The Low‐Wage Conservationist: Biodiversity and Perversities of Value in Madagascar

Abstract

In the early 1990s, donors began to implement “integrated conservation and development projects” (ICDPs) in Madagascar to stem deforestation, develop ecotourism, and promote forest conservation practices in rural areas. ICDPs recruited agrarian labor to groom and police parks and disseminate rules. In this article, I present a Marxian analysis of biodiversity's value in the global north, focusing on the role of manual workers in a Biosphere Reserve. I argue that ICDP's reliance on cheap local labor has maintained the historical interdependency of “slash‐and‐burn” agriculture, wage work, and forest conservation. By facilitating the discovery of species while unintentionally perpetuating the conditions of habitat endangerment, the conservation labor process creates forms of rain forest value.

Conservation′s Ambiguities: Rangers on the Periphery of the W Park, Burkina Faso

“…Therefore, "an immersed and open-minded ethnography" which starts from the lived experience of the residents themselves and opens up the Marxian analysis as presented in this analysis-"is essential to any investigation of contexts of cultural difference and intercultural encounter" (Cepek 2011: 512). Sodikoff (2009) pointed out that local-level conservationists are pushed into a position of low-wage labourers, because the international conservation labour process looks for lowwage labourers in the developing countries in order to create biodiversity value in the developed countries. The low wages maintain one ambiguous feature of conservation, namely that local conservationists are forced both to implement conservation and to continue nature destructive practices, because they are not rewarded enough for their jobs (Sodikoff 2009).…”

“…Sodikoff (2009) pointed out that local-level conservationists are pushed into a position of low-wage labourers, because the international conservation labour process looks for lowwage labourers in the developing countries in order to create biodiversity value in the developed countries. The low wages maintain one ambiguous feature of conservation, namely that local conservationists are forced both to implement conservation and to continue nature destructive practices, because they are not rewarded enough for their jobs (Sodikoff 2009). My analysis of the rangers' livelihoods adds to this by showing the multiplicity of conservation's ambiguity.…”

“…They are thus not solely low-wage labourers as Sodikoff (2009) demonstrates. Rather, they are low-wage labourers on a national or international level, but high-wage labourers on the local, rural level.…”

“…A more political economy-or economic anthropological-approach thus seemed to offer a better way to scrutinize how people become environmental subjectivities in practice. My case study of the moral and objective economy of conservation labour on the periphery of the W park in Burkina Faso, however, reveals that the Marxian approaches to conservation (as proposed by many authors: see for e.g., O'Connor 1988;Sodikoff 2009;Cepek 2011;Kelly 2011) or, more generally, the political economy approaches to conservation fail to capture the multiple ambiguities faced and produced by local-level conservationists. Furthermore, these current approaches sometimes underestimate the agency inherent to conservation labour, although in various ways, it is the local-level conservationist who negotiates and reproduces conservation's ambiguities.…”

“…My field experiences were often that the local-level conservationists, who are the pre-eminent environmental subjectivities, are forced to tolerate and even continue some of the environmentally unsustainable practices, such as poaching and clearing large plots of land for agriculture, in order to maintain their livelihoods. As Sodikoff (2009) demonstrates with a Marxian theoretical framework, the current conservation labour structure of the neoliberal conservation processes pushes local-level conservationists into a subordinate position, which is poorly rewarded, and thus forces the residents into destructive practices. A more political economy-or economic anthropological-approach thus seemed to offer a better way to scrutinize how people become environmental subjectivities in practice.…”