Communal Arrangements for Sustainably Managing Soil Quality and Adapting to Climate Change: A Case Study in the Peruvian Central Andes

Historically, local communities in the Andean mountains have exhibited a remarkable capacity to overcome climate variability and natural risks by maintaining ecological stability and productivity and ensuring the multifunctionality of their agroecosystem through ingenious soil management and conservation practices. This chapter explores the interactions between ecological and socio-institutional changes in a complex adaptive system. It develops an interdisciplinary and participatory framework to understand the main changes that have occurred in communal land management and their effects on soil quality, as a proxy for describing the capacity of soils to provide multiple key agroecosystem functions in two indigenous communities in the Central Peruvian Andes. We assessed soil quality according to local knowledge and scientific information in several selected cultivated fields (or chacras) under either communal management, i.e. the Laymi system, or individual management resulting from progressive land parcelling. Our findings emphasized the importance of maintaining commons to sustainably manage natural resources and soil quality. During discussions about the results of the study, the communities suggested future strategies that could be implemented at different scales to adaptively respond to environmental changes. They discussed the management practices to improve crop productivity and to protect soil from erosion and the options to reshape or establish new communal land use schemes, management of temporal user rights and communal rotations.