Leah S. Horowitz

Integrating Indigenous Resource Management with Wildlife Conservation: A Case Study of Batang Ai National Park, Sarawak, Malaysia

This paper examines the indigenous land and forest management systems of the community of seven Iban longhouses whose territories comprise the area of Batang Ai National Park in Sarawak, Malaysia. It also discusses the integrated conservation and development program (ICDP) at the park. This project is attempting to work within the existing system of customary law to build on traditional legislative infrastructure and management practices, in order to enlist the cooperation of local people and their leaders in implementing a new conservation strategy. In addition to reinforcing local authority, park planners recognize the need for local people to be given strong incentives to participate in co-management of the protected area. This paper argues that, despite a history of conflict with indigenous peoples, State officials have in this instance demonstrated a willingness to work with local people and community leaders. At the same time, they are encouraging community development, helping people to find alternatives to activities that threaten the parks wildlife.

It's up to the clan to protect: Cultural heritage and the micropolitical ecology of conservation in New Caledonia

Abstract This case study from New Caledonia explores the motivations of local people in initiating co-managed conservation projects on customary lands. Kanak villagers viewed “conservation” largely as a means of reinforcing their cultural identity through preservation of their cultural heritage, grounded in the landscape. However, at the same time, they hoped to promote economic development. Ironically, thus, they found it necessary to welcome outside influences—to seek visits from non-Kanak tourists and to request financial and technical support from the provincial government, which had been created by the colonial power. Meanwhile, although a desire to reinforce customary authority structures formed an important part of this search for a unifying cultural identity, the quest for a stable, traditional, shared “past” created new, micropolitical instabilities within the community, conditioned by expectations of financial gain and by sources of social status. A “micropolitical ecology” approach revealed that a conservation program grounded in customary authority would be the only acceptable solution, although it would be difficult for villagers to agree on who filled customary roles. This study indicates the importance of gaining a clear understanding of intra-community dynamics and of community members’ perceptions of external groups, in order to design appropriate strategies for co-management.

Rhizomic Resistance Meets Arborescent Assemblage: UNESCO World Heritage and the Disempowerment of Indigenous Activism in New Caledonia

This article draws on Deleuze and Guattaris concepts of arborescent and rhizomic assemblages to examine encounters between large-scale conservation and grassroots resistance to industry. I explore how the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations (UNESCO) World Heritage listing of New Caledonias reefs contributed to the demise of Rhéébù Nùù, an indigenous activist group that had been targeting a multinational mining project. I also interrogate how an assemblages form enables certain modalities of power while constraining others and how these differences in power modalities inform relationships between types of assemblages. Mistakenly expecting assistance in protecting their coral reef from mining impacts, Rhéébù Nùù relinquished the coercive power inherent to their rhizomic form in favor of participation in UNESCOs arborescent structure via World Heritage “management committees”—a globally promoted, but locally inappropriate, comanagement diagram that targeted local fishing activities despite an absence of overfishing. Thus, this article argues that rhizomic structures have unique means of influence, exercised through particular modalities of power, which might be lost through cooptation into arborescent assemblages that exercise different modalities of power and might employ locally inappropriate diagrams. Ultimately, conservation does not only result in the extension of state powers, as the literature has shown; as this study demonstrates, it can surreptitiously support the extension of environmentally damaging industrial development at the expense of grassroots action.

Beliefs about Ecological Impacts Predict Deer Acceptance Capacity and Hunting Support

Ecological impacts of deer overbrowsing often lead resource managers to recommend deer control through hunting, which may be strongly opposed by local residents. Adaptive impact management argues that understanding wildlife impacts of concern to the public can improve wildlife management. However, research on public wildlife acceptance capacity for deer, and on support for hunting, has emphasized concerns about household impacts and deer well-being, general environmental beliefs and attitudes, and beliefs about consequences of hunting, but not public concerns about deer ecological impacts. Our survey of neighbors of urban wetlands shows that beliefs about deer ecological impacts are statistically significant predictors of deer acceptance capacity and of support for hunting, controlling for other factors. Including ecological-impact beliefs adds substantially to the explained variance in deer acceptance capacity, and slightly to the explained variance in support for hunting.

‘It shocks me, the place of women’: intersectionality and mining companies’ retrogradation of indigenous women in New Caledonia

Abstract Indigenous women’s social positionings are complex and dynamic, informed by culture and post-colonial politics; gender and ethnicity intersect with age, socio-economic status, and social hierarchies. This article uses an ethnographic study of Kanak women’s engagements with mining in New Caledonia, to examine three questions. First, how do indigenous women’s dynamic social positionings shape their possibilities for negotiation with and resistance to industry? Secondly, how do women’s possibilities for engagement in turn shape the wider community’s possibilities for negotiation with or resistance to industry? Finally, what is the companies’ role in shaping women’s possibilities for such engagement? I draw on the critical feminist concept of intersectionality, bringing this into conversation with concepts of symbolic and cultural violence and hegemony. Over time, women began to actively negotiate with and resist industrial projects, in line with growing gender equity in New Caledonia, but the mining companies referenced – and thus reinforced – women’s dominated social position as an excuse to sideline their concerns, a type of cultural violence I term ‘retrogradation.’ Thus, this article recognizes indigenous women’s increasing agency in engaging with external actors, such as industrial projects, yet also shows how outsiders can commit retrogradation to further marginalize young, rural, poor community women. I discuss how such marginalization limits options for the larger group. Finally, I point to a way out of oppression, through transformation of hegemonic ideologies.

Power, cooptation, and the multiplicity of response assemblages: An example from New Caledonia

This commentary provides an empirical example that supports Briassoulis’s ‘response assemblage’ (RA) conceptualization but also suggests an extension of this framework. It uses an example of different approaches to protecting New Caledonia’s coral reefs—the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage List and Rhéébù Nùù, an indigenous group targeting a multinational mining and refinery project—to demonstrate that RAs, as responses to specific environmental threats, may be not only parts of multiplicities (complex socioecological systems) but multiple themselves. Further, it shows that distinct RAs may compete and even come into conflict. Moreover, this example demonstrates the crucial role of power—or perceptions of power—in determining the outcomes of RAs, and in particular, of the interactions of multiple RAs.