Abstract
Beneath the glacier-cloaked summits of Peru's Cordillera Huayhuash, resilient communities have long endured and enjoyed the austerity of the Andean highlands. Currently, however, the physical and cultural landscapes of the Huayhuash are undergoing a rapid transformation driven by powerful forces ranging from shifting climate regimes to the advent of the global economy through adventure tourism, conservation, and mining. These latter changes offer promise for improved quality of life while leading to intense conflicts over natural resource management and competing visions of the future. In 2001 the Peruvian government mandated the Cordillera Huayhuash Reserved Zone with a focus on conserving freshwater resources. Local attempts to create Private Conservation Areas (PCAs), with a particular emphasis on developing alternative incomes through tourism, have been enabled through recently legislated legal instruments. Four individual comunidades campesinas have self-financed the development of PCAs and the community-led efforts are now officially recognized by the Peruvian government. These local conservation efforts directly overlap the national conservation effort creating an unprecedented legal situation in Peru. Yet with a lack of financial and technical resources these local efforts are struggling for viability and sustainability as they face the conflicts inherent in their negotiations with the mining industry and pressures from the foreign-financed national conservation effort. I will present a historical and spatial analysis of how this situation developed and some preliminary results on conflicting perceptions of conservation in the Cordillera Huayhuash.