Image: Illustration of the Plan de Vida, reproduced with permission by local artist Angélica Ramírez

What happens when the protection of nature becomes a justification for dispossessing the people who have lived with, cultivated and cared for it for centuries? And what happens when those communities refuse to accept the premise that environmental protection is something that must be imposed upon them by the state?

Across the world, the escalating ecological crisis has lent new urgency to governmental efforts to protect biodiversity, restore forests and conserve endangered ecosystems. Yet the politics of environmental protection are rarely as benign as the language of conservation might suggest. Behind the apparently consensual ambition to preserve nature lie profound disagreements about who has the authority to govern land, what constitutes legitimate environmental knowledge, and whose ways of living are deemed compatible with ecological survival.

These questions are particularly acute in Mexico’s Lacandon Jungle, one of the most biodiverse regions of Mesoamerica. Here, Indigenous communities have spent decades confronting successive programmes of state-led development, including initiatives that seek to preserve biodiversity by restricting traditional agricultural practices and bringing communal territories under external environmental management.

The latest chapter in this history has taken an intriguing turn. Rather than merely resisting the imposition of new environmental regulations, three communities of the Bienes Comunales de la Zona Lacandona (BCZL) have embarked upon an ambitious project to articulate their own vision of territorial governance. The result is a Plan de Vida (Life Plan): a collectively developed framework for organising community life, managing natural resources and sustaining the ecological relationships upon which the communities depend.

The Plan is not called a constitution. Nevertheless, we argue in our recent article that it represents a remarkable experiment in constitutionalism from below, one that invites us to reconsider where constitutional authority resides and how law might be mobilised against ostensibly progressive forms of dispossession.

When conservation becomes dispossession

The history of the Lacandon Jungle is inseparable from the history of colonialism, capitalist expansion and struggles over communal property. Its forests have long attracted outsiders seeking to exploit their resources, from nineteenth-century logging companies to contemporary conservation organisations.

The purposes of these interventions have changed, but certain assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and their territories have proved remarkably resilient.

In the late twentieth century, substantial areas of the Lacandon were designated for environmental protection, including through the establishment of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. Much of the reserve overlaps with territories recognised as communal lands under Mexican law. Yet the designation of these lands as protected areas has enabled state authorities to impose restrictions upon their use, often without meaningful recognition of the communities’ own ecological knowledge and governance practices.

This is part of a wider phenomenon sometimes described as green grabbing: the appropriation of land and resources in the name of environmental objectives. Where earlier forms of dispossession were justified through the language of civilisation, improvement or economic development, contemporary interventions increasingly invoke the imperatives of sustainability and conservation.

The result is a peculiar inversion. Communities whose livelihoods depend upon sustaining ecological relationships find themselves positioned as threats to nature, while external institutions acquire the authority to determine what environmental protection requires.

Community resistance – The ‘Plan de Vida’

In 2019, representatives of the Lacandon communities sought support from the Mexican government for their ambition to manage their territories themselves. What emerged from this encounter was something considerably more ambitious than a conventional environmental policy document.

Drawing inspiration from Planes de Vida developed by Indigenous communities elsewhere in Latin America, the BCZL embarked upon a process of collective reflection concerning their histories, values, political institutions and aspirations for the future. More than 1,600 people were consulted, including through gatherings known as circles of the word, in which ancestral knowledge and intergenerational exchange played a central role.

The first version of the resulting Plan, printed as an illustrated book in 2022, articulates a vision of territorial governance grounded in Indigenous cosmovisions and the aspiration towards buen vivir, or good living.

Its ambitions extend far beyond forest management. The Plan addresses food cultivation, education, health, economic organisation, cultural practices and political decision-making. It promotes agroecology, seed exchanges, community-led research, cooperative economic relations and the recovery of traditional medicinal knowledge. It also proposes strengthening the participation of women and younger generations in community life.

These are not simply supplementary social objectives appended to an environmental programme. They reflect a fundamentally different understanding of what environmental governance entails.

Where conventional conservation policy frequently treats nature as an object to be protected, administered or scientifically managed, the Plan begins from the relationships through which communities and ecosystems sustain one another. The forest is not a museum of untouched nature, nor merely a stock of resources to be preserved for future exploitation. It is a living entity, inseparable from the histories, practices and collective existence of the people who inhabit it.

This understanding also challenges the compartmentalisation characteristic of modern governance. Questions of biodiversity cannot be neatly separated from questions of education, economic organisation, food production or political autonomy. Environmental protection is inseparable from the reproduction of a particular form of collective life.

Can a community write its own constitution?

One of the most striking features of the Plan de Vida is its relationship to legal form.

Although it is not formally designated a constitution, the Plan borrows several features associated with constitutional documents. It articulates foundational principles, organises collective commitments into structured provisions and invokes rights recognised under the Mexican Constitution and international law.

By translating community practices and aspirations into a document that resembles a constitutional text, the BCZL makes its political claims legible to state authorities. The Plan asserts that Indigenous communities are not merely stakeholders to be consulted in environmental decision-making, but political communities possessing their own institutions, normative commitments and authority to govern their territories.

This is particularly significant in Mexico, where constitutional recognition of Indigenous rights coexists uneasily with legal and administrative arrangements that continue to facilitate extractivism and the erosion of communal autonomy.

The contradiction is not simply one between law and its imperfect implementation. It is also internal to the constitutional order itself: a system that recognises Indigenous self-determination while maintaining institutional structures through which that self-determination can be frustrated.

The Plan de Vida exploits this contradiction. It invokes the constitutional commitments of the Mexican state while simultaneously asserting a source of political legitimacy that cannot be reduced to state recognition.

Perhaps the most important contribution of the Plan de Vida, however, lies not in its resemblance to a constitutional document but in its attempt to transform the material organisation of community life.

Constitutionalism is conventionally associated with the establishment of governmental institutions, the allocation of public powers and the recognition of fundamental rights. Yet critical constitutional scholarship has increasingly questioned whether constitutional orders can be understood independently of the social and economic relationships through which political power is exercised.

The Plan de Vida offers a compelling example of what a more materially grounded constitutional politics might entail.

Its provisions are concerned not only with who governs, but with how people cultivate food, exchange goods, transmit knowledge, care for ecosystems and reproduce their collective existence. The aspiration is not simply to secure recognition within an existing legal framework, but to strengthen the practices and institutions through which a different form of political community can be sustained. This is constitutionalism understood not simply as a text or institutional settlement, but as an ongoing process of collective political creation.

The politics of reconstitution

None of this suggests that grassroots constitutionalism is free from contradictions. Existing communal governance structures have their own exclusions, particularly concerning gender and formal political participation. Nor can the adoption of a Plan de Vida guarantee that state authorities will respect the communities’ territorial autonomy.

Indeed, the uncertain relationship between the Plan and the institutions of the Mexican state is central to its political significance.

What the Lacandon experience reveals is that constitutional struggles do not take place exclusively in courts, legislatures or moments of formal constitutional reform. They also unfold through the everyday practices by which communities organise economic life, defend their territories and contest the authority of institutions claiming to govern on their behalf.

For critical legal scholars, this raises questions that extend well beyond Mexico. As governments increasingly mobilise environmental imperatives to justify interventions in land use, agriculture and natural resource management, whose knowledge and whose authority will determine the terms of ecological transition?

The Plan de Vida does not offer a ready-made answer to these questions. It does, however, challenge us to recognise that resistance to dispossession can also be an act of constitutional creation—and that the struggle over who gets to protect nature may be inseparable from the struggle over who gets to make law.