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.