Cameras to the people: Reclaiming local histories and restoring environmental justice in community based forest management through participatory video

We discuss how “participatory video” (PV) can help with indigenous peoples’ needs for cultural reassertion as well as with creating opportunities for restoring environmental justice in their territories when community-based natural resource management and autonomous development themselves have become issues of local contention.The story we share is the one of the Monkox people of Lomerio, Bolivia, who recently started using video cameras to reconstruct the struggle for land rights in their territory and to document tensions around community forestry management as part of a participatory research project with the Universidad NUR from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and the School of International Development (DEV) from the University of East Anglia (UEA). As we will see, participatory videos can have great power as part of an activist and practise based approach for environmental justice research.