de la posición estatal frente al tema de soberanía alimentaria, muestro que la tendencia de las organizaciones sociales que trabajan el tema de soberanía alimentaria es ver a los consumidores como actores poco involucrados, centrados en sus beneficios particulares entorno a precios y salud, lo que significa que los consumidores no son percibidos como actores en si mismo. Al enfocarme en los miembros de la Canasta Comunitaria Ciudad Viva, un modelo de compra colectiva de alimentos en el sur de Quito, muestro que mientras los consumidores reproducen lógicas individuales de ahorro y de salud, también movilizan lógicas alternativas basadas en relaciones sociales y afectivas. Propongo que estas lógicas, presentes en los consumidores, deberían formar parte de las bases para una mayor inclusión y articulación de consumidores en el marco de soberanía alimentaria. A partir de este análisis se muestra la importancia de mirar a los consumidores como actores políticos y valorar las prácticas cotidianas de los habitantes urbanos como cimientos para la mayor politización del consumo.Item Relational database for Ecuadorian mammals deposited in museums around the world(Texas Tech University, 2007-08) Estupiñán, Juan Pablo Carrera; Baker, Robert J.; Edson, Gary F.; Ladkin, NicolaNatural history collections play an essential role in the conservation and study of the biodiversity of our planet. Since the 19th century, increasing collections of fauna from Ecuador have been deposited in numerous institutions around the world. These collections have allowed a better understanding of the distribution and systematics of Neotropical mammals. During 2006, an extensive survey based on scientific literature, natural history museum databases, and personal communications with museum’s staff, was carried out to update our knowledge about collections of Ecuadorian mammals. The main goal of this project was to create a central database, hosted at the Museum of Texas Tech University, with the list of institutions that hold those specimens, dates of collections, taxa represented, and regions surveyed in Ecuador. A total of 42 institutions from South America, North America, and Europe have been identified. An effective collaboration with 28 of these 42 institutions made it possible to compile more than 20,000 records allowing the creation of a centralized database. The system has the advantage of being simple and easily accessed via internet. The information is organized by Geography and Taxonomy criteria allowing queries without limitations. The scope of this project demonstrates effective collaboration among natural history museums in the 21st century.Item The unmaking of empire : nature and politics in the early Colombian imagination, 1808-1821(2011-05) Afanador, Maria Jose; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Deans-Smith, SusanIn this report I argue that during the independence wars from Spain and the first decade of republican rule, the learned elite of the viceroyalty of New Granada—present day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama—articulated narratives of nature and science to debates over provincial hierarchies, to justify provincial unity, foreign commercial integration, and the creation of political symbols for the new polity. In the process of undoing the Spanish empire, the lettered elite conceived of their homeland’s natural bounties as key cultural capital, and as the language with which to frame their aspirations as political community, as part of a national polity or of regional patrias. By using newspapers, constitutional debates, scientific writings, and visual evidence, I place the elite’s sensibilities and concerns about their fatherland’s nature in the wider context of political transformations that took place from 1808 and on. In the first section, I explore eighteenth-century assessments of New Granada’s nature, offering an overview of key conceptions of New Granada’s geopolitical situation and nature that shaped the Creole imagination. In the second section, I characterize the reforms brought about by the Bourbon monarchy in New Granada, giving weight to the socialization of practices of the utility of science among the learned elite. The third section illustrates how Neogranadians deployed nature in assessing provincial fragmentation, and in the debate over the preeminence of Santafé as capital when the monarchic crisis exploded. The fourth section explores how nature was employed as an argument in debates over the integration of present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador into a single republic, and the adoption of a federal or a central state. Finally, section five discusses the role of New Granada’s natural landmarks in discourses of provincial and foreign commercial integration, along with a reflection on the use of nature as political symbol for the new republic. My aim is to explore the ways that the lettered elite incorporated nature into geopolitical discourses of a polity separate from Spain, and to uncover the tensions embedded in the ways they imagined their desired nation.