Team Leader for a technical assistance loan supporting nine Brazilian Amazonian states in developing their ecotourism strategies. PROECOTUR was among the first IDB operations to explicitly link sustainable tourism to biodiversity conservation.
PROECOTUR was pioneering in a way that is easy to underestimate now. In the mid-1990s, the proposition that tourism could be structured as a conservation instrument — rather than a threat to be mitigated — was not the consensus position inside multilateral development banks.
The operation covered nine Amazonian states, each with different institutional capacity, different tourism assets, and different pressures on the forest. The technical assistance loan financed the development of state-level ecotourism strategies rather than imposing a single federal template.
It established a template inside the IDB for tourism operations that treat biodiversity as the asset being monetized and therefore the asset requiring protection — an argument Juan would go on to make in many other institutional settings.