How to Make Friends with Jaguars: From Market-Based Collusion to Chasing Conviviality in Big Cat Conservation

Abstract

Jaguars are one of Mexico’s most iconic species. They are ecologically crucial and charismatic animals that inform conservation strategies. This thesis examines jaguar conservation programmes in Southern Mexico, the region with the best-preserved American tropical forest north of the Amazon and home to the largest jaguar population in the country. Drawing on fieldwork in Laguna Om, a rural community near the border with Belize, it employs a political ecology analysis to show how jaguar conservation is complicit with the deleterious capitalist economy, responsible for the decline of the species. It demonstrates how market-based instruments and other instances of what scholars term ‘neoliberal conservation’ facilitate harmful infrastructural expansion, exacerbate capitalist value capture, and advance dispossession to the detriment of big cats, tropical forests, and local people. This research closely follows calls for decolonising conservation practice and points towards potential elements for a post-capitalist vision. Building on proposals for ‘convivial conservation’ and other alternatives to market-oriented schemes, it promotes non-commodified coexistence between humans and non-humans. This monograph dissects the ties of jaguar conservation with a destructive form of development and investigates why people in Laguna Om care about protecting more-than-human nature. In doing so, it explores possibilities for detaching conservation from the growth-driven economy and redirecting it towards a convivial future for people and big cats.