Indigenous and Peasants Lands Under the Spotlight—A State Forest Policy in the Gran Chaco, Argentina

Abstract

This chapter analyzes national forestry policy focused on peasants and indigenous peoples who inhabit the Gran Chaco, Argentina, whose lands and life systems have been affected by deforestation, the expansion of the livestock farming model, and what some authors call “world land fever.” The forestry policy under analysis is the Native and Community Forestry Project (2015–2020), managed by the Undersecretariat of Planning and the Environment and Sustainable Development Secretariat in close collaboration with the Forestry Department. The main purpose of this work is to highlight how and in which ways the “strengthening of land tenure” is taken as a pivotal objective of the forestry policy, which are some of the procedures (accreditation, minutes, administrative records, guarantees, etc.), and State regulation methods brought into play from the perspective of officers and project technicians. In the framework of “strengthening,” the project implemented an organization of the legal land registry of the territories together with a series of State provincial agencies. It is important to point out the contradictions and tensions that arose during the policy implementation, in relation to the importance acquired by some of the procedures and requirements deployed by state agencies in order to endorse the project [Research for this chapter took place within the UBACyT Research Project (20020170100457BA) “Practical articulations of different political-administrative levels of organization: social relationships and political processes” (2018–2021), and within the framework of the FILOCyT Program (FC19-015) “Public policy, territorialities and technological devices: a comparative anthropological analysis of social processes of production, demarcation and spatial representation in Argentina” (2018–2021)].