This collection of original essays powerfully demonstrates the vital role communities can play in conserving nature and resources; it also clearly articulates the dangers community actors face in wresting a place at the negotiating table. Based on research in more than twelve countries, the volume provides a feast of real world insights into the transnational movement called community-based conservation. It is the starting point for anyone interested in the shifting landscape of debates on conservation.
Arun Agrawal, University of Michigan Communities and Conservation is a solid effort to debate and document the historical development, political shape, and complexity of community-based natural resource management. It asks hard questions of all the actors involved in people and conservation issues. By challenging our understandings of social justice, cultural respect, and community, this book should be required reading for all conservation organizations, development institutions, and government agencies.
Thomas O. McShane, senior conservation advisor, World Wildlife Fund International A unique and necessary volume. The editors perform a vital service in assembling this stellar cast from the scholarly, activist, and donor communities. The dialogue here is unprecedented and much-needed. This lively and engaging book is itself an example of the coalition-building the authors propose—a world-changing traffic of ideas and practices across geographical, political, and professional borders.
Hugh Raffles, University of California, Santa Cruz Communities and Conservation provides a bracing challenge to advocates of both conservation of biodiversity and the rights of local peoples. The terrain of conflict and cooperation between these two communities has not been well mapped, and self-promoting arguments of elision, laden with shibboleths, are too common. If either side is to succeed, let alone if the numerous areas of agreement are to be achieved, questions such as raised in this perceptive, important book must be understood and addressed.
Kent H. Redford, Wildlife Conservation Society The book speaks to a range of topics such as social movements, transnationalism, and environmentalism. For historians, anthropologists, sociologists, or political scientists interested in these issues, this book will be 'good to think with' due to its combination of rich case studies with nuanced theoretical insights. The origins and history of the transnational network explored here is not easily explained, and this book is as much an analysis and archive of its emergence, as it is about community-based natural resource management per se.
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Community is what Raymond Williams called a 'keyword', a sort of semantic building block whose meanings are bound up with the problems the word is being used to address. Communities and Conservation explores both the historical and institutional semantics of community and how community has become a building block—what they call a charismatic program—for the making of contemporary conservation and resource management. Residing within its institutional perimeters are subtle forms of rule, identity, discipline, and power, and also, as the authors show, the potential to challenge conventional models of governance and sustainable development. An indispensable collection for any understanding of the intersections of social justice and advocacy in the realm of natural resource management.
Michael Watts, director, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley This collection consists of well-written and powerful chapters, which will serve as references for students, researchers and practitioners in years to come.
Tor A. Benjaminsen, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
Development and Change