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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:
- Monday 25 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 Monday 25 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Laura A. Ogden will present from her new book entitled "Loss and Wonder at the World’s End" (Duke 2021), which catalogs the ways environmental change and colonial history are entangled in the Fuegian Archipelago of southernmost Chile and Argentina.
Paper long abstract:
Laura A. Ogden will present from her new book entitled "Loss and Wonder at the World’s End" (Duke 2021). In the book, she brings together animals, people, and things— from beavers, stolen photographs, lichen, American explorers, and bird song--to catalog the ways environmental change and colonial history are entangled in the Fuegian Archipelago of southernmost Chile and Argentina. Ogden archives forms of loss—including territory, language, sovereignty, and life itself—as well as forms of wonder, or moments when life continues to flourish even in the ruins of these devastations. Her account draws on long-term ethnographic research with settler and Indigenous communities; archival photographs; explorer journals; as well as experiments in natural history and performance studies. "Loss and Wonder at the World’s End" frames environmental change as imperialism’s shadow, a darkness cast upon the Earth in the wake of other losses.
Paper short abstract:
Co-management in Argentina’s national parks system defines spaces for indigenous participation. This paper interrogates this inclusion. Exploring the limits of the articulation of hierarchies of knowledge, power, and social identities, it finds that the basic logics of conservation are reproduced
Paper long abstract:
Protected areas in Argentina, Patagonia in particular, have seen a surge in co-management strategies by which indigenous groups are given access to decision-making processes hitherto denied local residents. These initiatives sit oddly with past and current park policies marked by repression, dispossession and forced resettlements. Co-management as a principle for environmental governance has occurred alongside the emergence of multiculturalism at large in Argentina, a country whose history is tainted by its ideals of European whiteness and their concomitant policies towards people of indigenous descent. Given the history of Argentina and the well-sustained critiques of the politics of recognition in settler colonialism, the question is to what extent co-management is a viable pathway for including indigenous groups in the governance of resources and landscapes. This paper asks whether the historically conditioned coercion associated with protected areas can be challenged by the inclusion of indigenous peoples in the management of Argentina’s protected areas, or whether co-management merely ends up reproducing unequal hierarchies of power, knowledge and social identities. It does so with reference to collaborative mixed methods data collection the Mapuche communities of the southern parts of the Lanín National Park, analyzing the range of impacts in terms of resource access and control, access to decision-making processes, and the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the territorial governance of protected areas. It finds that while co-management represents an important step towards greater inclusion in decision-making processes, these largely remain within the logics of markets and so-called science based conservation.
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyzes indigenous people's contribution to healing blue Patagonia in Chile through the Indigenous Marine Areas (IMAs). IMAs safeguard customary uses, sacred places, and multiple biodiversity hotspots, and they are based on a broad care strategy of humans and other-than-human.
Paper long abstract:
The Chilean blue Patagonia is an essential ecosystem for marine life, a hot spot for biodiversity, a climate refuge, and a global center of the aquaculture industry. However, over the last years, environmental crises and social injustices have increased, turning visible the cumulative impacts of salmon farms over the marine habitats and indigenous people's livelihoods. Marine pollution, coastal litter, harmful algal blooms, and fish epidemics are some of the environmental problems which affect water quality, species conservation, and small-scale fisheries economies.
To face this critical scenario, indigenous communities have created Marine Indigenous Areas (IMAS, or ECMPOS in Spanish) to safeguard their livelihoods and conserve the ecological system that sustains them. IMAs protect indigenous customary uses, sacred places, and biodiversity hotspots. They are based on the daily lives relationship between humans and other-than-human and express a broad care strategy to safeguard marine socio-ecological dynamics.
Based on ethnographic information collected over the last three years in the coastal zone of Hualaihué, Chaitén, Quellón y Puyuhuapi, the paper analyze the IMA's care practices focusing on: i) the other-than-human agency in the production of care narratives and behaviors; ii) the role of women in the reproduction of the customary uses and the social organization; iii) the reuse of salmon litter to re-construct coastal environments; iv) the political outcomes of IMAS in the re-appropriation of the oceans commons.
Finally, the paper contributes to the current discussion about blue Anthropocene, showing how indigenous communities have acted at the frontline to heal blue Patagonia.
Paper short abstract:
The objective of this paper is to historically problematize the category of "indigenous" in Nahuel Huapi National Park, a protected area that, until a few years ago, didn't recognize the existence of indigenous communities within its jurisdiction.
Paper long abstract:
The objective of this paper is to historically problematize the category of "indigenous" in Nahuel Huapi National Park, a protected area that, until a few years ago, didn't recognize the existence of indigenous communities within its jurisdiction. This category should be considered in relation to the forms of recognition or non-recognition of indigenous peoples within the nation-state-territory of Argentina, the legal changes that at the national and international level provide rights to these peoples and in accordance with what the Global environmentalism policies are define as "indio verde" or "ecologically noble savages". In this framework, this paper seeks to question the processes of construction of indigenous identities beyond the usual political approach, to place it in the relationships and frameworks that are built between humans and non-humans. This seeks to account how non-human entities play at the moment of constructing and understanding the category of "indigenous" at Nahuel Huapi National Park, and how this network constructs a type of particular indigenous identity crossed by a know-how that must take part in the conservation of nature.