Transboundarities urge us to rethink about political borders, ecosystems and research

Transboundary conservation in Mesoamerica has incited us to rethink about international and ecosystemic borders, but also those of research. Transboundary research unfolds hidden state-centrisms and siloed politics but also broader, shared phenomena.

The challenge of researcher’s state-centrism

The late Mexican scholar, Jan de Vos, once wondered how literature on the Lacandon rainforest seemed so unanimous about the given rainforest abruptly ending at the River Usumacinta, which is the border between Mexico and Guatemala. This despite the fact that any observation could have confirmed that the same landscape continued unchanged across the river in the Guatemalan side. De Vos had just revealed something called methodological nationalism.

Methodological nationalism refers to research that automatically assumes that the nation-state and its borders are the main societal unit and object of analysis, and this is taken as given. In methodological nationalism, scholars often unconsciously reproduce state-centrism and take part in the construction of its borders. This is further fostered by research funding calls that limit to national issues.

In the 1990s, the discussions on globalization questioned state-centrism in research. For example, political scientists noted that international agendas impact so much on national policies that they could not be ignored. Also, global history has actively sought to center its analysis on phenomena and spaces that transcend state borders. The well-known environmental challenges – climate change, biodiversity loss, contamination – do not have whistle-stops at international borders either.

Sometimes transboundary research nevertheless is impossible or dangerous due to geopolitical tensions.

In our newly published book, The Maya Forest Waterlands: Shared Conservation, Entangled Politics and Fluid Borders, we address methodological nationalism and transboundarities in the borderlands of Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, which is called the Maya Forest.

No transboundarities without borders – but there are many kinds of borders

The concept of transboundarity and its definitions have not been commonly discussed by international literature. Most of the existing one is focused on transboundary cooperation in issues related to natural resources. In here, transboundarity refers to actions, conditions and perspectives that cross or transcend international borders. This is, of course, relevant in the world where we have at the moment, and depending on the ways of calculating, some 280 000 km of land borders between countries.

Transboundarity, in other words, is dependent on borders: there is no transboundarity without a border. However, there are many kinds of borders: cultural, scientific, ecosystemic and every-day borders.

In our newly published book, we address international borders but also other borders, such as those formed around natural resources, in other words, the siloed politics. State borders are typically drawn in line with natural elements, such as rivers and mountains. They are expected to be permanent and stable, but as natural elements, they shift and change – rivers in particular. Simultaneously, each state has divided its natural resources to well-defined sectors: there’s water policy, forest policy and land-use policy. In reality, natural resources tend to be transboundary. In the tropical borderlands, they constantly transcend our given, categorized boxes: they form forest waterlands that challenge us to rethink both transboundarities and our existing conceptual categories.

According to natural scientists, biodiversity tends to be richest in the borderlands of ecosystems, or, in other words, at their transboundary edges. These include, for example, different swamp and wetland areas located between land and marine or coastal ecosystems, where connectivity occurs. However, the challenge in this kind of transboundary research is that ecology as a discipline is often divided into distinct fields of expertise.

Transboundary conservation highlights ecosystemic and species’ connectivities

Transboundary conservation is not a new phenomenon but it was particularly promoted as a strategy in the 1990s by the international conservation organizations. The aim was to create protected areas along and across international borders. This is also the case with the Maya Forest.

Social scientists have criticized transboundary conservation for many reasons. However, in particular they have pointed out that often these “transboundary protected areas” are not really jurisdictionally so. Yet, what social scientists often do not realize is the distinct understanding of transboundarity. In nature conservation, the jurisdictional or human-centered transboundarity is of less importance while this ecological transboundarity seeks to safeguard ecosystemic connectivity and the mobilities of other species across political borders.

Transboundary research is challenging but it expands our horizons importantly

Transboundary conservation sets many kinds of challenges for the researchers: it requires transboundary research. Our transboundary research in the borderlands of Mexico, Guatemala and Belize entailed research that integrates perspectives from the three countries, and fieldwork on different sides of various borders. Among others, this requires understanding different languages, cultures and geopolitics, as well as managing administrative and logistical issues in different locations.

Mesoamerican scholars have argued that transboundary research is important to produce broader regional perspectives but that they are difficult to conduct due to lack of resources. National funding programs often only allow for research adjusted within national borders even though the phenomena to be researched may be transboundary. As a result, researchers have tended to publish edited works in which different scholars from different countries provide results from their own respective, bordered edges, and putting these pieces together in a more integral, “transboundary” approach. Yet, they speak for the necessity of real transboundary and broader regional research because many significant societal and environmental phenomena and processes transcend national borders.

In our own research we arrived at the same conclusion. Despite obvious challenges, transboundary research helped recognize broader dimensions and horizons that we could have not captured otherwise. For example, in my research in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, I constantly ran into the same mention about chewing-gum collectors, which turned out to be a major shared and transboundary history, albeit silenced, within all of the Maya Forest.

The open-access book The Maya Forest Waterlands: Shared Conservation, Entangled Politics and Fluid Borders (2025) by Hanna Laako and Edith Kauffer has just been published in the Routledge Studies in Conservation and the Environment. Additionally, Laako and Kauffer have produced a short video about their research in English, with Finnish subtitles and Spanish subtitles.