Sustaining Life, Contesting Gender Frameworks: Care And Political Agency Among Indigenous Women In Socio-Environmental Projects In The Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

This article analyzes the tensions that emerge in the implementation of gender approaches in socio-environmental projects in the Peruvian Amazon through a critical systematization of the author’s professional experience as a gender specialist in a climate adaptation project carried out in the province of Atalaya, Ucayali, between 2023 and 2025. Drawing on a feminist situated anthropology perspective, it examines the costs and conditions of Indigenous women’s participation, the institutional fragility of gender approaches, disputes surrounding care, and the relevance of care for broader debates on just socio-ecological transitions. The findings show that, in certain contexts, gender approaches can be reduced to a logic of bureaucratic compliance that obscures the material and relational conditions sustaining participation. At the same time, they reveal that Indigenous women are not passive beneficiaries but active agents who negotiate, challenge, and resignify institutional frameworks through their own practices. The article argues that care is not an additional component of socio-environmental projects, but
a fundamental condition for sustaining life and advancing any horizon of just socio-environmental transformation.