How are institutions included in Integrated Conservation and Development Projects? Developing and testing a diagnostic approach on the World Bank's Forest and Community project in Salta, Argentina

The opportunities and challenges of ensuring participation and success of Integrated Conservation and
Development Projects (ICDPs) have been fairly studied. However, it is not often well-established which
institutional mechanisms explain the failure in meeting participatory and project goals. To fill this gap,
we develop a telecoupling-inspired diagnostic approach to assess the level of institutional distance and
opportunity for collective decision-making in ICDPs by looking at project information flows, project asset
flows, and rules and regulation flows between project actors. We construct three management arche-
types based on the direction and directness of such flows: decoupled management, telecoupled manage-
ment and collaborative management. The archetypes are applied to a case study of a World Bank-
financed ICDP in Argentina, drawing on qualitative data collected from individual interviews with project
actors. Our findings challenge the notion that a project becomes participatory if the project design pro-
vides guidelines for participatory implementation. We find that our diagnostic approach helps to con-
cretize the call for inclusion of local project actors across the project cycle, which is needed to make
projects collaborative, relevant, and socially just. Finally, we advocate future project assessments to build
on this approach and map the practical institutional relationships between project actors to provide
transparency on the de facto level of project collaboration. This article is relevant for both academics
and practitioners designing and implementing conservation and development projects.