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

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.

Our core objective of designing an effective landscape of conservation has built-in impact pathways centred on the creation, production and dissemination of what we call Collective Sustainability Plans (CSPs). To ensure effective and meaningful impact, the pathways have been designed as three intertwined processes. The first is the CSPs themselves, which will articulate the needs and interests of communities in the region, in a manner that has been previously absent. The process of designing and producing the CSPs will also allow the team to identify and address local gaps in capacity. Finally, we will build connections and increase communication within a network of local and national leaders and policy-makers that will facilitate the use of CSPs in decision-making processes in order to improve the effectiveness, sustainability and equity of Protected Areas (PAs).

The value and use of the CSPs is clear in the Peruvian context, where the government sectors that oversee land, development and infrastructure are more powerful and have more resources than those that oversee conservation and rights. Based on our research experience and pilot projects in the Ucayali region including work with MINAM and SERNANP our project has been designed to address the resulting demand for capacities, information and active participatory planning by governmental actors seeking more equitable and effective systems of environmental protection and indigenous rights. On the other side, our work and discussions with local communities and indigenous-led organisations have similarly emphasised a desire that local voices and perspectives be included in policy discussions.

In Peru, recent laws seeking to widen participation in environmental management have led to a current emphasis on national and subnational government offices using Plan de Vida (PdV - life plan) methodologies. These aim to inform environmental and development policies relevant to indigenous peoples and the co-governance of PAs. However, these laws have not been matched with policy shifts and the genuine opening of participatory spaces, nor the efforts at capacity building needed to ensure the effective participation of indigenous peoples. Further, although the government's interest in PdV methodologies is laudable, its institutions have not developed effective ways to harmonize and correlate them with other data sets and information. By developing and integrating methodologies based on recognised approaches and that link to stated but unrealised governmental priorities, the project is positioned to offer both the engagement and effective research that governmental and NGO actors require and local communities are demanding. Our collaboration and co-production with local, NGO and government stakeholders from the outset ensures that the projects' methodologies and findings will be put to practical use from the start. Further, our interactions over the past decade with indigenous communities and our research partners, including local federations, the Peru-based NGO ProPurus; the indigenous university UCSS-NOPOKI, and the North American based Upper Amazon Conservancy have emphasised the potential that local communities see for PdV methodologies. These contexts and relationships will underpin the project's capacity development of local communities in the skills and knowledge needed to effectively use our CSP methodologies to elucidate the issues they face and ensure better access to decision-making processes.

Through ensuring and showcasing the effectiveness of our methodologies, research and analysis at the local level, which we recognise is the most effective space in which to have an immediate impact, we will then work with our broader networks, including UK-based academics and international organisations such as CIFOR, and attendance at international conferences to disseminate our findings and show its relevance and potential for similar contexts in Latin America and globally.