The (post-)colonial history of Latin America is largely characterized by processes of land accumulation and commodification by small social elites at the expense of communal lands inhabited by indigenous and Afro-American groups. Several administrative and land reforms aimed at restoring local control over communal resources in the 20th century had no lasting effect or did not take sufficient account of local traditions and interests. Since the 1990s, however, in the context of global sustainability and climate change debates, indigenous and African American communities have had increasing success in defending their communal worldviews and practices amidst a new phase of land grabbing and extractivism.
The panel seeks to combine theoretical reflections and empirical case studies on how indigenous and African American cosmovisions and practices have been able to challenge traditional Western models of development and grapple with the ongoing limitations, contradictions and conflicts characterizing the regeneration of the commons in Latin America from the 20th century to the present day.
Latin America hosts an immense biological and natural wealth as well as a rich cultural diversity. Still today, the most preserved ecosystems in the region are managed and protected as commons by indigenous and local communities. Nevertheless, since colonial times, extractive practices were imposed as the mail economic activities. The intense extraction of minerals and the vast production of sugar, exported to Europe, relied on land grabbing, over-exploitation of natural resources and forced labor. Together with a wide cultural destruction, these violent changes imposed irreversible damage and suffering on nature and people. Despite this brutal story, by 2000, because of long struggles and commoning, 32% of the forestlands in LA were commons, with a much larger share in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil.
During the past four decades a new strong wave of extractivism has been imposed in the region in response to the increasing global demand of raw materials lead by China´s strong economic growth. In the context of the negotiation of their debt with the financial international agencies, and in need of foreign currency, LA countries assumed the role of net providers of mineral, oil and agricultural products, globally traded as commodities.
National industrial development as well as food security were largely lost, inequality rapidly increased, authoritarian governments from right and left took hold, imposing privatization of water, lands and forest commons. In this dramatic context, commoning is at the core of the defense of land, water, forests and cultural commons.
The work I propose to present is part of a wider collaborative research project, part of the International Panel for Social Progress www.isp.org reflecting on the joint impact of inequality, loss of governability and ecological deterioration. With this frame we seek to document: legal and political processes of commons defense in LA, as well as initiatives of commons governance, use and creation. A key question I want to address is whether these initiatives contribute to the construction of post-extractivist realities and if so, how they do it.
The studies on governance of Common Pool resources like community forests state that these resources can be successful governed without significant government intervention. However, Payments for environmental services policy is gaining important place in the governance of these resources as a last resort mechanism. Hence, the present work studies the impact of this policy on sustainable management of community forests in the state of Mexico. This state was chosen due to its resistance to urban forces for deforestation.
To achieve its objective, this work bases its analysis on understanding how the payments for environmental help communities to comply with E. Ostrom, 8 principles for sustainable governance of common resources. It uses 40 case studies of communities that have received Payments from the Mexican Fund for Environmental Compensation for Change in Land Use in Forest Areas of the state of Mexico in the period of 2019 to 2023.
Keywords: payment for environmental services; community forests, sustainable governance.
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.
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