Legal Sensitivities around the Right to Environment. An Ethnography of the Environmental Defenders of Casa Grande, Vizcarra and El Portillo, Jujuy

Abstract

This article is the result of my doctoral thesis, in which I set out to describe and analyze the uses, exercise, resignification, and how relationships between facts and the right to environment are woven from an ethnographic approach focused on the Group of Women Defenders of Habitat and Environment of Casa Grande, Vizcarra and El Portillo — hereinafter, the Environmental Defenders. To this end, I developed an analytical proposal based on the construction of two differentiated territorial scenarios: on the one hand, those scenarios currently crossed by extractive models; and on the other, territories that, although not yet intervened, are potentially crossed by extractive models. This classification, developed specifically for this research, allows us to capture the diversity of contexts through which the Environmental Defenders move.

In the province of Jujuy, in northwestern Argentina, disputes over the use and control of territory have intensified in recent decades parallel to the advance of various extractive projects, particularly related to lithium mining, agribusiness and real estate speculation (Pragier, et al, 2022; Esposito, 2024; Nuñez, et al, 2025). These activities have generated profound transformations in local ecosystems, as well as social and environmental conflicts that directly affect indigenous communities that have historically inhabited those territories. In this scenario, multiple forms of environmental defense have been deployed, articulating normative frameworks, territorial memories, community ties and daily care practices (ANDHES, 2022, FARN, 2019).

In the El Aguilar mountain range, among the most visible and active actors in these processes are the Environmental Defenders. Their participation in environmental defense is not limited to protest or public denunciation, but includes a wide range of daily, organizational and legal actions through which they reconfigure meanings and ways of exercising rights in relation to the territory. These situated practices, anchored in concrete experiences, frequently overflow traditional legal categories and demand more complex perspectives to be understood.

Within this framework, the thesis aimed to investigate how these women resignify, use and exercise rights related to environmental defense in contexts marked by unequal power relations. It starts from the assumption that conventional legal categories fail to capture the density of these experiences and that, therefore, it is necessary to approach local ways of naming, understanding and exercising the law, as expressed in their daily practices and in the conflict scenarios they face.

The research problem that guided the thesis focuses on the existing knowledge gaps regarding how rights are resignified, used, exercised, and how those relationships between facts and rights are woven from the ethnographic fieldwork observation of the group of Environmental Defender women, especially in scenarios crossed and potentially crossed by extractive models. Rather than starting from pre-established legal categories, the purpose is to identify the native categories that emerge around environmental defense as a situated exercise within the discipline of law, but anchored in the local experiences of the Environmental Defenders.

These native categories emerge from direct contact with environmental defense practices. Some find correspondence with legal categories, such as reparation and remediation. Control, on the other hand, is more linked to monitoring processes developed within the framework of the application of local regulations. For its part, caring for water refers to a broader interpretation, articulating a set of rights coming from different branches of law, as does the constitutionalization of extractivism.

In this work, the focus is on the women Environmental Defenders, recognizing their central role in daily environmental defense practices and in resistance processes against the persistence and advance of extraction. These women not only sustain life in their territories, but also build their own ways of understanding and exercising rights, from their place in the community and their relationship with the environment.

Although there are studies that address the effectiveness of the exercise of the right to environment (FARN, 2023; ANDHES, 2024), my research seeks to go beyond deductive or normative approaches. I am interested in exploring how, from the experiences and practices of the defenders in the territory, their own meanings about the law are constructed, removed from — or not necessarily coincident with — formal conceptions and practices and those of the legal field.

In this sense, the native categories that arise from the community practice of these women can coincide with, complement, or even challenge traditional legal categories, and it is precisely in that relationship that the understanding of environmental defense processes is enriched. This approach is particularly relevant in extractive contexts, where tensions between formal recognition of rights and their effective exercise become acute, and where Environmental Defenders develop their own ways of naming, understanding and defending their relationship with the environment.