Catherine Corson

Territorialization, enclosure and neoliberalism: non-state influence in struggles over Madagascar's forests

Using the case of the expansion of Madagascars protected areas, this paper examines ‘state’ territorialization under neoliberalism as a process that involves non-state as well as state institutions. Challenging notions of state territorialization as a state controlled process, it reveals the state as a vehicle through which numerous non-state entities sought to expand their control of and authority over Madagascars forests. It argues that, as state and non-state entities negotiated Madagascars protected area boundaries, associated rights and acceptable uses, they determined not only claims to forest lands, but also the authority to make forest policy and to decide who could accumulate wealth from Madagascars forests. Ultimately, the expansion entailed practices of primitive accumulation by enclosing common lands and creating new opportunities for private capital accumulation.

Enclosing the global commons: the convention on biological diversity and green grabbing

‘Green grabs,’ or the expropriation of land or resources for environmental purposes, constitute an important component of the current global land grab explosion. We argue that international environmental institutions are increasingly cultivating the terrain for green grabbing. As sites that circulate and sanction forms of knowledge, establish regulatory devices and programmatic targets, and align and articulate actors with these mechanisms, they structure emergent green market opportunities and practices. Drawing on the idea of primitive accumulation as a continual process, we examine the 10th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity as one such institution.

From Rhetoric to Practice: How High-Profile Politics Impeded Community Consultation in Madagascar's New Protected Areas

When Madagascars former president announced at the 5th World Parks Congress his intention to triple the countrys protected areas, he underscored that the new parks would engage local communities. Donors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have since touted the programs commitment to community involvement. However, research in Madagascars eastern rainforest revealed how a series of political decisions at multiple scales impeded village consultation. While the high-profile announcement successfully mobilized biodiversity conservation funds, it also drew attention toward meeting the demands of capital city-based politicians, foreign donors, and international NGOs and away from effectively engaging rural communities, thereby reinforcing nonlocal decision-making power. By revealing how conservation projects are embedded in and productive of politics in and among sponsoring organizations, the article responds to calls for greater analysis of the political, economic, and social contexts of conservation projects and specifically the politics among the donors, governents, and NGOs behind international conservation and development.

Studying Global Environmental Meetings to Understand Global Environmental Governance: Collaborative Event Ethnography at the Tenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity

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

Half-Earth or Whole Earth? Radical ideas for conservation, and their implications

We question whether the increasingly popular, radical idea of turning half the Earth into a network of protected areas is either feasible or just. We argue that this Half-Earth plan would have widespread negative consequences for human populations and would not meet its conservation objectives. It offers no agenda for managing biodiversity within a human half of Earth. We call instead for alternative radical action that is both more effective and more equitable, focused directly on the main drivers of biodiversity loss by shifting the global economy from its current foundation in growth while simultaneously redressing inequality.

Exploring the Association Between People and Deforestation in Madagascar

An island widely recognized for remarkably high biological diversity, Madagascar continues to experience considerable deforestation. This study explores possible causes of forest loss between 1990 and 2000. Applying a multivariate probit model, the study considers a range of human geographic, physical geographic, and infrastructure data to identify likely reasons for deforestation during the final decade of the twentieth century. Results indicate that protected areas substantially slow forest loss. They also show that access via roads and footpaths were important prerequisites for deforestation during the 1990s. Neither population density nor poverty seemed to be related to forest loss, though data shortcomings may help explain this lack of relationship. The issues that appear to be linked to deforestation in Madagascar are sensitive to policy decisions, suggesting that development strategies can help stem forest loss in this important repository of biological diversity.

The right to resist: disciplining civil society at Rio+20

Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the United Nations (UN) Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) and its preparatory meetings, we examine how the official UN ‘participatory’ process for engaging civil society in Rio+20 negotiations simultaneously enabled and disciplined contestation through processes such as seeking consensus around a common statement, professionalizing civil society representatives and controlling protests in order to protect broad access to negotiations. We document how, in doing so, the official participatory process undermined the right to voice diverse positions. We also find that Southern access to negotiations was limited by lack of funding, human resources, location and language. Finally, we illustrate how a group of non-governmental organizations based primarily in the Global South utilized the official UN Major Groups ‘participatory process’ to build alliances to protect resource rights language in the negotiating text. Ultimately, we argue that, through the struggle to build alliances, activists critical of the green economy became enlisted in reproducing its hegemony.

Everyone's Solution? Defining and Redefining Protected Areas at the Convention on Biological Diversity

For decades, conservationists have remained steadfastly committed to protected areas (PAs) as the best means to conserve biodiversity. Using Collaborative Event Ethnography of the 10 th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD/CoP), we examine how the PA concept remains hegemonic in conservation policy. We argue that, as a broadening base of actors frame their political objectives through PAs in order to further their agendas, they come together in a discourse coalition. In this coalition, actors do not necessarily have common interests or understandings; rather, it is through dynamic struggles over the meaning of the PA concept and the continual process of reshaping it that actors reproduce its hegemony. In this process, the CBD/CoP disciplines and aligns disparate actors who might otherwise associate with distinct discourse coalitions. As the concept accommodates a wider range of values, PAs are increasingly being asked to do more than conserve biodiversity. They must also sequester carbon, protect ecosystem services, and even promote human rights. These transformations reflect not only changes in how PAs are defined and framed, but also in the realignment of relationships of authority and power in conservation governance in ways that may marginalise traditional conservation actors.

Capturing the Personal in Politics: Ethnographies of Global Environmental Governance

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

The Making of a ‘Charismatic’ Carbon Credit: Clean Cookstoves and ‘Uncooperative’ Women in Western Kenya

The Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change first legitimized state-to-state carbon trading in 1997 with the goal of cost-effectively reducing carbon emissions. Voluntary carbon markets for private trading have emerged since, often claimed by their proponents to pioneer innovative projects that reduce poverty as well as carbon emissions. We use the case of a cookstove project, financed by the carbon emissions reductions generated when rural Kenyan women switch from traditional to energy-efficient cookstoves, to illuminate the complex process through which ‘charismatic’ pro-poor carbon offsets are produced. We highlight the role of womens labor in creating the initial carbon emissions reductions, which then become tradable virtual commodities through a series of studies to measure and verify the associated carbon savings, as well as the signing of a contract that transfers the property rights to the verified savings from the stove user to an international nonprofit carbon credit developer. We argue that, while introducing some improvements in cooking time, smoke level, and labor, the improved cookstove carbon offset ultimately constitutes a gendered, ongoing accumulation by decarbonization that, by securing the means of future wealth that could be generated from the project for investors in the Global North, marginalizes rural Kenyan women.