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Global conservation, protected areas, and Indigenous Nations in the Peruvian Amazon
23 January 2023, 2:00 pm–3:30 pm
An event part of the Environment and Society in the Americas Seminar Series
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Sold out
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
UCL Institute of the Americas
Indigenous organizations, international actors, and national authorities portray different images of Indigenous Peoples’ relationship with the natural environment. Based on these images, these actors deploy ecological, economic, and security arguments to create or transform protected areas.
By exploring three cases of conflicts over the creation and management of protected areas in the Peruvian Amazon this paper maps the tensions around the different images and explores how indigenous organizations and state authorities - backed by international actors - engage with security, economic and ecological rationales from their own sovereignty standpoint.
The paper argues the state weakens indigenous political aspiration of sovereign territorial control by translating this agenda into depoliticized mechanisms and assumptions of modern international environmentalism, which ultimately limits their capacity to truly contribute to conservation goals. Rather, a ‘nation-building’ approach to conservation, by conceiving Indigenous Nations as sovereign partners in environmental management, might give legitimacy to environmental initiatives.
About the Speaker
Dr Roger Merino
Associate Professor at School of Public Management, Universidad del Pacífico of Lima, Peru
Professor Merino's research areas include political ecology, international environmental governance, and indigenous rights. He earned his PhD in Social and Policy Sciences and a M.Sc. in International Policy at the University of Bath (United Kingdom). He has published research articles in leading international journals, such as World Development, Third World Quarterly, American Journal of International Law, Global Environmental Politics, Environmental Science and Policy, Oxford Development Studies, among others. He has also been Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Institute for Global Law and Policy and Fellow at the Social Science Summer School of the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton. He is the author of the book “Socio-legal Struggles for Indigenous Self-determination in Latin America: Reimagining the Nation, Reinventing the state” (Routledge, 2021).
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