Rural intersections: Resource marginalisation and the “non-Indian problem” in highland Ecuador

Abstract

This paper examines the combination, and mutual reinforcement over time, of political marginalisation and resource-related conflicts that have affected indigenous communities in Cotopaxi province, in the highlands of Ecuador – based on ethnographic fieldwork studying the relational dynamics of community organizing and indigenous political action. Over the course of the last century, national policies for agrarian change focused successively on ‘modernization,’ agrarian reform, and integration into globalized markets and systems of production. Indigenous populations have consistently been targeted by these policies – the existence of widespread poverty was often dubbed the ‘Indian problem’ by institutions of authority. However, government policies directed at this ‘problem’ have repeatedly recreated the very issues they outwardly sought to resolve: rural indigenous populations have been redefined (as peasants, then workers, or now ‘partners’ in national agricultural projects), but they have not been repositioned. The ‘problem’ can thus more accurately be located within the histories of dispossession and systemic politico-economic exclusion that both (i) support structures of inequality, and (ii) allow environmental and juridical injustices to persistently shape the contexts within which rural indigenous communities here, and elsewhere, are acting. Examining the ‘non-Indian problem’ in Ecuador, and the mechanisms behind social and environmental inequalities (Callewaert, 2002) more broadly, this research engages environmental injustice as a socio-historical process rather than the result of discrete events or as an ahistorical phenomenon (Pellow, 2000). In the community studied here – San Isidro – collective action challenges entrenched historical inequalities in access to land and water, and seeks to increase shared labour on common infrastructure, whilst also managing communal areas of páramo moorland. This research identifies links between place-based processes of development and coordinated efforts to defend rural livelihoods – with implications for policies of governance (land rights, water rights), and for the design of localised resource management.