The Making of an Integrated Landscape of Conservation: Sustainable Development, Environmental Justice and the Politics of Territory in the Amazon

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The conservation of tropical forests is central to global environmental and sustainable development goals, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the 2015 Paris Agreement. With these goals in mind, numerous Protected Areas (PAs) have been established in order to preserve these forests under different conservation regimes. However, these PAs remain threatened by global, national and local demands for natural resources while the agendas of their indigenous inhabitants remain largely unrecognised in related decision-making processes. This is a particularly pressing issue, as over half of the world's tropical forests fall within claimed and titled indigenous territories with the rights of indigenous peoples recognised by international agreements (e.g. UNDRIP & ILO169) and national laws (e.g. Peru's laws of Prior Consultation and Native Communities). We hypothesise that the source of this gap between the aspirations and realities of conservation efforts lies in the persistence of top-down approaches to development and conservation, despite claims of participatory processes, and governance structures that prevent the effective participation of local and indigenous peoples and their knowledge in relevant decision-making processes.In order to address this issue, research will centre on the Purus-Manu conservation corridor in Peruvian Amazonia which is representative of the complex social, cultural and political realities of contemporary forest usage and conservation. The area encompasses a diversity of peoples and communities involved in a range of agricultural and extractive activities associated with differing regimes of ownership and rights. This includes not only officially recognised PAs and indigenous land claims but also extractive concessions and nascent carbon market financing. The tensions between different understandings and uses of the environment have, at times, led to physical violence and intimidation at the local level. These tensions are also evident up to the highest levels of the Peruvian government where ministries for land, development and infrastructure tend to be more powerful than the ministries that oversee conservation and rights. In this context while there are actors within Peru's government seeking a more equitable and effective system of forest conservation and the support of indigenous rights they are stymied by a lack of data, knowledge and capacities to carry out participatory planning and active multi-sector and multi-level coordination.The project will address these issues, first through an innovative ethnographic 'landscape approach' that will engage across different locations simultaneously to study and compare environmental, social and political dynamics at different levels of society and governance. In doing so, we will interrogate indigenous territorial and environmental conceptions and priorities, and how they relate, intersect and diverge from those of NGOs and government actors, as well as the hierarchies of power that privilege certain types of knowledge and information.This research will then underpin the design of a practical pathway to build local and national capacities and empower all stakeholders to work towards a transformation of how forest conservation can be encouraged and managed. This will be achieved through the design and implementation of what we have called Collective Sustainability Plans (CSPs) that will evidence the needs and desired futures of forest communities.The project builds on the team's previous individual and collective engagement in the region. This has included pilot projects that facilitated multi-actor co-learning spaces, as well as capacity building work around collaborative mapping and audio-visual techniques, and the production of films by Indigenous Peoples.