In Ecuador, a recent court case has exposed a number of pressing issues regarding collective property, ancestral territory, and environmental governance in the Amazon. In accordance with international law, an Indigenous community sued the state for property rights to their ancestral territory in a protected area of the Amazon. However, the suit elided the fact that another Indigenous community had been using this territory for hunting and fishing for nearly a century and had an ongoing “use and management” agreement with the Ministry of the Environment. The trial unfolded in terms of exotic tropes as a competition over which community was “more ancestral.” Ultimately, in 2024, the judges recognized the claims of the plaintiffs. The NGO that had sponsored the suit is part of a broader push in Latin America to obtain collective property titles for Indigenous communities in protected areas. It is now intent on replacing all use and management agreements in the Ecuadorian Amazon with collective property titles under the argument that property rights will better ensure Indigenous autonomy, the defense of territory against extractivism, and environmental sustainability. How will territorial disputes be resolved, and how will governance terms be (re)defined in relation to the prior use and management agreements, to improve autonomy and sustainability, as this development paradigm presumes? Does this push represent a legal fetishism based on stereotypes rather than concrete conditions? This paper aims to explore critically questions around the push to obtain collective property titles in Ecuador and across Latin America as an emerging and evolving paradigm in commons governance.
