Peter Larsen who holds a PhD in Development Studies (’12) has just published a book on resource governance.
The twentieth century involved an unprecedented scramble for resources reaching the most remote corners of the world. Simultaneously, a quiet revolution has taken place with environmental protection, land and community rights regimes gradually taking hold, albeit unevenly, across the global South.
In Post-Frontier Resource Governance: Indigenous Rights, Extraction and Conservation in the Peruvian Amazon, Peter Larsen offers an anthropological analysis of the paradox. Building on the concept of post-frontier governance, he presents a portrayal of the host of new regulatory technologies, practices and institutions that nominally close, yet more accurately characterise and restructure, contemporary resource frontiers. He examines ethnographically these arrangements in the Peruvian Amazon by focusing on the Yánesha people and their involvement with the organisation of indigenous rights, conservation and protected area planning, logging, and oil development.
Dr Larsen tells us more about his book.
Why did you decide to study resource extraction and conservation in Peru?
After having spent years working as an applied anthropologist with NGOs and international organisations, I was keen to use research to take a step back and make sense of sustainable development in practice. Peru is a dual hotspot on account of its century-old extractive activities and its biological and cultural diversity. It was an ideal place for fieldwork as well as learning from engagement with professionals and activists working on the ground.
Your research is based on the idea of frontier, which some years ago was a commonly used concept in conservation studies. But what does the concept of “post-frontier governance” mean?
It’s meant both as a provocation and as an attempt to theorise a set of governance trends that in many ways have transformed the institutional context and complex problem of sustainability in places such as the Amazon. The frontier as we knew it no longer exists. After more than two decades of sustainable-development crafting, it is no longer enough to simply identify immediate threats as deforestation. Places like the Amazon are no longer institutional terra nullius lacking policy intervention, but carefully mapped and regulated spaces. Nonetheless, sustainability problems and frontier dynamics of degradation and marginalisation persist. They have even intensified in some respects. The “post-frontier governance” concept is an attempt to draw attention to these new trends and make sense of them.
What are your conclusions about the paradox you based your analysis on, and about the “arrangements” you describe?
The paradox concerns the dual reality of regulatory closure of frontiers through institutions like protected areas and indigenous land titles co-existing with the continuous opening and extractability beneath the surface. The Amazon is particularly illustrative of this challenge, given the intensity of conservation measures and indigenous titles. More than a third of the Peruvian Amazon, for example, is covered by protected areas and indigenous territories. What happens when oil exploration is planned? How do safeguard mechanisms play out in practice? In the book, I stress the importance of taking a grounded approach to understand these mechanisms in their social and historical context. The chapters show in ethnographic detail that what on paper seeks to protect and empower may lead to the exact opposite. It discusses the evolving governance arrangements, power dynamics and new forms of knowledge restructuring the post-frontier. Sustainability is never a done deal, but very much a project in the (un)making. Anthropology has a crucial contribution to make in providing sustainability thinkers and practitioners with critical analysis.
Is your book a way to contribute to a positive future for the Peruvian Amazon?
I hope so! Discussion and debate are crucial. In the real world, we are often caught up in everyday problem solving, vested interests and the “heat of events”, be they global policy meetings or local development negotiations. NGOs, government agencies or local stakeholders rarely have the time and energy to step back and reflect. Yet, given the gravity of sustainability challenges in the Amazon, independent analysis is more than ever crucial. The book is now being translated into Spanish and will be published in Peru. This summer, we shall organise a major event on extractive industries in Latin America, together with partners in Peru and Switzerland, including the Graduate Institute.
Peter Larsen is Lecturer of Anthropology, Development and International Governance at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland.
This book is the last one of the former series that the Graduate Institute managed with the publisher Palgrave. More information.