Community forest concessionaires: resisting green grabs and producing political subjects in Guatemala

Abstract

In 2005, Guatemalan community forest concessionaires achieved a remarkable legislative victory that reversed a green land grab in the Maya Biosphere. The fight over this space, the Mirador Basin, provides valuable contributions to analyses of global land grabs, grassroots politics and power relations underpinning environmental governance. First, the fight for the Mirador Basin illustrates how green land grabs create new natures, rather than simply enclosing existing green spaces. Second, it contributes to recent scholarship detailing land-grabbing practices of resistance, acquiescence and incorporation ‘from below’ by describing how Maya Biosphere community forest concessionaires were able to reverse a green grab. Lastly, I argue this successful reversal largely rests on the articulation and mobilization of a new rights-bearing subject – the forest concessionaire. Struggles for land in the Maya Biosphere illustrate that practices and relations of green governance do not always create disciplined, neo-liberal, green subjects. Rather, community forestry has provided a political platform turning reserve residents into influential actors participating in the re-territorialization of power in contemporary Guatemala.

Keywords:

• green land grabs
• community forestry
• Guatemala
• Maya Biosphere
• land dispossession

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Rosemary Joyce, Diana Ojeda, Paepin Goff and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on previous drafts, as well as Claire Sarraille and Paepin Goff for the maps. All errors in fact and interpretation are mine. Pseudonyms are used for people, but not places or organizations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 From 2000 to 2013, deforestation in the area of the reserve home to forest concessions was 0.4 percent, versus 1.0 percent in the national parks (Hodgdon et al. 2015). These deforestation rates, however, mask acute differences in deforestation rates between different parks. Lamentably, the two largest national parks in the west have suffered some of the highest rates of deforestation in the world since their creation, while others have close to zero deforestation (Hodgdon et al. 2015).

2 Flex-crops are crops that have ‘multiple uses (food, feed, fuel, industrial material),’ which proponents argue can be ‘flexibly interchanged’ in response to fluctuations in world demand and prices (Alonso-Fradejas, 2015, 490).

Additional information

Funding

Thank you to the Inter-American Foundation Grassroots Development Fellowship and the John L. Simpson Research Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley for funding this research.

Notes on contributors

Jennifer A. Devine

Jennifer A. Devine is an assistant professor of political geography at Texas State University. She is a specialist in the fields of Latin American politics, human-environmental change, and critical race, gender and feminist theories. She earned a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013. Her current research focuses on the environmental impacts of drug trafficking in northern Guatemala and community forestry as a strategy for improving regional security. She has also published articles in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Antipode and Latin American Research Review, and is currently co-editing a special edition of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.