Contribution short abstract

Direct access positions indigenous organizations as GEF fund recipients, exposing fundamental misalignments between global conservation logics and territorial governance practices. Examining positionality within this encounter in Madre de Dios, Peruvian Amazon.

Contribution long abstract

Political Ecology's decolonial turn increasingly centers indigenous territorial governance. Direct access to environmental funds theoretically shifts power by positioning indigenous organizations as direct recipients, yet implementation reveals deeper incommensurabilities between global conservation frameworks and territorial realities. This contribution reflects on positionality while coordinating GEF financing within an indigenous Amazonian federation in Madre de Dios, Peruvian Amazon, examining how this structural encounter shapes what becomes possible in conservation practice.

GEF frameworks operate through predetermined indicators, results-based management, and donor accountability logics measuring hectares, outputs, and quantifiable deliverables. Indigenous federations—born from centuries of territorial struggle—enact governance through political articulation across nations, territorial surveillance against extractive industries, intercultural education, ecosystem services provision, and forest defense as lived practice. These contributions exist but remain largely invisible to indicator systems designed within different epistemological frameworks.

Direct access doesn't resolve this misalignment—it relocates where the encounter happens. Indigenous organizations must now navigate institutional precarity, limited technical capacity, and internal power dynamics while simultaneously translating territorial governance into audit-legible documentation. Working within rather than observing these processes exposes how federations strategically reconfigure global resources toward territorial autonomy while confronting frameworks that cannot recognize their substantive forest governance contributions.

Does direct access enable territorial projects or simply shift where colonial validation structures operate? How does positionality within indigenous organizations—rather than studying them—reshape understanding of these encounters? Can global conservation finance and territorial governance logics genuinely articulate, or does "decolonial practice" obscure persistent incommensurability?