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.