Conservation without Community: Tourism, Extractivism, and Territorial Conflict in the Jaaukanigás Wetland

Abstract

This article analyzes the territorial tensions that emerge around the Jaaukanigás wetland, in northeastern Santa Fe Province, Argentina, stemming from the promotion of ecotourism as an environmental conservation strategy. Drawing on a political ecology and critical geography approach, and based on fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025 that included interviews and participant observation, this study examines the discourses, actors, and infrastructures that reconfigure access to, use of, and control over this hydro social territory. Although ecotourism is presented as a sustainable alternative, in practice it reproduces extractive and exclusionary logics that render invisible and/or criminalize traditional territorial uses—such as artisanal fishing, gathering, small-scale livestock raising, and agroecology— sustained by Indigenous, peasant, and fishing communities. Rather than conserving with and from the communities, public policies and private venture tend to aestheticize the landscape and folklorize its inhabitants, thereby reinforcing processes of territorial dispossession. In response, this work identifies local organizing strategies that challenge these models and propose alternative ways of inhabiting and caring for the wetland, grounded in knowledge, memories, and practices rooted in social and productive history of the region.