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Conservation through Parcellation: A Geographic Account of How Cabécar Communities Stopped an Arc of Deforestation in the Costa Rican Talamanca
Tappan, Taylor
Tappan, Taylor
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Abstract
Latin America’s indigenous territories contain nearly one-third of the region’s carbon stored in tropical forests. Yet these forests are under threat. In recent decades indigenous peoples have mobilized to demand formal land rights in response to the aggressive expansion of logging, mining, agricultural colonization, and cattle ranching onto their ancestral territories. Their coordinated activism has prompted governments, often supported by multilateral development agencies such as the World Bank, to title vast areas of land in Central America and the Amazon basin to indigenous communities. Geographers have begun to assess whether the titling of indigenous territories is an effective policy strategy for curbing tropical deforestation. However, few studies describe how land use and land tenure practices exist beneath the umbrella of titled indigenous territorial jurisdictions (ITJs) or how these practices correlate to forest cover outcomes. This dissertation combines archival research, a multitemporal land use/land cover (LULC) change study, and a subsistence parcel-scale land tenure survey conducted during 2018-2019 fieldwork in Chirripó Reserve—the largest indigenous territory in Costa Rica—to understand whether a home-spun system of parceling and privatizing lands along the reserve’s western boundary has effectively stabilized the colonization front since its establishment in 1976. The findings of my research illustrate how indigenous Cabécar communities have implemented their own cadastral-based property regime to allocate land inside Chirripó and, in turn, stopped an arc of deforestation along the agricultural colonization front.
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2022-12-31
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University of Kansas
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Geography, Cabecar, conservation, Costa Rica, forest, indigenous, land tenure