Assembling participatory Tambopata: Environmentality entrepreneurs and the political economy of nature

•Tambopata (southern Peruvian Amazon) was established after a participatory planning process•I aim to contribute to fill the gap in knowledge about how environmentality gradually takes possession of the state•The commanders of environmentality were the white and the whitened; the powerless needed brokers to be heard•Environmentality competes and fuses with other governmentalities giving form to modern state action•Institutional entrepreneurship is situated in human-ecological context•In particular, institutions and networks situate agency

This environmental history exposes the main role of the entrepreneurs of environmentality in the assembling of the political economy of nature. Environmentality studies have not told us much about the champions of the green state and how do they succeed in forging new discourses, technologies and practices of forest governance. Discovering nature, embedded in professional networks and economic interests, conditioned by historical contingency, a handful of institutional entrepreneurs collided and ended up building willful alliances to translate the rising global paradigm of participatory forest governance into a specific case. That the encounter of domestic and transnational groups of forest bureaucrats, tropical biologists, nature enthusiasts, eco-tourism entrepreneurs, activist anthropologists and grassroots leaders produced a participatory protected area, friendly towards indigenous peoples rights and forest-based economic development, can only be fully understood when looking at agency in its specific human-ecological context. At Tambopata, nature, economic development and indigeneity, and the governmentalities associated to them, ended up redefined within the process.