2025/11/05 by Camilo Castillo Estupiñan · 2 voices
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · #Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management #Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond #Plant and soil sciences
paper · doi:10.2458/jpe.6424
openalex created_date 2025/11/05 · openalex publication_date 2025/11/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This paper examines the role of plants shaping the political ecology (PE) of the conservation of the Andean páramos in the Sumapaz Region in Colombia. Due to their rich biodiversity and role in the water cycle, páramos have gained a prominent importance in the conservation and environmental agenda of Colombia. However, despite the importance of plants in scientific and policy accounts of páramos, plants have been usually taken by scholars as secondary elements in the PE of páramos conservation. Based on an ethnographic work with geographers, biologists and campesino communities (small-holder famers), this article offers an empirical approach that highlights and attends to the importance of other-than-humans such as plants in the infrastructures that shape conservation. By analyzing how plants participate in organizing an herbarium, mapping a páramo and food cultivation, the article shows how following other-than-humans can offer a possibility for researchers to address the materiality and multiplicity that shapes the PE of conservation. As the article argues, those two elements contribute to a non-essentialist understanding of other-than-humans which is crucial to situate the stakes at play in politically contested ecologies. Regarding materiality, the article analyzes how plants are constituted in practice within the infrastructures that they contribute to shape, and that shape plants in turn. In the case of multiplicity, the article spells out the place of plants in sustaining situated ways of living and being in the world crucial to understand the political ecology of páramos conservation. In this way, the article contributes with an empirical study that nurtures and invites to develop further the current scholarship interested in the interrelated links between other-than-humans and infrastructures as central features in the PE of conservation.