The post-political ecology of protected areas: nature, social justice and political conflicts in the Galápagos Islands

Abstract

The aim of this article is to reflect upon the motivations and the outcomes of the socio-political conflicts which attempted to challenge the rationality of conservation in the Galápagos Islands, in light of recent inquiries into the post-political condition. Protected areas, we argue, are paradigmatic examples of post-political spaces where universal moral imperatives and the overwhelming role of scientific knowledge reduce the possibility for disagreement, and make traditional political means useless. In order to sustain this argument, we discuss the idea of a post-political condition in relation to the debates about biodiversity, social justice and the political ecology of protected areas in the Global South. We will see how the alliance between conservation science, the State and the tourism industry strongly influenced the territorialisation of the Galápagos Islands and what the political implications are. Such alliances became the object of violent confrontations during the 1990s, which favoured the adoption of reforms inspired by the principles of sustainability and environmental governance. The idea of a post-political condition, in our opinion, can help to understand the outcome of these conflicts and, more generally, the difficulties in reconciling environmentalism with social justice in protected areas.