Post-frontier Resource Governance

Indigenous Rights, Extraction and Conservation in the Peruvian Amazon

P. Larsen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137381859
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The author presents an anthropological analysis of the regulatory technologies that characterize contemporary resource frontiers. He offers an ethnographic portrayal of indigenous rights, resource extraction and environmental politics in the Peruvian Amazon.

1

The Post-frontier Paradox

Introduction

Consider the all-too-familiar images of deforestation, socio-environmental conflict and rights infringements in the Amazon. The 20th century involved an unprecedented scramble for resources fuelled by flows of capital to the most remote corners of the world from the South American rainforests, across the Russian tundra, to the highlands of Southeast Asia. This run, and the traces it left, intensified after the turn of the century. Whether targeting sub-soil resources, land or forests, both state and corporate expansion efforts have led to an exponential growth of resource frontier creation, which is transforming ecologies, geopolitics and social dynamics.

Now picture the mosaics of community land titles, territorial reserves and protected areas which have spread out across places like the Amazon in the last four decades. The second half of the 20th century witnessed a quiet revolution with environmental protection and land and community tenure regimes gradually taking hold, albeit unevenly, across the global South. While, just a few decades ago such regions would only figure as national backwaters and resource pools, they now feature equally as biodiversity hotspots, titled territories and protected areas. Institutional topographies and policies have never before appeared as green and socially inclusive; yet they coexist with a deepening socio-environmental crisis. Nowhere is this paradox more apparent than in so-called resource frontier regions, where intensified pressures stand in contrast to, persist and even thrive under new environmental and social protection measures. How do we make sense of this paradox?

The post-frontier

Whereas much anthropological literature offers a critique of state expansion, neoliberalism and corporate predation, the resulting call for “more” rights and conservation measures is no longer adequate. At the resource frontiers of the 21st century, sustainability measures are no longer simply absent, but part of the problem complex. I call this new situation the post-frontier, and this book aims to offer an ethnographic portrayal of it. I define the post-frontier as the host of new regulatory technologies, practices and institutions that nominally close, yet more accurately characterize and restructure, contemporary resource frontiers. It entails a narrative shift from governance modalities of discovery, conquest and extraction to modalities of recognition, environmental protection and social safeguards. I examine these post-frontier arrangements ethnographically in the Peruvian Amazon by focusing on the Yánesha people and their involvement with indigenous rights organizing, conservation and protected area planning, logging and oil development.

While by no means resolving the deep sustainability challenges of our times, post-frontier regimes, albeit unevenly implemented and diverse, have arguably transformed the rules of the game. In the early 21st century, resource frontiers are no longer formulated through the century-old frontier language of extraction potential alone, but rather are framed in terms of post-frontier sustainability and positive outcomes. Consider the “the future we want” Rio + 20 outcome acknowledging “that mining activities should maximize social and economic benefits as well as effectively address negative environmental and social impacts” (United Nations 2012). Whereas frontier modernism implies a radical transformation of localities to be discovered, extracted and transformed by new technologies and external actors alone, post-frontier narratives build on and work through the recognition and incorporation of localities, rights and environments. Backwaters across the globe are no longer black holes awaiting discovery at the “outer edge”, but are part of the inner sustainability calculations of nation states. With ever more detailed maps, inventories and regulations, contemporary hopes and utopia are no longer encapsulated in the frontier dreams of El Dorado alone, but equally so in the post-frontier of sustainable development.

Biodiversity planning, indigenous land titling and safeguard measures, this book argues, involve new forms of governance modalities. Yet, the more such modalities have been implemented, the more new and different questions have cropped up about their effects, new forms of violence and dispossession. The post-frontier coexists with intensified processes of land grabbing, environmental degradation and social exclusion. Multiple frontiers seem to thrive within this post-frontier era, perhaps better perceived as a Pandora’s box of fractured regulatory and bureaucratic measures unable to resolve an ever-deepening environmental and social crisis. We are therefore challenged to view post-frontier closures not merely as poorly implemented sustainability solutions, but rather to interrogate the entanglements of post-frontier sustainability and frontier expansion. This book zooms in on this paradox by offering a historically informed ethnography of indigenous rights, conservation and sustainable forestry in the Peruvian Amazon. It moves beyond merely denouncing a failing post-frontier, and takes it seriously in both ethnographic and theoretical terms. Like any other transformative process (Scott 1998), post-frontier projects rarely fare as planned, yet they do something. Where and how the post-frontier is found in practice is significant. These patterns and practices are not chaotic, but structured and structuring of new frontier encounters.

Looking towards the Amazon was an obvious choice given my long-standing professional involvement with indigenous rights and conservation preceding my return to academia (Larsen and Oviedo 2005; Larsen and Springer 2008; Maffi et al. 2000). Not only does the region exhibit some of the most telling resource frontier dramas, it equally hosts emblematic efforts to recognize and title indigenous territories, promote community forestry and promote protected area conservation to halt deforestation. Against the odds of extractive industries, investment-eager governments and entrepreneurs, conservation actors and indigenous organizations have, over the last four decades, carved out new legal spaces for indigenous rights and environmental conservation. The stark contrast between massive development pressures exemplified by road building, deforestation and extractive industries on the one hand and the pioneering efforts to adopt indigenous rights legislation and ecological planning measures on the other offers a particularly potent terrain which is explored in this book.

Rethinking the frontier

From a minimalist economic perspective, a frontier is “an area or source of unusually abundant natural resources and land relative to labour and capital” (Barbier 2011: 7). Yet from another perspective, such “unusual” resource abundance is not objectively given, but relies on distinct place constructions, development ideologies and a distinct political economy (Tsing 2005). Kopytoff has similarly stressed frontiers as a “political fact”, where areas are defined as “lacking any legitimate political institutions and as being open to legitimate intrusion and settlement” (Kopytoff 1989: 11). Schmink and Wood, in a similar vein, portray frontiers as a power field characterized by resource contestation and resistance (Schmink and Wood 1992: 14). Geiger defines frontiers as “areas remote from political centres, which hold strategic significance or economic potential for human exploitation, and are contested by social formations of unequal power”. He equally describes them as “loosely-administered spaces rich in resources coveted by non-residents” (Geiger 2008: 78). He proposes eight properties of contemporary frontiers in the South including particular forms of state operations, economic dynamics and environmental aspects as well as the exclusion and denial of indigenous claims.

Anthropological depictions have long thrown into question state projections bringing new orders, technologies and people to the frontier. Ethnography often begins, and in part ends, with a critique of its violent, unruly and chaotic nature, whether under colonial or postcolonial regimes. The Comaroffs spoke of the “unwritten agreements, unruly populations, and protean social arrangements” of the imperial frontier “with little of the ethical restraint that reined them in ‘back home’ ” (Jean Comaroff and Comaroff 2012). Where planners aspire to new social orders and development, in what Anna Tsing tellingly called “free-for-all frontiers” (2005), anthropologists often portray the ensuing environmental havoc and social disorder. Where nation states see frontier entrepreneurship, anthropologists unmask the “far west” agency, laissez faire politics and impacts of voracious transnationals, uprooted colonos and state expansion (Burger 1987; Davis 1977; Geiger 2008). Frontiers are seen as deregulated and raw wilderness appearing in confusing boundary-lands of “law and theft, governance and violence, use and destruction” (Tsing 2005: 27). They are imposed and “not a natural or indigenous category … a foreign form requiring translation” (ibid.: 31). The technical optimism of anthropological involvement in frontier settlement projects of the 1950s and early 1960s is long forgotten, and is replaced instead by studies of conflict, marginalization and contestation. For many, the frontier is simply a natural consequence of unleashing unmediated capitalist forms of extraction. As Schmink and Wood in their incipient political ecology of Amazonia argued: “So long as governments do not impose their own regulatory mechanisms, the natural environment can (indeed must) be exploited for short-term gain” (Schmink and Wood 1987: 42). Depictions of social disruption, environmental degradation and internal colonization undermined the belief that further expansion and development of so-called hinterlands would harbour solutions to all the instances of national disarray. Frontier ideologies were, from this perspective, both in crisis and in need of a regulatory cure. As new resource frontiers have proliferated across the globe, emphasis on neoliberalism and deregulation is often employed to explain the unleashing of frontier wilderness. For Tsing, the Dayaks in Meratus, Kalimantan experienced shock, disruption and radical transformation resulting from a “free-for-all” frontier, at once “unstable” and expanding. Specific historical conjunctures had allowed for the intensification of a frontier culture “dedicated to the obliteration of local places, local land and resource rights, and local knowledges of flora and fauna” (ibid.: 68). As Anna Tsing summarizes the situation:

A frontier is an edge of space and time: a zone of not yet not yet mapped, not yet regulated. It is a zone of unmapping: even in its planning, a frontier is imagined as unplanned. Frontiers aren’t just discovered at the edge; they are projects in making geographical and temporal experience. Frontiers make wildness, entangling visions and vines and violence; their wildness is both material and imaginative.

(Tsing 2005: 28–29)

While the frontier critique has offered modernist pretensions a sobering reality check, ongoing transformations rendered evident by two decades of sustainability language and institution crafting prompt new questions about the nature of contemporary frontiers. Summarizing contemporary frontiers as under-regulated or unplanned chaos is, in most cases, empirically untenable and obscures the significance of a regulated post-frontier. It is challenged and contrasted by the massive resources, scientific investigation, planning and regulatory devices involved in their creation and maintenance (see Chapter 3). As Tsing herself noted, these constitute the “salvage frontier, where making, saving, and destroying resources are utterly mixed up, where zones of conservation, production and resource sacrifice overlap almost fully, and canonical time frames of nature’s study, use, and preservation are reversed, conflated, and confused” (ibid.: 32). Such dynamics, this book argues, are neither exceptional nor confused, but representative of contemporary post-frontier governance patterns. Descriptors such as messiness, friction and dispossession obscure rather than qualify and elucidate the phenomena at stake. Fractioned and reversed spaces are not exceptional, but patterned mediations. Resource frontiers are no longer simply encountered, resisted and contested, but fundamentally mediated through elaborate policies and new post-frontier institutions.

The advent of the post-frontier

“Loreto has come a long way since the rubber era and is no longer governed by the logic of frontier expansion” (Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000: 308). So ends a landmark study, entitled “Tamed frontiers”, of Loreto in the Peruvian Amazon at the turn of the millennium. The post-frontier at stake was not simply the “low” after the resource high had dried out; rather, the authors pointed to an evolution of governance practice. Horror stories of enslaved Indians and rights abuses, reflecting the dark side of rubber and other resource booms, belonged to the past. After almost two centuries of Peruvian independence, and further waves of violence and dispossession, the Amazonian frontier had been tamed in Loreto through “the suppression or containment of the worse traits identified with the frontier economy” (Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000: 5). In a critique of sweeping statements about violent Amazonian frontiers, the authors concluded that there were no doubts about the magnitude of positive change (ibid.: 308), emphasizing the “assertion of civil rights, the shaping of a regional identity and the development of a regionalist ideology” (ibid.: 320).

In Brazil, Cleary would judge the notion of frontier to have “run its course” and become meaningless as an academic construct (Cleary 1993: 349). The demise of frontier development politics seemed to suggest that “frontiers” had become a thing of the past. The historical events leading to the post-frontier are well illustrated by the Amazon gaining global media attention, notably in the 1980s, as a stage for iconic frontier battles in response to ruthless development, colonization and forest clearance on the one hand, and for forest dwellers and environmentalists on the other. The Amazon “crisis”, epitomized by the murder of the rubber tapper leader Chico Mendes in 1988 and the arrival of indigenous leaders to the global scene, triggered waves of protests and sustainability planning (Cleary 1991). Most countries in the Amazon now have complex legal bodies, institutional systems and safeguard measures that – on paper – sustain the forests, secure the rights of indigenous peoples and protect biodiversity. Whereas the literature stressed how sustainability was ignored in Latin America just two decades ago (Goodman and Redclift 1991), it has since become omnipresent.

In narrative terms, the arrival of a post-frontier of social complexity would appear to signal the end of frontier dynamics, which since the 16th century had shaped the governance topographies of the continent. Forests are no longer simply timber stocks waiting to be harvested, but part of recognized ecosystems worthy of protection. Protected areas have been set up in areas doomed for clear-cutting. Land rights have been won after long battles. Protected area expansion is particularly illustrative of the global reach of post-frontier institutions. By 2010, 12.7% of the world’s terrestrial and inland water areas were designated as protected areas numbering some 177,547, their extent having increased by 48% since 1990 (Bertzky et al. 2012). Today roughly 41% of the Amazon Basin is covered by protected areas and indigenous territories (IBC 2011; RAISG 2009). The resulting institutional topography is revelatory in regard to the reach of the post-frontier, yet equally treacherous about its significance.

Contrasting frontier and post-frontier narratives

Whereas frontiers represented uncharted territory out of sight and control, the post-frontier is, in narrative terms, visualized, inventoried and managed. Where frontier missions would map routes, conversions and infidels, post-frontier maps would cover plant communities, protected areas and indigenous territories. Whereas the development frontier brought “civilized” order to nature and wilderness, the post-frontier, on paper, re-establishes socio-ecological order to civilization. Where dynamic frontiers would replace dormant hinterlands, regulated post-frontiers would project to normalize the Wild West. The list could continue.

Post-frontier projects, I argue, on paper often harbour distinct prescriptive qualities that depart from the deficits of frontier narratives. They, in modernist narrative terms, advance from a deficient frontier past projecting a re-ordered post-frontier present and future with new and more sustainable institutions. Such prescriptions are typically manifest in legislative and rationalist policy orders projecting to achieve a set of hoped-for sustainability outcomes. Frontier narratives, on the one hand, evolve around presenting dormant or idle resource spaces in need of frontier expansion, investment and extraction. Post-frontier narratives, on the other, “close” such spaces through new technologies, safeguard regulations and social change. Whereas resources in frontier narratives await discovery, the post-frontier emphasizes protection and sustainable extraction.

Forest concessions have been replaced by sustainable forestry as the management paradigm, just as regulatory shifts in the energy, mineral and oil sectors today speak about minimizing negative impacts and generating benefits. Environmental plans are now staple ingredients in both local and national administrations. Today, projects on carbon sequestration, mitigation and biodiversity conservation, among others, appear side by side with agricultural expansion, road penetration and resource extraction in a new narrative of post-frontier sustainability order in the global South.¹ The post-frontier not only concerns resource planning, but also the wide array of land rights, redistributive mechanisms and labour legislation, which equally transform the social landscape. The absence of citizenship and other papers, which were common just a few decades ago in the peripheries of nation states, are increasingly being replaced by registers, identity cards and associated rights regimes. The frontier property landscape of state and private ownership has increasingly, notably in Latin America, been complemented by other forms of individual and collective property forms (Sunderlin et al. 2008). Beneath global post-frontier trends are huge differences, of course: 98% of forests are under government ownership in Africa, 68% in the Asia-Pacific zone and 33% in Latin America (Hatcher and Bailey 2011: 16). Protected areas also vary considerably in terms of recognizing community rights and needs, just as safeguard measures in the extractive sector differ substantially between countries.

Table 1.1 Contrasting narratives

Frontier narratives	Post-frontier narratives
Legal terra nullius	State order and regulation
Economic value	Multiple socio-ecological values
Nature as obstacle and resource	Bio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Maps
• Foreword by Jonathan Friedman
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• 1. The Post-frontier Paradox
• 2. The Peruvian Amazon and Post-frontier Ethnography
• 3. Frontier Narratives
• 4. Decolonizing Indigenous Governance
• 5. Greening the Frontier
• 6. The Double-bind of Community Conservation
• 7. Community Forestry and Post-frontier Deforestation
• 8. Oil Exploration and the Extractive Post-frontier
• 9. Indigenous Power and Post-frontier Politics
• Concluding Remarks: Theorizing Post-frontier Governance
• Postscript: Biosphere Dreams and Biosfears
• Notes
• References
• Index