Layered Environmental Governance: Co-producing forest conservation in indigenous and community contexts in Oaxaca, Mexico

Join our session with Esther Perez Macias, from the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Mexico City.

Abstract

My project examines how forest conservation and their participation in the production of public environmental goods is organized in indigenous and community contexts in Oaxaca, Mexico, where implementation does not follow a state-led model but instead emerges from territorially embedded institutions such as assemblies, collective labor (tequio), and customary authority structures. What I find is that global environmental instruments, including voluntary carbon markets directed by international climate compensation mechanism like REDD+, do not organize action in these settings but rather attach to existing systems of governance. This creates a layered form of environmental governance in which local knowledge, market standards, and fragmented forms of state presence interact in ways that are not fully captured by current theories of policy implementation, the most approach is co-production theory.

Rather than presenting this as a closed argument, I would be particularly interested in using the session as a space for dialogue around a few broader questions: how to conceptualize the relationship between local knowledge and global expertise, how to understand markets when they function as governance devices rather than policy tools, and how to rethink implementation in contexts where coordination does not originate from the state.

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