Forest Bureaucrats in the Peruvian Amazon

Forest bureaucrats in the implementation of Payment for Ecosystem Services Schemes in Amazonian indigenous communities

In this seminar, I will present the empirical findings of an ethnographic research on forest bureaucrats implementing a payment for ecosystem scheme in Amazonian indigenous communities of Peru.  I explore how forest bureaucrats shape and adapt official state goals and rules on forest conservation to enact environmental statehood. The results suggest that forest bureaucrats use discretion to explain a PES scheme in their own terms, adapting, interpreting and ignoring formal regulation, promoting non-rentable off farm activities and organising capacity building events outside the conservation field. The overall effort of forest bureaucrats relegates environmental statehood to favour the bureaucratisation of communities, which coincides with ongoing state formation ideals of being reordered in terms of an audit culture. In these scenarios, the logic of PES schemes of conservation as trade for economic incentives and the promotion of behavioural land use change become secondary concerns in the daily practice of a PES within indigenous communities.