Emerging landscapes of private conservation: Enclosure and mediation in southern Chilean protected areas

The current boom of private conservation reveals a strong alignment between neoliberal processes of dispossession and environmentalism. Yet, private conservation can also serve as the setting for the development of critical environmental agendas raised by NGOs. Based on ethnographic research in the southern Chilean Andes, this article shows that dispossession and collaboration are intertwined features of private conservation. These two processes are engendered by changes affecting not only farmers' access to natural resources, but also their specific forms of engagement with landscape constitutive of senses of belonging. Property constitutes a compelling technology in the enforcement of wilderness enclosures and yet it can offer means for farmers to mediate between conservation and farming concerns. Attention to mediations and property exposes the ambivalences of private conservation under neoliberalism.