Vanessa Toro Barragan

Plant-endophyte symbiotic relationships may function to increase plant host fitness in drought and could help us understand fungal and plant community changes as global precipitation patterns change.

To understand the drivers of fungal community composition, we looked at whether endophyte communities are distributed based on 1) plant-host specificity 2) spatial distribution.

We observed that endophytes are not plant-host specific in these grass species and determined that spatial distribution significantly drives the composition of endophyte communities.

Costa Rica’s colonial history experienced racial and ethnic segregation, with Afro-Caribbean, indigenous, and rural peasants at the periphery of the  nation and a whitened Costa Rican identity, at the nation’s urban center. Furthermore, the peripheral populations experienced a conflict with multinational banana companies and most recently, international conservation initiatives for access to and control of territory and its resources. A more recent market-based initiative, Payments for Environmental Services (PES) pays landowners to keep forests protected to ensure forest services of scenic beauty, biodiversity, aquifer protection and carbon sequestration.  However, this initiative emerges on layers of historical demographic patterns influenced by colonial policies and economies. Taking spatial analysis view of demography and PES can highlight spatial clusters or relationships between demographic makeup and conservation initiatives.

For ethnic minorities in Latin America and throughout the Global South, an expansion of citizenship rights, such as constitutional recognition of ethnic groups, has been undermined by State-sanctioned neoliberal policies, political corruption, and violent occupation of territories. State-led planning within these contexts is characterized by the use of centralized planning models that execute megaprojects which continue to represent dominant economic and political interests at the expense of ethnic communities, oftentimes, touting inclusive planning practices. In these instances, insurgent planning practices, collective actions from below, challenge the neoliberal mechanism of dominance through inclusion, with alternative forms of city-making.
            In Buenaventura, Colombia, a port city which is part of the constitutionally recognized Afro-Colombian and Indigenous ethnic-territory, 67% of the population cannot meet its basic needs for housing, water, sanitation, food, healthcare and/or education. This high rate of unmet basic needs sits in stark contradiction to the wealth flowing through its port economy, which brought in 1.7 billion USD in national custom revenues in 2016 and manages 30% of the nation’s exports. In 2017, El Movimiento Cívico de Buenaventura para Vivir con Dignidad y Paz en el Territorio (Buenaventura Civic Movement to Live with Dignity and Peace in the Territory) emerged as a multisectoral coalition to address structural inequality and violence. The movement successfully organized a 22-day civic strike to close the commercial activity of nation's third-largest port. An estimated 25% of bonaverenses, people of Buenaventura, participated either by blockading, marching or negotiating with the government. In an agreement to end the strike, the movement created an autonomous fund to finance a 10-year comprehensive development plan and secured 500 million USD of initial financing.
Through interviews with movement leaders, social media, historical context, and analysis of the legal agreements, I describe three mechanisms of civic governance that the movement offers for an insurgent planning practice. The first is multisector solidarity that is built by a process of collective learning. The second mechanism looks at the committee structure of the Movimiento Cívico, in which thematic committees are established to manage the priorities of the city. The third, is the legal framework that creates a mixed-management board of directors, with Movimiento Cívico representatives and the State, for the autonomous fund and the 10-year comprehensive development plan. These mechanisms, formas propias de gobernanza (our own ways of governance), contest the relationship with the State and aim to restore a cosmovision (worldview) that reflects the ethnic-territory.