- Convenors:
-
Deborah Delgado Pugley
(Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru)
Giancarlo Rolando (Trinity College)
Silvia Romio (Università Cà Foscari Venezia)
Ana Watson (University of Calgary)
Cari Tusing (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de ChileUniversity of Copenhagen)
Esther Leemann (University of Zurich)
- Format:
- Roundtable
Format/Structure
A research-based conversation structured as a comparative dialogue that explores changes in conservation arrangements across Indigenous territories.
Long Abstract
Conservation initiatives and Indigenous land titling frameworks often converge around imaginaries of preserving collective spaces, codifying rights, and romanticizing nature-culture relationships. Yet these shared imaginaries frequently collide with contradictory national agendas, weak institutions, and exclusionary conservation models. Such tensions raise fundamental questions about who has the right to define, govern, and benefit from the territory.
For many Indigenous and local communities, conservation and land tenure policies come with unclear promises about access to benefits and little recognition of their own systems of governance and knowledge. Indigenous leaders and communities have actively developed strategies since the 1980s that challenge displacement and dispossession, reshaping conservation discourse through practices rooted in self-determination, knowledge, and territorial agreements. Drawing on political ecology, this panel examines how conservation and Indigenous rights intersect in both collaborative and conflictive ways.
We seek to explore three interrelated issues:
(1) How do realities on the ground compare to imaginaries about what conservation and Indigenous land titling will achieve?
(2) How do local/regional contexts, legal frameworks, and fraught timelines shape lived realities in the “leftovers” of fragmented landscapes?
(3) What alternative pathways—especially those led by Indigenous women, youth, and grassroots leaders in the Global South—point toward more just, inclusive, and ecologically grounded ways of practicing conservation?
We welcome contributions from across regions that look at how Indigenous communities navigate overlapping conservation and tenure regimes, question the gap between lofty narratives and lived realities, and imagine alternatives to exclusionary models. Our goal is to identify practical pathways for environmental governance that respond to cultural contexts, respect Indigenous self-determination, and take conservation beyond business-as-usual in the face of the climate crisis.
Accepted papers
Contribution short abstract
The study argues that conservation-induced displacement set in motion processes that redefine people’s relations to land and environment as observed for forest dependent communities like the Sahariya villages displaced from and resettled outside the Kuno National Park in central India 25 years ago.
Contribution long abstract
Conservation-induced displacement and resettlement offer conditions that force communities to adjust their traditional ways of life to new constraints. Certain livelihoods become difficult to sustain while new opportunities emerge that provide sustenance. A transition in livelihoods is marked primarily by loss in landholdings and access to forests that redefine relations in the community and with the environment. Contemporary research on fortress conservation point to the ways in which communities try to contest and reclaim lost territory however, for ‘voluntary’ displacement and resettlement processes of south Asia, the struggle is that of adjusting to new environments. This study is about life in a resettled Sahariya village that was displaced 25 years ago from the Kuno National Park in central India. Through an ethnographic study over 10 months from September 2025 to June 2026, this study traces the history of displacement and resettlement over the last two decades. It shows how conservation-induced displacement led to – (a) new patterns of farming and land ownership, (b) shift from forest economy to labour economy, and (c) an amalgamation of rituals, symbols and practices that represent both the new and the old worlds. The study argues that conservation-induced displacement set in motion processes that redefine people’s relations to land and environment as observed for forest dependent communities like the Sahariya.
Contribution short abstract
The paper examines how overlapping conservation, economic land concessions, and Indigenous land titling in Cambodia reshape Bunong territories. It exposes the contradictions between inclusive imaginaries and exclusionary realities, showing how Indigenous communities navigate dispossession.
Contribution long abstract
This paper explores how conservation and Indigenous collective land titling intersect and collide in contemporary Cambodia, where global sustainability narratives, national land reforms, and Indigenous claims meet under unequal power relations. Drawing on ethnographic research since 2010 among Indigenous Bunong communities in Mondulkiri province, it examines how environmental conservation and collective titling—framed as progressive tools for sustainability and recognition—have paradoxically reinforced dispossession. Conservation areas such as the Phnom Nam Lyr Wildlife Sanctuary and economic land concessions have fragmented Indigenous territories, while state-led titling processes remain slow, bureaucratic, and restrictive. Both frameworks rest on shared imaginaries that portray Indigenous people as forest guardians and partners in sustainable development, yet their implementation reveals deep contradictions: communities navigate overlapping protected areas, contested claims, and criminalization of traditional livelihoods. The paper shows how state, conservation, and development actors mobilize the idioms of inclusion and sustainability, central to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to legitimize exclusionary governance. These frameworks, deeply entangled with national agendas that prioritize territorial control, elite accumulation, and concessionary expansion, reproduce dispossession while projecting reformist imagery. The SDGs function less as transformative instruments than as an institutional epiphenomenon—a discursive form that enables the Cambodian state to reframe dispossession through the language of global sustainability while maintaining structural inequalities. Despite these constraints, Bunong actors engage strategically with titling and conservation regimes to mitigate loss and sustain limited access. The paper calls for conservation frameworks grounded in Indigenous self-determination, territorial recognition, and ecological justice.
Contribution short abstract
This paper applies an analytic of assemblage to an Indigenous biocultural territory in Belize. Dissolving binaries that represent Indigenous Maya as a threat to, or the saviour of, biodiversity, I emphasize complexity and foreground the roles of factors including tenure, markets and education.
Contribution long abstract
The Toledo District of Belize is a contested biocultural assemblage of Indigenous Q’eqchi’ and Mopan Maya communities, 80% forest cover, and more than 50% coverage of exclusionary protected areas. In 2015, following a protracted litigation, 41 of these communities secured affirmation of customary communal land tenure at the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). A major effort to demarcate customary community boundaries, subject to the foot-dragging tactics of the state, drew attention to an open secret - there was considerable overlap with protected areas. Maya leaders and activists have, somewhat aspirationally, represented Q’eqchi’ and Mopan relationships with forests as one of interdependence, which commits them to a responsibility of care and stewardship, rendering Maya communities as effective practitioners of conservation. In contrast, the Belizean state and transnational conservation NGO alliances have argued that a rapidly expanding population practicing unsustainable ‘slash and burn’ agriculture compromises this notion of Maya conservationists and emphasizes the need for exclusionary protected areas to protect biodiversity.
Using an assemblage thinking of territory that emphasizes contingency, emergence and process, this paper attempts to dissolve this binary, drawing from an ethnographic study of two Maya communities (Li, 2007). In describing the attempts of various entities to deploy territorialities to assemble different visions of future human-nature relationships, I demonstrate that these visions rarely map neatly onto individuals or communities. I argue that decolonial conservation unfolds in tension with conflicts over tenure, struggles over traditional vs. state governance, increasing penetration of global commodity markets, urbanization of Maya youth, and much more.
Contribution short abstract
I examine the socio-political tensions that Indigenous communities in Fitzcarraldo District have experienced in recent years over the paving of the Salvación–Boca Manu road, in Manu Nacional Park's buffer zone.
Contribution long abstract
The growth of road infrastructure in areas of high environmental protection, such as buffer zones, is a difficult process to contain (Salazar Moireira, 2022), with profound implications for conservation. According to Harvey and Knox (2012; 2015), roads in the ‘Amazonian frontiers’ generate expectations of modernisation and development in communities that perceive themselves as isolated from urban centres. However, the structural precariousness of these frontier contexts limits the materialisation of the projected benefits, producing an ‘enchantment’ that makes road construction a central aspiration of the local imagination.
This paper aims to take a different perspective, beginning by examining the socio-political tension that some Arakmbut and Yine communities in the province of Fitzcarraldo have experienced in recent years with regard to the paving of the Salvación–Boca Manu road and their status as a ‘border society.’ We will prioritise the social and political dimension of the community members themselves, who have led these protests and collective efforts for paving, despite their awareness of the environmental risks and future economic precariousness that this could bring to Manu National Park. The episodes of protest—marches, river blockades, and kidnappings—have revealed persistent patterns in local politics and raise questions about some central issues, in particular the limits of conservation policies in integrating the economic and social demands of indigenous peoples, as well as their plans to offer valid alternatives to the advance of neoliberalism and the resulting environmental degradation.
Contribution short abstract
This study examines how conservation in Uganda marginalizes the Batwa, whose landlessness and unresolved claims reveal deep policy contradictions. Drawing on political ecology, it highlights Indigenous knowledge and Buntu Bulamu as pathways toward just, inclusive conservation.
Contribution long abstract
This paper examines the intersections of conservation, Indigenous land rights, and climate politics through the lived experiences of the Batwa of Southwestern Uganda. While conservation imaginaries in Uganda often invoke promises of inclusion, ecological protection, and formalized land rights, the Batwa’s reality starkly diverges from these narratives. Evicted from their ancestral forests in 1991 without consultation or compensation, the Batwa remain landless, marginalized, and structurally excluded from the very conservation frameworks that claim to safeguard both people and nature. Their displacement—legally justified through state definitions of forest land as “public land”—reveals how national agendas and tenure regimes reproduce dispossession rather than protection.
Drawing on political ecology and ethnographic fieldwork, this study analyzes how legal processes and institutional timelines have prolonged Batwa precarity. Despite winning a landmark case against the Ugandan government, subsequent state appeals have left their land claims unresolved since 2003. This prolonged legal limbo illustrates how fragmented landscapes and weak institutional commitments shape everyday experiences of exclusion.
In engaging the conference’s core questions, the paper highlights Indigenous critiques of conservation’s lofty narratives, exposes the contradictions embedded within national tenure frameworks, and foregrounds pathways for more just governance. Particular attention is given to Indigenous-led alternatives—such as Buntu Bulamu, a Ugandan articulation of Ubuntu—that emphasize relationality, reciprocity, and collective stewardship. These approaches, rooted in Indigenous knowledge and self-determination, culturally meaningful models for re-imagining conservation in the climate crisis. Ultimately, the study advocates for governance frameworks that not only recognize but are reshaped by Indigenous authority, land rights, and ecological worldviews.
Contribution short abstract
Communal reserves were set up to move beyond exclusionary, colonizing conservation models by making Indigenous communities co-managers with the state. Yet ethnographic data shows exclusionary patterns persist. Can state-sponsored conservation be reshaped to genuinely include Indigenous Peoples?
Contribution long abstract
The Peruvian State created the conservation category of communal reserves—natural protected areas jointly managed by the state and Indigenous communities on equal footing—with the dual purpose of protecting the forest and moving beyond exclusionary, colonizing conservation models. From this perspective, the co-management relation recognizes Indigenous Peoples’s pre-existing rights over the territories and resources under protection. However, ethnographic data from the Purús Communal Reserve shows that the establishment and management of communal reserves can be experienced by Indigenous communities as a process of dispossession. Likewise, the co-management relation reveals persisting power asymmetries between the state and Indigenous communities, as well as significant divergences in their expectations regarding the co-management relationship and, more fundamentally, in their understandings of the landscape and how human beings should relate to it. Drawing on ethnographic data from the Purús Communal Reserve, this paper explores how these tensions and divergences manifest in order to identify the possibilities and limits of co-management in its current form. Finally, it seeks to imagine future alternatives that overcome the limitations of this collaboration model between Indigenous Peoples and the state in a way that respects Indigenous ways of inhabiting the world and their desired futures.
Contribution short abstract
I argue that the Indigenous right to land and conservation projects are encoded in a parallel process of racialization and propertization. From ethnographic research in Paraguay and Chile, I propose a series of equivocations regarding Indigenous relationships to land, livelihoods and conservation.
Contribution long abstract
In this paper, I argue that both the right to land for Indigenous people and conservation projects are encoded in a simultaneous process of racialization and propertization in Latin America. This is based on shared common values and universalized beliefs of how land is to be held, managed and distributed, a process begun through internal settler colonialism and encoded in a liberal approach to land law. I propose there are a series of equivocations (following Viveiros de Castro 2004) regarding Indigenous relationships to land, livelihoods and conservation. The first equivocation is land as property; the second is man or the state as title-holder, and the third is conservation with Indigenous erasure (pristine wilderness/absolute rewilding). I draw on my ethnographic research on Guarani collectively titled property in Paraguay and Lafkenche Indigenous coastal management areas in Chile to show how Indigenous people navigate the interstices of these equivocations to (re)produce their land and sea livelihoods, questioning both property and conservation through their own relational, autonomous approaches, where liberal understandings of land use management and rights might dictate otherwise.
Contribution short abstract
Drawing on a Feminist Political Ecology framework, this study examines power dynamics within Canada-funded highland wetland conservation projects in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia where national protected areas overlap with Indigenous territorial rights.
Contribution long abstract
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly promoted as strategies to respond to societal challenges by delivering multiple benefits for human well-being, biodiversity conservation, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. At international and national levels, initiatives such as wetland and peatland conservation, ecosystem restoration, and reforestation have advanced under the NbS framework. The highest concentration of NbS initiatives in Latin America has emerged in the Andes, largely financed through international cooperation. Although recent progress in recognizing Indigenous peoples’ roles in climate solutions and biodiversity conservation, major gaps in participation remain. Andean Indigenous communities continue to be marginalized in conservation decision-making, resource governance, and benefit-sharing processes. Particularly, Andean Indigenous women face intertwined barriers that restrict their participation, access to NbS benefits, and influence over NbS governance.
Canada has committed to supporting global climate efforts by promoting NbS in the Global South under its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP). While FIAP is aligned with global environmental and gender equity goals, concerns persist regarding its ability to translate intersectional and community-driven approaches into practice. Drawing on a Feminist Political Ecology framework, this study examines power dynamics within Canada-funded highland wetland conservation projects in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia where national protected areas overlap with Indigenous territorial rights. Using a qualitative intersectional lens, we analyze how gender, ethnicity, and cultural identity shape access to resources and participation in NbS. Findings reveal key barriers and opportunities for Indigenous women’s leadership in NbS initiatives This study contributes to ongoing debates on environmental justice and inclusive environmental governance.
Contribution short abstract
This paper examines chakra (forest garden) revitalization by Sacha Awana, the research arm of the Quijos Nation of Ecuador’s Amazon, as part of a strategy to enhance territorial autonomy, food sovereignty, and biodiversity management, thereby contributing to Indigenous forest governance.
Contribution long abstract
This presentation will examine initiatives by Sacha Awana, the research arm of the Quijos Nation of Ecuador’s Amazon, to revitalize Quijos women's chakra (forest garden) practices as part of a broader strategy to strengthen territorial rights and food sovereignty while enhancing biodiversity management and contributing to rainforest conservation. Chakras are widely understood to be biodiverse-rich productive spaces and loci of female productive and ceremonial practices. Yet, territorial loss and fragmentation, economic pressures on Quijos families, and the acceleration of legal and illegal mining operations have contributed to a decline in women’s gardening practices as land is converted to cash-cropping, sold, or concessioned off to mining companies. With the decline of the chakras, so too is the Traditional Ecological Knowledge of chakramamas (women gardeners) in decline. Sacha Awana, however, sees the revitalization of chakra practices and the Traditional Ecological Knowledge associated with them as vital to enhance territorial autonomy and strengthen domestic economies. By working closely with elder chakramamas and younger Quijos women in inter-generational land-based workshops, they are consolidating and transmitting ancestral chakra knowledge to the next generations of Quijos gardeners, while positioning Quijos women at the forefront of forest governance and management practices from Indigenous Quijos perspectives.
Contribution short abstract
The implications of conservation-induced displacement of the Mosopisyek in Uganda reveal potential limitations of land titling in environmental governance. In this context, Indigenous stewardship and intergenerational knowledge preservation are crucial for just and effective conservation.
Contribution long abstract
As conservation efforts increase globally, the push to conserve biodiversity is met with questions over who belongs in conservation spaces. Dominant conservation paradigms, such as the creation of protected areas and national parks, have long been critiqued for displacing local and Indigenous communities who hold deep ecological knowledge of their environment. However, there have also been calls to return land rights and decision-making power to Indigenous communities in these contexts.
In this dialogue, we draw upon our work with the Mosopisyek, an Indigenous community displaced from their ancestral lands due to the creation of Mount Elgon National Park. When Mount Elgon was gazetted as a national park, the Mosopisyek were displaced out of the forest and resettled on land never formally titled to them. Through semi-structured interviews and storytelling sessions with Mosopisyek community members and tribe elders, we explore what conservation practice grounded in Mosopisyek customs and ecological knowledge might look like.
Our analysis points to two potential pathways. First, rather than viewing land titling as an endpoint, our analysis highlights the importance of recognising Indigenous communities as legitimate stewards on-the-ground. Second, Mosopisyek elders describe how displacement has fractured the transmission of ecological and medicinal knowledge, underscoring the need for structured intergenerational knowledge-sharing that sustains cultural continuity and strengthens community participation in environmental governance. Together, these pathways emphasise how Indigenous land rights, self-determination, and stewardship can ground more just forms of conservation decision-making.
Contribution short abstract
This comparative study, based on fieldwork in four communities, examines how Native Community structures and proposals for Indigenous Nations shape territorial control, identifying barriers and opportunities for more just and responsible governance of Amazonian forests.
Contribution long abstract
Indigenous territories in the Peruvian Amazon face growing political, economic and environmental pressures that threaten both community well-being and the integrity of tropical forests. Although Indigenous peoples have long governed their lands, these governance schemes are often misunderstood or marginalized within state-led frameworks. This comparative study examines how different Indigenous governance schemes—such as the organization of Native Communities and emerging proposals for the recognition of Indigenous Nations—shape territorial control, environmental justice and the protection of ancestral lands in Madre de Dios.
This research has been carried out in close collaboration with the Native Federation of the Madre de Dios River and Tributaries (FENAMAD). Together we support a pilot Indigenous Researchers in Training Program, aimed at strengthening the research capacities of young Indigenous people. This partnership allows us to analyze how Indigenous, state and academic knowledge systems interact and influence territorial decision-making.
Based on fieldwork carried out in four Indigenous communities of two Indigenous Peoples, this study identifies the barriers and opportunities that different governance schemes face for a more just and responsible governance of tropical forests. The findings aim to strengthen Indigenous leadership, inform debates on territorial rights, and contribute to political ecology discussions on knowledge, power and self-determination in Amazonian conservation.
Contribution short abstract
Indigenous organizations in Peru repoliticize technical climate tools like jurisdictional REDD+ and ART-TREES to counter territorial fragmentation, contest authority, and recenter control over conservation and climate governance.
Contribution long abstract
This paper examines how a consortium of Amazonian Indigenous organizations in Peru is reshaping conservation governance by strategically repoliticizing technical climate instruments—particularly emerging jurisdictional REDD+ arrangements and standards such as ART-TREES. Drawing on ongoing collaborative research with the Grupo Perú, I show how Indigenous leaders identify “nearly-closed” institutional windows, including the possibility of non-contiguous jurisdictional REDD+, to assemble a critical mass of territories capable of benefiting meaningfully from carbon finance. This strategy responds to decades of territorial fragmentation produced by successive waves of collective titling and the creation of national parks.
In contrast to James Ferguson’s notion of the Anti-Politics Machine—development apparatuses that depoliticize structural problems—Indigenous organizations engage in an inverse movement. After long experience navigating an ambiguous state—one that profits from their lands, intervenes sporadically and unreliably for urgent services, and demands compliance in transnational arenas—they have learned to master bureaucratic and market tools designed beyond the Peruvian state. Rather than accepting carbon standards and monitoring systems as neutral, they deliberately repoliticize them: contesting authority, expanding decision-making space, and recentring territorial control. Technical language becomes a terrain of struggle through which they reclaim agency, influence conservation norms, access climate finance, and redefine governance rules.