Taylor, Carylanna. 2011. Watershed Management in the Wake of Transnational

Migration: Honduras. In Patrick Manning and Barry Gills, Eds. Andre Gunder Frank and

Global Development: Visions, Remembrances, and Explorations. New York: Routledge, pp.

232-257.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Immanuel Wallerstein

1. The World Economy in Theory and Practice: The

Contributions of Andre Gunder Frank in the Era of

Underdevelopment and "Globalization"Patrick Manning and

Barry K. Gills

Part 1: Andre Gunder Frank’s Critical Vision

2. Frankian Triangles Albert Bergesen

3. ReOrient the 19th Century: Andre Gunder Frank‘s

Unfinished Manuscript Robert Denemark

4. The Modern World System under Asian Hegemony: The

Silver Standard World Economy, 1450-1750 Barry K. Gills

and Andre Gunder Frank

Part 2: Continuing Debates

5. Exiting the Crisis of Capitalism or Capitalism in

Crisis? Samir Amin

6. Human Sociocultural Evolution, Hegemonic Transitions

and Global State Formation Christopher Chase-Dunn and

Thomas Hall

7. The Paradoxes of Colonial/Modernity Anibal Quijano

8. "Dependency Theory and Cultural Studies: Lessons from

Latin America John Beverley

9. Tides of Hegemonic Change: The Atypical Trajectory of

the 1970s-To-Present B-Phase Crisis Jeffrey Sommers and

Boris Kagarlitsky

Part 3: Multidisciplinary Developments

10. Explaining the Spatial Transformations of the World

Copper Market During the Long Twentieth Century Jan-

Frederic Abbeloos

11. Reorienting Iran: Following Gunder Frank's Advice One

Decade at a Time Kevan Harris

12. The Korean Developmental State and Neo-Liberal

Transition in the World System Hae-Yung Song

13. Watershed Management in the Wake of Transnational

Migration: Honduras Carylanna Taylor

14. Conclusion Patrick Manning

232

Chapter 13

Watershed Management in the Wake of Transnational Migration: Honduras

by Carylanna Taylor

Residents of a Honduran village, when asked by a Peace Corps Volunteer asked why they

continued to attend talks on sustainable resource management but chose not to implement the

farming practices taught, responded simply--there was not enough labor. My 2007 and 2009

observations and interviews in the area told the same story. Even compared to a 2001 visit, there

are fewer young men, fewer hands to do the backbreaking work of building terraces or digging

rain-fed irrigation ditches. Residents of ―Aguas Blancas‖ continue to express interest in

watershed conservation and management.1 They state the importance of protecting the area

surrounding their water source to ensure the continued provision of potable water to the

community. They acknowledge that, since 1987, their land falls within a wide ring of inhabited

but regulated land that protects the cloud forest at the core of Cerro Azul Meámbar National Park

(PANACAM by its Spanish acronym). Residents of this ―buffer zone‖ accept that their actions

are important to the provision of water to neighboring cities and of electricity to the nation via

hydroelectric generators fed by streams originating in their villages, even while they fight to

bring electricity to their homes. Similarly, despite conflicts over just compensation for land

appropriated by one of the municipalities that co-manages the parks, they see residents of the city

less as competitors than as an extension of their community: the place where their children go to

school and their produce is sold. Due to extensive out-migration to Honduran cities and abroad,

particularly the United States.2 they simply have insufficient labor to keep up the time-intensive

farming practices that many had adopted during the height of PANACAM‘s environmental

education and agricultural extension programs in the late 1990s. In the larger buffer-zone village

of Santa Rosa, even several former agricultural extension agents have dropped all soil

conservation measures except for not burning scrub brush prior to planting. Hiring day-laborers

at five dollars per day is simply not a viable option when little cash income is to be derived from

corn or bean crops meant primarily for subsistence.

A centuries long process of colonialization and underdevelopment has shaped land and capital

distribution in Honduras, pushing small farmers from the easily degraded slopes while large-

scale production of cattle and sugarcane for export dominates the more fertile valleys. That

hillside farming households earn less than a dollar a day and, yet, supply more than 80% of the

1 Watersheds are identifiable areas of land of varying scale that drain into a common water

source. When taken as units of social analysis, watersheds emphasize the interconnectedness of

community and household practices and a shared physical environment (Berkes et al. 1998).

Focusing on watersheds also reflects the centrality of water to community development and

Honduran national policy (República de Honduras 2006).

2 I use ―transnational‖ in lieu of ―international‖ or ―global‖ as it suggests multiple border

crossings of people and funds, reflects intentions to return, and highlights that these occur within

and between two nation states: Honduras and the United States.

233

nation‘s staple crops, further reflects their position at the periphery of the world system. As

Stonich (1993), Blaikie and Brookfield (1988), and Diaz (1985) have discussed the role of

dependency on capitalist markets and land degradation in the development of underdevelopment

in Honduras, I will not go into that history here. Instead, I focus on how , the most recent

manifestation of those processes, transnational labor migration, is affecting the ways in which

households and villages manage their resources, potentially leading to further environmental

degradation, diminished capacity of subsistence agriculture, and greater reliance on markets for

food and agricultural inputs. In Santa Rosa well over one-third of households have a nuclear

family member living abroad. With an even higher rate of international and domestic out-

migration, more than half of the households in Aguas Blancas have emigrant members. These

villages reflect a national trend of significant temporary outmigration to Honduran cities (San

Pedro Sula, Tegucigalpa), Mexico, Spain, and, especially, the United States (New York, New

Jersey, Florida, Texas, and California), where networks of emigrants serve to facilitate future

emigration from the communities of origin. The transnational extension of family and

community networks is particularly evident among several hundred emigrants from Santa Rosa

and Aguas Blancas who have concentrated on Long Island, New York, alongside other

Hondurans, El Salvadorans, and Dominicans.

Most emigrants from the area send at least some money or goods home to their families

of origin. Remittances range from gift boxes at holidays, to help with unexpected medical bills,

to regular biweekly deposits of US$150-200 meant to cover day-to-day expenses of children,

parents, and/or siblings. Some also regularly send money to pay for maintenance of farms and

cattle. Their investments directly and indirectly affect the use and management of natural

resources on their properties and in their surrounding watersheds. For example, two brothers on

Long Island send money to two younger brothers still living at home in Santa Rosa to care for

the cattle that the U.S.-based brothers are slowly accumulating. Three siblings from another

transnational family, all residents of the U.S. for more than a decade, send money to their parents

so they can rent pasture and a shredder for their and their parents‘ ninety-plus cows. A

dishwasher on Long Island sends money back to his wife in Santa Rosa so she can pay laborers

to harvest coffee. The cost of labor is high enough and his U.S. earning potential low enough that

he plans to return to Honduras in time to harvest this year‘s crop himself, knowing that, given his

age and the current immigration climate, he is unlikely to make a fourth trip North.

While complications from lost labor were mentioned again and again in interviews with

Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa farmers, the socio-economic-environmental impacts of

remittances are less obvious to those on the ground and merit exploration. Because both villages

lie within the borders of a national park that is grappling with how to conserve park watersheds

using diminishing financial resources, they also face the challenges of community-based

watershed management initiatives. These challenges include determining the limits of

―community‖ in the context of villages comprised of many transnational family networks and

taking into account the impact of emigration on the distribution of wealth, status, and power

within a given village-community.

Migration and economic remittances finance economic and social capital: the

possessions, funds, and social relations that increase an actor‘s ability to advance their interests

(Bourdieu 1977). By increasing economic and social capital, remittances appear to be creating a

new class of rural ―nonpoor‖ (Ravnborg 2002). Some families are recording more material gains

234

from migration (houses, vehicles, land), separating themselves from poorer community residents,

and adding an intermediate layer of non-poor in the highly stratified rural hierarchy. Their

resource use and agricultural practices, shorthanded here as watershed impacting practices

(WIP), differ from their neighbors and create new considerations for conservation and

development efforts.3 For example, nonpoor tend to use more pesticides but burn less. Nonpoor

are also more able to use remittances to hire labor as imperfect substitutes for emigrated family

members. Households with emigrants often either rent-out land owned by emigrants or use

remittances to rent pasture or land for corn and beans. Depending on hired labor and cultivating

rented land often corresponds to a shift away from more sustainable agricultural practices

(Jansen et al 2003b; Loker 2004; Ravnborg 2002a).

Also flowing within the transnational family networks are ideas and values generated in

the emigrants‘ new residences that can impact how remitted funds are spent and further affect the

livelihood strategies in their households and communities of origin. Like economic remittances,

these social remittances (Levitt 1998) affect the distribution of economic and social capital

among village residents as well as watershed practices.

Taking an anthropology-centric approach, in this chapter I develop a ―political ecology of

transnationalism‖ framework to look at some of the dynamics by which the interaction of

remittances, emigration, and watershed resource management play out. The chapter draws on

ethnographic research among Honduran hillside farmers to explore the relationship between

transnational flows of labor, funds, and ideas and on-the-ground practices which impact the ways

natural recourses are used, managed, and distributed. Through a review of the experience of

emigration, remittances, distribution and use of resources in Honduras, I suggest that remittance-

driven changes in such practices may exacerbate inequalities among watershed residents and

deepen dependency on remittances, migration, and markets. Andre Gunder Frank‘s notion of

underdevelopment opened my eyes to the painful irony that is the impetus for this project: the

pursuit of wage labor in more developed regions is rooted in the same historical processes that

have resulted in inadequate access to quality land and in labor becoming the nation‘s top export.4

3 Watershed impacting practices (WIP) refers to all human activities with potential impact on the

watershed of interest, not only those that might be considered ―conservation‖ or ―natural

resource management.‖ Such activities include behaviors taken on individual farms or as part of

community or park projects that relate to watershed function, for example tree cutting, soil

conservation, application of pesticides, community-built infrastructure to supply water to

individual houses, or petitioning a municipality for equitable compensation for farm land

appropriated for municipal water provision.

4 Land use in Honduras follows the three historical stages of dependence outlined by dos Santos:

1) colonial dependence with monopoly over land, mine, and manpower, 2) financial-industrial

dependence with expansion of the production of raw materials and agricultural products for

export (end 19th century), and 3) postwar ―technological-industrial‖ dependence based on

multinational corporations (1970). Colonization and a centuries long process of integration into

the global capitalist economy through focusing on export agribusiness at the expense of

production of staples for domestic markets, placed Honduras in a process of underdevelopment

and ever greater integration into the five hundred year world system. The Latin America-wide

235

The exodus of labor and subsequent transfer of remittances in turn further modify the relations of

those who remain with their natural resources, threatening their ability to feed themselves and

spurring even greater outmigration and dependency on local and international markets for food

and inputs to produce food. Frank‘s career-long interest in anthropology (c.f. Frank 1956, 1970)

included an appreciation for ethnographic studies such as this that unveil the lived experience of

underdevelopment. He also appreciated anthropology‘s holism – in this case looking for local

manifestations of global processes through an updated political economy that considers

connections between culture, environment, and economy.

EMIGRATION AND REMITTANCES AMONG HILLSIDE FARMERS

A political ecology of transnationalism perspective highlights that the dynamics I outline

are embedded in contemporary and historic inequalities that drive land distribution and

environmental degradation. Over two million Hondurans (more than a quarter of the country‘s

population) live on the steep hillsides that make up eighty-five percent of the country‘s farmed

land and produce over eighty percent of basic foods (Jansen et al 2003a). Over ninety percent

live on under US$1/day (Pender & Scherr 2002). Meanwhile, the fertile valley floors are

dominated by wealthy landowners producing cattle ranches, bananas, melons, and other exports.

The colonial legacy of inequitable land distribution endures in Honduras: the country‘s

basic foods are cultivated on the least fertile lands, with the steepest slopes, greater population

density, the highest susceptibility to droughts and floods, and the least amount of development

and credit assistance by growers operating at subsistence level (Julin Mendez 1986; Jansen,

Pender et al. 2003). People living on the laderas are neglected by policy and have failed to

benefit from macroeconomic reforms.

Inequitable land use and growing rural poverty have resulted in migration, landlessness,

urbanization, and escalating pressure on tropical forest areas in the remainder of the country

(Stonich 1989; Chapman 1965).5 The growing demand for fertile soils as the agriculture frontier

expands up hillsides and into forests results in erosion and combines with increased chemical

inputs and cattle to produce unsustainable changes in agricultural production (Jansen, Damon et

al. 2003; Loker 2004; Ravnborg 2003). Jansen (1997) and Ravnborg (2003) note that there are

varying levels of poverty and kinds of production strategies among ladera farmers: producers

adapt their livelihood strategies to a set of relations and production circumstances (biophysical,

socioeconomic, structural, etc.).

Rural to urban migration in Honduras has long operated as an alternative livelihood

strategy, and as an escape valve for rural population pressure and underemployment. Over the

process has been analyzed in detail by (Cardoso & Faletto 2008 [1979]; dos Santos 1970; Frank

1969; 2000; Mintz 1985; Wallerstein 1979; 1987; Wolf 1982).

5 Current residents of Aguas Blancas and other communities in Cerro Azul Meámbar National

Park were themselves or were related to agricultural colonists, most arriving in the 1950s-1970s.

Establishment of the park in 1987 and active management beginning in 1992 all but halted

immigration to this mountainous frontier.

236

past two decades, some 23% of the population has migrated internally, most to the free-trade

zones around San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa where foreign companies have established

factories or maquiladoras (Amaya 2007). Out-migration from rural communities is augmented

by increasing numbers of teens and young adults going to live with relatives in nearby and major

cities for secondary and postsecondary education, often made possible by money sent by parents

or siblings who have emigrated to urban areas or abroad, especially to the United States.

Nearly one million Honduran emigrants reside in the United States, sending home

approximately US$935 million each year.6 These remittances are equivalent to 21% of the

nation‘s GDP and equal two times the sum of official development assistance and foreign direct

investment (Inter-American Development Bank & Multilateral Investment Fund 2006; Solimano

2004). Economic remittances to Honduras are among the fastest growing in Latin America and

subsidize the basic necessities and livelihoods of those remaining in this second poorest nation of

the Americas (Sladkova 2007; 2008). Domestic emigrants benefit from and add to transnational

income streams (Amaya 2007).7

Hillside farmers in Honduras spend economic remittances on food, home repair, health,

education, and, to a far lesser degree, farm maintenance (Agencia de Cooperación Dense 2005).

In my study area, spending remittances on ―farm maintenance‖ includes hiring laborers,

purchasing chemical inputs such as herbicides and chemical fertilizers, purchasing, feeding, and

pasturing cows, and, less frequently, buying or renting productive land. As with building homes

in their communities of origin, for those emigrants who do not trust the stability of Honduran

banks or for those whose legal status prevents investing in the U.S., such earmarking of funds

serves to consolidate investments for an eventual return. (Cf. Cohen 2001 for similar experience

among transnational emigrants from Mexico.) All of these practices carry potential consequences

for corresponding watersheds.

DYNAMICS OF THE STUDY SITE

Reflecting a global trend towards the decentralization of conservation efforts, Honduran

national policies place responsibility for rural drinking water supply in the hands of village-

community water councils. In turn, development and conservation organizations treat the water

6 As this chapter goes to press, the global economic slowdown and 2009 political turmoil in

Honduras threaten to significantly change these figures. Among the study population,

deportations and voluntary return migration among Honduran emigrants, layoffs, and reduced

work hours have made sending money home increasingly difficult. While this dynamic has

greatly colored my more recent work, this chapter is necessarily written primarily in the

―ethnographic present‖ of 2007 and early 2009, when remittances had not yet dropped off

significantly.

7 Conditions are often not an improvement for those who migrate domestically, as Honduran

cities have been hard pressed to keep up services and infrastructure for the marginal urban poor

(Vinelii 1986:108). Similarly, emigrants to the U.S. often share crowded quarters, have few

funds after making the costly and dangerous border crossing and sending as much as possible

home, and for the majority without papers, are at continual risk of immediate deportation.

237

councils as the principal agents of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM):

each organization is responsible for the small watershed which feeds the spring or stream that

provides community drinking water (Bahamondes 2007a; República de Honduras 2006; USAID

2005). This is the case in my study site, Cerro Azul Meámbar National Park (PANACAM in its

Spanish acronym). The 20,0000 hectare zoned park is co-managed by four municipalities, the

national forestry service, and a Honduran non-governmental organization (NGO) that takes care of

daily operations. The NGO, Aldea Global, recently finished a participatory process to rewrite the

park management plan, reorienting conservation efforts along its three watersheds, which feed two

major hydroelectric projects in central Honduras, the Francisco Morazán (―El Cajón‖) Dam and

Canaveral Hydroelectric Project on Lake Yojoa.

Refocusing the management plan on community-based microwatershed management

mandates an even greater role for watershed conservation to each of the 64 villages and hamlets

located in the buffer zone surrounding the nationally vital, water-generating cloud forest at the

park‘s core (Aldea Global 2007). Aldea Global spent the first half of 2009 working with each

community to self-define the boundaries of their microwatershed in an attempt to strengthen

commitment to the conservation of forests, soil, and water within and beyond the park‘s borders. 8

Agricultural options in the park buffer zone are limited as the terrain is too steep to plow

and as it is over fifty percent forest and protected by park regulations (Pfeffer 2005). Households

in the hillside villages of my study area make their livelihoods by growing staples (corn, beans)

and cash crops (coffee, yucca), gathering forest products (honey, resin, wood), and performing

carpentry, truck-driving, and off-farm wage labor. Local farmers impact their microwatersheds

directly through the application of chemical fertilizers, burning or incorporating crop stubble and

weeds, use of green/organic manure, and erosion control measures which affect soil structure.

I have chosen to focus on Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa because they are experiencing

high rates of emigration and an influx of economic remittances while playing an ongoing role in

park management. Aguas Blanca‘s microwatershed lies within the larger Lake Yojoa watershed.

It encompasses all of the sixty-household village, including the spring and stream that provide

the village drinking water, farmland, and residences, before flowing into the small river that

leads to the lake. With four hundred and fifty households, Santa Rosa provides a counterpoint

with a more diverse economic base. The village draws its water from a microwatershed within

the El Cajon watershed.

Aldea Global works with multiple other institutions involved in the management of the

park: its major concerns for buffer zone co-management are deforestation, fire control, erosion,

and application of chemical agricultural inputs, especially pesticides (PANACAM 2007).9 It tries

8 Watersheds, at the community stream and/or spring level are sometimes called

―microwatersheds‖. They form part of the catchment basins for larger bodies of water.

Watershed resources also include farmland, fallow fields, and other flora and fauna.

9 Collaborators of Aldea Global include municipalities, national agriculture service, national

agricultural institute, coffee promoters, ministries of education and health, and national electric

and water organizations.

238

to promote ―conservation‖ activities in buffer zone communities and alternative, socially and

environmentally sustainable economic opportunities such as ecotourism and organic, shade-

grown coffee production.10

Aldea Global and the other co-managers also aim to support communities in improving

their roads, schools, and basic services and in obtaining titles for buffer zone residents‘ land,

although they often fall short in practice, particularly in the provision of electricity.

Environmental education programs targeting school children, community members, and park

visitors talk about the roles and resources of the park (protection of cloud forests and

biodiversity) and emphasize the role of managing the watersheds and forests of the buffer zone

to protect community water supply.

In an era of declining funding for conservation and global trends in privatization and

decentralization, park management is looking to place much of the onerous work of park

conservation in the hands of the communities that became part of the park‘s buffer zone when it

was established in 1987. In 2009 Aldea Global carried out a project of microwatershed

delineation in which community water councils were asked to define the borders of the

microwatersheds for which they were willing to take the responsibility of protecting. This

responsibility included boundary marking, educating about acceptable activities within the area

surrounding the community‘s water source(s), and reporting transgressions such as cutting,

burning, hunting, or new farming to park authorities, the local police, or one of the two military

brigades stationed in the park. There was no real recourse in enforcement. Lives have been lost

in the past for reporting cutting and fires, making watershed protection a risky proposition. The

imposition of conservation responsibilities on buffer zone residents in the context of limited

involvement from park management raises serious concerns for the future of community-based

management in the area. Of more immediate concern to this chapter is understanding the degree

to which ―community-based‖ includes transnational emigrants and the funds and ideas they

remit.

While documenting community water council activities throughout PANACAM in 2007,

I stayed with the president of the Aguas Blancas‘ water council and his family. Since my first

visit in 2001, the family had amassed a second coffee plot, a little general store, a new house

with guest rooms for tourists, a second house for his mother, and electricity. All were made

possible by funds remitted by his two eldest sons, one working for a horse show in Florida and

the other in retail in New Jersey. ―Javier‘s‖ middle children have all emigrated domestically: a

daughter goes to middle school in Taulabé, a son studies computer technologies at a

Siguatepeque high school and another goes to the university part-time while living and working

with his older brother in a maquiladora in San Pedro Sula. Each generation of emigrants makes

it possible for the next to ‗get ahead‘ and for parents and youngest siblings to stay in Aguas

10

I use terms like ‗conservation,‘ ‗natural resource management,‘ and ‗sustainable‘ loosely,

recognizing that each has been critiqued extensively. Aldea Global‘s activities include: training

programs for sustainable resource management (ex. sound burning, and sufficient fallows),

technical assistance in soil conservation (ex. terracing), agroforestry, organic agriculture, crop

diversification, agrochemical use and management, family and school gardens, fish farms, and

small community run hydroelectric projects.

239

Blancas. Out of caring for relatives in their villages of origin and out of a desire to return ―home‖

if only to visit or retire, transnational emigrants continue to express concern for the family farms

and community conservation and development projects.

In Aguas Blancas a pair of families with successful emigrant members have accumulated

substantial material wealth (new houses, vehicles, small store, refrigerators, cell phones,

computers) while others who have had repeatedly failed migrations are worse off than before, in

some cases opting out of community-subsidized electricity for their small adobe homes. Social

capital accrues to families of successful migrants through formal schooling, informal education

activities, and increased social status derived from education and relative wealth. Over time, this

dynamic deepens divides between the relatively capital-rich and capital-poor, with corresponding

repercussions in community and natural resource management. For instance, in Aguas Blancas

and Santa Rosa, this has translated into a disproportionate number of community leaders coming

from transnational families.

Understanding how these divides in social and economic capital and impacts on

watershed management and watershed impacting practices are related to migration and

remittances – and how they may contribute to community (under)development and dependency –

requires an approach that fuses place-based ethnography with a broader view of historical and

global trends.

POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF TRANSNATIONALISM

In order to understand how transnational emigration (out-migration) affects family and

community relationships with natural resources, this chapter links two rich bodies of

anthropological (as well as sociological and geographic) theory and scholarship: political

ecology and transnationalism. This effort sits at the intersection of trends towards a more

contemporary, interdisciplinary, transnational, and environmentally concerned anthropology that

was foreseen by Kearney (1995) over a decade ago. Focusing on the distribution of power within

human/environment relations, political ecology (Bryant 1997; Peet & Watts 2000; Robbins 2004;

Stonich 1993; 1995; Wolf 1972) provides a theoretical framework to consider the historical,

political, economic, and environmental factors operating on local, national, and global scales,

which shape household watershed-impacting practices. Among the political economy lessons,

the dependency school insight that ―peripheral‖ countries such as Honduras have been (and are

being) underdeveloped through their relationship with the core is key (Cardoso & Faletto 2008

[1979]; Frank 1969; 2000) Biersack and Greenberg (2006:17) find a complementary relationship

forming between transnational studies and political ecology, a relationship that is developed here

into a multi-scaled political ecology of transnationalism..

Transnational migration has received a growing amount of attention in the literature since

the 1990s (Cohen 2001; Conway & Cohen 1998; Edelman 1998; Glick Schiller et al 1995; Kyle

2000; Sheridan 1995). 11

A transnational approach to migration is meant to simultaneously 11

Stark (1991; 1986) in Mexico and Adams (1998) in Pakistan argue that domestic and

transnational remittances may have different effects. Extensive rural-urban migration scholarship

in Africa is helpful in bringing domestic migration into the transnational social field (Adepoju

1974; Aderanti 1974; Cliggett 2003; Gugler 2002; Trager 1998).

240

ground and traverse sites or phenomena often conceptualized as ―local,‖ ―global,‖ and

―national.‖ It compares historically emerged boundaries with ―unbounded arenas and processes‖

(Basch 1994) such as transnational flows of people, funds, and ideas between the Honduran and

U.S. nation states. Levitt (1998) contributes the concept of the ―transnational social field‖ as a

way to conceptualize the space within which communities and families of international and

domestic emigrants function. Remittances create and reinforce communities or networks across

transnational social fields, bridging the multiple boundaries of core and periphery.

Anthropological and sociological ethnographies of transnational families add nuance to

understanding local manifestations of these broad processes (Levitt 2001; Olwig 2007;

Schmalzbauer 2005).12

A ―transnational political ecology‖ framework encourages a continued

focus on human-environment relations within transnational social fields and on any resulting

(re)production of inequality.

Research linking emigration and environment has traditionally focused more on

environmentally-related causes for emigration. For instance, increases in rural outmigration in

Latin America have been blamed on government policies making peasant agriculture untenable

(Jenkins 1977), lack of land or titling (Lopez & Valdes 2000), and environmental conditions

(Hugo 1996). The few researchers studying the impact of emigration and remittances on sending-

community resources or resource-impacting practices note the paucity of empirical research on

the subject (Adger 2002; Appleyard 1989; De Sherbinin et al 2007). Two studies from

environmental and natural resource economics are notable exceptions. Adger (2002) works

within a political ecology framework to assess the impacts of emigration and remittances on

resource-depleted coastal communities in Vietnam. Aryal (2007) shows that outmigration and

remittances indirectly reduce incentives for labor-intensive land conservation, an insight

supported by my work in Honduras.

Discussion of remittances and environmental conservation in the academic literature is

limited to dynamics with indirect impacts on conservation, such as consumption, construction of

houses, purchase of agricultural land, poor caretaking of rented parcels, or imperfect substitution

of hired labor for family labor. Although the implications of remittance expenditure for

conservation is not a prominent focus of academic scholarship, their role in rural development

has been recognized in project literature since the 1970s (cf. Suro 2003), including the

expenditure patterns cited above for rural areas near PANACAM (Agencia De Cooperacion

Denesa 2005).

In rural Honduras, remittances tend to increase dependence on formal markets for

agrochemicals and staple foods, as remaining farmers shift toward cash crops and substitute

pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers for lost labor (Stonich 1995). Cohen (2005) cautions that

migration and remittances may be positive forces in maintaining migrant households of origin.

Whether remittances are, on average, a source of development or underdevelopment for

households and communities is an active debate to be explored further below.

12

A call to focus on families and family networks goes back at least to Macisco (1972), and

more recently to Boyd (1989), who provides a rich view of families as contentious sites of

conflicting interests among members.

241

All of these impacts of transnational migration have implications for conservation and

rural development initiatives, encompassed here as watershed management. Drawing heavily on

political ecology, the body of scholarship around Community-Based Natural Resource

Management (CBNRM) illustrates the importance of attending to issues of power and control

over resources, equitable participation, and locally-managed decision-making processes in

watershed management (Agrawal & Gibson 1999; Brosius et al 1998; 2006; Nygren 2004;

2005). CBNRM scholars treat communities not as homogenous entities, but rather as comprised

of individual actors with competing interests. Communities, and by extension CBNRM, are seen

to operate within local, national, and global flows of people, money, and ideas (Agrawal &

Gibson 2001). In her work with Dominican migrants, Levitt (1998; 2001) has shown that

although they may be rooted in shared places of origin, family and community networks are not

isolated or spatially confined but rather operate in transnational social fields (Levitt & Glick

Schiller 2004; Schmalzbauer 2004).13

Unfortunately the nuanced scholarly definition of

community (which allows for a community capable of spanning spatial boundaries, migration,

and remittances) is often not shared by those behind CBNRM projects (c.f. Bahamondes 2007a).

In addition to economic remittances, across these transnational social fields flow social

remittances: ―the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from host-to sending-

country communities‖ (Levitt 1998:927). Social remittances impact home countries through

entrepreneurship, community development, and political integration. Social remittances carry the

potential to change the distribution of ―social capital,‖ the social relations that increase the ability

of an actor to advance his or her interests (Bourdieu 1977). Economic and social remittances act

as sources of social capital by increasing social status, including that gained from greater access

to information and external resources, affecting who gets to make decisions in the management

of community natural resources.

CAPTURING TRANSNATIONAL FLOWS AND THEIR IMPACTS ON CAPITAL AND

PRACTICES

This chapter is informed by 2007 predissertation research on PANACAM watershed-

related policy and projects and the 2009-2010 dissertation research which grew out of it. 14

By

13

Alternately, these flows of people, funds, and ideas could be conceived of as overlapping

ethnoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1996; Nygren 2004)

14 Predissertation and master‘s thesis research led me to Cerro Azul Meámbar National Park

(PANACAM). During research for my masters in Development Sociology at Cornell University,

I focused on environmental education and water conservation discourse, including interviewing

park rangers during a 2001 visit, transcribing an environmental education radio program, and

collecting documentation on laws, funding, and projects impacting the park (Bahamondes 2003a;

b). Much of the thesis was based on a survey of 601 park residents and 54 in-depth interviews on

resident conservation values and practices collected by M.J. Pfeffer and students from 1996-

1998. (Aguas Blancas is in both datasets and Santa Rosa was included in the surveys.)

I returned to PANACAM in July-August 2007 to document community-based watershed

activities, including hydroelectric projects, multi-community collaborations, inter-community

water conflicts in the park, and major issues such as aging or inexistent water systems, drying

242

focusing on one PANACAM buffer-zone village and four transnational families that stretch from

it to the United States, the dissertation sought to capture how transnational economic and social

remittances affect watershed impacting practices among Honduran hillside farmers and to trace

the resulting unequal distribution of economic and social capital. 15

In 2007, I interviewed park

managers and community leaders to document the range of watershed management projects and

concerns affecting the park and its residents. Migration surfaced as a pervasive, understudied,

factor in watershed management and use. The 2009-2010 research proceeded in four phases.

Phase I began with four participatory group interviews in order to develop a village-wide survey

designed to 1) determine migration patterns and histories 2) identify uses of monetary

remittances and content of social remittances, 3) record watershed impacting practices and

participation in community WIP activities, and 4) understand in general terms the distribution of

economic, social and symbolic capital within the community. The open- and closed-ended

question household survey was administered to 31 households, with follow-up surveys

administered to the 18 families engaged in agricultural activities. During this period four

households receiving economic remittances from abroad and three households without

international emigrants were chosen to reflect varying combinations of economic capital, social

capital, and emigration experiences.

Phase III included multiple in-depth interviews with resident family members and those

who have emigrated to Honduran cities. Heads of household were asked to keep ―remittance

diaries‖ to record the receipt and expenditure of migradollars as well as to track migration and

environment related phone conversations with emigrant family members. These diaries were

continued by phone during the third phase of the project spent interviewing and observing

transnational family members and exploring networks of Aguas Blancas-area emigrants in the

United States (Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Long Island, New York). In the final stage of the

project, the experiences of Aguas Blancas and the case-study families were compared to those of

other villages in and around the park through several consultations and town-hall-style meetings,

held with members of other park villages and with park managers. Extended home stays with

transnational family members were an essential component of participant observation in both the

U.S. and Honduras.

springs, inadequate management, and forest fires (Bahamondes 2007b). I visited villages

throughout the park, speaking with park managers and water council members and interviewing

representatives of each of the park co-managing municipalities and of national water and forestry

agencies (resulting in 7 taped interviews). In Aguas Blancas and another village I spent several

days interviewing residents and water council members (10) and conducting group interviews

(2).

15 The specific village was selected during prior research based on 1) inclusion in Pfeffer et al.‘s

1996-1998 surveys and qualitative interviews that formed the basis of my 2003 study of the

globalization of water conservation discourse, 2) interest in the project, and 3) the extent of

migration, impact of remittances, and resulting inequalities. In order to illustrate the feasibility of

a transnational political ecology informed study I focus on the methodology of the more recent

dissertation study.

243

The contrast of community, emigrant, park, and transnational family networks also

responds to calls to conduct multiple levels of analysis, providing insight into powerful macro-

level forces such as decentralization and dependency (Frank 2000; Massey 1990; Massey 1987;

Nygren 2005)—the result approaches an ―ethnography of the world system‖ (Marcus 1995).16

The project develops the relationship between transnational studies and political ecology into a

multi-scaled ―political ecology of transnationalism‖ to integrate the political, economic, and

environmental factors that shape household and community watershed impacting practices. By

showing that, in the wake of emigration, watershed use and management is unbound, the project

will provide empirical evidence to challenge the dangerous misconception of community as

spatially bound village—a misconception that underlies many community-based conservation

and development efforts.

The research project was also designed as an opportunity for residents of Aguas Blancas

and co-managers of Cerro Azul Meámbar National Park to consider the possibility of emigrated

family members as potential stakeholders, suggesting the need to consider the role of social

remittances and inequalities in social and economic capital in watershed impacting practices and

conservation leadership. It is also an opportunity to confront how these dynamics potentially

increase dependency on migration and remittances.

MIGRATION & REMITTANCES AFFECT WATERSHEDS & WATERSHED

IMPACTING PRACTICES

A key insight from a political ecology of transnationalism approach is that seemingly

unbound processes stretching across transnational spaces share very real consequences in

specific places. This section uses existing information on the park and region to identify some of

the pressures of emigration and remittances on park watershed and watershed-impacting

practices at the household and village-community levels. While little has been written explicitly

on the environmental impacts of remittances, it is clear that they are difficult to predict due to the

number of confounding variables. Describing a coastal ecosystem in Vietnam, Adger (2002)

shows that impacts on mangroves are mediated by education, consumption, income inequality,

and investments in alternative businesses associated with remittances. Pressure on forest and

farm land in Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa is mediated by similar factors.

Using satellite imagery, Pfeffer et al (2005) have shown that in the buffer zone of Cerro

Azul Meámbar National Park, where Aguas Blancas is located, lower population density from

substantial out-migration corresponds to an increase in coffee production with less land farmed

and more food purchased. The amount of fallow land decreases as lands once used for staple

16

This methodology expands on existing multi-sited ethnographies (Burawoy 2000; Gupta &

Ferguson 1992; Kearney 1995; Marcus 1995; Sahlins 1993) and on the use of kinship for studies

of transnational migration (Boyd 1989; Cohen 2001; Olwig 2003; 2007; Schmalzbauer 2004;

2005; 2008). Focusing on transnational family networks allows for a nuanced, non-spatially

bound treatment of community and conservation (Agrawal & Gibson 2001; Schmalzbauer 2004).

In pragmatic terms, the methodology is designed to maximize limited project resources to

capture expansive flows of people, funds, and ideas across transnational space and the impact

that they have on the beliefs and practices of real people in a real place.

244

crops are used for shade coffee or revert to protected, untouchable forest.17

Coffee cultivation has

several environmental advantages over corn or beans: existing trees are conserved and new

planted for shade-grown coffee, soil erosion is lesser, fallen leaves are left as mulch, and fewer

agrochemicals are used. Increased coffee production also brings environmental impacts. In some

areas, the increased availability of cash income from remittances or increased sales increases the

application of pesticides, potentially impacting the water supply. In Aguas Blancas, the pulp left

over from stripping the flesh of the coffee berry from the bean washes into the village stream,

depriving the water of oxygen needed to sustain aquatic life. In Santa Rosa, coffee is sold as

berries, displacing this kind of pollution from the village‘s microwatershed.

Many studies of migration and conservation are based on the assumption that

depopulation is good for the environment. In PANACAM there is empirical evidence tying

depopulation and environmental recovery, however it is inaccurate to assume depopulation is the

only – or even primary - consequence of emigration, as remittances and resulting inequalities

between households act as confounding variables. Recognizing that it is tricky to predict the

impact of labor/population size, Pfeffer et al (2005) suggest that lower population density and

competition for resources in PANACAM may result in less opposition to conservation programs.

However, as the Peace Corps volunteer found in Aguas Blancas, there may be insufficient labor

to implement the programs.

My interviews with farmers in Santa Rosa suggest that outmigration has made labor-

intensive investments in land management and improvement become less attractive, including

conservationist methods such as composting, terracing, or live fences. Pender (1999) showed a

similar effect from an increase in off-farm opportunities and rural wages. Purchased inputs

(pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers) substitute for time, especially where the fallow cycle is

shortened due to land scarcity, as is the case within the buffer zone of the national park (Loker

2004:136). Increased availability of cash through remittances makes purchase of these chemical

inputs more tenable. Shorter fallows, labor scarcity, and more chemical-intensive practices

degrade soil and foster dependency on purchased fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.

Emigration also creates a market for labor and rented land, both of which tend to have

more negative, long-term, environmental impacts (especially from erosion and agrochemical use)

than does family-owned land with family members as laborers (Jansen, Damon et al. 2003).

Increased renting of land and hiring of laborers have been associated with a decline in long-term

sustainable land use practices (Jansen, Damon et al. 2003). Of those hiring outside labor in Santa

Rosa, only those who could draw on other family members (brothers, uncles, nephews) and close

friends with similar work ethics had confidence in the quality of work performed. Even then,

$5/day labor is prohibitively expensive for such labor-intensive practices as terracing or

maintaining a rain-fed irrigation system. When paid by the day, weeding by hand or hoe is far

more expensive than buying and applying herbicide with a backpack sprayer.

17

In the park, implementation of policies and reforestation programs also play a part in this

conversion. Using satellite imagery, Pfeffer et al. (2005) showed that between 1993 and 1998 the

proportion of land in Aguas Blancas dedicated to coffee increased by 17% to account for 34% of

total land (with 6% in agriculture, 2% in fallow, and 58% in forest).

245

With land rental comes a decreased knowledge of the land being farmed and less impetus

for investing scarce labor and capital in long-term projects; land owners are more likely to

reclaim improved parcels for themselves. Renting farmers, when they rent land in exchange for

clearing fallow lands, benefit from improved soil quality, but often the land is a marginal parcel

with degraded soil that requires extra fertilizers and urea to be coaxed into production.

As suggested above, remittance- and migration-financed economic, physical, and social

capital are creating a new class of rural ―nonpoor‖ whose resource use and agricultural practices

sets them apart from their neighbors. They create new issues for sustainable agriculture: for

example, nonpoor tend to use more pesticides but burn less (Jansen, Pender et al. 2003). To the

extent that the nonpoor hold a greater extent of land and larger numbers of cattle than their

neighbors, and to the extent that they are more likely to participate in community leadership,

their watershed-impacting practices are disproportionately represented in community natural

resource management. Ravnborg (2003:1934) uses a political ecology perspective to show that

farmers‘ natural resource management practices are also shaped by the broader social

relationships and norms that govern how resources are controlled and accessed. These

relationships and norms shift under transnational migration and remittances.

Through increased spending on houses, water, electricity and other community

development projects, migradollars can change the status of one community relative to another

and relative to local authorities increasing their ability to negotiate for scarce government and

NGO resources (Durand et al 1996; Goldring 1998; 2004; Taylor et al 1996). The poorest

communities in PANACAM are those that are the farthest from the Pan-American Highway,

which acts not only as a vehicle of commerce but as a means of ready access to domestic and

transnational migration. Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa have enjoyed a remittance-driven

material and educational prosperity not felt in the more isolated eastern side of the park.

Availability of road, water, and electricity infrastructure mirrors this prosperity.

Emigrants also directly impact watershed management practices by funding infrastructure

development such as potable water systems. In Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa, emigrants with

homes in the villages invested directly by paying fees assessed to each tap in the new system and

by hiring day laborers to stand in for their mandatory labor contributions. Emigrants also helped

relatives meet their own labor and fee requirements. A handful from Santa Rosa donated directly

to the project.

Jones (1998) cautions that while remittances at first decrease inter-familial inequality in

the sending community—and rural-to-urban inequality—the divisions between families

eventually increase. This has certainly been the case in Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa, where

families without remittances have less secure income and little cash income necessary for

modern amenities, secondary education, and health care. In Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa the

strongest leaders also have multiple children in the United States. Both have been singled out by

Aldea Global to receive extensive environmental and agricultural education, increasing their

status through knowledge, visibility, and connections.

Even from this partial listing, it is clear that the environmental impacts of migration and

remittances are multiple and multi-directional. Taken together, they exacerbate dependency on

agrochemicals, hired labor, rented land, and on emigration and remittances. A political ecology

246

of transnationalism approach ties these local socio-economic-environmental dynamics to global

flows of people, funds, and ideas.

REMITTANCE-BASED DEVELOPMENT OR DEPENDENCY?

Land use in Honduras follows the three historical stages of dependence outlined by dos

Santos (1970): colonial dependence with monopoly over land, mine, and manpower, 2) financial-

industrial dependence with expansion of the production of raw materials and agricultural

products for export (late nineteenth century), and 3) postwar ―technological-industrial‖

dependence based on multinational corporations. Colonization and a centuries-long process of

integration into the global capitalist economy through focusing on export agribusiness at the

expense of production of staples for domestic markets, placed Honduras in a process of

underdevelopment and ever greater integration into the five-hundred-year world system. The

Latin America-wide process has been analyzed in detail elsewhere (Cardoso and Faletto 2008

[1979]; dos Santos 1970; Frank 1969, 2000; Mintz 1985; Wallerstein 1979, 1987; Wolf 1982).

Relations of production continue to evolve in Aguas Blancas. The past decades have

already seen a shift from subsistence agriculture to a mix of subsistence agriculture and coffee

growing. Integration into the capitalist market economy began with sale of basic produce and

coffee and has recently accelerated through such purchases as materials to fabricate homes (tin

and concrete as opposed to adobe and straw) and basic grains such as corn. Be it due to coffee

production or emigration, households no longer produce sufficient staples for household

consumption. As evidenced by the co-existence of market production (coffee), subsistence

farming (corn, beans), and a nascent service economy (eco-tourism), multiple modes of

production overlap in Aguas Blancas. Remittances, domestic and transnational, are an additional

mode which further incorporates residents into the market and is creating dependency on

emigration.

As of 2006, 10% of Hondurans resided in the United States. Together these emigrants

(predominately men under 36 years of age) send US$200-300/month back to the 11% of

Honduran households with family members in the States. At the national level, US$2.3 billion in

remittances (up from $US50 million in 1990) surpassed the combined income from foreign

direct investment, exports, and maquiladoras (Banco Central de Honduras 2007).18

In its quest to

make the most of remittances, Honduras has the help of international agencies such as the Inter-

American Development Bank (IDB) and the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), which are

actively looking at remittances as a form of, and possibly a replacement for, foreign aid

(Chimhowu, Piesse, and Pinder 2003; Inter-American Development Bank and Multilateral

Investment Fund 2006; Terry 2005). As United States aid to Honduras rapidly declines (even

18

Increases in the consumption of foreign goods and investment have augmented international

reserves, stabilized the exchange rate, and slowed inflation and interest rate reductions. The

government sees the contradictions between increasing income and an apparent shift from

production to consumption in rural areas, but concentrates energy on finding ways to help

emigrants remit cheaply and safely. The Central Bank sees opportunities for development in

remittances, even as it recognizes the precarious dependent position they put the country in vis-á-

vis the United States (Banco Central de Honduras 2007).

247

prior to the June 2009 coup, in part because of the country‘s diminished importance as a staging

zone for operations in Central America (see Ruhl 2007)), remittances from the U.S. came to

account for twice the country‘s combined overseas direct assistance and foreign direct

investment of approximately $US 935 million in 2004 (Inter-American Development Bank and

Multilateral Investment Fund 2006). 19

Resulting short-term increases in consumption and

longer-term increases in savings and investment are seen as having a positive impact on local

development (Solimano 2004).

Exploring the possibility of tapping remittances directly for development projects, MIF-

IDB (2001) found that 43% of Central Americans were interested in investing in a fund that

would benefit the development of their home country, especially if directed to their city or

region. About a fifth of Latin American immigrants have already contributed money to

―collective remittances,‖ events organized by Latin American communities throughout the

United to raise money for projects in their home country. Providing theoretical support to these

governmental and aid agency contemplations of remittances, some scholars look to remittances

as possible subsidies for rural or community development or more generally as sources of rural

investment which will help alleviate rural poverty (ex. Durand, Parrado, and Massey 1996;

Taylor 1999). Little is said on resulting increased market dependence or environmental impact.

Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa already tap directly into remittances for development,

channeling funds to community level development. The Aguas Blancas water council assesses

prorated fees to emigrant members to pay for water or electricity hookups to the homes that their

remittances have financed. While developing its water system in 2003-2008, emigrants living on

Long Island were asked by the emigrant son of the then-community-council president to donate

to the improvements, channeling funds to the Santa Rosa water council. Organizing across such

distance faltered when the person entrusted with delivering the funds failed to arrive. Later

contributions took the form of direct individual to water-council remittances via Western Union

and Money Gram. Indirectly, emigrant members of both communities subsidize community

development through remittances that free up financial resources otherwise dedicated to food,

lodging, education and healthcare. Remittances also allow older or infirm community members

to ―buy out‖ of their community labor responsibilities by hiring a day laborer to take their place.

In this way, the community council of Santa Rosa compensates for the loss of labor through

emigration. By assessing monetary and labor fees to each water tap, whether the corresponding

home is occupied or not, the water council brings in resources from successful migrants who

have built houses ―back home.‖ In turn, these elevated fees subsidize the project as a whole.

While it is hard to deny that remittances contribute to community and economic

development through infrastructure and education, the changes in watershed management

practices and potential changes in the watershed environment discussed above suggest that

remittances come with a price. Others are concerned with the economic, social, and, to a lesser

19

This is significantly higher than for most developing countries: on average, remittances are the

second most important source of external finance, less than direct investment and surpassing

foreign aid (Solimano 2004). In Honduras remittances amount to 70% of total export revenues

and 21% of GDP (Inter-American Development Bank, and Multilateral Investment Fund 2006).

These flows of capital are among the fastest growing in Latin America.

248

degree, environmental impact of increased market integration, increased dependency on

capitalist markets brought about as a result of increased consumption and emergence of land and

labor markets, paired with withdrawal of government assistance under the rubric of

decentralization (cf. Reichert 1981).

I explore the implications of transnational migration and remittances for natural resource

management practice and policy more thoroughly elsewhere (c.f. Taylor 2009). Here I would

like to ask another related question: how do emigration and remittance induced changes in

household and community natural resource management practices impact the sustainability and

(under)development of rural livelihoods? While not easily answered because of the great number

of confounding variables that have been laid out above, I am asking if emigration and remittance

generated changes in watershed impacting practices (as well as the resulting environmental

impacts, exacerbate dependency on domestic and transnational labor and commodity markets. To

the extent that livelihoods are made more difficult as a result of these changes, emigration and

remittances could be considered a source of underdevelopment.20

While I focus on the potential

negative impacts because I think they are more indirect and hidden, I appreciate that those

families and communities that have benefited value the positive impacts of remittances such as

the improved housing, running water, electricity, and greater educational opportunities described

for Javier‘s family and community.

Because I see evidence of both development and dependency in Aguas Blancas and other

Honduran communities I have visited, I am appreciative of positions which allow analysis of

both. Drawing on his work with sending community households of peasant farmers in Oaxaca,

Mexico, Cohen illustrates that development/underdevelopment is a false dichotomy (Cohen,

Jones, and Conway 2005; Cohen 2001; Conway and Cohen 2003, 1998). He frames the study

within a transnational model which allows for a more nuanced study of current and long-term

multidirectional relations across domestic and international fields of social and economic

interaction:

A transnational approach breaks down the contradictions of dependency and

development and defines the outcomes of migration and remittance use as rooted in a

series of interdependencies that emphasize production and consumption, class and

ethnicity, and the individual and the community while transcending localities and

national boundaries (Basch et al. 1994:22; Kearney 1996:133). (Cohen 2001:955)

Cohen argues that contradictions are not an inherent quality of transnational migration, but rather

arise from the historical development of the process, such as the history of land distribution

driven underdevelopment leading to migration discussed above. His conceptualization of

transmigration is robust enough to look at remittances on the multiple levels in which they are

earned and spent, to see both economic and social remittances and to examine the economic,

social, and political transactions and structures within which they are embedded. When concern

20

At the national level the Honduran economy is inextricably intertwined with U.S. production

and demand for labor. Even channeling the over US$2.3 billion returned by immigrant workers

each year into national or local projects does not erase the accompanying degree of economic

dependency on the U.S. and continuation of transnational migration and remittance.

249

for the impacts and inequalities produced by human/environment relations is added, it becomes a

political ecology of transnationalism approach.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Transnational migrants occupy interlaced social spaces across borders and maintain

strong ties to both ―home‖ and ―host‖ countries (Basch 1994; Levitt 2001). Those who have

emigrated from places like Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa remain connected to their ―home‖

communities and to household and community water(shed) management practices indirectly

through economic and social remittances and resulting changes in watershed-impacting practices

and in the distribution of economic and social capital. Their very absence has environmental,

social, and economic repercussions as families adapt to having fewer hands to perform labor

intensive soil conservation practices or as they rent out emigrants‘ land. Emigrants impact

watersheds directly through their investments in crops, cattle, labor, and agrochemicals and by

helping to fund community-wide environmentally impacting or conserving activities such as

installing a water system.

If the conceptualization of community in community-based natural resource management

is to be expanded to include families and communities operating across transnational social

fields, then home villages and park managers will need to address how best to include

transnational emigrants in more formal decision making about watershed resource management.

An ethnography informed by a political ecology of transnationalism offers insights into historical

and day-to-day role of emigration and remittances in fostering development and

underdevelopment through watershed impacting practices and management.

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