Abstract

This article examines the role of plants shaping the political ecology (PE) of the conservation of the Andean páramos in the Sumapaz Region in Colombia. Due to their rich biodiversity and role in the water cycle, páramos have gained major importance in the conservation agenda of Colombia. However, despite the importance of plants in scientific and policy accounts of páramos, plants have been usually taken by scholars as secondary elements in the PE of páramos conservation. Based on an ethnographic work with geographers, biologists and campesino communities (small-holder farmers), this article analyzes the material multiple becoming of plants as participants in conservation and their political effects through three practices: i) organizing herbarium collections, ii) mapping a páramo and iii) crop cultivation. It also discusses existing scholarship on the 'distinctive capacities' of plants and argues for the need to understand those capacities as they emerge in events where plants shape hierarchies, asymmetries and ways of living in conservation. In this way, the article contributes an empirical study that nurtures and invites us to develop further the current scholarship on the implications of other-than-human capacities in the PE of conservation.

Keywords: other-than-humans, páramos, conservation, plants, multiplicity, materiality, political ecology, science and technology studies, plantiness

How to Cite:

Castillo Estupiñan, C., (2025) “How plants participate in politically contested ecologies? Species, vegetation cover and crops in the conservation of the páramos in Colombia”, Journal of Political Ecology 33(1): 6424. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.6424