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- Convenors:
-
Esther Leemann
(University of Zurich)
Cari Tusing (Austral University of Chile)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Collective land title promises to preserve indigenous lands and livelihoods, often in line with green conservationists. However, titling may ensure large territories or fragmented communities. What perspectives can anthropology provide on collective land titling as a conservation strategy?
Long Abstract:
With the emergence of participatory approaches in conservation, green and indigenous rights movements often joined as allies in the struggle to defend indigenous forested lands and livelihoods. Indeed, intact forests are deforested significantly less when they are held by indigenous people (Fa et al. 2020). Collective land title is a conservation strategy that promises to safeguard indigenous autonomy, forested lands, and livelihoods by granting legal title to indigenous groups. However, as Garnet et al. (2018) argue, indigenous people may have aspirations for their land that do not always follow conservation goals. Furthermore, collective land titling may title extensive territories or only apply to small, fragmented communities. This leads to a diversity of opportunities and challenges.
This panel looks at the nexus between collective land titling, autonomy and conservation. How are indigenous choices about their livelihoods facilitated or circumscribed by their land title? What happens when the titled territory has specific conservationist management plans? What happens when titled territories are small and fragmented, or when they are extensive? What kind of tensions appear between indigenous autonomy, preservation of livelihoods and conservationists goals? Why might indigenous peoples decide to use the titled land for purposes like plantations or cattle not envisioned by conservationists? We are interested in contributions that examine what kind of land use and land use change can be observed on the ground as indigenous groups seek and win collective land title. We invite reflections on the role of anthropology on issues of conservation, indigenous ways of life and title.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 October, 2021, -Cari Tusing (Austral University of Chile)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the impact of collective land title intended to preserve indigenous forest-based livelihoods in Paraguay. Titling communities as opposed to territories permitted large-scale agrarian change despite titling efforts, causing livelihood changes within communities due to renting.
Paper long abstract:
Collective land title promises to preserve indigenous forest-based livelihoods, and in turn is often in step with conservationist goals to prevent deforestation of native forests. In northern Paraguay, collective title, when achieved, is based upon smaller fragments of community-based title, as opposed to extensive territorial claims of the indigenous Guarani 'retã' or nation. This paper examines how agrarian change impacted collective land titling claims, disputes and successes, which formalized Guarani lands as part of the Paraguayan property regime. Collective title concentrated land claims on communities, fragmenting Guarani territory and opening it to large-scale agroindustry and massive forest loss. Many titled Guarani communities, despite renting being unconstitutional, rent their land to cattle ranchers, furthering agrarian change within communities. despite collective land title aims to conserve livelihoods. It closes with a reflection on the role of anthropology on issues of conservation, indigenous ways of life and title.
Esther Leemann (University of Zurich)
Paper short abstract:
The Cambodian case study analyzes the lived experiences of land fragmentation despite titling efforts. Communities adjusted their livelihoods to secure reduced lands in the context of rapid agrarian change, which undermines their land claim as 'custodians of forests' in the legal framework.
Paper long abstract:
Collective land titling aims to safeguards indigenous people and their ways of life by guaranteeing communal access to land. The narrative of land titling often conflates the preservation of indigenous livelihoods with the protection of forests.
Through a case study of indigenous land titling in Cambodia, I analyze the lived experiences of land fragmentation and ongoing struggles for rights to land and forests in a context where large agricultural players have implemented a staggering loss of indigenous land and forests through the expansion of rubber tree plantations. The Cambodian case study reveals that indigenous claimants are kept on the treadmill of titling. To secure reduced lands in the context of rapid agrarian change, communities dynamicly adjusted their livelihood practices and shifted from hill rice to rubber as part of diverse agroforestry systems. This agrarian change occured on indigenous lands while collective title claims were processed. Because the role of indigenous communities as custodians of forests is codified in the Cambodian legal framework by linking their right to indigenous lands and forest resources to so-called traditional uses this dynamic adaptation of livelihoods threatens to undermine their land claim.
Joshua Mayer (University of California, Los Angeles)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the failure of communal titling to advance conservation in a seemingly ideal case and argues that legalistic efforts to solidify the title compete with Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities’ attempts to confront underlying structures driving deforestation and dispossession.
Paper long abstract:
On paper, the Rama-Kriol Territory in southeastern Nicaragua ought to be an exemplary case of collective land titling. The massive, multi-community territory covers nearly 400,000 hectares of land and a similar amount of maritime territory. It includes six Indigenous Rama communities and three Afrodescendant Kriol communities. It also includes 70 percent of the Indio-Maíz Biological Reserve, a major focus of national and international conservation efforts. While factions of the territorial government and multiple conservationist NGOs have dedicated tremendous energies and resources to conservation in the territory, deforestation and Rama-Kriol dispossession have advanced at an alarming rate over the past decade
To examine this outcome, this paper draws a distinction between property in law and property as embedded in social relations. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research, the paper advances a two-part argument. First, collective titling, as a shift in property in law, left unchanged the social relations in which property is embedded—social relations that are structured by settler colonialism and racial capitalism. A just form of conservation cannot be attained without confronting the underlying social structures of property. Second, conservationist efforts have conflicted with Rama-Kriol autonomy by focusing on property in law to the exclusion of the Rama and Kriol communities’ competing political projects. Rama-Kriol autonomy is itself critical to any confrontation of settler capitalism, I argue, and needs to be prioritized to avoid a human and ecological catastrophe.
Geronimo Barrera (The University Of Texas at Austin) Gaspar Salinas
Paper short abstract:
After 10 years of implementing community-based forest conservation, how has this scheme affected Indigenous Chatino custom land rights in San Juan Lachao (Mexico)? In this paper, we trace the role of conservation in recent changes over the communality of land, its meaning, and increased enclosure
Paper long abstract:
San Juan Lachao (SJL) is a Chatino Indigenous and mestizo municipality in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. For over a decade, communities have implemented community-based conservation and forestry schemes that include sustainable wood extraction, cloud mountain forest conservation, PES, and carbon offsetting. The land is communal, collectively titled, and the local government follows the usos y costumbres system shared with many Oaxaca communities. This paper engages the communality of land and forest conservation nexus considering that SJL’s recent history is defined by an ongoing fronterization process as the territory and population have been integrated into the global market as a resource frontier. Coffee plantations, wood extraction, and carbon offsetting are examples of resources produced through this process, transforming SJL landscapes and peoples' life projects.
Our paper reflects on community-based conservation's role in resource production, particularly regarding the current trend towards enclosure of communal land and local struggles to protect the forest from cattle raising. The paper questions the work of conservation through local understandings and meanings of communality of land, highlighting the tensions that emerged between Chatino’s life projects and conservation goals. Our participation looks for reflective spaces to trace local experiences on conservation, building on years of collaboration and shared experiences by presenters. The paper weaves together Gaspar Salinas (Chatino, native of SJL) experience as part of the local communal authority and as a traditional healer, with Geronimo Barrera (graduate student, Mexico City) experience working with SJL communities, to analyze the multiplicity underpinning conservation implementation in communal lands.
Venkat Ramanujam Ramani (Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment) Sharachchandra Lele (ATREE)
Paper short abstract:
Collective land titling under India’s Forest Rights Act, 2006, promised autonomy for the residents of central India’s Maikal Hills. It helped crystallize an incipient conservationist ethic but has failed to deliver on its promise because of its inability to challenge deep-seated power asymmetries.
Paper long abstract:
Collective land titling with the twin aim of strengthening indigenous autonomy and bolstering conservation lies at the heart of India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006. The law exudes a spirit of reparative justice towards indigenous communities (called Adivasis), and assumes an inherent indigenous capacity for environmental stewardship that is expected to thrive once titling formalizes collective rights to forest management and conservation. In this paper, we discuss the experience of the Baiga Adivasis of central India’s Maikal Hills, who successfully mobilized for collective land titling but found their hopes of autonomy belied. Forest officials interpret titling differently, and insist on logging the forests for timber. Meanwhile, a section of the Baigas determinedly strives to regulate forest use for livelihoods, and has woven a religious idiom into their conservation efforts. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement between 2011 and 2021, we suggest that collective land titling contributed to the crystallization of an incipient environmental consciousness that emerged in the region in the 1990s. Far from being inherent ecological guardians or strategically deploying an essentialist identity to press territorial claims, the Baigas developed a conservation ethic in response to a combination of forest degradation, the local circulation of contemporary environmentalist ideas, and the ascendancy of changing religious practices. However, their predicament suggests that while collective land titling may dovetail with wider enabling political and cultural currents, it may still not surmount deep-rooted power asymmetries that hinder both forest-based livelihoods and conservation.
Elizabeth Shoffner (University of Washington)
Paper short abstract:
Land titled to three Mbya Guarani communities with the intervention of a conservation NGO reconfigures pathways to land rights. I argue for theorizing Latin America’s ‘territorial turn’ beyond the state, considering the role of conservation partnerships in shaping and arbitrating Indigenous rights.
Paper long abstract:
Neoliberal conservation governance regimes are rarely theorized in relation to Latin America’s ‘territorial turn’ of the 1990s, wherein legal mechanisms were created for Indigenous communities to map their traditional territories and obtain collective property titles. However, there are frequent practical overlaps in processes of titling land to Indigenous communities with the support of conservation organizations. Drawing from seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork during 2017-2020 and the analysis of legal documents and government files and archives, I examine a case in Misiones, Argentina where the intervention of an international conservation organization ‘resolved’ over a decade of dispute between several Mbya Guarani communities and a logging company. The 2012 purchase of approximately 4000 hectares of subtropical forest for conservation and the titling of the majority of this land to three Mbya Guarani communities was hailed as an unprecedented process of negotiating Indigenous territorial rights through multicultural alliance. Yet I demonstrate that despite the concrete material gains of secure land tenure for the Mbya, land titling through conservation reconfigures the pathways to legally enshrined forms of ‘rights’ and ‘recognition’, while creating new challenges in terms of who is authorized to speak for this titled land. Thus, I argue for theorizing the ‘territorial turn’ beyond the state, with special attention to how Indigenous rights are shaped through conservation partnerships.