A Panamazonian Project Facing the State? Particularities and Constrains of Indigenous REDD+ Proposal

As globalized economies develop new forms of intervention in the Amazon, using various levels of governance to further their encroachment, halting the abatement of  “indigenous space” (Chirif, 2006) seems both ever more urgent and highly implausible. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) expand as a paradigm for environmental management in the biome, REDD+ being one of its most ambitious experiments (Corbera 2012). PES schemes are contributing to change not only legal frameworks that regulate access to natural resources but also the value of “natural” assets. These transformations lead to further changes in indigenous peoples’ recognition, legal rights and economic opportunities.

Indigenous peoples networks detain different praxis in order to protect themselves from dispossessory process (Li, 2010). Facing the national-state has always being hard for their movements. One of their main strategies to gain influence was to change the scale of their intervention (Pieck, 2006). In 2009 a proposal for “holistic management of forests”, that seeks to adapt REDD+ objectives to indigenous worldviews, is presented by their umbrella organization, the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA). 

States engagement in the climate regime can be seen as a ‘denationalized state agenda’ (Sassen 2006), as they actively participate in new kinds of trans-governmental partnerships and highly specialized convergence in regulatory issues. Tropical countries are adopting new institutional arrangements aspiring to receive climate financing in the form of cooperation and new business opportunities. How do Amazonian States currently read indigenous peoples’ proposals regarding territorial management? What can we learn from indigenous movement’s practices facing green economy? Based on fieldwork both in the UNFCCC and in Peru and Bolivia, this paper seeks to contribute to a reflection on the role imagined for and attained by communities with diverse approaches to the biophysical environment.