Presentation short abstract

Through Ecuador’s FONAG case in Quito’s páramos, this paper examines how neoliberal conservation adapts within illiberal landscapes, reinforcing local hierarchies while enabling community counter-conducts that contest authority and reshape hydrosocial territories.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores how neoliberal conservation persists and transforms amid increasingly illiberal political and social landscapes through the case of the first water fund in the world (FONAG) and its conservation agreement with Virgen del Carmen, a community in Quito’s páramos. Framed as participatory, market-based mechanisms to safeguard water sources, such agreements operate through hybrid governmentalities that entangle neoliberal, disciplinary, and sovereign forms of power. Drawing on fieldwork (2023–2024), the paper shows how FONAG’s conservation agreement—implemented through incentives, monitoring, and technical assistance—has reinforced existing intra-communitarian hierarchies, centralizing authority in local elites while marginalizing collective governance. Yet, these dynamics also provoke everyday negotiations and counter-conducts, such as emerging initiatives in community tourism, through which residents seek to reclaim autonomy and redefine the meanings of conservation.

By situating this case within debates on neoliberal conservation and governmentalities, the paper argues that water funds exemplify the mutation of neoliberal rationalities in an era increasingly shaped by illiberal turns, where technocratic, moral, and exclusionary logics converge. Yet, rather than signaling the mere persistence of these rationalities, the case of FONAG reveals how they are reworked and re-legitimated through local moralities and territorial struggles. In a context where liberal ideals of participation and inclusion falter, conservation becomes a field where illiberal and neoliberal forms of rule intertwine, producing both exclusions and new forms of agency. This perspective highlights conservation not simply as an instrument of technocratic governance, but as a contested political terrain where community, and market rationalities are negotiated and redefined.