Engaging anthropology in the environment-development debate. Local actors on the
interface of local, national and global conservation politics in the periphery of the
transnational park W.
Julie Poppe, IARA, K.U.Leuven
Since the Brundtland report (1987), ‘sustainability’ has become the panacea for
development, which defined conservation and protection of environment as indispensable
for development worldwide. In this environment-development debate, ‘community
participation’, or the involvement of local people on all levels - from policy making to
policy implementation-, has become the new orthodoxy to reach ‘sustainable’
development.
Some anthropologists have critically approached the core concepts of ‘development’,
‘nature conservation’ and ‘community participation’ as hierarchical, top-down or
hegemonic enterprises, while others have analyzed local perspectives on environment and
development, thereby contributing to the current bottom-up or people-centered
approaches in environment-development policies. What is lacking in the contemporary
environment-development debate are anthropological approaches that are neither bottomup nor top-down, but that actually put all local actors and their interactions and
relations in the conservation and development arena on stage. Local actors are not only
those people living ‘traditionally’ in a certain region, but include people like state
servants, foresters, or NGO-workers as well.
Using examples from my own fieldwork and doctoral research in Eastern Burkina Faso,
this paper will show how anthropologists can conduct a study of different actors on the
interface of local, national and global environmental politics in order to contribute
effectively to nuanced knowledge on ‘community participation’ in the current
conservation and development debates. My research engagement lies in the careful and
accurate description of different local actors and their relations and interactions in the
conservation arena. It is important to not only portray local actors as victims of the
“repressive state” or of international conservation regimes, but increasingly as agents
who are state and international actors or who negotiate and compromise with state and
international actors. As such, all local actors take part in and inform the construction of
the state and the global world. The study of the actual and interactional street-level
discourses and practices between the different actors in the conservation arena forges
the grounds of my research on how people find their ways to actively engage or
(re)constitute their ‘environment’ and ‘development’. Ideally, this knowledge is the
foundation for ‘participatory’ projects on environment and development.