Michel Dulcire

Taking into account local practices and indigenous knowledge in an emergency conservation context in Madagascar

At the 5th World Parks Congress, held in Durban, South Africa in 2003, the President of Madagascar committed his government to tripling the country’s protected zones over the next 5xa0years. The announcement reflected a desire to combine rapid conservation efforts with sustainable development. Conservationists in Madagascar focused their attention on the endemic baobab tree, Adansonia grandidieri. This paper aims to identify the contradictions between the political emergency of the biodiversity conservation effort and local development needs. Eighty-three semi-structured interviews were conducted in two villages near the protected area of “Baobab Alley” in the Menabe region. Malagasy conservationists believed the area’s protected status would benefit the local economy through eco-tourism. However, the conservation actions undertaken there display limited understanding of local dynamics and conflict with farmers’ needs. To protect the baobabs, the government has prohibited rice cultivation without providing compensation. We show that the multifunctional baobab tree is integrated into an agroforestry system and protected by farmers. Based on these results, we address the issue of how to combine conservation and local development objectives through the involvement of farmers and the recognition of local knowledge in tree management. We also demonstrate that an emergency approach to conservation is not conducive to the successful integration of conservation and development.

Contributing to Innovation, Policies and Local Democracy Through Collective Action

This chapter deals specifically with the many forms of collective action that family farmers undertake. It focuses, on the one hand, on the diversity of functions performed through collective action and, on the other, on the deeply evolutionary nature of organizational forms developed – even though some are part of long-term trends – and concentrates on three specific issues: innovation, insertion of agricultural products into markets, and the formulation and orientation of public policy. These multiple commitments have contributed in a more general way to the consolidation of local democracy where organizations of family farmers play an important role. Farmers have been coming together in organizations for a very long time in Western European countries and in those which experienced high levels of European emigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The movement is slower and more recent in developing countries; it follows on from the independence of former colonies and the democratization movements of the 1990s. And yet, collective dynamics in these countries often play today a central role in local and national political arenas.