Contribution short abstract:

Looking at a community-based conservation initiative in the Ecuadorian Amazon, this contribution highlights different ways to perceive the Commons, emphasizing local perspectives on nonhuman agency and human-nonhuman commoning.

Contribution long abstract:

Conservation practices are increasingly contested around the world, with calls for more sustainable and convivial ways of preserving the natural environment. Across geographies, Commons are often places of conviviality (Büscher and Fletcher, 2020) and constitute essential examples of constitutionality (Haller et al., 2016), directly framing and redefining coexistence practices. However, as colonial continuities and neoliberal ideologies create an uneven playing field in which powerful actors embrace western knowledge systems against local worldviews, socio-economic change as well as processes such as Commons grabbing and green enclosures have the potential to disrupt patterns of commoning and coexistence.

This contribution provides insights from a case study in the Ecuadorian Amazon where an indigenous community works with ecotourism as a community-based conservation initiative. In this community, jaguars are seen as active agents in their forest Commons. While jaguars’ agency inside the forest constitute the basis on which human-nonhuman interaction are built, I aim to show that due to structural power inequalities, this is not the way jaguars are officially allowed to be perceived. While from a local perspective, jaguars are seen as active agents in a forest Commons, officially they are just resources to be (sustainably) exploited for conservation.

This contribution discusses not only how nonhumans in different contexts actually co-shape the Commons, but also how global power inequalities invisibilize these interactions.