Drones in the forest: Space, technology and neoliberalisation in Colombia’s contested conservation areas

Keywords: Drones, Forest, Neoliberalism, Feminism, Colombia
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 44

Abstract

Drones are taking on a new and important role as a monitoring technology in community-led forest conservation, as well as a pre-emptive technology for detecting potential timber-cutters and poachers in global conservation. This makes the technology a focus for political geographers and political ecologists for the same technologies can be used to surveil and police rural communities, even if that is not their design purpose (Millner, 2020; Adams, 2019). As in new spaces of war, drones may also create a feeling of fear or geography of control by engaging height and the volume of space – what some geographers refer to as a politics of verticality. On the other hand, they may be reclaimed for new kinds of activist witnessing, as in the protests at Standing Rock (Kaplan, 2020) or by Indigenous communities to protest the wrongs of private actors – a potential we characterise as “feminist drone”.

We draw on interviews with actors working with drones in conservation ecology, coca eradication, community monitoring and the military in Colombia to explore the place of this technology in a country in ongoing conflict. Through our data, we argue that drones in Colombia are being increasingly a) used by lone scientific actors, without the involvement of local communities, or b) outsourced to skilled private companies, without the ethos of working closely with rural communities. Unlike the examples of “feminist drone”, which have led to resistance and empowerment, in Colombia, this “neoliberal drone” infrastructure has reiteratively strengthened the conflict situation and vice versa.