Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the failure of communal titling to advance conservation in a seemingly ideal case and argues that legalistic efforts to solidify the title compete with Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities’ attempts to confront underlying structures driving deforestation and dispossession.

Paper long abstract:

On paper, the Rama-Kriol Territory in southeastern Nicaragua ought to be an exemplary case of collective land titling. The massive, multi-community territory covers nearly 400,000 hectares of land and a similar amount of maritime territory. It includes six Indigenous Rama communities and three Afrodescendant Kriol communities. It also includes 70 percent of the Indio-Maíz Biological Reserve, a major focus of national and international conservation efforts. While factions of the territorial government and multiple conservationist NGOs have dedicated tremendous energies and resources to conservation in the territory, deforestation and Rama-Kriol dispossession have advanced at an alarming rate over the past decade

To examine this outcome, this paper draws a distinction between property in law and property as embedded in social relations. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research, the paper advances a two-part argument. First, collective titling, as a shift in property in law, left unchanged the social relations in which property is embedded—social relations that are structured by settler colonialism and racial capitalism. A just form of conservation cannot be attained without confronting the underlying social structures of property. Second, conservationist efforts have conflicted with Rama-Kriol autonomy by focusing on property in law to the exclusion of the Rama and Kriol communities’ competing political projects. Rama-Kriol autonomy is itself critical to any confrontation of settler capitalism, I argue, and needs to be prioritized to avoid a human and ecological catastrophe.