Reserve labor: A moral ecology of conservation in Madagascar.

This dissertation examines forest conservation efforts in Madagascar through the practices and meanings of conservation as a form of labor, one which is integrally tied to other land-based labors. It argues that the people versus parks framework of political ecology has obscured tensions internal to postcolonial conservation economies and their division of labor. Biodiversity conservation in Madagascar depends fundamentally on locally-hired, manual workers of NGO-managed projects, yet these workers are the least valued institutionally. The structure and relations of labor end up encouraging the very land uses and land ethics that international planners seek to change, particularly slash-and-bum agriculture (called tavy). I use the concept of moral ecology to denote the interconnectedness of diverse values concerning labor and land, including trees, plants, animals, minerals, and sea beds. The term also alludes to the interdependence of land-based labor processes, such as timber and mining concessions, ritual work, tavy, cash cropping, and the conservation activities of NGOs. Madagascar has been the focus of numerous studies of the people versus parks dynamic due to the scope and intensity of biodiversity protection efforts on the island since the 1980s. Ninety percent of the island's rain forest species exist nowhere else but are threatened by tavy, logging, mining, and other erosive land uses. My analysis dismantles the people versus parks framework by focusing on individuals positioned as both targets and implementers of environmental plans, and by showing how people and parks mutually constitute each other. Findings derive from fourteen months of ethnographic and archival research between 2000 and 2002. They center on Betsimisaraka conservation agents of the Mananara-Nord Biosphere Reserve project in northeast Madagascar. These workers performed the tasks of forest surveillance, trail construction and maintenance, tourist guidance, and conservation awareness-raising among subsistence farmers. As locals, they also engaged in work, such as rice farming, market-vending, fishing, and cash cropping, each involving specific moral and environmental relationships. The study demonstrates how conservation and market-oriented forms of production have been inextricably tied to subsistence agriculture, and how conservation projects incorporate the people they target. More broadly, it documents a postcolonial political economy, where the international focus on biodiversity protection legitimates foreign expropriation of land from the poorest while devaluing the labor that protects and adds value to nature reserves.Ph.D.African historyBiological SciencesCultural anthropologyForestrySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125224/2/3186760.pd