Perry Maddox

PERRY MADDOX, then a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, was awarded a grant in October 2022 to aid research on “Swidden Futures: Indigenous/Campesino Practice and Climate Politics in Panama and the UN,” supervised by Dr. Naveeda Khan. After decades of advocacy, the Local Communities and Indigenous People’s Platform (LCIPP) was successfully passed in the 2019 UN climate negotiations, acknowledging Indigenous peoples as holders of “traditional knowledge” which must inform climate solutions. However, what constitutes such knowledge and how it is to shape climate policy remain contested. This project traces the efforts of Indigenous Ngäbe, Buglé, and campesino people from western Panama, who have reclaimed and reforested lands devastated by cattle ranching, to position their experiences of rehabitation as useful knowledge for climate policy. In particular, it examines: 1) the political and agroecological work by which these lands were transformed from ranch to swidden and forest, and are maintained against threats of dispossession; 2), the onset of climate change and climate policy as they are refracted through practices of rehabitation; and 3) the engagement of Indigenous/campesino people with international climate governance, to draw attention to the ongoing labor that makes liveable landscapes. While the project explores how Indigeneity is mobilized within climate politics, it also centers Indigenous practices of rehabitation as a vital mode of knowledge production for life with climate change, ultimately asking what re-habitation’s encounter with climate policy makes visible about dominant conceptions of human-ecological relations.