Adaptation sovereignty: situated responses to environmental change

This paper investigates Indigenous illegal artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) and its motivations in Madre de Dios, Peru, through the lens of resource sovereignty and adaptation. It proposes and applies a new framework of adaptation sovereignty to examine responses to socio-environmental change — in this case, change caused by ASGM on Indigenous territories conducted by external, non-Indigenous miners. This study addresses a critical gap in the literature regarding Indigenous communities who experience external ASGM on their lands while engaging in the same activity. The authors draw on semi-structured interviews, informal discussions, participant observation, and observations of mining activities in three Indigenous communities to illustrate how Indigenous community ASGM emerges as a strategy rooted in self-determination and territorial presence, enabling communities to remain on their lands despite disruptions to traditional livelihoods caused by external ASGM. It argues that ASGM functions as both a survival strategy and an enactment of territorial belonging and authority under constrained and contested conditions. This paper responds to calls for a better understanding of the motivations underlying illegal ASGM in the Amazon rainforest. It introduces adaptation sovereignty as a conceptual framework that centres sovereignty while making analytically visible contradictions of adaptation, including the tension between ASGM as a means of maintaining community presence and its role in degrading the ecological conditions that support that presence. The paper further examines community aspirations for a better future and analyses how external interventions and conceptions of Indigeneity shape the possibilities, limits, and repercussions of adaptation sovereignty.