‘Las mujeres son las guardianas de la Pachamama”: Contesting climate change adaptation expertise through Indigenous women’s environmental politics in Peru

Abstract:

In Peru, Indigenous women have pushed discussions of Indigenous life worlds, cosmovisions, and relationship with land to the forefront of national climate change adaptation planning processes. Indeed, Peru is undergoing an active moment for critical studies of climate change expertise, having recently approved a National Adaptation Plan, elected an anti-extraction president, and re-written its National Climate Change Strategy. Indigenous women have harnessed this critical juncture to re-orient a national adaptation planning process that was previously focused on disaster risk reduction, as framed by Western science and climate research. Drawing from Picq’s (2018) ‘vernacular sovereignties,’ I argue that Indigenous women’s leadership and political imagination in national level climate change adaptation forums in Peru has driven a shift towards expertise by and within marginalized communities, thereby contesting the rigid boundary between the roles of technocratic experts and traditional knowledge bearers in climate change adaptation planning. Based on an analysis of Indigenous women leaders’ speeches, national interviews, writing, policy briefs, and organizing strategies, this study asks how Indigenous women push for public policies that would position Indigenous people, and especially Indigenous women, as experts and national leaders at the forefront of adaptation planning. This study finds that that Indigenous women in Peru resist exclusion from the state and blanket characterizations of vulnerability in order to claim expertise over their own lives, territories, and life worlds, thereby opening space not just for Indigenous women’s leadership, but also for other marginalized groups and ‘non-scientists’ to make claims to and exercise climate change expertise.

Keywords: climate change adaptation, Indigenous studies, gender, expertise, climate governance

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