Suchergebnisse

A highly regarded academic and former policy analyst and consultant charts the forty-year history of neoliberalism, environmental governance, and resource rights in Madagascar Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet the island nation's habitats are still in decline. In this important ethnographic study, Catherine Corson illustrates how the effort to attract high-level political attention to conservation by isolating the environment in national parks and blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers has avoided challenging key drivers of Madagascar's deforestation

A highly regarded academic and former policy analyst and consultant charts the forty-year history of neoliberalism, environmental governance, and resource rights in Madagascar Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet the island nation's habitats are still in decline. In this important ethnographic study, Catherine Corson illustrates how the effort to attract high-level political attention to conservation by isolating the environment in national parks and blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers has avoided challenging key drivers of Madagascar's deforestation.

In this article, I argue that reconciling conservation and livelihoods in Madagascar requires an examination of the historical processes and political-economic systems through which the strong foreign influence on conservation has formed. I begin by documenting how a group of scientists and policy-makers came together in the 1970s and 1980s to mobilize global attention to the importance of protecting Madagascar's flora and fauna. I illustrate how their influence materialized not only through formal political negotiations and bureaucratic practice but also via informal collaborations across multiple geographic and institutional sites. Then, I examine how the critical historical conjuncture of the mid-1980s—with its emphasis on biodiversity, sustainable development and neoliberalism—prompted a reconfiguration in power relations among public, private, and nonprofit actors. This reconfiguration provided the political-economic context for the transformation of a scientific campaign into a well-funded foreign aid agenda, encompassed in the Madagascar National Environmental Action Plan. I illustrate how, although numerous actors advocated for integrated conservation and development approaches throughout Madagascar's environmental history, the political, scientific, and financial strength behind the international conservation lobby often overpowered the push for more comprehensive or integrated development approaches. Finally, I conclude by arguing that effective and equitable conservation in Madagascar will require transforming the power relations that have both created Madagascar's environmental crisis and efforts to redress it. RésuméDans cet article, j'avance que pour réconcilier la conservation de la nature et les moyens de subsistance des gens à Madagascar, il faut commencer par un examen critique des processus historiques et des systèmes économiques politiques qui ont eu une forte influence étrangère sur la conservation dans le pays. Je commence par documenter comment un groupe de scientifiques et de responsables politiques se sont réunis dans les années 1970 et 1980 pour mobiliser l'attention mondiale sur l'importance de protéger la flore et la faune de Madagascar. J'étudie comment leur influence s'est matérialisée non seulement par des négociations politiques officielles et des pratiques bureaucratiques, mais aussi par des collaborations informelles dans de nombreux endroits sur le terrain et dans les institutions. Ensuite, je montre comment la conjoncture historique du milieu des années 1980 qui était caractérisée par un accent mis sur la biodiversité, le développement durable et le néolibéralisme, a permis de reconfigurer les relations de pouvoir entre les entités publiques, privées et les organisations à but non lucratif. Cette reconfiguration a forgé le contexte politico-économique dans lequel ces acteurs dévoués ont transformé une campagne scientifique en un programme d'aide étrangère bien financé et inclus dans le Plan National d'Action pour l'Environnement de Madagascar. Je montre comment, bien que de nombreux acteurs aient depuis longtemps défendu les approches intégrant conservation et développement pour protéger l'environnement de Madagascar, la force politique, scientifique et financière derrière le lobby de la conservation a souvent surpassé les efforts consentis pour des approches plus exhaustives et intégrées de développement. Enfin, je conclus en faisant valoir que pour réaliser la conservation efficace et équitable à Madagascar, il faudra transformer les relations de pouvoir qui ont à la fois créé la crise de l'environnement à Madagascar et les efforts destinés à la redresser.

ABSTRACT This article uses theories of virtualism to analyse the role of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project in the production of natural capital. Presented at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the project seeks to redress the 'economic invisibility of nature' by quantifying the value of ecosystems and biodiversity. This endeavour to put an economic value on ecosystems makes nature legible by abstracting it from social and ecological contexts and making it subject to, and productive of, new market devices. In reducing the complexity of ecological dynamics to idealized categories TEEB is driven by economic ideas and idealism, and, in claiming to be a quantitative force for morality, is engaged in the production of practices designed to conform the 'real' to the virtual. By rendering a 'valued' nature legible for key audiences, TEEB has mobilized a critical mass of support including modellers, policy makers and bankers. We argue that TEEB's rhetoric of crisis and value aligns capitalism with a new kind of ecological modernization in which 'the market' and market devices serve as key mechanisms to conform the real and the virtual. Using the case of TEEB, and drawing on data collected at COP10, we illustrate the importance of international meetings as key points where idealized models of biodiversity protection emerge, circulate and are negotiated, and as sites where actors are aligned and articulated with these idealized models in ways that begin further processes of conforming the real with the virtual and the realization of 'natural capital'.

In this article we elaborate on how we use collaborative event ethnography to study global environmental governance. We discuss how it builds on traditional forms of ethnography, as well as on approaches that use ethnography to study policy-making in multiple institutional and geographical sites. We argue that global environmental meetings and negotiations offer opportunities to study critical historical moments in the making of emergent regimes of global environmental governance, and that collaborative ethnography can capture the day-to-day practices that constitute policy paradigm shifts. In this method, the negotiations themselves are not the object of study, but rather how they reflect and transform relations of power in environmental governance. Finally, we propose a new approach to understanding and examining global environmental governance—one that views the ethnographic field as constituted by relationships across time and space that come together at sites such as meetings.

Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to draw legitimacy from the United Nations system—from its declarations to its special rapporteurs—and to build transnational strategic alliances in ways they could not with participatory discourses. Using it, they have brought attention to biodiversity as a basic human right and to the struggle to use, access, and own it as a human rights struggle. In this article, we show how the 2016 WCC provided a platform for building and reinforcing these alliances, advancing diverse procedural and substantive rights, redefining key principles and standards for a rights-based conservation approach, and leveraging international support for enforcement mechanisms on-the-ground. We argue that, as advocates staked out physical and discursive space at the venue, they secured the authority to shape conservation politics, shifting the terrain of struggle between strict conservationists and community activists and creating new conditions of possibility for advancing the human rights agenda in international conservation politics. Nonetheless, while RBAs have been politically successful at reconfiguring global discourse, numerous obstacles remain in translating that progress to secure human rights to resources "on the ground", and it is vital that the international conservation community finance the implementation of RBA in specific locales, demand that nation states create monitoring and grievance systems, and decolonize the ways in which they interact with IPLCs. Finally, we reflect on the value of the Collaborative Event Ethnography methodology, with its emphasis on capturing the mundane, meaningful and processual aspects of policymaking, in illuminating the on-going labor entailed in bringing together and aligning the disparate elements in dynamic assemblages.Keywords: Human rights, global conservation governance, collaborative event ethnography, Indigenous peoples

Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to draw legitimacy from the United Nations system—from its declarations to its special rapporteurs—and to build transnational strategic alliances in ways they could not with participatory discourses. Using it, they have brought attention to biodiversity as a basic human right and to the struggle to use, access, and own it as a human rights struggle. In this article, we show how the 2016 WCC provided a platform for building and reinforcing these alliances, advancing diverse procedural and substantive rights, redefining key principles and standards for a rights-based conservation approach, and leveraging international support for enforcement mechanisms on-the-ground. We argue that, as advocates staked out physical and discursive space at the venue, they secured the authority to shape conservation politics, shifting the terrain of struggle between strict conservationists and community activists and creating new conditions of possibility for advancing the human rights agenda in international conservation politics. Nonetheless, while RBAs have been politically successful at reconfiguring global discourse, numerous obstacles remain in translating that progress to secure human rights to resources "on the ground", and it is vital that the international conservation community finance the implementation of RBA in specific locales, demand that nation states create monitoring and grievance systems, and decolonize the ways in which they interact with IPLCs. Finally, we reflect on the value of the Collaborative Event Ethnography methodology, with its emphasis on capturing the mundane, meaningful and processual aspects of policymaking, in illuminating the on-going labor entailed in bringing together and aligning the disparate elements in dynamic assemblages.Keywords: Human rights, global conservation governance, collaborative event ethnography, Indigenous peoples

This special issue introduces readers to collaborative event ethnography (CEE), a method developed to support the ethnographic study of large global environmental meetings. CEE was applied by a group of seventeen researchers at the Tenth Conference of the Parties (COP10) to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) to study the politics of biodiversity conservation. In this introduction, we describe our interests in global environmental meetings as sites where the politics of biodiversity conservation can be observed and as windows into broader governance networks. We specify the types of politics we attend to when observing such meetings and then describe the CBD, its COP, challenges meetings pose for ethnographic researchers, how CEE responds to these challenges generally, and the specifics of our research practices at COP10. Following a summary of the contributed papers, we conclude by reflecting on the evolution of CEE over time.