Remaking the Amazon? The Emergence of Transterritorial Spaces of Governmentality
2026-07-17
Since the Paris Agreement, the Amazon has been reimagined not merely as a sovereign territory but as a critical “body” of planetary physiology. This Forum article argues that this shift represents the emergence of the Amazon as a “transterritorial space”—a zone governed by transnational flows of capital, data, and carbon metrics that override local knowledge, modes of life, and conflicts. Drawing on the work of political scientist Edson Passetti and Caribbean scholar Katherine McKittrick, I analyze how the region and its environments are being governmentalized. I propose that current climate governance functions as a rationality that reduces the Amazon to a monoculture of carbon sequestration for the benefit of global elites and capitalist mechanisms in the North and the South. As evidenced by the outcomes of the thirtieth Conference of the Parties, the danger lies in the preservation of structures crucial for the continuity of fossil fuel exploration and the proliferation of market-oriented mechanisms. These mechanisms frequently ignore urgent scientific alerts regarding deforestation, while local knowledge is legitimized only when forced to fit within the dominant rationalities underpinning global climate governance.