The Maya Forest Waterlands Shared Conservation, Entangled Politics, and Fluid Borders

About this book

This book examines the entanglements and blurred edges of nature conservation and geopolitical relations in the borderlands of the trinational Maya Forest.

Maya Forest is an umbrella term for transboundary conservation developed by scientists and conservationists in the 1990s to protect the threatened rainforest in the borderlands of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. Currently, the Maya Forest is a biodiversity hotspot composed of a network of protected areas and heritage sites. However, issues related to water, land, and forests have often been treated as separate political units, and not as part of the same history. Written by two authors with decades of hands-on experience in this region, this book sheds light on the complex dynamics by which conservation and natural resource management geopolitically shape borderlands such as the Maya Forest. The book introduces the novel concept of forest waterlands as borderlands and fluid edges, which are now subject to concern by conservationists. These are entangled spaces in which conservation, peoples, and politics interact, connect, and disconnect with the nexus of waters, forests, and lands. The book sheds light on the building and mapping of the Maya Forest ecoregion, with particular attention to water as an often neglected, but unifying element. It showcases how the Maya Forest is a distinct region characterised by transformations entangled with the Maya, trails of biological stations, the shared history of chicleros (chewing-gum hunters), fluid international rivers and transboundary basins, and various geopolitical discrepancies. It offers a contemporary glimpse into the Maya Forest's intertwined bio- and geopolitics, which urge us to rethink borders and boundaries.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of nature conservation, global environmental politics, geopolitics, borderlands, international relations, and natural resource management.

Contents

Introduction

1. From Borderlands to Forest Waterlands
2. Borderlands, the Maya, and the Building of the Maya Forest
3. Rethinking Transboundarities: Connectivities of Water and Conservation in the Maya Forest Waterlands
4. Maya Forest Waterlands as Waterless Transboundary River Basins for their Inhabitants
5. Political Trails in the Maya Forest: Go-betweens, Curating, and Places-in-knots in Three Biological Stations

Afterword: The Maya Forest Waterlands, or there and back again

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Biography

Hanna Laako is a senior researcher at the University of Eastern Finland (UEF). She worked as a researcher in southern Mexico for ten years and currently leads a research project on Political Forests – the Maya Forest – financed by the Mexican Council of Science and Technology CONACYT, and the Finnish Kone Foundation. She holds a PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Edith Kauffer is a senior researcher at CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social) in Mexico. She is the former coordinator of the researchers' water network on the border between Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize (RISAF) (2003-2016) and the co-coordinator of the Comparative Research on Regional Integration and Social Cohesion Consortium (RISC) working group on Management of Strategic Resources, Environment and Society. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Aix-Marseille University, France.