Linking Livelihoods and Conservation: Challenges Facing the Galápagos Islands - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 80

to tourists in the first place - over simple promotion of the quantity of visitors. In
the same way, businesses can add value to local products by adopting best practice
principles, and linking into international “eco consumer” networks. Finally, govern-
ment should encourage local successful entrepreneurs to invest part of their benefits
in continental Ecuador. This would slow the economic growth in the archipelago
and contribute to development in the rest of the country.
Recommendations
(a) Implement policy changes that increase the flow of economic benefits of tour-
ism to the resident population.
(b) Employ concessionary management techniques based on social, economic and
ecological criteria, codes of conduct to regulate tourism growth, market focus
and local equity.
(c) Support small and medium scale enterprises through alliances with micro-
finance, market, training and capacity-building institutions. Encourage high
quality products and best practices to develop niche markets.
(d) Encourage Galápagos private investment in mainland Ecuador to slow the islands'
unsustainable economic growth and help to develop the rest of the country.
Educational Reform
Education is of very low quality in the Galápagos; school programs tend to
be mediocre and ill-adapted to the particularities of the archipelago. Teachers
receive poor salaries and have inadequate professional qualification. All of this
despite the fact that education was recognized as a key to a sustainable society
when the Special Law of Galápagos was developed in 1998. The Special Law
included a framework for an integral reform of the Galápagos educational system.
This framework promoted an overhaul of the primary and secondary education
system, including: modernizing infrastructure; ensuring teachers are relevantly
trained; a customized curriculum drawing primarily on specific examples from the
Galápagos; a focus on human and environmental relations (such as the importance
of biodiversity to livelihoods); and a consideration of living with limits (such as
energy consumption and waste management). Unfortunately, 10 years on, this
educational reform has not yet been implemented because of failure of institutional
capacity and leadership as well as a lack of resources.
Additionally, there are few opportunities for vocational and tertiary education in
Galápagos. As a consequence, the local population has little opportunity to gain the
skills that would prepare them for employment in the tourism and conservation
sectors, and skilled workers are often drawn from outside the islands. Furthermore,
many of the managerial jobs in these sectors are often occupied by “Galápagueños”