Conservation Is Our Government Now

by West, Paige

• ISBN13: 9780822337492
• ISBN10: 0822337495
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-06-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

A significant contribution to political ecology,Conservation Is Our Government Nowis an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program-mostly ngo workers-and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each grouprs"s expectations led to disappointment for both.West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area-including ideas of space, place, environment, and society-was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts,Conservation Is Our Government Nowdemonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

Author Biography

Paige West is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Acknowledgments	xxiii
Abbreviations and Acronyms	xxix
1. New Guinea—New York	1	(26)
2. Making Crater Mountain	27	(25)
3. Articulations, Histories, Development	52	(73)
4. Conservation Histories	125	(22)
5. A Land of Pure Possibility	147	(36)
6. The Practices of Conservation-as-Development	183	(32)
7. Exchanging Conservation for Development	215	(24)
Appendices	239	(12)
Notes	251	(28)
Bibliography	279	(32)
Index	311