Rethinking Landscape Conservation: Linking Globalized Agriculture to Changes to Indigenous Community-Managed Landscapes

Abstract

Community-managed landscapes have valuable conservation potential. In particular, indigenous community management has slowed deforestation. However, globalized agriculture is an underlying driver of changes to indigenous community-managed landscapes. Our objective is to explain a hypothesized global-to-local causal pathway that stems from processes of globalized agriculture and changes to indigenous community-managed landscapes. The global-to-local pathway involves a nested hierarchy of political–economic processes, specifically land and natural resource privatization, commodification, and acquisition. At the local landscape level, we focus on changes to land tenure, livelihoods, land use, and land cover. Changes to land tenure involve a shift away from community and toward individual ownership and management. Concurrently, livelihoods shift away from subsistence and toward market-oriented activities. Subsequently, land use shifts away from small-scale extensive and toward large-scale intensive crop cultivation, away from diverse crop cultivation and toward monocropping, and away from crop toward livestock farming. Ultimately, land cover shifts away from diverse agro-forested and toward homogeneous deforested lands. We illustrate our approach using ejidos, a type of community-managed lands, in Yucatán, México as an exploratory example. We use descriptive statistics to initially assess the shift in ejido land tenure, from community to individually parcelized systems, and the shift in a principal subsistence livelihood and land use activity, from maize cultivation to cattle rearing. We highlight that individually parceled areas within ejidos are more deforested than community-managed areas. In all, we urge landscape conservation scientists to more fully consider not just local actions but also impacts stemming from globalized agriculture and to advance the breadth and depth of more extensive studies and analyses.