Confronting environmental conservation and social justice: the case of Páramo Santurbán

This study analyses the perspectives of the different stakeholders involved in the conflict around páramo Santurbán, a mountain complex in Colombia threat by a large-scale gold mining project. In a dialog with theories about hydrosocial territories, conservation and social justice, I address the increasing tensions between rural and urban communities due to the various and sometimes opposite ways of perceiving nature and conservation. As part of the analysis, I try to identify the kind of knowledge used by the different groups to understand how the diversity and complexity of the perceptions seem to make the tensions there unresolvable.