Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the transforming relationship between the Peruvian State and indigenous Amazonian leaders through the analysis of a participatory mechanism for conservation in protected areas in the Amazon: the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve’s co-management regime.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the transforming relationship between the Peruvian State and indigenous Amazonian leaders through the creation of the co-management regime for Communal Reserves, a participatory mechanism for conservation. This presentation is based on research with the key stakeholders to the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve (ACR) in the southern Peruvian Amazon and expands on previous analysis (Palacios and Sarmiento 2021). We focus on the internal dynamics of the ACR’s co-management, which is co-managed by ECA-Amarakaeri, an organization representing the ten indigenous communities in the Reserve’s buffer zone, and SERNANP, Peru’s protected areas service.

The presentation examines a seemingly contradictory process at play in the ACR. The reserve’s co-management has rendered its management ‘technical’, moulding indigenous leaders into Indios permitidos who manage the territory through apolitical conservation agendas that do not always match those of the communities they represent. However, this is not a unilinear process without contradictions as in incorporating green language in their political practice, indigenous peoples are pushing for the formation of a type of Estado permitido that not only recognizes their cultural rights but also their role as authorities with the same political legitimacy as the State in the ACR’s co-management. In this sense, we argue that although the current status of ACR’s co-management shows an apparent depoliticization in the indigenous governance of the territory through a "successful" participatory mechanism, there is also a re-politicization of indigenous Amazon leaders by using this space and its alliances to insert themselves politically in broader technical and political negotiation arenas.