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- Convenors:
-
Piergiorgio Di Giminiani
(Universidad Catolica de Chile)
Elliott Oakley (University of California, Santa Cruz)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on the relation between democracy and neoliberalism as it emerges in conservation projects along the Argentina-Chile border. Attention is drawn to the implementation of participatory schemes in conservation and their impact on broader debates on democratization.
Long Abstract:
Since the 1990s, the southern Andes along the Argentinean-Chilean border has seen an unprecedented growth of public and private conservation projects. Such growth has contributed to the transformation of this area from a remote natural resource frontier, whose economic and political foundations date back to settler expansion and Indigenous dispossession at the turn of 19th century, to a global ecotourism destination. This transition shows both continuities and disruptions between settler colonialism and conservation, which has partially succeeded in mitigating natural resource depletion while reproducing settler forms of exclusion of local populations from the emergent green economy. The conservation boom of these frontier areas is strongly linked to broader political and economic processes taking place in Argentina and Chile since the 1990s. Both countries have been undergoing processes of democratization, following military rule during the 1970s and 80s. At the same time, neoliberal adjustments of public governance – favoring new state-market alliances and the liberalization of land and other resources – was pivotal to the establishment of non-governmental and corporate conservation projects, including private protected areas. In this panel, we interrogate how the relation between democracy and neoliberalism emerges from both conflicts and collaborations generated by conservation in and around protected areas along the Argentinian-Chilean border. A comparative look between the two countries reveals differences and similarities in the implementation of now-dominant participatory schemes in conservation management and their impact, or lack thereof, on broader debates on democratization and the role of local knowledge unfolding in both countries. This panel brings together scholars and practitioners based in Argentina and Chile and institutions from the Global North in the hope of generating a symmetric dialogue on democracy and conservation and the challenges posed by neoliberal processes of environmental private investment.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the legal politics of neoliberal enclosure pitting the Mauricio Macri administration (2015-2019) and green philanthropist organizations against provincial lawmakers over the creation of three wilderness reserves in Argentine Patagonia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the contentious legal politics employed by the center-right Mauricio Macri administration (2015-2019) and green philanthropist organizations—such as the Wyss Foundation and Fundación Rewilding Argentina—to create three wilderness reserves (reservas naturales silvestres) in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz. These reserves were the result of private land donations made to the federal government and the use of executive decree powers by President Macri. Provincial lawmakers responded by: filing a lawsuit; legally re-designating these reserves as provincial protected areas; and passing a law to ban any subsequent creation of new protected areas for twelve months. The study focuses on the Piedra del Fraile (now Los Huemules) wilderness reserve located adjacent to Glaciers National Park and the mountain village of El Chaltén. I argue that the enclosure debate is shaped by regional histories of neoliberalism linked to anti-democratic federal prerogative concerning territory and resources. Previous research has highlighted how post-authoritarian conservation in Argentina has involved a shift toward institutional decentralization, community-based governance, and green development since the 1990s. This paper draws attention to how the project of post-authoritarian conservation can be short-circuited by the legal politics of enclosure being driven by the global conservation movement (such as “30x30”), which has centrally involved private land trusts in Patagonia.
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates the rising prominence of philanthro-environmentalists in conservation governance. I trace how they seek to reconfigure and rescale state conservation behavior in Chile using a novel, not-for-profit conservation finance mechanism called Project Finance for Permanence.
Paper long abstract:
Scientists and policymakers are sounding the alarm on the biodiversity crisis. They warn that in addition to accelerating rates of species and habitat loss, there is a widening financing gap between the total cost of global conservation goals and the actual amount spent by national governments and other sources. Conservation philanthropy is increasingly regarded as key to closing this financing gap, especially in countries of the Global South where the greatest conservation gains are concentrated but where national governments often cite a lack of fiscal and administrative capacity to pursue these gains. This paper interrogates the rising prominence of big, international philanthropic foundations (BIPFs) in conservation governance, and particularly a class of actors I call ‘philanthro-environmentalists.’ Philanthro-environmentalists are distinguished from two other actor classes already receiving significant scholarly attention – BINGOs and philanthrocapitalists – in that they do not seek to make conservation pay for itself through market-based, for-profit interventions. Rather, they seek to leverage their money and influence to improve funding and political guarantees for state-owned conservation areas. Taking Chile as a case, I trace how a transnational network of philanthro-environmentalists is using a novel, not-for-profit conservation finance mechanism known as Project Finance for Permanence to secure substantial political commitments from the state in exchange for substantive philanthropic support for a large-scale national parks initiative in Chilean Patagonia. I argue that philanthro-environmentalism aims to address the biodiversity crisis not only by harnessing private, philanthropic wealth but also by reconfiguring and rescaling state conservation behavior in Chile and beyond.
Paper short abstract:
This papers offers a historical perspective on the intersection between conservation and resource extraction in northern Patagonia (Argentina) focusing on early conservation efforts in the 30s and 40s, and the establishment of a secret atomic project that challenged this ethos.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reviews and complicates some of the foundational categories that eventually become a staging ground for the ‘conservation boom’ in northern Patagonia. The creation of the Nahuel Huapi National Park in the Andes in the 1930s enabled the Argentine National Parks Bureau to build roads, hotels, churches, and tourist villas, profoundly transforming the built environment of the town of Bariloche, the gateway to the park. The resignification of this space committed Bariloche to a primary role as steward and enforcer of a state-sanctioned conservation ethos, with a cultural landscape that reflected its purposeful and cohesive legacy. This ethos constitutes nature as simultaneously pristine and institutionally constructed. However, in the late 1940s, a secret scientific project authorized by President Juan Domingo Perón disrupted this narrative in two ways. The Huemul Atomic project, set in the middle of the lake, becomes a destabilizing force for the history of conservation of Nahuel Huapi. On the one hand, the Huemul project disempowered the citizens of Bariloche from any territorial decision-making with regards to the uses of the island. On the other hand, the project uprooted the value of conservation from the island itself, which henceforth became a sort of non-space that fails to be re-patrimonialized for the following seventy years.