By Juliana Robles de la Pava

The notion of Critical Conservation urges us to be suspicious of any stable equivalence and compels us to inhabit contradictions rather than resolve them. In his well-known essay Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Bruno Latour proposes a reorientation of critical thought: not toward dismantling what is taken as given or self-evident, but toward engaging with what truly matters, those networks of people, instruments, practices and institutions that affect both humans and other-than-human beings on this planet.

If, in its Latin etymology, conservation implies keeping intact, safeguarding, saving, or even monitoring, its critical inflection seems to demand something else from us. Rather than committing to preservation as maintenance, it asks us to allow ourselves to be affected by those matters of concern that communities collectively decide to care for (including what they recognize as vulnerable to loss, transformation, or even deliberate decay, acknowledging that care may at times mean letting go).This shift does not involve only communal memories, but also ways of doing, gestures, values, forms of knowledge, and all that is deemed worthy of care and decay because it calls human beings to respond and to cultivate capacities. In this sense, Critical Conservation is a mode of practice that stretches the very idea of conservation toward all those enactments through which care is performed and sustained.

Conservation, in both its theoretical formulation and practical implementation, has been fundamentally structured by modern Western ontological and epistemological assumptions. Whether framed as a technical science or as a discipline grounded in the historical and aesthetic criteria of the humanities, it has reproduced a regime of knowledge sustained by singular, self-authorizing principles that claim universality. In doing so, it has naturalized a particular understanding of being, value, permanence, and material integrity as if these were neutral and globally applicable.

A critical view of conservation argues that such foundations are neither universal nor sufficient. If we instead attend to multiplicity (to entropy understood as transformation and ongoing change rather than as mere degradation) the very ground of conservation shifts. Entropy, in this sense, disrupts any univocal principle of preservation and compels us to recognize conservation as inherently plural, contingent, and situated.

Critical Conservation emerges precisely from this disruption. It is not an extension of conventional preservation paradigms, but a reorientation that takes seriously the variable practices and modes of existence of communities, as well as the dynamic relations that constitute broader ecological networks. Because these relations are always in flux, conservation cannot be premised on stability alone; it must be responsive to variability, relationality, and transformation.

Accordingly, Critical Conservation must actively displace the assumptions about being and knowing that Western modernity has institutionalized. It must undertake a sustained engagement with decolonizing practices and discourses, understood, following Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, as processes that unsettle dominant epistemologies and open space for plural, situated, and insurgent forms of knowledge. This is not a supplementary gesture, but a structural reconfiguration of what conservation is, whom it serves, and how it is practiced.
From my perspective, the step that can initiate a movement of decolonization in conservation consists in transforming the very nature of what has been considered conservable in the West. The issue is not merely methodological or institutional; it is ontological. What must be displaced is the underlying assumption about what “nature” is, and therefore about what conservation is understood to sustain, reproduce, and stabilize as a field of intervention.

The theoretical tool for this displacement can be found in the Amerindian notion of multinaturalism, rooted in Amazonian ethnography and elaborated by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Rather than situating Critical Conservation within the framework of multiculturalism –where different cultures are assumed to offer distinct interpretations of a single, shared nature (of objects, practices, species, etc.)– I propose a more radical gesture in relation to our contemporary matters of concern: engaging conservation with diverse modes of enacting and inhabiting the planet, with heterogeneous ways of composing worlds rather than merely representing one.

Multinaturalism does not posit a plurality of cultural perspectives on a stable ontological background. Instead, it refers to what Viveiros de Castro calls “immediately relational multiplicities.” This formulation rejects the assumption of things-in-themselves endowed with intrinsic stability, waiting to be apprehended through different classificatory regimes. What exists, rather, are relational configurations that do not presuppose a single foundational ground.

Through this lens, the category of “nature” becomes profoundly destabilized. If there is not one nature diversified by culture, but multiple natures constituted through distinct relational worlds, then the idea of a univocal conservation becomes conceptually unproductive. Conservation can no longer be oriented toward managing a universal domain called nature (or culture) as if these were coherent, pre-given spheres. It must instead grapple with ontological multiplicity as the very condition of its practice. In this sense, multinaturalism can propel us to think of conservation as multiplicity. It invites us to transform our understanding of conservation through sustained dialogue (and even complicity) with Amazonian cosmologies. Such complicity implies more than inclusion or consultation; it entails allowing those cosmologies to unsettle and reconfigure the conceptual architecture of conservation itself. Only through this ontological reorientation can conservation begin to operate as a genuinely decolonial project.

If conservation is understood as engagement with ontological multiplicity rather than as the management of a stable domain, then its methods, evaluative criteria, and institutional procedures must be fundamentally reconfigured. Conservation decisions can no longer rest solely on material integrity or historical authenticity as self-evident standards. They must emerge through negotiation across relational worlds in which different modes of existence articulate distinct forms of value. In such a framework, criteria are not applied; they are co-articulated.

The question of who practices conservation is likewise transformed. The conservator can no longer occupy the position of sole epistemic authority. Expertise becomes distributed, situated, and relational. Communities are not “stakeholders” to be consulted within a pre-existing framework; they are co-theorists of what conservation is and what it does. Conservation thus shifts from resisting change toward accompanying transformation. Entropy, in this sense, becomes something to interpret, navigate, and work with, rather than a force to be simply counteracted.

Within this orientation, communities of practice are not peripheral contributors but generative sites where conservation is continually redefined. Learning does not occur through the extraction or incorporation of knowledge into an unchanged disciplinary structure. It unfolds through sustained collaboration that reshapes the very categories, assumptions, and temporalities through which conservation operates.

From my perspective, this is how critical engagement with conservation becomes possible: by displacing what the commons has normalized as self-evident and opening space for the uncommoning of conservation through multinatural worlds.