Search for: All records

This article advances geographic scholarship about conservation and protected areas (PAs) through a focuson biocultural geographies. Biocultural geographies derive from relationships between heterogenousIndigenous stewardship practices, biological diversity, and trans-scalar multidimensional social, political, andecological processes. The concept brings together insights from political ecology and biocultural conservationto address the interplay between environmental governance, cultural change, and biodiversity. We drawfrom collaborative, transdisciplinary research with Siona, Siekopai, and Cofan Indigenous communities inthe northern Ecuadorian Amazon, a site of global importance for its biodiversity and cultural heritage. Thisis also a region of rapid and extensive social-ecological change driven by expanding agricultural frontiers,intensifying extractive industries, and new infrastructure development for regional integration. It is from thiscontext that we call for a timely and critical conversation between human–environment geographers and thefield of biocultural conservation, two approaches that have reshaped thinking about PAs and the role ofIndigenous stewardship in an era of accelerating global challenges to social-ecological well-being. Data forour analysis derive from a multiyear study that investigates strategies used to ensure social-ecological well-being in the face of change. Our findings show that Siona, Siekopai, and Cofan stewardship sustains thebiological diversity that characterizes many Amazonian PAs through locally adapted institutions based onknowledge, innovation, and practices they collectively hold. Such stewardship advances self-determinationthat challenges conventional conservation and PA models by centering Indigenous territorial governance.