PhD Dissertation Defense: Johan Arango-Quiroga
Date/Time: Wed, July 15th, 2026 at 9:00 am (ET)
Location: Zoom (for Zoom access, RSVP here)
Title: “Resisting, Building, Envisioning: Community-Led Conservation, Rights of Nature, and Biodiversity Futures”
Abstract:
Despite significant growth in biodiversity policy and scholarship, community-led conservation is rarely examined from the standpoint of those who build it. This dissertation takes the knowledge, experience, and agency of Indigenous Peoples, afro-descended communities, and campesinos as its analytical starting point, proceeding from the empirical premise that understanding community-led conservation requires centering those who practice it. The analysis unfolds across two levels of inquiry: 1. a systematic examination of how scholarship documents participation and experience in community-led conservation and 2. a grounded case study of how residents of Junín and Chalguayacu Alto in Ecuador’s Intag Valley have sustained three decades of mining resistance while simultaneously constructing conservation in the same territory.
The dissertation is organized into four chapters. Chapter 1 applies meta-ethnographic analysis to 68 peer-reviewed case studies, examining whose perspectives are captured in community-led conservation scholarship and which strategies are documented alongside them. Chapter 2 draws on 612 quotations across those same cases to analyze how community members experience implementation, identifying four themes: 1. the collective practices through which communities exercise agency and build conservation under conditions designed to constrain them, including dismantling internalized oppression, constructing local knowledge monitoring systems, and advancing policy advocacy and coalition building; 2. navigating power differentials with external actors; 3. a spectrum of structural constraints ranging from dispossession to tokenistic consultation; and 4. the appropriation of Indigenous and local concepts by external interventions.
Chapter 3 draws on the Legal Distributional Analysis framework to map the competing legal tracks through which communities and the state have contested the Intag Valley territory. The 2023 annulment of CODELCO’s (Corporación Nacional del Cobre de Chile) environmental license, upheld by the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court in 2024 and followed by the company’s withdrawal from the territory in 2025, is examined as the product of three decades of collective action that transformed community territorial knowledge into legally admissible evidence. The chapter maps rights of nature as politically contingent resources whose enforceability depends on the organizational capacity communities assemble to deploy them, and closes by imagining how differently arranged legal terrain could shift what conservation-advancing communities can claim and build.
Chapter 4 draws on 26 interviews and six participant-generated photostories to examine what conservation-aligned participants in Junín and Chalguayacu Alto envision for the future. Their vision centers territory as an integrated life system, organizes livelihoods around Buen Vivir and community wellbeing, and draws on grief over what conflict has cost, pride in what communities have defended, and counternarratives that insist on being known on their own terms as the forces that sustain the capacity to keep building. Reading these findings through a restorative justice lens yields the chapter’s central contribution: in contexts of protracted extractive conflict, social repair is conservation work, and the Sanctuary of Life model emerging from Intag offers a replicable template for community-governed conservation grounded in intergenerational obligation and territorial practice.
Taken together, the four chapters demonstrate that centering the knowledge, agency, and practice of those building community-led conservation carries both analytical and practical consequences: what communities know, what they have built, and what they envision are indispensable starting points for understanding what conservation requires and who its primary architects are.
Committee Members:
Prof. Laura Kuhl, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University (Chair)
Prof. Dan Danielsen, School of Law, Northeastern University
Prof. Gabriela Garcia, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University