Practising Nature: A Phenomenological Rethinking of Environmentality in Natural Protected Areas in Ecuador and Spain

Abstract

The literature on environmentality analyses how local people living in natural protected areas might come to care about, act in relation to, and think of their own actions in terms of environmental protection by becoming actively involved in conservation government and management. In this paper we contribute to a clearer, broader, and more nuanced understanding of the connection between different regulatory regimes and the formation of environmental subjects, using a phenomenological approach that places more emphasis on the agency of the people subjected to conservation. In particular, we examine how people living in three different natural protected areas in Ecuador and Spain negotiate, incorporate, and contest different regulatory frames of conservation; how, in this process, they end up creating and enacting new forms of practice that neither infringe nor fully comply with these regulations. With this analysis, our paper seeks to show that even if conservation makes the inhabitants of natural protected areas act and think differently, these people also have the capacity to manipulate these transformations via the creative use of different environmentalities and under the influence of their own interests, habits, affects, and situated forms of human-environment engagement.

Keywords

• conservation
• nature
• protected areas
• environmentality
• practice
• agency
• Spain
• Ecuador