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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:
- Thursday 28 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 Thursday 28 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This talk examines Chilean-Argentinian binational conservation in Tierra del Fuego. Bearing on settler-colonial legacies, this “diplomatic” conservation promotes political collaborations between two conflictual states while silencing Original Peoples and their demands.
Paper long abstract:
In 2008 Chile and Argentina accorded to restore the native ecosystems of Austral Patagonia affected by beavers. The binational agreement was driven by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which had received 300,000 ha of land in the Chilean side of Tierra del Fuego. Adopting the name that selk'nam peoples used for the region, WCS opened the enclosed Karukinka Park and implemented projects including eradicating invasive species like beavers. To fund conservation, WCS receives cooperation funds and sells Fuegian natures in carbon credits or elite ecotourism.
Following this session's thread to address private conservation in the Argentinian-Chilean south, I examine the complexities of Tierra del Fuego. In a region defined by Chilean and Argentinian conflicts and a long history of exceptional and military governments, transboundary conservation proposes itself as geopolitical repair and scientific diplomacy. However, the asymmetrical power of actors participating in these diplomatic encounters responds not only to the effects of neoliberal conservation but also to legacies of racism and settler-colonialism.
Using data from fieldwork in Tierra del Fuego (2018-2020), this talk describes how some of the tensions in binational conservation are made visible while others are excluded. While conflicts between Chilean and Argentinian actors are now embraced as part of "conservation management," disputes arising between conservation actors and the Original Peoples of Tierra del Fuego are silenced. In this context, conservation actors engage with indigenous peoples both as "extinct" and/or as crucial actors for conservation agendas that are already designed.
Paper short abstract:
This paper differentiates landscape form and ecological function to analyze ideas of wilderness and restoration in Torres del Paine National Park. We suggest that deepening state-market alliances in Patagonia intensify differences between conservation for ecotourism and ecological processes.
Paper long abstract:
This paper elaborates the distinction between landscape form and ecological function to analyze ideas of wilderness and restoration in and around Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park. At the start of the UN Decade on Ecological Restoration (2021-2030), the urgency of halting ecosystem degradation is clear. Restoration ecology projects in Torres del Paine, led by state (CONAF) and NGO actors, are oriented toward recovering from tourist-caused wildfires and impacts of ranching estancias that shaped the park’s trails and landscape. But the aim to reproduce particular landscape forms (e.g. lenga forests), which have become central to Patagonian ecotourism, potentially differs from conserving and restoring ecological function on that same landscape, as climatic change means a different spatial distribution of the region’s glacial, forest, and steppe ecosystems. Drawing on ecological habitat distribution models of the region’s three native Nothofagus species (coihue, lenga, and ñirre), fieldwork visits in 2019 and 2020, and satellite imagery from the past fifty years, we suggest that deepening state-market alliances in Patagonia reproduce the emphasis on conserving and even restoring particular landscape forms, intensifying the differences between conservation for ecotourism and ecological processes.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing upon field experiences and conservations with avian ecologists working around protected forests in Chile, I examine how the ideas of forest vitality and human disturbance are produced and contested in conservation science and how they reconfigure debates on farmers' environmental impact.
Paper long abstract:
For the last 40 years, scientific research in Chile has been shaped by two tendencies: a paradigm of environmental impact assessment (EIA) characterized by the leading role of private environmental consultancy companies, and underfunded university-based research based on competitive schemes emphasizing academic freedom and career trajectory. Only recently, researchers have been engaging with more experimental forms of community engagement in science in the attempt to bridge a gap between scientific achievements and application to social issues. Ecological research carried out in conservation areas serves as a testing ground for rethinking the role of politics in conservation, as it prompts scientists to provide certainty over the nature of human activities and their long-term impact beyond observable landscape sciences. Drawing upon field experiences and conservations with avian ecologists working around protected forests in southern Chile, I examine how the idea of human disturbance is produced and contested at the same time in conservation science. By prompting new ways of perceiving forests inspired by observations of avian communities’ collaborative and predatory behaviors, avian ecology complicates notions of forest vitality and life cycles employed in negotiations between conservation actors and farming populations. To explore this point, I focus on the afterlife of dead trees.