The Ethics and Efficacy of Conservation in the Region of Masoala National Park, Madagascar
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Bankoff, Richard
- Graduate Program:
- Anthropology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 06, 2020
- Committee Members:
- George H Perry, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
George H Perry, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Nina G Jablonski, Committee Member
Douglas Warren Bird, Committee Member
Guangqing Chi, Outside Member
Rosemary Jane Jolly, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Mary Katherine Shenk, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Anthropology
Communicative action
Ethnography
Socioecology
Bioethics
Human-natural systems - Abstract:
- Despite abundant effort, money, and talent dedicated to their success, many projects designed to stem ecosystem decline and extinction fail. With each failure of conservation policy, sponsoring external institutions often try different models of enforcement, incentivization, or both to segregate local human societies from their home ecosystems. Drawing on Foucauldian analyses of power and domination, I suggest that this response misses the common underpinning of these failures: that local peoples have fundamentally different perceptions of the value of nature; feel deprived of their autonomy to enact that valuation; and, therefore, respond to the restriction of these human-natural relationships in ways that defy official outcomes and expectations. Features of conservation are complicit in this biopolitical machine, as: (i) conservation contains the positive biopolitical element of choosing which life is to grow and which to wither; (ii) despite repeated policy failures, similar paradigms predominate in conservation governance; and (iii) local political powers exploit the presence of this extrinsic ethic to depoliticize their control. An anthropologically-contextualized case study from Madagascar will ground this biopolitical analysis, comparing the aspirations of conservation and development with their realized results a generation later. In rural areas of low-income countries such as Madagascar, conservation-related resource restriction can lead to pernicious economic effects of on local human populations – a so-called poverty trap. Conversely, rising human wealth in such places has been hypothesized to correlate with increased resource consumption, a worrying pattern known as the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), bedeviling efforts to implement development alongside conservation. Although regions experiencing both these phenomena seem to have strong economic disincentives to participate in conservation, the degree to which these factors impact locals’ underlying valuation of conservation – a critical component of community buy-in – is unclear. We tested how variation in reported valuation toward conservation varied with economic conditions and human consumption of selected park resources in four villages sites in Masoala National Park (MNP), Madagascar. We examined changes to park ecology around villages to determine whether changes in local value orientation or socioeconomic base correlated with conservation outcomes. We found evidence for both EKC and poverty trap effects operating in the park. However, we also found that despite these tensions, support for the value of conservation to local communities is high, with most dissent on the basis of implementation and prioritization differences rather than core value conflicts. These results suggest that values informing the conservation ethic are indeed commonly shared with local people in the villages near MNP. However, the mere presence of an overlap does not allow us to derive the complex cultural, personal, political, and ethical choices that drive behaviors relevant to ecosystemic functions. To gain greater context on the ethical priorities and decision-making of people in these communities, we conducted a series of semi-structured mini-focus group interviews in all four villages. Interviews were designed to provoke both direct and indirect expressions of personal and communal values with regard to nature, governance, livelihoods, and social life. Findings from thematic coding and content analysis further support the contention that, at least in Masoala, distortions in communication and power rather than inherent ethical incompatibilities are to blame for failures of conservation policies. Their shared desire for preservation notwithstanding, without a sea change in the powers that organize life on the Masoala, humans and rainforest alike are sure to continue to suffer needlessly under the conservation problematic.