Since Charles Darwin's famous visit to the Galapagos the reputation of the archipelago has been growing in the Western imagination as a place where one can study and understand evolutionary processes.  Scientists who were concerned with collecting and classifying animals and plants from the Galapagos, with the support of UNESCO and other international organizations and universities, created the Charles Darwin Foundation in 1959. That same year, the Ecuadorian Government founded the Galapagos National Park, in charge of protecting 97% of the Archipelago's terrestrial area. Since its beginning the GNP sought to restore degraded ecosystems and thus craft a "natural laboratory". Part of the plan to protect the flora and fauna of the Islands included the creation of a large tourism industry based on cruises that go from island to island.  Conservationists' efforts in the 1980s and 1990s focused on protecting the oceans around the Galapagos and controlling and managing fishing for sea cucumbers, lobsters and sharks. Local people, and in particular the fishermen, resisted the efforts made by the government, conservationists, and the booming and powerful tourism industry, to impose a globalized conservation strategy and discourse and to control and limit local residents' activities. They developed new forms of resistance, appropriation and negotiation to deal with the government and the different conservation organizations.  As extractive activities became illegal and criminalized and as fishing became less important from an economic point of view, local people, including the fishermen, began to view tourism as an important alternative economic pursuit. During the late 1990s new decision making bodies emphasized consensus and instituted a participatory management system in the Galapagos Marine Reserve. These organisms were not entirely successful, however, and conflicts and tensions reemerged after their creation. Despite their participation in these organisms, many local people felt ignored and marginalized while many managers and conservationists felt that locals, and especially the fishermen, had been abusing the system and the management process. The "Galapagos Paradox" results from a process by which the very same conditions that cause the Galapagos to attract the attention of scientists, conservationists and of tourists, are being put at risk by the success of its reputation and the increasing number of residents and visitors.  These visitors and residents threaten the isolation of the archipelago, which has been critical in maintaining the uniqueness of the islands.Key words: Galapagos, national park, conservation, resistance, fishing.

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Like many other oceanic islands around the globe, environmental conditions, social circumstances and forces of globalization combine to challenge the sustainability of the Galapagos Archipelago of Ecuador. This paper describes a food-supply system in Galapagos that is mainly controlled by population growth, weak local agriculture, imports from mainland Ecuador and the influence of a growing tourism industry. We use system dynamics (SD) as a modeling technique in this paper to identify the main driving forces operating on the Galapagos food system to create a series of future scenarios and to examine the subsequent implications across the supply system structures. We model the supply side of the food system using secondary data collected from governmental and non-governmental sources. We find that the consumption profile of the local inhabitants of the Galapagos is on average higher than consumption in the Ecuadorian mainland. This fact, plus rapid growth of the local population fueled by the tourism industry, has created a decrease in per capita local food production and an increase on food import dependence that now, challenges the sustainability of the archipelago. Imports are the largest source of food in the archipelago. Approximately 75% of the agricultural food supply was transported from the mainland in 2017. Our model projects that this fraction will increase to 95% by 2037 with no changes in food policy. Moreover, any plan to increase tourism arrivals must be accompanied by a plan to address the subsistence needs of the new population that the tourism industry attracts. Policies to promote local agricultural growth should be central to the development strategy implemented in the Galapagos.

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Human activities contribute to the degradation of water quality on the Galapagos Islands, affecting human health and Galapagos’ fragile ecosystem. Despite the numerous resources vested in water management, programs have yet to achieve measurable improvements in water quality. To identify the governance mechanisms and barriers to improving water quality, we applied a two-pronged strategy: a collaborative, bottom-up compilation and prioritization of technical specialists and stakeholders’ concerns, and an evaluation of top-down government plans. The comparison of priorities and programs shows four major themes that require attention: barriers to better governance, community involvement, research, and policy. The islands lack a transparent method for accountability of the funds designated for water management, the efficacy of implementation, and results and progress beyond government periods. Government projects have included limited public participation, resulting in projects that do not meet stakeholder’s needs and concerns. Furthermore, the majority of the programs have not been completed within the timeline or budgets allocated. We recommend implementing a participatory governance mechanism that responds to each island’s context, balances socioecological and policy priorities and evaluates past projects to have adequate benchmarking, mitigating a planning fallacy. All programs should be accompanied by a transparent monitoring system that ensures accountability and evaluates water quality programs’ efficiency and effectiveness, according to goals and indicators developed collaboratively. This research may aid practitioners in small island developing states (SIDS) around the globe that are struggling with similar water management and governance issues and who may benefit from taking a bottom-up and top-down approach to assessing technical specialists’ and local stakeholders’ concerns in relation to past, present and future government programs.

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International service-learning combines aspects of conventional study abroad with aspects of conventional service-learning,1  offering an exceptional degree of integration into a target culture and an intensive experience of community service. The present study describes an effort to establish, through qualitative assessment, the degree to which such integration and experience actually take place, and their effects on the students involved. The target group is a single organization (the only such organization) with a twenty-year history of providing a range of intensive service-learning programs for American students outside the United States.