Land Use in Cotopaxi Province and Its Future Through 2030: A Qualitative Analysis from the Perspectives of Territorial Governance and Public Action

Abstract

Territorial planning in Cotopaxi province faces a structural disconnect between the biophysical aptitude of the land and political-administrative occupation decisions, a tension that climate change and anthropic pressure will intensify toward 2030. This article aimed to determine the characteristics of land use in Cotopaxi to establish technical grounds for resilient long-term territorial planning. A qualitative case study design was adopted, triangulating a documentary corpus of current planning instruments (national, provincial, cantonal, and parish-level) with 23 semi-structured interviews conducted with representatives of productive associations and indigenous and peasant communities across four parishes, analyzed through the two-cycle coding process of Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña (2014). Results show that, of the four public action resources theorized by Subirats et al. (2008), the cognitive resource is the most consistently deficient, more so than regulatory availability, which proved relatively robust. The study also identified a systematic asymmetry between those who bear the cost of páramo conservation and those who benefit from water resources without corresponding responsibility, as well as a fifth resource not contemplated in the original theoretical framework: community social capital (collective labor, assembly-based governance, local knowledge), present throughout the peasant corpus as a de facto territorial management mechanism. The study concludes that Cotopaxi's territorial resilience toward 2030 depends less on the availability of regulation than on institutional capacity to coordinate legal, financial, cognitive, control, and community resources across levels of government.