Moving Territories: Strategic Selection of Boundary Concepts by Indigenous People in the Bolivian Amazon - an Element of Constitutionality?

Abstract

In this case study, we analyse to what extent the establishment of the Pilón Lajas Indigenous Territory and Biosphere Reserve in the Bolivian Amazon reflects the six elements of the concept of constitutionality. Our analysis elucidates what happened during the second phase of establishment, in which land rights of lowland indigenous peoples were extended to collective territorial rights including highland indigenous peoples and peasants. The case adds a dynamic perspective on the constitutionality framework by providing a longitudinal analysis of a bottom-up institution building process for natural resource governance.

The political ontology of protected area co-management: worlding and nature perceptions among stakeholders

“…(Director ad interim of the Biosphere Reserve, Rurrenabaque, 2013) This account has been reproduced in various studies (Costas Monje, 2010;Mariaca, Arteaga and Loayza, 2011;Painter, Duran and Miro, 2011;Surkin et al, 2010) and has proved to be strategically effective for both institutions for raising funds and acquiring development and conservation projects (SERNAP and CRTM interviews). However, previous research indicates that co-management remains conflictive (Gambon and Rist, 2018). We argue that some of these conflicts are rooted in the asymmetric recognition, and thus representation, of different ontologies enacted by the involved stakeholders in the way that co-management is formalized and implemented.…”

“…Such expression of complexity would be only possible through a process of creating completely new spaces of political dialogue rather than including Indigenous people into existing spaces. This aspect would not only lead to overcoming the notion of 'representative democracy' rooted in Western principles and build new mechanisms of dialogue valuing multiple ontologies (Martin et al, 2016) but also reduce the risk of the state and conservationists coopting the Indigenous organization through established forms of participation (Ferguson, 1994;Gambon and Rist, 2018).…”

“…In mid-October 2013, a committee consisting of the CRTM board, two environmental NGO consultants to the Indigenous organization and two park rangers of the Biosphere Reserve left Rurrenabaque on a sevenday trip to visit all the communities along the Quiquibey and Beni Rivers. The joint community visit presented a sign of rapprochement between the two institutions after a conflict had erupted the year before, putting a temporary halt to co-management (Gambon and Rist, 2018). The main objective of the tour, which was to be repeated later along the Rurrenabaque-Yucumo road, was to inform the river communities about the initiation of the process for updating the management and life plan for Pilón Lajas, to be completed in 2017.…”

Institutional Change on a Conservationist Frontier: Local Responses to a Grabbing Process in the Name of Environmental Protection

“…Furthermore, this article has shown how the reigning ideology in a society defines which discourses and forms of legitimization are acceptable. In the process of commons and resilience grabbing, the Western ideology of conservationism has spread to many parts of the world, where indigenous people find themselves obligated to legitimize their existence in resourceful areas in conservationist terms [14,38,46]. Consequently, the study's main contribution to the debate around commons grabbing processes consists of focusing on its influence on identity building processes.…”

Transdisciplinarity and epistemic communities: Knowledge decolonisation through university extension programmes

“…Relational epistemic communities are committed to issue‐driven and problem‐solving research where knowledge is endogenous and co‐produced by the interaction of mosaic epistemologies. Their members are bounded by a shared commitment to embrace inter‐ontological dialogues and to produce socially robust knowledge, understood as a process more than a final product (Gambon & Rist, 2018; Nowotny, 2003). The idea of ecologies of knowledges (Santos, 2008, 2016) becomes a methodological approach for this transdisciplinary knowledge co‐production; thus, I conceptualise relational epistemic communities as clusters of ecologies of knowledges.…”