Paper short abstract:

In Lima, concerns about ecosystem endangerment afford opportunities to enact new forms of formality that attempt to marginalise informal squatters. At the same time, conservation offers inventive ways for squatters to pragmatically draw from those techniques of formality to attain their own goals.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among fog oasis conservationists in Lima, in this paper I show how emergent ethics of conservation became enmeshed with discourses on (in)formality. I demonstrate this by framing concerns about the endangerment of species endemic to Lima against the background of deep-seated understandings of informal urbanisation as a threat to the city itself. As a continuation of more long-standing attempts by the city’s affluent populations to hold informal forms of livelihood at bay, discourses on species endangerment lent conservationists and peripheral residents a powerful tool to marginalise informal squatters and perceived land trafficking activities. However, these ecosystem threats proved difficult to pin down and stabilise, in particular because squatters were understood to strategically emulate conservation practices as a means to avoid denunciation. At the same time, conservation occasionally required adopting informal methods, which rendered conservationists themselves reportable to authorities. I frame these shifts as displacements of the grounds for conservationists and informal squatters to maintain any fixed positions vis-à-vis one another, thereby displacing (in)formality onto their respective others. Against this background, I argue that concerns about species and ecosystem endangerment afford opportunities to enact new forms of formality that attempt to marginalise ‘the informal’. At the same time, fog oasis conservation offers inventive ways for squatters to pragmatically draw from those techniques of formality to attain their own goals.