With the progressive establishment of protected areas for conservation and communal indigenous land, market economy has been regulated in the Peruvian Amazon. Interlinked networks and institutions situate the agency of institutional entrepreneurs championing forest protection and indigenous peoples’ rights over territory and resources. This paper shows how a critical integration of new institutionalisms in the social sciences provides a suitable theory frame to study the process of protectionist institutional change as envisioned by Karl Polanyi. The cumulative result of socially-embedded state activism –that is, regulatory activism that is embedded in society– is an institutional regime that strengthens the resources and capabilities of conservationist groups and Amazonian indigenous peoples’ organisations as collective constructs while facing the social forces of commodification.