Paper short abstract:

Land titled to three Mbya Guarani communities with the intervention of a conservation NGO reconfigures pathways to land rights. I argue for theorizing Latin America’s ‘territorial turn’ beyond the state, considering the role of conservation partnerships in shaping and arbitrating Indigenous rights.

Paper long abstract:

Neoliberal conservation governance regimes are rarely theorized in relation to Latin America’s ‘territorial turn’ of the 1990s, wherein legal mechanisms were created for Indigenous communities to map their traditional territories and obtain collective property titles. However, there are frequent practical overlaps in processes of titling land to Indigenous communities with the support of conservation organizations. Drawing from seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork during 2017-2020 and the analysis of legal documents and government files and archives, I examine a case in Misiones, Argentina where the intervention of an international conservation organization ‘resolved’ over a decade of dispute between several Mbya Guarani communities and a logging company. The 2012 purchase of approximately 4000 hectares of subtropical forest for conservation and the titling of the majority of this land to three Mbya Guarani communities was hailed as an unprecedented process of negotiating Indigenous territorial rights through multicultural alliance. Yet I demonstrate that despite the concrete material gains of secure land tenure for the Mbya, land titling through conservation reconfigures the pathways to legally enshrined forms of ‘rights’ and ‘recognition’, while creating new challenges in terms of who is authorized to speak for this titled land. Thus, I argue for theorizing the ‘territorial turn’ beyond the state, with special attention to how Indigenous rights are shaped through conservation partnerships.