Juan Castro Blanco National Water Park, Costa Rica
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This case innovation has been analysed using the Transformative Intervention Mixes (TIMs) framework. The framework maps the regulatory, economic, social‑behavioural, technological and material interventions at play, clarifying how these elements interact and what this configuration suggests about the innovation’s capacity to support transformative change.
Community-led Green Land Acquisition
Community-based organisations (APANAJUCA and AFAMAAR) mobilising partnerships and fundraising to purchase or secure land within/around the Juan Castro Blanco National Water Park (Costa Rica) to consolidate protected area land and protect freshwater resources.
Protected area consolidation, freshwater protection, and community-driven conservation finance
Most land within Costa Rican protected areas can remain privately owned; Juan Castro Blanco National Water Park has high private ownership, creating challenges for consolidation and watershed protection. Local organisations developed mechanisms to acquire land for conservation purposes.
Local to regional (watershed/protected area landscape).
Practical: acquisition of land to alter land use and consolidate protected area coverage for freshwater protection.
Political: community organisations partnering with state-linked and public-interest entities, navigating protected area governance where private land remains within formal park boundaries.
Personal: motivations linked to public health concerns (gastric cancer) and community commitment to protect water resources.
The paper frames the mechanisms as socially innovative approaches that may be informative for other contexts where protected areas include substantial private landholdings.
Conservation Basic Income - Income for People Living in Biodiversity-rich Conservation Areas
Payment for Ecosystem Services - Grain for Green, China
Sustainable Biodiversity Stewardship - South Africa
Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) - Semporna Priority Conservation Area, Malaysia
Horizontal Partnerships - Pastaza Marañon Foreland Basin, Peru
Summary
This case is strongly evidenced in Financial / Market-Based mechanisms and Biophysical resources, with community organisations mobilising funds and partnerships to purchase land and thereby change ownership and land-use trajectories within a protected area. Knowledge and Technology appear as enabling supports, including use of geographical information and emphasis on the park’s hydrological importance. Voluntary-advisory-educational tools are present through community organising and partnership-building, but formal education programmes are not central. Regulatory tools are contextual (protected area designation alongside private ownership) rather than the primary lever used. The configuration implies a distributive and material pathway: transformation is pursued by reallocating property/land control to secure ecological functions, with mobilisation partly anchored in public-interest motivations. An implementation-relevant insight is that high private ownership within the park is explicitly identified as a structural constraint, making acquisition (and associated partnerships) the core operational mechanism.
Implications for Intervention Mix Design (analytical reflection): Because acquisition focuses on land consolidation, broader transformative scope would require alignment with complementary governance instruments (e.g., clearer regulatory pathways for expropriation/compensation or long-term stewardship arrangements), which are discussed as contextual dynamics rather than designed tools. Additional mix elements could be needed to address livelihood impacts and equity risks associated with land acquisition, but these are not described as implemented instruments in the named source. This reflection highlights potential alignment needs without implying they are already in place.
| Tool Category | Examples | How it ENABLES (mechanisms) | How it HINDERS (barriers) | Opportunities to strengthen | Risks / caveats | Additional suggestions and resources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regulatory | Protected area status co-exists with private ownership; expropriation/compensation is referenced as a mechanism in the background governance context. The 1972 Water Law imposed protection buffers around springs used for human consumption; the 1996 Forestry Law reinforced protection of all water springs; protected-area regulations restricted land use inside the park. |
Defines the formal conservation boundary and sets the governance context within which acquisition occurs. These rules defined prohibited activities, justified forest and spring protection, and created the legal basis for limiting productive land uses within and around the protected area. |
High levels of private ownership within protected area boundaries constrain consolidation and protection of freshwater resources. Issues with weak enforcement, repeated violations, delayed expropriation and compensation, and legal conflict over land-use restrictions. |
Better alignment between new community-based governance arrangements and formal legal and planning systems. | Outdated regulations and weak enforcement can undermine legitimacy, create conflict with landholders, and delay conservation outcomes. | Voluntary conservation easement frameworks; payment schemes; community-based conservation landholding entities; safeguards addressing livelihood impacts of land consolidation; Planning regulations that prioritise hydrologically important areas. |
| Financial / Market-Based | Community organisations mobilising fundraising and partnerships to acquire land for conservation. | Directs financial resources towards land purchase/consolidation to secure conservation outcomes. | Dependence on voluntary funding and partnership dynamics can limit pace/scale (implied by fundraising reliance; not quantified). | Partnerships with public-interest organisations are described as supportive. | Acquisition can create displacement/exclusion risks depending on mechanisms and compensation adequacy. | Conservation Basic Income (separate catalogue entry) as a complementary income-support mechanism to mitigate livelihood pressures. Land purchase and conservation funds to buy privately owned land inside the park. Watershed Solidarity Fund pooling user, municipal and donor contributions for stewardship (cf. Italian mountain commons). Fair compensation and buy-out schemes for landowners transferring property or use rights. Community conservation easements with compensated use restrictions instead of full purchase. Fiscal instruments to reveal health benefits of nature conservation. |
| Information / Education | Raise awareness about polluted water and forest protection; Nectandra eco-loans requiring environmental workshops and educational programmes in schools. | Education built local support, linked conservation to health and water security, and formed part of the non-monetary return expected from eco-loan recipients. | Maintaining consensus across actors is difficult because sectors define sustainability and conservation differently. | Continued educational work that reinforces a common sustainability framework across sectors. | If awareness is uneven, mistrust can grow and alliances needed for social innovation may weaken. | |
| Choice Architecture | ||||||
| Social Norms | Community fundraising through local events, auctions, parish fairs, and broad civil-society support for preserving water for future generations. | Collective civic engagement supports sustained mobilisation for acquisition and stewardship. | Jealousy, resentment and friction among actors when roles, hierarchies or accomplishments are contested. | Maintaining collaborative norms that recognise multiple roles and reduce inter-organisational tension. | Shared norms can fragment if actor interests diverge or if benefits are perceived as unevenly distributed. | ICCA governance mechanisms (separate catalogue entry) as another community-led conservation governance model. |
| Emotional Appeal | AFAMAAR influenced by alerts from health authorities about high rates of gastric cancer in Zarcero, linking water/land protection to health concerns. | Health-linked concern provides a motivational frame for mobilisation and support for land acquisition. | Fear-based mobilisation can be difficult to sustain if it is not coupled with practical organisational mechanisms and visible results. | Continued framing that connects conservation to tangible local wellbeing and intergenerational responsibility. | Emotionally charged conflict over threats to the park may intensify disputes with other land users. | Wildeverse (separate catalogue entry) as a contrasting emotional-engagement mechanism via media rather than place-based mobilisation. |
| Technology | Use of geographical information data to map the park’s hydrological importance and location. | Spatial information supports targeting and justification for acquisition priorities linked to watershed protection. | Macroscope (separate catalogue entry) as a broader-scale ecological data integration approach. | |||
| Infrastructure (Hard/Soft) | Community-based organisations; green savings trust arrangements; eco-loan fund; partnerships with municipalities, cooperatives, NGOs, utilities and park management. | These soft infrastructures coordinated actors, channelled finance, and created durable organisational arrangements for conservation-oriented land acquisition. | Challenges come from diverse interests, difficult consensus-building, and outdated planning and legal systems. | Further institutionalisation of adaptive governance arrangements that can work with, rather than against, formal systems. | Organisational complexity can produce administrative burdens, inter-actor friction, and governance instability. | Social innovation for protected areas; collaborative environmental governance; public-private-community partnerships. |
| Biophysical Resources | Land acquisition to consolidate park land and protect freshwater resources. | Changes land availability/management to secure watershed and forest functions within the protected area landscape. | Ongoing private land presence and associated land uses. The balance between productive and conservation land is difficult because the same lands are valuable for agriculture and dairy production. |
Continued land consolidation and corridor creation where finance and governance conditions permit. | Conservation land acquisition outcomes depend on mechanisms used and social context, including risks of displacement/exclusion. | Participatory contract design (separate catalogue entry) as an alternative tool for influencing land management without transfer of ownership. |
| Knowledge | Recognition of ecosystem services provided by the park; identification of agrochemical pollution risks; technical assistance and coaching in green business through the eco-loan mechanism. | Knowledge about water quality, ecosystem services and management options shaped priorities, justified acquisition, and supported organisational learning. | Actors hold different understandings of sustainability and conservation, making shared governance difficult. | Continued knowledge exchange that supports a common sustainability framework. | Without shared understanding, governance alliances may weaken and decisions may be contested. | Nature-Based Thinking (separate catalogue entry) as an analytical lens for linking governance, communities and nature. |
| Other | Social innovation mechanisms created by local civil society for conservation-oriented land acquisition. | These hybrid mechanisms combined governance change, finance, collective action and conservation goals in ways not previously available in the local context. | Such innovation still faces governance limits linked to land markets, consensus-building and regulation. | Further replication of locally adapted social-innovation mechanisms where community motivation and organisational capacity already exist. | There is a risk that innovation remains dependent on a small set of committed organisations and individuals. | Social innovation; community-based conservation; regional sustainable development. |
Note: Blank cells reflect that the documentary evidence available for this case did not contain sufficiently explicit information to address these dimensions. This absence should not be interpreted as implying that such mechanisms were irrelevant or ineffective, but simply that they were not documented within the scope of the source materials.