Contribution short abstract

Indigenous organizations in Peru repoliticize technical climate tools like jurisdictional REDD+ and ART-TREES to counter territorial fragmentation, contest authority, and recenter control over conservation and climate governance.

Contribution long abstract

This paper examines how a consortium of Amazonian Indigenous organizations in Peru is reshaping conservation governance by strategically repoliticizing technical climate instruments—particularly emerging jurisdictional REDD+ arrangements and standards such as ART-TREES. Drawing on ongoing collaborative research with the Grupo Perú, I show how Indigenous leaders identify “nearly-closed” institutional windows, including the possibility of non-contiguous jurisdictional REDD+, to assemble a critical mass of territories capable of benefiting meaningfully from carbon finance. This strategy responds to decades of territorial fragmentation produced by successive waves of collective titling and the creation of national parks.

In contrast to James Ferguson’s notion of the Anti-Politics Machine—development apparatuses that depoliticize structural problems—Indigenous organizations engage in an inverse movement. After long experience navigating an ambiguous state—one that profits from their lands, intervenes sporadically and unreliably for urgent services, and demands compliance in transnational arenas—they have learned to master bureaucratic and market tools designed beyond the Peruvian state. Rather than accepting carbon standards and monitoring systems as neutral, they deliberately repoliticize them: contesting authority, expanding decision-making space, and recentring territorial control. Technical language becomes a terrain of struggle through which they reclaim agency, influence conservation norms, access climate finance, and redefine governance rules.