Organizer: J. Peter Brosius, University of Georgia
Chair: Michael R. Dove, East-West Center
Discussant: Henri Bastaman, Ministry of State for Environment, Jakarta
In recent years "the environment" has become a central element in the civic and political discourse of Asian nations. Environmental discourses are deployed not only by local and transnational Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) but, increasingly, by national governments themselves-a matter that is too often overlooked. This panel examines the continuing emergence of Asian environmental discourses in order to understand the ways in which different sets of agents have appropriated this discursive element and are transforming it. Toward that end, members of this two-part panel are guided by two central questions. First, to what degree is it possible to identify the source of particular discursive elements, and the processes by which such elements are diffused, appropriated, and transformed? Second, in what ways are the discourses of the environment employed by different sets of actors as a pivot around which to frame and contest a range of other concerns: social justice, resource rights, ethnicity, history, national sovereignty, development, and the like. Emerging from those two larger questions are a range of more specific issues. How do local NGOs transform internationally valorized discourses of things such as biodiversity or indigenous resource rights in the context of particular political cultures? How are those discourses in turn appropriated by national governments to legitimize traditional configurations of power or co-opt nascent environmental movements? And how do these local appropriations of the transnational discourse of environmentalism themselves transform elements of the transnational discourse?
Rethinking "Thinking Globally and Acting Locally": A Critical Look at
North-South Environmental Rhetoric
Michael R. Dove, East-West Center
A perduring challenge of human environmental relations is to develop conceptual tools that transcend specific times and places. An emerging challenge of global environmentalism is to develop tools that are transcendent without being self-privileging. A case in point involves one of the most important conceptions of global environmentalism-the injunction to "think globally and act locally" (TG/AL). We will attempt to show how this phrase has been appropriated in global environmental discourse-in particular between "North" and "South"-to address not transcendent ecological issues but parochial social, political, and economic ones.
Environmentalists in the North developed the concept of TG/AL as a reaction against localized, non-systemic thinking. However, critics in the South argue that the concept focuses attention on problems of the global level at the expense of the local level, implying that what is good for the globe is good for the local community. And indeed, people vary in their degree of involvement in local versus global political-economic systems, and their self-interests vary accordingly.
On the other hand, some Southern governments have just used the critique of TG/AL to divert attention from despoliation of the environment by local elites. They have invoked the specter of global environmentalism to recast politically unpopular disputes over local resource degradation and social equity as politically popular ones about the world order.
This zone of contestation between Northern and Southern, and transcendent and parochial, environmental discourses will be examined using data from South and Southeast Asia.
Elephants or People: The Debate on the Huai Kha Khaeng and Thung Yai Naresuan
World Heritage Sight
Anders Baltzer Jorgensen, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen
While the forest cover of Thailand is decreasing drastically, an increasing number of forest areas are being reserved as protected areas, national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. The most prominent of these is the Huai Kha Khaeng and Thung Yai Naresuan World Heritage Site, which has been planned by the Thai Government in cooperation with the World Bank. The project has come under criticism from several directions. A main point of criticism is the anticipated role of the people living in or around the forest-mainly Lao and Karen.
The project has now become an important element in the general debate on forest conservation, biodiversity conservation, indigenous property rights and indigenous knowledge in Thailand. These terms have now been adopted in a Thai political discourse where institutional procedures and participation loom large. The parties to this debate are mostly divided into two camps: (1) biological conservationists and (2) those who emphasize participation by local forest people. This confrontation tends to render the two groups in fixed positions.
The first part of the paper presents the types of discourse and action employed by different sets of actors: central and local government agencies, NGOs, academics, journalists, and donors. The second part will focus on the Karen: the way they have appropriated environmental discourses, their perception of what is at stake for the forest, and their own survival strategies. Finally, some implications for the general discourse on conservation will be suggested.
Saving Siberut: The Discourse of Natural and Cultural Heritage Conservation in
Indonesia
Gerard A. Persoon, Leiden University
For more than 15 years the island of Siberut (West Sumatra) has been the focus of much attention by a number of Indonesian governmental institutions and international organizations (WWF, Conservation International, Survival International) with an interest in conserving the natural and cultural heritage of the island. Recently the Asian Development Bank has launched a multi-million dollar project to conserve the biodiversity of the island. This project is based on the so-called Integrated Protected Area System (IPAS) approach, which mandates participation by local communities. On Siberut, however, this is a totally new phenomenon: there is no tradition of participation in matters which originate from outside. The history of outside involvement on the island has been characterized by imposed changes (logging, resettlement, new religions, abandonment of traditional culture). "Biodiversity conservation" and "sustainable development planning" represent yet another kind of external imposition on local communities.
This paper will examine the history of environmental discourse with respect to Siberut, focusing on the kinds of language used and the kinds of methods employed by a range of actors and institutions who have operated from highly divergent motives and perspectives.
Dispatches from Penang: Discursive Production and Praxis in Malaysian Rainforest
Politics
J. Peter Brosius, University of Georgia
Beginning in 1987 the environmental group Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) became the pivot of a broad-based transnational environmental campaign against logging in Sarawak, East Malaysia. In an effort to internationalize the campaign, SAM established itself as a clearinghouse for information and joined with a number of international environmental NGOs in a sustained critique of the political economy of logging in Malaysia. For their part, foreign environmentalists organized actions in their own countries in an attempt to influence Malaysian environmental affairs.
Subsequent to this, however, SAM became increasingly disillusioned with Euro-american environmentalists, who carried out activities that SAM considered inappropriate. Thus, from 1990 on, SAM distanced itself from foreign NGOs, and SAM rhetoric began to mirror that of the Malaysian government. SAM began to frame environmental concerns not as a critique of Malaysian political elites, but as a North/South issue. At the 1992 Rio Summit SAM representatives explicitly endorsed the Malaysian government's position on Northern "eco-colonialism."
In this paper I examine this shift in SAM's perspective. In particular, I consider the degree to which it can be seen as a response to actual events as the Sarawak logging campaign unfolded, as opposed to a response originating in the discursive realm, as North/South rhetoric was increasingly deployed by Southern activists and intellectuals from the late-1980s on. This case has implications for understanding how environmental politics are configured through a dialectical process that emerges in the interplay between discursive production and concrete praxis by particular agents.