Understanding priorities in the Amazon
My project aims to explore the relationships between commitments and priorities for biodiversity conservation from international to sub-national scales. Mainly, I will examine what is being visibilized and invisibilized in the prioritization process for area-based strategies in the Peruvian Amazon. My starting point is to identify, compare, and contrast narratives around conservation and territorial priorities from national and sub-national actors involved in decision-making about biodiversity conservation. At the sub-national scale, I will look into two key area-based conservation strategies that highlight grassroots initiatives, interculturality, territorial priorities in their governance schemes: a Communal Reserve and a Conservation Concession. Then, I will analyze the decision-making process behind the implementation and prioritization of these conservation strategies, what counts as valid priorities and data, and what does not. I root my approach in critical political ecology and post/anti-colonial perspectives from South America. I also intend to use the framework for evaluating the justice dimensions of conservation data (Pritchard et al., 2022). Finally, I will discuss challenges to prioritization in conservation strategies to pursue ecologically and socially just pathways.
Pre-Doctoral Researcher