Eduardo Romero Dianderas

I am interested in understanding how the governance of tropical rainforests is being transformed in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss. As the global environmental crisis leads governments, corporations and multilateral institutions to increase the availability of funds, technology transfers and policy changes to guarantee the survival of Amazonia as one of the largest biodiversity hotspots and carbon sequestration biomes in the world, I wonder about how the rapid transformation of the regimes of environmental governance in the region are changing the possibilities of human and nonhuman life in Amazonian environments.

If the late modern era centered political deliberation in the figure of the white urban subject and its authoritative forms of expert knowledge, my work asks what new forms of political governance, expert knowledge and democratic coexistence can be cultivated once we approach more-than-human life through the existential predicaments opened by our time of climate change and biodiversity loss. How can trees, rivers or wetlands become allies to think about environmental governance, economic development and democratic consensus in new ways?

If technical authority and expertise have been traditional cornerstones of modern bureaucratic rule, my scholarship aims to contribute to a large conversation that thinks in political terms about the everyday work of experts, bureaucrats and technical authorities. In particular, I want to understand mundane technical objects – lines drawn on maps, or timber volumetric calculations written down on paper – as abstract representations of the world that are not the sole creation of technical authorities, but that actually bring together a vast constellation of human and nonhuman actors in Amazonia. Further, I am interested in thinking about their existence politically, that is, as more than just neutral and objective representations of the world. I believe this mode of critique is fundamental for cultivating healthier and more sustainable relations between technical knowledge and democratic deliberation in today’s world.