Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea

by Paige West

Overview

A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is 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 group’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 Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822337492
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	05/31/2006
Series:	New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.16(w) x 9.08(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

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

2. Making Crater Mountain 27

3. Articulations, Histories, Development 52

4. Conservation Histories 125

5. A Land of Pure Possibility 147

6. The Practices of Conservation-as-Development 183

7. Exchanging Conservation for Development 215

Appendices 239

Notes 251

Bibliography 279

Index 311

Editorial Reviews

Conservation Is Our Government Now is a timely and significant contribution to contemporary critical scholarship on conservation. More than any other study of which I am aware, it provides an ethnographically rich, nuanced account of the encounter between conservation practitioners and a local community. It is an exemplar of the power of ethnographic writing to reveal other subjectivities and other ways of being.”—J. Peter Brosius, coeditor of Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management


“Incisive, moving, and beautifully written, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an absolutely exemplary study and a completely absorbing narrative. It is quite simply one of the most sophisticated political ecology books I have read to date.”—Neil Smith, author of The Endgame of Globalization

From the Publisher