Implications of environmental conservation policies in the relationship between the inhabitants of Guasca and their surroundings

Abstract

Within the agenda of some national governments, emphasis has been placed on the importance of combating climate change and protecting natural resources, which is why they have developed state policies that allow greater control over these resources and ensure their preservation and watch out. These policies have considered it viable that such protection can be encouraged through the economic investment of private actors (banks, NGO, environmental entities, among others). However, by inserting the conservation of natural resources in cost-benefit logic, it generates that dynamics of hoarding are developed where the people with greater purchasing power decide how and in what form these resources are used. By thinking of the local population as a predator that only draws resources from its surroundings, the historical relationship of this with nature, where sensory and material ele-ments have been created and strengthened, is unknown. The municipality of Guasca is not alien to these policies of environmental conservation and although they may be designed to protect nature, tend to ignore the people who for many years have lived with this (peasants and local people). It is also contradictory that those who develop these policies often pretend to give simultaneous uses to nature so they are opposed. In this way we can observe places in Guasca that are projected (by territorial entities, environmental corporations and private entities) for the conservation of water sources, fauna and flora simultaneously with mining- energy extractive projects. © 2017, Asociacion de Antropologos Iberoamericanos en Red. All rights reserved.