In the 1970s and 1980s, scientists and NGOs convinced Congress and the U.S. Agency for International Development to fund environmental programs, including one for preserving Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Millions of dollars later, Madagascar's habitats are still in decline. Catherine Corson, a specialist in using ethnography to study polic-making processes, explains why.
Connecting forty years of political negotiations across Congress, USAID, and Malagasy villages, Corson charts how successful efforts to garner international funding for conservation in Madagascar undermined efforts to empower rural communities in forest management. By focusing blame on impoverished Malagasy farmers for their slash-and-burn agricultural practices, politicians were able to become “green” without challenging drivers of deforestation, including the logging and mining industries. An important contribution to a range of scholarly and professional fields, Corson's book uses the situation in Madagascar as a window into the transformation of global environmental governance under neoliberalism and its implications for biodiversity conservation.
