Presentation short abstract

This paper asks how social property and climate change responses mutually remake one another in Oaxaca, Mexico. By examining carbon markets and wind expansion, it argues that such environmental interventions have had critical consequences for how we understand collective land.

Presentation long abstract

As climate change responses expand across rural areas in the global South, new investments interact with diverse land politics, modifying or competing with existing land uses and livelihood struggles. In the context of carbon markets or climate change mitigation projects, questions about how the land should be used, for what purposes, and with what consequences become relevant. This holds for the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where approximately 80% of the land is still held under social property regimes. Climate change responses in this state interact with a different set of land authorities that respond in myriad ways, attending to distinct conceptualisations of collective land. This paper thus aims to answer the question of how and under what conditions collective land is made and remade in the context of climate change responses.

By examining two case studies, the international carbon market in the Chatino region and wind energy expansion in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, this paper argues that such environmental interventions have had critical consequences for the reorganisation of land tenure. In the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, wind energy expansion has disbanded social property through a slow transition to private property by exploiting an agrarian conflict that can be traced back to the 1960s. Carbon in the Chatino region has had unintended consequences and contradictory outcomes: communities negotiate and use it to avoid enclosure due to cattle expansion, yet it furthers processes of proxy privatisation. In both cases, notions of how social property should operate have challenged communal arrangements.