Abstract

This book is for researchers, graduate students, and professionals who are interested in better understanding conservation-based development, and its complexities with relation to core and peripheral areas, neoliberalism, sustainable development, gov-ernance, and territorial transitions. This book documents the evolution of strategic initiatives to foster conservation-based development in the southern reaches of Argentina and Chile. It examines the approaches and challenges associated with contemporary conservation-based development, and offers strategies for building resilience and sustainability, contextualized through Patagonia’s varied and volatile circumstances of climate change, environmental and human health, and geographic periphery.The foundations of contemporary Patagonian social-ecological systems (SES) evolved during the nineteenth century, when Argentina and Chile emerged as inde-pendent states, with formal colonization and frontier expansion efforts that extended the length of the southern cone periphery, including claims to strategic points of control for the Strait of Magellan. Recent human settlement, emergent national development strategies, formal colonization, and frontier expansion efforts designed to exploit natural resource-rich territories have led to the manifestation of Patagonia as an ideal region for conservation-based development.This work applies an SES lens to conservation-based development in Patagonia, bringing together authors with historical, contemporary, and future-oriented per-spectives, to increase understanding of the social and environmental implications of nature-based tourism and other forms of conservation-based territorial develop-ment. By focusing on Patagonia (as a region) and its various forms of conservation-based development, this book contributes one of the first collections of peer-reviewed South American-based lessons and will be valuable to researchers and practitioners, both locally and around the world, seeking to better understand complex intercon-nections between social and ecological environments, and pursue a similar path to resilience and sustainability.