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Presentation short abstract

In the Argentine Chaco, jaguar reintroduction meets an older pastoralist regime. Using land-use regimes and the Patchy Anthropocene, we show how conservation enacts power and produces friction, arguing that the collision is a coexistence problem between regimes, not only between humans and jaguars.

Presentation long abstract

The reintroduction of jaguars (Panthera onca) into the Argentine Chaco has sharpened tensions between transnational conservation agendas and local modes of relating to nature. We argue that these tensions are shaped by collisions between two multispecies land-use regimes with competing histories, practices, and claims to legitimacy. Drawing on the Patchy Anthropocene framework and the concept of land-use regimes, this article examines how conservation enacts power in a frontier landscape: privileging particular pasts and futures, reframing whose presence counts as legitimate, and producing friction where regimes overlap.

We reconstruct a pastoralist regime in which semi-feral livestock were fundamental to settlement and remain linked to livelihoods, culture, and historically embedded relations with carnivores. We then contrast this with an emergent conservation regime organised around wilderness imaginaries, protected areas, and ecotourism, in which the jaguar functions as a flagship connecting local landscapes to extra-local circuits of funding, expertise, and publicity. Attention to regime histories shows how conservation can render residual the long presence of the pastoralist regime, alongside Indigenous regimes that persist and precede both.

Based on qualitative research in the Impenetrable region, combining oral histories with Criollo pastoralists and analysis of public materials produced by conservation actors, we characterise the contemporary Chaco as a mosaic of overlapping and competing histories. We conclude that the collision is a coexistence problem between regimes, not only between humans and jaguars, and that conservation practice must engage these frictions rather than overwriting them.