In the region of Ancash, Peru, rural farmers, NGO staff, state workers, and mine engineers all argue that environmental conciencia (consciousness) is crucial for protecting natural resources from pollution and overuse. However, they draw on different rationales of indigeneity, science, and economics to define what constitutes effective conservation and who has authority over nature. NGOs train rural farmers to be 2environmental promoters3 who monitor pollution and embrace ancestral (indigenous Andean) views of nature as they coordinate among mine companies, state authorities, and their fellow villagers. This dissertation argues that promoter training reflects an attempt to create environmental subjects—those who view the stewardship of nature as necessary for resource preservation (Agrawal 2005)—but that differently situated subjects decide to protect nature for different reasons. Through community-based stewardship, promoters and other actors draw from the multiple discourses of conciencia (indigenous, scientific, and economic) to dispute both state-sanctioned and private sector authority, articulating competing ideas of environmental management. This argument departs from previous analyses of decentralization and environmental governance that suggest community stewardship initiatives lead marginal resource users into deeper compliance with a singular, state-sanctioned logic. Further, existing scholarship on environmental subjectivity does not consider how other dimensions of subjectivity are engaged and reconstructed through processes cultivating environmental subjects. In Ancash, actors continuously re-situate themselves in different ways with respect to gender, ethnicity, scientific expertise, and economic incentives according to their own priorities. Some resource users (including rural indigenous women) have been less able to participate in debates over stewardship, but are symbolically central to indigenous constructions of it. In analyzing the context of competing discourses and multifaceted subjectivities involved in environmental stewardship, this dissertation advances a new scholarly approach to subjectivity and environmental governance that illuminates inequalities and explains how and why rural stewards participate in diverse, strategic, and sometimes ambivalent ways.
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