Territorial sovereignty, environmental conservation and common-field communities in central Chile

Abstract

In the mountain chains of the Andes and the Coast in Central Chile, are located land communities, owners of collective property. This paper analyzes the role of community property as guarantor of the conservation of Mediterranean ecosystems, in light of the theory of the commons, Latin American political ecology and the proposals of the ontological turn. The reality of three field communities in the Valparaíso region is analyzed, based on ethnographic studies. Facing the threats that affect the communities - mining, monocultures, urbanization, - the common land as undivided and non-transferable territory constitutes the binding support of the relationship between communal farmers and their environment, expressed in their productive practices -principally livestock- as in novel practices of community conservation, which allow the exercise of sovereignty over the territory, as a form of environmental, social and cultural resistance.