This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.This edited volume examines how economic processes have worked upon social lives and social realities in Latin America during the past decades.

This book explores the role of trust in social struggles related to tropical forest preservation in El Petén, Guatemala. The author combines ethnographic exploration of how trust is formed in the local context with insights about postcolonial inequalities, which structure discourses on development and climate change in ways that exclude local actors.Empirically, the book follows the complicated engagements of local concession-holding forest communities with outside actors aiming to develop archaeology-based tourism in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve. A central argument presented is that...