This project aims to quantitatively explore the role of Indigenous Peoples in defending their territories in the face of rapidly expanding commodity and extractive frontiers. This will be done by: (1) assessing emerging threats to Indigenous land-based stewardship across scales, as well as the factors shaping success in Indigenous Peoples’ resistance movements against commodity and extractive-driven development, and (2) uncovering the potentialities and pre-figurative politics of a growing global discourse around Indigenous land-based stewardship.
With a strong focus on the geospatial analysis of the stewardship contributions of Indigenous Peoples, the project aspires to upscale case-specific insights and create global knowledge that can unveil general patterns and dynamics in the social-ecological realities of Indigenous Peoples, while embracing contextual complexities through the use of ethnographically-grounded data. In order to promote the scalability of place-based ethnobiological evidence, and connect local realities to global environmental decision-making contexts, the project will apply: (i) cross-scale, multi-site research design (aggregating data from different field sites); and (ii) cutting-edge methodological developments in geospatial analysis (e.g., counterfactual analyses, matching methods).
This project is embedded within the Ramón y Cajal research fellowship of Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of the Spanish Government (RYC2021-034198-I).
January 2023 – December 2027