The unruly complexity of conservation arrangements with Mexican rural communities: Who really funds the game?

Abstract The influence of private financing on ecological conservation has grown in recent years, but little is known about the actual links between large-scale development projects, public-private contractual arrangements, and community-based conservation. We analyze the political economy of such links by considering a conservation area under management by a rural community involved in wind energy projects receiving environmental compensation. Our study was carried out in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, the most significant wind corridor in Latin America, where the Voluntary Conservation Areas (VCA) strategy was originated. We investigated the role of public-private conservation financing in developing wind energy projects in the area, with a critical approach to the neo-institutional theory of natural resources management. Our mixed field research methods combined ethnography, in-depth structured interviews, surveys, participant observation, and social cartography. We found that: 1) The neoliberal Mexican government has actively oriented community conservation towards a market compensation mechanism; 2) since this mechanism can be easily corrupted, it results in a mix of formal and informal rules that allegedly provides “sustainable and socially responsible” cooperation, but exploits and deepens the market and state failures to which rural poor are exposed; 3) the mechanism provides malicious incentives that allow transnational energy companies to continue to profit from degrading the environment, by combining this degradation with low-cost low-effective conservation of mountain and forest areas owned by rural and indigenous peoples.