Peter Bille Larsen

Municipal environmental governance in the Peruvian Amazon

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to illustrate the particularities and challenges associated with creating municipal environmental governance institutions in the Peruvian Amazon.Design/methodology/approach – A case‐study approach based on qualitative research, document analysis and interviews is used based on field research between 2007 and 2009.Findings – Findings reveal the limitations of municipal governance institutions to reflect local environmental concerns illustrated by the example of oil exploration. Whereas municipal institutions put in place resulted in environmental plans and policies, they failed to effectively address major sustainability concerns within their territorial boundaries. On the one hand, policy ambiguities about the meaning of “local” action reflect longstanding divides between centralised policy making and local agenda setting. On the other hand, findings point to the flexibility of local environmental processes easily neglecting core environmental problems.Practical implicat...

Introduction: Rethinking the Boundaries of Conservation NGOs

As debates rage on about changes required to build a different future for the planet, the role of conservation nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) as the global watchdogs of sustainability is increasingly prominent, but also questioned, in the public sphere. Vigorous debates about the role and effects of conservation NGOs call for independent analysis and examination of contemporary challenges and solutions. This book aims to showcase and challenge some of the latest engagements between critical social science and conservation NGOs. The authors have sought to do this partly because they believe it to be fundamentally important. Through such engagements it is possible to learn more about the consequences and politics of conservation policy, the way in which organisations function, and the interactions between various epistemologies and epistemic communities. This is a productive and insightful area for both researchers and practitioners. The chapters that constitute this book showcase and debate some of the approaches that demonstrate these insights.

Community Forestry and Post-frontier Deforestation

Tropical forestry is renowned for not bringing in tax revenues, not being managed according to regulations, not hindering deforestation and not leading to local benefits. “Forests are one of developing countries’ most mismanaged resources,” the World Bank concluded (World Bank 2008: 1). State absence, weak governance, illegality, corruption, informality and other “negative” qualifiers have been raised as explanations of tropical forest loss for four decades, ever since it was declared the “problem of the decade” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1974. In response, forest management approaches of various kinds have proliferated, constituting a major field of investment in deforestation hot spots.

Decolonizing Indigenous Governance

The recognition of indigenous peoples and their collective rights forms a central pillar of many post-frontier landscapes, signalling a shift from discrimination to inclusion. Across the continent, indigenous peoples have gone from being objects of frontier intervention and conversion to becoming subjects with rights and agency. From Tierras Comunitarias de Origen in Bolivia to resguardos in Colombia, and Comunidades Nativas in the Peruvian Amazon, the emergence of legal recognition, distinct rights spaces and new forms of indigenous agency are key markers of the post-frontier state in the late 20th century. This shift is at once normalized and deeply contested across the Amazon. On the one hand, community organizations, federations and collective rights legislation are today central to most decision making. On the other hand, the emancipatory potentials of state recognition, multiculturalism and inclusive policies have been questioned (Hale 2002). This prompts the need for careful investigation into the specific genealogies of post-frontier language.

Indigenous Power and Post-frontier Politics

The post-frontier does not involve changing government policies and regulatory arrangements alone, but equally involves a changing landscape of political subjectivities and agency. Where frontier politics are imposed on the periphery by the centre, spearheaded by frontier pioneers, post-frontier narratives are about empowered communities, political representation and rights. New “indigenous” forms of governance institutions (representative organizations, networks and alliances) and inclusive devices such as consultation mechanisms characterize the post-frontier landscape.

The Peruvian Amazon and Post-frontier Ethnography

I was drawn to Latin America and the Amazon not only because of the presence of centuries of deepening frontier pressures, but equally so by the proliferation of indigenous rights and environmental measures in recent decades. The Peruvian Amazon covers more than 78 million ha or some 61% of Peru’s total surface, with a total population of around 3.6 million. Of these, some 332,975 live in 1,786 native communities — the term used to simultaneously describe indigenous communities and their land titles in the Amazon region. By 2010, 1,254 of these communities had received titles covering some 11 million ha (13.6% of the national territory) and five territorial reserves had been created for indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. The 2007 census lists 1,786 indigenous communities, which constitute 9% of the total Amazonian population. In total, the combined figure of protected areas and indigenous territories covers 36.3% of the Peruvian Amazon (IBC 2011).

Greening the Frontier

How, and under what conditions, are frontier landscapes of extraction transformed into green post-frontier landscapes? Amazonian environments are not simply peripheral sites succumbing to the central appetite for resources, but are equally emblematic sites of unevenly spread environmental governance crafting. Where frontier maps inventory potential resources, green post-frontier maps display biodiversity priorities, ecological zones and protected areas. The shift from extraction to green protection, and environmental sustainability, is at the heart of post-frontier narratives and institution building. This chapter is an attempt to decrypt the significance of environmental governance crafting at the frontier, or what I name “green linearity”, illustrated with examples from the protected area field. To disentangle this matter in both empirical and conceptual terms, this chapter explores the specific greening of the Amazonian frontier illustrated with ethnographic detail from the Peruvian Amazon.

Concluding Remarks: Theorizing Post-frontier Governance

Future historians may remember the late 20th century for its proliferation of “sustainable development” tools to resolve longstanding social and environmental challenges at the frontier. Where Igor Kopytoff spoke of Africa as a “frontier continent” with new polities spreading around mature African societies (Kopytoff 1989: 7), historians may even, with a hint of irony speak of a “post-frontier world” as the nominal taming of frontier topographies becomes globalized. While much hope is still placed upon the discovery of new frontier resources, the promised land of El Dorado is no longer about gold alone, but involves sustainable harmony, underpinned by post-frontier institutions harmonizing environmental, social and economic objectives. Just as modernism implies radical breaks from the past, the post-frontier attributes transformative powers to new sustainability institutions. Yet, similar to the fall of modernity, we are currently witnessing crippled post-frontier institutions capable of securing neither environmental sustainability nor social justice. A zero-sum conception of the post-frontier, where new regulatory measures are ipso facto seen as taming the frontier, is at best misplaced optimism, at worst misleading. As ever more technico-salvatory means are invented and proliferate at the frontier, failures and contradictions abound.

The Double-bind of Community Conservation

For the last few decades, protected areas have formed part of the arsenal of tools promoted by conservationists to close frontiers. Protected areas epitomize the notion of the post-frontier through the nominal isolation of a zone within a larger span of “non-protected” areas. They involve distinct ways of seeing, understanding and producing the world (West et al. 2006). Much literature has emphasized the imposition of systems based on a Western worldview, managerial logics and top-down-driven solutions. Relying on Cartesian divisions between nature and culture, state incorporation and dispossession, the dramatic consequences of their establishment have repeatedly been noted (Colchester 2003). This has led to massive calls for change, from both conservationists and social movements.

Oil Exploration and the Extractive Post-frontier

Extractive industries form a fundamental, and deepening, part of the Latin American political economy, affecting ever more distant environments across the continent. Anthropologically, how do we conceptualize the governance encounter between extractive industries and indigenous communities inhabiting the very places where the hunt for resources is taking hold? How do we conceptualize the encounter of the big with the small, the geopolitically important, with the socially insignificant? How, and to what extent, do post-frontier regulations and practices, transform the governance dynamics at stake? This chapter explores the advent of the post-frontier in the extractive industry, through an ethnographic portrayal of the workings of new mitigation devices in the oil fields of the Peruvian Amazon.