Risking Environmental Justice: Culture, Conservation, and Governance at Calakmul, Mexico (original) (raw)

Institutional Change on a Conservationist Frontier: Local Responses to a Grabbing Process in the Name of Environmental Protection

Land, 2019

In a wave of global conservationism, Ecuador established two large protected areas in its Amazon region in 1979. One of these is the Reserva de Produccion Faunistica Cuyabeno (RPFC), located in the northeastern corner of the country. Given that this land was previously managed as commons by local indigenous groups, the establishment of protected areas has had numerous consequences for these people. The research conducted comprised three months’ fieldwork in three of the affected Siona communities, primarily through the use of participant observation. Based on the framework developed by Ensminger, this paper demonstrates how institutional change has occurred in the last few centuries with the arrival of various frontiers overriding the region. This has led to the almost total eradication of traditional institutions and the introduction of a new ideology, namely conservationism. In order to legitimize their existence in the Reserve, indigenous groups are compelled to argue in a conser...

The Political Economy of the Ecological Native

In Chimalapas, Mexico, nongovernmental actors attempted to integrate campesinos into the discourse and practices of the Western environmental movement. The political economy school of anthropology assumes that cultural identity and practice flow from historical experiences grounded in relevant national and institutional contexts. In this article, I argue that although the movement in Chimalapas drew from the well-developed symbolic toolkit of the environmental movement, it was not able to create a space for local concerns within a transnational agenda that was already fairly well established and inflexible. Political ecology was the hinge of this movement: a political-economic analysis that validated traditional agrarian concerns in Chimalapas but included an environmentalist discourse legible to international funders. In this way, environmentalists in Chimalapas attempted both to create new practices and to link old practices to new expressions of culture and identity. [

The Power of Environmental Knowledge: Ethnoecology and Environmental Conflicts in Mexican Conservation

Theory in political ecology emphasizes the role of competing interests in shaping resource use. Although supportive of These approaches, this article draws on the importance of meanings assigned to ecological systems to question how epistemological differences also contribute to environmental conflicts. Following calls to examine the interface between environmental knowledge and action, consideration is given to ethnoecological constructs of forests on Mexico's southern.Yucatan peninsula, home to the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. To quiet opposition to the Reserve, government agents increased financial aid to the region in the form of conservation development projects. With the counsel of a Reserve director, local residents effectively used these projects to press for an environmentalism based on sustainable resource use. This position has associations with a local etlunoecology of land as a place of work. In examining how , ettnoecologies played out in contests surrounding conservation, possibilities for a localized, alternative environmentalism are discussed, as well as the importance of enviromnental constructs for research in political ecology.

3 The Difficult Invention of Participation In the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve, Peru

ibcperu.org

After ten years of demands by the Harakmbut people, the Peruvian State officially recognised the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve (ACR) in 2002. Supported by the regional indigenous federation FENAMAD, the Harakmbut aimed to recover an ancestral territory lost through a harsh process of evangelisation that began in the 1940s. The Global Environmental Fund, through UNDP, supported their cause by providing $1 million in financial support. However, today, after 5 years of the reserve's existence, the victory of FENA-MAD and the Harakmbut has proven unsatisfactory, and doubts and disappointment have begun to appear within the communities. The benefits from this reserve seem to be more of a political and symbolic nature for advocates of indigenous interests and conservation than of an economic (and therefore concrete) nature that would benefit local people. Indeed, the dream of political self-determination has led to conservation being used to support a political struggle. Though international debate promotes the incorporation of local actors in the management of protected natural areas (PNAs), experience with the ACR shows that the establishment of a conservation structure based on co-management between indigenous people and state administration is a hard road, demanding preparation, economic resources and information, and incorporating a high risk of failure.

Beyond Nature Appropriation: Towards Post-development Conservation in the Maya Forest

Conservation and Society, 2014

The establishment of biosphere reserves in Mexico was followed by alternative livelihood conservation/development projects to integrate indigenous groups into Western style conservation under the idea of sustainable development and participation. In this paper, I discuss the outcomes of two forest wildlife management projects in one Maya community along the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve in the state of Quintana Roo. Both projects ultimately failed and the community mobilised and expelled the NGO from the community. I argue that the failure of these projects involved two dynamics: 1) lack of coherence between the objectives of state agencies, conservation NGOs, and the local community; and 2) unequal ethnic relations, reproducing relations of colonial inequality and dictating how indigenous groups can participate in managing a territory for conservation. If collaboration and local participation are key in conservation management programs, these case studies suggest that greater institutional accountability and community autonomy are needed to make the practice of conservation more democratic and participatory. The expulsion of the NGO as a conservation and development broker also opened the space for, and possibilities of, post-development conservation practice that challenges the normalising expectations of Western biodiversity conservation.

Unintended Developments: Gender, Environment, and Collective Governance in a Mexican Ejido

This article examines the unintended outcomes of a neoliberal program designed to privatizeMexico’s communal lands. Although postrevolutionary agrarian law excluded women from official landholding and leadership positions, steps toward land privatization inadvertently increased women’s access to land, government resources, and political power. Using ethnographic and survey data collected in a Veracruz ejido, I demonstrate how Mexico’s agrarian counterreforms triggered novel subjectivities and practices. While men acted as self-imagined private property owners and decreased participation in traditional governance institutions, women became registered land managers and leaders for the first time in the ejido’s history. These interlocking processes stopped the land-titling program in its tracks and reinvigorated collective governance. Even state actors charged with carrying out ejido privatization were implicated in the empowerment of rural women and failure to fully privatize land. This research contributes to nature–society debates by arguing neoliberalism does not always end economic self-determination and communal governance in agrarian contexts. Rather, I demonstrate the ways in which processual policy, subjectivity, authority formation, objects, and environmental narratives combine to produce new political trajectories with positive implications for rural women and the environment. Key Words: environment, gender, governance, Mexico, neoliberalism.

The Difficult Invention of Participation in the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve , Peru

2008

After ten years of demands by the Harakmbut people, the Peruvian State officially recognised the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve (ACR) in 2002. Supported by the regional indigenous federation FENAMAD, the Harakmbut aimed to recover an ancestral territory lost through a harsh process of evangelisation that began in the 1940s. The Global Environmental Fund, through UNDP, supported their cause by providing $1 million in financial support. However, today, after 5 years of the reserve’s existence, the victory of FENAMAD and the Harakmbut has proven unsatisfactory, and doubts and disappointment have begun to appear within the communities. The benefits from this reserve seem to be more of a political and symbolic nature for advocates of indigenous interests and conservation than of an economic (and therefore concrete) nature that would benefit local people. Indeed, the dream of political self-determination has led to conservation being used to support a political struggle. Though international...

Conservation, Traditional Knowledge, and Indigenous Peoples

American Behavioral Scientist 58(1); Sage Publications, 2014

In this study I examined examples of implementation of conservation policies initiated by the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992). I focused on the 101 conservation initiatives conducted during the period of 2002-2012 on the territories of groups classified by the international law as indigenous peoples. I assessed a degree to which conservation benefited indigenous communities as means to combat poverty and ecological degradation. I focused on the connections between the provisions of the CBD Article 8(j) that specified the importance of protecting indigenous and local communities’ traditional knowledge and practices (TK) to conservation, and the actual realities of conservation initiatives in which indigenous expertise was used. I learned that despite the wide use of elements composing TK in the projects examined, only certain communities benefited from the conservation initiatives, with a predominant part of beneficiaries located in the states that insured greater degree of legal and social protection to indigenous individuals as citizens of those states. For the most part conservation was imposed upon indigenous groups; some communities suffered displacement and poverty loosing the lands and resources to the conservation authorities. At the same time in other cases conservation projects offered an opportunity for indigenous individuals to advance their perspectives on managing traditional lands and natural environments and thus, to some degree, advanced underlining these groups’ interests. I concluded that collaborative work between indigenous groups and the outside agencies remains the key means toward improving the indigenous economies and relations with external actors while also serving as a means to care for the environment across geo-political boundaries.

A participatory approach to conservation in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, Campeche, Mexico

Landscape and Urban Planning, 2006

Since the advent of integrated conservation and development programs, participatory approaches have been used to engage local people in protected area management and conservation action. While participatory approaches provide local people a role in telling their own story and enable them to contribute to conservation and development processes, it is unclear how much consideration local people's opinions receive within the framework of a participatory process that exists to meet the specific goals and objectives of conservation programs. This paper evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the participatory approach used in an applied research program conducted in three ejido communities in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. The research program used community mapping, historical matrices, institutional diagramming, seasonal calendars, semi-structured interviewing and other community-level reflection techniques to assess the complex interrelationships among population growth, migration, tenure regimes, and land-use practices in rural communities bordering the reserve. The program also sought to build local capacity and support for land-use planning and conservation programs. While the paper acknowledges the critical benefits of local participation it also questions the compatibility of this approach with conservation programs administered by conservation organizations as they are currently structured.