One and three forests: Understanding institutional diversity in Amazonian protected areas

Abstract

We offer an ethnographic account of how forest conservation is diversely assembled at the contiguous Tambopata National Reserve and Bahuaja Sonene National Park, biodiversity hotspots in the southern Peruvian Amazon. In so doing, and revising Elinor Ostrom and collaborators' Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework, we put together a theory framework of forest institutional change, informed by assemblage perspectives. Given the context of high world society interest in the Amazon and low spatial reach of the Peruvian state, charismatic wildlife watching and scientific investigation, Brazil nuts harvest, and gold mining shape the customizing of conservation assemblages. Institutional change is the result of how Peruvian State and diverse local groups adapt, resist and reconfigure through the ongoing practices of assemblage, which are pulled by conservation and commodification forces. Responding to the IAD framework, we propose institutional diversity fundamentally means that practices of assemblage are neither uniform, nor static.