A Political Ecology of Secondary Forest Degradation

Indigenous territories in the Peruvian Amazon have long been celebrated for their role in forest conservation — and rightly so. Yet the communities within them face mounting livelihood pressures: territorial fragmentation, resource enclosure, and ecological decline that threaten their ability to sustain themselves from the land. At the center of these pressures is the degradation of swidden-fallow agriculture, a rotational system in which short cultivation periods alternate with long fallow cycles that allow secondary forests to regenerate. Growing evidence shows these fallow cycles are shortening across the region, with serious consequences for both forest ecosystems and Indigenous food security. This dissertation proposes to reframe that degradation not as a local management failure, but as the outcome of broader political-economic processes — enabled by the fragility of Indigenous territorial rights — that erode the conditions under which sustainable land management is possible.

My doctoral research project pursues three interconnected objectives: mapping the spatial extent and patterns of secondary forest degradation across Indigenous territories in the Peruvian Amazon; tracing the political-economic mechanisms that link territorial governance and land control regimes to landscape-level change; and documenting how Indigenous families are experiencing and adapting to the erosion of fallow-based livelihoods and land management systems. Together, these objectives ask a central question: how do the structural vulnerabilities of Indigenous territorial rights shape the degradation of the very forest landscapes Indigenous communities have long sustained?