Forest governance and the politics of care: Practices, subjectivities and more‐than‐human‐relations in contemporary conservation regimes in Guaviare, Colombia

Abstract Market‐based conservation instruments such as REDD+ and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) have been promoted to curb deforestation in the Colombian Amazon. Yet these schemes remain contested, as they advance neoliberal conservation and reproduce gender inequalities. Although feminist scholarship has documented these problems, less attention has been paid to how market‐based conservation shapes the politics of care. We examine how, within Colombia's REDD+ strategy REM Visión Amazonía (VA), the PES Amazon Forestry Incentive enacts, organizes and recognizes forest care, and how this intersects with campesina (smallholder farmers) women's forest care practices in Guaviare. Drawing on feminist political ecology and care scholarship, we analyse the forest ontologies, care practices, environmental subjectivities and political projects sustained and obscured by VA. We rely on fieldwork combining semi‐structured interviews, document analysis and focus groups with programme staff and campesina women. Our findings show that VA enacts forests as discrete land units, made legible through carbon accounting and satellite monitoring and valued for their economic contributions. Care, in turn, becomes a contractual responsibility enacted through conservation agreements, financial incentives and monitoring systems, cultivating subjectivities aligned with economic rationalities and contract compliance. These framings reproduce structural gendered inequalities that value ‘productive’ work while rendering invisible the reproductive labour sustaining life and forested landscapes. In contrast, campesina women enact forests as a mosaic of life‐sustaining relations embedded in the finca (small farm). Through embodied, affective labour and sustained attentiveness to local ecologies, they practise forest care to secure campesino life across generations. These practices inform collective political projects such as La Guardiana del Chiribiquete , a grassroots initiative through which campesino communities contest institutional definitions of forest conservation and assert alternative caring subjectivities grounded in territorial permanence, self‐determination and intergenerational responsibility. An analytics of care highlights the multiplicity of relations that sustain forests and the exclusions through which some forms of care are recognized while others are not. Thereby, we contribute to debates on market‐based conservation by raising questions, beyond its economic logics, about the worlds and socio‐ecological relations nourished through forest governance arrangements. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.