Producing conservation territories Transforming páramos in Ecuador

During the last decades, Ecuador's páramo wetlands have become increasingly important sites for environmental governance. Historically, these humid, highly biodiverse Andean moorland ecosystems were seen as empty desolate and unproductive spaces, and later, between the 1960s and 1990s, as spaces for expanding the agricultural frontier of rural communities. Since the end of the 1990s, this changed as páramos came to be seen as important spaces for biodiversity and water conservation. Using the Foucauldian notion of governmentality we show, first, that a new “narrative” about these spaces leads to new state and non-state interventions that rearrange the socio-material relations in these ecosystems. Then we analyze how the “conservation narrative” has been translated to projects and programs that advance biodiversity conservation and the water regulating capacity of paramos. By analyzing the most important Ecuadorian paramo conservation initiatives of the last three decades, we show how this takes place through different techniques of government that aim to conduct-the-conduct of rural communities. The latter we argue, is a continuation of a centuries old pattern of governing marginalized rural populations to serve the interests of the ruling elite. Historically, this process created longstanding socio-environmental injustices that current initiatives are failing to address. The latter makes many of the conservation interventions fragile in the long run.