Radio broadcasting for sustainable development in southern Madagascar

The Millennium Development Goals have been written into the Madagascar Road Map (2007 - 2012) in order to improve the Malagasy social, economic and environmental situation. The Andrew Lees Trust Radio Broadcasting Project in southern Madagascar has been set up to alleviate poverty and, through a recent DFID (Department for International Development) funded evaluation study, has demonstrated its contribution and work towards the United Nations targets set for 2015. This article draws on the DFID study, “The Contribution of Radio to Millennium Development Goals in Southern Madagascar“, to illustrate the project’s success in approaching the main goals of poverty alleviation and education. Radio is a cost effective, non-formal learning medium, which can reach across vast geographic distances to communities in the most remote and isolated regions, and can deliver vital development information to all members of the community irrespective of age, gender, or beliefs. This article reinforces the assertion that radio can act as a vital tool in reaching Millennium Development Goals in Madagascar and beyond.RÉSUMÉ Les Objectifs de Développement du Millénium ont été inscrits sur la Feuille de Route de Madagascar afin d’améliorer la situation sociale, économique et environnementale à Madagascar. Le projet d’émission radiophonique de l’ONG Andrew Lees Trust a été élaboré pour lutter contre la pauvreté et s’est avéré capable d’apporter des éléments décisifs pour atteindre les objectifs fixés par les Nations Unies pour 2015 selon une étude récente du Département pour le Développement International (DFID). Cet article s’inspire des études du DFID “The Contribution of Radio to Millennium Development Goals in Southern Madagascar” pour illustrer en partie la réussite du projet quant à la réalisation des principaux objectifs que sont l’éducation et la diminution de la pauvreté. La radio est un moyen de communication peu onéreux, qui ne nécessite aucune formation particulière mais qui a la capacité de couvrir de vastes zones géographiques pour atteindre les communautés les plus isolées et les plus reculées afin qu’elles aient accès, quel que soit leur age, sexe, et croyance, à des informations essentielles portant sur le développement. Cet article confirme l’importance vitale de la radio pour atteindre les Objectifs de Développement du Millénium à Madagascar

Resource Warfare, Pacification and the Spectacle of ‘Green’ Development: Logics of Violence in Engineering Extraction in Southern Madagascar

Bringing political ecology's concern with the critical politics of nature and resource violence into dialogue with key debates in political geography, critical security studies and research on the geographies and phenomenology of violence and warfare, this paper explores strategies ‘from above’ in relation to the establishment and operation of the Rio Tinto QIT-Madagascar Minerals (QMM) ilmenite mine in southeast Madagascar. While QMM claims to be a responsible ‘green’ self-regulator and sustainable development actor, it has triggered serious social, environmental and legal conflicts since its inception, including allegations of a ‘double land grab’ to accommodate mining activities and compensatory biodiversity offsetting. We argue that ‘pacification’, theorised as a productive form of violence that works through the re-ordering of socio-nature, underwrites the forms of ‘security’, ‘stability’ and even ‘sustainability’ that facilitate multiple and overlapping strategies of value extraction in the territorial and extra-territorial spaces occupied by the QMM mine partnership. By situating these dynamics historically, we identify ways in which pacification draws upon sedimented and evolving logics of racialised violence to facilitate operations and silence opposition