Virtualism, Governance and Practice: Vision and Execution in Environmental Conservation 9781845456191, 9781845459604

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Virtualism, Governance and Practice

Studies in Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology General Editor: Roy Ellen, FBA Professor of Anthropology, University of Kent at Canterbury Interest in environmental anthropology has grown steadily in recent years, reflecting national and international concern about the environment and developing research priorities. Tis major new international series, which continues a series first published by Harwood and Routledge, is a vehicle for publishing up-to-date monographs and edited works on particular issues, themes, places or peoples which focus on the interrelationship between society, culture and environment. Relevant areas include human ecology, the perception and representation of the environment, ethno-ecological knowledge, the human dimension of biodiversity conservation and the ethnography of environmental problems. While the underlying ethos of the series will be anthropological, the approach is interdisciplinary. Volume 1

Volume 8

Te Logic of Environmentalism: Anthropology, Ecology and Postcoloniality Vassos Argyrou

Fishers And Scientists In Modern Turkey: Te Management of Natural Resources, Knowledge and Identity on the Eastern Black Sea Coast Ståle Knudsen

Volume 2

Conversations on the Beach: Local Knowledge and Environmental Change in South India Götz Hoeppe Volume 3

Green Encounters: Shaping and Contesting Environmentalism in Rural Costa Rica Luis A. Vivanco Volume 4

Local Science vs. Global Science: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development Edited by Paul Sillitoe Volume 5

Sustainability and Communities of Place Edited by Carl A. Maida Volume 6

Modern Crises and Traditional Strategies Edited by Roy Ellen Volume 7

Travelling Cultures, Plants and Medicine: Te Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacy of Migrations Edited by Andrea Pieroni and Ina Vandebroek

Volume 9

Landscape Ethnoecology: Concepts of Biotic and Physical Space Edited by Leslie Main Johnson and Eugene S. Hunn Volume 10

Landscape, Power And Process: Re-Evaluating Traditional Environmental Knowledge Edited by Sabrina Heckler Volume 11

Mobility And Migration In Indigenous Amazonia: Contemporary Ethnoecological Perspectives Edited by Miguel N. Alexiades Volume 12

Unveiling the Whale: Discourses on Whales and Whaling Arne Kalland Volume 13

Virtualism, Governance and Practice: Vision and Execution in Environmental Conservation Edited by James G. Carrier and Paige West

Virtualism, Governance and Practice Vision and Execution in Environmental Conservation

Edited by James G. Carrier and Paige West

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

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9/25/09

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Published in 2009 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2009 James G. Carrier and Paige West All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. data record for the title is available at the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-1-84545-619-1 (hardback)

Contents

List of Figures, Tables and Boxes

vii

Preface

viii

List of Abbreviations Introduction James G. Carrier and Paige West

xi 1

1.

Virtualism and the Logic of Environmentalism Vassos Argyrou

24

2.

New Nature: On the Production of a Paradox Maarten Onneweer

45

3.

A Culture of Conservation: Shaping the Human Element in National Parks Kathy Rettie

66

4.

A Bridge Too Far: The Knowledge Problem in the Millennium Assessment Colin Filer

84

5.

Creolising Conservation: Caribbean Responses to Global Trends 112 in Environmental Management Tighe Geoghegan

6.

Uncivil Society: Local Stakeholders and Environmental Protection in Jamaica Andrew Garner

134

vi | Contents

7.

‘The Report Was Written for Money to Come’: Constructing and Reconstructing the Case for Conservation in Papua New Guinea Flip van Helden

155

Conclusion: Can the World Be Micromanaged? Josiah McC. Heyman

177

Notes on Contributors

189

Index

191

List of Figures, Tables and Boxes

List of Figures 1.1

Spaceship Earth

5

2.1

Main Ecological Structure

58

4.1

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Conceptual Framework

87

4.2

Linkages between Ecosystem Services and Human Well-being

88

4.3

Adapting the MA Conceptual Framework for Local Needs

103

4.4

Changing Availability of Ecosystem Services under Four Scenarios

106

Table 4.1

Four Global Scenarios in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

105

Boxes 4.1

Initial Selection Criteria for Sub-Global Assessments

90

4.2

The Indigenous Voice

95

4.3

Modernism Unmasked

96

4.4

A Dissonant Voice

98

4.5

Contested Definitions

101

Preface

In October of 2005 we held a workshop at Oxford Brookes University. Its title was ‘People Protecting Nature: Social Dimensions of Environmental Conservation’, and we had organised it because we wanted to bring together people who had studied the ways that systems of environmental management were related to the people involved in them and affected by them. This topic is important in itself, but also we thought that it would be useful to try to relate it to the established subfields of the anthropology of landscape and of the environment. Twenty-five people attended, and their interest and enthusiasm, in some cases in spite of substantial jet lag, indicated that it was stimulating and enjoyable. The joy of intellectual life is the unforeseen, and this workshop provided that joy. Several of the participants had experience with, studied or worked in environmental organisations, ranging from the small and local to the large and global. Some of their workshop papers and much of the discussion was about their experiences. What made this talk so intriguing was what it revealed about these organisations. They were not the rational and efficient bureaucracies focused on environmental protection that, perhaps without thinking much about it, many of us thought that they were. Their understanding of the environment that they were supposed to protect was elusive to the point that, in extreme instances, it disappeared altogether. Their ability to assess the projects that they supported was questionable, as field staff turned failures on the ground into successes in their reports, and thereby secured another round of funding. Their institutional memories were short, suggesting that they were fairly unable to learn from their experiences: one participant recently engaged by a regional organisation that he had worked for on a project a few years earlier found a note in the files saying that he should never be hired again. Initially these revelations were that anthropological staple, tales from the field: interesting, even fascinating, but of uncertain significance. However, as these conversations continued we began to think differently about our individual experiences with these organisations. What many of

Preface | ix

us had experienced and observed was not, perhaps, what we had assumed: an exception to a general rule of competence and efficiency. Rather, it looked increasingly like the normal state of affairs. And if this was normal, then how were we to understand the body of scholarly work that treated these sorts of organisations as powerful and, more importantly, purposeful agents of control? How could we square the assertion that these organisations are, following the very influential arguments of Foucault, institutions of governance and governmentality, with the fact that often they seem unable to organise a French lesson in Paris? We do not have the knowledge and wit to answer our question. Instead, we have used this volume to pose it. The result is a collection organised in a way that is different from the conventional. This is not a set of chapters that illustrate different aspects of a central theme or issue that is laid out in the Introduction. Instead, the Introduction sketches the problem, the contrast between the assumption of the efficacy of these sorts of organisations and their observed uncertainties and failures. The sequence of chapters lays out first one side of the contrast and then the other. The Conclusion provides ideas for how we might think of it. We can only hope that readers find this problem as stimulating as we do. The workshop that started all of this was a success not only because of the interest and enthusiasm of those who came; in addition, the people and institutions who supported and facilitated it deserve much of the credit. Financial support came from the Economic and Social Research Council (as part of ‘Conflict in Environmental Conservation: a Jamaican Study’, RES 000 23 0396); from the Centre for Conservation, Environment and Development of the Department of Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University; from the British Academy (BCG-4005); from the Royal Anthropological Institute. That support helped several people to attend. It also made the workshop more congenial, and hence more productive, than it would otherwise have been. Because James Carrier lives in the UK and is associated with Oxford Brookes, he handled the organisation and arrangements for the workshop, the first time that he had done this sort of thing. His task was made much easier than it might have been, and occasionally made enjoyable, by several people at Oxford Brookes and at Oxford University who tolerated his ignorance and corrected his more awkward errors. Jane Iliffe, at the School of Social Sciences and Law at Oxford Brookes, deserves special thanks for her help at many points. Josiah Heyman agreed to write the concluding chapter in the midst of his own extensive duties as head of an anthropology department, for which we are grateful. He is not a student of environmental management, but has spent years studying what this volume is about – organisations

x | Preface

and the ways that they work in practice. Finally, we want to thank Dan Brockington and Kenneth Iain MacDonald. They are not represented by papers in this volume or in the workshop, where they served as commentators. However, their thoughts both during and after the workshop made valuable contributions to what you see here. James G. Carrier Paige West August, 2008

List of Abbreviations

BRG CANARI CIDA DEMO EHS ENGO GEF GIS ICAD IPCC MA MPA NCRPS NEPT NGO PDF PNG SLHTP TNC TPDCo UNDP USAID WWF

Bismarck-Ramu Group Caribbean Natural Resources Institute Canadian International Development Agency Development of Environmental Management Organizations Ecologische Hoofd Structuur, the Main Ecological Structure environmental non-governmental organisation Global Environment Facility geographic information systems integrated conservation and development Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Millennium Ecosystem Assessment marine protected area Negril Coral Reef Preservation Society Negril Area Environmental Protection Trust non-governmental organisation Project Development Facility Papua New Guinea St Lucia Heritage Tourism Programme The Nature Conservancy Tourism Product Development Company United Nations Development Programme United States Agency for International Development Worldwide Fund for Nature

Introduction

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the understandings of nature and the natural environment that predominate in Western societies have shifted in a marked way. Previously, nature had commonly been something to be subdued, whether through engineering works, dikes and drainage systems, through health projects, sewers and reservoirs, or through agricultural improvements, irrigation and soil management. Alternatively, it had been something to be looked after, whether land that needed to be kept in good heart so that it would continue to be fruitful, or specific places that commemorated human achievement. Since the 1950s, however, nature and the natural environment have acquired new meanings. Something that was to be subordinated to human purposes has become something to be protected and respected for itself. This is the emergence of environmentalism, a set of ways of thinking about the world, particularly about the natural surroundings and their relationship with people. We refer to these as a set of ways because they range widely, from the ecocentrism discussed in the first chapter in this volume, through a concern for biodiversity to more limited efforts to protect particular species or habitats (see, e.g., Bosso 2005). Although they range widely, they have certain things in common. One important thing they have in common is that while environmentalisms of different sorts are ways of thinking, they are not only that, if ‘ways of thinking’ is taken to mean simply cultural understandings, what is in our heads. They include as well the intersection of these understandings with the world and people in it, which is to say, with ways of identifying and evaluating the natural surroundings. These identifications and evaluations in turn entail ways of organising and acting. So as nature has changed in human eyes, the ways that we deal with nature and each other has changed as well. Some of the new ways that people deal with these things are the subject matter of this volume. We will consider them as they appear in conservation policies, projects and programmes, which are institutional expressions of one or another environmentalist vision. They are also practical executions of

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that vision, intended to bring the world, or parts of it, into conformity with it. This is the ‘vision and execution in environmental conservation’ of our subtitle. These projects and programmes have attracted interest from scholars concerned with power, many of whom see environmentalism as a distinct way of understanding the world, one that imposes distinct orders on people in that world. Our purpose in this volume is to consider the argument that such scholars make. That consideration involves three questions. First, is environmentalism a distinct way of understanding the world? Second, is that understanding associated with efforts to impose a distinct order on the world and people in it? Third, what are the effects of these efforts? These three questions are the ‘virtualism, governance and practice’ of our title. In this volume, then, we are concerned with two things. One is conservation projects as institutional expressions of environmentalism. The other is how a number of scholars, anthropologists and others, have approached those projects as exercises in power. To anticipate what we will argue in this Introduction, and what is illustrated by the sequence of chapters in this volume, we see that scholarly approach as misdirected because it is partial. Many have seen these projects as Foucauldian systems of knowledge-power and governance or as virtualising regimes that seek to make different parts of the world conform to the virtual reality defined by the environmentalist vision. Such a view is justified if we look at what environmentalist institutions claim to be doing and how they claim to be doing it. However, that view looks much less justified if we look at what happens in environmental management projects as they work out in practice rather than in vision and intent. While we make this observation about the differences between vision and practice in terms of environmentalism and environmental management projects, we think that it may apply more generally. For instance, a number of recent works describe the same difference in the field of development (Crewe and Harrison 1998; Lewis and Mosse 2006; Mosse 2004; Mosse and Lewis 2005). If it does apply more generally, then we may need to look afresh at the applicability of Foucauldian models or models of virtualism to things like global environmental, development or other institutions. The governance and the shaping of the world that they are seen to exert may exist in the head office and in theory, but may be much harder to find in practice. Our concern with the relationship between vision and practice means that we approach the practical effects of environmental projects in terms of what they tell us about that relationship. This does not mean that we think that a project that fails to execute the intentions of the relevant organisation is a project that has no important consequences. Such projects can have a host of consequences for those who develop the project, for

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Introduction | 3

those who staff it and for those who live where it operates. Such consequences may well be important. However, from our perspective these are unintended consequences, not directly bearing on the question of how able environmental organisations are to carry out the goals that they proclaim and that some scholars criticise.

Environment Visions People everywhere have always paid attention to their surroundings, including what we would call their natural environment. They have noticed when it gets wetter or drier, when crops are better or worse, when fish and game are more or less plentiful, and they have sought to understand and perhaps even affect these things. In doing so, people have assigned meanings to these things and organised their lives accordingly. Even though people have always paid attention, the nature of that attention varies across societies and through history. For instance, Tim Ingold (2000) argues that it changed markedly in Europe between the Medieval and Modern eras. He says that in the earlier period, predominant views identified and gave significance to the surroundings in terms of their relationship with people. Later, however, they began to construe important aspects of the surroundings as a realm that is beyond people, a natural environs that is ‘out there’ and has an existence of its own (see also Escobar 1999; Latour 1993). Just as the meaning and significance of the surroundings has not been stable within Western societies, so it has not been uniform among them in the Modern period. For instance, British imperial game preserves in Africa may look like environmental conservation. However, they reflected specific metropolitan understandings of England and its relationship with Africa, and of English men and their relationship to wild animals (MacKenzie 1989). National parks in the United States also may look like environmental conservation. However, they reflect specific understandings held by colonists and their descendants of the settlement of North America, the state of the continent and the place of pre-colonial populations (Cronon 1995). Parks in some European countries also may look like environmental conservation. However, they too reflect specific understandings, in this case not of a pre-colonial landscape putatively empty, but of an early human landscape, though ‘early’ can be as late as the first part of the twentieth century, before the industrialisation of agriculture in the area in question (e.g., Aldridge 1989: 81; Kull, Kukk and Lotman 2003; an example in Austria is Nationalpark Neusiedler See n.d.). Present-day environmentalism also carries a range of meanings. The images of the natural environment and of threats to it implied by a concern

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with global warming are different from the images and threats implied by a concern for a valued species, and are different again from the images and threats implied by a concern for biodiversity and the security of ecosystems. The first chapter in this volume considers one of the sets of meanings that the environment has in contemporary society. In ‘Virtualism and the Logic of Environmentalism’, Vassos Argyrou analyses ecocentrism, and in doing so pursues the question that Ingold addressed, the relationship between Modernity and understandings of the natural world. In doing so, he shows how environmentalism can have a totalising vision of the world and the people in it. Argyrou begins by identifying a feature of Modernity that he sees as crucial. That is a rejection of qualitative difference. This rejection is apparent in much of science, which reduces what appear to be qualitative differences between things to quantitative differences in the arrangement of basic units that these things share, whether electrons and protons to account for the apparent differences between hydrogen and lead, or of nucleic acids to account for the apparent differences between cauliflowers and butterflies. This rejection of qualitative difference appears as well in the Modern approach to the human world, manifest in growing attacks on discrimination between people based on race, sex, religion, physical ability and the like. For Argyrou, then, Modernity is driven by a vision of sameness: differences are superficial and at most quantitative, rather than fundamental and qualitative. Sameness has existed previously in Western thought, for instance in Medieval arguments that all living things are God’s creatures and subjects. While sameness may have been important in earlier thought, the Modern form bases it on what are taken to be material, natural grounds, rather than divine ones. Environmentalism takes, as we have said, a variety of forms. However, in its most thoroughgoing form, the forms of ecocentrism that Argyrou describes, it manifests that Modern, material vision of sameness. This sort of environmentalism does not just reject qualitative differences within the natural world and within the social. In addition, it rejects qualitative differences between these two worlds: the distinction between them is illusory. With this denial of differences nature is socialised, for instance with the argument that trees (Stone 1974) or whales, porpoises and dolphins (US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit 2004) have legal rights. Alternatively, people and society are naturalised, for instance with the argument that people’s mental, cultural and social attributes are governed by the natural processes of genetics (e.g., Dawkins 1976) or evolutionary psychology (e.g., Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby 1991). This denial of difference is not, however, evenhanded, but instead reflects Modern naturalism. While people are construed as part of nature, nature itself is construed in a way that is purged of its social networks (Latour 1993; Strathern 1989), thereby forgetting the ways in which the social makes the natural (Smith 1990).

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Introduction | 5

Figure 1.1 Spaceship Earth (courtesy NASA).

Argyrou’s ecocentrists, with their vision of people and nature as one, are part of a movement that obliterates another kind of difference by imposing a different kind of sameness. That is the difference of distance, which is reduced to insignificance in the image that led Ingold to his characterisation of the Modern view, the famous photograph of the earth taken by astronauts orbiting the moon (Fig. 1.1; see Cosgrove 1994). If people are part of nature and if all of nature has the same rights, then we are all part of the same system and distance disappears. This is the view contained in James Lovelock’s (1979) influential idea of Gaia, the earth as a single, integrated system. If people and nature are one, subsumed in a single whole, then environmentalists can claim a moral right to control the use of the environment throughout the world. In this situation, conservation planners in New York have the right and even the obligation to make sure that New Guinea villagers do not hunt their prey to extinction (as van Helden describes in his chapter in this volume) and that Jamaican towndwellers do not fish out their waters (as Garner describes in his chapter).

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Ecocentrism, then, completes the movement that began with the change that Ingold described, and presents a third Western view of the natural surroundings. Ingold said, remember, that in the Medieval period those surroundings were defined in relationship to people, while in the Modern era they became separate, nature ‘out there’. With the appearance of ecocentrism, the radical separation of people and the surroundings is reversed, with people and nature becoming one in a way that makes nature people’s foundation, and so locates it ‘in here’. The ecocentrism that Argyrou describes is an extreme form of environmentalism. However, like other forms it defines the world, and in that definition it provides both justification for changing the world and guides for action to effect that change. The justification is contained in the assertion that we confront severe and imminent environmental degradation. We need to act quickly to introduce thoroughgoing changes, even if this means overriding local opposition and forgoing some of the rights and privileges that people enjoy (see Brockington 2004: 414). The guides contained in its definition of the world tell us what we should do. In the case of the ecocentrism that Argyrou describes, these would include sets of changes in the ways that people deal with their natural surroundings and with each other. These guides reflect a body of suppositions contained in the definition of the world that underlies them. For some of the writers that Argyrou describes, those suppositions are derived from research and speculation about the origin and development of life on earth, and about the origin of the universe. The biologists and physicists who produced that research and speculation wanted to produce parsimonious ways of making sense of a set of observations about life on earth and about the universe. In that way they are fundamentally descriptive, even if the events and processes that they describe are not accessible to us. We can not, after all, see the emergence of organic chemicals in the primordial earth of thousands of millions of years ago, much less the Big Bang of more thousands of millions of years before that. For Argyrou’s ecocentrists, however, these parsimonious accounts become something different, the basis of a definition of the fundamental nature of life on earth, and indeed of the earth itself. This definition, being fundamental, is not only descriptive but is also prescriptive. Put simplistically, if we are all really the same at a fundamental level, the sort of sameness invoked by those who say that humans share a high percentage of their genes with various other species, then any apparent differences between us are merely on the surface. They are epiphenomenal, and therefore are not legitimate bases for dealing with one another. The next step, of course, is to discourage or prohibit such illegitimate dealings, and so bring people’s lives in the world into conformity with the definition of that fundamental nature.

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Introduction | 7

What we have described here is an instance of virtualism (see Carrier 1998), and it is worth explaining what that is. Let us begin with a set of people who have studied one or another aspect of the world, whether that be English grammar, economic activity or the natural environment. These people necessarily approach their object of study from a certain perspective, which is to say that they are interested in it for certain reasons and want to answer certain sorts of questions. From their study, they produce a body of observations and a set of rules and principles that give them significance and that explain them. Of course, these rules and principles are not complete and neutral. Rather, they are partial. That is because they are concerned with specific parts of the world and because they reflect the perspective of those who formulate them. As well, of course, they are not directly observable, just as the law of gravity is not directly observable however often we may see objects fall. Rather, they are parsimonious models that do two things. First, they translate what we observe into the terms of those models, such as apples falling from the branches of trees that get translated into masses in a gravitational field. Second, they account for what the falling apples do, and do so in ways that can be used to predict future events, such as the fall of apples still on branches. The results of the study of gravity, or English grammar or economic activity, constitute a kind of virtual reality. That is, they are a set of partial analytical and theoretical arguments that define a world, rather like a computer program defines the world that one sees when one puts on the goggles of a virtual reality game. This virtual reality becomes virtualism when people forget that the virtual reality is a creature of the partial analytical and theoretical perspectives and arguments that generate it, and instead take it for the principles that underlie the world that exists and then try to make the world conform to that virtual reality. Of course, not just anyone with a view of how the world really is can implement that vision and seek to make the world conform. Rather, these virtualising visions are enacted through the nexus of knowledge and power that Foucault (1972) describes. So, the visionary must be powerful politically and the vision must be grounded in a form of knowledge production that is powerful socially, such as the biology and physics that some ecocentrists invoke. Virtualism is, then, not just a process that occurs in people’s heads. It is also a social process by which people who are guided by a vision of the world act to try to shape that world to bring it into conformity with their vision. The broader the vision and the more powerful the visionary, the more pervasive the shaping. For Argyrou’s ecocentrists the vision is total, encompassing everything on earth, and indeed elsewhere; in grounding it in science, they claim a potent legitimacy for it.

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Virtualising Visions Many writers have seen aspects of virtualism in environmental conservation, and especially in projects intended to protect biodiversity. Arturo Escobar (1998: 56) argues that the concern with biodiversity has ‘resulted in an ... institutional apparatus that systematically organizes the production of forms of knowledge and types of power’. This apparatus defines the world in terms of its biological vision and attempts to bring the world into conformity, through ‘scientific research, in-situ and ex-situ conservation, national biodiversity planning, and the establishment of appropriate mechanisms for compensation and economic use of biodiversity resources’ (1998: 57). From the perspective of this concern, often the world that is seen is strongly abstracted, translated into the terms of the conservationist model in the same way that a physicist translates an apple falling from a tree into a mass in a gravitational field. So, conservationists of the sort Escobar describes represent the world in terms of biodiversity hotspots, and perhaps threats, and ignore the social and political features of the areas that they portray. Dan Brockington (2004), for instance, describes how environmentalist organisations describe the Mkomazi Game Reserve in Tanzania. They present it in almost purely ecological terms, stressing the nature and supposed fragility of the ecosystem, and ignore the socio-political context in which it exists. The people who were displaced by the park are not mentioned or are treated as illegitimate interlopers who despoil the surroundings. Raymond Bryant (2002: esp. 275–7) describes a more thorough instance of this in the Philippines. There, an umbrella organisation of national and international organisations presents biodiversity and its protection in terms of a map, a representation that is highly abstract: ‘Not visible in this map is any sign of people: there is no reference to cities and towns or any real indication of cultural and linguistic factors’ (2002: 276). Likewise, the state is ignored, at least in the form of political units like provinces. Where it does appear, it is only in terms of state-authorised entities linked to biodiversity: ‘parks, protected areas, marine reserves’ (2002: 276). Even when biodiversity projects claim to attend to the social aspect of conservation, planners and managers tend to do so in ways that translate people’s actions into terms that fit with preexisting notions of the effects of those actions. Paige West (2006), for instance, describes a project in Papua New Guinea specifically designed to integrate the conservation of biodiversity and the social needs of people. In spite of this professed attention to the social, the solutions that managers arrived at reflected their presupposition that local people are threats to biodiversity. What we have related from Brockington, Bryant and West refers to representations that translate the world into the terms of an environmentalist

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Introduction | 9

model. These representations elide aspects of life that do not conform to the model’s terms, either because they are defined as immaterial or because they are inconvenient. As Bryant argues at length, such representations are exercises in power-knowledge that both create and describe the world in an authoritative way. This virtualism in creation and description can take more concrete forms. One such form is the focus of Maarten Onneweer’s chapter, ‘New Nature: On the Production of a Paradox’. He describes efforts in the Netherlands to protect the environment by reshaping the surroundings, in the form of the Ecologische Hoofd Structuur (EHS), the Main Ecological Structure. As Onneweer describes, the EHS involves creating areas of what can be called ‘raw nature’ in various parts of the country, connected by corridors to form a national nature network. Intriguingly, creating raw nature requires substantial human effort, as the areas selected to become parts of the EHS are turned into construction sites: hills are created and topsoil is stripped away, and water courses, drains and embankments are changed. The bulldozers and backhoes depart and things are left to take their own course. This activity is guided by a vision of nature that, as Onneweer describes, developed over the last third of the twentieth century. During that period a set of Dutch environmental scientists gradually developed and advocated a particular model of natural processes in the country, the ways that they were being threatened and how they could be protected. Together with environmental organisations, they persuaded the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fisheries (now Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality) to implement their vision, to make their virtual reality real on the land. As we said, virtual realities reflect the particular perspectives and concerns of those who construct them in the world that they confront. This is true of the EHS. It rests on a view of the surroundings that takes as its point of reference what north-western Europe is presumed to have been like between the end of the last ice age and the beginning of human habitation. This is not the nature of Argyrou’s ecocentrists, which includes people. Rather, it is Ingold’s Modernist view of the environment, the view that drove early national parks in the United States and that is expressed in representations of the Mkomazi Game Reserve and in biodiversity conservation in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. This is an environment that is out there, distinct from humans. The vision that drives the EHS is not innocent, any more than is the one that drove the American parks. Rather, it is one that elides and denies the Dutch past. Significant parts of land in the Netherlands have been reclaimed from the sea and effectively all of it has been the subject of intensive agricultural and engineering effort for centuries. Perhaps because of that, many in the Netherlands value a worked and productive

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landscape, one in which centuries of human activity are visible. Their vision of the environment is one that is found in many parts of Europe, a vision of a simple past, pre-industrial or perhaps even ancient, but still a past that is peopled. This is denied by the virtualising vision of the EHS, which elevates space defined by nature over place defined by people’s activities. The bulldozers and backhoes that strip the land of its topsoil also strip the land of its links to people, and people of their links to the land, justified by environmental ideology and its ‘principles or higher causes ... in whose name sacrifices have to be made’ (Brockington 2004: 414). As Onneweer observes, this denial is implicit in one aspect of the EHS vision, the notion of a transportable nature that can be stamped on the land anywhere in the country. Such a notion encourages forgetting and physically erasing the histories of people on the land, as these people see the results of their and their ancestors’ efforts to shape their land denigrated and overwritten with a land that knows neither them nor anything peculiar to people and place. And in this, the environmentalism that underlies the Ecologische Hoofd Structuur meets the vast agricultural and urban projects of what James Scott (1998) identifies with High Modernist ideology. Divergence and locality, the social and historical processes that generate them and the differentiations that they reflect and foster, are swept aside to make way for a rational uniformity that is seen, paradoxically, as natural. Environmentalist virtualism does not lead only to reshaping of the land to bring it into conformity with an ecological vision. It can also lead to efforts to reshape people. An obvious form this can take is campaigns to persuade people to think, and hence to act, in appropriate ways. Virtualisms concerning people can take more subtle and less expected forms as well. The next chapter in this volume describes some of these, Kathy Rettie’s ‘A Culture of Conservation: Shaping the Human Element in National Parks’. Alarmed that the growing number of visitors would threaten the nature that its parks were supposed to protect, in 2000 the Canadian government enacted new goals for its park system: ecological integrity replaced sustainable public benefit and enjoyment as the priority. To promote its new priority, the park system decided that it had to foster a New Model Visitor, one who would experience a park in a way that would foster a sense of commitment to Canada’s parks and share their environmentalist vision (cf. Agrawal 2005). Rettie describes two aspects of generating such visitors: objectification of visitors through modelling; shaping visitors to think in approved ways about what they are doing. The park system objectified visitors when it bought a computer program that allows them to project visitor movements through the parks, as a series of dots that move across a park map. These projections can be based on models that express sets of supposed motivations, and that

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Introduction | 11

predict what a virtual visitor would do in the context of the properties of different locations within a park. This objectification allows managers to see the anticipated changes in visitor behaviour that would follow from changes in visitor motivation. Such computer simulation provides a seemingly scientific justification for efforts to shape visitor desires and expectations. It is worth noting, though, that these simulation programs were developed mainly for commercial purposes, and they embody and express commercial assumptions. Indeed, as Rettie reports, one thing that attracted the Canadian parks administration to this sort of program is that it is said to be used by large companies running tourist sites, most notably the Disney Corporation. The other aspect Rettie describes is shaping visitors to think in approved ways. Such shaping is, of course, not new: any road- or pathside sign shapes the way the visitor perceives the landscape (Wilson 1992), as Onneweer makes clear for the EHS. However, the shaping that the Canadian park system adopted was a conscious policy of changing visitors’ orientations toward the parks, which it pursued through the content of interpretive exhibits and performances. As Rettie notes, this moved the parks firmly into the realm of governance, as they sought to impart in visitors a conceptual sense of how the parks ought to be perceived and how visitors ought to act, and a moral sense that these are right and that deviation from them is wrong. In doing this, the parks would make the virtual visitor flesh. This shaping requires that the parks have decided what sorts of visitors are preferred and what sorts are not, an assessment based on conformity to the parks’ vision of the New Model Visitor. Here the virtualising vision of the parks runs up against their position in the Canadian political economy. Canada’s parks decreasingly are run as a public service and increasingly are run as a business (see, e.g., Eagles 2002). Parks need visitors, not just because visitor numbers can be used to justify government funding but also because visitor spending is part of park revenue. The contradictions among the environmentalism of the virtual visitor, the commercial orientation of the parks and the motives of existing visitors are contained in that ranking of more and less desirable sorts of visitors. Rettie notes that a third of park visitors are considered undesirable, those who visit parks to go to bars, parties, concerts and shops. These are people with no environmentalist engagement, people who do not ‘take ownership’ of Canada’s parks and environment, which is to say, those who do not think about them and act towards them in the ways that the park administration wants. However, they generate significant revenues while posing no real threat to park ecology: never straying from the main roads, they disturb no wildlife and erode no land. This tale of the undesirable visitor points to a possible problem with the claim that environmentalism contains totalising visions with virtualising

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tendencies. Certainly the first three chapters of this volume show that there are such visions and tendencies. However, these undesirable visitors raise the possibility that realising the virtualism in practice is more problematic than critics seem to assume, just as the High Modern projects that Scott describes were more difficult to realise than their proponents assumed. If this is the case, then it would appear that the critics have privileged what André Béteille (1991: 6) called the ‘book-view’ over the ‘field-view’ of the environmental institutions that attract their attention. Béteille was referring to scholars studying India, and he objected that many of them saw India primarily in terms of analytical models. He said that they paid too little attention to the society as revealed by field research, which often differs from the India defined by those models. A similar thing may happen among some of those whose concern with the model and logic of governmentality, power-knowledge and the like leads them to focus on models of virtualising environmentalisms. They appear to ignore the relationship between what those models portray and the world revealed by fieldwork and case studies, between virtualism and governance on the one hand and execution on the other. The next chapter looks more directly at that relationship between virtualising tendency and practical execution. It is Colin Filer’s ‘A Bridge Too Far: The Knowledge Problem in the Millennium Assessment’. Filer’s chapter describes the practicalities of the virtualising vision of environmentalism as they appear in that Assessment. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is a high-level, large-scale effort to define both the state of the natural surroundings and, more subtly, how decision makers and the public ought to think about them. As Filer describes it, that orientation is economistic, even neoliberal. The natural environment is seen in terms of environmental services, construed overwhelmingly in material terms: water, CO2 absorption and the like. People are seen as little more than consumers of these services, and social groups are seen as little more than parts of webs of service provision and consumption. This orientation is not only material and economistic, it is global. The scope of that orientation is indicated by the organisations that fund the Assessment: the Global Environment Facility, the United Nations Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The World Bank, the United Nations Environment Programme. That global orientation is indicated as well by the fact that only one of the Assessment’s four constituent working groups was concerned with local, national and regional issues. That was the aptly-named Sub-Global Working Group, which had amongst its charges the issue of traditional or indigenous knowledge and its relationship with modern science. It was as a member of this working group that Filer was involved in the Assessment.

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The Assessment was intended to define the world from a particular perspective, and to define correct and incorrect forms of human behaviour regarding the world. It should, then, be an example of environmental virtualising. Certainly, as Filer describes, some people came to see it as such. This is particularly the case with indigenous and tribal groups, and the handful of participants concerned with those left out of this global vision. They all saw the perspectives and values of such people being denied any legitimacy by a Western steamroller. It is also the case with both Filer and one of the anthropologists he suggested for working-group participation: both of them saw the Assessment as the imposition of an anti-politics managerialism (see Ferguson 1990). In this sense, then, Filer’s chapter is an extension of the arguments made in the preceding chapters in this volume. And yet, what Filer describes of the reality of the operation of the Assessment does not neatly fit this view. Virtualism may exist at the level of intent and even policy, but is less clear at the level of organisation and execution. The committee meetings generated dissent, especially when that virtualism looked as though it was going to touch on sets of real, rather than virtual, people. Representatives and advocates of different such groups raised spirited objection, as did some members of the Assessment groups themselves. Moreover, as Filer notes, what had appeared to be consensus among members of some of the Assessment panels began to disintegrate when the time came actually to identify in practical terms what they were talking about abstractly. The points that Filer invokes echo the case that Rettie describes. There exist cracks in the edifice of virtualism that some critics see in environmentalism, cracks that suggest that virtualising tendencies may be harder to turn into virtualising practices than some seem to think. Saying this does not mean that the virtualising tendencies, and even pressures, do not exist, nor does it mean that those tendencies and pressures have no significant consequences. We are not, that is, arguing that the power of local people and their resistance overwhelms the virtualising pressures manifest in the Ecologische Hoofd Structuur or the Canadian park system or the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment; doing so strikes us as being romantic to the point of irresponsibility. It does, however, remain the case that virtualising pressures are constrained by forces and factors that are the context in which those pressures operate. The remaining chapters in this volume describe different aspects of that constraint.

Environmental Practice The first of these is Tighe Geoghegan’s ‘Creolising Conservation: Caribbean Responses to Global Trends in Environmental Management’,

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which focuses especially on the place of the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI) in the relationship between global environmental institutions and local people and projects. The metaphor that Geoghegan uses to describe that relationship is ‘creolisation’, originally a term in linguistics that has come to be applied to much of life in the Englishspeaking Caribbean and, indeed, to many places elsewhere (a classic statement is Hannerz 1987). In its regional usage, it refers to the ways that the ideas and practices introduced by dominant outsiders, typically based in Europe and North America, are not only adopted in the Caribbean, but also adapted to fit regional preferences and peculiarities. Geoghegan describes this creolisation in terms of the global visions that underlie and animate various environmentalist orientations that are injected into the region. While these differ in various ways, they have some common attributes. Important among these is a totalising uniformity, the assumption that because at heart the world is uniform in crucial respects, programmes are readily transportable from one part of the world to another. And, of course, if these programmes are implemented in the ways that their global advocates intend, they will bring different places in the world into conformity with the global vision they embody. That global vision is a sort of managerial neoliberalism applied to environmental conservation. It presupposes the incompetence of government and, rather than attempting the political task of trying to make it competent, this vision seeks to displace it with the seemingly nonpolitical, technical strengthening of ‘civil society’, individuals and voluntary organisations driven by the desire for financial gain. The dislike of government and the stress on individuals and gain are the neoliberal side of the vision; the attempts to impose monetary reward and generate the right kind of voluntary organisations are the managerial side, one that, once again, echoes High Modernism. If made flesh, this vision would make a capitalist, individualist world populated by rational, moneyseeking actors. In some circumstances, of course, governments are strong and willing enough to resist the imposition of this vision. For instance, Ralph Litzinger (2006) describes how China was able to thwart such an attempt, in the form of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund. Caribbean governments are too weak or unwilling to do this, or may in fact contain powerful factions that see the neoliberal vision as self-evident and even natural. So, outside agencies are relatively able to try to impose virtualising projects in the region. However, the metaphor of creolisation suggests that the region is sufficiently distinct that programmes developed elsewhere are not, in fact, readily exportable to the Caribbean. CANARI, as Geoghegan describes, is an institutional expression of that metaphor, for it seeks to ensure that those programmes actually fit local needs and practices, modifying or even rejecting them if they do not. The rubric for this testing

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and adaptation is stakeholder involvement, which invokes the important symbol of the representation and participation of interested parties as a counterweight to the symbolic and institutional strength of global visions and virtualising models. It could be argued, of course, that CANARI’s creolising efforts to restrict the effects of the virtualising visions of donors and aid agencies serve to increase governmentality in the region (e.g., Pugh 2005). This may be. However, the argument is fairly meaningless. That is because any effort to constrain any influence, certainly any effort that has a chance of success, is likely to entail organisation, thereby increasing governmentality. Curiously, then, when it points to the increase of governmentality, and then stops, this argument echoes the Modernist ideology that Scott describes: local circumstances and variations are ignored in the pursuit of a uniformitarian vision, not of rational ordering but of spreading governmentality. CANARI policies and practices hardly can be said to deny the virtualising tendencies of large donors and projects: as we have indicated, the influence and resources of those donors and projects are too great. However, when CANARI interposes itself between donor bodies and the world that those bodies seek to shape, modifying standard programmes to make them better suited to regional and local circumstances, or even urging that they be rejected, that regional organisation makes the virtualising consequences of environmentalism problematic. As Geoghegan describes, CANARI can challenge the underlying assumptions of the agencies and programmes involved. These agencies and programmes, like the global visions and virtualising tendencies that they embody, are still there. However, their connection with the world outside of themselves and the realisation of that virtualising tendency seem less secure, at least in the Caribbean, than they do when one’s focus is limited to just those institutions and their visions. Geoghegan’s chapter describes how an institution can complicate the relationship between a virtualising vision and the people and situations it seeks to encompass. That relationship can be complicated in other ways by the local people who are the subject of those visions. They might conform to global expectations only temporarily, for instance during the period of a project, and then revert to their normal lives once project staff leave. From a short-term perspective, the project may look like an example of virtualism; from a longer-term perspective local people are revealed to have constructed a Potemkin village to gain the rewards of the project. It may also be that local people are incapable of conforming to the vision, for reasons that are beyond the scope of the analytical model that drives it. The next chapter describes this sort of situation. It is Andrew Garner’s ‘Uncivil Society: Local Stakeholders and Environmental Protection in Jamaica’. Garner’s focus is inshore, artisanal fishers in Negril, a tourist

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town at the western end of Jamaica, their relationship with a Canadian aid agency and the ways that relationship is affected by their position in the Jamaican social and political order. As Garner describes, late in 2004 a volunteer working with that aid agency arrived in Negril to evaluate the possibility of directing development funding to local fishers. In both development and conservation circles, people like Negril fishers are important. They are local resource users; they are stakeholders in the local environment; their institutions are part of civil society. They are, then, a set of people ripe for the sort of classification and manipulation that is part of a virtualising environmental vision (see Bryant 2002; Walley 2004). That vision, like the Canadian aid agency, assumes that local stakeholders are joined in a collectivity that speaks for them, both in the sense of representing their interests and in the sense of controlling them. And sure enough, when the Canadian volunteer arrived, he found a flourishing fishing co-operative that was holding meetings, electing officers and making decisions. However, things unravelled fairly quickly: scheduled meetings failed to happen; decisions by the co-operative board were ineffective. Fishers’ initial conformity to the global vision of what the community of local resource users is like reflected their interest and enthusiasm. The deterioration of the situation that the volunteer witnessed reflected the social situation and cultural values of the fishers, and their position in the Jamaican political economy. For one thing, Negril fishers are no community of local resource users, their fishing beach is no community site. Rather, as Garner puts it, it is the place where a few hundred independent businesses operate. One reason for this may be that these local resource users were not a bounded ethnic group. Rather, they appear to be a class fraction, and hence alien to the conceptual frame of many organisations that fund conservation and development projects. Another reason is that Negril fishers, like many men in the region, strongly value autonomy and strongly distrust authority. Thus, they do not hold to the assumptions that funding bodies seem to make about what constitutes legitimate authority and what does not. Even if they had been more willing to grant authority to the co-operative and have it speak for them, it is not clear that these fishers could have conformed to the assumption of aid agencies about local resource users. This is because fishers were heavily constrained in what they could do and how they could appear to others by forces at work in what Garner calls the political-economic heartwood of environmental conservation in Jamaica. Moreover, these constraints were frequently misrecognised or misrepresented by those who confronted fishers. Such people saw the results of those constraints, but ascribed them to fishers’ incompetence, immorality or plain fecklessness. So, for instance, fishers were unable to show title to the land that they used for their fishing beach, which many

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took as evidence that they were squatters. However, as Garner relates, that title was in the hands of the national government, which was in the process of certifying it. It had been in government hands for several years, but fishers lacked the legal or political resources to get that process completed. What Garner tells us of the Negril fishing co-operative shows that when globalising visions encourage people to see the world in a particular way, they can act as blinders, inducing a methodical ignorance of institutions and processes outside their scope. For these fishers, those institutions and processes are the social, political and economic forces at play in Negril in particular, and in Jamaica more generally. And as Geoghegan describes in her chapter, they exist in different forms in other places in the region. Those forces shape what fishers can do and how they are treated in ways that further decrease the likelihood that a virtualising vision will be realised. To repeat a point we have made before, to say that the virtualising vision may not be realised does not mean that Negril fishers will be left alone. Rather, their failures to conform to the conception of a community of resource users may result in their being defined as too irresponsible to merit consideration by governments and environmental organisations, stripped of whatever legitimacy they may have, dispossessed of their fishing beach and their livelihoods. The final chapter in this volume looks at another reason why that virtualising vision may not be realised, one that goes to the core of environmental virtualism. That reason is the very institutions that international environmental bodies use to implement their programmes and policies. The chapter is by Flip van Helden, ‘“The report was written for money to come”: Constructing and Reconstructing the Case for Conservation in Papua New Guinea’. In this chapter, van Helden describes the development and execution of two conservation projects in Papua New Guinea (PNG). These were in the late 1990s and they were funded by bodies like The Nature Conservancy, the Global Environment Fund and the United Nations Development Programme. These are just the sort of organisations that attract criticism for their totalising views and virtualising tendencies. They may well deserve these criticisms, but, as this chapter shows, those views and tendencies are not necessarily as powerful as critics suppose. The first of the projects was in island PNG, and was intended to establish an integrated conservation and development project to eliminate the harmful wholesale commercial logging that was taking place in the project site. No sustainable forestry project emerged and commercial logging continued. However, project staff were able to convert that project from a failure into a source of valuable lessons learned, and hence into justification for the second project. This took place on the PNG mainland, and it also was intended to establish integrated conservation and development projects to protect forest resources. From the perspective of

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the organisations that funded it, it too was a failure, just as many such projects fail around the world. The significance of van Helden’s tale lies not, however, in the fact that these projects failed. Rather, it lies in the nature of that failure, and what it tells us about those large environmental organisations. As he shows, the failure of the first project was effectively defined away: it did not become a success, but it was valuable nonetheless in constructing the case for the second project. That second project failed because it was captured by the field staff. These people were energetic and conscientious, but their orientations and goals were markedly different from those of the project managers in their offices in the national capital, and from those of the funding agencies involved. In short, the funders and managers had little control over what was happening in the field. Indeed, they may well not even have known what was happening in the field, or known that field staff had visions of the project different from those of their superiors in national and head offices. This state of affairs is not uncommon. In large projects of the sort van Helden describes, the head office frequently has little knowledge of and control over what is going on in the field, and frequently is ignorant of the difference between its vision of the project and the vision held by field staff (Chapin 2004; see also Mosse 2004). In the case van Helden describes, the funding agencies had fairly strict guidelines about the sort of environmental situation, sort of local people and sort of project that would merit funding. Those who sought the funds for the second project were able to construct something that would satisfy those agencies. This was a vision of environmental threat (where there was no real evidence of one), of rapacious and despoiling villagers (again without evidence) and, of course, of a project team that knew the local people and their orientations and motivations well enough to devise a successful programme (and again, without evidence). Doing all this required care and attention. Those proposing and running the project had to know which views of local people were preferred by the funding agencies, preferences that changed fairly rapidly. They had to know enough about the local areas to be able to find or to construct a real or looming environmental crisis. And, of course, they had to know the features of project proposals that would mark them as suitable to achieve the funder’s goals and so attract the funder’s support. From what van Helden describes, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that the funding agencies became the captives of project proposers and staff. Partly, of course, this is because the isolated parts of PNG are a long way from agency headquarters, and even from their regional offices. However, this capture was facilitated by the very vision of the funding bodies, a vision that was explained in formal documents and advice to potential applicants, and was fleshed out in gossip and advice circulating among those applicants. The result is a kind of virtualism writ small.

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Funding bodies had a vision of what projects and the world in which they operate fundamentally are like. They acted to implement that vision and as a result these virtualising agencies got what was, in fact, virtual projects: on paper they were what the funders wanted; in practice they were not. Appropriately, van Helden’s chapter recapitulates much of the argument that this volume makes. The bodies that supported these projects in PNG had a virtualising vision of the world. That vision was concerned with biodiversity, threats to it and ways to protect it, and it underlay the first project that van Helden describes, in island PNG. The project’s failure to produce local conservation activities made it clear that the underlying vision was flawed, not least because its partiality, the corollary of its focus on biodiversity, excluded any serious attention to the social, political and cultural factors that influence people’s approaches to their natural surroundings. However, a range of factors made it unlikely that this realisation would be communicated to the funders’ head offices. Most especially, as van Helden indicates in his discussion of the exercise in damage limitation that followed the failure of the first project, no one wanted to call it a failure and certainly no one wanted to be blamed for it. While this can involve conscious deception, more likely to be important are the sort of consensusgenerating social processes and assumptions that David Mosse (2006) describes. As well, those funding bodies have consolidated their control over environmental conservation (see Chapin 2004: 22–8). As Filer’s chapter noted, the result is that it is increasingly difficult to get support for conservation projects without adopting the approaches and tools that such bodies recognise and authorise. This, of course, reduces the likelihood that there will be support for projects that recognise and take account of the local context of ecological processes. This in turn raises doubts about the depth of support for participatory or community-based environmental projects, for they contradict the Modernist uniformitarian denial of context that is part of the totalising vision of many powerful environmentalisms. Here is the political power that, we said earlier, underlies a potent virtualising vision. And, of course, to pass the message of a flawed orientation up the chain to headquarters would challenge not only the power of those bodies; it would also challenge the pertinence, and hence authority, of the system of knowledge production that, as we said earlier, is necessary for a powerful virtualism. That system of knowledge production is the natural sciences, particularly the idea of biodiversity and the field of conservation biology, as well as the social sciences, particularly assumptions about maximising materialism. For all of these reasons, the powerful conservationist virtualising vision was not challenged. While this may help maintain the strength of that vision, it does not mean that its virtual reality is realised in the field in PNG. Villagers there were prepared to conform to project expectation when they thought it was

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in their interest to do so, but as the promise of project support receded their conformity declined. The same, of course, applies to project field staff, who constructed a world that reflected funders’ vision as expressed in their policy statements and guidelines. And finally, the field staff in PNG acted in ways that echo what Geoghegan says of CANARI, albeit in a more surreptitious way. Convinced that the funders’ vision would neither help nor work in PNG, they rejected some parts of it and modified others. The result was a creolised, or perhaps ‘pidginised’, model of environmental protection.

Conclusion From what we have said, there is good reason to think that large environmental organisations and large conservation projects are not as effective as their publicity suggests, or as their critics seem to think. These projects can fail to achieve their stated goals for a variety of reasons, some because of factors at work in project sites, some because of factors at work within these organisations. For good or ill, they may have a vision of the world, but they do not seem very effective as virtualising institutions. However, to say that they are not very good as virtualising institutions is not, as we have stated, the same as saying that they are inconsequential. In his Conclusion, Josiah Heyman reminds us that their goals and programmes have effects on people in different parts of the word. These are not just the people who are the focus of their projects, but also the staff that they employ, the organisations with which they contract, the government bodies and officials with which they interact. As he argues, if we are to understand the significance of these institutions, we have to attend to these effects, which can be systematic even if unintended. Even though they may have significant unintended consequences, these organisations appear to have a hard time making the world conform to their vision of it. This raises a simple question: If these organisations are not, in fact, very good at conserving the environment in ways that they claim to do, what do they think that they are doing? What factors lead them to continue to follow a path that seems so laden with failure? To begin to answer that question requires what many have called for but few, if any, have done, a careful study of those organisations themselves (MacDonald 2002), the sort of study that builds on observations of the type that Mosse (2004, 2006) has made about the legitimising aspect of large-scale projects and the interpretative communities that they foster. Their apparent difficulty in making the world conform to their vision raises a second question that is more narrowly academic: Why do critics see in them a new device of global governance and control? On paper, as some of the chapters in this volume show, these organisations appear to

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justify that criticism. However, as other chapters show, justification is much less certain when one complements the attention to policy statements, maps and project guidelines with attention to the practical operation of projects and the relationships between these organisations and the contexts in which they exist. As we have said already, we do not mean that we think that these organisations are powerless, or that their projects have no effects. To say that they have power and that their projects have effects, however, is not the same as saying that these organisations can do what they claim and what the critics say, impose a new order on the pertinent parts of the world and the people who live there. We have already suggested something that may bear on this second question, in our invocation of Béteille’s difference between the book-view and the field-view. This is, however, only the beginning of an answer. To extend it into something more complete and adequate, we would need what none have called for, the detailed study not of environmental organisations but of those who comment on them. We close, then, with questions rather than answers. We hope, however, that what the contributors to this volume have had to say makes these questions both sensible and salient for those who seek to understand environmental conservation in its present form.

Acknowledgement We want to thank Kenneth I. MacDonald not only for his participation in the workshop from which this volume comes, but also for his helpful suggestions about an earlier draft of this Introduction.

References Agrawal, Arun. 2005. Environmentality: community, intimate government, and the making of environmental subjects in Kumaon, India. Current Anthropology 46: 161–90. Aldridge, Don. 1989. How the ship of interpretation was blown off course in the tempest: some philosophical thoughts. In Heritage interpretation vol. 1: the natural and built environment, ed. David Uzzell, pp. 64–87. London: Belhaven Press. Barkow, Jerome H., Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (eds) 1991. The adapted mind: evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Béteille, André. 1991. Introduction. In Society and politics in India: essays in a comparative perspective, A. Béteille, pp. 1–14. London: Athlone Press.

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22 | James G. Carrier and Paige West Bosso, Christopher J. 2005. Environment, Inc.: from grassroots to Beltway. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Brockington, Dan. 2004. Community conservation, inequality and injustice: myths of power in protected area management. Conservation and Society 2: 411–32. Bryant, Raymond L. 2002. Non-governmental organisations and governmentality: ‘consuming’ biodiversity and indigenous people in the Philippines. Political Studies 50: 268–92. Carrier, James G. 1998. Introduction. In Virtualism: a new political economy, ed. J. G. Carrier and Daniel Miller, pp. 1–24. Oxford: Berg. Chapin, Mac. 2004. A challenge to conservationists. World Watch 17 (6): 17–31. Cosgrove, Denis. 1994. Contested global visions: One-World, Whole Earth and the Apollo space photographs. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84: 270–94. Crewe, Emma and Elizabeth Harrison. 1998. Whose development? An ethnography of aid. London: Zed Books. Cronon, William. 1995. The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature. In Uncommon ground: toward reinventing nature, ed. W. Cronon, pp. 69–90. New York: W. W. Norton. Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eagles, Paul F. J. 2002. Trends in park tourism: economics, finance and management. Journal of Sustainable Tourism 10: 132–53. Escobar, Arturo. 1998. Whose knowledge? Whose nature? Biodiversity, conservation, and the political ecology of social movements. Journal of Political Ecology 5: 53–82. ———. 1999. After nature: steps to an antiessentialist political ecology. Current Anthropology 40: 1–30. Ferguson, James. 1990. The anti-politics machine: ‘development’, depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. New York: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock. Hannerz, Ulf. 1987. The world in creolization. Africa 57: 546–59. Ingold, Tim. 2000. Globes and spheres: the topology of environmentalism. In The perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill, T. Ingold, pp. 209–18. London: Routledge. Kull, Kalevi, Toomas Kukk and Aleksei Lotman. 2003. When culture supports biodiversity: the case of the wooded meadow. In Imagining nature: practices of cosmology and identity, ed. Andreas Roepstorff, Nils Bubandt and K. Kull, pp. 76–96. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern. London: Prentice-Hall. Lewis, David and David Mosse (eds) 2006. Development brokers and translators: the ethnography of aid and agencies. Bloomfield, Conn.: Kumarian Press.

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Introduction | 23 Litzinger, Ralph A. 2006. Contested sovereignties and the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund. PoLAR 29: 66–87. Lovelock, James. 1979. Gaia: a new look at life on earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacDonald, Kenneth I. 2002. Political ecology and the demand for organizational ethnography. Presented at the American Anthropological Association meeting, 19–24 November, New Orleans. (Available from author, at [email protected].) MacKenzie, J. M. 1989. The empire of nature: hunting, conservation and British imperialism. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Mosse, David. 2004. Cultivating development: an ethnography of aid policy and practice. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2006. Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection, and the ethnography of public policy and professional communities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 12: 935–56. ——— and David Lewis. 2005. The aid effect. London: Pluto Press. Nationalpark Neusiedler See. n.d. The Neuseidler See ecosystem. Apetlon, Austria: Nationalpark Neusiedler See – Seewinkel. Pugh, Jonathan. 2005. The disciplinary effects of communicative planning in Soufriere, St Lucia: governmentality, hegemony and space-timepolitics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (NS) 30: 307–21. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Smith, Neil. 1990. Uneven development: nature, capital and the production of space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Stone, Christopher D. 1974. Should trees have standing? Toward legal rights for natural objects. Los Altos, Cal.:, W. Kaufmann. Strathern, Marilyn. 1989. After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. New York: Cambridge University Press. US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. 2004. The Cetacean community vs. Bush. (Case number 03-15866; decision announced 20 November 2004.) www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/8D838D1B772C88DA88 256F32007C8AEE/$file/0315866.pdf?openelement (12 December 2006). Walley, Christine J. 2004. Rough waters: nature and development in an African marine park. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. West, Paige. 2006. Conservation is our government now: the politics of ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wilson, Alexander. 1992. The culture of nature: North American landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

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CHAPTER 1

Virtualism and the Logic of Environmentalism VASSOS ARGYROU

This chapter is concerned with the apparent reversal of the modernist ‘physics’ and ‘anthropology’ in environmentalism; the reversal, that is, of the modernist perception of the physical world and definition of humanity and culture.1 The central question it raises is whether this reversal signifies rupture with Modernism, as environmentalists and, for different reasons, their Modernist critics claim, or whether, rhetoric and common sense notwithstanding, it reflects some sort of continuity. Addressing this question not only helps illuminate the relationship between environmentalism and Modernity; it also shows how environmentalism, much like Modernity, can lapse into what Carrier (1998) calls ‘virtualism’; how, that is, it constructs a vision of the world, which it takes to be reality itself, and attempts to make the world conform to it. The idea that there is continuity between environmentalism and Modernity, rather than rupture, is not new. There is an argument from sociology according to which the core characteristic of Modernity is not rationality and science or whatever else has historically been used to isolate and define the Modern but something else. It is reflexivity, which is the practice of questioning and doubting everything, including the means by which one questions and doubts. As Giddens (1991) says, unlike the reflexivity of ‘traditional’ societies, which ceases its questioning when it reaches the authority of tradition, Modernity’s reflexivity is wholesale and makes no exceptions. On the basis of this argument, postmodernism emerges as reflexive Modernisation rather than something that takes us 1. This chapter draws on the argument developed in Argyrou (2005).

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beyond the Modern. This is because it does precisely what Modernism is supposed to do: question and doubt everything, including itself. In a similar vein, environmentalism emerges as ‘ecological enlightenment’ (Beck 1992), a radical questioning of the received wisdom about the nature of the physical world akin to the enlightened questioning of tradition and religion in the eighteenth century. As I have argued elsewhere (Argyrou 2003), there are good grounds for refusing to take reflexive Modernisation seriously as either a theory or a myth.2 But perhaps there is something to be said about the argument for continuity, provided that Giddens’s and Beck’s voluntarism is set aside and Modernism is posited in its full cultural density. The argument developed in this chapter is that environmentalism operates with an inherited cultural logic, which appears in the Modernist proclivity to imagine the social as a unity. This image of unity leads the Modernist to strive either to change society to fit this image or, since these are no longer revolutionary times, to reinterpret social divisions in such a way that the image’s integrity and persuasive force remain intact.3 Environmentalism operates with this logic, but does more than simply reproduce it: it takes it to its logical and ontological conclusion. Over and above the unity of the social, it imagines and propagates the unity of the social and the physical. As one might expect, and as will become apparent in the course of this essay, this vision of unity is most clearly articulated by the more radical environmentalist factions. It remains implicit, which is to say unthought, in mainstream environmentalism, as, for instance, in the often-heard but rarely clarified statement, ‘we are part of nature and nature is part of us’.

Rupture Up until the middle of the twentieth century, nature was perceived, broadly speaking, as an intractable domain of utility and danger that was to be mastered by ‘man’ and brought under his control, both conceptual and physical. This was the physics of Modernism, a view of the nature of nature that competed with, but for all practical purposes dominated, another strand of Modernism and its perception of reality, Romanticism (on the Romantic view of nature, see Berlin 1999). A corollary of this was the view that man could and should master nature, since it was to the

2. For a critique of the theory’s voluntarism and disregard of culture, see Alexander (1996). 3. In his discussion of the ‘utopian mentality’, Mannheim identifies the latter attitude as ‘liberal-humanitarian’ (1936: 211–47).

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extent that he did so that he would attain his telos and become what he was meant to be, the only relevant Subject of the world. This was the anthropology of Modernism, the dominant view of what it meant to be a human being. It was Modernist humanism in the double sense of this term: both the belief in the powers of man and the belief that all men were intrinsically the same – the idea of the ‘psychic unity of mankind’, as Tylor (1874) put it – which meant that those men who had a different perception of themselves and the world could be nothing other than culturally inferior and in need of humanisation. There are countless examples of this Modernist humanism in the literature. Here I choose the example of the nineteenth-century historian who looks at the world and sees clearly that ‘the tendency has been, in Europe, to subordinate nature to man: out of Europe, to subordinate man to nature’. Such is the rule, and although ‘there are, in barbarous countries, several exceptions … in civilized countries the rule has been universal’ (Buckle 1878: 151). Buckle goes on to clarify, and it is worth following his clarification at some length: It is accordingly in Europe alone, that man has really succeeded in taming the energies of nature, bending them to his own will, turning them aside from their ordinary course, and compelling them to minister to his happiness, and subserve the general purposes of human life. All around us are the traces of this glorious and successful struggle. Indeed, it seems as if in Europe there was nothing that man feared to attempt. The invasions of the sea repelled, and whole provinces, as in the case of Holland, rescued from its grasp, mountains cut through and turned into level roads: soils of the most obstinate sterility becoming exuberant, from the mere advances of chemical knowledge; while in regard to electric phenomena, we see the subtlest, most rapid, and most mysterious of all forces, made the medium of thought, and obeying even the most capricious behest of the human mind. In other instances, where the products of the external world have been refractory, man has succeeded in destroying what he could hardly hope to subjugate. The most cruel diseases … have entirely disappeared from the civilized parts of Europe; and it is scarcely possible that they should ever again be seen there. Wild beasts and birds of prey have been extirpated, and are no longer allowed to infest the haunts of civilised men. (Buckle 1878: 153–6)

The same humanist message, albeit now couched in the lexicon of modernisation and development, was very much in evidence in the 1950s and 1960s. Take, for instance, the United Nations expert advice to the ‘underdeveloped countries’: Economic progress will not be desired in a community where people do not realize that progress is possible. Progress occurs where people believe that man can, by conscious effort, master nature. This is a lesson which the human mind has been a long time learning. Where it has been learnt, human beings are experimental in their attitude to material techniques, to social institutions, and so on. This experimental attitude is one of the preconditions for progress. (UN 1951: 13)

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In 1962 the United Nations organised a conference ‘on the application of science and technology for the benefit of less developed areas’ (UN 1963) and published the proceedings in eight volumes. In the first volume, World of opportunity, the ‘less developed’ are encouraged to seize the opportunity provided by the more developed and ‘leap across the centuries’ (UN 1963: 221). The less developed did not need to reinvent the wheel, according to the United Nations experts. They could master nature and bridge the gap of centuries that separated them from the developed in a matter of decades. What they needed to achieve this feat was already at hand, Western science and technology. By the late 1960s the perception of nature and man’s relation to it begins to change. To stay with the United Nations literature, in 1972 the first conference on ‘the human environment’ was organised in Stockholm. The first statement of the declaration in the published report indicates the changes in the Modernist vision of the world and sets the mood and tone for the rest of the text: ‘Man is both creature and moulder of his environment, which gives him physical sustenance and affords him the opportunity for intellectual, moral, social and spiritual growth’ (UN 1973: 3). It would seem that man was still very much in evidence in the early 1970s, though a more discriminating reading suggests that this is not the man of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has now been reduced in size quite drastically. He is no longer master and creator but a humble ‘moulder’ of nature and a ‘creature’ in it. What we encounter in this text, then, is not ‘man’ but a new and much more modest persona, the ‘human being’. As for nature in the form of the intractable domain of utility and danger to be mastered and brought under control, it is nowhere to be found. It has been replaced by the ‘human environment’, which provides generously and takes care of the human being’s many and diverse needs, from physical survival to intellectual, spiritual, moral and social growth. How is this momentous transformation in the perception of nature and humanity to be explained? To be sure, there are well-known answers. One could argue, as most people probably would, that there was little choice in the matter. The imminent ecological collapse meant that we either change our ways or perish. But there are also well-known problems with such an argument. It assumes, as all positivism does, that facts are directly accessible without the mediation of culture. And because it operates with this assumption, it cannot explain disagreements about what is to count as a fact, or about what those things that do count mean. Take, for instance, the following facts provided by the ‘reformed’ Danish environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg: 1.

Deforestation: Deforestation in the Amazon was estimated at 2 per cent per year. Lomborg (2001: 114) argues that it ‘has been about 14 percent since man arrived … [while] at least 3 percent of this 14 percent has

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2.

3.

4.

since been replaced by new forests’. Moreover, the idea that forests are the ‘lungs of the world’ is a ‘myth’. While it is true that they produce oxygen, they consume precisely the same amount through decomposition when they die. ‘Therefore, forests in equilibrium … neither produce nor consume oxygen in net terms’ (2001: 115). Acid rain: Acid rain does not kill forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The controlled experiments carried out by the American National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) demonstrated that ‘even with precipitation almost ten times as acidic as the average acid rain in the eastern US (pH 4.2) the trees grew just as fast. In fact many of NAPAP’s studies showed that trees exposed to moderate acid rain grew faster’ (2001: 179). Biodiversity: Conservationists estimate that 25,000–27,000 species become extinct each year. Paul Erlich argued in 1981 that ‘half of the Earth’s species [will] be gone by the year 2000 and all gone by 2010–25’ (2001: 249). More recent, and for Lomborg more objective, estimates, including those of the UN Global biodiversity assessment, place the rate of extinction at 0.7 per cent per 50 years. ‘An extinction rate of 0.7 percent over the next 50 years is not trivial. … However, it is much smaller than the typically advanced 10–100 percent over the next 50 years’ (2001: 255). Ozone layer: The damage in the ozone layer, which allows more UV-B rays through the earth’s atmosphere, is not as serious as environmentalists claim. Exposure to UV-B radiation as a result of the ‘hole’ in the layer ‘is equivalent on the mid-latitudes to moving approximately 200 km … closer to the equator – a move smaller than that from Manchester to London, Chicago to Indianapolis, Albany to New York, Lyons to Marseilles, Trento to Florence, Stuttgart to Düsseldorf or Christchurch to Wellington’ (2001: 276).

The point in citing these facts is not to argue that Lomborg’s claims are somehow more objective than those of other environmentalists. Rather, it is that they reflect a different interpretation of the world. Like all facts, they are accessible through specific categories of perception and evaluation, which make them visible and perhaps relevant and meaningful. I say ‘perhaps’ because, as environmentalists themselves often point out, mere visibility is not sufficient to endow facts with meaning, relevance and urgency. One example should suffice here. ‘Opinion polls’, environmentalists point out, ‘confirm that many people now accept the significance of the crisis we call environmental. … Yet individually, relatively few people do anything significant about this recognition in their personal lives’ (Grove-White 1993: 29; see also Callicott 1999; Naess 1989). Such is the ‘troubling paradox’, Grove-White (1993: 23–4) says, that needs to be explained. ‘Can it be that

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such inconsistency reflects in part the inauthenticity of the largely “physicalist” descriptions of what is at stake?’ Are environmental facts, in other words, so ‘factual’ and ‘scientistic’ as to fail to move the wider public? Is there something else ‘at stake’, something more ‘authentic’ than scientific facts that could tip the balance? Grove-White thinks there is. ‘Scientism,’ he says, has failed to ‘engage people’s full being’; it has failed because of its ‘superficial treatment of the mysteriousness and open-endedness of existence itself. There is little sign in the official descriptions of environmental problems or methodologies of the radically unknown character of the future, or of humankind’s place in creation.’ The mysteriousness and open-endedness of existence, the radically unknown character of the future and humankind’s place in the creation, are not strictly related to the environmental crisis. Yet for Grove-White and other environmentalists, it is precisely such things that count and account for the difference between mere knowledge and conviction, indifference and concern, apathy and action. To understand environmentalism, then, facts are not enough. What we also need is the cultural context in which they acquire meaning, gravity, urgency. To be sure, the cultural context has already been sketched by environmentalists themselves. Szerszynski (1996: 105–6), for instance, argues that ‘even the dominant Modernist versions of environmentalism’, versions that rely heavily on science to make their case, ‘even when they take their most technocratic and seemingly morally neutral guises, can themselves be seen as crucially relying on certain moves within [the Modernist] problematic’, the question of how to ‘find meaning in a meaningless universe’. The context, it would seem, is the meaninglessness of the modern condition, a view shared by environmentalists, their critics (e.g., Ferry 1995; North 1995) and the social theorists who see environmentalism as one of the movements that grapple with this problem (e.g., Giddens 1991). On the basis of this argument, environmentalism emerges as a radical break with Modernism in a double sense. Not only does it reverse the Modernist physics and anthropology, it also overcomes Modernism’s inability to provide meaning and ontological security. There is no doubt that the environmentalist perception of nature and humanity is very different from that of the Modernist paradigm. What is not so clear is whether this change goes beyond the phenomenological level, the level of experience and common sense, and signifies a deeper rupture. What also needs to be examined is the presumed meaninglessness of the modern condition, what Weber liked to call the ‘disenchantment of the world’. His expression refers to the disappearance of the magical in nature, but it says nothing about culture. We must therefore ask whether the magical has been banished from Modernist society and culture as well. Is it really the case that although people find meaning in their private lives, such as love (Weber 1946b), the ‘meaning of meaning’ (Ferry 1995: 136) is

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absent and there is no unifying meta-narrative? The conventional answer is ‘Yes’. At the heart of Modernity is the idea of individual autonomy and freedom as the highest of all values, and the demand to think for oneself, the essence of Kant’s answer to the question of what Enlightenment is about. Hence, as Weber (1946a: 155) saw it, there are two kinds of people. One kind is those who bear the meaninglessness of the modern condition ‘like men’. The other is those who cannot do so, but turn to mythologies like religion for support, losing their autonomy in the process. Although it is rather rhetorical to dub the idea of individual autonomy and freedom the highest of all values, since it points directly to the sacred, it is not inaccurate. That Modernism is characterised by a cult of the individual, so that in Modernism, as Durkheim (1984 [1933]: 122) put it, ‘the individual becomes the object of a sort of religion’, is by now taken for granted. But precisely because of this, it is necessary to see how it is conceptualised and how it manifests itself in practice. My argument will be Durkheimian, namely that Modernism, far from being disenchanted and meaningless, has its own ‘sort of religion’. That is what, for reasons that will become apparent, I call ‘pure humanity’. I will also argue that environmentalism differs from Modernism only to the extent that it makes pure humanity more inclusive, to the extent that it encompasses nature itself. To substantiate these claims it will be necessary to sketch the cultural logic of Modernism, the process through which the Modernist subjectivity comes to imagine the world as a unit and then attempts to change or reinterpret the world in such a way as to make it conform to this vision – a classic example of virtualism.

The Logic of the Same It is often said that Modernity is an ‘internally referential system’ (Giddens 1991), one that authorises its truths and forms of knowledge with reference to itself. This claim, which can be traced back to the Enlightenment, raises two questions. First, where does one need to go to have this totalised view of the world, society as a closed system without external referents? Second, and more importantly, what happens when one arrives there? The answer to the first question is logically and historically straightforward. To see the world as a totality, one must step outside it. This, for instance, is what Kant (1781) did at the dawn of Modernity, when he posited time and space as the conditions of possibility of experience. In order to put an end to speculative philosophy and delimit the proper domain of metaphysics, he became speculative and metaphysical himself by stepping outside the world of experience, even if only once. He had to do so because no one can know the conditions of possibility of experience by means of experience itself. To know those conditions, one must rely on something other than experience, in this case the imagination.

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As the story goes, stepping outside the world in order to constitute it as reality in its totality became necessary when faith in a divinely ordained world collapsed. What has not, to my knowledge, ever received serious consideration is the second question: what happens when one steps outside the world and looks at it from a cosmic perspective? Perhaps this is because, since the Enlightenment, the metaphysical as a domain of investigation has been discredited to such an extent that no one is prepared to venture into it – no one, that is, except anthropologists, and even then only insofar as they deal with non-Western metaphysical systems. But perhaps it is time to treat Western metaphysics with all due anthropological seriousness. Not to do so would render the anthropological treatment of non-Western metaphysics patronising and superfluous. As everyday experience suggests, distance has the effect of levelling difference and rendering things indistinguishable, as when one moves away from the trees and sees the forest. Looking from a distance through the mind’s eye – that is, with concepts – has the same effect. The more general and abstract the concepts used to conceptualise the world, the more the world emerges as a unity.4 The limiting case in the Western intellectual tradition is reached in Hegel’s disagreement with Kant about the possibility of knowing ‘the thing-in-itself’, the essence of the world or what in philosophy is often called ‘Being’. As Collingwood (1945) explains, for Hegel Being or the nature of reality was the easiest thing to know. There is simply nothing in particular to know about it precisely because there are no distinctions to be made, whether qualitative or quantitative, spatial or temporal, material or spiritual. Looking from such a distance, all difference disappears and everything fuses together, all individual beings become one. The observer ends up with a picture of the world a--s absolute unity, Being pure and simple, which is nothing, since nothing can be distinguished in this picture, though not nothingness. This metaphysics of identity or sameness is the prerequisite of Modernist physics. Collingwood compares the Modernist vision of the physical world with the ancient Greek vision. As he points out (Collingwood 1945: 98, emphasis added), ‘for Aristotle, nature is made up of substances differing in quality and acting heterogeneously: earth naturally moves towards the centre, fire away from the centre, and so forth’. By the time of Bacon and Galileo, these differences are stripped away. ‘For the new cosmology there can be no natural differences of quality; there can only be one substance, qualitatively uniform throughout the world, and its only differences are therefore differences in quantity and of geometrical structure’ (1945: 98). In his own reflections on Modernist cosmology,

4. The same sort of unity can occur with the conceptual proximity and immediacy of intuition or direct experience (see Argyrou 2005).

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Heidegger makes a similar point. In contrast to the Aristotelian doctrine of differences in quality, the modern view of the natural posits that ‘no motion or direction of motion is superior to any other. Every place is equal to every other. No point in time has preferences over any other’ (1977: 119, emphasis added). The same metaphysics of sameness informs the Modernist perception of the social world. Consider, for instance, Marx’s argument about the capitalist economy and the equalisation of different things on the market, including labour. As in the perception of the natural world, the process is one of conceptual distancing and abstraction. Different kinds of work are decontextualised and become equivalent, abstract labour. Different things or use values are equalised in exchange as commodities, as bearers of the same amount of abstract labour. This equalisation and interchangeability of concrete individuals is also reflected, positively this time, in the figure of the abstract and universal, that is, purified, human. As Davies argues in a recent study, the essence of humanism is a universal capacity to think of yourself … as an individual: not as Florentine or Marseillais or a sailor or Roman Catholic or somebody’s daughter and grand-daughter, important though all those affiliations might be, but as a free-standing, self-determining person with an identity and a name that is not simply a marker of family, birthplace or occupation but is ‘proper’ – belonging to you alone. (Davies 1997: 16)

So, even though this type of subjectivity is enmeshed in all sorts of affiliations, it has the ability to disengage itself from all particularity and imagine itself as a unique being, as someone irreducible to any time or place. Yet the experience of the self as a unique being is universal, is what unique individuals recognise in other unique individuals, is what unites and makes them the same in their uniqueness. Humanity, says Davies (1997: 21), ‘is both general and special, common and rare. Each of us lives our human-ness as a uniquely individual experience; but that experience … is part of a larger, all-embracing humanity, a “human condition”’. The primary effect of this abstraction, then, is the dissolution of particularity and difference, such as those based on class, religion, kinship and ethnic identity. From a position outside it, the social world emerges as an ‘allembracing humanity’, an absolute unity which, much like Hegel’s Being, or the nature of physical reality, is nothing, though not nothingness; nothing, since there are no distinctions to be made, whether historical, social or cultural. All one can say about humanity in this sense is that it simply is.5

5. It should be noted that interchangeability of concrete individuals is not without problems. For instance, as second-wave feminism has come to recognise, there is no such thing as universal ‘woman’, only women in different social, cultural, historical contexts (e.g., di Leonardo 1991).

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It should already be apparent that humanity is epistemologically pure, as in the Kantian notion of pure intuitions uncontaminated by the empirical. My contention, to which I will return below, is that it is pure also in the anthropological sense, namely, as that which designates the highest of all values, the sacred. What needs to be noted also is that, much like the pure intuitions of time and space that are the condition of possibility of legitimate experience, the concept of humanity delimits the domain of legitimate social experience. Anything that contradicts the vision of the social world as a unity, such as ethnocentrism or sexism, emerges as fiction and is explained away as the result of, say, ignorance or arrogance. Finally, let us note the inevitable conflict between the metaphysical and the empirical, between pure humanity and its less than pure manifestations in society and history, between the dissolution of the particularities of class, kinship, religious and ethnic identity in the imagination and their stubborn persistence in everyday life. This brings me back to the question of the disenchantment of the world. To explore this issue further, I turn to what is admittedly an unlikely source, Weber. As we have seen, he is one of those who believed that one of the key characteristics of Modernism was the disenchantment of the world. He recognised that this was a predicament, but he argued that the ‘fate of the times’ needed to be borne with courage for the sake of human freedom and dignity: To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all they do not make it hard for him. One way or another he has to bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice’ – that is inevitable. If he can really do it, we shall not rebuke him. (Weber 1946a: 155)

It should be noted in passing, but not because it is a trivial matter, that there are symbolic profits to be gained from this manly posture. The more meaningless the world, the greater the admiration for those who can bear it. In any case, Weber has also done much to further our understanding of the nature of religion, particularly as it comes to bear on the question of meaning. As he points out, although the idea of salvation is very old, it ‘attained a specific significance only where it expressed a systematic and rationalized “image of the world” and represented a stand in the face of the world. … “From what” and “for what” one wished to be redeemed … depended upon one’s image of the world’ (Weber 1946b: 280). There are, then, two key elements in Weber’s schema: constructing a systematic, rationalised image of the world, and taking a stand in the face of the world. Having taken a stand, one discovers that the ‘face’ does not fit the image; in other words, that the real world is quite different from how one imagines it. As a result, Weber goes on to say, the actual world or at least ‘something in the actual world … is experienced as specifically

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“senseless”’ (1946b: 281). The actual world, or whatever in the world does not fit the rationalised image, becomes the ‘from what’ one wishes to be redeemed. No doubt, Weber’s intention was to explain the psychology of world religions. However, what he has to say bears such an uncanny resemblance to the psychology of Modernism that it becomes the postmodernist’s ‘ethnographic allegory’ (Clifford 1986), talking about the self through a description of others. It should already be apparent that the Modernist systematic and rationalised image of the social is pure humanity, the vision of human unity attained when one disengages from all particularity and difference. It should also be apparent that particularity and difference themselves, the social divisions encountered in the course of everyday life, are the ‘senseless’ from which the Modernist subjectivity wishes to be redeemed. This picture of Modernism is not as abstract as it might appear. It describes the Modernist subjectivity’s ‘stand in the face of the world’ since at least the nineteenth century and highlights its historical trajectory to the present. What I have in mind as a rough index of both is the struggles against social divisions during this period, particularly their proliferation in the twentieth century. If struggles against class inequality attained significance towards the end of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century stands witness to struggles against divisions based on gender, race, culture, ethnicity, sexuality, age and physical ability. It could be argued perhaps that the proliferation of these struggles signifies the reverse of what I am suggesting here. The proliferation of the divisions themselves could suggest a growing anti-humanist tendency, that the nineteenth century was primarily classist, while the twentieth became in addition sexist, racist, ethnocentric, nationalistic, homophobic, ageist and ableist. Yet all empirical evidence goes against such an interpretation, and it would be easy to show that all these divisions existed prior to the emergence of the struggles against them. A more plausible explanation would be that the divisions were ‘discovered’, acquired relevance and became the object of serious concern, as a result of a growing intolerance of anything perceived to undermine the vision of human unity. Far from being anti-humanistic, the twentieth century is the time when humanism becomes the dominant ideology. Humanity, then, is pure not only in an epistemological sense but also in a cultural sense. As a conception it is immaculate, uncontaminated by the empirical world of society and history. As a value it has attained the status of the highest of all, the sacred. If the foregoing, admittedly sketchy discussion is anything to go by, it emerges as a religion in its own right. It is not, to be sure, an institutionalised religion in the narrow sense, like Comte’s Religion of Humanity (see Wright 1986), but a less formal and more widespread cult of the universal human, a religion of human unity, purity and innocence. And it promises as much as Comte’s own religion,

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continuity in the face of the ultimate discontinuity. If nationalists are concerned with the survival of the nation (Anderson 1991), for humanists what counts is all nations put together, humanity writ large. Yet pure humanity is not the end of the road for the Modernist subjectivity. There is another step in the metaphysics of sameness, which both logically and ontologically must be the last one. When this step is taken, the Modernist subjectivity arrives at a new destination, a cosmic position that affords the most inclusive of all visions of unity, not unlike Hegel’s Being pure and simple in which nothing can be distinguished and hence nothing can be known. This is the environmentalist vision of the world in which humanity and nature unite in a monumental embrace. It is the virtual reality which environmentalism, particularly in its more extreme forms, seeks to impose on the world.

Pure Being Although environmentalists are concerned about nature, it should not be assumed that they are indifferent to humanity. This much is clear in the case of mainstream environmentalism, where concern about nature is presented as a means to the survival of humanity. But it is not as clear in the case of the more radical environmentalist factions, such as Deep Ecology, and lack of clarity has given rise to charges of ‘ecofascism’ and misanthropy (e.g., Ferry 1995). Such charges against radical environmentalism are partly due to an inadequate understanding of the process through which one arrives at such generalisations as humanity and nature, as well as what they mean in the face of the world. If, as I have already suggested, this process is one of conceptual distancing,6 then the unity of humanity and nature as a rationalised image of the world presupposes the rationalisation of the unity of humanity. This means, as we have seen, the experiencing of human divisions as senseless. The radical environmentalist literature is replete with examples of concern about the unity of humanity, but here I shall mention only a few. ‘Thinking of nature alone will not do,’ Gottlieb (1996: 525) reminds those environmentalists who neglect the senseless in society: We are creatures of history and society as well as of the earth and air. We hunger for justice as we hunger for food and water. And without a compelling memory of class, gender, racial and national forms of oppression … deep ecology … will be blind to complex and painful issues of social injustice and political reorganization.

6. As I have already suggested (see note 4), it could also be the reverse, a process of conceptual proximity.

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Concern for nature, then, does not mean that environmentalists are indifferent about the social. If it appears so, it is only because their brand of egalitarianism, which often goes by the name of ‘ecocentrism’, is broader and far more encompassing than its social equivalent. In accordance with this extremely broad, ecocentric egalitarianism, supporters of deep ecology hold that their concerns well and truly subsume the concerns of those movements that have restricted their focus to the attainment of a more egalitarian human society … for example … feminism, … Marxism, antiracism, and anti-imperialism. (Fox 1995: 270–1)

A similar attitude and vision of the world is to be found in another branch of radical environmentalism, ecofeminism. Speaking of the differences between traditional feminism and ecofeminism, Warren points out that the latter ‘reconceives feminism’ by showing that all forms of oppression are based on the same patriarchal logic of domination. ‘Other systems of oppression (e.g., racism, classism, ageism, heterosexism) are also conceptually maintained by a logic of domination. … By clarifying this conceptual connection between systems of oppression … [ecofeminism] leads to a reconceiving of feminism as a movement to end all forms of oppression’ (Warren 1998: 330). Ecofeminism will liberate not just nature, but also all those who are dominated on the basis of race, class, age, gender and sexual orientation. Much like other types of radical environmentalism, it is both a humanism and a humanism-cum-naturalism. At the beginning of the last section I raised the question as to where one needs to go to have a view of Modernity as an ‘internally referrential’ system, that is, to attain a totalised view of the social world. The same question needs to be raised with respect to the environmentalist vision. Where does one need to go to see that ‘we are part of nature and nature is part of us’ or, as in the more radical environmentalist vein, that all the human and the non-human are One? What happens when one arrives there, and how does this vision of unity both produce and transcend the senseless of the empirical world? Environmentalists, particularly of the more radical persuasion, often have recourse to evolutionary biology and cosmological theory to buttress their vision of the world. Although both theories are well known, it may be instructive to follow environmentalists in these temporal journeys in some detail.

The Story of the Origin of Life ‘In the beginning there was high-energy physics, but during the cooling of the universe we encounter the origins of chemistry’; we reach, that is, the time when atoms begin to combine and form molecules. ‘Two kinds of chemistry were needed to get life going: the chemistry that generates the so-called building blocks of life – water, carbon dioxide … methane, and

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hydrogen sulfide – and the chemistry that allows these to associate into yet larger assemblies called biochemicals.’ The first chemistry occurred at about 4.5 thousand million years ago, the second at about half a thousand million years later. By chance, a ‘mutant’ biochemical acquired the ability to reproduce itself and to pass the instructions of reproduction on to its products. This accident was a momentous event of the highest order, the beginning of life. ‘Thus life emerged from non-life … the first progenitor cell from whom all creatures flow’ (Goodenough 1998: 18–27). From a position four thousand million years in the past, then, we see the origin of life, the first progenitor cell. We do not literally see it, of course. As Goodenough notes, we will perhaps never know what happened exactly. Nonetheless, we know enough about the result of the process to work backwards and construct a plausible picture. Contemplating this picture, ‘we realise that we are connected to all creatures [and] not just in food chains or ecological equilibria’. The connection is not merely one of interdependence but also, and more importantly, of substance, of ‘deep genetic homology’. ‘We share a common ancestor. … We are connected all the way down.’ We are, in short, kin to all creatures. ‘I walk through the Missouri woods and the organisms are everywhere. … I open my senses to them and we connect. I no longer need to anthropomorphize them, to value them because they are beautiful or amusing or important for my survival.’ There is no need to humanise them and make them the same because they are already the same. ‘I take in the sycamore by the river and I think about its story … the tiny first progenitor that gave rise to it and me’ (Goodenough 1998: 72–4).

The Story of the Origin of the Universe In the beginning, there was nothing, even if not nothingness. There was only a mathematical point that contained everything even if nothing could be distinguished from anything else, much like Hegel’s Being pure and simple. We go back 13,500 million years to a time of primordial silence … of emptiness … before the beginning of time … the very ground of all being. … From this state of immense potential, an unimaginably powerful explosion takes place … energy travelling at the speed of light hurtles in all directions, creating direction, creating the universe. (Seed and Fleming 1996: 503)

From a position further back in time, then, some 9.5 thousand million years before the origin of life, we see the Big Bang and the beginning of the universe. Once again, we do not literally see it, but we know enough about the result to construct a plausible picture. ‘All that is now, every galaxy, star and planet, every particle existing comes into being at this great fiery

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birthing. Every particle which makes up you and me comes into being at this instant and has been circulating through countless forms ever since.’ The origin of the universe, then, was in a fundamental sense also the origin of ‘you’ and ‘me’. In form we may not have become ‘you’ and ‘me’ for thousands of million years to come, but in substance we have been present from the beginning. ‘When we look at a candle flame or a star, we see the light of that fireball. … [Our] metabolism burns with that very same fire now’ (Seed and Fleming 1996: 503). All is One: you and me, the sycamore by the river, the river and the pebbles in it, the stars and the galaxies. All is the same because every thing is a manifestation of the same primordial stuff, matter and energy, the product of a cosmic dance in which beings arise and fall away in a never-ending cycle of birth, death and rebirth. ‘Countless times in that journey [of evolution] we died to old forms, let go of old ways, allowing new ones to emerge. But nothing is ever lost. Though forms pass, all returns’ (Seed and Macy 1996: 502). Let us note a few things about the Origin. The first is its metaphysical status. To know the origin of life one must take up a position before life, on the other side of its origin. In the same vein, to know the origin of the universe one must take up a position in some other universe. From this position, one can then watch ours coming into being, as well as what came after, including the origin of life. Let us also note that in both stories everything is the same at the Origin: all life in one cell, everything conceivable in a mathematical point. Nothing can be distinguished at the Origin because everything is One, a case of absolute identity. Or so evolutionary biology and cosmological theory claim. Yet we need not take either of them for granted. Further reflection suggests that even at this level of abstraction, at the limit, there can never be only One, Being pure and simple. If there is One, an absolute unity, if this One can be conceptualised at all, it is only because it assumes Another, something which is not part of this unity. It is important to explore this irreducible dualism between the One and the Other further, not for scholastic reasons but precisely because it illuminates why the divisions of the One and the Same become meaningless, the senseless from which the Modernist subjectivity wishes to be redeemed. I am referring as much to the divisions of humanity as to the grandest of all divides, between humanity and nature. If everything is the same at the Origin it must be because of something not of the Origin. There must be Another or an Other that resists assimilation, retains its otherness, can never be part of the One and the Same, and by virtue of its radical difference makes it possible for the One and the Same to recognise its oneness and sameness. What of this Other, then? What could it be, and where is it to be located? We have already had a glimpse of it in the two stories of the Origin. Life emerged from non-life, says Goodenough. No doubt. Being able to identify life presupposes that one has already contemplated non-life. Time emerged from a

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mathematical instant, says cosmological theory. It could not have been otherwise. Without this strange instant – strange because, being mathematical, it has no duration and is therefore non-time and non-being – without this instant, then, time and being as we know them would be meaningless. Let us, then, provisionally say that this Other lies before the Origin and is utterly different from the One and the Same, the beginning of time, being and life. To be more precise, it is their exact opposite. It is non-life and non-being. I say ‘provisionally’ because there is another ‘place’ where this Other, non-life and non-being, can be located, another position from which the One and the Same become visible. This ‘place’ is after the Origin and very far away from it. In this case too there are hints in the radical environmentalist literature as to where this other position might be. In his discussion of one of Schumacher’s articles, for example, the respected Norwegian environmental philosopher Naess says: ‘Schumacher announces that he will in the article “take an overall view” which “can be obtained only from a considerable height”.’ Naess quickly translates Schumacher’s statement into his own brand of environmental philosophy, ‘Ecosophy T’. ‘In the terminology of Ecosophy T, [a considerable height is] “a considerable depth”’ (Naess 1989: 188). Naess is alluding to the Origin here, the idea that we are connected ‘all the way down’, but is the change in terminology and perspective legitimate? It may very well be the case that Schumacher meant exactly what he said, ‘considerable height’ and not ‘considerable depth’. Let us look at an example that indicates both height and depth. Science, says Callicott, has expanded our world view. In which direction, backwards or forwards? In both directions at once, it would seem. The Earth is a ‘small planet’ in an immense inhospitable universe. We and its other denizens are, from a cosmic point of view, close kin. And, from the same cosmic point of view, we do in fact depend for our existence – with every breath we take, with every morsel of food we eat – on our fellow voyagers in the odyssey of evolution. (Callicott 1999: 130)

The ‘odyssey of evolution’ directs the reader back to the Origin. But it also points outwards to a location far away from it, ‘a cosmic point of view’. At the Origin there is no cosmos, only the One and the Same, whether a mathematical point or the progenitor cell. It is by moving away from it that the cosmos begins to unfold, things emerge and can be distinguished from each other, until one reaches the here and now of cosmological theory and evolutionary biology with its inexhaustible diversity. But what if one continues to move forward or upward, Schumacher’s ‘considerable height’, beyond the here and now? In that case, one reaches the end of the cosmos. And if one takes the next step, that is, the step outside, one has a view of the cosmos in its entirety, ‘a cosmic point of view’. Looking from this position, says Callicott, all the denizens of the planet, not only human beings but all living creatures, emerge as ‘close kin’. They become One and the Same, again.

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If everything becomes the same, again, it must be because of something not of this world. As I have already suggested in the discussion of the Origin, there must be an Other that resists assimilation, retains its otherness, can never be part of the One and the Same, and by virtue of its radical difference makes it possible for the One and the Same to recognise its sameness. What of this Other, then? We have already encountered it lying hidden before the Origin. It is the non-life of evolutionary biology, the non-time and non-being of cosmological theory. In this encounter at the end of the cosmos, it may be designated with different words. One could call it the unknown or unknowable, perhaps nothingness, or death. To distinguish it from the Origin, let us simply call it the End. Its name is not significant. Its location is not significant either, for the position before the Origin and after the Cosmos are in a fundamental sense the same. They both designate non-life and non-being. What is significant is the End’s indispensable function of making sameness visible to the One and Same – to all those, that is, who imagine the world in this way. Without the End and its opposite, the Origin, the unity at the Origin and the unity from a cosmic point of view would be inconceivable. Even more significant for this essay is the ontological threat that the End poses to the Modernist subjectivity. To know that all beings are in a certain sense the same is not necessarily a profound truth. Everyone with elementary knowledge of biology or cosmological theory knows this and takes it for granted. To know these things in the face of something that threatens the meaning of the world, however, is to know them with an intensity and a sense of urgency that cannot but elevate them to the status of the most profound truth. ‘Think to your next death. Will your flesh and bones back into the cycle. Surrender. Love the plum worms you will become. Launder your weary being through the fountain of life.’ Do so, one is tempted to add, without fear of the End. For ‘nothing is ever lost. Though forms pass, all returns’ (Seed and Macy 1996: 502).7 Such is the promise of Sameness. But what if some things are forever lost? What is one to do about the nagging suspicion that the End may truly be the end and that there is nothing anyone can do to prevent it from breaking in? In that case, there is at least the comfort of knowing that one is not alone. Here is Goodenough again (1998: 75): ‘Blessed be the tie that binds. It anchors us. We are embedded in the great

7. An example of a practical manifestation of this view: ‘This sense of identity with other things in nature is partly responsible for a recent trend in burial in the UK. … Instead of being buried in a conventional coffin, which prevents some agents of decomposition from getting at the body, some people are now being buried in biodegradable coffins which allow their remains to be more quickly absorbed and “recycled” by natural processes, helping to sustain other life forms’ (Milton 2002: 155–6; n. 2).

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evolutionary story of the planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone.’ And here is another radical environmentalist: In late 1995 astronomers discovered 50 billion more galaxies than they had known previously. This cosmological event was widely reported in the news media, in the wake of which I heard three paradigmatic responses. The first was from a modern mentality: So what? The second from a famous literary scholar of the deconstructionist-postmodern persuasion who felt despondent about our fate as a satellite of a ‘banal and decentered star’. … I found this reaction terribly sad and utterly hilarious, so I consulted the most insightful cosmologist I know. I asked Brian Swimme, ‘What’s the meaning of the discovery of 50 billion “new” galaxies in the universe?’ Without an instant’s hesitation, he declared exuberantly, ‘We can never be alone again! We have all these relations we didn’t know about!’ Ah, yes. (Spretnak 1997: 184)

Death and cosmological loneliness, then. Both are exorcised by the unity of humanity and nature propagated by environmentalism.

Conclusion To sum up the argument, it should be clear that neither the Origin nor the cosmic perspective by themselves can produce the vision of sameness that environmentalists envision. Although they render the sameness of all beings inevitable, in and of itself this is neither here nor there. Time intrudes and dilutes the sameness of beings into difference, which is also to say that it dilutes the significance of sameness into indifference. What is needed is a difference that would make the difference generated by time appear insignificant, a difference so radical that it would make sameness appear as nothing short of identity. What is also needed is a difference that would raise the ontological stakes high enough to render the vision of unity ‘uniquely realistic’, as Geertz (1973) might say, a difference that would imbue unity with so much value as to render it what the highest of all values is, sacred. The difference that does both of these things, by virtue of its radical otherness and the ontological threat it poses to the Modernist subjectivity, is the difference of/at the End. The key question I have raised in this chapter is whether the reversal of Modernist physics and anthropology in environmentalism constitutes a radical rupture with Modernism, as both environmentalists and their critics claim. At the phenomenological level, there can be no doubt. Modernist nature, that domain of utility and danger that was to be mastered by man and brought under his control, has been transformed into environmentalist nature, a domain of life to be protected and cared for. Nor is there any doubt that man has been drastically reduced in size and now emerges as a much smaller and more modest persona, the human

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being, a being among other beings in nature. At a deeper level, however, things appear rather differently. The reversal of the Modernist physics and anthropology was a necessary step, the next and probably last logical and ontological step, in the unfolding of the Modernist logic of the same and the Modernist subjectivity’s quest for salvation. Put in another way, at the phenomenological level there are two virtual realities. At a deeper level, there is only one which environmentalism takes to its logical and ontological conclusion. In this more profound sense, environmentalism is Modernism at the end of the road, an end which is also the beginning of a journey that comes full circle. The Modernist subjectivity may not be aware of this, but its traditional enemies appear to have sensed it. For it is hardly an accident that the world religions in the narrow sense have come to endorse environmentalism and rally behind its cause. What this chapter has also tried to do, with respect to both Modernism and environmentalism, is to show how historically- and culturally-specific visions of the world become universalised so that the world, which notoriously refuses to fit into human conventions, must be made to conform to them. It may, of course, be argued that this sort of ‘virtualism’ constitutes the essence of culture, the models of reality which, as Geertz says, become models for reality. This may be so, but to this politically innocent understanding of culture two things must be added. First, in all cultures there are competing models of reality and hence struggles about which one will become the model for reality. Second, and related to this, although historically and culturally specific, Modernism and its latest incarnation, environmentalism, are systems with global pretensions. It would be naïve to assume that they will take over the world without facing fierce resistance.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1996. Critical reflections on ‘reflexive modernization’. Theory, Culture and Society 13: 133–8. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined communities. London: Verso. Argyrou, Vassos. 2003. Reflexive modernization and other mythical realities. Anthropological Theory 3: 27–41. ––––––. 2005. The logic of environmentalism: anthropology, ecology and postcoloniality. Oxford: Berghahn. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. From industrial society to the risk society. Theory, Culture and Society 9: 97–123. Berlin, Isaiah. 1999. The roots of romanticism. London: Pimlico. Buckle, Henry T. 1878. History of civilisation in England. Vol.1. London: Longmans, Green and Co.

Virtualism and the Logic of Environmentalism | 43 Callicott, J. Baird. 1999. Beyond the land ethic: more essays in environmental philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press. Carrier, James G. 1998. Introduction. In Virtualism: a new political economy, ed. J. G. Carrier and Daniel Miller, pp. 1–24. Oxford: Berg. Clifford, James. 1986. On ethnographic allegory. In Writing cultures: the poetics and politics of ethnography, ed. J. Clifford and George Marcus, pp. 98–121. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collingwood, Robin George. 1945. The idea of nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Tony. 1997. Humanism. London: Routledge. Durkheim, Emile. 1984 (1933). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press. Ferry, Luc. 1995. The new ecological order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fox, Warwick. 1995. The deep ecology–ecofeminism debate and its parallels. In Deep ecology for the twenty-first century, ed. George Sessions, pp. 269–89. Boston: Shambhala. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goodenough, Ursula. 1998. The sacred depths of nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gottlieb, Roger S. 1996. Spiritual deep ecology and the Left: an attempt at reconciliation. In This sacred earth, ed. R. S. Gottlieb, pp. 516–31. New York: Routledge. Grove-White, Robin. 1993. Environmentalism: a new moral discourse for technological society. In Environmentalism: the view from anthropology, ed. Kay Milton, pp. 18–30. London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The question concerning technology and other essays. New York: Harper and Row. Kant, Immanuel. 1781. The critique of pure reason. Various editions. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. di Leonardo, Micaela (ed.) 1991. Gender at the crossroads of knowledge: feminist anthropology in the postmodern era. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lomborg, Bjorn. 2001. The skeptical environmentalist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and utopia. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul. Milton, Kay. 2002. Loving nature: towards an ecology of emotion. London: Routledge. Naess, Arne. 1989. Ecology, community and lifestyle: outline of an ecosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

44 | Vassos Argyrou North, Richard. 1995. Life on a modern planet: a manifesto for progress. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Seed, John and Pat Fleming. 1996. Evolutionary remembering. In This sacred earth, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb, pp. 503–6. New York: Routledge. Seed, John and Joanna Macy. 1996. Gaia meditations. In This sacred earth, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb, pp. 501–2. New York: Routledge. Spretnak, Charlene. 1997. The resurgence of the real: body, nature and place in a hypermodern world. New York: Routledge. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 1996. On knowing what to do: environmentalism and the modern problematic. In Risk, environment and modernity, ed. Scott Lash, B. Szerszynski and Brian Wynne, pp. 104–37. London: Sage. Tylor, E. B. 1874. Primitive Culture. Vol. 1. New York: Henry Holt. UN (United Nations) 1951. Measures for the economic development of underdeveloped countries. New York: United Nations. ———. 1963. Science and technology for development: report on the United Nations conference on the application of science and technology for the benefit of the less developed areas. Volume 1. World of opportunity. New York: United Nations. ———. 1973. Report of the United Nations conference on the human environment, Stockholm, 5–16 June 1972. New York: United Nations. Warren, Karen. 1998. The power and promise of ecological feminism. In Environmental philosophy (2nd edn), gen. ed. Michael Zimmerman, pp. 315–44. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Weber, Max. 1946a. Science as a vocation. In From Max Weber: essays in sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, pp. 129–56. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1946b. The social psychology of the world religions. In From Max Weber: essays in sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, pp. 267–301. New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, Terence R. 1986. The religion of humanity: the impact of Comtean positivism in Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2

New Nature: On the Production of a Paradox MAARTEN ONNEWEER

I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday’s newspapers, in the jejune of advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs. Robert Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey (1996: 74)

One metaphor that continues to be turned into things is nature. As a concept it seems to have attained enough substance to be considered part and parcel of the modern world. Or has it? A famous poem of 1946 by the Dutch writer Bloem announced that in the Netherlands, ‘Nature is for the empty or contented’,1 giving the impression that one would be hard pressed to find anything of nature in this country of the created and planned landscapes of land reclamation, agricultural rationalisation and urbanisation. Nature has become, if anything, the artefact of authenticity that is mainly found in reserved areas. To use Smithson’s words, in these reserves nature is boxed up in cold rooms, landscape museums that contain the corrupted images of larger and lost wholes. Since Bloem’s poem, Dutch ideas on nature have changed considerably, as have the products of these ideas. I will address one recent development 1. ‘Nature is for the empty and contented / After all: what is left of nature in this land? / A little wood, the size of a postage stamp, / a hill, residences stuck onto it’ (translation drawn from Sakaama & Atmo 1997).

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in Dutch conceptualisations of nature, nieuwe natuur, ‘new nature’. New nature is a category of landscape that emerged in the last two decades as the outcome of a collective enterprise of ecologists, government planners and nature management organisations eager to counter the ecological degradation of Dutch nature areas. Driven by the vision that the landscape can be moulded into any required form, agricultural lands are bought and redesigned to reproduce images of pristine and primeval nature. New nature areas are far from natural: every square metre is planned, every hill or gradient is created. Even if some of the landscape was formed by water or wind, it was anticipated and part of the plan. The efficacy of new nature is contested. The paradox of created nature has caused debate among ecologists, conservation and animal protection organisations, and landowners such as farmers; it is the topic of a vast number of newspaper articles and television broadcasts. Surprisingly, these debates are not only about the artificiality of new nature, but are also pragmatic: is new nature really working? Two locations where new nature was recently established demonstrate what is involved, Tiengemeten and the Elfenbaan. The island of Tiengemeten lies in one of the main estuaries of the Netherlands. In the seventeenth century it was a mere sandbank, but due to the construction of polders and dikes it developed into agricultural land. In the past ten years parts of the island were bought by nature conservation groups, and four years ago the Dutch nature conservation organisation Natuurmonumenten proudly announced that the last farmer had left the island and it would be given ‘back to nature’. Pristine wilderness would be created by knocking down dikes and introducing large herbivores, in this case Highland cattle. New nature was also created on a 7.5 km strip of land between the N11 highway and the railway between the towns of Leiden and Alphen aan de Rijn, the area now called the Elfenbaan. Carefully planned and plotted, natural gradients were created by bulldozers and backhoes. The N11 itself was constructed at the expense of a peat meadow landscape and the Elfenbaan was to compensate for this loss. The natural gradients constructed at the Elfenbaan are usually gentle slopes, but there are also some steep embankments that can provide nesting grounds for swallows and kingfishers. Shortly after its construction, the uncommon bank swallow (Riparia riparia) settled there. These are just two examples of new nature, both of which are part of the Ecologische Hoofd Structuur, ‘Main Ecological Structure’ (EHS), the government’s scheme for a nation-wide network of natural areas. In this network the existing nature areas are joined by new areas, such as Tiengemeten. To establish a network, these areas are connected by robuuste verbindingen, ‘robust connections’, natural relays, of which the Elfenbaan new nature area is an example. The EHS is intended to ward off ecological

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degradation that threatens the nation’s biodiversity. When first imagined, it would require an additional 50,000 hectares of nature to connect and expand existing nature areas. At present, half of that is realised. In the following I will demonstrate how the physical construction and invocation of nature in the landscape by nature management organisations has directed the attention of the public debate to the efficacy of new nature. I will argue that ideas of nature have come to focus on the potentiality of biophysical processes and spontaneity, and thus on an ecologically sound future instead of an authentic past. As I shall show, this is a virtualising vision, to make concrete in the world the potentiality that it is assumed to contain. I will continue with a discussion of how this orientation towards the future came about. Central in this analysis is the temporality and topography of these new landscapes, which will allow me to illuminate the often concealed ideological properties of nature, or what is invoked as being nature, through the engagements of different sets of people with the biophysical world.

Ecological Abstraction and Landscape Potentiality A renowned Dutch ecologist, Frans Vera, has emerged as one of the main protagonists of new nature for landscape planners. Vera’s image of new nature is based on the analysis of a period before human habitation of the Netherlands (approximately 10,000 BP; see Vera 1997). This is an image of a primeval past, one not spoiled by human enterprise, and it gained popularity among contemporary ecologists and nature conservation groups. It is seen as an ideal, authentic Dutch nature that advocates consider a good option for new nature areas. Vera’s analysis has proved to be the basis of a substantial change in thinking about nature’s temporal connotations. In general, relations between nature and the land in the Netherlands are often loaded with temporal tropes, such as ‘giving the land back to nature’ or ‘nature monument’. In the context of nature conservation these tropes appear as a straightforward exercise in nostalgia, looking at the past for ecological authenticity. However, new nature connotes a particular valorisation and evocation of past–present–future relations (cf. Gell 1992; Munn 1992). To start with the past, the primeval era chosen for new nature is not one of several equal possibilities. Rather, it was chosen because at that time nature did not include humans and could therefore be considered ecologically sound. Bringing this past into the present is not, however, a conspiracy of misanthropic ecologists. In the recreated primeval nature known as new nature, humans are allowed to visit, but not to work or live in the landscape. Other pasts, the ones not chosen, might include groups of people in nature, such as farmers or, in other parts of the world, people

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who have been called ‘indigenous’. I now want to draw your attention to what makes the new nature different from other natures, a specific reference to an imagined future. New nature is different from other natures not only because it points to an ecologically attractive future, but also because it points to a particular kind of national space in which nature could be enshrined. The valorisation of the image of primeval nature, as incarnated in new nature and the EHS, has uprooted nature from the places where it exists and the histories that shaped it. Instead, the EHS is a virtual model of the nation’s ecological space-to-be, compartmentalised alongside other bestemmingen (designations) of the land, such as agriculture, traffic and urban space, all arranged according to modernist values of demand and priority. New nature has become a commodity in the hands of planners who can use the abstracted (ecologically pure) primeval past to convey in their models how the land ought to be: a self-sustaining ecological network that will ward off further ecological degradation. The implementation of new nature in the EHS is conspicuously close to an act of virtualism as defined by Carrier: Perceiving a virtual reality becomes virtualism when people take this virtual reality to be not just a parsimonious description of what is really happening, but prescriptive of what ought to be; when, that is, they seek to make the world conform to their virtual vision. (Carrier 1998: 2, emphasis added)

This virtualism is built into the EHS, which sees the relation of nature and the landscape in terms of how it ought to be and how everything in the present is an unfulfilled illustration of it. We are in the realm of issues discussed in anthropological work on landscape, place and space. For instance, in his canonical introduction to The anthropology of landscape, Hirsch (1995) has proposed seeing the landscape as a cultural process that oscillates between lived-in places and more abstract, imagined spaces. The EHS as a virtual model of the landscape is one of these abstract, imagined spaces that is negotiated in the here-and-now of place. As Hirsch argues, space and place can be associated with a number of other concepts, such as a foreground actuality of place and a background potentiality of space. The potentiality that Hirsch refers to is important because exploring the temporal connotations of potentiality helps us to better understand the production of nature in the landscape in the Netherlands. Temporality recurs in literature on the landscape (e.g., Bender 2002; Ingold 2000; Küchler 1993, 1999; Tilley 1993). In these works, however, landscape temporality is often described in terms of pasts and memories. The temporal inverse of memory is potentiality, a relation with the future through the landscape. As I will show, the potential of the Dutch landscape to harbour primeval nature has allowed planners and conservation organisations to seize a particular future. This future is available because

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of the plasticity of the landscape and the spontaneous processes of nature. Analogous with Küchler’s (1993) distinction between landscape of memory and landscape as memory, landscape as potentiality points to a possible future in the landscape, mediated by policies but made possible by the perception of what is known as the maakbaarheid, ‘mouldability’, of the landscape. Another aspect of the virtualism of the EHS has to do with the representation of ecology and the policies that have followed from it. As noted, the EHS has taken the form of a network. This form derived from dominant discourses in system ecology, particularly zoology, that see ecosystems as composed of groups of species that spread better and suffer less from inbreeding if they are free to move from one area to another. Networks, in the crude representational sense of lines in a web, are ideal for this movement. Bearselman and Vera (e.g., 1989), two ecologists at the forefront of the EHS, argued that a network of linked nature areas would be a very efficient topography for the spread of species, and consequently for stopping the ecological degeneration of existing nature areas.2 Here, then, a network model that was derived from the analyses of the biophysical world is translated into a model of how Dutch nature ought to be; in other words, the landscape is to be made to conform to a theoretical model from system ecology. Though contested, the preliminary successes of the EHS suggest that, when constructing nature, animals are good to think with. But before we go into this I will describe the evolution of different topographies and temporalities of nature among Dutch nature conservation groups, in order to show the historical development of the current situation.

Wilderness to Island, Monument to Potential Here I will present a description of the evolution of ideas of nature in the Netherlands. This history will inevitably be brief, but I hope to convey a sense of the changes in temporal and topographical characterisations of nature. Historically these ideas have moved from an omnipresent

2. Interestingly, the image of the network of interconnected natural areas did not only derive from Dutch nature, but also from remote areas such as Indonesia and Canada in the 1970s, and later the Bialowieza in Poland and the Serengeti in Tanzania. The Bialowieza is taken to be the last primeval forest of Europe (though see Schama 1995 for its history); its complex ecology is taken to be an example of a truly unspoiled ecosystem, an icon of true nature. The presence of the large ‘European buffalo’, the wisent, seems to have an extra appeal, as do the large herbivores in the Serengeti (see Van der Lans 1980; Van de Veen 1985; Vera 1997; Wallis de Vries 1995).

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contemporary wilderness, to island-shaped monuments of the past, to more future-oriented networks of interconnected nature. Nature conservation in the Netherlands is generally traced back to a small group of city-based nature enthusiasts early in the twentieth century. This group was composed of teachers, biologists, hunters and members of the landed gentry, and it became engaged in saving the Naardermeer, a lake in which Amsterdam’s municipal government wanted to dump its waste in 1904. The group saved the area by buying it, and soon more areas were bought with government support. The nature in the areas selected had to be merkwaardig, ‘noteworthy’ or ‘of particular quality’, and in danger of being lost to agriculture or urbanisation (Van der Windt 1995). Nature conservation in these first decades was based on the idea of excluding human interference other than management in landscapes with wetenschappelijke waarde, ‘scientific value’, or natuurschoon, ‘natural beauty’. In these reserves, nature was no longer seen as untamed and malevolent wilderness (De Pater and Renes 1999). Rather, following the German example, it was seen as a monument (naturdenkmäler in German, natuurmonumenten in Dutch). This view was institutionalised in the first nature conservation organisation, the Nederlandse vereeniging voor het behoud van Natuurmonumenten (Dutch society for the conservation of nature monuments), in short, Natuurmonumenten. The temporal and spatial connotations of the idea of the naturemonument are clear: the areas involved are like islands, relics of a larger whole. They are places in which a national identity in the form of unspoiled nature can be commemorated, mediated by teachers and scientists.3 Natural processes were to be left as undisturbed as possible as long as the ‘original’ condition and image of the area would be retained (Van der Windt 1995), reflecting the Arcadian view of nature (Worster 1977; see also Van Koppen 1997a, 1997b). From the start, then, nature was seen in terms of a temporal dimension of protected places in a specific topography of distinction from other forms of land use. Protected areas were historical islands in a temporal void. After the Second World War a number of biologists became involved in the protection of nature areas. The early texts of one of the most influential, Victor Westhoff, is explicit on this matter: the primary reason for the

3. North American national parks preceded the Dutch and German in linking nature to the nation, though the role of schoolteachers seems more prominent in the Netherlands. The North American case is often related to the wellknown ‘frontier mentality’ (see, e.g., Cronon 1995; Schama 1995), which is obviously lacking in the Netherlands. Also, conservationists in the Netherlands generally have had to deal with only one group of claimants to the land, farmers, whereas in North America conservationists also had to deal with Native Americans (see Cronon 1983).

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protection of nature areas is scientific research. That was because, ‘for research on living creatures we cannot adequately rely on the laboratory, experimental garden, menagerie hortus and greenhouse’ (Westhoff 1951: 11, my translation). These areas were not only the last remaining patches of wilderness (woestenij), but included lands that had been marginal for agriculture since the nineteenth century, such as heather land, peat meadows and chalk meadows. The inclusion of marginal lands in this period attracted criticism from some nature enthusiasts, who did not want to include agricultural land. To resolve the matter, the term half natuur, ‘half nature’, was introduced by the biologist Westhoff for the agricultural areas that were rich in rare and endangered species (Westhoff 1951, 1970; see also Kull, Kukk and Lotman 2003; Schouten 2001; Van der Windt 1995). The emergence of the idea of half nature coincided with the substantial rationalisation and mechanisation of agriculture that began directly after the Second World War, encouraged by the government, which resulted in a radical separation of conservation areas and agricultural areas (Van der Ploeg 1997; Van Koppen 1997a). Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, then, the nature that deserved protection was understood as national, and had either special scientific or aesthetic value. It took the form of fragile islands in a malignant sea of culture, and access to it was mediated by nature conservation groups allied with scientists. In the later 1960s and the 1970s this began to change, especially because of the influence of botanists. Conservation increasingly became oriented towards vegetation types that were linked to the physical geography of certain districts, known as plantengeografische districten, ‘vegetationgeographical districts’, and later flora districten, ‘flora districts’ (Weeda 1990). This added a new connotation to nature areas, which came to be seen not just as monuments but also as representatives of the ‘potential natural vegetation’ (natürliche potentielle Vegetation) of a particular geography, as promulgated by the German botanist Tüxen (1956). Nature conservation (natuurbehoud) joined forces with natuurontwikkeling, ‘ecological reconstruction’, the latter envisaging a natural potentiality of a certain place without too much regard for its present state. This made natural landscapes more malleable: one could turn a meadow into a heath or a place that could harbour peat meadow birds or bank swallows, if these plants and animals were seen as valid representatives of the local ecology. In other words, attention shifted from the commemoration of local nature to the possibilities for nature in the future, which changed the temporal and spatial connotations of nature. In the 1970s the perils of industrialised society threatened to disturb the monumental and scientific landscapes of old. The celebrated heath lands, loved for their purple heather, were overrun with grasses due to eutrophication through the acid rain caused by industry, traffic and animal

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husbandry. When the reintroduction of sheep by nature management organisations proved insufficient, large machines were called to the rescue. Scrapers and backhoes removed the enriched topsoil of the heath to allow heather to establish itself on the barren sands.4 Nature’s image was regained under industrial care, looking partly like a nature reserve and partly like a construction site. In this period as well, the concept of the ecosystem became more important in nature management circles, giving rise to a topography based on networks. Zoologists, who became influential in nature management in the early 1980s, challenged the island topography of nature monuments. They said that populations in these islands were cut off from other areas, which meant that the biodiversity of nature islands would only decrease. To remedy this, the first nature areas in the form of ‘stepping stones’ were built late in the 1980s. These were smaller islands between the large ones, corridors and overpasses over highways, allowing animals to move to different areas. In the late 1980s two ecologists at the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fishery (LNV), Vera and Bearselman, developed the idea of the Main Ecological Structure, the EHS. This was presented to the public as a network that would be constructed by connecting existing and new nature reserves through natural relays: line-shaped new nature areas that would connect existing and new nature islands (LNV 1990; Van der Windt 1995). With this, the government took upon itself the task of dealing with ecological degradation by co-ordinating the EHS. Also with this, Dutch nature would become interconnected; no longer a topography of islands but a network of places and links that, as of yet, stops at the country’s border. The EHS and the understanding of nature that it embodies became dominated by a powerful coalition of government officials, nature organisations and ecologists (Hajer 1995). They would protect nature by buying out the farmers in the envisaged new nature areas (LNV 1990). At present the EHS is half realised, but its completion seems to depend on funding rather than ecological need. There is a tendency to create the new nature landscapes that are cheapest to produce and maintain. Planners and policy makers now speak of the gross or net variety (bruto of netto variant) of the EHS, the gross variety being what was first envisaged, the net variety being what is possible in these times of economic constraint. As new nature and the EHS landscapes have come into existence, their efficacy has become the subject of debate. Some of the ecological relays seem unrealistic works of art, on paper allowing massive ecological 4. There is historical irony in the fact that one of the main civil engineering companies involved in ecological reconstruction, Heidemij, owed its existence to the transformation of heath and peat lands into agricultural lands in the nineteenth century.

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transportation but in practice producing little movement (cf. Roos 1999). Several ecologists have also argued that there is too much emphasis on maintenance through grazing, and that in some cases this might not result in the intended protection of endangered species. On the other hand, the spontaneous settlement of bank swallows in the specially constructed banks in the Elfenbaan seems to show that nature can be developed. But is it still natural? To address this, it is necessary to consider the paradox mentioned in the title of this essay. That is, the difference between nature as something untouched in abstract space, and nature as a place with history. In the next section I will explore what made it possible to produce new nature areas and still think of them as natural.

Collaborators in the Images of Paradox: Mouldability and Spontaneity How does one invoke nature where the landscape does not speak for itself as being nature, particularly where it has just been at the mercy of a bulldozer? As Ronayne (2001: 149) argued for heritage sites in Ireland, ‘we never confront landscape as a self evident entity; it is always-alreadyintroduced to us’. This introduction, often by means of visitor centres and information boards, transforms the unknowing passer-by into the informed visitor. It does so by means of information that distances and consolidates the landscape. Or, more mundanely, the most common signs demarcating nature areas are still ‘Nature reserve, no entry’, often accompanied by barbed wire fences. New nature areas are a bit different in this respect: often visitors are allowed to enter the reserve and wander around; some managers even see visitors as another influence that adds ‘natural’ dynamic to the area. Furthermore, the tone of the signposts has changed. While the first nature monument, the Naardermeer, had signs that said wetenschappelijk reservaat, ‘scientific reserve’, on Tiengemeten we get: ‘Here, in the polder Brienenswaard which you are watching now, a large pristine wilderness will emerge: a Dutch Jungle’.5 Other signs at new nature areas often refer to the connection with other areas that allows plants and animals to spread, indicating that the visitor’s partial vision should be complemented with knowledge of broader natural processes. Though not all new nature areas are introduced with such explicit reference to primeval forces and future potentialities, many of the signs are meant to make visitors aware of the processes that are to take place and can be experienced. In terms of

5. My translation. Note the future tense in ‘will emerge’, drawing attention to the potentiality of the area.

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temporality, we could perhaps borrow from Fabian (1983) and say that our coevalness with nature is denied: when we walk through a nature reserve at Tiengemeten, we should imagine it as a primeval wilderness. The visitor’s non-coevalness then runs both ways, backward and forward, into a primeval past that is made available in the potential future. A distance of sorts from what the visitor sees can be achieved through discursive means, as by a sign an area manager puts up that says that the area belongs to nature (and therefore not culture, of which you are a part). However, this does not sufficiently explain how a primeval wilderness can be perceived, and especially how something pristine can be perceived in a built landscape. I address this issue in terms of the interplay of two qualities of new nature that appear as opposites: mouldability and spontaneity. I will argue that new nature depends on its mouldability, its ability to be fitted into the required shape, while the allure of a pristine landscape in this manufactured shape can only come about through its spontaneity, its ability to overtake its own raison d’être. The first step in this process is effacing the history of the places where new nature is to be constructed. I turn to that now.

Carving Nature out of History; or, Nature by Accident In addition to the ideas that nature management in the Netherlands took over from system ecology (as described above), some biologists were also inspired by the emergence of ecologically valuable nature in places where no one had expected it. The most striking of these lies in the last big land reclamation project, the Flevopolder. An accidental by-product of these civil engineering works was a wetland of unprecedented ecological value, the Oostvaardersplassen. This area was actually meant to be an industrial estate, but it became marshy and in a short time attracted so many rare birds and mammals that in 1968 it was decided to preserve the area for the sake of its natural value. The Oostvaardersplassen is now one of the most renowned nature reserves in the Netherlands and an icon for ‘new nature’ because something pristine spontaneously emerged at a place were no one had planned or anticipated it (cf. Vera 1988; Wallis de Vries 1995). This was no relic of times gone by, but entirely new, bulging with potential rather than kept stagnant in a monument. Especially after the perceived success of the introduction of large herbivores there, a new type of landscape could be envisaged. If the natural glory of the Oostvaardersplassen emerged on an industrial site, needed little maintenance because of grazing and had a proper natural appeal, why not build more at other places? To put it bluntly, who needs local history when we can have nature in any place we choose, and cheaper too? Perhaps so, but even though nature seems to have been carved out of history, this was mainly achieved by changing its temporal and

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topographical register. Consider a statement made by the biologist Wallis de Vries (1995: 31) in relation to the Oostvaardersplassen: ‘Apart from the regulation of the water level, the initial seeding of grassland, and the introduction of large herbivores, little human activity has affected the community of succession in this area.’ Wallis de Vries’s statement is exemplary for ecological nature management. My interest lies in the fact that the unfettered ‘community of succession’ is taken as the main constitutive fact of the true natural state of the Oostvaardersplassen. This presupposes that nature proper originates from an empty space, or perhaps fallow land, in which the essence of nature, the spontaneous and successive occupation of the a-biotic environment, produces an area of pristine nature that shows little or no human activity. This is not historical nature celebrated through its local manifestation, but an a-historic ecological space. Out of history does not, however, mean out of time, since, as I have indicated, new nature acquired a distinct primeval connotation at an early stage. The idea of primeval (oer) landscapes became influential in Dutch nature management circles in the 1970s, when managers began to look for more ecologically sound forests to replace the existing monoculture commercial forests. This idea gained strength after the monoculture forests suffered extensive loss in the unusually heavy storms of 1972–73. Some management groups saw this as proof of the lack of vitality of those forests. They argued that natural primeval forests would not have suffered such losses, and that they could do more than just provide timber; they could also be recreation and nature areas (see Van der Windt 1995).6 Beginning in the 1980s, large herbivores were introduced at several small forest sites to initiate natuurlijk bosbeheer, ‘natural forestry’. Most popular were Konik horses, which resemble the Tarpan horses that once roamed Europe; Heck’s cattle were also introduced, a kind of cattle bred by the Heck brothers in the 1920s to ‘bring back’ (in appearance) the long-extinct Auroch. Through the grazing of these beasts, natural forest came to mean primeval forest, and the primeval connotation soon extended to non-forest areas. The ecologist Vera challenged the idea that north-western Europe’s original climax community was a dense forest. He argued that the vegetation was kept in a constant state of change by natural events like storms and floods, and particularly by large herbivores such as Aurochs and Tarpan horses.

6. Mainstream ecology at that time considered the climax stage of the community of succession of the Netherlands to be dense forest. That is, dense forest was seen as the natural state of areas unspoiled by human interference, a situation taken to be equivalent to the situation before human habitation (Tüxen 1956; Vera 1997; Van der Windt 1995). Note again the temporal implications of potential, referring for the first time to both the distant past and the possible future.

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Vera (1997) said that these animals prune trees and bushes to such an extent that the era between the last ice age and the start of human habitation was one of unstable forest mosaic or park-like landscape.7 Vera’s depiction of primeval nature came at a time when several management groups were already experimenting with the introduction of large herbivores in old forests and new nature areas, to see if this would create a natural dynamic and more variation in the landscape.8 As was envisaged, the large herbivores turned these areas into half-open forest mosaics. These herbivores also differentiated nature from the half nature managed by farmers. Where farmers were inclined to see humans as the creators and managers of Arcadian landscapes, new nature relies on spontaneous natural succession in a dynamic maintained through grazing. It is important to recognise, however, that the primeval nature of the pastmade-present by these management policies is not nature as such. Rather, it is one possible nature, the one often taken to be original and therefore valid because it refers to the non-historic past and so denies human influence. Nature conservationists advocated the idea of north-western Europe as an ecological whole, before human history, as a solution to the problem of the future of nature in the Netherlands. The success of their advocacy seems to rest on the way that their vision represents a pristine wilderness, one that can be realised more cheaply than nature monuments, which are expensive to maintain. Furthermore, this primeval nature is not constrained by the older concern to produce a nature appropriate to local geography, since new nature could be implemented at any place in the Netherlands.

A Soil for Amnesia9 I said that the new nature landscapes emerge spontaneously in response to large-scale engineering works defined by maps and plans. The Dutch 7. To support his thesis Vera draws from different sources, but primarily pollen research that showed that oak (Quercus robur and petraea) and hazel (Corylus avellana) were omnipresent after the last ice age and thus able to regenerate, which they seem unable to do in modern forests. The key difference is said to be the modern absence of grazing by large herbivores. This argument was made earlier by Bearselman and Vera (1989), Van der Lans (1980), Van de Veen (1985) and Wallis de Vries (1995), though they received little attention. 8. Organisations such as Stichting Ark, Werkgroep Kritisch Bos Beheer, Bureau Stroming and Wereld Natuur Fonds (the Dutch World Wildlife Fund) started such introduction in the early 1990s in areas near big rivers (de Grensmaas, Millingerwaard, Blauwe Kamer and Duursche Waarden). 9. Harrison (2004), drawing on Küchler (1993, 1999), has linked the manipulation of the landscape to the idea of forgetfulness of a landscape. In his account, the flat land of shifting rivers of Papua New Guinea has influenced the potential of the landscape to contain or, indeed, forget history through what he calls a purposeful amnesia. The title of this section refers to this idea.

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landscape provides little resistance to such modifications, as soft soils predominate except in the most southerly areas, where they are more rocky. This is the physical basis for the renowned Dutch maakbaarheid, ‘mouldability’, which refers to the tradition of civil engineering, apparent in projects such as the Westerschelde storm surge barrier and especially polders such as the Flevopolder and Wieringermeerpolder. For instance, the Wieringermeerpolder involved an all-encompassing orchestration of land and society. After the Wieringermeer was drained in 1930, the area was laid out, villages were planned and people selected for settlement in a way intended to produce optimal religious and socio-economic diversity in an ideal agricultural society. Mouldability is also a crucial ingredient of new nature landscapes. Because they are to reflect a primeval past and future, they need to shed their association with human history. This requires a different orchestration of people and activity: transient tourism instead of durable agriculture, with its half nature. The mouldable landscapes of new nature have an intrinsic forgetfulness. Obviously there are large machines involved, but once they have gone nothing is left to remind one of the previous landscape. In this sense we are not dealing with what Küchler (1993) called a landscape as memory, but with a landscape of potentiality. The forgetfulness of the landscape allows one to call upon its potentiality; new nature areas, as part of the EHS, are a topography and temporality waiting for fulfilment. One of the prerequisites for this is confidence in mouldability, which exists in the land itself and in the reorganisation of social groups and their relations to the land. Furthermore, the role of flora and fauna in the landscapes of potentiality is constitutive. It should, and inevitably will in this climate, spontaneously invade the lands uncovered by civil engineering like a present being opened. But this potentiality is a mixed blessing.

Starting with a Clean Slate? If, as I have argued, new nature is based on forgetfulness, we can begin to understand how it is possible that planners have envisaged a future national landscape of interconnected nature in the EHS. For one thing, because new nature is mouldable it can be made to fit this network topography. Moreover, through the spontaneity of the primeval community of succession, new nature can be produced as if it derives from a non-historic virtual space, unfettered by local circumstance. The virtualism of new nature opened new opportunities for national planning bureaus and nature management organisations. In a discourse coalition of these organisations (Hajer 1995), the EHS was envisaged as 50,000 hectares of new nature planned to connect and expand existing nature reserves (see Fig. 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Main Ecological Structure (courtesy Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, Netherlands). Index translated by author.

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This figure is not an ecological main structure; it is a map designed to convey an image of national control over ecological degradation, showing how it ought to be. It does so by depicting nature in a homogeneous green colour that represents stylistically the kind of nature that I have described, one carved out of history and produced in empty space. One consequence of this is that in the EHS all nature is equal: nature areas are light green and the connections dark green; nature in the north is just as green as in the south, east and west. Furthermore, if one proposed nature area is inconveniently situated, we can cancel it and compensate by changing the map and putting a bit of green somewhere else. This idea of compensation is not as hypothetical as it might seem. The Elfenbaan new nature area is one of many instances of schaamgroen, ‘green embarrassment’ or ‘fig-leaf green’, pieces of new nature planned because another piece of green had to be sacrificed to another purpose, a road in this case. In nature management, it appears, the priorities have changed: local nature is of minor importance; the task ahead is to unify all Dutch nature into one system. This is a corollary of the virtualising capacities of new nature that enables the EHS to maintain its virtual integrity. It allows connections with nature areas already implemented because it can replace problems in the present situation with plans and incentives for the future. EHS policy announcements illustrate this. Consider the following: Until 2013 the council of Zuid-Holland province will realise approximately 6,000 hectares new nature in the EHS. To improve the connection of nature areas the provincial council will implement 2,000 hectares of ecological relays to be finished in 2018. In the east of Zuid-Holland province the council and the national government are collectively aiming to realise robust connections, also about 2,000 hectares in size. (Provincie-Zuid-Holland 2006, my translation)

As to where this will happen and what kind of nature we are talking about, the reader is left in the dark. In this, new nature is a virtual black box rather than a real landscape. In practice, in the integration of plans with other land designations and priorities, it remains to be seen which institution should be planning what kind of new nature where (LNV 2000; see also Hajer, Gomart and Grijzen n.d. ). Needless to say, when new nature and its ideological connotations come off the map and into the landscape, problems emerge.

New Nature and its Malcontents In a provocative newspaper article, the ecologist Schouten (2004) has appealed to the government to make their vision of new nature clearer and provide an explanation of the choices that are made concerning nature management. Schouten, a student of Westhoff, wondered whether the half

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nature landscapes were to be abandoned for good and whether a nature monument can be compensated for with a new nature area; in other words, whether all nature is interchangeable. The article received little comment; it seems as if government planning bureaus and nature management organisations are more interested in securing land than in debating and describing the sort of nature being established. The approach to the landscape used by nature management and government organisations will probably appeal to a public, largely urban, who have come to see nature as a community of succession threatened with ecological degradation. The EHS offers a comprehensive model of nature and seems like one of the best ways to integrate nature with policy. But the kind of nature invoked is often at odds with the understandings of nature found among farmers and some ecologists. Some examples will illustrate this. The Gaasterland area was incorporated in the EHS, but after massive local resistance in 1995 the plan was abandoned. Local farmers, many of whom were faced with the forced sale of their property, were furious. The main cause of their reaction was that a landscape of which they considered themselves constitutive parts would be modified by what was considered urban policy. The objectors presented an alternative future for the landscape, in which farmers managed nature in accordance with local perceptions of an historical landscape (Joustra 2001). Disagreements between nature management organisations and farmers are common when it comes to new nature, and have emerged in De Peel, De Blauwe Stad and Mantingezand. Disagreement mainly arises because some nature organisations, seeking to secure enough land for nature, have bought out many farmers and are often actively against nature management by farmers. In rural areas these organisations are sometimes dubbed de nieuwe landadel, ‘the new landed gentry’. I have interviewed a number of farmers in Drenthe, in the east of the Netherlands, on their ideas about a new nature area (Onneweer 2000). Most of them, and especially the more Christian ones, perceived the nearby new nature areas as a dreadful mess and were concerned that if these lands were not properly kept (i.e., mowed and pruned) it would lead to mayhem rather than nature. This reflected the way that they saw landscape as linked to local history and sacrifice: ‘our grandparents have struggled to cultivate these lands’; ‘those who know how much suffering there has been in these areas to get these lands in their present state would never consider undoing it in such a way’. In other words, new nature disputes are not only over land. They are also disputes between adherents of a conception of local places bound with history and identity, and adherents of a conception of a national primeval nature that makes the commemoration of these places impossible. An alternative ‘agricultural nature’ is often proposed by farming organisations and especially by the recently established foundation for

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cultuurlandschappen, ‘culture-landscapes’. In these landscapes, nature is kept by farmers, who receive additional income for planting hedges, mowing at particular times, leaving the edges of their land fallow and so forth. The groups involved see agricultural nature management as the traditional practice of the farming community, even when it has to be combined with intensive agriculture, though to some degree the emergence of the EHS has fostered the development of local traditions of agricultural nature management.10 In addition, the large herbivores used in new nature schemes have become problematic. For one thing, several ecologists have raised questions about their effectiveness. The benefits of their grazing for the vegetation of some areas remains to be established, and in the meantime they are eating away at endangered plants (Biersma 2004; Meijden and Kooistra 2004). In addition, the fate of these animals has led to controversy between nature management organisations, tourists and the animal rights movement. In winter, there is too little vegetation to support the Konik horses and Heck’s cattle in the Oostvaardersplassen, and weak and hungry animals are left to starve. This is not due to lack of monitoring or negligence. Instead, it reflects management policy, which is to create a more natural population dynamic and attract more scavengers to the area. Visitors and people concerned with animal rights are not convinced that this is a natural process and have taken up the issue with the Minister of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality. A solution has been found to satisfy most of the parties involved: the manager of the area checks the animals regularly and kills individual animals that he suspects will not recover. Astonishingly, nature has taken advantage of this situation: for the first time in two hundred years a Black Vulture (Aegyptus monachus) has been spotted in the Netherlands, and it was actually eating the carcasses left by the manager.11

Conclusion: Effectively Nature? What does it mean, this change in topographical and temporal register, from monuments of natural glory to landscapes for the future that are produced through maps and policies and civil engineering? For one thing, as I have shown, the practice of nature management has become more entangled with the spontaneity of nature itself, as management comes to

10. The temporal and topographical implications of agricultural nature management are beyond the scope of this chapter. 11. Personal communication from Feike Boersma, manager at Oostvaardersplassen. Unfortunately, the animal was hit by a passing train and died.

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rely on natural processes that are actually happening or are expected to happen. It does so, paradoxically, by moulding the landscape into a condition in which these seemingly spontaneous processes should appear. Attention is now drawn to the efficacy of these visions, policies and practices, to the practical advantages of bringing distant pasts and foreign herbivores into national nature, and to the nature appearance of constructed environments in which specially bred animals are allowed to die of starvation to serve the ecology. Is the result, new nature, anything like nature? This wondering, however, is rare. In public debate, alternative conceptions of nature are rejected as unscientific romanticism or reduced to the terms of cost–benefit analysis. The successes of agricultural nature are doubted by some nature management organisations while celebrated by farmers as proof for a place-bound, historical, even artisanal nature management. In contrast, ecological and government bodies see in new nature a successful reintroduction of primeval, ecologically sound nature, as well as a continuation of a fine tradition in civil engineering. The paradoxes that emerge when producing primeval nature are usually taken for granted by its protagonists but never fail to amaze me: I have often wondered who is fooling who when I am walking through the newly created ‘Dutch jungle’ and encounter the favoured species. Have the little egrets agreed to the scheme? Have the area managers been able to stage nature to perfection? New nature appears to function according to plan in its forgetful landscapes, its ecological non-places and in its abstract representation in the EHS. Enforced by the government and the main nature management organisations, its topographical and temporal frames have begun to dominate the Dutch perception of nature. We might wonder, with Strathern, whether the new invocation of continuity with primeval nature by conservationists has not in itself brought the most radical break with all that we consider nature in general, ‘and thereby revolutionised the very concept of nature to which they would probably prefer to be faithful’ (Strathern 1992: 3).

Acknowledgement Thanks are due to many people for helping me with this chapter. I would especially like to mention Peter Pels, the ‘young anthropologist in Leiden debate group’ and the participants at the Oxford Brookes workshop where this was presented.

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References Bearselman, Fred and Frans Vera. 1989. Natuurontwikkeling: een verkennende studie. Ministerie van Landbouw Natuurbeheer en Visserij. ’sGravenhage: SDU publishers. Bender, Barbara. 2002. Time and landscape. Current Anthropology 43: S103–12. Biersma, Rob. 2004. ‘Grote grazers funest voor kwetsbare planten’. Toename Schotse Hooglanders en Koniks op natuurterreinen bedreigt 122 plantensoorten. NRC Handelsblad (6 August): 2. Carrier, James G. 1998. Introduction. In Virtualism: a new political economy, ed. J. G. Carrier and Daniel Miller, pp. 1–24. Oxford: Berg. Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang. ——— (ed.) 1995. Uncommon ground, towards reinventing nature. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. De Pater, Ben and Hans Renes. 1999. De landschappelijke transformatie van Nederland sinds 1850: ‘Plaatsloze’ landschappen in een geMcDonaldiseerde wereld? In Landschap in meervoud: perspectieven op het Nederlandse landschap in de 20ste/21ste eeuwi, ed. Jan Kolen and Ton Lemaire, pp. 197–216. Utrecht: Jan van Arkel. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the other: how anthropology makes its objects. New York: Columbia University Press. Gell, Alfred. 1992. The anthropology of time: cultural constructions of temporal maps. Oxford: Berg. Hajer, Maarten A. 1995. The politics of environmental discourse: ecological modernisation and the policy process. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———, Emilie Gomart and Jantine Grijzen. n.d. De planning van natuur en landschap: Wanneer stimuleert of beperkt het aanwenden van deskundigheid collectieve besluitvorming? Netherlands organisation for scientific research, Research programs www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/ pages/ NWOP_6C8G6C/ $file/ MDB-part9.pdf pp. 1–6. (9 June, 2006) Harrison, Simon. 2004. Forgetful and memorious landscapes. Social Anthropology 12: 135–51. Hirsch, Eric. 1995. Introduction: landscape: between place and space. In The anthropology of landscape: perspectives on place and space, ed. E. Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon, pp. 1–30. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The temporality of landscape. In The perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill, T. Ingold, pp. 189–208. London: Routledge. Joustra, Wio. 2001. Paradijs Gaasterland telt natuur in punten en niet in hectares. Noorderbreedte (special edition: Mag het ook mooi zijn? Themanummer over het geïntegreerde gebiedsgerichte beleid) (14 February). www.noorderbreedte.nl/nieuw/artikel_rechts.php3?artikel=603 (20 February 2005)

64 | Maarten Onneweer Küchler, Susanne. 1993. Landscape as memory: the mapping of process and its representation in a Melanesian Society. In Landscape: politics and perspectives, ed. Barbara Bender, pp. 85–106. Oxford: Berg. ———. 1999. The place of memory. In The art of forgetting, ed. Adrian Forty and S. Küchler, pp. 53–72. Oxford: Berg. Kull, Kalevi, Toomas Kukk and Aleksai Lotman. 2003. When culture supports biodiversity: the case of the wooded meadow. In Imagining nature: practices of cosmology and identity, ed. Andreas Roepstorff, Nils Bubandt and K. Kull, pp. 76–96. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. LNV (Ministerie van Landbouw, Natuurbeheer en Visserij) 1990. Natuurbeleidsplan: regeringsbeslissing. Tweede Kamer, vergaderjaar 1989–1990, 2–3: 21149. ’s-Gravenhage: SDU publishers. ———. 2000. Natuur voor mensen, mensen voor natuur: nota natuur, bos en landschap in de 21ste eeuw. ’s-Gravenhage: Ministerie van Landbouw, Natuurbeheer en Visserij. Munn, Nancy J. 1992. The cultural anthropology of time: a critical essay. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 93–124. Onneweer, Maarten. 2000. Boeren en natuur: de achtergronden van natuurbeheer bij boeren en hun beeld over natuur. MS. Provincie Zuid Holland. 2006. Milieu, natuur en water: Natuur in Zuid-Holland. Provincie Zuid Holland afdeling Groen. Last update 28 September 2005. www.pzh.nl/thema/milieu_natuur_en_water/groene_ruimte/natuur /index.jsp (9 June 2006) Ronayne, Maggie. 2001. The political economy of landscape: conflict and value in a prehistoric landscape in the Republic of Ireland – ways of telling. In Contested landscapes: movement, exile and place, ed. Barbara Bender and Margot Winer, pp. 149–64. Oxford: Berg. Roos, Rolf. 1999. Bewegelijke kustlandschappen: over ecologie en esthetica. In Landschap in Meervoud: perspectieven op het Nederlandse landschap in de 20ste/21ste eeuw, ed. Jan Kolen and Tom Lemaire, pp. 117–40. Utrecht: Jan van Arkel. ‘Sakaama & Atmo’ (trans.) 1997. The Dapperstraat, by J. C. Bloem. www.xs4all.nl/~driek/dapperstraat.html (9 June 2006) Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and memory. London: Fontana Press. Schouten, Matthijs. 2001. De natuur als beeld in religie, filosofie en kunst. Utrecht: KNNV Uitgeverij. ———. 2004. Een moeras? Of liever een boslandschap? Over het gevaar van zelfgemaakte natuur. NRC Handelsblad (11 December): 17. Smithson, Robert. 1996. A tour of the monuments of Passiac, New Jersey. In Robert Smithson: the collected writings, ed. Jack Flam, pp. 68–74. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

New Nature: On the Production of a Paradox | 65 Tilley, Christopher. 1993. Art, architecture, landscape [Neolitic Sweden]. In Landscape: politics and perspectives, ed. Barbara Bender, pp. 49–84. Oxford: Berg. Tüxen, Reinhold. 1956. Die heutige potentielle natürliche Vegetation als Gegenstand der Vegetationskartierung. Angewandte Pflantzensoziologie 13: 1–42. Van de Veen. 1985. Natuurontwikkelingsbeleid en bosbegrazing. Landschap 1: 14–28. Van der Lans, Hans. 1980. Het oerbos van de toekomst. De Kleine Aarde 34: 47–9. Van der Meijden, Ruud and Laura Kooistra. 2004. Hap, slik, weg met de grote grazers! Die brengen de biodiversiteit in gevaar. NRC Handelsblad (6 March): 7. Van der Ploeg, Jan Douwe. 1997. On rurality, rural development and rural sociology. In Images and realities of rural life: Wageningen perspectives on rural transformation, ed. Henk de Haan and Norman Long, pp. 39–73. Assen: Van Gorcum. Van der Windt, Henny. 1995. En dan, wat is natuur nog in dit land? Natuurbescherming in Nederland 1880–1990. Amsterdam: Boom. Van Koppen, Kris. 1997a. Claims of culture: social representation of nature and their consequences for agriculture. In Images and realities of rural life: Wageningen perspectives on rural transformation, ed. Henk de Haan and Norman Long, pp. 287–305. Assen: Van Gorcum. ———. 1997b. Terug van Arcadie. In Museum aarde; criterium of constructie, ed. Jozef Keulartz and Michiel Korthals, pp. 71–87. Meppel: Boom. Vera, Frans. 1988. De Oostvaardersplassen: van spontane natuuruitbarsting tot gerichte natuurontwikkeling. Amsterdam: IVN; Haarlem: GrasduinenOberon. ———. 1997. Metaforen voor de wildernis: Eik, hazelaar, rund en paard. Doctoral thesis, Wageningen University. Wallis de Vries, Michiel F. 1995. Large herbivores and the design of large-scale nature reserves in Western Europe. Conservation Biology 9: 25–33. Weeda, E. J. 1990. Over de plantengeografie van Nederland. In Heukels’ flora van Nederland (21st edn), ed. R. Van der Meijden, pp. 16–24. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff. Westhoff, Victor. 1951. De betekenis van natuurgebieden voor wetenschap en practijk. Working paper. Plenaire vergadering van de ContactCommissie, 3 November. Amsterdam: Contact-commissie voor Natuur- en Landschapsbescherming. ———. 1970. Oecologische grondslagen van natuurbehoud en natuurbeheer. Annalen van het Thijmgenootschap 58(2): 5–23. Worster, Donald. 1977. Nature’s economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 3

A Culture of Conservation: Shaping the Human Element in National Parks KATHY RETTIE

In principle national parks contain a nation’s natural heritage and they exist as a means to protect it for future generations; they are places where national environmental ideology and policy translate to practice. When the world’s first national park was created in 1872 in Yellowstone, in what is now the US states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, natural resources were seen as unlimited and national parks were idealised as ‘islands of stability and a refuge for spiritual, cultural and physical renewal’ (Wright 1996: 3). Industrialised society’s ideology of sovereignty over the environment and urban society’s ideology of nature for spiritual renewal shaped national park philosophy. Created primarily for human well-being (Halvorson 1996: 15), they were a reflection of the interests of the upper class and a device for their enjoyment (Wright 1996: 6). Now, however, values have changed: landscape once deemed important for pleasure, enjoyment and profit is now landscape for preserving, and nature that once was deemed infinite is now considered limited and endangered. National parks in Canada are part of the way that the state moulds mental structures and imposes common principles of vision (and division) that encourage the construction of national culture forms, self-images and identity. In this way, people’s conceptualisation of the relation between themselves and nature is a matter of ideology, influenced in this case by nonviolent strategies of power. These are exercised by the Parks Canada Agency, a government body based in Ottawa. It manages the country’s national parks, forty-two in 2006, which are the property of the federal government and belong to the citizens of Canada. As part of its management, the Agency

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uses public documents, brochures, in-park interpretative programmes, parks’ web-sites and other media to shape public views on topics such as the values of nature, conservation and national identity. In doing so, it hides popular truths and the inherited knowledge of habitus, supplanting them with a collection of taught knowledge and the culture and actions that they legitimate (Bourdieu 1977: 187). Thus it is that government discourse continually shapes the meaning of national parks. Recent Parks Canada discourse speaks of sharing passion and leadership and of putting the protection of natural resources in the hands of society, a society that has been educated in national park priorities. In practice this means trying to turn tourists into advocates for parks, and trying to get Canadians to embrace their natural and cultural heritage. Visitor-tourists should feel they are part of a solution to the many stresses put on the environment, particularly the parks’ flora and fauna. Parks Canada’s position on enlightenment and conservation is, in many ways, similar to what Joseph Sax sees among environmentalists who assume that the public shares the way that they understand nature and national parks, an understanding that stresses the values of independence, self-reliance and self-restraint. ‘Follow me and I will show you how to become the sort of person you really want to be. I will show you that nature, taken on its own terms, has something to say that you will be glad to hear.’ The preservationist [environmentalist] is not an elitist who wants to exclude others. He is a moralist who wants to convert them. (Sax 1980: 15)

While its discourse may speak of sharing passion and concern for the environment, Parks Canada Agency practice promotes a sense of rights and wrongs that guide individuals’ activities, buttressed by prohibitions, the laws and rules that constrain action. This is most clear in regulations prohibiting the removal of park artefacts, taking game, altering natural objects and polluting the landscape. This guidance resembles what Foucault (1991 [1975]: 177–84) calls ‘normalising judgement’, indoctrinating people with standards of acceptable thought and behaviour, thereby shaping their activities through an imparted sense of right and wrong and its corollary, a fear of being observed acting incorrectly. In the case of society’s perceptions of national parks, legislation enshrines the altruistic benefits of conservation and society’s responsibilities towards future generations, and regulation puts legislation into practice. The goal is to have park visitors become a self-regulating, and self-berating, lot whose actions conform to what they have been told is best for the conservation of the national parks. This translates into such things as keeping your campsite clean and reporting those who do not, respecting trail closures, taking only pictures and ‘packing in/packing out’ (never leaving garbage behind). In a

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more complex way, it has the potential to garner support for higher park entrance fees, as people come to believe and understand that with more money, managers can better meet altruistic goals of nature protection. However, the position of parks is contradictory. As is the case for most countries, the mandate for Canada’s parks contains both protection and use. The Canada National Parks Act says: The National Parks of Canada are hereby dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, education and enjoyment, subject to the Act and regulations, and the National Parks shall be maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. (Department of Justice 2000: §4 (1))

In promoting both preservation and use, the mandate fosters confusion and controversy through various interpretations of what is to be preserved and what is to be used and enjoyed, what preservation is to be sacrificed for that use and what enjoyment is to be sacrificed for that preservation. As Gary Wockner (1997: 10) notes: Preservation versus use is the primary debate around which some type of coherent policy is contrived to set the stage to manage nature. Ambiguity has left the door open for managers to exterminate some wildlife and coddle others and to define ‘preservation’ and ‘natural conditions’.

It is those who make the policy who make these decisions. This tension between use and protection is not new. Throughout the history of national parks, tourism and conservation, nature use and protection, are closely connected. The first parks in North America were created to attract tourist dollars that would otherwise be spent in Europe. This is especially true for Canada’s first national park, Banff. It was designated late in the 1800s and promoted by the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) as a destination for tourists who would arrive by train and enjoy being pampered in the grand CPR hotel set in the mountain wilderness. These tourists’ dollars would help offset the cost of building the railroad through the Canadian Rockies. As parks became more accessible to those outside the upper class, partly due to the invention of the automobile, and as the conservation movement began to take hold, the purpose of national parks shifted more towards the ecological integrity that is important today. Equally, however, the push for more tourist-visitors and the money that they bring is increasingly important (e.g., Eagles 2002). The contradiction remains: a neoliberal approach to selling nature as a commodity to meet financial targets for park operations stands opposed to the more poetic ideologies of national parks as lands set aside for future generations.

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Policy Shifts and Contradictions Parks Canada’s targets for conservation and use have shifted over the years, as have the discourses supporting those targets and the associated initiatives. Some of these changes contradict the previous ideologies and beliefs instilled to promote older targets or positions on the environment and human use. Most of the examples I use to illustrate this are drawn from the four contiguous national parks located in the Rocky Mountains along the Alberta–British Columbia border, commonly known as the ‘mountain park block’. They are the Banff, Kootenay, Yoho and Jasper National Parks. In 1998, Parks Canada initiated ‘The panel on the ecological integrity of Canada’s national parks’. This was to determine the state of the natural conditions in, and the issues related to the ecological integrity of, national parks, and to recommend actions. The panel reported that thirty-seven of the thirty-eight national parks then in existence were ‘significantly threatened’ by numerous stresses responsible for habitat loss and fragmentation, and for species loss (Parks Canada Agency 2000: 5–6). In what some considered a ‘crisis-driven’ response, the Canadian parliament amended the National Parks Act to make ecological integrity the first priority: ‘Maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity, through the protection of natural resources and natural processes, shall be the first priority of the Minister when considering all aspects of the management of parks’ (Department of Justice 2000: §8 (2)). The direction of park management policy changed accordingly. Concern with the environmental sustainability of existing use gave way to the protection and restoration of ecosystems, measured in national audits. So, park management decided to favour using fire (in the form of controlled burning) as a means to expand habitat, increasing restriction on human use, better control of exotic species and the use of indicator species to measure changes in ecological integrity. In pursuit of these goals, Parks Canada staff were strongly advised to base their management decisions on scientific evidence, which led to the establishment of a substantial programme of natural-scientific research. Ecological integrity, the ‘land ethic’ (Leopold 1966), is the dominant ideology incorporated into policy documents, legislation and development review processes (Parks Canada 1994, 1997; Parks Canada Agency 2003a). For Parks Canada, an ecosystem has integrity when it is deemed characteristic of its natural region, including the composition and abundance of native species and biological communities, rates of change and supporting processes. In other words, ecosystems have integrity when their native components (plants, animals and other organisms) and processes (such as growth and reproduction) are intact (Parks Canada Agency 2000). This shift in focus to conservation was intended to simplify

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decision making by placing the priority on protection and restoration of the natural environment, rather than enjoyment and use. However, it generated controversy. Critics of this biocentric approach asked whether the parks are for bears or humans (Cooper, Hayes and LeRoy 2002). In the mountain park block the grizzly bear was selected as the indicator species, the mark of the health of the ecosystem. Selecting this species had scientific logic in its favour. It is at the top of the local food chain, so that its well-being is taken to reflect the well-being of those species further down the chain. It is also the carnivore about which the most was known, having been subject to numerous collaring and tracking studies that helped to identify prime habitat areas and ranges. As well, selecting the grizzly bear had cultural logic in its favour. It is a charismatic large mammal and a symbol of the Canadian wilderness, and it was expected that the public would support policies intended to protect it. Rather lofty targets for habitat effectiveness and security and species mortality were incorporated into fifteen-year management plans. These targets appear arbitrary in important ways. For example, on the lands nearest the town of Banff, with substantial human use, the habitat effectiveness target is 90 per cent, which is the same as the target for the little-used land on the east slopes of Banff National Park. On the other hand, in the area adjacent to the village of Lake Louise the target is much lower, only 60 per cent (Parks Canada 1997: 44). Similarly, the mortality target of less than 1 per cent per annum for Banff National Park seems unrealistic. The park’s entire grizzly population is estimated at only 60–80: one excess death in a year would mean missing the target. To meet its targets, park planners are focusing on controlling or reducing human use within certain popular areas of the park. One way to do this is to close trails, and trail closures have risen dramatically since the adoption of the 1997 park management plan. This has had an immediate and decisive impact on visitor experience. This connection between the natural and social side of management is apparent in the Lake Louise area of Banff National Park. Lake Louise is an important international symbol of Canada. The view of Lake Louise with Victoria glacier in the background and the poppy gardens in the foreground is famous, and, according to a BBC television programme (Milmo 2002), Lake Louise is the eleventh most popular place in the world to visit. The area surrounding Lake Louise is not only breathtaking but it sustains one of the densest grizzly bear populations in North America, together with a high level of human use. It has two major wildlife corridors, along with four developed areas (which have lodges, hotels and a village), a section of the Trans-Canada highway, secondary roads and a railway line. This mixture of bears and people may seem to indicate successful cohabitation. However, some fear that human use is encroaching on wildlife

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and therefore must be more carefully managed: the high levels of human use are said to reduce the effectiveness and security of the habitat for bears (Tremblay 2001: ix). They are concerned especially with the summer, when visitor numbers are highest (80,000 people visit the Lake Louise ski area in the summer) and the grizzly bear population is active (as many as fourteen bears forage on the cleared ski runs). Given the stringent targets set in the Banff National Park Management Plan (Parks Canada 1997), managers worried that current policies would not be adequate, and in 2004 significant federal funds were allocated to develop and implement a human-use strategy for the Lake Louise area. A primary focus was to be on a transportation system that would control the number of people travelling from the valley bottom, where the village of Lake Louise is located, to the upper level of the valley, where the lake for which the village was named, Victoria Glacier and Moraine Lake are located. However, Parks Canada lacks the ability to develop and implement a strategy because of gaps in social science research and questionable information from previous studies. In other words, Parks Canada is in a quandary because of its previous focus on biological and other natural sciences at the expense of attention to the social side of management. Their latest corporate orientation document reflects this difficulty and seeks to deal with it, recognising that ecological integrity is not simply a matter of natural science, for it cannot be achieved without ‘people’. There is new emphasis upon human relations with nature. This means producing policy that defines appropriate activities and levels of use, and generating programmes that will encourage the right kind of tourism by fostering the right kind of tourist. Parks Canada presents this in terms of partnership and involvement. High-level agency documents stress the importance of having ‘more Canadians share the passion and commitment of protecting and presenting Canada’s natural and cultural heritage. People protect what they value and a wilderness experience builds far more passion than reading a book about the wilderness’ (Latourelle 2004). The message, then, is to integrate ecological integrity, visitor experience and public education. This appears to mark what Alston Chase (1986: 361) criticises as a ‘growing preoccupation with politics that encourages a search for the solutions not in better biology, but with the right ideology’, and some see serious contradictions between ecological integrity and visitor experience. Agency staff who have worked for years to preserve and protect national park resources will find it hard to accept the idea that having more visitors is a good thing. Accepting and implementing this new orientation will require substantial changes in Parks Canada. The forces encouraging those changes arise in tourism and Canada’s changing political economy.

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Neoliberal Parks Recently the national park system has been contributing $CA 1.2 billion to the economy annually, and in 2003 a quarter of Canadians visited a national park (Parks Canada Agency 2005b). In spite of this, there is concern that Parks Canada is not benefiting from the rapid growth in tourism. Recent in-house statistics show that visits to the mountain park block are declining and camping is less popular than in previous years. One reason for this may be that entry fees for national parks increased significantly over the past decade, leading people to visit less expensive, nearby provincial parks. The concern with visitor numbers, like the increase in entry fees, can be linked to increasing demands that the Parks Canada Agency be more self-sufficient financially in the face of declining federal support. Parks are under pressure to cease being sites of nationhood and natural beauty, and start being businesses. The tourism industry does not, however, take its lead from Parks Canada policies. Rather, it is concerned with market demand. Recently there has been much discussion of ‘experiential tourism’, which is supposed to be engaging, personally relevant, socially satisfying and memorable.1 Experiential tourism is linked to experiential learning, in which people are said to create meaning through direct experience (Pine and Gilmore 1999). In practice the growing concern with experiential tourism has meant paying less attention to what is offered to tourists, and more attention to the ways that tourists feel. This shift is reflected in the recent Canadian Tourism Commission decision to stop trying to attract tourists with the ‘Mounties, mountains and moose’ that have proven successful in the past. The new slogan is ‘Canada. Keep Exploring!’, presenting Canada as a place where tourists can fulfil their dreams (McArthur 2005). To keep pace with this, Parks Canada has had to shift from emphasising the provision of services, facilities and programmes in ways that are geared to meet its goals and objectives, to emphasising visitor needs and expectations. Although the political-economic pressures leading to this change are very different from the pressures that led environmentalists to attend to the social side of conservation, the result is the same: people are important if conservation is to succeed. In Parks Canada’s view, this shift in the nature of tourism is the result of a growing cultural stress on the authenticity of experience and on elements of personal growth (MacCannell 1999). This is not mass tourism, but personal and individual; the parks need to show rather than describe.

1. The Parks Forum 2005 in Canmore, Alberta, 17–19 March 2005, included presentations from Scott Jones and from Pam Veinotte and Beth Russel-Towe on this topic (Chambers 2005).

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The orientations and interests of tourists are seen to be focused increasingly on opportunities to connect with unique natural and cultural heritage. People seek experiences that they think will match their interests and provide a sense of personal accomplishment; most importantly, these experiences allow visitors to create their own memories (Parks Canada Agency 2005b). What this Agency rhetoric does not consider is that most of what it presents is not very new. One’s experience, whether alone or in a crowd, is always personal and individual. The focus on showing rather than describing contradicts the purpose behind interpretive theatre, promoted as an essential learning experience. All tourists are keen to experience events and visit sites that fall into their own areas of interest. Not only is the novelty of experiential tourism doubtful, promoting it and encouraging its individualistic approach to connecting with nature challenges much that comprises the Agency’s human-use strategy. Recent park policy reflects this focus on such tourists. That is the policy of the integrated mandate, which puts ecological integrity, visitor experience and public education on equal footings. This policy is partly a response to reports that criticise the Agency for its lack of public education and its failure to increase public awareness of the benefits of national parks. The federal government has allocated millions of dollars to raise the profile of national parks, enhance educational opportunities and improve visitors’ experience. To a significant degree this entails the mundane refurbishment and repair of visitor service infrastructure, such as washrooms, roads and campsites. However, it also includes projects to expand education programmes such as interpretative theatre in campgrounds and visitor centres. Once again, however, the social science knowledge needed to make informed decisions is lacking. The federal government has given the Parks Canada Agency ten years to demonstrate significant improvements in visitor experience and education, and the Agency recognises that it needs to learn more about the visitor it is trying to manage. They accept the idea that Typically the best insights on how to reach and attract potential new users for a product or service can be gained by studying those who already use it. A good understanding of the behaviour, motivations and preferences of ‘users’ helps in designing a communications strategy that will have the maximum potential to reach more like-minded people, the largest potential new user group. (Guidelines Ltd 2005: 14)

This approach is seen as more effective than the often difficult, timeconsuming and costly task of attempting to understand non-users and persuade them to visit the parks. To this end, in 2003 a survey of visitors to Banff, Jasper, Kootenay and Yoho National Parks was conducted. This was a comprehensive study of national park visitors designed to collect ‘detailed information that tells us, in real numbers: who the visitors are, why they are here, where they are

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going, what they are doing and when they are doing it’ (F. Grigel presentation May, 2005). Visitors arriving at the entry points to the parks, at bus and train stations and at the nearest international airport, were asked to complete trip diaries for Parks Canada. Of the diaries distributed, 25 per cent were completed, nearly 2,400 over one calendar year. Data collected via electronic and pneumatic counters on roadways and trail counters at trailheads were incorporated into the analysis. The results appeared in The 2003 Mountain Park visitor survey (Parks Canada Agency 2003b). It revealed that the most popular visitor activity was driving and sightseeing (54%), followed by eating in a restaurant (45%), shopping (35%), sightseeing and landmarks (32%) and hiking (27%). The report categorised tourists by type (i.e., independent: travelling alone or in groups of 2–6; group), length of stay, purpose of visit, how frequently they visited the mountain national parks. It is not surprising that the report has attracted the attention of local businesses, government economists and park planners. Two Parks Canada initiatives that spring from the more people-focused perspective are the creation of a ‘culture of conservation’ and undertaking human-use simulation modelling. The first is concerned with visitor experience and public education, seeking to shape tourist experiences and expectations through the transfer of selected knowledge. The second is a tool designed to mimic patterns of visitor use, providing managers with information to make decisions regarding appropriate use levels, and so shape human activity in the landscape.

Culture of Conservation Parks Canada recently adopted a theme that focuses on creating a culture of conservation among Canadians, proclaiming the need to engage Canadians in the mission and mandate of Parks Canada. The overarching goals of the programme are called the ‘three I’s’ – Inform: to raise awareness of Parks Canada’s system of national parks; Influence: to foster understanding and enjoyment of individual heritage places in ways that respect their ecological integrity; Involve: to strengthen emotional connections to and the sense of ownership of heritage places and national parks as symbols of Canada. Starting with the assumption that ‘products, services and events reach specific audiences and produce both short and longer-term changes in the audience’ (Parks Canada Agency 2005b: ii), a recent report noted that ‘external communication is intended to change behaviour of people and organisations in ways that support the Agency’s goals for protection and presentation [of nature]’ (2005b: iii; bold in original). Following corporate direction, ecological-integrity education projects are being developed to engage Canadians through learning activities, and to generate support for

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the national parks: ‘Parks Canada aims to convert those visitors who presently have low awareness and understanding of ecological integrity and who are least likely to seek out and participate in park learning opportunities into park supporters’ (Guidelines Ltd 2005: 9). Learning, then, goes hand in hand with support. According to Parks Canada, one reason for spending the money and effort to gather information on how tourists currently use the park, such as the 2003 visitor survey, is to identify certain groups of tourists and educate them on the values of national parks. The language used to justify this is that of experiential tourism: ‘one of the keys in learning through experience is that people can create the meaning themselves. The visitor’s experience, the outcome of their visit, must become a primary consideration. This will be essential to Parks Canada’s continued relevance to all Canadians’ (Parks Canada Agency 2005a). The Agency target is that 50 per cent of visitors will have a learning experience. This is not, however, simply the personal spontaneity of experiential tourism. That is because these learning experiences have to be ones that can be measured against the right values and that will send the tourist home with the right memory. Visitors are expected to participate in guided events led by a Parks Canada representative or to visit interpretive exhibits and museum galleries of historic sites. An important part of this is interpretive theatre productions staged in campgrounds and historic sites, intended to provide active learning along with entertainment. In such productions, costumed players re-enact events and activities that have special significance to the park or site. To encourage active learning, the audience may be invited to join in with the players or participate in other ways; for example, in Rocky Mountain House visitors assume roles as competing fur traders while following historic trails near the river. Whatever the social, political or economic justification for stressing engagement and learning among tourists, it is not clear that Parks Canada knows enough about tourists to implement its policies. This is apparent in the 2003 survey. The Agency’s analysis concluded that the visitors most motivated to be learners were those who fitted the ‘getaway visits’ and the ‘habitual visits’ categories. This conclusion was based on the fact that they were prone to answer the question ‘How important were each of the following opportunities in your decision to be in the parks on this trip?’ with either (a) learn about Canada’s natural and cultural heritage or (b) see unique museums, galleries and culture (Guidelines Ltd 2005: 14). However, like the habitat protection targets described earlier, this conclusion seems arbitrary. That is because visitors in these two categories ranked lowest on the scale of participation at learning events. This raises the possibility that their answers to the ‘opportunities’ questions are little more than examples of normalising judgement in action. Apparently, when they are not being quizzed they follow their preferences, which do not include engaging in the

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designated learning experiences. This raises questions about the validity of the survey results, yet those results are the knowledge base on which policies are being formulated and decisions made. These results are used not only to define proper park visitors; they are also used to define improper ones. For instance, during a Parks Canada workshop on human use, statistics were presented that placed a third of the visitors to the mountain national parks in an ‘undesirable visitor’ category. These are visitors who seek experiences such as bar-hopping, partying, attending a concert and shopping. These activities are considered outside of the ‘preferred’ national park experience that improves awareness of ecological integrity and nature appreciation through a wilderness experience. At the workshop there was considerable discussion of the merits of converting and enlightening that group, though, as I will show later in this chapter, the Agency does not appear to have thought through the implications of classifying such visitors as undesirable. Clearly, more and different research needs to be undertaken if Parks Canada intends to respond to visitors’ real experiences and expectations. Surveys cover only a certain sector of the visiting public – those willing to complete a diary and survey while on holiday. In an effort to hear more from a broader audience, Parks Canada is now employing a web-based survey system that is designed to collect responses from a group of up to 5,000 respondents, as well as funding research using lengthier focus groups. They have also supported a project carried out by geography students at the University of Calgary that has involved participant observation (Anderson et al. 2005). This project showed that many of the ‘learning opportunities’ in the mountain park block were of limited effectiveness because of their hours of operation and their location. So, for instance, the lack of public transportation meant that visitors who did not have access to a vehicle could not attend many of the better but more remote events. As well, the project found that interpretive displays in visitor centres were outdated and did not link individual parks to the national system of parks and protected areas, and that new Canadians, mostly identifiable by ethnicity, were not taking advantage of these sites and programmes. Moreover, it seems that in many cases visitors stopped at visitor centres only to use the public washrooms. In other words, it appears that many visitors, even those who are seen to be the most motivated to engage in learning experiences, use national parks in a manner that contradicts Parks Canada’s current vision for human use. What becomes obvious in turn is that, whatever the rhetoric, Parks Canada’s policies and priorities are not driven by shifts in people’s changing desires and values.

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Modelling for Decision Making I said that the second initiative springing from the more people-oriented perspective is simulation modelling. As this is new and likely to be unfamiliar, it is worth describing in detail, following information presented to Parks Canada officials and researchers during an introductory workshop conducted by a human-use simulation modelling consultant. Human-use simulation modelling is considered a tool for monitoring human use, integrating human activities with wildlife movements and predicting the effects of displacing use. Making use of techniques employed by conservation biologists, humans’ patterns of landscape use will be tracked and reported in a manner similar to that used to illustrate how creatures like cougars and wolves use the landscape. In fact, one public presentation was entitled ‘Tracking patterns of visitor use – what to do when the radio collars don’t fit.’ The need for human-use modelling was premised on predicted increased visitor use, new modes of recreation, conflicts arising from multiple types of use, increased environmental effects, the cascading consequences of all of these changes, and the desire to explore alternatives to further restrictions on visitor access. In particular, there was concern that increased numbers would result in crowding on trails and at popular sites, which would in turn lead to the deterioration of visitor experience, especially for those who want a peaceful, wilderness setting. As envisaged, human-use simulation would allow a comprehensive and dynamic understanding of visitors’ behaviour and interactions over time across the landscape, and would provide a framework for incorporating visitor information into planning and management. Visitor interactions that are difficult or expensive to study in the field could be measured, and alternative management strategies could be tested. Importantly, simulation is also seen as useful for communicating complex management issues to the public and decision makers. Instead of presenting statistics on human and wildlife movements and explaining what they mean in the landscape, such simulation modelling would allow Parks Canada to present them ‘virtually’ on a screen. The human-use simulation model uses geographic information systems (GIS) and a computer-generated model of human agents to simulate human behaviour in a specific landscape. The standard way of modelling humans in such simulations is the ‘autonomous’ mode: the agent uses no internal logic, but rather follows the itinerary of the typical trip. The virtual visitor changes from ‘autonomous’ to ‘intelligent’ when made subject to ‘agent rules’. These include a number of standard attributes, including preferences, fitness, travel mode and travel speed. They also include a set of stimulus-response or event-action rules. The result is that, whereas the autonomous agent simply moves from place to place, the

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intelligent agent does so for a ‘reason’, a set of defined attributes and decision routines. The intelligent mode of navigation is initiated when an agent enters a locale, where the agent uses its internal system to navigate within the locale. Because agents have different attributes, decision routines and trip durations, they will behave in different ways in the virtual locale. The results are portrayed as dots moving across a landscape reproduced on a computer screen. The contractor for the human-use simulation project is supposed to develop new techniques for analysing visitor count data in order to generate likely trip itineraries for the simulation. During the introductory presentation of the project, however, methodology was a central topic, including alternative means of data collection: it was seriously suggested that visitors wear tracking bracelets instead of doing trip diaries. A library of intelligent agent characteristics and rules compatible with national park activities would be developed, and the agents would be programmed in a way that would increase transferability of the program to different national parks. Contemplating merging GIS capabilities and the data from the 2003 visitor survey, Parks Canada employees decided that human-use simulation could have significant benefits for visitor experiences, ecological integrity and park operations, but only if the simulation project meant asking the right questions, merging new and existing data, applying it to real rather than hypothetical issues and ensuring that the model provides reliable information for decision making (these require more and better data than Parks Canada has). This approach to planning for human-use management has certain corollaries. Firstly, a key attraction for Parks Canada was the consultant’s testimonial that the private sector is using human-use simulation models, though most such models are closely guarded, proprietary secrets. For example, it was said that the Disney Corporation has developed a visitor model that it uses on a daily basis. Factors such as day of the week, weather, facility and ride openings or closures, and the like are entered, and the model produces estimated revenue and attendance, and staffing requirements for restaurants, rides and support functions. This is said to have allowed them to reduce bottlenecks and optimise staffing levels throughout each day. The apparent attraction of this sort of commercialcapitalist model to an organisation like Parks Canada, whose reason for existence is supposed to be the protection and enjoyment of natural resources for future generations, points to the pervasive influence of a neoliberal orientation in a government agency that sees itself as having to compete for visitors and emulate one of its most successful competitors. Further, this type of modelling entails an objectification of visitors. In the model, visitors’ personal preferences and decisions are defined by assumptions created and applied by a management team that inevitably seeks to support and advance certain agency policies. This introduces the

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risk that the virtual reality of the model will overtake visitors’ reality, creating a totalising vision of park visitors in terms of a certain set of models and assumptions concerning what parks are and what they need to do. In the policy and planning process, visitors could be dehumanised to ‘agents’.

Conclusion Human-use management in Canada’s national parks is based on strategies of power employing tools of dominant ideology, normalising judgement and virtualism. One national park mandate stresses human use and enjoyment. Human-use management, however, evokes images of directing or limiting the freedom and spontaneity of the people who use the parks. However, if the environment is a commodity for sale in the nature-tourism industry, then, as Daniel Miller points out, managing the consumption manages the commodity (Miller 1998). Control, regulation and restrictions on use are all part of national park human-use strategies, limiting visitor numbers to decrease environmental damage. At the same time, however, increased use helps to alleviate budget shortfalls. Those who stress income see benefits in attracting new types of tourists and adjusting to global economies, all the while confirming and strengthening Canadians’ sense that the national parks are theirs. The contradictions in the national parks’ orientations do not, however, reside only in the tension between the goals of use and conservation. As I noted, they appear as well in the virtualising vision of the engaged visitor, the preferred type that others should emulate. Recall that a third of visitors are ‘undesirable’, interested in shopping, eating and driving. To classify them as undesirable misses important points. In terms of the environment and the indicator species, such visitors have effectively no adverse effects. Politically, the desires of those visitors are as legitimate as those of engaged environmentalists: they are all part of the body of Canadians that the national parks are supposed to serve. Seeking to change these undesirables, or others, into the preferred type of visitor through education does not accord with the neoliberal and commercial rhetoric of responding to visitors’ needs and shifting social values. While seeking to change visitors may reduce the uncertainty in visitor scenarios, it also removes visitors’ individuality and impinges upon their freedoms. The well-behaved tourist who visits and uses sites selected by Parks Canada, and who is willing to pay more to enter the parks and to engage in various programmes, because they think they should, is a walking fantasy. Such a fantasy is the result of projecting on to visitors the contradictions that Parks Canada confronts. In other words, the problems the parks confront become transformed into problem visitors. This fantasy solution to the Agency’s problems illustrates the connection between epistemic analyses (such as the analysis of human-use data) and

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political regulations as a construction of social norms, part of Foucault’s theory of normalising judgement. In their flirtation with human-use simulation, Parks Canada is considering deferring to a model built on nonrepresentational information to create the predictable tourist, and then using the result to support policy and management decisions. ‘Power is reenacted and reproduced over time, it circulates’ (Foucault 1991 [1975]: 98), creating a reliance on the predictability of social actors: the present actions of a dominant agent, Parks Canada, rely upon the future actions of the aligned agents, tourist-visitors, being the same as their past action. Power, knowledge and discipline in the present-day structure are thus linked through the effects of an ‘examination mechanism’ that coerces by means of observation. The state acquires knowledge about its subjects and then utilises this knowledge to exercise power and discipline, which produces subjected and practised ‘docile’ bodies (Foucault 1991 [1975]: 138). What does all this mean about the information Parks Canada is using? Potentially it will be used to generate and justify policy that shapes how we use nature. But there is the potential for human-use simulation and its world of virtual scenarios to change the relationship between the people who make the decisions and the people whose rights and desires are said to be the basis of those decisions. There is a danger that actual visitors or tourists will henceforth be referred to as agents. Danny Miller points to just this potential: Neo-classical economists claim their consumers are merely aggregate figures in modelling. Their protestations of innocence are hollow, however, because these virtual consumers and the models they inhabit and that animate them are the same models that are used to justify forcing actual consumers to behave like their virtual counterparts. The problem is the effects that the model has on the possibilities of consumer practice. In some kind of global card trick, an abstract, virtual consumer steals the authority that had been accumulated for workers in their role as consumers. (Miller 1998: 214)

Is there a danger that the virtualism that Miller refers to will take over reality, that a conscious attempt will be made to make the real world conform to the virtual image? Carrier explains how this virtualism emerges: Here the world is seen in terms of the concepts and models of economic abstraction, which are taken to be the fundamental reality that underlies and shapes the world. Those who adopt this view of the world can be said to perceive a virtual reality, seemingly real but dependent upon the conceptual apparatus and outlook that generates it. Perceiving a virtual reality becomes virtualism when people take this virtual reality to be not just a parsimonious description of what is really happening, but prescriptive of what the world ought to be; when, that is, they seek to make the world conform to their virtual vision. Virtualism thus operates at both the conceptual and practical levels, for it is a practical effort to make the world conform to the structures of the conceptual. (Carrier 1998: 2)

There is a distinct possibility that those engaged in writing policy and planning documents will adopt this way of thinking, delving more into the

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virtual than the real. After all, at first glance it appears to be simply a handy tool for predicting visitor movements and displacements, and for providing evidence to support management decisions. Whether or not Parks Canada succumbs to virtualism, they are unlikely to be able to make the world conform to their vision. The mountain national park’s landscape is too vast and the tourists are too independent. Moreover, the learning initiatives and the human-use simulation modelling contradict current visitor expectations and beliefs. I think it very unlikely that tourists will agree to wear trip-tracer bracelets, which intrude on the privacy and sense of freedom that many park visitors expect from a ‘nature’ experience. The contradictions in reducing human use while at the same time encouraging more visitors to experience the park at first hand in the approved way suggests that the Agency has not looked beyond the level of rhetoric, even though that rhetoric will be reflected in human-use policy. Discourse on experiential tourism touts individuality and personal experience, yet there is an underlying presumption of and support for a homogenous visitor population. Can better research help us find a way out of these problems? Speaking directly to the anthropological study of parks, John Bennett (1990: 454) asserts that anthropologists have a vital role in analysing the way societies allocate and control their natural resources, ‘since their ethnographic casestudy method can be easily adapted to such research. This task must begin with research on the institutions and organisations that any society has available to make resource decisions’, institutions like the Parks Canada Agency. Research on the organisational culture of the dominant (the Agency) and the experience and expectations of the dominated (visitors and citizens) could prove worthwhile.

Acknowledgement Notes on programming intelligent agents were provided by Dr. Randy Gimblett, School of Natural Resources, University of Arizona.

References Anderson, Lee, Crystal Burke, Amy Christenson, Kyle Griffin, Cory Gross, Jessica Malcolm, Colin Park and Michlyn Simbirski. 2005. From the visitors’ perspective: a study of learning opportunities in four of the Mountain National Parks. (Prepared for the Parks Canada Agency.) Banff: Parks Canada Agency. Bennett, John W. 1990. Ecosystems, environmentalism, resource conservation and anthropological research. In The ecosystem approach in anthropology:

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82 | Kathy Rettie from concept to practice, ed. Emilio F. Moran, pp. 435–57. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carrier, James G. 1998. Introduction. In Virtualism: a new political economy, ed. J. G. Carrier and Daniel Miller, pp. 1–24. Oxford: Berg. Chambers, Dan. 2005. 2005 Parks Forum final report: 2005 parks forum – parks, landscapes and open spaces: a new tomorrow. Edmonton: ARPA. www.parks.arpaonline.ca/2005/2005-Parks-Forum-FinalReport.pdf (6 September 2006) Chase, Alston. 1986. Playing God in Yellowstone: the destruction of America’s first national park. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press. Cooper, Barry, Jason Hayes and Sylvia LeRoy. 2002. Science fiction or science fact? The grizzly biology behind Parks Canada management models. Fraser, BC: The Fraser Institute. Department of Justice. 2000. Canada National Parks Act 2000, c. 32, An Act respecting the national parks of Canada [Assented to 20th October, 2000]. Ottowa: Department of Justice, Canada. http://lois.justice.gc.ca/en/ N-14.01/19110.html (21 August 2006) Eagles, Paul F. J. 2002. Trends in park tourism: economics, finance and management. Journal of Sustainable Tourism 10: 132–53. Foucault, Michel. 1991 (1975). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Guidelines Ltd. 2005. The Banff ecological integrity project: data analysis report. Prepared for Parks Canada Agency. Vancouver: Guidelines Ltd. Halvorson, William. 1996. Changes in landscape values and expectations: what do we want and how do we measure it? In National parks and protected areas: their role in environmental protection, ed. R. Gerald Wright, pp. 15–30. Boston: Blackwell Science. Latourelle, Alan. 2004. Message from the Chief Executive Officer: The basic issue – sharing the passion, sharing the leadership. Memo to all staff. Leopold, Aldo. 1966. A Sand County almanac: with essays on conservation from Round River. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McArthur, Keith. 2005. Tourism ads to shun Mounties and moose. The Globe and Mail (12 May): A1. MacCannell, Dean. 1999. The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class (new edn). Berkeley: University of California Press. Miller, Daniel. 1998. Conclusion: a theory of virtualism. In Virtualism: a new political economy, ed. James G. Carrier and D. Miller, pp. 187–215. Oxford: Berg. Milmo, Cahal. 2002. List of world’s most desirable destinations reveals canyon that lies between tourist dreams and reality. The Independent (8 November). http://travel.independent.co.uk/news_and_advice/ article126784.ece (18 October 2006) Parks Canada. 1994. Guiding principles and operational policies. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada.

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Shaping the Human Element in National Parks | 83 ———. 1997. Banff National Park management plan. Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services of Canada. Parks Canada Agency. 2000. Unimpaired for future generations? Protecting ecological integrity with Canada’s National Parks. Vol. 1: A call to action. Report of the Panel on the Ecological Integrity of Canada’s National Parks. Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services. ———. 2003a. Banff National Park of Canada: State of the park report. Banff: Banff National Park. www.pc.gc.ca/pn-np/ab/banff/docs/rap-rep/chap1/ rap-rep1_E.asp (18 October 2006) ———. 2003b. Mountain Park visitor survey: a year round survey of visitors to Banff, Jasper, Kootenay and Yoho National Parks of Canada. (Sponsored by Parks Canada, the Canadian Tourism Commission and the Mountain Park Visitor Survey Partnership with a contribution by Alberta Economic Development.) Banff: Banff Lake Louise Tourism. ———. 2005a. Minister’s round table on Parks Canada 2005. Gatineau, Quebec: Parks Canada. www.pc.gc.ca/agen/trm-mrt/2005/itm4/table4a_e.asp#7 (6 September 2006) ———. 2005b. National performance and evaluation framework for engaging Canadians: external communications at Parks Canada. Report produced by the Performance, Audit and Review Group, February. Gatineau, Quebec: Parks Canada. www.pc.gc.ca/docs/pc/rpts/rve-par/26/index_e.asp (6 September 2006) Pine II, B. Joseph and James H. Gilmore 1999. The experience economy: work is a theatre and every business a stage: goods and services are no longer enough.Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press. Sax, Joseph L. 1980. Mountains without handrails: reflection on the national parks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tremblay, Marie A. 2001. Wildlife corridors in the Lake Louise area, Alberta: a multispecies management strategy. Prepared for: Kootenay, Yoho, Lake Louise District, Parks Canada. MS. Wockner, Gary. 1997. National park conundrums: The wolves of Isle Royale. Fort Collins, Colorado: B-Store Press. Wright, R. Gerald (ed.) 1996. National parks and protected areas: their role in environmental protection. Boston: Blackwell Science.

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CHAPTER 4

A Bridge Too Far: The Knowledge Problem in the Millennium Assessment COLIN FILER

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) describes itself as ‘an international work program designed to meet the needs of decision makers and the public for scientific information concerning the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and options for responding to those changes’ (MA n.d.). It could also be described as a process, a network, a community or an organisation, depending on the point in time or point of view from which it is considered. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it was designed to oscillate between an operational state, in which a programme of work was actually undertaken, and a virtual state, in which the products of that work are presented for public inspection or digestion. The work of design began in 1998 with a ‘Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems’ (WRI 2000); the assessment became fully operational after an MA board meeting held in February, 2002; and the first operational phase came to an end with the final board meeting in March, 2005, which authorised the public release of the findings. In 2009, it remains to be seen whether this ‘organisation’ will return from its virtual state, as a well-populated web-site, to its previous operational state as a set of working groups and a series of meetings. In this chapter, I shall discuss some of the problems that arose as the MA tried to grapple with the role of local and indigenous knowledge in the construction of a ‘multi-scale’ assessment of the world’s ecosystems and, more especially, on the way in which these issues were addressed in a conference on ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’ held in Alexandria in March, 2004. Anthropologists like myself have only played a marginal role

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in these deliberations, and my own membership of the MA’s Sub-Global Working Group was somewhat accidental. However, the act of participant observation in this enterprise has enabled me to consider the extent to which the ‘knowledge problem’ encountered in the sub-globalisation of the assessment is itself evidence of a deeper ‘virtualising’ tendency of the kind discussed in the Introduction to this volume.

The Millennium Assessment as a Form of Environmental Governance The MA’s organisational form, in its fully developed state, would be familiar to students of Polynesian society, for at its heart was a quadripartite structure – four clan-like groups of experts in one transient and transnational epistemic community. Three of the four main ‘working groups’ were responsible for writing reports about the changing ‘Conditions’ of different ecosystems, recent or current ‘Responses’ to these changes, and plausible ‘Scenarios’ for their further transformation over the next fifty years, all at a global scale. The fourth was a ‘Sub-Global’ working group whose task was to assess the relationship between conditions, trends, responses and scenarios in specific corners of the globe, and hence to provide useful information to ‘decision makers’ at lower levels in the global hierarchy of environmental governance. Each of the four clans had two chiefs or ‘co-chairs’, one representing the Global North, the other the Global South. This bifurcation of chiefly power was repeated in the composition of the Assessment Panel, which oversaw the work of the four working groups, and the MA Board, whose members represented the consumers of their work. All eight clan chiefs were members of the Panel, and this council of chiefs had its own pair of paramount chiefs who were not clan chiefs, but had semi-divine status as members of the Board. At the same time, the two gods or spirits who presided over the Board, the God of the North and the God of the South, were also ‘ex officio’ members of the Panel. The constitution and performance of the Assessment therefore blurred the separation of producers from consumers, in the same way that an act of sacrifice may blur the separation of human and spiritual power. Metaphors aside, this internal governance structure was consciously designed to achieve the goals of credibility, legitimacy and utility (Reid 2004: 3). The emphasis placed on the needs and interests of ‘decision makers’ was meant to remedy the perceived failings of a previous assessment of global biodiversity (Heywood 1995). Although the MA was not established as an inter-governmental process or organisation in its own right, the ‘global users’ represented on its Board were primarily the Conventions on Biological Diversity, Desertification, Wetlands and

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Migratory Species. These four multilateral environmental agreements or environmental policy regimes have their own governance structures and organisational cycles to which those of the MA were deliberately linked.1 The MA could therefore claim a degree of kinship with the IPCC, which is the expert or scientific component of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and there was in practice some overlap in the actual membership of these two epistemic communities. If an epistemic community is defined as a transnational community of experts which also functions as a policy community (Coleman and Perl 1999), it still needs something more than a form of internal organisation to create a sense of community amongst its members. It needs a common understanding of the world ‘out there’, through which its members can articulate or engineer the ‘bridge’ between science and policy. In recognition of this point, the final step in the design of the MA was the establishment of a ‘conceptual framework’, which all members were meant to internalise as a condition of their membership. All members will therefore be painfully familiar with Figure 4.1, even to the point of having lost the capacity to question its significance.2 But what I find interesting about this image of the world as an interaction between the contents of four boxes, at three spatial scales, over two temporal scales, is that the people ‘out there’ are performing exactly the same roles as the people ‘in here’. In other words, the community’s representation of its social environment appears to be a function of its own governance structure. In the beginning, there are only three kinds of people in the picture. First of all, we have the ‘decision makers’ whose decisions constitute the ‘strategies and interventions’ that cut across five of the six causal arrows connecting the contents of the four boxes. Then we have the ‘experts’ who understand one or more of these six causal relationships. And finally we have all the other ‘users’ of ecosystem services, which means the rest of the human population. The creation of a new epistemic community entails the creation of a subset of decision makers who also count, in this utilitarian world, as ‘users’ of the ecosystem assessment produced by a subset of the experts.3 But when we add a third dimension to this world, we find that decision makers are ranked in terms of the level of political

1. 2.

3.

The ‘MA’ was not known as the ‘MEA’ because ‘multilateral environmental agreements’ had already captured the second of these acronyms. This diagram was debated and elaborated in two Technical Design Workshops (April and October, 2001), then finalised and published in the report of the Conceptual Framework Working Group (MA 2003: 9), and has since reappeared in every one of the main assessment reports. At the Second Technical Design Workshop there was some debate about the confusion that might arise from the ambiguous use of the word ‘user’ to refer to the users of ecosystem services and the users of the MA.

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Source: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Figure 4.1 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Conceptual Framework (source: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment; used with permission)

organisation at which their decisions have an effect, while the experts are ranked in a corresponding hierarchy of scales at which they have some understanding of the causal relationships affected by these decisions. The MA Conceptual Framework does not exactly preclude the existence of other types of people who are not part of the same story. For example, there might be people who specialise in the understanding or management of ‘good social relations’ without having any obvious association with the drivers of change in the delivery of ecosystem services. There could be all sorts of people making ‘cultural and religious’ choices about the consumption of ecosystem services without ever counting as the sort of decision maker who makes decisions on the basis of scientific evidence. However, the discovery of such people is largely

88 | Colin Filer CONSTITUENTS OF WELL-BEING ECOSYSTEM SERVICES Provisioning FOOD FRESH WATER WOOD AND FIBER FUEL ...

Supporting NUTRIENT CYCLING SOIL FORMATION PRIMARY PRODUCTION ...

Regulating CLIMATE REGULATION FLOOD REGULATION DISEASE REGULATION WATER PURIFICATION ...

Cultural AESTHETIC SPIRITUAL EDUCATIONAL RECREATIONAL ...

Security PERSONAL SAFETY SECURE RESOURCE ACCESS SECURITY FROM DISASTERS

Basic material for good life ADEQUATE LIVELIHOODS SUFFICIENT NUTRITIOUS FOOD SHELTER ACCESS TO GOODS

Health STRENGTH FEELING WELL ACCESS TO CLEAN AIR AND WATER

Freedom of choice and action OPPORTUNITY TO BE ABLE TO ACHIEVE WHAT AN INDIVIDUAL VALUES DOING AND BEING

Good social relations SOCIAL COHESION MUTUAL RESPECT ABILITY TO HELP OTHERS

LIFE ON EARTH - BIODIVERSITY Source: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

ARROW’S COLOR Potential for mediation by socioeconomic factors

ARROW’S WIDTH Intensity of linkages between ecosystem services and human well-being

Low

Weak

Medium

Medium

High

Strong

Figure 4.2 Linkages between Ecosystem Services and Human Well-being (source: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment; used with permission)

overridden by the need to establish a global form of expert consensus within a specific set of environmental policy regimes. This point can be illustrated by a second representation of the MA Conceptual Framework, which unravels the one causal relationship that is not straddled by the strategies and interventions of decision makers (Fig. 4.2).4 An anthropologist or sociologist might struggle to make sense of the idea that there is ‘low potential for mediation by socioeconomic factors’ in the relationship between ‘cultural ecosystem services’ and ‘good social relations’. But that is simply because the ‘potential for mediation’ is a purely economic phenomenon. The diagram is simply telling us that the user of a degraded ‘cultural ecosystem service’ generally finds it hard to purchase an adequate substitute. For example, if you had a house with a nice view, and the view is now obstructed by a multi-storey car park, you

4.

Figure 4.2 has been generated and disseminated in much the same way as Figure 4.1, but when it first appeared in the report of the Conceptual Framework Working Group (MA 2003: 78), the arrows connecting the boxes were not subject to the double form of quantification found in later versions.

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could sell up and move house, but then you would have a different view. This example is not meant to trivialise the point at issue, but only to show that a closer inspection of the boxes and arrows in the Conceptual Framework does not immediately lead us to a world of greater social complexity, but only to a world of more specific ‘trade-offs’ between economic and environmental values. This attenuation of social and cultural complexity is partly due to the fact that most members of the epistemic community were either environmental economists or ‘utilitarian’ ecologists, and one key element of the assessment process was the effort to construct a second ‘bridge’ between these two groups of experts. For this purpose, it was necessary to construct a model of the world in which all people are more or less alike, distinguished mainly by the amounts of ‘ecosystem services’ that they consume, while ecosystems themselves are mainly distinguished by their capacity to keep up the supply.5 But the credibility and legitimacy of this model was also a function of the demand made by a more important group of consumers, for if the MA could not imagine an ‘external’ power structure distinct from its own ‘internal’ hierarchy of knowledge, this was partly because it had a mandate to present a group of global decision makers with a confirmation of their own power to make significant decisions. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the wording and working of a multilateral environmental agreement (see Berkhout, Leach and Scoones 2003). My aim is not to deplore this form of technical rationality, but to explore the tensions that arose from its transposition to the lowest rungs in the ladder of environmental governance, below the level of the signatory state.

The Sub-Globalisation of the Millennium Assessment In September, 2000, the MA Board circulated a call for expressions of interest in conducting one of ten ‘local, national or regional assessments’. This document stressed the need for active engagement on the part of ‘potential users and decision makers’, and included a set of criteria for the assessment of proposed assessments (Box 4.1). At the same time, the Board established a Sub-Global Assessment Selection Working Group to review the selection criteria and determine the way in which sub-global assessments ought to be conducted once they were selected.

5.

This may be one reason why the MA did not attract much support from big international NGOs (non-governmental organisations) engaged in the representation and defence of unique zones of wilderness.

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1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Where it matters most: Where population pressure is greatest or environmental or socio-economic change is happening at a higher pace Where we are most worried about impacts Where future pressures will be greatest Where people want it: Where there is a committed host agency Where there is donor interest Where there is the commitment to maximize the inclusiveness and transparency of the process Where there is sufficient political stability and broad sociopolitical commitment Where there is commitment by multiple sectors for engagement in the process Where it will help to meet national needs in relation to multiple convention processes Where there is a good chance of success: Where critical data are available Where capacity or the ability to build capacity exists Where the potential for impact exists Where the results will have broader applicability and in particular can help to inform or catalyze other processes: Where methods or policy options might be applicable to other regions and countries Where it fills a gap or adds to the diversity of the efforts Source: MA (2000).

Box 4.1 Initial Selection Criteria for Sub-Global Assessments

This group proposed that the overall aim of the sub-global component of the MA should be ‘to develop and test a set of internally consistent cross scale methodologies for integrated ecosystem assessments’ in a small number of ‘focal regions’ – Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, Northern Europe and Central America (MA 2001: 1). Allowance was also made for the inclusion of one ‘cross-cutting’ assessment (to examine a single type of ecosystem in different parts of the world) and one ‘outlier’ assessment (to examine a set of ecosystems not found in any of the four focal regions). While these six ‘core’ assessments would receive financial support from the MA budget, further allowance was made for the inclusion of selffunded ‘partner’ assessments meeting similar ‘quality control standards’ (MA 2001: 11), which essentially meant a peer review process based on the

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manual already developed by the IPCC. At the same time, the group proposed to loosen the selection criteria by allowing that a sub-global assessment might usefully be carried out in places which might not be ‘facing serious degradation or rapid change’, but where it ‘might still be helpful to people and decision-makers’ or where ‘people face difficult choices regarding trade-offs among ecosystem goods and services’ (MA 2001: 14). When the MA Board endorsed these proposals in January, 2001, it looked as if I had been wasting my time in organising an expression of interest to undertake an assessment of ‘Small Islands under Pressure in Papua New Guinea’ unless I and my colleagues could secure an independent source of funding for this exercise. Oddly enough, in May that year I received a call from the same UN official who had sent me the Board’s call for proposals, suggesting that I should revise our own proposal for inclusion in the Milne Bay Community-Based Coastal and Marine Conservation Project. That was a project substantially funded by the Global Environment Facility, ‘implemented’ by the United Nations Development Programme and ‘executed’ by Conservation International. Having now secured a promise of funding for an assessment of ‘Small Islands in Peril in Milne Bay Province’, I was able to attend the MA’s Second Technical Design Workshop in the guise of a putative ‘partner’.6 In that capacity I joined a sub-global ‘breakout group’, whose members took issue with some of the recommendations previously made by the SubGlobal Assessment Selection Working Group and proposed a more inclusive approach to the selection and authorisation of sub-global assessments. When the MA Board met to initiate the operational phase of the assessment in February, 2002, it agreed to enlarge the potential membership of the Sub-Global Working Group, partly because the Southern African assessment was the only one of the four ‘focal regional assessments’ which had got itself organised in the course of the previous year (Reid 2004). The Sub-Global Working Group elaborated the conditions of its own membership at its first meeting in June, 2002 (MA 2002a). Over the course of the next eighteen months, eighteen sub-global assessments were formally approved by the MA Board, while another sixteen late arrivals were granted the status of ‘associated’ assessments. In order to gain the approval of the Board, each sub-global assessment was required to

6.

The scope of the sub-global assessment in PNG was later widened to include all of the country’s ‘coastal, small island and coral reef ecosystems’ because persistent delays in the implementation of the Milne Bay project meant that the ‘Small Islands in Peril’ programme could not be completed before the MA’s reporting deadline.

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demonstrate its commitment to replicate the internal governance structure of the global assessment by setting up its own User Group and Steering Committee. However, most members of the Working Group were themselves engaged as workers in the actual conduct of a sub-global assessment. In the course of its six meetings, the group was continually redividing itself into sub-groups responsible for the individual chapters of a final report that would synthesise the findings of all the approved assessments. In this process, individual members came to represent specific disciplines or areas of expertise, as well as the sub-global assessments in which they were participating. Since the social and intellectual composition of this working group was considerably more diverse than that of the three ‘global’ working groups, the work of manufacturing an expert consensus was that much harder, and the members were sometimes given to wondering whether it was worth the effort. There were two main reasons why the MA, unlike the IPCC, was designed to adopt a ‘cross-scale’ or ‘multi-scale’ approach to the business of environmental assessment. First, there was a recognition that the supply of many ecosystem services depends on decisions taken at multiple levels in a global political hierarchy, including the local or ‘community’ level. This meant that the credibility, legitimacy and utility of an ecosystem assessment would need to be established at each of the levels at which relevant decisions are being made. But the MA also diverged from the IPCC in its greater recognition of the role of ‘non-governmental’ decision makers and their greater reliance on ‘unscientific’ forms of expert knowledge (Reid 2004). The Sub-Global Assessment Selection Working Group remarked that it would therefore be important to ‘incorporate local knowledge at all scales, not only in terms of the technical knowledge of the ecosystem; but in particular in terms of management, user interests and co-operation, capacity and network building’ (MA 2001: 7). In this process, sub-global assessments would foster ‘respect for informal knowledge among scientists and decision makers, and an appreciation of scientific knowledge among the public and ecosystem users … [by] bringing an awareness of ecosystem functioning “into people’s sitting rooms”’ (2001: 21). And so it came to pass that the Sub-Global Working Group was held responsible for the two most ‘experimental’ features of the MA as a whole, the bridging of scales and of ‘epistemologies’ (Reid 2004).

Bridges, Scales and Epistemologies The idea of ‘bridging epistemologies’ was canvassed in the first draft of the Conceptual Framework report, which included a paragraph at the end of the introductory chapter stressing the need to make the assessment

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process meaningful to indigenous and local communities, by expanding the ‘community of experts’ to include the holders of ‘local and traditional knowledge’. The circulation of this draft report coincided with the first meeting of the Sub-Global Working Group, whose minutes record the group’s recognition of the ‘unique needs and circumstances faced by local assessments and/or those involving traditional/indigenous knowledge’ (MA 2002b). A conference on the subject of ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’ was originally meant to be held in combination with the second meeting of the Working Group in Kunming (China) in June, 2003. However, that plan was scuppered by the outbreak of Secondary Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and the conference was eventually held in combination with the Working Group’s third meeting in Alexandria in March, 2004. Insofar as the Working Group had developed a common approach to this subject, it was not that of the social anthropologist, but that of the ‘social ecologist’. The dominant theoretical discourse was that of the Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org) and its ‘house journal’, Ecology and Society.7 This meant that local or indigenous communities and their ‘knowledge systems’ were construed as elements in complex ‘socialecological systems’ whose behaviour is the legitimate subject of systems ecology (see Berkes, Colding and Folke 2004). This way of thinking can seem quite alien to social or environmental anthropologists, who prefer to view the world through the lens of political ecology (see Paulson and Gezon 2004). When each member of the Working Group was asked to nominate one or more ‘outside experts’ to be added to the list of conference speakers, I sought to reduce my sense of intellectual isolation by nominating Peter Brosius. A couple of other anthropologists found their way to the conference, but we were still in a very small minority. In a paper presented at one of the plenary sessions, Brosius spoke about the competition and division between anthropologists and ‘local/ indigenous advocates’ in the representation of ‘local local’ people8 and their knowledge on the world stage, where one set of voices is mediated by the conventions of social science, while the other is mediated by ‘transnational discourses of indigeneity’ (Brosius 2004: 7). The key

7.

8.

Carl Folke, Madhav Gadgil and Christo Fabricius were not only current members of the Working Group, but had also been members of the SubGlobal Assessment Selection Working Group. A paper by Gadgil and his collaborators (Gadgil et al. 2000) had been circulated as a model for the conduct of community-based ecosystem assessments when the MA Board issued its initial call for sub-global assessment proposals. This phrase was used to refer to ‘peasants, farmers, fishers, or indigenous peoples, often living in out-of-the-way places, frequently marginalized politically and economically’ (Brosius 2004: 4).

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question which he raised was why they both agree to treat local or indigenous knowledge as environmental, rather than political, knowledge: ‘[I]n a “policy environment” characterized by dispossession, where the threats to local communities result from the actions of “decision-makers,” of what relevance is indigenous knowledge of nature by itself, divorced from its significance with respect to the making of claims?’ (2004: 12). He went on to argue that the growing volume of the ‘local/indigenous’ voice in the transnational discourse of conservation has been accompanied and contradicted by the development of ‘large-scale’, ‘ecoregional’ planning and management strategies that prevent it from having any actual effect. And so, despite the unprecedented number of local/ indigenous advocates present at the Fifth World Parks Congress in 2003, Brosius reports that he left Durban feeling that an enormous weight of managerialism had descended over conservation, much as it once did on development, and that this state of affairs was in large part due to the efforts of major conservation organizations to consolidate their authority over global conservation practices. They are achieving this consolidation by establishing administrative technologies in which they are taken for granted as methodological gatekeepers. Increasingly conservation has become a gated community that one can only enter by accepting the methodological terms promulgated by major conservation organizations and donors. This has occurred as tools or approaches that originated as emancipatory moves became incorporated into the managerial apparatus of conservation. Once incorporated, they become tied to the imperatives of funding cycles, scalingup, accountability to donors, and more. (2004: 17–18)

Brosius was too polite to say that he would leave Alexandria with the same feeling, but he might have suspected that the ‘local/indigenous advocates’ in his audience would express this sentiment anyway. In Alexandria, as in Durban, these characters outnumbered the anthropologists by five to one at the very least. Their views of the ‘epistemological bridge’ were set out in the report of a conference workshop session that was printed and circulated to all participants in the final plenary session (Box 4.2). My own contribution to this final plenary session was partly motivated by my reaction to the views expressed by Brosius and the Indigenous Voice, but also reflected the role which I had come to play as the ‘anthropological joker’ in the Working Group, entertaining the rest of the group with alternative metaphorical constructions of their work (Box 4.3).9 In this instance, I was aiming to take issue with the assumption lurking in the conceptual architecture of the whole conference, that the world

9.

This is not a verbatim transcript of what I said in the plenary discussion, but a version which I elaborated on my laptop immediately afterwards and then circulated to other members of the Working Group.

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The western scientific paradigm is embedded in a world view that is impacting the world through disciplines which impose values on governance, research, education – all of life. In this context the world view/paradigm of others – indigenous societies which are more horizontal and linked to nature – is denied and only elements of practice are permitted to surface. Actions are taken out of the western world view informed by science and thus tensions between the youth and elders emerge, knowledge is lost and undermined, language is threatened and biodiversity is diminished. Indigenous world views are seriously threatened, as has been witnessed in this conference, sometimes shattered … A bridge between epistemologies is not possible or not desirable because it produces invasion and domination. We can only – consciously – sit down at a table of dialogue, in a world where many worlds (or epistemologies) are welcome, where we can talk between us, and also talk with modern science. But at this table we need to leave behind arrogance and the wish or attitude to dominate. We have to come with humbleness, with eagerness to learn, with openness and respect. In this neutral space of encounter, what can everyone contribute, what is our gift? What is the gift of the scientist? Is the scientist prepared for a dialogue? Is he or she able to support us? Do they have the means to talk with us? Can they enter an alliance and commitment overcoming the limitations of their worldviews? Source: IKAP Network on Capacity Building in MMSEA (2004) Box 4.2 The Indigenous Voice

consists of a set of bounded spaces at different scales, in which systems of different types, including ‘knowledge systems’, are piled on top of each like the layers in a club sandwich. But more importantly, perhaps, I was taking aim at the simplistic dualism which radically divides the knowledge of ‘modern science’ from that of ‘local’, ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ peoples, and then seeks to recombine them in the policy process, while ignoring all the many other forms of knowledge (including hybrid forms of knowledge) that inform policy or management decisions at different levels in a political hierarchy. I certainly could not claim that anthropologists were the only conference participants to take issue with this peculiar form of epistemology, but there was still a notable reluctance to challenge the purity, consistency and validity of the ‘local’ ‘traditional’, or ‘indigenous’ knowledge whose advocates were squaring off against the forces of scientific managerialism. If these folks appreciated the point of my own metaphorical deconstruction of these forces, as well as the point which

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Talk about building a bridge between epistemologies, and you’ll find yourself on a funny old road. A bridge makes sense only if it joins two points or places which are on roughly the same plane or level, otherwise the engineering can be tricky. One would also have to assume that they were not connected before, otherwise there would be no need to build a bridge in the first place. Then again, when you actually get down to the business of building a bridge, you are likely to forget about any third point or place which might otherwise be connected to either of the first two points or places. Bridge building is a very focused business. This metaphor could make sense of the synthesis of a pair of dismal sciences like economics and ecology, but will it fit the relationship between scientific and indigenous knowledge? Indigenous knowledgeholders might not think so, because the scientists will surely be the guys designing the bridge. That’s one problem. But the real sticky question is this: WHAT IS UNDERNEATH THE BRIDGE? Metaphorically speaking, it could be a six-lane motorway, a disused railway track, or a raging river. On the other hand, it might just be a tramp sleeping in a pile of old newspapers. On a bad hair day, it could even be the herd of elephants which threatens to consume the field of daisies so carefully watered by the tribe of communitarian gardeners who got involved in the Southern African sub-global assessment. Now if it is a raging river, or even a herd of elephants, rather than a sleeping tramp or an old railway track, it could threaten to damage or destroy the fabric of the bridge. Indigenous people might welcome the prospect, if their knowledge is stuck at one end of the bridge, and they can see a bunch of hungry scientists heading towards them. Now let’s get real, folks. What is REALLY underneath the bridge? I guess it would have to be the things we know to be there, but which we have not thought about enough or do not want to think about too much. The American military–industrial complex, for example. Or the social construction of scientific inquiry and public policy on top of piles of dirty money. Or a gaggle of non-scientific and non-indigenous cosmologies and ideologies, including the notion that God is the one and only driver of ecosystem change. Or the real bundle of property relations which tells us who actually owns the ecosystems which are being driven under the bridge. So far so good. But what about SCALES? /continued … Box 4.3 Modernism Unmasked

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It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to think of building a bridge between two floors in a block of flats or a shopping mall. Come to think of it, the floors in a shopping mall are often connected by means of an ESCALATOR, and that sounds like a far better way of representing the connection of scales in a multi-scale assessment. Mind you, from my experience of shopping with my teenage daughter every weekend, I would have to say that there can be something depressingly similar about the landscape encountered on each floor. I guess it rather depends on whether one is actually hunting for a pair of trousers or an ironing board, or just waiting for the moment when one can escape to the car park and head for home. If this is the supermarket of science we are talking about here, I guess that many of our indigenous friends might feel the same way. Then again, some of them might be content to sell their knowledge in the Savage Slot shops formerly run by anthropologists like myself. And then we might wonder whether shops in this particular chain are only found on the ground floor, or whether you can find them on different floors in different malls, just like the Body Shop. Whatever the answer to that question, the fact remains that, in a multi-storey building, there is nothing very interesting in the space between one story and another story except a third story, and each story has a plot full of shops. Well there might be room for the odd tramp, if he could get past the security guards at the entrance, but the thought of a herd of elephants charging up an escalator in a shopping mall is seriously scary. Surely enough to send the Savage Slot shopkeepers, not to mention all the other merchants in the science market, heading for the exits in double quick time. Across the bridge, into the car park, into the car, and off to the countryside for a well-deserved break from the spatial connotations of modernistic metaphors. Box 4.3 continued

Brosius had made about the political content of all forms of knowledge, they might have been less amused by the quotation with which I prefaced my own conference paper (Box 4.4). Now this is certainly not the voice of indigenous wisdom. Nor would any self-respecting anthropologist, let alone a systems ecologist or ‘postnormal scientist’, dream of representing an indigenous community and its environmental knowledge in these terms. So why would an anthropologist want to quote it? The answer is that this is the most ‘politically incorrect’ quotation that I have been able to extract from what many anthropologists might otherwise consider to be a well-grounded

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Once upon a time in the not too distant past an international NGO decided to do nature conservation in the Wasi river basin. This was [an] understandable idea. The place was the environmentalist’s dream. Lots and lots of bush filled with a multitude of flying and biting things. A diverse bunch of unwashed and scabrous savages leading traditional lives that they punctuated with stories and wars to give it some meaning. No industry, no logging or mining, just a virginal tract of scrub … One must ask why the Wasis have not stuffed the place up themselves? Are they, as some of our NGO friends suspected, the possessors of native wisdom that has allowed them to live in harmony with nature for an interminably long time? Unfortunately not … The distressing fact is the Wasis would have destroyed the place were it not for the malaria and other parasites that kill most of their kids, sap their energy and make them mad. In essence, their population has not been able to get to the level where it can push the resources to the point of scarcity … The best thing the international NGO … could do would be to simply leave the Wasis alone while doing what they could to deter the nastier industries from entering the region … IF they could bring health, education and awareness to the villages, only then would there be a need to talk conservation. Source: People Against Foreign NGO Neocolonialism 2003 (in Filer 2004: 1). Box 4.4 A Dissonant Voice

‘nationalist’ condemnation of ‘eco-imperialism’ or ‘scientific managerialism’.10 It also seems that the anonymous author of this particular passage, in what is almost certainly a multi-authored document, is a ‘foreign nationalist’, because (s)he asks why the benighted members of the Wasi community ‘were unable to smelt steel, ponder nuclear physics and destroy the place like we did’ (my emphasis). So it appears that ‘we’ are not simply reading a national and nationalist response to a specific form of foreign domination, but encountering a far more complex set of personal, institutional and ideological relationships within the ‘national conservation community’, if such a thing exists. One of the main points of my paper (Filer 2004) was to illustrate the inability of the international conservation community and its ‘scientific managers’ to simplify this set of relationships by constructing a meaningful ‘bridge’ between their own visions of biodiversity and the

10.

Chapin (2004) has produced a ‘transnational’ version of this argument that is ‘correctly’ aligned with the Indigenous Voice.

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multiple forms of ‘local local’ knowledge which are at work within a state whose political leaders are themselves ‘indigenous people’ or ‘customary landowners’. This in turn was meant to set the stage for a consideration of the way in which these multiple forms of knowledge might be represented, in our sub-global assessment of PNG’s coastal ecosystems, as the formal properties of different resource management regimes. But the task now facing the Sub-Global Working Group was to build a bridge between multiple ‘knowledge systems’ from an assortment of building materials found in this and seventeen other sub-global assessments.

The Knowledge Market and the Knowledge Chapter If the conference in Alexandria was meant to facilitate the collective drafting of the two chapters on ‘knowledge’ and ‘scale’ in the synthetic report of the Sub-Global Working Group, it may not have served its purpose very well: members of the group continued to agonise or wrestle over the content of these chapters in terms that were not markedly different from those established in previous deliberations. In the meeting that took place immediately after the conference, the members of each chapter-writing team solicited information from the members of each subglobal assessment team through an institution known as the ‘knowledge market’. In the first instance, this meant that the Co-ordinating Lead Authors of each chapter set up stalls in one large room, and all the other members of the working group visited each stall in turn to answer questions about their own sub-global assessment. Thereafter, each chapterwriting team had a room to itself, and the individual responsible for writing a specific chapter section would roam around the other rooms to gather additional information from individual members of sub-global assessment teams who were thought to have specific knowledge of the topic covered in that section. This could and did result in a series of inconsistencies that reflected the diversity of knowledge, experience and opinion contained in each of the assessment teams, so each member of a chapter-writing team also had to volunteer for the subsequent task of interrogating the authors of another chapter in order to remove these inconsistencies. The authors of the knowledge chapter had an especially difficult task because the commodity which they were trading through the knowledge market was the knowledge of knowledge, or the diverse individual knowledge of diverse ‘knowledge systems’. The task was made even harder by the absence of these objects from the MA Conceptual Framework (see Fig. 4.1), by the diversity of views expressed by those participants in the Alexandria conference who were not already members of the Sub-Global Working Group, and by the limited amount of time

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which now remained for the construction of a bridge between the systems under scrutiny. Authorship of the knowledge chapter was not a popular option amongst members of the Sub-Global Working Group. The authors of the Conceptual Framework report had eventually decided that knowledge systems of all kinds should be regarded as a distinctive type of ‘cultural ecosystem service’ (MA 2003: 58), but they eschewed the earlier idea of ‘incorporating traditional knowledge at all scales of the assessment’.11 One of the standing jokes of the MA was that the authors of this report only discovered the true extent of their mutual misunderstandings when they came round to the task of writing its glossary, though they did not even try to define the different types of knowledge (system) that might be assessed as ecosystem services (MA 2003: 44–5). If the authors of the sub-global knowledge chapter thought that this was now their privilege or burden, they might have been surprised to find that two of the other three working groups were trying to fill the same space at the same time (Box 4.5). The eventual compromise, as represented in the glossary of all four working group reports, was a definition of indigenous and local knowledge as ‘the knowledge that is unique to a given culture or society’, and a definition of traditional ecological knowledge as ‘the cumulative body of knowledge, practices, and beliefs evolved by adaptive processes and handed down through generations’.12 Under the terms of this compromise, traditional knowledge ‘may or may not be indigenous or local’, but the authors of the sub-global knowledge chapter do not elaborate on this enigmatic statement. They say that indigenous knowledge is a subset of local knowledge, which is a subset of traditional knowledge; they say that local and traditional knowledge may include some elements of scientific knowledge; and they say that ‘practitioners’ may have their own distinctive kinds of knowledge (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 90), but it is not clear whether these may be local or traditional if they are not exactly scientific. It seems that the sub-global knowledge chapter was obliged by the MA Conceptual Framework to regard any form of knowledge as the property of an expert or a decision maker at some distinctive level of political organisation, and to regard each knowledge system as the property of a ‘social-ecological system’ at some distinctive spatial scale. Knowledge of things other than ecosystem services was ruled out of the equation by the

11.

12.

Procedures for achieving this goal had been mentioned in the second review draft circulated in October, 2002, but it seems that the concept of ‘incorporation’ was then suppressed because of the risk that it would invite the kind of criticism voiced by the indigenous people’s lobby at the Alexandria conference (see Box 4.2). This definition is apparently based on one produced by Fikrit Berkes (1999: 8).

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*Indigenous Ecological Knowledge: Local, community-based systems of knowledge that are unique to a given culture or society and have developed as that culture has evolved over many generations of inhabiting particular ecosystems. [Sub-Global Working Group] *Indigenous Ecological Knowledge: A cumulative body of knowledge, know-how, practices or representations maintained or developed by peoples with extended histories of interaction with the natural environment. [Conditions and Trends Working Group] *Indigenous knowledge: (1) the local knowledge that is unique to a given culture or society. It is the basis for local-level decision-making in agriculture, health care, food preparation, education, natural resource management, and a host of other activities in rural communities. Or (2) the knowledge that people in a given community have developed over time, and continue to develop. It is based on experience, often tested over centuries of use, adapted to local culture and environment, dynamic and changing. [Responses Working Group] *Traditional knowledge: knowledge held by members of a distinct culture and to which numerous members of the culture contribute to over time. It is acquired through past experiences and observations, through means of inquiry specific to the culture and generally concerns the culture itself or its local environment. [Responses Working Group] Source: MA (2004). Box 4.5 Contested Definitions

needs of multilateral environmental agreements, while the knowledge belonging to indigenous experts and decision makers was ruled in by the more specific needs of the Convention on Biological Diversity.13 Nonindigenous decision makers (or ‘practitioners’) may have their own ‘epistemologies’ or ways of knowing things, but these boil down to a mix of the knowledge derived from scientific and ‘traditional’ experts. The role of non-scientific knowledge in a sub-global ecosystem assessment therefore boils down to the question of how much of it exists in any particular space and what value is assigned to it by decision makers operating at a specific level of political organisation (Ericksen and

13.

Each of the multilateral agreements represented on the MA Board could be said to contain its own ‘political epistemology’, in which the connections between specific forms of knowledge and the roles of their owners or advocates have already been cast in global (if not managerial) concrete.

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Woodley 2005: 111–13). Nevertheless, the authors of the sub-global chapter could not avoid all of the awkward questions raised at the Alexandria conference, nor could the knowledge market erase all of the contradictions between the expert knowledge of different members of the Sub-Global Working Group. It is all very well for the authors to applaud the metaphorical construction of a bridge between knowledge systems as a way of replacing the dubious concepts of integration, assimilation or incorporation with the brighter concepts of mutual respect and reciprocal exchange (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 92). But some local decision makers may still express a preference for scientific knowledge over their own local knowledge, and whatever their preference, it is still unclear what benefit they might gain from the inclusion of local knowledge in an ecosystem assessment conducted by scientific experts. Nor is there any obvious reason why decision makers at a global or national level should lend any credibility to the scientific or traditional knowledge of experts operating at a lower level in the hierarchy of environmental governance (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 100–1). As the authors later concede, ‘[k]nowledge becomes a slippery and value-laden issue when political and power interests are at stake, as they inevitably are in resource management’ (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 114). In these circumstances, we should hardly be surprised if different members of the same sub-global assessment team were unable to produce an internally consistent representation of the relationship between different forms of knowledge, or if different authors of the sub-global chapter were unable to eliminate the inconsistencies. According to one of the authors, ‘the PNG assessment found that traditional ecological knowledge is not immune to outside influences, since most coastal communities in Papua New Guinea have been exposed to western schooling and Christian teachings for several generations’ (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 90). Later in the same chapter, another author tells us that ‘[l]ocal communities in Papua New Guinea see no need for science, because their local knowledge systems are so robust and form the basis of their daily practice’ (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 107). It is not impossible to imagine a world or a space in which both of these statements are equally true. But it is much easier to imagine the real world in which no such general statement can be equally true in all parts of a country renowned for its social complexity and cultural diversity. The authors of the sub-global chapter say that the PNG assessment was one of the few sub-global assessments in which all local knowledge counts as indigenous knowledge because its owners identify themselves as indigenous people (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 90), but even the truth of this statement is questionable in a state where the majority of citizens appear to prefer the status of ‘customary landowner’ to that of ‘indigenous

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Pachamama

Indicators of indigenous knowledge

Ecological functions

Kaypacha Hananpacha Ukupacha

Diversity nurturing Spiritual attainment

Munay, Yachay, Llankay Adaptation Co-evolution Learning systems Information and knowledge transmission systems

Pachakuti

Ayni

Changes within thresholds Complexity of cause and effect of changes

Ayllu Traditional institutions Governance systems Customary laws Social struggles

Figure 4.3 Adapting the MA Conceptual Framework for Local Needs (source: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Vilcanota sub-global assessment; used with permission)

person’ (Filer 1997). Only one sub-global assessment was able to represent an indigenous knowledge system in a way that met the needs of global decision makers, by constructing an image of the world that looked like a bridge between global and local versions of indigenous knowledge (Figure 4.3). This picture was presented to the Alexandria conference as the output of a local ecosystem assessment undertaken by the International Center of Traditional Knowledge, Ecology and Policies, but this ‘international center’ was itself the property or ‘project’ of a ‘community-based Quechua-Aymara organization’ based in the Vilcanota sub-region of the Peruvian Andes (Capistrano et al. 2005: 357). The magical power of this picture is attested by its reproduction as the only diagram in the sub-global knowledge chapter (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 110) and its subsequent reappearance in both the ‘Synthesis’ and ‘Summary’ reports of the global assessment (MA 2005a, 2005b). But what exactly does it represent? In the sub-global knowledge chapter it is described as a local and indigenous response to the difficulty of translating the MA Conceptual Framework into the Quechua language, and hence as a sort of compromise between that framework and a ‘cosmovision’ which is ‘represented in an

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ancient Inca icon that embodies the Andean conception of ecosystems’ (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 109–10). Even at the time of the Alexandria conference, the MA’s Chief Executive Officer noted that the MA Conceptual Framework was not only part of the epistemic community’s ‘common culture’, but also formed an obstacle to the inclusion of alternative ‘world views’ within the sub-global assessment process (Reid 2004: 12). The text that accompanies the Inca alternative describes its distinctive features as follows: The Vilcanota conceptual framework includes multiple scales (Kaypacha, Hananpacha, Ukupacha), which represent both spatial scales and the cyclical relationship between past, present, and future. Inherent in this concept of space and time is the adaptive capacity of the Quechua people, who welcome change and have become resilient to it through an adaptive learning process. … The Southern Cross shape of the framework diagram represents the Chakana, the most recognized and sacred shape to Quechua people and orders the world through deliberative and collective decision-making that emphasizes reciprocity (Ayni). Pachamama is similar to ecosystem services combined with human well-being. Pachakuti [sic] is similar to the MA ‘drivers’ (both direct and indirect). Ayllu, Munay [love], Yachay [knowledge], and Llankay [work] may be seen as responses, and are more organically integrated into the cyclic process of change and adaptation. (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 110)

The wording of this text is clearly consistent with the definition of ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ adopted as a compromise between the four clans in the epistemic community. However, this was also indigenous knowledge, and once the indigenous voice had spoken out against its own ‘incorporation’, the producers of this alternative conceptual framework played no further part in the writing of the sub-global knowledge chapter, nor could their assessment be interrogated through the knowledge market to reveal a world of social practice underneath this virtual reality. Their picture spoke for itself, as if it somehow represented all indigenous epistemologies on the other side of a half-built bridge, its meaning both transparent and opaque because the bridge was incomplete.14 Alternatively, this one picture was the bridge between the global forms of scientific and indigenous environmental knowledge.

14.

The sub-global knowledge chapter notes that the MA Board had tried to stimulate the conduct of distinctively ‘indigenous’ sub-global assessments through discussion with indigenous participants at a meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice, but ‘no new assessments were generated through this effort’ (Ericksen and Woodley 2005: 103).

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Virtual and Practical Realities It is hard to imagine how any decision maker, even an Inca one, could actually put this ‘cosmovision’ into practice. But that is not the point at issue. The architects of the MA would say that an assessment, like an audit, is not in itself a plan of action, but only the revelation of some underlying truth. If the MA counts as a specific case of virtualism, then its distinctive features must be found in the way that it separates and reconnects the experts and decision makers who inhabit its attenuated social world. Like the IPCC before it, the MA recasts the relationship between virtual and practical realities in the construction of scenarios that are neither plans nor predictions, but ‘plausible futures’. Scenarios (like knowledge systems) do not make a visible appearance in the MA Conceptual Framework, but may be understood as models constructed out of the interaction between the measurable drivers of environmental change and the values of decision makers organising ‘strategies and interventions’. The expert modellers gained access to these values by inviting decision makers to make up stories that expressed their hopes and fears about the future. The conversion of these narratives or ‘storylines’ into scenarios is a sort of inverted virtualism, for instead of putting a plan into practice or ‘realising’ a virtual representation of the world, it inserts the values of decision makers into a set of virtual realities in order to confront these ‘practitioners’ with the consequences of their own practical and political decisions. At a global level, amongst the multilateral environmental agreements, this technique produced a set of four scenarios distinguished by the extent of globalisation and the form of environmental management (Table 4.1). The virtual realities generated under each of the four scenarios after a time lapse of fifty years were summarised in the form of bar charts showing changes in the availability of different types of ecosystem service to consumers in the Global North and the Global South (Figure 4.4). Like the ancient Inca icon, this vision of the future was not only featured in the technical report of the Scenarios Working Group (Carpenter et al. 2005),

Table 4.1 Four Global Scenarios in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Interconnected World

Disconnected World

Reactive Management

GLOBAL ORCHESTRATION

ORDER FROM STRENGTH

Proactive Management

TECHNO-GARDEN

ADAPTING MOSAIC

– 80

– 60

– 40

– 20

0

20

40

60

Regulating Cultural

Regulating

Provisioning Cultural

Order from Strength Regulating

Provisioning

Developing countries

Cultural

TechnoGarden

Industrial countries

Regulating Cultural Provisioning

Adapting Mosaic

Figure 4.4 Changing Availability of Ecosystem Services under Four Scenarios (source: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment; used with permission)

Source: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

– 100

DEGRADATION

IMPROVEMENT

Global Orchestration

80 Provisioning

100

Changes in ecosystem services in percentage

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but also reproduced in both the ‘Synthesis’ and ‘Summary’ reports of the global assessment (MA 2005a, 2005b). Although the values are not explicit, decision makers are free to witness the virtues of proactive environmental management, and to see that the downsides of reactive management are especially pronounced in a disconnected world. The subtlety lies in the apparent trade-off between material and cultural ecosystem services when proactive managers choose between globalisation and ‘regionalisation’. A very crude decision maker might take this to mean that proactive management of an interconnected world will provide more hamburgers for the hungry masses, but globalisation will still have a negative effect on cultural diversity, including the diversity of local and indigenous knowledge systems. The sub-globalisation (or ‘regionalisation’) of the assessment itself was partly justified by the idea that ‘plausible futures’ might be defined and described in different ways at different scales (MA 2001: 4). What this meant, in practice, was a diverse range of stories and pictures that probably matched the diversity of knowledge systems at sub-global and sub-national levels of political organisation, but could not be shown to do so in any systematic way because there was no uniform procedure for capturing the hopes, fears and needs of decision makers outside of the sub-global ‘knowledge market’ (Lebel, Thongbai and Kok 2005). The most elaborate procedure was the one adopted by the Southern African regional assessment, but the stories told by national decision makers in this region could only yield a very simple choice between a (hopeful) ‘partnership’ scenario and a (fearful) ‘patchwork’ scenario, the difference residing in their capacity to influence and implement the New Partnership for Africa’s Development inspired by the leaders of the African National Congress (Scholes and Biggs 2004). The least elaborate procedure was the one adopted by the community-based Vilcanota assessment, whose indigenous conceptual framework already encompassed ‘the cyclical relationship between past, present, and future’, and thus precluded any other kind of storyline or model. A global decision maker might not be surprised by the inability of local or indigenous communities to construct or interpret scenarios as a decision-making tool. But that is not my point. A ‘community-based assessment’ could only be part of the Millennium Assessment if it was initiated or conducted by an expert who could represent what Brosius called ‘local local’ people and their knowledge on a higher stage. Most of those who did this work of representation were either ‘indigenous advocates’, like the one responsible for organising the Vilcanota assessment, or social ecologists who define ‘local communities’ as little more than spatially bounded sets of environmental management institutions. Aside from the expert ‘bridging the scales’, the ‘local local’ experts and decision makers on the lowest rung in the hierarchy of

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environmental governance were expected to be the same people, knowing what they were doing and doing what they were knowing (MA 2001: 21). As a result, these local communities themselves become virtual communities, unrecognisable to anthropologists who specialise in the study of social and cultural diversity because they simply cannot contain the cast of characters that we would normally expect to find in any actual place. The local communities that do make an appearance in the technical report of the Sub-Global Working Group (Folke and Fabricius et al. 2005) are therefore distinguished less by their own social organisation or history than by the form of their relationship, perhaps even their subordination, to one of the group’s own members.

Conclusion I do not wish to imply that the Millennium Assessment is a kind of Flat Earth Society, whose members can only talk about things which global conventions already know. Nor do I wish to suggest that my own role as joker, storyteller and part-time lexicographer in the Sub-Global Working Group should be taken as a model of what anthropologists ought to be doing in this kind of exercise. What I think we should not be doing is washing our hands of a process in which ‘local local’ people, knowledge or communities are going to be represented in any case, and pretending that the purity of our own brand of scientific knowledge will have its own distinctive impact on the policy process if we just keep talking to each other. From my own experience of this particular process, I would say that there is considerable scope for anthropologists to make strategic or tactical alliances with environmental scientists, systems ecologists, political economists and transnational advocates of local or indigenous knowledge, to challenge the ‘top down’ approach to problems of environmental management. And yet I think it is also important for us to abandon the pretence that we specialise in the analysis of things which are said and done at the ‘local local’ scale, and have nothing special to say about the links (if not the bridges) which connect the judgements or decisions made at multiple levels in the global hierarchy of environmental governance. As we have seen, there are several reasons to describe the Millennium Assessment as an exercise in virtualism. It represents the world as a hierarchy of more or less (dis)connected social-ecological systems, then populates it with exactly the same kinds of people as are recognised to exist within its own organisational structure. It discovers a set of relationships between people, ecosystems and knowledge systems that seems in many ways to be preconceived in the design of its own utilitarian conceptual framework. It cultivates an air of intellectual and emotional detachment in the name of technical rationality; conceals its value

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judgements in the form of scenarios based on the emotions of decision makers who seem to have no politics at all; and then adopts the language of civil engineering in order to represent an ideal world in which they will be free to exercise their powers of proactive environmental management. Nevertheless, the sub-globalisation of the assessment created a space in which all these representations could be challenged and revised, and even if the Sub-Global Working Group was obliged to produce the appearance of an expert consensus, the obstacles to that achievement have become a subject of ‘assessment’ in their own right.

Acknowledgement This is a revised and expanded version of a paper originally presented at a workshop organised by the University of Melbourne’s School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Science in November, 2004. The author would like to thank Peter Dwyer for his comments on the earlier draft.

References Berkes, Fikret. 1999. Sacred ecology: traditional ecological knowledge and resource management. London: Taylor and Francis. ———, Johan Colding and Carl Folke. 2004. Navigating social-ecological systems: building resilience for complexity and change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berkhout, Frans, Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones (eds) 2003. Negotiating environmental change: new perspectives from social science. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Brosius, J. Peter. 2004. What counts as local knowledge in global environmental assessments and conventions? Presented at the conference ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’, Alexandria, March. www.millenniumassessment.org/documents/bridging/papers/ Brosius.peter.pdf (9 October 2006) Capistrano, Doris, Cristían Samper K., Marcus J. Lee and Ciara RaudseppHearne (eds) 2005. Ecosystems and human well-being. Volume 4: multiscale assessments. Washington, DC: Island Press. Also www.maweb.org//en/ Products.Global.Multiscale.aspx (20 October 2006) Carpenter, Steve R., Prabhu L. Pingali, Elena M. Bennett and Monika B. Zurek (eds) 2005. Ecosystems and human well-being. Volume 2: scenarios. Washington, DC: Island Press. Also www.maweb.org//en/ Products.Global.Scenarios.aspx (20 October 2006)

110 | Colin Filer Chapin, Mac. 2004. A challenge to conservationists. World Watch Magazine 17 (6): 17–31. Coleman, William D. and Anthony Perl. 1999. Internationalized policy environments and policy network analysis. Political Studies 47: 691–709. Ericksen, Polly and Ellen Woodley, with Georgina Cundill, Walter V. Reid, Luís Vicente, Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, Jane Mogina and Per Olsson. 2005. Using multiple knowledge systems: benefits and challenges. In Ecosystems and human well-being. Volume 4: multiscale assessments, ed. Doris Capistrano, Cristían Samper K., Marcus J. Lee and Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, pp. 85–117. Washington, DC: Island Press. Filer, Colin. 1997. Compensation, rent and power in Papua New Guinea. In Compensation for resource development in Papua New Guinea, ed. Susan Toft, pp. 156–89. (Monograph 6.) Boroko: Law Reform Commission; (Pacific Policy Paper 24.) Canberra: National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University. ———. 2004. Hotspots and handouts: illusions of conservation and development in Papua New Guinea. Presented at the conference ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’, Alexandria, March. www.millenniumassessment.org/documents/bridging/papers/Filer. colin.pdf (9 October 2006) Folke, Carl and Christo Fabricius, with Georgina Cundill, Lisen Schultz, Cibele Queiroz, Yogesh Gokhale, Andrés Marin, Esther Camac-Ramirez, Shivani Chandola, Mohamed Tawfic Ahmed, Bibhab Talukdar, Alejandro Argumedo and Fabricio Carbonell Torres. 2005. Communities, ecosystems, and livelihoods. In Ecosystems and human well-being. Volume 4: multiscale assessments, ed. Doris Capistrano, Cristían Samper K., Marcus J. Lee and Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, pp. 261–77. Washington, DC: Island Press. Gadgil, Madhav, Achar K. P., Amba Shetty, Anirban Ganguly, Harini Nagendra, Harish R. Bhat, Jayashree Venkatesan, Krishna K., Krushnamegh Kunte, Kunjeera Moolya, Laxman Nandagiri, Nayak M. B., Ranjit Daniels R. J., Shankar Joshi, Shridhar Patgar, Shrikant Gunaga, Subramanian K. A., Suri Venkatachalam, Utkarsh Ghate and Yogesh Gokhale. 2000. Participatory local level assessment of life support systems: a methodology manual. (Technical report 78.) Bangalore: Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science. Heywood, Vernon H. (ed.) 1995. Global biodiversity assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for United Nations Environment Programme. IKAP (Indigenous Knowledge and Peoples) Network on Capacity Building in MMSEA (Mainland Montane SE-Asia) 2004. Report of the workshop ‘Bridging epistemologies – indigenous views’. Presented at the conference ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’, Alexandria, March. www.millenniumassessment.org/documents/bridging/papers/ikap. pdf (9 October 2006).

The Knowledge Problem in the Millennium Assessment | 111 Lebel, Louis, Pongmanee Thongbai and Kasper Kok, with John B. R. Agard, Elena Bennett, Reinette Biggs, Margarida Ferreira, Colin Filer, Yogesh Gokhale, William Mala, Chuck Rumsey, Sandra J. Velarde, Monika Zurek, Hernán Blanco, Tim Lynam and Yue Tianxiang. 2005. Sub-global scenarios. In Ecosystems and human well-being. Volume 4: multiscale assessments, ed. Doris Capistrano, Cristían Samper K., Marcus J. Lee and Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, pp 229–60. Washington, DC: Island Press. MA (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment) n.d. About the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. www.maweb.org/en/about.overview.aspx (20 October 2006) ———. 2000. Regional, national, and local ecosystem assessments: call for proposals for the Sub-global Components of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Unpublished document circulated by the MA Board. ———. 2001. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment sub-global component: purpose, structure and protocols. Report of the Sub-Global Assessment Selection Working Group. ———. 2002a. Policies of the Sub-Global Working Group. Unpublished document approved by first meeting of the MA Sub-Global Working Group, Panama, June. www.maweb.org/proxy/document.41.aspx (20 October 2006) ———. 2002b. Summary of Proceedings: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Sub-Global Working Group Meeting, Panama, 10–14 June. MS. ———. 2003. Ecosystems and human well-being: a framework for assessment. Washington, DC: Island Press. Also: www.maweb.org//en/ Products.EHWB.aspx ———. 2004. MA glossary of terms – 17th September 2004. Unpublished draft circulated to members of the MA Sub-Global Working Group. ———. 2005a. Ecosystems and human well-being: synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press. Also: www.maweb.org//en/Products.Synthesis.aspx. ———. 2005b. Our human planet: summary for decision makers. Washington, DC: Island Press. Also: www.maweb.org//en/products.global.summary.aspx. Paulson, Susan and Lisa L. Gezon (eds) 2004. Political ecology across spaces, scales, and social groups. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Reid, Walter. 2004. Bridging scales and epistemologies in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Presented at the conference ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’, Alexandria, March. www.millenniumassessment.org/ documents/bridging/papers/reid.walter.pdf (9 October 2006) Scholes, Robert J. and Reinette Biggs (eds) 2004. Ecosystem services in Southern Africa: a regional assessment. Pretoria: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. WRI (World Resources Institute) 2000. People and ecosystems: the fraying web of life. Washington, DC: WRI.

CHAPTER 5

Creolising Conservation: Caribbean Responses to Global Trends in Environmental Management TIGHE GEOGHEGAN

Being men, they could not live except they first presumed the right of everything to be a noun. The African acquiesced, repeated, and changed them. Derek Walcott, Names1

Development practitioners are perpetually challenged to reconcile the virtual models of international development with complex real-life situations. Those who believe that development decisions should be made by the people who are affected by them face an additional challenge: although most of the powerful actors who comprise the international development community, including donor and international development agencies and transnational non-governmental organisations, claim to embrace participatory approaches, these are expected to occur within frameworks and paradigms defined by them. In the Caribbean, the process of adapting imposed ideas, institutions and technologies to actual situations and needs is nothing new. The term ‘creolisation’, most often applied to language formation, signifies the melding of different influences that has characterised Caribbean history since the arrival of Columbus, and particularly since the establishment of the plantation system and the importation of African slaves. The concept

1. From Derek Walcott’s Sea grapes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976).

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can also be applied to some of the approaches to natural resource protection that have evolved in the region, particularly over the past few decades. This chapter looks at the work of one organisation, the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI), which has been developing ways of managing natural resources to improve the lives of local people equitably and over the long term. This has often meant adapting frameworks and models advanced by international agencies to CANARI’s understanding of local situations and needs. Using examples from CANARI’s work, I will illustrate the misfit between three virtualising conservation models and local institutional reality, and describe how CANARI and its partners transformed those models, seeking to create approaches more appropriate to the region. In this way, CANARI has worked to reduce the ability of transnational conservation actors to impose their visions of the world on the Caribbean, by modifying those visions through policies and programmes that suit local conditions rather than conforming to the virtual models of those powerful actors. I conclude with some lessons for actors who, like CANARI, find themselves negotiating in the space between discourse and practice, narrative and reality.

Imported Solutions to Hypothesised Problems Caribbean perceptions of nature have been strongly influenced by history, and their emphasis on the environment’s role in nurturing livelihoods, meeting needs and providing refuge has been widely noted (Griffith and Valdés Pizzini 2002; Lynch 1993; Olwig 1980; Renard 1979). Most conservation initiatives in the region, on the other hand, have largely been shaped by forces and influences from the outside, particularly Western Europe and North America. The colonial powers established forest reserves early on, to protect watersheds and timber resources from the effects of local people’s use. By the middle of the twentieth century, metropolitan governments were creating national parks, following Western models, in their Caribbean territories. This pattern has continued, with the protection of natural resources in many countries seen as falling under the general heading of ‘development’, and therefore dependent upon and driven by external funding and assistance. Conservation initiatives have thus been framed within prevailing development discourses that evolve, overlap and compete with one another over time. In the general area of conservation, three main discourses stand out. The first is the neoliberal discourse (Carrier 2003). This has shaped much of the development assistance agenda for the past twenty years, and has encouraged the privatisation of conservation, through greater participation of NGOs, community organisations,

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individuals and businesses (e.g., Pagiola, Arcenas and Platais 2004). The second is the ‘global environmental problems’ discourse (Adger et al. 2001). This has driven the international environmental agenda since the World Conference on the Environment in 1992, and it frames environmental issues in ways that create a major role for international actors, even at national and local levels. The third is the ‘values-led conservation’ discourse (Jepson and Canney 2003; for a critique see Wilshusen et al. 2002). This has framed the protection of nature as a moral imperative, rather than one deriving from economic or scientific considerations. Its advocates suggest that the educated elites who share that value system must take the lead in upholding it, as the motives of neither states nor international organisations can be trusted; in more extreme formulations, not even international environmental organisations are trustworthy. The objectives and motivations behind the creation of these discourses may not be so easily untangled. For instance, they all could be argued to fall within the broad heading of neoliberalism or to reflect neo-imperialist motivations. However, as discourses they are reasonably distinct in the directions they suggest. Each can easily be translated into simple narratives or even simpler and emotionally compelling images, which international agencies and NGOs have deployed with increasing effect in order to influence policy. Many have noted the ‘striking discrepancies between discursive simplifications and the diversity of situations within local contexts’ (Adger et al. 2001: 708; see Fairhead and Leach 1998; Li 2002; Roe 1991). In fact, because the arena of development discourse is filled with contesting narratives that often simultaneously find favour, the problem of matching international development discourses to local realities is even more complex. If ‘involving the local community’ through stakeholder participation is a key to successful projects, then how can we deal with problems that appear to need technical, science-based solutions, like global warming? If increased equity is a prerequisite for ‘making poverty history’, how can we make market-led economic growth strategies equitable? These apparent paradoxes are resolved through a set of new narratives: marine reserves will increase catches and so improve livelihoods in the long run (Gell and Roberts 2003); ecotourism actively involves and brings benefits to local communities (The Nature Conservancy 2006); creating markets for environmental services can help the poor (Scherr, White and Khare 2004). Development agencies, having fostered the creation of these virtual models, then expect their grantees and local partners to make them real. However, attempts to use even the least convoluted narratives to guide conservation initiatives in the Caribbean have had little success. The problems associated with efforts to establish protected areas based on

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simplified models supporting powerful discourses have been documented for Jamaica (Carrier 2003; Geoghegan 2004), Trinidad (Fairhead and Leach 2003) and Puerto Rico (Fiske 1992; Valdés Pizzini 1990). In every case, the problems were associated with a Western model’s lack of fit with local interests, objectives and institutional situations. More complex narratives, stressing the need for stakeholder participation and equitable allocation of benefits and costs, create further complications. Governments draw on the discourse of sovereignty to assert their stewardship of a nation’s natural assets on behalf of all their citizens. Local people may see the natural environment surrounding them as theirs, a perception supported by the popular discourse of communitybased resource management (e.g., Berkes 1989; McCay and Acheson 1987). Finally, the increasingly dominant global environment discourse supports claims that all people have a right to participate in decisions about the future of the world’s natural patrimony (e.g., Barrett et al. 2001). The problems created by such competing claims have manifested themselves in a range of situations, from local resistance to the creation of a national park in St John in the US Virgin Islands and its subsequent management directions (Fortwangler 2007; Olwig 1980), to conflicts between commercial and recreational fishermen in Puerto Rico (Griffith and Valdés Pizzini 2002), to the forced removal of farming families to make way for the expansion of conservation areas in the Dominican Republic (Geisler, Warne and Barton 1997).

Creolisation: a Caribbean Response to Virtualism Sidney Mintz usefully defines the word ‘creole’ as ‘something of the Old World, born in the New’ (Mintz 1996: 301). The languages of the Caribbean that were created through the cultural encounters within colonial plantation economies are called creoles, and ‘creolisation’ was initially used to refer to these processes of language formation. Although the word is sometimes seen as carrying the stigma of past patterns of racist exploitation, it has in recent years escaped the field of linguistics to describe other ‘processes of cultural synthesis and transformation’ (AbouEl-Haj 1991, quoted in Stewart 1999: 42), particularly those associated with globalisation (Stewart 1999: 42–3). Mintz (1996: 302) emphasises creolisation’s transformational nature: rather than simply ‘average out, or marry neatly together’, disparate pieces of different cultures, it draws on those elements to create something new. He sees this process as profoundly modern, although it began in the Caribbean more than five hundred years ago: ‘“creolisation”, a truly ancient Caribbean term, is now being applied elsewhere and, indeed, is treated as emblematic of what is said to be happening to the world as a whole’ (Mintz 1996: 300).

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While creolisation normally refers to processes through which elements of different cultures are brought together and transformed, it can be equally useful for describing processes through which abstract models are transformed to fit real landscapes, situations, institutions and needs. In fact, creolisation can be seen as the converse of what the Introduction to this volume describes, the virtualising tendencies and potentials in environmentalism, the ways that it involves defining the world and then remaking it to fit environmentalism’s rendering of it. The concept is therefore appropriate for understanding processes through which globalising Western conservation and natural-resource management models are transformed to fit a local Caribbean reality. While creolisation may be particularly Caribbean, observers of development have identified similar processes of transformation elsewhere, which belie the hegemonic power of virtualism. David Mosse (2005: 239), in an ethnography of a development project in India, draws on de Certeau’s (2002) work on the ‘subversive’ ways that consumers adapt products to unintended uses, to describe how subordinates in the power relations of development may ‘consent to development models while making them something different, escaping the power of the dominant order without leaving it, using their tactics to contend with the strategies of consultants and donor advisors’. Alnoor Ebrahim (2003: 20), in an examination of organisational change within local NGOs, also in India, found evidence of ‘complex strategies … to resist funder influence or to buffer themselves from unwanted interference’. These sorts of strategies are evident in the Caribbean cases discussed below.

Melding Something New: Examples from the Work of CANARI Evolving out of a programme created late in the 1970s to explore the ways that the region’s natural resources could more effectively contribute to development, CANARI has been a fixture on the Caribbean environment and development scene for many years.2 Having its genesis in an initiative of a North American private foundation (the Rockefeller Brothers Fund), CANARI’s own evolution through decades of field experience is itself a process of creolisation. Its work is based on the idea that the region’s 2. CANARI started out as the Eastern Caribbean Natural Area Management Programme, a collaborative project of the Caribbean Conservation Association and the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources. It became an independent organisation in 1986 and changed its name to the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute in 1989. It is currently based in Laventille, Trinidad, and works throughout the island Caribbean.

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development depends to a significant degree on the ability of local people, and especially the poor, to have access to natural resources and to make use of them for their livelihoods. This requires that the management of natural resources be oriented towards both protecting them over the long term and allocating their benefits in ways that are equitable and contribute to larger processes of poverty reduction and development (CANARI 1996: 1–2; 2003: 11). CANARI promotes the involvement of stakeholders in policy formulation and management in a programme built around the testing of methods and the promotion of policies and approaches for sustainable and equitable natural resources use. More an independent, not-for-profit technical and research organisation than a membershipbased NGO, it works with the full spectrum of natural resource management actors, from governments to NGOs, community groups and private businesses, to individuals. The conceptual framework that guides CANARI’s work can be summarised as follows (Geoghegan and Renard 2002: 16–18).3 1.

2.

3.

Every resource management regime affects people, either as direct users of those resources or as beneficiaries of the goods and services that the regime provides. Therefore, resource management is above all about the relationship (whether economic, cultural or spiritual; permanent or sporadic; immediate or distant) between people and natural resources, as well as of the human interactions that these relationships engender. The concept of ‘local community’ is too narrow to be of use in the analysis and understanding of the place of people in complex resource systems. That is because it suggests a homogeneity that does not exist at all pertinent levels and because it ignores people who cannot be identified with a specific geographic area. ‘Stakeholder’ is a more useful concept because it recognises all those, whether local or not, who have influence on, or can be affected by, a management process. The relationships among and between stakeholders, and their uses of or relations with natural resources, are governed by formal and informal institutions, including rules, norms, laws, policies and organisations, as well as modes and patterns of behaviour. These regulate and guide the lives and actions of people, are almost always complex and dynamic, and reflect and embody power differentials within society.

3. This conceptual framework reflects the influence of recent post-New Institutionalist thinking (e.g., Cleaver 2000; Leach, Mearns and Scoones 1999; Mehta et al. 1999), which emphasises the messy nature of institutions, the role of human agency in forming and reforming them, and the power relations and differences in knowledge and perception that shape the way societies are organised and resources are managed.

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4.

5.

6.

Resource management can be seen as the task of enabling institutions to meet social and environmental objectives, including sustainability, biodiversity conservation, the provision of human needs, the elimination of poverty, social justice and equity. Creating effective systems of management requires a comprehensive understanding of the complexity and coherence of existing institutions and the diversity, interests and power dynamics of the stakeholders. Using the tools of participation to involve stakeholders in the design of management arrangements is crucial to ensuring that they address both the social and the ecological aspects of natural resource management, rather than focusing only on narrow conservation objectives and technical approaches.

The three cases that follow illustrate how CANARI has employed this framework in research that has sought to resolve the misfit between externally designed development projects driven by virtualising narratives on the one hand, and on the other people’s real life issues, priorities and needs. The cases all focus on work in the small island state of St Lucia. It is about 616 km2, with a population of around 150,000, and its economy has been heavily affected by the vagaries of global markets, particularly in its two key sectors of agriculture and tourism. While tourism has experienced uneven but reasonably steady growth over the past few decades, it has had a serious environmental impact on coastal areas. Moreover, its benefits have failed to reach much of the population, particularly in rural areas. They have been hurt by the loss of preferential access of bananas to European markets, which led to a recent dramatic upsurge in poverty and unemployment on the island.

Marine Protected Areas and Coastal Zone Management Caribbean coastal zones, like those of most small islands, tend to bear the brunt of human-induced environmental pressure (UNEP 1996: 1). One popular management response to this pressure and the resulting effects on natural resources is the creation of marine protected areas (MPAs), which have been established throughout the region to protect specific areas deemed critical to development (Geoghegan, Smith and Thacker 2001). Transnational conservation organisations like The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the WWF have increasingly promoted MPAs as a solution to coastal ecosystem degradation, often through their influence on development agencies such as the US Agency for International Development. They promote MPAs, sometimes called ‘marine reserves’, in which fishing activities are eliminated or restricted and management costs are covered through revenue from marine and coastal-based tourism activities (Roberts and Hawkins 2000: 6).

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This model reflects a number of assumptions that are often presented as being based on strong scientific evidence. The core assumption is that the ways in which poor local people use and manage marine and coastal resources are destructive and that increased pressure caused by coastal population growth is exacerbating this destructiveness to crisis levels. The solution offered by the MPA model lies in the further assumption that the activities of other users, particularly tourists and the businesses that cater to them, are compatible with and complementary to coastal conservation and can create economic opportunities for local people that offset what they lose from the abolition of fishing and other local activities (Lutchman 2005: 9, 22). The narrative through which these assumptions are communicated consists of two main messages. The first is that special places need special protection, with the attendant implication that places that are not special (it is unclear who decides what is special and what is not) do not need any particular protection. The second is the idea that these places need protection urgently, because rapid changes in the coastal zone are creating the sort of situation that Garrett Hardin (1968) called the ‘tragedy of the commons’. A passage from The Nature Conservancy’s Parks in peril programme web-site about an ‘imperilled’ marine park in the St Vincent Grenadines illustrates the narrative particularly well: Many human activities continue to jeopardize the health of the Grenadines ecosystems, including ‘slash and burn’ deforestation, agricultural runoff, overgrazing, sand mining, and poaching. Fishing threatens the area, not only by over fishing, but mangrove harvesting for boats and uncontrolled anchoring. The area continues to be subject to unregulated tourism activities in the form of coastal development, including marinas and golf courses, and off shore cruise ships. Pollution has become such a problem that swimming has been cautioned in many areas. (The Nature Conservancy 2005).

The way this model is implemented often suggests that marine and coastal areas with tourism potential are a priori considered to be of high ecological value and under threat, and that they need management systems that discourage local uses such as fishing and other forms of resource extraction in favour of ‘well-regulated’ tourism use.4 The MPA model is supported by a robust literature on MPA environmental and economic benefits (e.g., Dixon, Scura and van’t Hof 1993; Gell and Roberts 2003), particularly in terms of producing revenue for conservation through user fees and reversing the negative effects of

4. Carrier (2003: 220) has suggested that, regardless of the tragedy of the commons argument underpinning the virtual model, MPAs can be construed as part of a neoliberal approach to environmental protection, which is based on commercialisation of protected areas to cover the costs of protecting them, often accompanied by a transfer of management responsibility from the state to private or non-governmental actors.

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over-fishing. At the same time, MPAs have been criticised for inequities in the allocation of their benefits and costs, with the tourism sector tending to reap most of the benefits and fishers and local conservation organisations carrying most of the costs (Carrier 2003; Geoghegan, Smith and Thacker 2001; Sandersen and Koester 2000). CANARI has done considerable work in support of a broader concept of marine protected areas, particularly through the promotion of increased stakeholder participation in planning and management in order to achieve greater equity in the allocation of the benefits and costs. In addition, it has recognised that the emphasis on a special management category ‘may have diverted attention and resources away from integrated coastal resource management’ in areas that are less spectacular or valuable in terms of biodiversity but are more critical to coastal people’s livelihoods (CANARI 2003: 13). Put more bluntly, the emphasis on MPAs has been based on an implicit assumption that poor people are a danger to coastal resources and that coastal protection therefore requires replacing them with other users who are seen to be more benign. Whether or not it reflects sound environmental science, the MPA model being promoted by transnational conservation organisations offers nothing in the way of a solution to the social and livelihood needs of poor coastal communities that are not suitable sites for tourism development. The fishing village of Laborie, on St Lucia’s south-west coast, is typical of such Caribbean coastal areas. Between 2000 and 2003 it was the site of a CANARI research project to explore options for coastal resource conservation outside the framework of MPAs and with an emphasis on livelihood benefits. In collaboration with local organisations and stakeholder groups, as well as national agencies, the project looked at the status of several coastal resources, the requirements for their sustainable utilisation, the formal and informal institutions involved in their management, and the linkages between these resources, the management institutions and local livelihoods. One of the main findings of the project was that despite the lack of formal and explicit management structures and rules, there was substantial evidence of local residents managing the resources they relied on, either on their own or in co-operative arrangements, and of using the information provided by this project and other sources to improve the effectiveness of these management systems. This appears to indicate that even very informal multiple-stakeholder institutions can achieve management objectives without the need to establish the types of new organisations and institutional arrangements that MPAs require. It also implies that stakeholders can manage resources effectively without the transfer of management authority from the state to communities or the private sector, and without changes in the allocation of property rights (Renard 2005: 175).

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The project also found no evidence to support the assumption that increases in poverty and unemployment automatically lead to more intense resource use and increased degradation; in fact, even very poor people in Laborie appear to be able to manage natural resources effectively and sustainably when they have the appropriate institutions, such as customary rules, legal frameworks and co-operative arrangements (CANARI 2003: 95). These findings refute both of the main arguments underpinning the MPA narrative: the argument about special places and the argument about protection from exploitation. This research provided support to the possibility of protecting coastal and marine areas in ways that achieve valid aims of conservation, but without alienating them from people who depend on those resources for their livelihoods: management areas for use by local people, rather than parks imperilled by them. Indeed, the main effect of the project was to encourage Laborie community organisations and coastal resource users to take further actions to sustain the coastal resources in Laborie Bay despite the lack of any externally imposed conservation measures such as MPAs. This small dent in the armour of the virtualising narrative about MPAs is reflected in the title (if perhaps not yet the substance) of a current project for St Lucia and neighbouring countries that is funded by the World Bank and influenced by TNC: ‘Protected Areas and Associated Livelihoods’.

Spreading the Benefits from Tourism For a number of years, criticism of the negative environmental and social impacts of the ‘sun, sand and sea’ model of tourism has been joined with calls for the development of niche markets, such as ecotourism, that are alleged to provide more consistent and sustainable environmental, social and economic benefits, particularly when implemented through community-based initiatives (Patullo 1996). Heavily promoted by transnational conservation organisations such as Conservation International and IUCN – The World Conservation Union since the concept was first articulated in the 1980s, ecotourism has been warmly embraced by governments in developing countries as a way to increase the economic returns from tourism. The assumptions behind the ecotourism concept are similar to those that underpin the promotion of MPAs. Biodiversity and natural landscapes are threatened by damaging extractive activities, often carried out by local people. These assets could be protected through management systems oriented towards sensitive, low-impact tourism, which would offer high economic returns for reinvestment into conservation and community development. The ecotourism model is thus one of natural areas and their use being carefully managed in order to offer an ‘un-spoilt and attractive destination’ that will ‘conserve

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… biodiversity and contribute to the well-being of local people’ (Conservation International 2006). West and Carrier (2004: 485) have persuasively criticised the model for ‘its tendency to lead not to the preservation of valued ecosystems but to the creation of landscapes that conform to important Western idealisations of nature through a market-oriented nature politics’. This virtualising tendency and its associated alienation of local people from those landscapes are apparent at ecotourism sites throughout the Caribbean. And despite the rhetoric about benefits flowing to local communities, few community-level ecotourism initiatives have succeeded in the region. The majority do little more than raise false hopes and create irrelevant capacities, such as tour-guiding skills in communities that have no means to attract tourists (Clauzel 2001). Nonetheless, as agricultural market collapse and other factors have limited choices in rural areas, and given the structural constraints to the entry of small local entrepreneurs in the mass tourism sector (CTO 2001), the potential benefits of nature- and culture-based tourism to rural communities cannot be wholly dismissed. During the 1990s CANARI began to encourage a dialogue in the region, to develop an alternative vision of tourism as an instrument for rural development. Deliberately rejecting the term ‘ecotourism’, with its attendant emphasis on conservation rather than livelihood benefits, CANARI and its colleagues in this effort referred to the form of tourism embodied by this vision as ‘heritage tourism’. It is defined as a form of sustainable development that involves local people, protects the resource base, provides opportunities for local enterprise and employment, and builds a sense of common purpose and shared values. While this vision, which was articulated in a small CANARI publication (Geoghegan 1997), could itself be described as a form of virtualism, it was sufficiently relevant to the local context to inform the design of the St Lucia Heritage Tourism Programme (SLHTP). This programme, launched by the Government of St Lucia in 1998 and funded through a European Union facility, was aimed at mitigating the economic consequences of the decline in the banana sector. The SLHTP differed from many ecotourism initiatives in that it did not aim to create a niche tourism sector based on the supposed tourists’ perception of local attractions, nor did it assume that benefits would trickle down to the local level. Rather, the SLHTP’s emphasis was on enhancing the impact of the entire tourism sector on communities, and on improving the relationship between tourism and other facets of rural development (Renard 2001). The approach was to help community groups and small entrepreneurs determine what existing assets they might be able to use to create products that would be interesting to overseas and national visitors and locals, that could contribute to a more positive image of tourism’s role in St Lucia’s development, and that might create linkages to other sectors of the rural

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economy. The programme gave particular attention to overcoming the obstacles to small, local entrepreneurs entering the sector. It provided loans, developed and helped people to meet quality standards, created a heritage tourism marketing brand, and developed a marketing strategy. The ‘products’ ranged from a weekly fish-fry fête in a fishing village, to a heritage farm that displayed traditional methods of agriculture and food processing, to rural guests houses and restaurants, botanical gardens, hiking trails and waterfalls. In order to secure a market, the SLHTP organised the different entrepreneurs into an association and helped them to create and market one-day package tours. It also promoted tours and events for schoolchildren and other local groups. The SLHTP treated heritage tourism not as a solution to the problems of the rural economy, but as a way of shifting the entire tourism sector, to make it more sustainable, equitable and focused on the needs of disadvantaged rural people (Renard 2001). It did that by putting the emphasis on local people, their choices and the resources they rely on, rather than on the tourists and the income they can generate. Not all the initiatives that the SLHTP supported have been successes, but it has increased the involvement in and local benefits to local people from tourism, although barriers to substantial local involvement in the sector remain formidable (Jules 2005: 22–3). One important characteristic of the SLHTP is that it was a government programme. Although it was implemented with considerable autonomy, it was under the umbrella of the Ministry of Tourism, into which it was eventually completely absorbed. This allowed it to try to influence government policy in directions favourable to small-scale, locally managed initiatives. This also allowed it to combine many small and scattered enterprises into a national ‘product’ substantial enough to assume its own place within the larger and more powerful resort side of the industry. But it was careful to ensure that tourism attractions were not geared mainly to the desires of foreign tourists, but instead reflected the country’s history accurately and would appeal to local people. As a result, there is evidence of a national perceptual shift regarding the value, both locally and to visitors from abroad, of St Lucia’s natural and cultural heritage (Renard 2001). The idealised model of ecotourism is one in which markets in the enjoyment of biodiversity and nature become an effective form of conservation that makes the state’s role in conservation redundant. What the history of the SLHTP appears to indicate instead is that the realisation of such markets, in ways that provide accessible benefits to local people, requires and depends upon the orchestration and oversight of the state. It also suggests that private-sector conservation is comprised not of anything as simple as the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, but of interlacing webs of formal and informal, public and private, visible and invisible institutions, driven by a variety of actors, all pursuing individual strategies and objectives.

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The experience of the SLHTP is more complex and problematic than the vision of heritage tourism that CANARI espoused in the 1990s. It is this experience, and not the vision, that has the potential to change approaches to natural heritage tourism in St Lucia and neighbouring countries, and to make them more responsive to local needs than the virtualising framework of ecotourism. CANARI’s contribution was in weaving together a concept of heritage tourism that drew enough from the political, economic and social context of small Caribbean islands to usefully inform practice.

Markets for Watershed Services Recently a discourse has emerged that sees natural resource degradation as a problem of inadequate incentives, which can be solved through the use of market-based instruments (Landell-Mills and Porras 2002; Pagiola, Arcenas and Platais 2004). This departs from neoclassical economic theory, which treats environmental services as public goods or externalities. Instead, this discourse, derived from New Institutional Economics and promoted heavily by the World Bank, posits that markets can evolve when such services become scarce, or are perceived as scarce by parties willing to pay for their provision. As long as transaction costs are lower than net benefits, environmental service markets are claimed to offer the most efficient way of allocating scarce public goods. As with ecotourism, the model of an environmental service market is based on the assumption that natural resources can be managed more sustainably and efficiently by markets than by state regulation, community initiative or the responsible actions of private individuals. The idea of environmental service markets covers a wide range of financial incentives, most of which could not be defined as true markets with multiple buyers and sellers. One example of this is the purchase of carbon offsets, in which companies producing carbon emissions pay for forest protection in exchange for permission to exceed legally-mandated emission limits. Other examples, often referred to as watershed service markets, include payments by ecotourism enterprises to landowners to protect landscapes and biodiversity, and payments by downstream water suppliers to upstream owners and managers of forest lands. The rhetoric of this new field (Pagiola, Arcenas and Platais 2004; Scherr, White and Khare 2004; Tognetti, Aylward and Mendoza 2005) reflects a limited concern for the causes of environmental problems. Further, it places markets in classic opposition to states, presumed to be incompetent, and fails to recognise the community-based and co-management approaches that have gained ground over the past twenty years. While there has been general enthusiasm for the idea of a market in environmental services among donors and aid agencies, concerns have

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been raised about the impacts on the poor (Landell-Mills and Porras 2002: 152; Pagiola, Arcenas and Platais 2004). In 2002 CANARI was invited to collaborate in a global project, funded by the UK Department for International Development, to test the potential of these approaches for watershed management and improving local livelihoods, particularly for the poor. Although the fit between market instruments and poverty alleviation is not an obvious one, the emphasis on poverty was crucial from the donor’s perspective, given its current focus on achieving the Millennium Development Goals, including the halving of world poverty by 2015. CANARI was sceptical about the potential for market mechanisms to help solve problems of growing rural poverty, but agreed to explore the idea with the major formal watershed management institutions in a few countries of the region. These consultations found no evidence that government agencies in the Caribbean were prepared to trust markets to protect watersheds, contrary to the conclusion of Landell-Mills and Porras (2002: 10) that ‘market development is attractive to governments since it enables governments to transfer a large share of environmental service provision to nongovernmental actors’. There was, however, some interest in increasing the involvement of both watershed service ‘providers’, such as upstream landowners, and ‘beneficiaries’, such as water companies or coastal tourism interests, in management arrangements. More urgently, there was a feeling that donors would soon begin putting pressure on countries to introduce market-based approaches to watershed management, and that it was therefore important to develop the knowledge and experience to respond from a position of strength. On that basis, in collaboration with governmental and non-governmental bodies in St Lucia, as well as Jamaica, CANARI began research projects to explore the feasibility of implementing incentives in specific contexts. In order to build this basis of knowledge and experience, the project took an action-learning approach, which involved many of the major actors in watershed management in each project country and in the region in research and analysis. This action-learning group’s preliminary conclusions cast doubt on the effectiveness of markets as a device that can offer the natural resource protection and livelihood benefits that the rhetoric implies (McIntosh and Leotaud 2007). The determination of its promoters to see the environmental service market model implemented on the ground is profoundly challenged by the complexities of watersheds and their management. The research from this project suggests an alternative understanding of land use problems in watersheds. Rather than being the result of ignorance or greed, they appear to have complex origins, implying that changing how people use the land requires addressing underlying social, economic and ecological issues, rather than simply giving payments to landowners for improved practices. As in the case of

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ecotourism, rather than providing a way to reduce the role of the state in watershed management, market-based instruments would seem to create new responsibilities for government agencies, as would any new system of incentives. They must determine what practices will achieve desired management objectives, identify the individuals or groups who will receive the incentives, determine how the system will be financed, create the institutional framework for implementation and monitor effectiveness. All these roles obviously carry heavy transaction costs. Nonetheless, the idea of a market in environmental services did suggest to CANARI and its research partners some new and potentially promising insights into watershed management, albeit more modest ones than its supporters claim for it. Most current approaches to watershed protection are characterised by inequity. Voluntary groups and committees charged with local education or rehabilitation of degraded areas in poor rural communities have been encouraged to assist in protecting watersheds with promises of improved water supplies or even direct financial compensation. While local benefits often fail to materialise, large commercial enterprises such as water companies and beach resorts benefit at no cost. In this situation, it makes sense to do a better job of rewarding local groups that effectively contribute to improved watershed management. Doing so, however, requires a detailed understanding of the motives driving individual volunteers, rather than an a priori assumption that financial payments provide the most effective incentive. Through the project, CANARI sought to give the government agencies, regional organisations and NGOs that were involved in the research some tools to contest efforts to impose virtualising narratives regarding watershed service markets, and perhaps to translate donor interest in market-based approaches into mechanisms for a more equitable sharing of costs and benefits.

Translating Virtualism into Creole Mosse talks about how development brokers, like CANARI, are engaged in ‘the constant work of translation’ (Mosse 2004: 647), mediating between the virtual models of donors and other transnational environmental actors on the one hand, and on the other the interests, needs and possibilities of their presumed beneficiaries. CANARI clearly sees itself as this type of translator, and frames its structure and programme around that role. However, like all translators, it carries into its work its own set of biases, which are a product of its institutional culture and of the people who have contributed to it. Many of these people share common attributes: they have spent significant parts of their lives in both the Caribbean and in Northern countries, have been educated in North American or European institutions, and have middle-class backgrounds and left-leaning political

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orientations. The personal histories, values and field experiences of this group may help explain CANARI’s role as a broker that reframes the models and expectations of powerful development actors into the creole reality of Caribbean landscapes. However, accepting the role of translator requires that CANARI always walks a fine line. It is financially dependent on donors that are keen to see the models they believe in made real. At the same time, it is institutionally dependent on the relationships that make its work possible, the partners with whom it implements its projects and the people who benefit from them. These include government departments, NGOs, academic institutions, community organisations and individuals, most in the Caribbean region but also many outside of it. This web of relations is the product of years of effort. It also comprises the bulk of CANARI’s institutional and programmatic resources, more important to it than its relationship with any individual donor. In negotiating this territory between its donors and its partners and clients, between virtualism and creolisation, what is perhaps most important to CANARI is to be able to translate the results of the region’s experiments in creolisation back to the donors and transnational actors, in order to make their models more closely resemble and respond to local conditions and needs. The key to doing that is to be able to show that creolised approaches are both different from and superior to the models that influenced them. At the same time, CANARI must avoid the danger of itself becoming a victim of virtualism by offering up to donors different but equally homogenised Caribbean models and visions of reality. Its fundamental need to protect its base of institutional support by giving its clientele approaches and tools they can actually use is a strong disincentive to virtualise rather than creolise. CANARI’s current managing director has also suggested that the creolised histories of many of the people who comprise CANARI militates against this tendency, because these people have constantly had to confront their places within societies that are different from the ones they originally came from (S. McIntosh, pers. comm.). CANARI’s fieldwork also discourages it from homogenising the region: it is impossible to have experience of working in the vast diversity of places that make up the Caribbean (Mintz 1996: 298–9) and then to suggest that an approach that worked in Dominica might be easily transferable to, say, the Dominican Republic.

Concluding Lessons These examples from CANARI’s work illustrate the dangers, pointed out by Li (2002) and others, of attempting to impose predetermined models on complex situations. It is more useful to see development practice as a

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continual process of negotiating and reframing understandings to move closer to responses that meet people’s objectives in a particular place and time. These responses evolve, through a process similar to the creolisation of a language, into something that is rooted in, and can change with, the culture and institutions of a place. As a facilitator of these processes of creolisation, CANARI has learned a bit about confronting prevailing conservation discourse with practice on the ground, and replacing static narratives with ongoing dialogue. It is worth closing with some of the lessons that the cases presented here illustrate. First, conservation initiatives that aim to shape the world to fit idealised concepts are not driven simply by an aesthetic urge for order. Virtualising development narratives are often skilfully designed to disguise, even from many of their proponents, the motives that underlie them. Each of the cases discussed here dealt with a narrative that would protect the interests of economic or political elites against other, weaker stakeholders, even when the rhetoric talked about livelihoods, equity and participation. One role for development organisations like CANARI is to make it possible for management interventions to be negotiated on the basis of a full, honest and participatory assessment of potential winners and losers. Second, neoliberal development narratives that portray the state as an impediment to effective natural resource conservation ignore the complex and necessary roles that governments play in natural resource institutions. Even when government management agencies are weak and poorly equipped, they still provide a framework around which resource management institutions can evolve. The policy arena is where natural resource management issues are negotiated, and policy is the legitimate manifestation of that negotiation. Policy processes thus need to be constructed in ways that allow all stakeholders to participate on a just and equitable basis, and CANARI has understood the importance of its role in facilitating such processes. Third, notwithstanding the clear and necessary role of governments in natural resource management, institutions of governance exist wherever natural resources are being regularly used, and they do not need to be official, formal or rigid to be effective. Transient, informal and invisible systems are always at work in tandem with formal structures, in place of them or in conflict with them. One of the main dangers of importing external concepts and models, including those that aim to increase stakeholder participation, is that they may require new institutional arrangements that undermine or destroy effective informal ones, while creating static frameworks that can perpetuate undesirable or ineffective structures and organisations. By failing to recognise informal institutions as ‘sites of social interaction and negotiation’ (Mehta et al. 1999: 35), new ‘participatory’ institutional arrangements can actually weaken stakeholders’ voices, rather than strengthen them.

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Fourth, the discourse of community-based resource management has been justly criticised for its unrealistic, homogeneous and geographically bounded concept of community. However, the neoliberal discourse of rational individualism is no more helpful in understanding human behaviour and motivation. Natural resource management institutions are framed by the real relations that connect people, the ways they organise themselves and co-operate to achieve objectives, and the networks that they rely on for stability and protection. Virtualised models of natural resource governance, by ignoring or oversimplifying such relationships, deny the power of people to continually create, modify and recreate society to meet the needs and desires of those who live within it.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank current and former CANARI colleagues for their helpful comments and suggestions on this chapter, Gillian Cooper, Lyndon John, Vijay Krishnarayan, Alana Lum Lock, Sarah McIntosh, Yves Renard and Allan Smith.

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CHAPTER 6

Uncivil Society: Local Stakeholders and Environmental Protection in Jamaica ANDREW GARNER

We’ve been involved in this country for decades. In that time, we’ve handed out millions of dollars for environmental projects. We’ve reported every one of these projects as a great success. But the environment has continued to deteriorate. Former USAID worker in Jamaica, quoted in Haley and Clayton (2003: 35) I want to be independent. I could sit on ma children feed me like I’m a likkle kid again. Lord God no! Negril fisherman talking about a future without fishing

In their polemic about the failure of non-governmental organisations to deliver conservation of the Jamaican marine environment, Haley and Clayton (2003: 36) call for ‘more honesty, transparency and objectivity about the role of the NGOs, and a more rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of NGOs’. They argue that substantial government and donor funding of marine parks, protected areas and other initiatives run by environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) has produced little change in coral reef degradation through over-fishing, algae blooms and bleaching. Their argument echoes a body of critical reviews of the effectiveness of NGOs in different parts of the world (Chabal and Daloz 1999; Fatton 1992; Hancock 1989; Klitgaard 1990;

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Wrong 2000), some of which indict NGOs for their complicity in creating the very problems they are funded to solve (Maren 1997). Raymond Bryant (2002) suggests that NGOs have been successful, but not perhaps in their efforts to conserve the environment. Rather, they have been at the forefront of promulgating new ways of socialising nature, new attempts to change how people think about, relate to and justify their relationship with their surroundings. This change lies not in converting locals to environmental thinking and acting, but in the unintended results of broadening conservation to include local communities, especially through linking conservation to development and poverty relief. In short, the change links conservation with ‘civil society’ concerns. I consider this point through a description of the effects on fishers of local, national and international environmental programmes in the Jamaican town of Negril. I want particularly to consider whether these programmes, in promoting aspects of what can be seen as civil society, may be increasing governmentality, the internalisation of what it is to be governed and the relationships of authority and obedience constructed in space. Negril is an interesting area in which to pursue these questions. Since the 1970s it has grown from a small, scattered rural village to a town of approximately 20,000 people. It is a major tourist destination with a designated marine protected area that covers effectively all of the coastal waters, part of the Negril Marine Park and Protected Area. It also has a significant number of inshore, artisanal fishers who are considered a key stakeholder group and are subject to attempts by government organisations and ENGOs to structure, organise and limit their activities. The fishers are well aware of their stakeholder status, as well as of the desire of many to remove them entirely from the coastal waters. Environmental conservation in Negril is dominated by organisations. While individuals often shape the operation of those organisations and represent them in meetings, it is organisations, however loosely defined, that are the reality through which conservation takes place. Almost every conversation that touches on the environment or conservation in Negril rapidly becomes a discussion of the merits and failures of the organisations involved. Hence it is necessary to deal with a complex array of organisations, often with competing agendas. I want to portray this organisational arena from the perspective of the men and women who worked on the main Negril fishing beach in the period between April, 2004, and April, 2005. A degree of caution is required when attempting to present that perspective. While the events described here might not be denied, their interpretation may be disputed, and people’s formal positions can diverge substantially from their more private opinions. I begin by presenting the two main models through which the environment is constructed for conservation, those of fortress conservation and community conservation. Bryant’s use of governmentality is useful

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for throwing light on the tension between them as they are revealed in the experience of the fishers in Negril. It does not, however, easily account for those moments when the fishers resist the blandishments of civil society and expose the political-economic heartwood of environmental conservation. I suggest that attention to political economy is necessary if we are to understand Negril and the limitations of the concern with civil society and governmentality.

Social Effects of ENGO Regimes Much critical literature addresses tensions between ENGOs’ role of environmental promotion and the fact that often they extend governmental processes, even if inadvertently (e.g., Bryant 2002; Cooke and Kothari 2001; Ferguson 1994; Fisher 1997; Williams and Young 1994). According to Bryant (2002) and O’Malley (1996), ENGOs act as both critics of state power and conduits for its extension. They are, then, implicated in social control through the extension of governmentality, the process by which subjects internalise state control through self-regulation. Borrowing from Foucault’s (1972) work on how power and knowledge are intertwined, critics argue that the disciplinary effect of technologies of power exercised by ENGOs is to create social order and make it inevitable. Environmental discourses are not exempt from this criticism. They constitute reality, creating both the objects of their knowledge and the silences in between, the appropriate forms of agency and the forms to be repressed, new domains of political calculation and prescribed forms of intervention (Braun 2000; Brosius 1999; Demeritt 2001; Escobar 1996; Robbins 2000). Two main environmental discourses appear regularly in the critical literature on ENGOs, which Adams and Hulme (1998) have called fortress conservation and community conservation, and while they discuss them in relation to African conservation, their analysis is applicable more broadly.

Fortress Conservation For much of the twentieth century the dominant theme in conservation was of species on the brink of extinction due to people’s greed and expansion. The response was to set aside parks where humans were separated from other species. This discourse of extinction and preservation, which Bryant (2002: 278) dubbed the ‘biodiversity regime’, erases people in favour of endangered biota and reduces places, spaces and things to subjects for scientific study. Environmentalists thus contribute ‘to practices that de-socialize nature thereby further rendering marginal local people’ (Bryant 2002: 278). The strength of this desocialising

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is made clear in a translation exercise that Paige West undertook among Gimi-speaking people in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. A statement that began, ‘Land use impacts on biodiversity include …’ was translated into Univisa-Gimi by one person and then back into English by another. The process removed all the implied human threats to the environment, rendering the piece simply as, ‘The villagers use the forest. They have gardens with sago and sweet potatoes. They cut trees for fire wood and trees to build houses.’ The translators said that ‘“it did not make sense” to talk about interaction with the forest in terms of threats because those interactions are necessary uses of the forest and the land’ (West 2001: 12). This environmentalist view has distinctive constituting practices and silences. First of all, like James Ferguson’s (1994) ‘anti-politics machine’ it has the effect of turning complex social problems into matters for technical and bureaucratic management. Ecologists, biologists and other scientists become the arbiters of understandings of the natural surroundings and of human–environmental relations, and the uncertainties and complexities that attend most scientific knowledge become lost in the desire to make statements in terms of absolutes. In Jamaica, for instance, it is taken for granted that the reefs in the coastal shallows all around the island are deteriorating and that over-fishing is a major cause, and this view attracts international environmental funding. That view, however, ignores other pertinent ecological interactions, for instance between hurricane damage and population crashes among sea urchins, and it ignores the fact that scientists themselves are not in agreement about the processes involved (cf. Haley and Clayton 2003: 38ff.). Secondly, in its simplified positing of a nature ‘out there’ that is in crisis, fortress conservation creates nature baddies, the people whose activities are causing the crisis, a point that West (2001) makes very well. In Negril, as elsewhere in Jamaica, ENGOs regularly argue that over-fishing has reduced the herbivore fish population to the point that algae grow unchecked on coral, smothering it. This simplified argument, with its clear assignment of blame, underplays the huge increases in nutrient-rich run-off generated by expanding tourism along much of Jamaica’s coast, and so underplays the point that the reduction in the herbivore population would make less difference if the nutrient inflow was reduced. As one marine park manager said when challenged about the long-term plans to remove ‘fishing pressure’ from the park, ‘I am here to protect the fish, not provide jobs.’ Thirdly, having posited a nature at risk and the causes, the next step is re-education of local people so that they would ‘come to appreciate the scientific – and hence incontestable – basis of protected area designation’ (Bryant 2002: 283). Turning locals into environmentally literate subjects is a process of internalising the disciplines of ENGOs (Agrawal 2005). And as I have indicated, more is involved than environmental sciences. The appreciation fostered and the discipline internalised include the moral

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high ground of the ENGOs and the moral ignorance and turpitude of those who are seen as preventing and obstructing the higher aim of environmental protection.

Community Conservation Driven in part by the new political realities of independence and by a growing concern with the failures and injustices of fortress conservation, a counter-narrative gained acceptance. In the 1970s and 1980s community conservation projects started across Africa’s protected areas (Adams and Hulme 1998: 9ff.; Barrow and Murphree 1998). This counter-narrative has two distinct elements. The first is a degree of power sharing, involving in the management of conservation resources those local communities with claims on their surroundings, whether based on property rights, spiritual significance or the like. The second is the linking of conservation to local development needs, though often this is only ‘conventional conservation projects “retro-fitted” with a participatory or community conservation approach’ (Adams and Hulme 1998: 10). Examples of this include ‘conservation-with-development projects’ (Stocking and Perkin 1992) or ‘integrated conservation and development projects’ (Barrett and Arcese 1995; Wells and Brandon 1992). Specifically in marine conservation, these two elements are contained in ‘comanagement’ (Dyer and McGoodwin 1994; Jentoft 1989; Ostrom 1990; Pinkerton 1989; Sandersen and Koester 2000). In Bryant’s (2002) terms, community conservation and co-management become the ‘empowerment regime’ whose principal effect is to create politically literate subjects, a regime where local people are not excluded from either the natural surroundings or the political process. Bryant (2002) is critical of such projects. He says that the main outcome of NGO activity is not empowerment, but the strengthening of governmentality, a concern with the appropriate ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault 1982: 220–1), in which the ‘right disposition of things’ (wealth, resources, means, customs and habits, ways of acting and thinking) are internalised in the subject (Foucault 1991: 93). However unintentionally, NGO activities ‘contribute to a common end: the extension of government through the systematic incorporation and regulation of hitherto marginal social and natural relationships into the mainstream of … society’ (Bryant 2002: 285). David Mosse (2005: 2), talking about aid and development, identifies a similar problematic underlying what he characterises as instrumental (rational planning), critical (domination-resistance) and community (participatory) views of development policy. None, he argues, succeeds in reversing the hegemony of development. Rather, the shift towards participation serves to ‘provide more effective instruments with which to extend technocratic control or advance external interests and

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agendas while further concealing the agency of outsiders, or the manipulations of more local elites’ (2005: 4–5). Mosse dislikes the governmentality argument, saying that we need to ‘move on from the image of duped perpetrators and victims caught up in … all-powerful Western development institutions’ (Mosse 2005: 6). Instead, he emphasises the point that development policy is primarily about mobilising and maintaining support, to ‘legitimise rather than orientate practice’ (2005: 14). Following this lead, it is worth asking how well the argument about extension of governance works in Negril.

Negril, Fishers and the Marine Park Negril, in Westmoreland Parish, is on the far western tip of Jamaica, and until the 1970s it was a village at the end of a single-track dirt road. Much of the land was, and still is, owned by a few wealthy landowners, while the majority of people there worked for sugar estates, farmed small plots of land, kept cattle, goats and pigs, and fished. Negril divides neatly in two. On one side there is the Great Morass, draining the nearby mountains and creating a sandy beach along the aptly named Long Bay. On the other, the West End, the land rises in a coral limestone shelf with cliffs plunging 30–40 feet into the sea. Between these two lies the South Negril River, the centre of town and the road out to Savannah-la-Mar, the nearest town and the capital of the parish. Several older fishers I interviewed remember when the first tourists arrived in Negril and picnicked on the beach in the early 1950s. By the early 1970s Negril had been discovered by American hippies and gained a reputation for being a relaxed place to visit. Most of the visitors stayed on the West End, pitching tents and renting rooms in local houses. Increasingly sophisticated accommodation was built and by the middle of the 1980s the focus had moved to the beach along Long Bay. By the 1990s Negril had become a major tourist destination, its beach almost all developed by a mixture of large chains, with their all-inclusive hotels, and smaller independent ventures. In the meantime the village had transformed into a small town as increasing numbers of Jamaicans moved to the area looking for work. Figures from 2003 indicate the nature of the change. In that year Negril, with a population of about 20,000 people, had about 100 hotels with about 5,850 rooms employing almost 7,800 people and attracting about 275,000 visitors, making it the third most popular tourist destination in the country (Bakker and Phillip 2005). This brief sketch introduces the fundamental issues leading to the establishment of the town’s two ENGOs and its fishing co-operative. Firstly, the rapid growth of the town and tourism has led to a dramatic

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increase in run-off of pollutants.1 The suspended nitrates and phosphates are the chief cause of algae blooms that choke the coral reefs. Secondly, the extensive building along the beach and backfilling into the Great Morass that is part of the tourism boom interferes with the natural drainage and filtering system. Thirdly, that boom has induced Jamaicans to go to Negril to seek work, with two effects: the local demand for fish has increased (tourists usually are served imported fish) and many who failed to find work took up fishing to help them get by. The effects of these changes were apparent to fishers, who said that over the past thirty years it had become significantly harder to catch the same amount of fish. There has also been conflict between fishers and the tourism sector. On land, as more and more of the beach was given over to tourism, fishers had to look for alternative sites to keep their gear and launch their boats. At sea, fishers confronted the growing number of water-sports companies offering jet skis, sailing, glass-bottomed boat tours, snorkelling and scuba diving. So, not only were coastal resources under pressure, there was an increasing number of confrontations between different users of them. This is the local social and environmental background of the founding, in 1991, of the Negril Coral Reef Preservation Society (NCRPS), the town’s main ENGO. Other background factors were also important. Economically, a debt-for-nature swap with the United States, organised by The Nature Conservancy, injected money into Jamaican conservation. Politically, the Natural Resource Conservation Act of 1991 promoted the management of coastal zone resources and identified areas around the coastline for greater degrees of protection. Two years later the Natural Resource (National Parks) Regulation 1993 laid down the framework for the management of marine parks, the first of which was the Montego Bay Marine Park (formed in 1989–90, with legislation after the fact; Haley and Clayton 2003: 43). The NCRPS proposed a marine park and associated watershed area, and much of the basic park apparatus was in place by 1994: management by the NCRPS, water sampling, wardens on patrol, boundaries, rules and regulations. But curiously, there it stopped. According to the Jamaica National Marine Fisheries Atlas (CFRAMP 2000), in 2000 the Negril park legally was still only a proposal, and according to several respondents in the country’s capital, Kingston, it remained so in 2004. In the meantime another ENGO, the Negril Area Environmental Protection Trust (NEPT), was set up to manage the watershed side of the protected area. The NCRPS and NEPT soon found themselves in competition for money and the relationship between them was often rocky. This resulted in some odd duplication of effort, for instance in the respective organisations’ education

1. In addition to tourism, the sugar industry is an important source of pollution, from the fertilisers used in cane fields.

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programmes. The NCRPS had a thriving junior ranger programme, while NEPT’s schools programme seemed more active in recent years. According to one ENGO manager, they had to be careful not to be operating at the same schools. The Negril Fishing Co-operative Society was established in 1992, and has approximately 360 fishers on its books.2 According to the Secretary, the Co-operative was set up primarily to get a fishing beach designated in Negril, seen as necessary because of tourism development. After two different sites were mooted the fishers were eventually successful in getting a third, on the South Negril River, designated as an official fishing beach. Fishers in Negril use several different techniques, including gill and seine nets, fish traps, spear guns, and trolling. They use a variety of craft, but the most common sort is 25–35 foot fibreglass boats with 35–50 h.p. outboard motors. The land at the fishing beach is dotted with corrugated iron and wood shacks or ‘camps’, where the fishers store their equipment or, in some cases, live. These are scattered around a central space with a few rickety tables where most of the catch is sold as soon as it is landed. There are also six stores offering basic food and drink, and the Fishing Co-operative trailer, permanently parked and selling fishing equipment and spares. The Fishing Co-operative is run by a Board of Directors elected at the Annual General Meeting, where fishers also elect the Chair, Deputy Chair, Treasurer and Secretary. A new Board was elected in April, 2004, as I began my fieldwork, and was seen by many as a renewal of the Co-operative after a time spent in the doldrums. Unusually, the fishers had elected a woman to be Chair. She was connected to one of the fisher families and was also a political worker for the local MP and party structure, but was someone the fishers could agree would be even-handed. All the other prospective candidates attracted strong opposition among one or another segment of the membership.3 Fishers privately said that they were willing to let the new Board have the benefit of the doubt, but were variously phlegmatic about its achieving anything. Board meetings were well attended for the first few months, and then things began to slip. Meetings were often inquorate, much delayed or cancelled. Decisions continued to be made sporadically, but 2. Figures about fishers in Jamaica are uncertain. Locally, Co-operative membership changes as new fishers arrive or return from other work and others leave or die, while the membership list is infrequently updated and often only half completed. Nationally, CFRAMP (2000) says that there were 11,000 registered fishers in Jamaica in 1997, but it is estimated that up to 20,000 Jamaicans make their living by fishing. 3. Even staff at the Jamaican body supporting co-operatives and at the local ENGOs kept asking me what I thought of the new Board and how it was working. The fact that the ENGOs wanted to ask me is perhaps a sign of the degree of actual co-operation between them and the Co-operative.

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often without any noticeable reference to the formal structure of the Cooperative. This state of affairs appeared to change in October, 2004, with the arrival of a consultant working for a Canadian government-sponsored organisation. He came to help the fishers attract development funding.

The Story of the Canadian Consultant Things started well. The Co-operative Board turned out to welcome the consultant, the meeting was called to order and prayers were said. The minutes from the last successful meeting were agreed. People closely but respectfully questioned the consultant via the Chair for a short time and then agreement was reached in terms of his general brief, all of which was properly minuted. The consultant later said how impressed he was with the meeting. Then some practical arrangements started to lose their gloss. It was agreed that he would meet the Board each week to report on his progress and get their guidance and advice. The first of these meetings simply did not happen. It was rescheduled for the next day, but only a couple of Board members turned up. Trying to get around this lack of success, and keen to ensure that the fishers were ‘fully engaged’ in the process, the consultant proposed that he have regular meetings with a small liaison group. This was agreed and Board members were assigned to the group. These meetings also did not happen. However, the consultant was able to get information and discuss matters with key members of the Board on a much more ad hoc basis. Matters were proceeding, but perhaps not as he had envisaged.

Probity and Governance ‘One of the areas I need to get information about before I can draw up a business plan for the development,’ explained the consultant, ‘are your accounts and records.’ Perhaps inevitably, I began to be drawn into the process, helping the Co-operative sort through their records and undertake an inventory of goods in the trailer, which had not happened for two years. While the minutes of meetings and AGMs were present, if somewhat patchy, over the previous two years, the accounts were proving elusive. It eventually emerged that the recent books had been taken away by the Jamaica Co-operative Union, a quasi-governmental body, to be audited and had not yet been returned. A meeting with them elicited a promise of an auditor’s statement of account. Despite several more requests, this had not appeared by the time the consultant left, nor four months later when I left. E-mails sent to various officials to chase this up bounced back. Apparently the records had to be sent to Kingston before the statement could be issued. The consultant was concerned. He did not

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think he could recommend that the Co-operative be responsible for the proposed development budget, and after some negotiation he obtained agreement that the money would be administered through the accounts of NEPT, one of the local ENGOs. Apart from probity in financial management, the consultant was also looking for evidence of good governance. While the minutes were satisfactory, there was the matter of the Co-operative manager, whose main task was to run the store. She had not turned up for work for five weeks. Being unable for so long to purchase supplies nearby, the fishers were pushing for something to be done. Several Board members knew that she was facing a personal crisis and were reluctant to do anything. However, after she failed to turn up as promised, first at work and then at a Board meeting, they reluctantly agreed that they needed to replace her with a new manager. A vote was taken and duly recorded: the consultant was pleased that a difficult decision had been made. The following Monday, however, she turned up to work, wearing the Co-operative shirt she had arranged for all Board members to have. That day the Chair, Deputy and Secretary were all away, and the other Directors did not think it was up to them to tell her about the Board’s decision. For the rest of the week she turned up regularly, and then disappeared again. The consultant now was concerned that the Board decision did not seem to have any effect. ‘How can I prove that their decisions stick?’ he asked, with a degree of frustration. Some months later an e-mail to the Co-operative arrived from the consultant. He had learnt of a Kuwaiti development fund that looked promising, but the application would have to come through the appropriate government ministry. Together with the Chair I visited the district planning office. In a flurry of activity the e-mail was faxed off to someone in the Tourism Product Development Company (TPDCo), which has some say in planning in Negril, with promises that this would move rapidly. As we left the building I asked the Chair if she thought something would come of this. She shook her head, ‘Nothing will come from TPDCo. They don’t really want us here.’ Funding, so far, has not appeared.

A History of Development Initiatives The consultant’s visit was but the latest of a series of attempts by or through Negril’s two ENGOs to help develop the fishers’ livelihoods and protect the coastal waters, either by identifying alternative livelihoods for fishers so that they can leave the fishery, or by encouraging deep-water fishing so that they will stop fishing in the coastal waters. As I delved into this recent history a somewhat depressing picture emerged, in spite of the co-operation and even enthusiasm of fishers at the start. That initial spirit

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is recalled by a Board member, describing the early days of the Cooperative’s relationship with the NCRPS and NEPT: Some people they might think we have an axe to grind, but once the organisation begun to take shape people really began to get involved. [NCRPS’s] Relationship with fishing co-op was mostly amicable in the early days, but there were times when one organisation would think the other was stepping on soft ground. Mostly the relationships were cordial as they see the fishers as vital in helping to preserve whatever they need to be preserved. The fishers started to perceive, to think environmentally. They see us as a strong link in the chain and we see them as a sister or brother organisation operating before us but operating in manner that we thought would be friendly.

One of the first and biggest grants was given by the European Union in 1992, mainly to set up the park operations and build a headquarters and visitor centre. Common to many major donors, the EU stipulated an element of funding for the local community and stakeholders. The fishers knew about this and expected a small allocation to spend themselves. I found a copy of a letter from the Co-operative to the NCRPS requesting that the funds be released to them. When questioned, several Board members recalled that they were somewhat surprised to find that it was up to the NCRPS to manage that part of the budget. Eventually the money was used to fund a modest test of sea-moss farming as an alternative livelihood (in 2004 no one was farming it). The fishers felt they had been let down and, as one former Chair commented, ‘We didn’t endorse the Coral Reef people so the second round of funding did not appear.’ Things looked far more hopeful for a $CA 250,000 development grant from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). This was given to the Co-operative in 1992 to develop the fishing beach, to build a Co-operative office, to bring water and sewerage on site, to build slipways and dry docks for larger boats suitable for deep-water fishing. This was conditional on the Fishing Co-operative having clear rights to the land, with a lease of at least ten years, and the money was released on the basis of a government undertaking about designation of a fishing beach and a stable lease for the land. Two sites on the South Negril River were offered. Both were above the bridge over the river, and hence limited the size of boat able to reach the landing site. This potentially undercut plans to move fishers out into deeper water, which would require larger boats. In addition, one site lacked road access and no planning permission for a road was guaranteed. The other was on the edge of the Great Morass and would require substantial infilling to create usable ground, one of the main things that NEPT was trying to curb. Meanwhile, time was passing. The Co-operative gained a year’s extension from CIDA and then proceeded to lobby for the current, seaward site on the South Negril River, which was privately

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owned. The government eventually gave the owner another site further down the beach in compensation and set up a lease for the Co-operative. The lease was finally signed in 1998, almost four years after the Cooperative had had to hand the money back to CIDA. They did, however, negotiate permission to keep the interest that had accrued while it sat for two years in their account, which they used to purchase the Co-operative trailer and connect to the electrical network. In 1997 the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) commissioned a report on ‘Sustainable interventions for Negril fisher families’ with a view to extending the Development of Environmental Management Organizations (DEMO) project to the area. The major objective for the USAID was to ‘stop and eventually reverse the degradation of the coral reefs (to be included in the marine park) by addressing one of the perceived causes for the degradation – over-fishing’ (Christophersen, Homer and Grant 1997: 7). Three alternative livelihoods were considered: fresh-water fish farming, sea-moss farming (again) and sustainable tourism. The conclusion was that all three were ‘financially feasible from the perspective of the fisher families’ (1997: 7) and that the USAID should extend the DEMO project. An important conclusion states that the key institutions involved with or on behalf of the Negril fishing communities (NRCA, NEPT, and others) are lacking in economics or financial expertise. The focus of any effort intended to improve the economic conditions of the Negril fishers cannot be done without rigorous economic input and analysis. (1997: 9)

No funding was forthcoming. In 2004, with the Canadian consultant’s visit, the lease issue returned. Despite keeping up payments on the lease, a substantial search failed to locate a signed copy. The fishers had several photocopies of the terms and conditions, but these were all unsigned. As the lack of proof of secure tenure remained a major issue, the Board of Directors and the consultant attempted to obtain a signed copy. This continued well after the consultant left, with phone calls and letters to the Commissioner of Land and the Minister in charge of fisheries. I was also able to pursue the issue with a local Councillor and, whether because of this or other efforts, a signed copy of the lease was delivered to the Fishing Co-operative at the end of March, 2005, shortly before I left Jamaica. The fishers regard this litany with a degree of wry humour and point to what they think is the principal problem. One former Co-operative official explained it this way: There was a lot of pressure to stop letting the fishers setting up a homeland in Negril. Tourism, TPDCo didn’t want to see fishers get established in the heart of Negril. We still think the government is still trying to pressure us in that how could a NGO be pressured to pay so much for a lease for a bit of

146 | Andrew Garner land? $J 100,000 per year, and $J 5000 for other site. [They had just been told that a co-operative in Montego Bay was paying $J 10 per year for their lease.] … [It is the] Tourist Board who is fighting against the fishers. They are a multibillion dollar concern and they don’t do anything at all. The Tourist Board, Negril Citizens Association don’t want us in this area here at all. They don’t want the fishers around. They don’t want us here. Man in Chamber of Commerce, this man’s name is Adam, he says the nearest fishers should be to Negril is like Orange Bay and Little Bay [each about 10 miles away and with established groups of fishers]. He says wherever there are fishers, the beach smell.

This tale of failure indicates that if they are to achieve a secure position in Negril, the fishers need to become an organisation. The Co-operative was the means through which they could negotiate with the government over land access, and it was encouraged by ENGOs because they required a local stakeholder body to deal with. But, following Bryant, there is more to this. In order for the Co-operative to operate, the fishers had to become disciplined subjects, to keep records, to hold minuted meetings, to manage accounts, to make group decisions. Moreover, that discipline needed to be internalised to the extent that the Co-operative would be seen by fishers as an organisation that could both represent them and modify their behaviour. By some organisational alchemy, the Co-operative had to become the representative of all the fishers. In Negril, both fortress conservation and community conservation appear to operate at the same time. In their publicity leaflets and schools projects, the ENGOs portray a nature that is in danger of imminent collapse, one that needs to be saved, as NCRPS literature puts it, ‘for our children’s children’. At the same time, they are required to engage stakeholder communities. The result is that fishers are in an ambiguous position. They are privileged because donor agencies see them as being in need of ‘mobilisation’, but also they are denigrated as the main cause of reef degradation. As the fishers know well enough, empowerment for the local community is not a result of environmental conservation in Negril.

The Uncivil Results of Civil Society The results of community conservation are convincingly critiqued by Bryant (2002) and West (2001). However, while their analyses of conservation in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea fit Negril in many ways, two areas deserve comment. One concerns the general idea that governmentality advances through the use of technical knowledge. One asks whether there are differences that need to be taken into account when discussing what

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‘community’ means in a setting where class and race are relevant, but not indigeneity. What I have to say about these suggests that analysis based on governmentality does not seem particularly suited to Negril.

Cartographic Hegemony The ability of maps and mapping to enforce ways of seeing the world has been subject to much comment. Strang (1997), for instance, shows how the maps of Australian colonial power, echoed in ruler-straight cattle station boundaries, attempt to impose a political and social order over Aboriginal ways of understanding the landscape. Similarly, Bryant sees the process of mapping as a form of governmentality made visible. Quoting Dean (1999), he asks how it is possible ‘to picture who and what is to be governed as well as how the relations of authority and obedience are to be constituted in space’ (Bryant 2002: 275). He answers this question by showing how maps of a ‘biogeographic imagined community’ (2002: 275) in the Philippines exclude references to towns, people and politics. Nothing should intrude on the nature that is at the core of the biodiversity regime. Under the more recent community regime, mapping took on new significance, and with it there has been interest in counter-mapping, in which local communities map their environments to dispute or establish claims (e.g., Peluso 1995). Bryant suggests that counter-mapping in fact is as much about conformity to state practices as it is about resisting them (2002: 281). Cartographic hegemony is about learning the mapping processes through which to lodge or challenge land claims, schooling in the state way of doing things. Maps provide a ‘common framework for discussions between the community and government technicians and officials’ (Poffenberger 1999: 93). It should, then, come as no surprise that maps in Negril are highly charged. One in particular, prepared by the NCRPS and fairly common in one form or another, presents the park boundaries and zoning areas. In bright colours it shows swimming zones, areas for water-sports and other craft, diving zones and fish nursery areas. As the park has yet to be fully designated, the map has an interesting partial status. One Kingston insider, when asked about the legal status of the park’s zoning map, simply responded, ‘What park?’ This is not how it is presented in Negril. Every now and then the Marine Police are called to tell fishers they are fishing illegally, and spear-gun fishers have their guns removed if caught in the nursery areas by park wardens. One older fisherman, who sits on the Co-operative Board, was incandescent with rage when he was told he could not fish where they found him, in the wrong zone, and that the wardens had asked the police to caution him: ‘I have been fishing here all my life. No one is going to stop me exercise my rights.’

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The Co-operative had been involved in discussion over the zoning map, and many fishers said they could see why it was there. The general attitude seemed to be that it was an occasional annoyance but that they could work round the restrictions. However, by the end of 2003 a great deal of this grudging goodwill had evaporated, and when I arrived both ENGOs were dismissed as ‘paper tigers’. The reason was that a new allinclusive hotel had opened early in 2004. It was built right in front of the fish nursery, with all swimming and boat access going through the middle of the area. Fishers wondered why they had avoided fishing there for nearly a decade, only to have a hotel open on the spot. They considered this to be evidence that everything could be bought if you had enough money, and it reinforced what they knew to be true: despite the rhetoric of participation they were not taken seriously. It was with a mixture of resignation and mild anger that they saw the NCRPS install a large display board with the zoning map and park regulations reproduced in large scale, right in the middle of the fishing village. ‘It’s like it has always been,’ commented one Rastafarian fisherman, ‘one rule for the rich and one rule for the poor.’

A ‘Community’ at Sea? The regime of community conservation requires identifiable local stakeholder communities. This operates at two levels. At one level, which we could gloss as cultural, communities are defined by a common language, shared rituals and beliefs and residence within or at the boundaries of the reserved area. So we can think of West’s three villages in Papua New Guinea, or Bryant’s ancestral lands in the Philippines. At the second level, as argued above, a community is an entity that has records that stabilise it over time, a degree of consensual representation (preferably something that looks democratic) and sufficient sway over its members to rein in violent confrontation. The degree to which these two levels coincide will depend on circumstance. When the local community is a village or set of villages, an indigenous governance system may well be in place, into which the second-level hallmarks of governmentality can be instilled. In Africa, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Australia, local community is often isomorphic with indigenous community. The problem in Negril is that describing the fishers as indigenous, while perhaps technically correct, is inappropriate. Negril fishers are not a group in any substantial sense, and the fishing beach is essentially made up of a number of independent, one-man businesses. Fishers share nothing much more than working experience and expertise, some friendships and an awareness of what can be roughly equated to a working-class identity. Most are at the fishing beach only to do their jobs and then return home. In fact their orientation and

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experience militate against co-operation. In this they echo the common adherence in the region, especially among males, to autonomy and equality, to relationships that are fluid and equal rather than structured and hierarchical.4 This valuing of autonomy appears when people consider the deep-sea fishing presented as an alternative to inshore fishing. While many Negril fishers have worked in the past on larger boats, they all felt the owners cheated them and they do not want to lose the independence of working for themselves again so lightly. The other side of this valuing of autonomy is a distrust of others. It is assumed, for instance, that one’s fish traps (pots) are never safe from thieves: ‘You can’t trust i. There alway somebody tief ya pots.’ The result is ‘every man for himself. If he have a way that he can do his things without certain things [like a communal ice-house for storing fish], that is not important to him’. Fishers, then, seek to be as independent as possible. They do not trust each other and do not trust authority, whether Co-operative, ENGO or government. Moreover, the coastal waters are not something in which fishers can claim rights in the way that an indigenous community can claim rights to areas of, or specific sorts of resources in, their surroundings. For most Jamaicans the sea is not something that is divided into areas or populated by things that are especially associated with one group or another. Rather, it is viewed as free. Indeed, several attempts have been made to create a commons out of marine park resources, the latest being in 2004 in Montego Bay. The park there sought to create a community of fishers licensed to fish in park waters and charged with self-monitoring and self-discipline. When I discussed this with fishers in Negril they thought it interesting, but not that it would work because ‘Everyone know the sea free’.

Conclusion When ENGOs and similar agencies want to conserve the environment, they need to engage with local stakeholders. The argument goes that when they are engaged, stakeholders become subject to bureaucratic processes which serve to mould them in certain ways, often glossed as governmentality, and which advance the legitimacy and power of the state. This may be true in many places. However, what I have described of Negril and its fishers indicates that there is more at work than the subtleties of governance.

4. The classic statement is Wilson’s (1973) work on reputation and respectability, and an extended historical treatment is in Olwig (1993). For its relationship to class, see Austin (1983), and to gender, see Besson (1993).

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Although ENGOs often have rules intended to ensure fair allocation of development resources, the application of those rules forces a particular kind of dialogue with the stakeholder community. At this juncture, basic inequalities shape the exchange between agency and local community. The ENGO can claim expertise and funding; on the other hand, the local community, if Negril fishers are any indication, may have little political and economic power. Moreover, as Bryant has suggested, the local community is prompted into a particular constitution by the ENGO’s own internal and external terms of reference. For instance, the fact that Negril fishers are formed into a local co-operative makes them attractive to ENGOs, who expect them to conform to their expectations. This makes the ENGO a dominant partner in a relationship that goes beyond the allocation of resources or the imposition of governmentality: moral constructions are at work as well, and not those of environmentality. So, when the fishers fail to produce audited accounts or copies of their lease, they are blamed for failing to abide by the terms needed for ENGO funding. Yet it is the Jamaican government that holds these documents, and the fishers lack the political power to get them. The negative moralisation of this group of local resource users may be common among respectable Jamaicans, but officially is not part of ENGO activity or of extending governmentality. However, in creating the marine park, ENGOs strengthened, even if unwittingly, the notion of a community opposed to marine protection: fishers are blamed for mistakes or wrong decisions that are largely beyond their control. This solidifies the perception that fishermen are obstinate, lax and dishonest, but it does nothing to facilitate either the protection of the coastal waters or the governability of fishers. Moreover, this moralisation does not seem to shame fishers into conformity with ENGO expectations or demands; rather, the opposite appears to be the case. This departs from an assumption of the model of community conservation, that local communities can be induced into conformity. Much of the work on community conservation has focused on distinct groups, especially fairly bounded ethnic or ethno-linguistic groups. The Negril fishers are also a definable group, but one based on socio-economic rather than ethnic factors. Fishers are not a distinct and self-contained part of Negril, but rather are a set of people individually connected in different ways to the rest of Negril society, economically, geographically and linguistically. Fishers may be able to evade governmentality because of these connections. They give fishers the resources to, for instance, adopt the co-operative idea, but run the organisation as they choose, which is not always as the ‘empowering’ ENGO would prefer. Bryant has shown how NGOs can structure local communities, drawing them into governmentality. However, what I have described in this

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chapter raises questions about the applicability of his argument and of a focus on governmentality. Community conservation does not work in Negril, nor does the governmentality associated with it. I have pointed to factors that help explain this, the social and cultural attributes of Negril fishers. They are not a community, but a set of individuals variously linked to a range of different sets of people in Negril and elsewhere. They distrust authority and value autonomy. They will not organise themselves and apparently cannot be cajoled into organisation by local ENGOs or outsiders. This makes them unsuited for environmental policies or analytical models that assume local resource users are members of, and can be engaged and influenced through, collectivities.

Acknowledgements This is based on research that was part of ‘Coastal environmental conservation: a Jamaican study’, running in 2004–5 and funded by the ESRC (RES-000-23-0396). Thanks are due to James Carrier for constructive comments, to Gunilla Sommer for her suggestions about the tourism industry in Negril and to Monica Lorenzo Pugholm for her insights into fishers’ views of deep-sea fishing.

References Adams, William M. and David Hulme. 1998. Conservation and communities: changing narratives, policies and practices in African conservation. (Working Paper 4.) Manchester: Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester. Agrawal, Arun. 2005. Environmentality: community, intimate government, and the making of environmental subjects in Kumaon, India. Current Anthropology 46: 161–90. Austin, Diane J. 1983. Culture and ideology in the English-speaking Caribbean: a view from Jamaica. American Ethnologist 10: 223–40. Bakker, Martine and Susan Phillip. 2005. Travel and tourism – Jamaica – February 2005. London: Mintel International Group Ltd. Barrett, Christopher B. and Peter Arcese. 1995. Are integrated conservationdevelopment projects (ICDPs) sustainable? On the conservation of large mammals in Sub-Saharan Africa. World Development 23: 1073–84. Barrow, Edmund and Marshall Murphree. 1998. Community conservation from concept to practice: a practical framework. (Working Paper 8.) Manchester: Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester.

152 | Andrew Garner Besson, Jean. 1993. Reputation and respectability reconsidered: a new perspective on Afro-Caribbean peasant women. In Women and change in the Caribbean: a pan-Caribbean perspective, ed. Janet Momsen, pp. 15–37. London: James Currey. Braun, Bruce. 2000. Producing vertical territory: geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada. Ecumene 7: 7–46. Brosius, J. Peter. 1999. Analyses and interventions: anthropological engagements with environmentalism. Current Anthropology 40: 277–309. Bryant, Raymond L. 2002. Non-governmental organisations and governmentality: ‘consuming’ biodiversity and indigenous people in the Philippines. Political Studies 50: 268–92. CFRAMP. 2000. Jamaica national marine fisheries atlas. (CARICOM Fishery Report No. 4.) Belize City: Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism. Chabal, Patrick and Jean-Pascal Daloz. 1999. Africa works: disorder as political instrument. Oxford: James Currey. Christophersen, Kjell A., Floyd Homer and S. Jacqueline Grant. 1997. Sustainable interventions for Negril fisher families. Report prepared for USAID/Jamaica and Development of Environmental Management Organizations (DEMO). Washington, DC: TSS. Cooke, Bill and Uma Kothari. 2001. The case for participation as tyranny. In Participation: the new tyranny, ed. B. Cooke and U. Kothari, pp. 1–15. London: Zed Books. Dean, Mitchell M. 1999. Governmentality: power and rule in modern society. London: Sage. Demeritt, David. 2001. The statistical enframing of nature’s limits. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19: 431–59. Dyer, Christopher L. and James R. McGoodwin (eds) 1994. Folk management in the world’s fisheries: lessons for modern management. Niwot: University Press of Colorado. Escobar, Arutro. 1996. Constructing nature: elements for a poststructural political ecology. In Liberation ecologies, ed. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, pp. 46–68. London: Routledge. Fatton, Robert, Jr. 1992. Predatory rule: state and civil society in Africa. Boulder, Col.: Lynne Rienner. Ferguson, James. 1994. The anti-politics machine: ‘development’, depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fisher, William F. 1997. Doing good? The politics and antipolitics of NGO practices. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 439–64. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock.

Local Stakeholders in Jamaica | 153 ———. 1982. The subject and power. In Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, pp. 208–26. Brighton: Harvester. ———. 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, pp. 87–104. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Haley, Michael and Anthony Clayton. 2003. The role of NGOs in environmental policy failures in a developing country: the mismanagement of Jamaica’s coral reefs. Environmental Values 12: 29–54. Hancock, Graham. 1989. Lords of poverty: the power, prestige, and corruption of the international aid business. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Jentoft, Svein. 1989. Fisheries co-management: delegating government responsibility to fishermen’s organizations. Marine Policy 13: 137–54. Klitgaard, Robert. 1990. Tropical gangsters: one man’s experience with development and decadence in deepest Africa. New York: Basic Books. Maren, Michael. 1997. The road to hell: the ravaging effects of foreign aid and international charity. New York: The Free Press. Mosse, David. 2005. Cultivating development: an ethnography of aid policy and practice. London: Pluto Press. Olwig, Karen Fog. 1993. Global culture, island identity: continuity and change in the Afro-Caribbean community of Nevis. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. O’Malley, Pat. 1996. Indigenous governance. Economy and Society 25: 310–26. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peluso, Nancy Lee. 1995. Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode 27: 383–406. Pinkerton, Evelyn (ed.) 1989. Co-operative management of local fisheries: new directions for improved management and community development. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Poffenberger, Mark (ed.) 1999. Communities and forest management in Southeast Asia. Gland: IUCN. Robbins, Paul. 2000. The practical politics of knowing: state environmental knowledge and local political economy. Economic Geography 19: 423–44. Sandersen, Håkan and Stephen Koester. 2000. Co-management of tropical coastal zones: the case of Sourfriere Marine Management Area, St Lucia, WI. Coastal Management 28: 87–97. Stocking, Michael and Scott Perkin. 1992. Conservation-with-development: an application of the concept in the Usambara Mountains, Tanzania. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (NS) 17: 337–49. Strang, Veronica. 1997. Uncommon ground: landscape, values and the environment. Oxford: Berg.

154 | Andrew Garner Wells, Michael and Katrina Brandon. 1992. People and parks: linking protected areas with local communities. Washington, DC: World Bank. West, Paige. 2001. Environmental non-governmental organizations and the nature of ethnographic inquiry. Social Analysis 45 (2): 55–77. Williams, David and Tom Young. 1994. Governance, the World Bank and liberal theory. Political Studies 42: 84–100. Wilson, Peter J. 1973. Crab antics: the social anthropology of English-speaking Negro societies of the Caribbean. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Wrong, Michela. 2000. In the footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: living on the brink of disaster in the Congo. London: Fourth Estate.

CHAPTER 7

‘The Report Was Written for Money to Come’: Constructing and Reconstructing the Case for Conservation in Papua New Guinea FLIP VAN HELDEN

Pulling together support for expensive conservation interventions under the tight bureaucratic guidelines of international conservation agencies is a highly technical and complex affair. Mainstream project development theory suggests that a careful analysis of the local situation leads to the design of a coherent set of conservation interventions on the basis of which donors decide to provide financial support to the projects of their choice. Critics, however, argue that many international conservation interventions rest on a limited set of stereotypical images and assumptions, often based on the notion of pristine nature being threatened by the harmful activities of fast-growing local populations. Such ‘off-the-shelf narratives’ (Fairhead and Leach 1997: 35) are not only used to define problems and justify interventions; in addition they are embedded in the administrative requirements of international conservation agencies such as the Global Environment Facility (GEF) (Zerner 1996), WWF, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (Chapin 2004). In the analysis of project development, most attention is usually given to the interconnections between project and people, taking a dyadic view of planned intervention as consisting of a project that intervenes and local people who are intervened upon. In these analyses the mainstream conservation narrative is often presented as hegemonic, overwhelming local communities and their knowledge and history, while enforcing a

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view of nature and local people that suits the needs of the intervening agencies (cf. Cronon 1992, 1995; Escobar 1996; Fairhead and Leach 1997; Hoben 1995; Leach and Mearns 1996; Stott 1999; Tiffen, Mortimore and Gichuki 1994; Zerner 1996). Other scholars, especially from development studies, have questioned the influence of such totalising narratives by pointing to the existence of counter-discourses and the ways in which local people resist, enlist and transform outside interventions (cf. Bierschenk 1988; Crehan and von Oppen 1988; Grillo 1997; Long and van der Ploeg 1989; Van Helden 2001b). This chapter steps away from these project–people approaches and looks at the internal operations of a biodiversity conservation programme in Papua New Guinea and the contradictions that are generated by the virtualising tendencies of its funding agency, the GEF. It describes how the programme’s management strategically deployed a variety of views with respect to local people and nature in their efforts to secure donor support for two integrated conservation and development projects (ICAD). In practice, however, the contradiction between GEF requirements and the realities of project implementation in rural Papua New Guinea became irreconcilable, leading to the collapse of these projects. This experience raises questions about the power of the mainstream conservation narrative and the ability of the international conservation agencies to enforce their views in the field.

Integrating Conservation and Development in Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea (PNG) consists of the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and contains the third largest remaining tropical forests on earth. It is home to some 5 million people, spread over thousands of clan groups. PNG continues to be a distinctly rural society with some 85 per cent of the population still dependent on subsistence agriculture supplemented by meagre cash incomes. While the country is rich in natural resources, Papua New Guineans are deeply disappointed by the failure of their government to provide them with the most basic infrastructure, health and education services and opportunities to earn money. The most critical societal feature of natural resource management in PNG is the constitutional recognition of the right of local clan groups to hold land and resources. It is not, therefore, surprising that PNG has a very limited system of formal protected areas. Unlike the conservation experience elsewhere, which is grounded in the alienation of land and resources from their original owners, the customary tenure system in PNG makes it difficult to use conservation legislation in a directive sense. Instead, conservation agencies need to make their work directly attractive

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to local resource owners. Since the early 1990s many PNG conservationists have come to regard the development of income-generating activities as a central part of their conservation efforts. The international experience with integrated conservation and development projects offers the theoretical framework for this approach and it became very popular in PNG in a short period of time (James 1996). ICAD approaches take a variety of shapes with different scales of operations, but they all tie the development interests of local resource owners with the conservation interests of the donor. By forging explicit linkages between environmental management and income-generating activities, the economic benefits of conservation are captured by local people, thus reducing the incentive to seek more destructive alternatives. In PNG such activities take the form of biological research, ecotourism, eco-forestry and the harvesting of various non-timber forest products. As conservation agencies try to make conservation attractive economically, they often compete with timber companies at the level of the local community. Agencies and companies both try to put together the most attractive package of resource-related benefits in an effort to sway local people to follow their lead (Filer with Sekhran 1998). The PNG Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Program (Biodiversity Program) was funded by the GEF and executed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the PNG Department of Environment and Conservation between 1993 and 1998. The programme’s main objective was to ‘expand the conservation system of Papua New Guinea to provide for biodiversity conservation’, by establishing pilot ICAD projects to develop innovative methodologies for the conservation of biodiversity. Success was defined as follows: ‘By the end of the project there will be at least two large conservation areas established … as extensions to the existing conservation system’ (UNDP 1993: 26). The first project took place in the Lak area in New Ireland Province between early 1994 and late 1996. The second project focused on the Bismarck-Ramu area in the Highlands of mainland PNG. It began in April, 1995, and continues up to the present day, although in an institutional form that is different from the way it started.

The Lak Project The approval of funding for the Biodiversity Program in 1993 led to the selection of the remote Lak area as the site of its first ICAD project. The criteria for selection were that the project area should contain high levels of biodiversity under immediate threat, that there was scope for establishing a conservation area of at least 80,000 hectares and that local communities should have ‘an acceptable means’ of collective decision

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making (UNDP 1993: 3–4). Lak met the biological criteria, the area was under serious threat as a result of ongoing forest operations, and the decision-making criterion was satisfied by the presence of a local Development Corporation. Intimations that the project team was overly optimistic in its reading of the local situation and warnings that the Lak population and its politicians were actually very much in favour of logging were ignored (Filer 1991a, 1991b). On the contrary, the choice for Lak ‘was a deliberate move to “take the fight to the enemy”: the only way to win was to compete head-on with the logging company for the favour of the local population’ (McCallum and Sekhran 1997: 52). It is important to note that the Lak project operated under very difficult circumstances. The project area covered the southern tip of New Ireland and was accessible only by dirt road or using its small airstrip. It was necessary to fly personnel and equipment into the area by chartered planes, at significant cost. Contact with the head office in Port Moresby took place by radio. At the same time, even relatively minor expenditure required permission from the UNDP offices in Port Moresby and New York. As there was no housing that the project could use, a lot of project time was spent on the construction of a base for its personnel. UN guidelines, tendering requirements and administrative procedures, and the need for multiple surveying visits, all hampered progress – to the great frustration of the staff. In the 1995 Project Progress Evaluation Report, the Chief Technical Adviser stated that ‘as much as 80 percent of the delay can be attributed to a lack of understanding, within the UNDP and OPS [Office for Project Services] administration of the unusual logistical, climatic and other difficulties that are a normal part of putting together a construction programme in an isolated part of rural PNG’ (CRC 1995b: 5–6). The gap between the perception of the project among the higher levels of the UN and the actual situation on the ground is most aptly described, perhaps, by the responsible project manager from UNOPS in New York. Upon arrival in Lak he exclaimed that he ‘could not believe the UN were implementing a project in a place where there was no flush toilet’. Soon after the start of project activities in March, 1994, it became apparent that the programme was far from welcome. Local people were benefiting from timber operations and saw conservation as a threat to this source of income. They preferred not to choose. As one person from Lak stated, ‘Really, I’m all in favour of the ICAD. … I just think we should have logging first and then worry about conservation later’ (McCallum 1996: 7). In the following years landowners actively played the timber company and the project team against each other in an attempt to maximise returns from the presence of two competing initiatives. The logging company knew how to play this game. It provided royalties to local landowners and maintained an extensive network of patronage relations with the local community and provincial government. In contrast, the initial focus of the

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Biodiversity Program lay on collecting data on local flora and fauna, on the construction of a project base and on an environmental awareness campaign. Already during the first forays in New Ireland, Filer (1991a: 20) noted that ‘too little [time] is spent with the landowners whose needs and views are critical to the outcome of the exercise’. The project team soon realised that it would have to compete with the logging company through the development of income-earning opportunities. An Alternative incomes assessment (Ellingson 1994) revealed that only sustainable timber production had any chance of competing with the logging operation. This defined the D of ICAD, and led the Biodiversity Program to develop its own sustainable timber enterprise in Lak. As time wore on, however, the project team and local people entered into a gridlock. The Biodiversity Program pushed people to cancel the existing logging agreement and choose its sustainable timber operation. In contrast, local people felt that the project should first live up to its philosophy of providing conservation-related development. By November, 1995, the Biodiversity Program concluded that the remaining forest resource was insufficient to support a sustainable forestry enterprise, which led to its withdrawal from Lak in August, 1996. During 1997 international log prices collapsed and the logging company also closed operations in Lak.

Processing the Lak Experience The Biodiversity Program failed to achieve its objective of establishing a conservation area in Lak. Yet, as Long and van der Ploeg (1989: 234) suggest, ‘a certain degree of “failure” is strategic in the reproduction of the intervention itself’, as ‘“failures” are the starting point for the elaboration of the next round of interventions’. In the middle of 1995, a process of digesting the Lak experience began. This had to prepare the ground for a withdrawal from Lak, while at the same time avoiding the conclusion that PNG land tenure, combined with the entrenchment of multinational logging companies, made biodiversity conservation in that country impossible. The question of how Lak could be best explained led to some discussion between those in favour of a relatively open analysis, with the aim of doing things better in the second ICAD site, and those who feared that this would damage their careers. Those in favour of open analysis were aided by a 1995 Project Review Mission (PRM), which suggested that ‘Lessons learned at Lak … need to be evaluated prior to the adoption of a strategy for ICAD 2 implementation’ (PRM 1995: Sect 3: 9). This led to a careful operation in damage control. The key objective of the Biodiversity Program had been ‘to establish two pilot Integrated Conservation and Development projects with the aim to develop innovative methodologies for the conservation of biodiversity’. As success

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had been defined as the establishment of ‘at least two large conservation areas’ (UNDP 1993: 26), the Lak team focused on the first half of this objective, establishing a conservation area. However, in its evaluation the team highlighted the second half of the objective. This would eventually find its most tangible result in Race for the rainforest: evaluating lessons from an integrated conservation and development ‘experiment’ in New Ireland, PNG (McCallum and Sekhran 1997). As the foreword states: ‘In the case of Lak the experimental result [of establishing a conservation area] may have been negative, but the outcome has been positive … [as] invaluable lessons have been learned’ (McCallum and Sekhran 1997: iii). While project failure was denied in the foreword of the official UNDP document, it is prominently displayed in the title of an MSc thesis written by the Lak conservation manager, ‘Analysis of an ICAD failure: lessons for conservation managers’ (McCallum 1996). While the failure to establish a conservation area was transformed into a number of useful lessons, questions remained about who and what were to blame for events. Schaffer (1984) suggests that policy documents contain a variety of ‘escape routes’, which allow project proponents to shift responsibility for failure. A well-known example is the analytical separation of policy formulation and implementation, which allows policy makers to lay the blame on project field staff, while the latter can argue the impossibility of their task due to the incompatibility of the project design and the context in which it was to be implemented. Another device, illustrated by the Lak case, is to focus on some objectives rather than on others. A third is to fall back on abstractions such as ‘administrative structures’, ‘local culture’ and ‘political systems’, which are claimed to be ‘corrupt’, ‘inefficient’ or suffering from ‘a lack of political will’. This device became important in processing the Lak experience. As the staff of the Biodiversity Program became frustrated with the lack of progress, the nature of Lak society came to be seen as one of the main reasons for the project’s failure. This is especially visible in the report of a May, 1996, strategic planning workshop (CRC 1996). The report points to local ‘motivation, attitude and cultural considerations’ as hindering the success of the project. Such considerations included low ‘Motivation to work … Men devote most of the day to customary activities and local politics and little physical labour is done’; ‘provincial politics’, as the ‘exProvincial Member was a staunch supporter of the ICAD Project and … candidates he defeated in the last provincial elections see it as their responsibility to destroy activities that he may bring to Lak’; ‘Customary jealousy’, because of which ‘the community will begin to work against’ anyone whose success leads him to ‘be seen to be exceeding the entitlement of his customary ranking’; a ‘short term’ orientation, found especially among ‘the older members of the community who desperately crave development so that they may amass as much wealth as possible in

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the short term to spend before they die’; ‘unrealistically high’ expectations, which ‘stem from the perception of development as cargo, ignorance of the modern world and a failure to appreciate the value of money’; and finally a failure to ‘accept some responsibility for the development attempt and to link it directly to themselves’, rather than see it as an entity separate from themselves (CRC 1996: 4–7). This representation of Lak people, which appears in attenuated form in Race for the rainforest, reveals a shift in the perception of local people. Initially, they were seen to be rational economic actors who would support conservation if provided with the right incentives and information. With the need to allocate blame for the project’s failure, local people came to be seen as suffering from negative customary habits. In fact, Lak people may have been much more rational economically than the project staff liked to believe. While the Biodiversity Program had $US 5 million to spend on consultants, studies, transport and the construction of a base, it did not have any funds to offer local people tangible benefits (PRM 1998: 11–12). Logging, in contrast, provided the Lak communities with some Kina 400,000 (approximately $US 500,000) in royalties between 1991 and 1995 (McCallum 1996: 38).

The Bismarck-Ramu Project By early 1995 the Biodiversity Program selected the Bismarck-Ramu area on mainland PNG as the site of its second ICAD project. This area was selected for the same reasons as Lak, with one key difference. Based on its experience in Lak, the Biodiversity Program concluded that ‘scarce conservation monies should not be invested in areas under severe threat’ (McCallum and Sekhran 1997: 51). The absence of large-scale resource development initiatives was crucial in the choice of this area. The Bismarck-Ramu area differed in many ways from the Lak area, but it was equally remote. This area covers the largest possible altitude interval in Papua New Guinea, from 60 metres above sea level at the Ramu River to 4,500 metres at the peak of Mount Wilhelm, and it contains most major Papua New Guinea vegetation zones. The area has no road access and contains three grassy airstrips. Most transport takes place on foot, requiring about five days of walking to make the descent from the village of Kol in the Jimi Valley to the Ramu River. The first patrols in the area followed the ICAD philosophy, stating that they would help people achieve development in return for conservation. People responded with enthusiasm, but at the same time tried to get as much money from of the project patrol teams as they could. A subsequent biodiversity survey led to blackmail, threats and serious conflicts (Van Helden 2001a). By late 1995 the programme and its two ICAD projects were

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in crisis: the Biodiversity Program was terminating operations in Lak and failing to establish good relations with local landowners in its second site. At this point a community development trainer joined the Biodiversity Program. This buoyant New Yorker with extensive community development experience used Paolo Freire’s (1970) radical perspective on social work to provide an alternative explanation for the failure in Lak and a rationale for a modified approach for the Bismarck-Ramu project. In his action-based model of community development, local people with the help of trained facilitators were to take stock of their situation by going through a series of training sessions designed to identify and tackle the issues that affected them. From his perspective, the programme’s problems were not caused by local people, but by the manner in which the programme implemented its projects. Projects in general, he argued, create unrealistic expectations and reduce people’s motivation to generate change for themselves. And indeed there were indications from both Lak and the Bismarck-Ramu area that the project had stifled local initiatives (McCallum and Sekhran 1997; Van Helden 2001b). In addition, the trainer argued that conservation projects could never beat logging or mining companies in terms of economic incentives and that local people should undertake conservation because they see it as important in its own right, not because they are paid to do so. Funds could be used to help people organise themselves, but not to generate development, to purchase participation or to sweeten the cost of conservation. The trick for the project was to identify communities with an interest in conservation and help them achieve it through a process of community empowerment. These views entailed a rejection of central aspects of the ICAD concept, and echo arguments that development and conservation are processes by which wealthier nations extend their power over developing countries (Guha 1989; Shiva et al. 1991). In this view, the ICAD model presents a vision of global degradation and environmental problems that blames poor nations and authorises Western interest groups to make decisions about poor countries’ resources. Typically these decisions call for increasing poor countries’ integration in the world economy and their subordination to a global bureaucracy dominated by Western interests. These critics argue, however, that the integration of local communities into world markets is the fundamental conservation problem, because it induces people to adopt unsustainable practices. Development assistance plays a central role in this process and ‘can be likened to the AIDS virus: a pathogen that destroys the ability of the host country to resist the invasion of a foreign socio-economic system’ (Schücking and Anderson 1991: 21). Those advocating this view tend to emphasise the ecological wisdom of indigenous people and the need for communities to uncouple from the world system. In advocating these views, the community trainer undercut the Biodiversity Program’s logic, based as it was on the idea that an integration of local communities into world markets through the judicious

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use of economic incentives may lead to the conservation of biodiversity. In emphasising the need for communities to make their own decisions, he turned the project’s ICAD philosophy on its head, while at the same time gaining access to the resources and legitimacy accorded by the UNDP and the GEF. His analysis was, however, compelling, as it provided an explanation for the Lak failure and an alternative approach in the Bismarck-Ramu area. It would take three years before the contradictions between this new community-based philosophy of the Bismarck-Ramu project and the orientation of its donors became apparent.

Creating Space for Change These new ideas led Bismarck-Ramu project staff to seek much more autonomy than the Lak field staff had enjoyed. The first step was to do away with the blueprint for conservation-area establishment, which the framework plan for the Bismarck-Ramu project (CRC 1995a) said would be a national park declared by April, 1998. The team decided that the type of management regime and the area involved would depend on the responses of local people. This meant a separate social feasibility study to assess the ‘conservation disposition’ of local communities, running concurrently with community work (Van Helden 1998a). This was a major shift in thinking, as it rejected the idea that biological experts should define the nature of conservation (e.g., Janzen 1986), instead giving this authority to local communities, the community facilitators and social scientists. This new vision was reflected in the changed composition of the project team, as a number of social scientists and community trainers replaced the biologists and conservation managers who had run the Lak project. The field staff’s second step was to redesign the position of the Bismarck-Ramu project within the Biodiversity Program. The Lak project had suffered from poor communications, difficult logistics and an awesome administrative burden involving several UN agencies. To avoid this in the Bismarck-Ramu project, it was decided that daily fieldwork would be done by an independent NGO under a single annual contract with the UNDP specifying the types of field activities to be undertaken. The NGO could hire and fire people, plan and budget on its own. A suitable NGO partner was found in Madang, on the north coast of PNG, and the project team recruited and trained a large number of Papua New Guinean community facilitators. The premise of the new ‘community entry approach’ was that local people can only make a change for the better if they organise themselves around issues that are important to them. This shifted the focus of the Bismarck-Ramu project away from its initial conservation-fordevelopment agenda towards the question of what communities could do

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for themselves. To encourage self-reliance and to avoid raising unrealistic expectations, the community facilitators were to avoid unnecessary exhibitions of wealth (helicopter transport gave way to walking from village to village); they were to stay, eat and work with local people; they were to state clearly that they were there not to bring money or services, but ‘only to talk’. This approach gradually evolved into a series of stages in which a variety of participatory rural appraisal techniques played a key role. The first patrol would build trust and emphasise self-reliance. The second would discuss recent changes in the environment and people’s resource use. The third would help people analyse and rank their needs and wants. The fourth and later patrols would focus on how people could plan and mobilise to address their local problems. Not surprisingly, the most urgent problems people identified had to do with the lack of health and education services, infrastructure and market access. As time wore on a number of communities became tired of the community facilitators, insisting that they should do or give something to demonstrate that they were serious about working together with them. The community facilitators replied that they were not there to bring anything and that people could always ask them to leave. Some communities did so, while the field staff decided to cease work in part of the area following a raft of problems associated with its biodiversity survey and the 1997 elections (Van Helden 2001a). Two groups of landowners on the Ramu River, however, became key partners to the project, eventually leading to the establishment of two informal Wildlife Management Areas (Van Helden 2001b). The shift from business-oriented development in Lak to community development in the Bismarck-Ramu area brought new language with it. The old emphasis had been on the ‘exchange’ of conservation and development, ‘early rewards packages’, determining the ‘incentive price for labour’ and ‘the transfer of skills’, in order to compete with the logging company in material terms. In contrast, the new community entry approach was framed in terms of establishing a ‘dialogue’ and ‘building trust’ with local communities in order to generate the ‘self-confidence’ needed for ‘empowerment’. It also triggered a shift in the underlying perception of local people. The Lak project, as well as the initial Bismarck-Ramu patrols, had been guided by the assumption that local people act on economic incentives. The community entry approach, however, was based on the idea that traditional communities had been characterised by cohesion, self-reliance and an essentially conservationist ethic before they became affected by globalising forces and lost their ability to make change, solve conflicts and manage nature. It became the task of the community facilitators of the Bismarck-Ramu project to lead these communities back to this original state, by emphasising the need for people to fend for themselves and by

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imbuing them with respect for the traditional features of their communities (Lalley 1999). This approach reflects the stereotypical views of local people as the ‘ecologically benign other’ and the ‘fallen angel’ described by Berkes (1999), Brosius (1999) and Neumann (1995). Such views allowed project staff to label communities that were not prepared to accept the notion of self-reliance as too far fallen to be saved: in the words of the community development trainer, ‘they didn’t get it’ (see Wood 1985). These views also justified excluding such communities from further project work. In addition to the justifications that these beliefs afforded staff confronted with recalcitrant villagers, they also gave the community facilitators a sense of pride and purpose in their interactions with local people, which would positively influence their work.

Seeking Second Phase Funding As the Biodiversity Program was to end in April, 1998, work on a proposal for a second phase of the Bismarck-Ramu project began in 1997. It became clear, however, that the chances of getting funding for a stand-alone project were slim. There were several reasons for this. One was that the GEF requires co-financing by other organisations. The project team could argue that the Papua New Guinea Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) was its main co-financing partner, but in fact for years the DEC had been withholding funding to the Biodiversity Program. Another was that the GEF only funds the ‘incremental costs’ associated with reducing the adverse effects of environmentally harmful ‘baseline’ activities, and not these activities themselves. The Bismarck-Ramu area contained no harmful operations that could be modified to become more sustainable. Thirdly, the GEF would only fund conservation projects that ‘include an incentive-based design’ to ensure long-term sustainability (UNDP n.d.: 5). The answer that a second phase of the project would make it economically advantageous for local communities to pursue conservation was in line with the dominant ICAD philosophy, but it clashed with the community entry approach that denounced the use of economic incentives. Finally, the GEF would only fund initiatives in areas under threat, while the Bismarck-Ramu area had been selected precisely because of its low levels of threat. In May, 1998, the chief technical adviser of the Biodiversity Program in Port Moresby and the UNDP office in New York concluded that the way to comply with these regulations was to have a second Bismarck-Ramu application to the GEF cover the whole 2,500 square kilometre Ramu River basin while simultaneously including a number of other partners. The crux of the resulting proposal was close collaboration with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which aimed to develop a sustainable timber

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operation, in order to demonstrate that timber concessions in PNG could be profitable, socially beneficial and ecologically sustainable if managed properly. In pursuit of this, TNC vied for a logging concession in the Josephstaal area in the north of Madang Province. TNC’s tender for the Josephstaal concession was joined to the establishment of the two Ramu River Wildlife Management Areas that had come from the Bismarck-Ramu project, to produce the idea of a ‘biosphere reserve’. In this plan, the Bismarck-Ramu area would constitute the core reserve, while the area to the north, including the Josephstaal concession, would serve as a buffer zone. These would be surrounded by an Outer Transition Zone that would cover the full Ramu River watershed and involve a number of commercial partners, such as a nickel-cobalt mine, a number of oil ventures and an oil palm plantation. This was a brilliant strategy for meeting the requirements of the GEF. In TNC, the Bismarck-Ramu project acquired a trustworthy partner with whom co-financing could be arranged. In addition, it could present its conservation activities as ‘incremental’ to TNC forestry operations and other industrial ventures operating in the Outer Transition Zone. Finally, this strategy would ‘make conservation pay’, in line with the dominant ICAD philosophy. The full proposal budget was $US 23.6 million for eight years, of which $US 5.3 million was to be funded by the GEF. Success depended on two things: TNC would have to secure the Josephstaal concession; the formal project philosophy, reflecting the orientations of staff in Port Moresby, Washington and New York, had to be meshed with the community entry approach of the Bismarck-Ramu field staff.

Constructing a Threatened Environment The process of developing a proposal for the GEF involves preparing a series of documents that together present the project as a unique and highly promising response to severe environmental threats. As 1998 progressed, the Biodiversity Program drew up a number of such documents. The first appeared in January and was an independent evaluation of the Bismarck-Ramu project (PRM 1998). The evaluation was generally positive about progress made, but noted that while the project had intended to develop a conservation area, it was too early to know whether such an area would indeed be established. The second document was a report, Race for the rainforest II (Ellis 1998), which was aimed at public consumption and which partially addressed the problem of the absence of a formal conservation area. It appeared in the middle of 1998 and gave an overview of the community facilitators’ progress in the Bismarck-Ramu area, explaining in detail how the community entry approach was followed by a conservation strategy. Most

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importantly, it described the imminent establishment of two Wildlife Management Areas on the Ramu River, suggesting that the achievements to date showed that the community entry approach could successfully lead to conservation without material incentives. The third document was an application to the GEF Project Development Facility (PDF) for funding to design a joint submission to the GEF. While the application was being processed in New York, work in Port Moresby commenced on drawing up a detailed project brief for a six- to eight-year project. With most of the administrative issues more or less settled through the co-operation with TNC, the lack of a substantial and identifiable threat in the Ramu valley became an obstacle to the second-phase submission. GEF regulations focused funding on projects that ‘reduce or eliminate an imminent threat’ to biodiversity of global importance (UNDP n.d.: 5). This led to the need to portray nature in the Ramu valley as being under serious pressure, which meant ignoring the fact that the area had been selected in the first place because there was little threat (DEC 1995: 28). A draft of the project brief listed a number of threats to the local environment, mentioning the risk of logging, mining and other industrial developments in the area. One section specifically focused on local people and their practices. This section is a caricature of local practices in the Bismarck-Ramu area. It included mention of ‘Forest loss due to aggressive swidden horticultural practice, burning unnecessarily large areas for gardens, unsustainable harvesting of fuelwood, housing and garden fencing material, and hunting practices that see over one hectare of forest cut down to capture one [tree kangaroo]’; ‘Degradation of habitat in montane areas due to increasing soil erosion resulting from shortening fallow periods and cultivation of steeper and higher slopes’; ‘Diminishing populations of species such as birds of paradise and crocodiles, both hunted for cash sale of skins, with their eggs collected for food. Birds of paradise are also trapped for live sale. Mammals such as the nearly extinct black-spotted cuscus (Spilocucus rufoniger) hunted for meat’; and ‘Overharvesting of wild plants for medicinal use and as food’ (CRC 1998: 8). Later in the section there is reference to ‘aggressive forest clearance’ and ‘hunting with firearms’ (1998: 17). For those familiar with the area there is no good reason to believe that these negative descriptions are warranted. For instance, the amount of work required to cut large trees by hand in order to clear land for food gardens means that ‘aggressive’ horticultural practices are out of the question. Similarly, there is no indication that wood collection is unsustainable, as most firewood and fencing materials come from trees that are cut in order to clear land for gardens. The statement that people will cut a hectare of forest to capture a tree kangaroo refers to an observation by a patrol team in April, 1995. When the patrol saw a spotted tree kangaroo in a tree, eight local men cut down ‘almost a hectare of small and medium-sized trees in a vain attempt to isolate and thus capture the

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animal’ (Filer et al. 1995: 31). They may have been showing off to the patrol, but the draft brief represents this event as if razing forest is part of daily hunting practice. Likewise, there are no records of crocodile or bird of paradise eggs being eaten in the Ramu area: the main wild eggs eaten are those of megapodes. The main birds caught for live sale are pigeons and cassowaries, and declining demand for feathers in the Highlands means that very few birds of paradise are hunted for their skins (Van Helden 1998a: 188–90). There is no evidence of the ‘overharvesting’ of wild plants for medicinal use and as food, and the high cost of cartridges means that hunting with firearms is limited to wild pigs and cassowaries for special occasions (1998a: 183–4). The PDF application did not use the same strong language as the draft, instead portraying environmental threats that are limited but that cannot be ignored in the longer run. The document thus balances between the need to sketch an endangered environment in order to secure GEF funding and the wish to do so without too much exaggeration. So, it points to the dangers of logging, thought it observes that a large part of the area is at little risk due to its steep slopes. It is less condemning of local people than the draft brief, but does state that immigrant communities colonising the Bismarck-Fall are ‘engaging in farming methods that are poorly adapted to agro-ecosystems at lower elevations’ (UNDP 1998: 4). This is contradicted by the social feasibility study, which pointed to the remarkable ability of immigrants to adjust to the local ecology (Van Helden 1998a: 165). The PDF application regards local people’s ‘lack of understanding’ as the main threat to local natural resources, as landowners in the Ramu valley lack the ‘basic capacity’ and ‘basic awareness’ (UNDP 1998: 4) to manage their resources sustainably. The application also argues that ‘without financing mechanisms such as community trust funds, microcredit facilities etc. even communities that have interest in pursuing conservation and sustainable use options cannot do so’ (1998: 5). This view of local people marked a fundamental difference with the views of the Bismarck-Ramu field staff, who saw communities as essentially conservation-inclined and who also argued for conservation without financial incentives. While the PDF application generally moderates the arguments made in the draft brief, it contains an important amplification, for it stresses neoMalthusian arguments about the threat posed by an expanding population (e.g., Ehrlich 1968; Hardin 1968). It does so when it asserts that ‘parts of the project area are exhibiting population growth rates of 3.5–4 percent due to such factors as in-migration and a decline in traditional family planning practices’ (UNDP 1998: 5). The source of this figure is uncertain and its interpretation is contentious. One possible source is Stanhope (1970, in Van Helden 1998a: 136), who reported growth rates of some 3.5 per cent in a community in an adjacent area early in the 1970s. More likely it is an

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erroneous interpretation of a TNC project document (TNC 1998: 10) that argues that ‘the situation in general in PNG is one of accelerating population growth. Birth rates average in the 3.5–4% range per year’. Whatever the source, it gives the wrong impression because it refers to birth rates while ignoring the high infant mortality rates for the area. The figure for overall population growth is less alarming: figures for the village of Sepu suggest a growth rate of 1.6 per cent per year. Moreover, the low population densities in the area, 0.5–2 persons per square kilometre, suggest that it would take a very long time to increase population pressure significantly (Van Helden 1998a: 126–9). This invocation of the neoMalthusian argument is intriguing as it occurred even though information pointing to low population pressures was available to the project as part of its own selection process (DEC 1995), in publications by its staff (McCallum and Sekhran 1997; Sekhran 1996) and in the findings of the social feasibility study (Van Helden 1998a, 1998b). Without a listing of threats and an upbeat presentation of achievements so far, however, there would be no case for support by the GEF. When asked, in March, 2000, about the obvious discrepancies between the situation in the Bismarck-Ramu area, the findings of the social feasibility study and the presentation of results in Race for the rainforest II, the PNG conservation manager of the project simply shrugged his shoulders and suggested that this equating of good intentions with actual results was logical, as ‘the report was written for money to come’ (John Chitoa, pers. comm.). Filer (2000: 20) suggests that the social feasibility study findings were ignored because the study ‘failed to place a sufficiently positive spin on the outcomes of the community development process’ and that Race for the rainforest II was commissioned to make ‘up for this deficiency’. In a critical analysis of conservation projects in PNG contained in the same paper, Filer concludes that many conservation proponents simply do not want to know what rural PNG is like, as this would force them to abandon some of their most cherished assumptions. In making this judgement Filer does not mention the pressures affecting project development personnel. Even if field conservationists wanted to revise their assumptions, it is unlikely that their funding agencies would allow them to do so. As has been described, such assumptions tend to be embedded in the eligibility guidelines of international conservation agencies. The project developers wanted to write a project proposal, comply with the expectations of the donor and so secure funding; they were not there to challenge the constellation of beliefs that underpins the international conservation establishment or to present a nuanced picture of the Bismarck-Ramu area. They all knew that once funding is provided it is possible to adapt project implementation to fit the visions of the field staff and local communities. While the accommodation to GEF guidelines was being carried out, the Bismarck-Ramu field staff in Madang became increasingly uneasy with

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the whole plan. Although collaboration with TNC would meet the administrative requirements of the GEF, it would generate a number of contradictions in the field. The Bismarck-Ramu team did not see how they could explain to local landowners that they were supposed to conserve nature on the basis of strongly held convictions, while 50 kilometres further downstream the same project was paying people to cut their forest in a sustainable manner. Entering into an agreement with TNC would inevitably lead to the end of the non-economic Bismarck-Ramu approach to conservation. Thus, the need to comply with GEF requirements led to an inconsistent project philosophy, which had to embrace both the noneconomic community entry approach of Bismarck-Ramu field staff and the ICAD-driven sustainable forestry venture. While UNDP briefs speak of the need for a ‘strategic logic’ to structure a successful proposal to the GEF, the designers did not manage to solve these internal contradictions. The most common response was to build an ever-increasing physical and institutional distance between the Bismarck-Ramu field staff and TNC. Thus, while the second phase of the project was to be a joint submission and co-operative endeavour, the idea for a joint office was scuttled and the Bismarck-Ramu field staff refused to have community facilitators working for TNC, who must have seen the situation as most confusing. At the end of 1998 the Biodiversity Program in Port Moresby closed down. At this point, the twelve community facilitators, the DEC conservation manager, the expatriate community trainer and a small number of support staff in Madang took on the name of ‘Bismarck-Ramu Group’ (BRG), reflecting its ad hoc nature. The BRG had no legal status other than that of an unincorporated association; it had no board, formal hierarchy, decision-making procedures or financial administration. Financially the group depended on the UNDP country office until the new GEF proposal was approved. This further increased the distance between Bismarck-Ramu field staff and those responsible for the development of the GEF proposal in Port Moresby, New York and Washington. During this period a certain radicalisation took place, leading the community facilitators to oppose all large resource projects – such as a local nickelcobalt mine, oil palm plantations and logging operations in the BismarckRamu area – and thus also to oppose co-operation with such ventures in the context of an ICAD project. The consequence was that in April, 1999, the BRG decided to break away from the joint proposal altogether, forcing the UNDP and TNC to terminate work on the GEF submission. The UNDP country office agreed to continue funding the group until the BRG managed to solicit new funds. In early 2001 a funding proposal was accepted by a combination of German and Dutch donors enabling the BRG to continue its work in the Bismarck-Ramu area up to the present.

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Conclusion In both the Lak and the Bismarck-Ramu project the field staff of the Biodiversity Program tried to engage local communities in its conservation efforts. Presenting it as a dyadic process consisting of a project that intervenes and local people who are intervened upon is, however, a simplification, as these encounters were seldom two-sided. In practice, both local communities and project staff are made up of a number of factions and supported by a range of actors and narratives. This chapter has looked at the fissures and factions within the Biodiversity Program and the sources of contention that resulted from the virtualising tendencies of its donors. The Lak project was, on the one hand, dominated by the interests of the UNDP hierarchy, which emphasised aspects of administration, proper procedure and accountability. On the other hand, the field staff of the Biodiversity Program was trying to establish a presence in Lak as quickly as possible in order to out-compete a local logging operation. This became especially apparent with regard to the construction of the Lak base. The second issue in the design of the Lak project was that while it ostentatiously emphasised the need for development to secure conservation, it made no budgetary provisions for the development of income-generating activities. When the project failed, exactly because most Lak people preferred the incomes provided by the loggers over the talk provided by the conservationists, the head office in Port Moresby blamed it on the cultural and customary habits of the Lak population. The development of a second phase of the Bismarck-Ramu project was characterised by two different fissures. Firstly, the GEF emphasised the use of economic incentives to secure conservation, while the Bismarck-Ramu field staff opposed the use of such incentives. As described, a concerted but ultimately unsuccessful effort was made to bridge the gap by drawing the TNC timber concession into the fray. The second set of fissures emerged around the question of whether to work in an area under threat or not. In the case of the Bismarck-Ramu project the area was initially selected because of its low levels of threat, a classification which had to be turned around in the preparation of the second-phase proposal, again forcing the head office to draw up a disparaging view of local people. These disputes reflect essentially opposing visions of nature, local people and the business of conservation. Dominant GEF discourse emphasises the vulnerability of nature as a result of the unfortunate practices of fast-growing local populations, suggesting that long-term conservation can only result from the use of economic incentives. In contrast, the Bismarck-Ramu field staff took a view of local people as being natural conservationists, who are likely to remain so once they are ‘led back to their traditional culture’. These visions of local people not only shape planned interventions, but also determine who is in charge. Where

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people are held to be destructive and ignorant they need to be excluded from nature; where they are held to be caring they need to be given the autonomy and self-confidence to pursue their conservationist practices. The first view leads to a policy that reduces the authority of local people over nature, transferring the management of resources to more educated professionals acting in the name of the public good; the second view legitimises an opposing perspective that argues that communities are best equipped to look after nature. These opposing explanations are part and parcel of the history of the Biodiversity Program. In the end, however, those who provide funds call the shots. As long as funding was available, the Biodiversity Program in Port Moresby allowed the field staff of the Bismarck-Ramu project to pursue their community entry approach. As the need for second-phase funding approached, the Port Moresby office started revoking some of the most basic tenets on which the project strategy had so far been based. Initially the area had been selected because of its low levels of threat, while during the life of the project the use of economic incentives had been denounced, and local people were viewed as conservationists at heart. Now, with an eye on the second phase, the need for economic incentives was reintroduced and the area was portrayed as being under threat as a result of the practices of ignorant local people. This was unacceptable to the field staff of the Bismarck-Ramu project, who decided to snub the GEF and proceed alone. This experience raises questions about the power of the mainstream conservation narrative and the ability of international conservation agencies to enforce their views in the field. It also shows how, in focusing on meeting rather than challenging the GEF requirements, senior project staff wittingly helped to reproduce the simplistic but dominant international narrative about local people and the manner in which they threaten nature.

Acknowledgement This chapter was written during a short research fellowship at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague during the autumn of 2005. The author would like to thank Jan Kees van Donge for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

References Berkes, Fikret. 1999. Sacred ecology: traditional ecological knowledge and resource management. London: Taylor and Francis. Bierschenk, Thomas. 1988. Development projects as arenas for negotiation for strategic groups. Sociologia Ruralis 28: 147–60.

The Case for Conservation in Papua New Guinea | 173 Brosius, Peter. 1999. Analyses and interventions: anthropological engagements with environmentalism. Current Anthropology 40: 277–309. Chapin, Mac. 2004. A challenge to conservationists. World Watch Magazine 17 (6): 17–31. CRC. 1995a. Bismarck-Ramu integrated conservation and development project: framework plan 1995–1999. Waigani: Papua New Guinea Biodiversity Conservation and Management Programme, DEC/ UNOPS-PNG/93/G31. ———. 1995b. Project performance evaluation report, summary. Waigani: DEC/UNDP. ———. 1996. Strategic planning workshop. Waigani: DEC/UNDP. MS. ———. 1998. Project brief for the Ramu catchment biosphere reserve initiative. MS. Crehan, Kate and Achim von Oppen. 1988. Understandings of development: an arena of struggle. Sociologia Ruralis 28: 113–45. Cronon, William. 1992. A place for stories: nature, history, and narrative. The Journal of American History 78: 1347–67. ———. 1995. The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature. In Uncommon ground: toward reinventing nature, ed. W. Cronon, pp. 69–90. New York: W. W. Norton. DEC. 1995. Prioritization of conservation areas: biological criteria. A working paper for discussion. Waigani: Conservation Resource Centre and the Resource Inventory Branch, Department of Environment and Conservation. MS. Ehrlich, Paul R. 1968. The population bomb. New York: Ballantine Books. Ellingson, Dennis (ed.) 1994. Alternative income opportunities – Weittin Valley ICAD, final report. Waigani: PNG Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Programme, DEC/UNDP, OPS-PNG/93/G31. MS. Ellis, Julie-Ann. 1998. Race for the rainforest II: applying lessons learned from Lak to the Bismarck-Ramu integrated conservation and development initiative in Papua New Guinea. Waigani: PNG Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Programme, DEC/UNDP, OPS-PNG/93/G31. Escobar, Arturo. 1996. Constructing nature. In Liberation ecologies: environment, development and social movements, ed. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, pp. 46–68. London: Routledge. Fairhead, James and Melissa Leach. 1997. Webs of power and the construction of environmental policy problems: forest loss in Guinea. In Discourses of development: anthropological perspectives, ed. Ralph Grillo and Roderick Stirrat, pp 35–58. Oxford: Berg. Filer, Colin. 1991a. Two shots in the dark: the first year of the Task Force on Environmental Planning in Priority Forest Areas. Research in Melanesia 15 (1): 1–48. ———. 1991b. Fieldwork report: logging or conservation in southern New Ireland. Research in Melanesia 15 (1): 66–75.

174 | Flip van Helden ———. 2000. How can Western conservationists talk to Melanesian landowners about indigenous knowledge? (Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Project, working paper 27) Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. ——— with Nikhil Sekhran. 1998. Loggers, donors and resource owners: policy that works for forests and people. London: International Institute for Environment and Development; Waigani: National Research Institute. ———, Michael Hedemark, August Kituai, Saem Majnep and Chris Unkau 1995. Ramu Conservation Area April 1995, site visit. Patrol report. Waigani: PNG Department of Environment and Conservation. MS. Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Grillo, Ralph. 1997. Discourses of development: the view from anthropology. In Discourses of development: anthropological perspectives, ed. R. Grillo and Roderick Stirrat, pp. 1–34. Oxford: Berg. Guha, Ramachandra. 1989. Radical American environmentalism and wilderness preservation: a Third World critique. Environmental Ethics 11: 71–83. Hardin, Garret. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: 1243–8. Hoben, Allan. 1995. Paradigms and politics: the cultural construction of environmental policy in Ethiopia. World Development 23: 1007–21. James, Jamie. 1996. Proceedings of the 1995 meeting of integrated conservation and development projects in Papua New Guinea. Waigani: Papua New Guinea Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Programme, DEC/UNDP, OPS-PNG/93/G31. Janzen, Daniel H. 1986. The future of tropical ecology. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 17: 305–24. Lalley, Barry. 1999. Guide for CD team members in the Bismarck-Ramu ICAD. Waigani: DEC/UNDP, OPS-Papua New Guinea/93/G31. MS. Leach, Melissa and Robin Mearns. 1996. Challenging received wisdom in Africa. In The lie of the land, ed. M. Leach and R. Mearns, pp. 1–33. London: The International African Institute. Long, Norman and Jan Douwe van der Ploeg. 1989. Demythologizing planned intervention: an actor perspective. Sociologia Ruralis 29: 226–49. McCallum, Rob D. 1996. Analysis of an ICAD failure: lessons for conservation managers. MSc thesis. Aberystwyth: University of Wales. ——— and Nikhil Sekhran. 1997. Race for the rainforest: evaluating lessons from an integrated conservation and development ‘experiment’ in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Waigani: PNG Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Programme, DEC/UNDP, OPS-PNG/93/G31. Neumann, Roderick P. 1995. Ways of seeing Africa: colonial recasting of African society and landscape in Serengeti National Park. Ecumene 2: 149–69. PRM 1995. Report of the Project Review Mission, June 18–July 5, 1995. Waigani: Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Program, PNG/93/G31. MS.

The Case for Conservation in Papua New Guinea | 175 ———. 1998. Report of the Final Project Evaluation Mission, January 24–February 7, 1998. Waigani: Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Program PNG/93/G31. MS. Schaffer, Bernard. 1984. Towards responsibility: public policy in concept and practice. In Room for manoeuvre: an exploration of public policy in agriculture and rural development, ed. Edward J. Clay and B. Schaffer, pp. 142–90. London: Heinemann. Schücking, Heffa and Patrick Anderson. 1991. Voices unheard and unheeded. In Biodiversity: social and ecological perspectives, ed. Vandana Shiva, P. Anderson, H. Schücking, Andrew Gray, Larry Lohmann and David Cooper, pp. 13–42. London: Zed Books, World Rainforest Movement. Sekhran, Nikhil. 1996. Pursuing the ‘D’ in integrated conservation and development projects (ICADPs): issues and challenges for Papua New Guinea. (Rural Development Forestry Network Paper 19b.) London: Overseas Development Institute. Shiva, Vandana, Patrick Anderson, Heffa Schücking, Andrew Gray, Larry Lohmann and David Cooper. 1991. Biodiversity: social and ecological perspectives. London: Zed Books, World Rainforest Movement. Stanhope, John M. 1970. Patterns of fertility and mortality in rural New Guinea. In People and planning in Papua and New Guinea, ed. D. J. van de Kaa, J. M. Stanhope, T. S. Epstein, N. H. Fry and C. L. Beltz (Research bulletin 34), pp. 24–41. Canberra and Boroko: New Guinea Research Unit, Australian National University. Stott, Phillip. 1999. Tropical rain forest: a political ecology of hegemonic myth making. (Studies on the Environment 15.) London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Tiffen, Mary, Michael Mortimore and Francis Gichuki. 1994. More people, less erosion: environmental recovery in Kenya. Chichester: Wiley and Sons. TNC. 1998. Josephstaal integrated conservation and sustainable forestry project, conservation plan. The Nature Conservancy Asia/Pacific Region. MS. UNDP. 1993. Project of the Government of Papua New Guinea, Project Document. Port Moresby: PNG Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Programme PNG/93/G31/A/IG/31. ———. 1998. Proposal for a PDF Block B grant to the Global Environment Facility, with regard to ‘The establishment and management of a biosphere reserve in the Ramu River catchment’. MS. ———. n.d. Eligibility criteria for GEF biodiversity projects. Unpublished briefing document. Van Helden, Flip W. 1998a. Between cash and conviction: the social context of the Bismarck-Ramu integrated conservation and development project. (Monograph 33.) Waigani: National Research Institute.

176 | Flip van Helden ———. 1998b. Results of the social feasibility study for the Bismarck-Ramu integrated conservation and development project. Waigani: Papua New Guinea Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Programme, DEC/UNDP, OPS-PNG/93/G31. MS. ———. 2001a. ‘Good Business’ and the collection of ‘wild lives’: community, conservation and conflict in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. The Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology 2: 21–42. ———. 2001b. Through the thicket: disentangling the social dynamics of an integrated conservation and development project on mainland Papua New Guinea. PhD Thesis, Rural Development Sociology Group. Wageningen, Netherlands: Wageningen University. Wood, Geof. 1985. The politics of development policy labelling. Development and Change 16: 347–73. Zerner, Charles. 1996. Telling stories about biodiversity. In Valuing local knowledge: indigenous people and intellectual property, ed. Stephen B. Brush and Doreen Stabinsky, pp. 68–101. Washington DC: Island Press.

Conclusion: Can the World Be Micromanaged? JOSIAH MCC. HEYMAN

Reading these fine contributions, and placing them in the context of James Carrier’s provocative concept of virtualism (Carrier and Miller 1998), leads me to offer two generalisations. There is, first, a pattern in which power elites attempt to micromanage the world. Often, maybe always, they fail in their overt mission, but with important effects nonetheless. Second, the organisations required to conduct these immensely complicated operations across the globe have given rise to a worldwide occupational group of project operatives and functionaries, a social grouping that merits attention. While these generalisations are grounded in case material, it is only recently (with some exceptions) that anthropologists and other fieldwork-based scholars have turned from studying communities to studying organisations. The source material is thus suggestive, but incomplete. Hence, my arguments aim more to open up lines of inquiry than to posit final and definite findings, and to outline domains of variation as well as broad commonalities. Perhaps, as Claude Lévi-Strauss said about totems, they will prove ‘good to think’. These patterns can be seen in three sets of cases, usually considered separately, but all broadly involving instrumental power projects extending across the world system.1 These sets include global environmental programmes (the chapters in this book, as well as Gezon 2006; West 2006, and so forth), development projects (e.g., Long and Long 1992; Mosse 2005; Wedel 1998), and dominant-power wars in peripheral

1. My conceptualisation of power (especially in organised projects) as involving an interactive network of fields and actors, not subject to automatic domination from the centre but nevertheless usually unequal, draws on Monique Nuijten’s (2005) smart conceptualisation of ‘force fields’ and ‘organising processes’ in the study of power.

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and semi-peripheral settings (Chandrasekaran 2006; Ricks 2006; Sheehan 1988). It is worth underscoring the parallels in phenomena that are usually considered separately. One important parallel is the effort by central officers to micromanage field employees and target populations. By ‘micromanaging’ I mean two things. One is the attempt to reshape people and environments across a distance, whether that be a social or physical distance, or both. Of course a variety of power projects involve action at a distance. We can think of James Scott’s (1998) account of modernist projects, which aimed at such actions by radically simplifying social and physical reality. Micromanaging differs insofar as it aims to work with, manipulate and alter very fine details of a particular situation towards a narrow driving aim; indeed, the notion of flexible and adaptive programming that is so widespread in the contemporary world (whether in development projects, environmental programmes or counterinsurgency operations) is precisely a reaction to the flaws of modernist radical simplification (see Li 2005). Micromanagement’s crucial feature is linking a central driving vision with complex performances in a field setting. Because of this, it requires a chain of organised actors and activities, from head offices through central field offices to specific field sites. Each link in this chain constitutes a particular organisational setting that operates in a distinctive environmental, social and political context. It is helpful, then, to think of the case studies in this book as different moments of inquiry into the process of micromanagement.2 On the one hand, we have a vision that the world can be microscopically managed. Argyrou’s chapter, for example, addresses very high-level changes in world view concerning the relationship between humanity and nature, but within those changes lurk the related confidence in certain scientific circles that nature can be modelled and understood in its full, complex detail, unquestionably an aspect of virtualism. Onneweer’s chapter, in turn, narrates an attempt to put into practice a supposedly science-based vision; we note, however, that often it was compromised or went awry (vis-à-vis the virtual model) through both human and environmental processes in the field. Rettie’s chapter, likewise, involves a practical virtualism, a complex model of park visitors and forms of data collection to track them. In some ways the model was quite informative, but there was not just a question of information but also the goal of managing the world through detailed information, the essence of micromanagement. In

2. The point of identifying ‘moments’ of inquiry into a complex arrangement is to bring into view issues and phenomena about which we should pose questions, rather than positing a fixed structure for which there are known analyses.

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this respect, the virtual model encountered limits: a large group of visitors did not adhere to the valued ideals of park management and were not particularly amenable to influence in those directions. We can thus identify several moments in the creation and deployment of a knowledge system in micromanagement: the basic idea that such perfect knowledge is possible, and the particular practices of highly detailed knowledge systems at central offices, field sites and organisational offices in between.3 Clearly, micromanagement can be studied through its manifestations in organised knowledge systems. But do such representations effectively encompass reality? Orrin Pilkey (Pilkey and Pilkey-Jarvis 2007), a distinguished coastal geologist, has expressed strong scepticism that such micromanagerial modelling actually works, at least in his area of environmental scientific expertise; for example, he points out that the models are filled with guessed-at quantitative values and fudgefactors designed to make them work, and that they are rarely fully ‘groundtruthed’ (assessed in terms of high-quality, long-term data). One can imagine generations of development anthropologists shouting ‘Hear, hear!’ In addition to multiple layers of knowledge and representation, the micromanagement process requires multiple layers of organisational actors, all of them with particular work routines, knowledge frameworks, interpersonal relationships and wider social and cultural contexts (see Mosse 2005).4 For example, we can envision an environmental nongovernmental organisation (NGO) based in the First World. There is a central executive staff and, adjunct to them, specialised money-raising staff. Studying these groups might help considerably in understanding the impulse towards particular versions of power projects (e.g., what is and is not seen as a matter for micromanagement). There will also be a regional or national office staff, some expatriate and some locals, and again we can raise a valuable series of ethnographic questions about them. For

3. One can hardly make these observations without mentioning Michel Foucault, his concern with expertise and human disciplines, and the synthetic term, power/knowledge. However, like others in this volume, I am sceptical about how perfect and efficacious such knowledge systems are (also see Heyman 1999, 2001). 4. In addition to the range of offices and actors that I discuss in the main text, there is a further source of variation, to which, of course, we should be attentive: that such organisations themselves are diverse in size and character. Often, the smaller organisations are clients of the larger ones, so that the various ‘moments’ within one entity that I outline in the text may in fact involve subcontracting arrangements among formally separate entities, a characteristic of the ‘flexible’ world of governmental and non-governmental development and environment projects. Thus, to follow micromanagement through the chain of staff from the central office to the field may involve researching multiple organisations and their articulations to each other.

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example, micromanagerial impulses from above are often narrow and deficient in context (e.g., limited to the injunction to conserve this or that focal species or habitat), so these middle ranks of the organisation have to translate those impulses into particular located activities, personnel, budgets, targets, measures and so forth (which they also have to translate back up the line in terms of head office impulses). Below these middle managers dwell a variety of field staff who transform the micromanagerial impulse (in the form they receive it) into both actions in the immediate setting and reports back up the chain. The goal that appeared to be clearly specified at the top may be completely reworked in the field. In the world of micromanagerial virtualism, the field staff are expected to be participatory, adaptive and flexible in their version of the project (the ‘micro’ part), but also produce representations for the home office (via the middle offices) of success in specific, rigid mandates that this or that is being ‘managed’. Finally, local human and biophysical actors at project sites ‘interface’ (a useful concept from Long 1992) with these organisational projects and staffs. This interface also merits close study (e.g., Gezon 2006; West 2006). At least, that is the idea: a system perfectly adapted to carrying out focused action over great distance. The reality is that micromanagerial systems rarely, if ever, achieve their highly ambitious goal of orchestrating a specific web of changes in complex settings. The question is, why? There are widespread and diverse possibilities for alteration, deviation and failure, and this is indeed the most fundamental point: by their nature micromanagerial power projects have so many places where they can go ‘wrong’ that they very likely will go ‘wrong’. (I put ‘wrong’ in scare quotes because the outcomes might well be desired, or at least utilised, by a variety of different actors; see Mathews 2005; Mosse 2005.) We can learn a great deal if we examine how such failures occur, rather than just reducing them to perverse refusals of various environments, local people and bureaucrats to sing in unison upon command. Van Helden’s chapter narrates two failures, one relatively straightforward and acknowledged as such, but the second one more subtle and interesting. Local field staff misrepresented upwards the human-environmental situation in this region of Papua New Guinea, obviously diverting the central organisation’s goals and resources, in order to maintain funding for their own project of participatory empowerment. The narrative was both false in itself and true as a virtualism: it pandered exactly to the central power goals of micromanaged ‘participatory’ development. Garner’s chapter is not so neat. This also was a sustainable development project with a typical goal of orchestrated participation, except that the social ground was so individualistic that orchestrating participation was difficult, if not impossible. So a virtual model of complex, adaptive management proved utterly unadapted to the difficult world. Also, there were important

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falsehoods at higher levels of power, specifically that this tropical reef conservation programme aimed to aid small fisherfolk when in fact it aimed at insulating large tourist developments from the costs and consequences of massive coastal change. Geoghegan’s chapter attempts to rescue these micromanagerial projects from their own contradiction, that they are the aggressive, linear pursuit of a central goal, and that because they operate as complex adaptive processes in the field they deviate in various ways from that central goal. Her argument is for creolisation, embracing and building on the reworking and modification process. While respecting the value of this position in the practical struggle to make projects more humane and equitable (which is far better than extreme modernism or top-down micromanagement), her argument does elide the element of power in these power projects. If the project is reworked in the field, it gains in the sense of being adaptive, systems-oriented and flexible, but it can easily have slipped altogether away from the driving goals of the central actors. The field staff can sometimes hide their hybrid acts, but in an open power contest, we must wonder if creolisation can only go so far, if the protection of tourist hotels and beaches will invariably trump the securing of beach landing and fishing rights for small fishermen. This little matter of power becomes apparent in Filer’s account of his work in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a dynamic systems model typical of contemporary micromanagerialism. Local social complexity and cultural hybridity are, to any anthropologist or other experienced field observer, fundamental to a systemic account. But they were difficult to include in the planning process, not only in the sense that even the most sophisticated modelling does not like complexity and mutability, let alone the disagreement and uncertainty inherent in considering them, but also that to have these elements penetrate and partially determine the rest of the model would mean displacing the dominant place of economic and environmental science postulates and the social power of their advocates. Local dynamics were kept in bounds in the planning process, then, by embracing cultural essentialisms that are painfully unrealistic. So I have put forth two apparently contradictory propositions about micromanagerialism: that it is strongly determined by unequal power, and that the goals of the powerful often fail in practice. I think most anthropologists would agree more or less with both points, favouring one or the other at different times but rarely confronting their paradoxical simultaneity. And yet that simultaneity is a reality, not just a product of unclear thought, and furthermore it is of great importance.5 The ways 5. This is one of those intriguing Batesonian contradictions; see Gregory Bateson (1972) on the limitations of conscious purpose. As Bateson says, ‘lack of systemic wisdom is always punished’ (1972: 434).

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micromanaged power projects deviate from their ostensible goals are diverse, as shown in this book. But the broad tendency to deviate is consistent and inherent in the nature of these operations. A network of very finely tuned activities that are loosely coupled, such as the farming systems of a peasant community, might include many specific failures and deviations, yet not collectively collapse except in very bad years. A rigid system with little variation might succeed or fail spectacularly, but it has little chance of deviation from its initial goals. But a highly linked power hierarchy that operates through diverse organisations, levels, activities and people presents many ways to deviate from initial goals. This is the fundamental reason why such vast power projects smack of hubris, and why they often fail in their own explicit terms. What do these organisations (and presumably their supporters) think that they are doing, given that often they are not very good at what they claim to do? How do they deal with an apparently poor record in their efforts to micromanage? In their public relations products, they are not going to admit to many failures, and the ones admitted to will have some message about how this shows that they are humble and able to learn from their experiences. In internal evaluation and planning documents there is often more honest admission of failure or incomplete success, though again such admissions are tactical (in the sense of arguing for some initiative or additional resources). As a consequence, such organisations tinker with their specific themes and tactics, in fact probably more often and more extremely than they need to in light of the issues on the ground. However, as Mosse (2005) shows, these top-down adjustments may be disconnected from ways that their programmes are actually succeeding, failing and mutating in the field. So, they may not be perfectly adaptive and flexible, but they are not always and completely rigid and incompetent; indeed, the degree of inflexibility varies a great deal.6 The issue is deeper than specific tactics. What such organisations cannot and do not admit, and cannot and will not modify, is their commitment to

6. David Mosse (2005, 2006) highlights how organisations and their associated interpretive communities turn incomplete, diverted or failed projects into apparent successes. This requires a rather favourable political field to pull off, including internal dissenters without connections or influence, and client populations that are happy with the alternative outcome or who are too powerless to raise effective complaints. It also requires a supportive financial and political climate surrounding the home office (not people looking for scandals). Given general patterns of unequal power, such a favourable climate for creative reinterpretation is rather common, and indeed helps constitute the privilege of the powerful – to be able to reinterpret their way out of fiasco. But it is not always the case, and the hypocrisies of organisations are sometimes revealed as scandals through concerted struggles for political and intellectual change, from the right or left.

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comprehensive management of the world, at least their chosen slice of it. To recognise tactical failure often justifies a new and even more expensive initiative. However, to admit to inherent limitations and incompleteness removes a significant amount of support and legitimacy, both internal and external. It may even bring into question basic justifying assumptions about the efficacy of conscious, purposive action (see note 5). A way to approach this issue is to ask what these micromanagerial power projects have in common, when one such initiative is war in Iraq and another is sustainable use of coral reefs and nearby shores. Odds are, the organisations and supporters of those two initiatives would not see eye to eye on either goals or tactics. But they do have in common, and thus need to preserve, a purposive, instrumental, detailed and multi-sited mode of social action, as opposed to an ethic of non-intervention. Let us now return to the central paradox of simultaneous power and failure. Incomplete accomplishment of and deviation from overt goals is not the same as absence of effects, often latent but profound. What social results emerge from power projects and their modifications, diversions, perversions and failures? This is the question of living with the consequences of hubris; unfortunately we do it all the time. The long chains of action involved in these complex programmes bring social and cultural changes at a number of points, some in the place of origination, some within the organisation, others in the loci of operation. Some are small in scale, some are ephemeral, but as Paige West’s fine ethnography shows (2006), such changes are often significant and enduring even though they are nothing like that envisioned from above, in the virtual model. Indeed, the consequences of project failure for local populations vary widely and interestingly, and they need to be documented and analysed much more than they are now. We might first start by asking whether a failure of project goals is a failure for local people; in the project studied by Mosse (2005), community desire for temporary wage labour was an important force in diverting the project from its official aims. One could hardly say that this failure hurt locals. The chapter here by van Helden illustrates a similar triumph of relocalisation. On the other hand, one would not want to romanticise all failures as creative relocalisations (or, analogously, as micro-victories of resistance). The world is littered with poorly designed, economically and socio-culturally inappropriate clean water projects, small production projects, improved housing projects and so forth, whose failure represents lost opportunities for people in desperate need of them. Perhaps more hurtful yet are those projects such as Garner describes, that constitute failure for a purpose, demonstrating (by completely absurd social design and implementation) that the local fisherfolk cannot and do not deserve to be stewards of their local environment, and it is better to displace them for grandiose tourism developments.

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At this point, the astute, cynical reader should be thinking that perhaps these failures, and the unspoken transformations that follow them, are the secret point of the power projects, and it matters little whether the ostensible goals have not been met or that the projects deviated from plans. One explanation of this is rather elemental: that such projects are really platforms for short-term greed, yuppie consultant jobs, lucrative contracts, corruption and payoffs to local politicians. This is, for example, one among several threads in Janine Wedel’s (1998) fascinating story of neoliberal restructuring in post-communist central Europe and Russia. A rather more complex account attributes these useful failures-cum-transformations to the working out of agendas to reorganise society, usually someone else’s, such as breaking down existing political-economic arrangements to allow entry of new investors and markets. Indeed, it is likely that in a heavily supported project (or constellation of projects) a number of motivations have coalesced, thus allowing for official goals, individual greed and covert political-economic agendas all to be part of our explanatory framework. And even if short-term greed does not start out as a paramount motivation, a complicated, multi-level project offers many opportunities for diversions in favour of key operatives and corporate and political allies. The other argument concerning hidden logics is more complex, and is illustrated well by James Ferguson’s The anti-politics machine (1994). In his analysis, an unspoken framework like capitalism, modernity or development enacts itself through the changes a project brings about, whatever happens at the conscious level (which tends to be failure, mystification or both). This proposition makes us look into the directionality of the changes that occur even with failed or deviated projects (also see Li 2005). Do such changes increase the commoditisation of biophysical stocks and flows? Do they move people out of non-capitalist social relations, towards the ‘free’ Man that Paine sought and that Marx critiqued? Do they promote Foucault’s governmentality, the ‘conduct of conduct’? We would be well advised to address such questions, in particular keeping in mind that official goals (and failures to achieve them) are not the same as de facto agendas and underlying assumptions. However, we would also be well advised to consider possible effects as more complicated and open-ended than allowed by Ferguson’s account (and other works like his). One of the important implications of viewing our topic as multi-level, complexly detailed power projects is that each of these diverse social situations and activities allows for its own dynamics, related to and interacting with the others, and perhaps trending in certain directions but by no means uniform and determinate. Change is not so easily controlled, not so easily micromanaged, whether by a C. Wright Millsian elite or a Foucauldian discourse. Thus it is that critics of environmental, development and other projects of the sort described in this book (e.g., Sachs 1992) recognise important

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tendencies and flaws, but characteristically overstate their case. Yes, these projects often display a mirage of accomplishment while deviating from their ostensible goals or simply careening into abysmal failure. They richly deserve criticism for failing to serve poor and powerless people. Yes, they often promote unforeseen or semi-intended directional effects in favour of states, commoditisation and modernity. Teasing out these tendencies is vital. Yes, those two criticisms are quite different and, indeed, somewhat contradictory. More importantly, however, the comprehensive critics do not allow for the complexity of the dynamics that occur at different moments in micromanagerial power projects, and they do not account adequately for the range of actors, with their own concrete interests and world views, who are both causes and products of such unpredictable changes. They do not speak adequately to the density of the causes and consequences of deviation and failure. And by making the projects excessively coherent, critics bypass their central quality of being intensely detailed and badly incoherent all at the same time. On the other hand, practitioners and supporters of such projects need to be more attentive to the explosively transformative potential of long-distance, complex micromanagement above and beyond its utility and flaws as a means of intentional action. Having spent so much effort on micromanagerialism, my second big idea thankfully is simpler and shorter. I am struck by the various cases of educated organisational staff these chapters describe, including those in historically less bureaucratised and Westernised places, such as Papua New Guinea. Increasingly, world NGOs and governmental aid agencies hire local staffs or subcontract to local NGOs. The literature on white-collar workers is, however, centred on developed, Western nations. C. Wright Mills’s White collar (1951) is a remarkable book, clearly relevant to understanding the social segment I am discussing here, but it is a very American book. Another approach is through the study of the state and its bureaucratic staffs. At their best, anthropological studies of state workers are less centred on the West, being grounded in particular historical sociocultural settings. However, they are frustratingly sparse and scattered (e.g., Arce and Long 1992; Cohen 1980; Dove 1992). Still, even good ethnographies of state bureaucrats are related to but not the same as ethnographies of managerial and field staffs of transnational projects in the same countries. Why? The latter are engaged within worldspanning virtualisms, such as the environmentalisms discussed in this book, which are different from (say) more circumscribed nationalisms. They regularly interact with expatriate managers, consultants and moneyraisers, as well as with their own states and various local populations. They move to follow their employment, like many (but not all) educated middle classes, but an interesting consequence is that they are often just as much strangers in project field sites within their own country as expatriate

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advisers and staffs are. (In the global circulation of NGO signs, however, they can be deployed for ‘local’, even ‘indigenous’, expertise and status.) Above all, an extensive, diverse and dispersed field staff is the characteristic social carrier of multi-sited, intricately detailed processes of micromanagement. Project staffs of all sorts, expatriate, national and local, appear in many ethnographies, but usually as a factor to be taken into account rather than as a set of people to be understood. Two ways of understanding them are worth consideration here. One is in terms of their roles and relationships in different links of the micromanagerial chain. This is exemplified by descriptions of local staffs and consultants in Mosse (2005) and Wedel (1998). The other is in terms of their wider socio-cultural worlds: their life experiences, their households, their perspectives on life. Frankly, I do not know of an adequate study at this level (of course I may have missed such work). This blindness is highly unfortunate. Also, it may be socially determined, because anthropologists, both as applied social scientists and as academics, are often in close touch with such national and local whitecollar workers. Are they too close to us? Too much like us? Too often our students, sharing our disciplinary training? With the reflexive turn in anthropology there is, honestly, no excuse for not understanding this broad, global socio-cultural stratum of which we are a part and in which we participate. Anthropology has shed unfortunate blinders in terms of its subject matter. We no longer envision our studies as isolated villages or tribes, or strip our accounts of evidence of wider connections (Wolf 1982). We have opened up a number of novel social-cultural processes as fieldwork ‘sites’, which has been glossed as multi-sited ethnography (though it may involve thinking about relations at a distance as much as actually visiting all those distant locales) (Marcus 1995; Tsing 2005). It is unrealistic to think our work will capture all the interacting places and levels at once, and we may be allowed a little nostalgia for the assumed simplicity of an older ethnography. One of the challenges of the new ethnography is how to do in-depth research in multiple places, or working in one place but accounting for a much longer processual chain. Here, I have broached some ways of tackling this challenge by diagnosing several moments in the chains of global power projects and the organisations that they spawn. Micromanagerial power projects, and the emergence within them of national and global white-collar occupational groups, are ‘good to think’ as we seek to encompass the topics of specific studies in wider processes.

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Conclusion: Can the World Be Micromanaged? | 187

References Arce, Alberto and Norman Long. 1992. The dynamics of knowledge: interfaces between bureaucrats and peasants. In Battlefields of knowledge: the interlocking of theory and practice in social research and development, ed. N. Long and Ann Long, pp. 211–46. London: Routledge. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Conscious purpose versus nature. In Steps to an ecology of mind, G. Bateson, pp. 426–39. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co. Carrier, James G. and Daniel Miller (eds) 1998. Virtualism: a new political economy. Oxford: Berg. Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. 2006. Imperial life in the Emerald City: inside Iraq’s Green Zone. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cohen, Ronald. 1980. The blessed job in Nigeria. In Hierarchy and society: anthropological perspectives on bureaucracy, ed. Gerald M. Britan and R. Cohen, pp. 73–88. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Dove, Michael R. 1992. Foresters’ beliefs about farmers: a priority for social science research in social forestry. Agroforestry Systems 17: 13–41. Ferguson, James. 1994. The anti-politics machine: ‘development’, depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gezon, Lisa L. 2006. Global visions, local landscapes: a political ecology of conservation, conflict, and control in northern Madagascar. Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press. Heyman, Josiah McC. 1999. United States surveillance over Mexican lives at the border: snapshots of an emerging regime. Human Organization 58: 429–37. ———. 2001. Class and classification on the U.S.–Mexico border. Human Organization 60: 128–40. Li, Tania Murray. 2005. Beyond ‘the state’ and failed schemes. American Anthropologist 107: 383–94. Long, Norman. 1992. From paradigm lost to paradigm regained? The case for an actor-oriented sociology of development. In Battlefields of knowledge: the interlocking of theory and practice in social research and development, ed. N. Long and Ann Long, pp. 211–46. London: Routledge. ——— and Ann Long (eds) 1992. Battlefields of knowledge: the interlocking of theory and practice in social research and development. London: Routledge. Marcus, George. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Mathews, Andrew S. 2005. Power/knowledge, power/ignorance: forest fires and the state in Mexico. Human Ecology 33: 795–820. Mills, C. Wright. 1951. White collar: the American middle classes. New York: Oxford University Press.

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188 | Josiah McC. Heyman Mosse, David. 2005. Cultivating development: an ethnography of aid policy and practice. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2006. Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection, and the ethnography of public policy and professional communities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12: 935–56. Nuijten, Monique. 2005. Power in practice: a force field approach to natural resource management. The Journal of Transdisciplinary Environmental Studies 4 (2): 1–14. Pilkey, Orrin H. and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis. 2007. Useless arithmetic: why environmental scientists can’t predict the future. New York: Columbia University Press. Ricks, Thomas E. 2006. Fiasco: the American military adventure in Iraq. New York: Penguin Press. Sachs, Wolfgang (ed.) 1992. The development dictionary: a guide to knowledge as power. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Sheehan, Neil. 1988. A bright shining lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random House. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: an ethnography of global connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wedel, Janine R. 1998. Collision and collusion: the strange case of Western aid to Eastern Europe, 1989–1998. New York: St. Martin’s Press. West, Paige. 2006. Conservation is our government now: the politics of ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Notes on Contributors

Vassos Argyrou is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull. His research interests include social and cultural theory, postcolonialism, postmodernism and environmentalism. Among his publications are Tradition and modernity in the Mediterranean: the wedding as symbolic struggle (Cambridge, 1996), Anthropology and the will to meaning: a postcolonial critique (Pluto, 2002) and The logic of environmentalism: anthropology, ecology and postcoloniality (Berghahn, 2005). James G. Carrier has taught anthropology and sociology, and carried out research, in Papua New Guinea, the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as studying environmental conservation projects in Jamaica. He is currently Hon Research Associate at Oxford Brookes University and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Indiana. He is editor of Confronting environments: local environmental understanding in a globalising world (AltaMira, 2004). Colin Filer holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow and Papua New Guinea, was formerly head of the Social and Environmental Studies Division of the PNG National Research Institute, and is currently Convenor of the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. Andrew Garner is an Honorary Research Associate at Oxford Brookes University and works in UK Government at the Home Office as a research analyst. He has published on environmental perceptions and related conflicts over forests in the UK and on environmental governance in Jamaica. He has also co-written a school textbook, Jamaican Americans (Horst & Garner, Chelsea House, 2007). His current interests include the human dimensions and strategic implications of global environmental change.

190 | Notes on Contributors

Tighe Geoghegan was one of the founders of the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute and has been involved in natural resource management for over twenty-five years. She is currently a Director of Green Park Consultants GPC Ltd, a small consulting and research group working on issues of sustainable development policy and planning from offices in the UK and Jamaica. Flip van Helden was trained as a rural sociologist and development economist. He obtained his PhD on the topic of integrated conservation and development in Papua New Guinea from Wageningen University in 1998. He is a senior policy adviser with the Nature Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality in the Netherlands. Currently he is seconded to the European Commission, where he deals with international forest policy. Josiah McC. Heyman is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at the University of Texas at El Paso. His interests include the anthropology of states, bureaucracies and public policies, as well as borders, mobility and migration. He has also explored the complex relationship between the social sciences, values, power and engagement. A list of his publications can be found at http://faculty.utep.edu/jmheyman Maarten Onneweer studied Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He recently started as a PhD candidate on a project entitled ‘The social life of springs. Researching a landscape of spirits and developments in the Kitui district, Kenya’, at the Research School CNWS, Leiden University. His thematic interests are in the anthropology of landscape, the anthropology of development and actor network theory. Kathy Rettie lives in the Canadian Rocky Mountains where she works for Parks Canada. She obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology from St Andrews University. Her research focuses on the human and social aspects of national parks. Paige West is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, where she teaches courses on environmental anthropology, culture and consumption, and environment and development. She is the author of the book Conservation is our government now: the politics of ecology in Papua New Guinea (Duke University Press, 2006) and has just completed a second manuscript entitled From modern production to imagined primitive: crystalizing coffee from Papua New Guinea.

Index

A anthropology and environmental science, 108 B Banff National Park founding, 68 Bateson, Gregory, 181 Bennet, John, 81 Béteille, André, 12 BINGO models assumptions underlying, 113–14, 128–9, 155, 171–2 and Caribbean practices, 113–15 constraining project developers, 169 critics of, 155–6, 184–5 ignoring informal institutions, 128 individualism in, 129 and interest, 128 and local contexts, 113 and local practices, 156 playing to, 156 and PNG context, 169 BINGOs limitations on, 156 Biodiversity Program, 157 change from economic to socio-political orientation, 164–5 community interests in, 163 explaining failure, 159–61, 162–3 first phase, 157–9, 171 fissures within, 171 Lak withdrawal, 159 Project Review Mission, 159–60 second stage funding, 165–6, 166–7 UNDP administrative requirements, 158, 163, 171 See also Bismarck-Ramu project; community entry approach; Lak

biodiversity regime, 136–7, 147 Bismarck-Ramu area, 161 Bismarck-Ramu Group, 170 Bismarck-Ramu project autonomy of field staff, 163, 169–70 biosphere reserve, 165–6 differences from Lak, 161 early reorientation in, 162–3 ending of, 170 field staff dissatisfied, 169–70, 172 GEF requirements for, 171 initial phase, 161–2 local community as environmental threat, 167–9 local needs in, 163–4 need for environmental threat, 167–8, 171 presentation to the GEF, 166, 167–9 and The Nature Conservancy, 165–6, 169–70 Brockington, Dan, 8 Brosius, Peter, 93–4 Bryant, Raymond, 135, 137–8 biodiversity regime, 136–7 governmentality, 135–6, 138–9, 150 maps and representations, 8–9, 147 Buckle, Henry T., 26 C Callicott, J. Baird, 39 CANARI basic orientation, 116–18, 127 institutional pressure on, 127 as intermediary, 127–8 origins, 116n, 116–17 cartographic hegemony, 147 in Negril, 147–8 See also Bryant, Raymond

192 | Index de Certeau, Michel, 116 civil society and conservation, 135, 146 Clayton, Anthony, 134–5 coastal waters in Jamaica See Jamaican waters Collingwood, R. G., 31–2 community in the absence of indigeneity, 146–7, 150 See also Negril fishers community conservation, 136, 138–9, 150–1 and governmentality, 138–9, 146, 148 needing stakeholder communities, 148 and stakeholder community, 150 community entry approach, 163–5 explaining uninterested communities, 165 related to environmental conservation, 166–7 conservation and development in the Caribbean, 113–14 conservation projects as expressions of environmentalism, 2 internal operations of, 156 and power, 2, 162 cosmological theory in ecocentrism, 37–8 creolisation, 112–13, 115–16 as generative, 115 of institutional models, 127–8 and power, 181 as reverse of virtualism, 116 response to virtualising institutions, 116 of virtual models, 126–7 Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, 14–15 D Davies, Tony, 32 deep ecology See ecocentrism disenchantment See Modernism Durkheim, Emile, 30

E Ebrahim, Alnoor, 116 ecocentrism, 4–5, 35–6 breadth of, 35–6 and cosmological theory, 37–8 and evolutionary biology, 36–7, 39 and meaning, 40–1

and sameness, 4, 6, 38–9, 40 and virtualism, 6 ecofeminism, 36 Ecologische Hoofd Structuur (EHS) See Main Ecological Structure ecosystem services See environmental services ecotourism assumptions underlying, 121–2 and environmental conservation, 121–2 virtualising tendencies, 122 Elfenbaan, the Netherlands, 46–7, 52–3, 59 ENGOs failing in Jamaica, 134–5 and governmentality, 135–6, 138–9 environmental conservation neoliberalism in, 12, 14, 124–5 variations in, 3 environmental management role of government in, 128 role of informal institutions in, 128 environmental services, 86–9, 124 in Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 89, 92, 100, 102, 107 environmental services markets assumptions underlying, 125–6 difficulties with, 125–6 effects on the poor, 125–6 and environmental conservation, 124–5 environmental threat and poverty, 121 environmentalism different from Modernism, 29–30 emergence of, 1, 25, 26, 27 and governmentality, 136, 137–8 and modernism, 24–5 in the Netherlands, 50–2 and power, 2, 5–6, 16–17, 94, 97–8 and sameness, 35 urgency in, 28–30 as virtualism, 3–4 Escobar, Arturo, 8 evolutionary biology in ecocentrism, 36–7, 39 experiential tourism, 72–3, 75 F farmers in the Netherlands See Main Ecological Structure, resistance to Ferguson, James, 137, 184

Index | 193 Filer, Colin, 169 fortress conservation, 136–8 Foucauldian approach, limitations of, 2, 11–12, 15–16, 20 Foucault, Michel, 7, 67, 79–80, 179 Freire, Paolo, 162 G Gaia, 5 Geertz, Clifford, 41 GEF, 156–7 funding requirements, 165, 172 Giddens, Anthony, 24–5 Global Environment Facility See GEF Goodenough, Ursula, 36–7, 40–1 Gottlieb, Roger S., 35–6 governmentality limitations on, 135–6, 149–51 and mapping, 147 See also ENGOs grizzly bear as indicator species, 70–1 Grove-White, Robin, 28–9 H Haley, Michael, 134–5 half natuur (half-nature), 51, 56–7, 59–60 Hegel, Georg, 31 Heidegger, Martin, 31–2 heritage tourism, 122–3 Hirsch, Eric, 48 human-use simulation modelling See simulation modelling I Inca knowledge, representation of, 102–4 informal coastal management, 120–1 Ingold, Tim, 3, 6 integrated conservation and development projects in PNG, 157, 163–4 International Center of Traditional Knowledge, Ecology and Policies, 102–3 J Jamaica Co-operative Union, 142–3 Jamaican waters degradation of, 137 free to all, 149

K Kant, Immanuel, 30 Küchler, Susanne, 48–9 L Laborie, St Lucia, 120–1 Lak, 157–8, 160–1, 171 logging operations in, 158–9, 161 people blamed for Biodiversity Program failure, 160–1 Lake Louise, Banff National Park, 70–71 Litzinger, Ralph, 14–15 local community idea of, 117 and resource management, 138, 162–3, 164–5 See also community conservation local knowledge in Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 95, 97–104 local and indigenous advocates, 94–5 and PNG, 102–3 as political or environmental, 93–4 and scale, 100, 102 science-tradition dualism, 94–7 as social-ecological system, 93 to make assessments meaningful, 92–3 local resource users, 16–17 Lomborg, Bjorn, 27–8 Lovelock, James, 5 M maakbaarheid See mouldable landscape Main Ecological Structure, 48–9, 57, 62 background, 52 conception of nature in, 48, 59–60 and ecological sameness, 59 effectiveness of, 61–2 and landscape, 48 nature and purpose, 46–7 in Netherlands landscape, 57 questions about, 52–3 resistance to, 60–2 as virtualism, 9–10, 49 managerialism in environmental conservation, 94 marine protected areas See MPAs micromanagement, 178 accounting for failure, 182–3

194 | Index assumptions underlying, 179 and local contexts, 181 and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 181 organisational correlates, 179–80 processes, 178–9 reasons for failure, 180–1 tendency to failure, 181–2 unintended consequences of, 183–5 See also project staff Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 12, 84 Conceptual Framework, 86–9 economic orientation, 88–9 as epistemic community, 85–6 and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 85–6 local communities in, 92–3, 107–8 scenarios, 105, 107 virtualism in, 105 working group organisation, 85–6 Miller, Daniel, 80 Mills, C. Wright, 185 Mintz, Sidney, 115 Modernism and environmentalism, 14, 24–5, 41–2 and Main Ecological Structure, 9–10 and meaninglessness, 29–30, 33–4, 40–1 and sameness, 4, 25, 31–2, 34–5, 41–2 and understandings of the natural world, 3–4 view of nature in, 25–7 Mosse, David, 116, 138–9, 182–3 interpretative communities, 19–20, 182 work of translation, 126–7 mouldable landscape, 45–6, 51 in the Netherlands, 48–9, 56–7 See also New Nature MPAs assumptions underlying, 119–21 BINGO support for, 118 in the Caribbean, 118 costs and benefits of, 119–20 and tourism, 119–20 multi-scale approach in Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in conceptual framework, 86–7 corollaries of, 94, 95–7, 100, 102 as evidence of virtualism, 84–5 justification for, 92

N Naess, Arne, 39 national parks as businesses, 72, 74–5, 78–9 and understandings of nature, 66 national parks in Canada contradictory position of, 68, 79, 81 and understandings of nature, 66–7 nature and temporality, 47, 54–5 a-historical, 55 future orientation, 48, 53–4 nostalgia, 47 potentiality, 48–9, 51 primordial past, 47–8, 50 nature baddies, 137, 150, 183 in Biodiversity Program, 171–2 nature ideas in the Netherlands, 45–6, 56 nature network in the Netherlands See Main Ecological Structure NCRPS, 140–1, 144, 147–8 founding of, 140 Negril alternative livelihoods study, 145 decline of fish stocks, 139–40 description, 135, 139–40 EU grant, 144 marine park map, 147–8 tension between ENGOs in, 140–1 uncertain status of marine park, 140–1, 147 USAID Development of Environmental Management Organizations project, 145 Negril Area Environmental Protection Trust See NEPT Negril Coral Reef Preservation Society See NCRPS Negril fishers 141n2 absence of community, 148–9 and autonomy, 148–9 collective attributes of, 148–9 fishing techniques, 141 as nature baddies, 150 Negril fishing beach, 139–40, 141, 148–9 title to, 144–5 Negril Fishing Co-operative Society, 141, 143 accounts and records, 142–3 and Canadian consultant, 142 CIDA grant, 144–5

Index | 195 and ENGOs, 150 and fishers, 146 as local stakeholders in EU grant, 144 manager, 143 operation of, 141–2 and public bodies, 145–6 relationship with NCRPS and NEPT, 143–4 structure of, 141 NEPT, 140–1, 142–3 New Institutionalism, 117 New Nature (nieuwe natuur), 45–7, 52–4, 56 and forgetfulness, 57 future orientation, 47 and mouldable landscape, 54, 57, 59 and spontaneity, 54 virtualism in, 47 normalising judgement (Foucault), 67, 75–6, 79–80 Nuijten, Monique, 177 O Oostvaardersplassen, the Netherlands, 54–5 organisations in Negril environmental conservation, 135 relationships among, 179 P Papua New Guinea, 156–7 Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Program See Biodiversity Program customary tenure, 156–7 park visitors shaping of, 67–8, 71, 74–5 undesirable, 76, 79 virtual, 77–9 Parks Canada Agency, 66, 67, 68 absence of social research, 71, 75–6 ecological integrity, 69–70 economic position, 72, 79 management targets, 70, 75 recent policy changes, 69–70, 71 survey of visitors, 73–4, 75–6 Parks in Peril, 119 People Against Foreign NGO Neocolonialism, 97–8 Pilkey, Orrin, 179

practical virtualism, 178–9 primeval landscape in environmentalism in the Netherlands, 45–6, 47–8, 55–6, 62 project staff class attributes, 186 consensus among, 19 in micromanagement, 185–6 significance of, 18–19 Q qualitative difference See sameness R Race for the Rainforest See Biodiversity Program: Project Review Mission radical ecology See ecocentrism raw nature See Main Ecological Structure Religion of Humanity, 34–5 sameness and difference, 33 of distance, 5 and ecocentrism, 4, 6, 36–8, 41 See also Modernism S Sax, Joseph, 67 scenarios See Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Schouten, Matthijs, 59–60 scientism in environmental conservation, 137–8, 163 and meaning, 28–9 Scott, James, 10, 178 simulation modelling, 77–8 social difference as fiction, 33 as meaningless, 34–5 Spretnak, Charlene, 41 St Lucia, 118 St Lucia Heritage Tourism Programme, 122–3 government role in, 123 informal institutions and, 123

196 | Index stakeholder, 114, 115, 116–17, 118, 128 community, 148–9 management of resources, 120–1 stakeholders in community conservation, 148 Negril fishers as, 135, 144, 146 Strang, Veronica, 147 Sub-Global Working Group, 85, 91–2, 98–9 establishing, 89–91 goals of, 90–1 report preparation, 99–100, 102 See also Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 29 T The Nature Conservancy, 119 Tiengemeten, Holland, 46–7, 53–4 totalising view of the world, 30–1 in ecocentrism, 36–40 and sameness, 31–2, 37–40 Tourism Product Development Company (TPDCo), 143, 145–6 translation of virtual models, 126–7, 180–1 U UN Stockholm Conference, 27 understandings of nature, 1 changing, 3, 6, 49–51, 52, 66 as ideology, 66–7, 71 and Main Ecological Structure, 9–10 relation to action, 1, 6 variations in, 3 United States Agency for International Development See USAID unity See sameness V Vera, Frans, 47, 49, 52, 55–56, 56n7 Vilcanota conceptual framework See Inca knowledge, representation of

virtual reality See virtualism virtualising tendency, constraints on, 17, 19–20 by local people, 15–17 by organisational practice, 17–19 by other organisations, 13–15 virtualism, 7, 80 in BINGO models, 114 as blinders, 17 and Canadian parks, 10–11 and ecocentrism, 6 in environmental conservation, 8–11 limitations of, 2, 12–13 and Main Ecological Structure, 9–10, 47–9 in Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 13, 105, 108–9 and New Nature, 57, 59 and objectification, 10–11 in park planning, 78–81 constraints on, 81 and power, 7–8, 10–11 resistance to, 60–1 visitor experience in Canadian parks effects of environmental protection on, 70 experiential tourism, 72–3 modelling, 77 most popular, 74, 76 and support for parks, 71, 73 W Wallis de Vries, Michiel F., 54–5 watershed management in the Caribbean, 125–6 Weber, Max, 29–30, 33–4 Wedel, Janine, 184 West, Paige, 8, 136–7, 183 Wilson, Peter, 149n