Organizer and Chair: Ronald J. Herring, Cornell University
Discussants: Ann Grodzins Gold, Syracuse University; Mark Poffenberger, University of California; Arun Agrawal, Yale University; Tania Li, Dalhousie University; Walt Coward, Ford Foundation, New York; Akhil Gupta, Stanford University
Since at least the seventies, academics, activists, administrators, and grassroots organizations sharing concerns for ecological recovery and social equity, have sought and often found solutions of appropriate scale and technology in community-based institutions. Effective administration and demonstrable successes evidently lie behind the turn to small-scale participatory strategies, to projects based on local perceptions. Contributing to the elevation of community solutions were dramatic instances of local resistance to mega-development and its ecological damages, as well as critiques by intellectuals and activists of externally imposed alien knowledge systems. Ideologies of empowerment for poor people and goals of social equity converge with heightened respect for local knowledge, conservation ethics and community administration.
Recently, however, voices from several directions target a misconstrued "romanticization" of indigenous ecological wisdom, and question whether local administration necessarily furthers or fosters equity. Grant officers reassess the effectiveness of community resource management; in disparate locations people talk of disillusionment with community often linked causally to global economic pressures, and sometimes to state and NGO activities.
We hope to begin to disentangle strands of these complexly interwoven themes. Who defines community, and who judges collective action’s success? Do the parameters of local success encompass planetary desiderata such as maintaining biodiversity or avoiding global warming? What common features are diagnostic of a sense of loss or deterioration of community? Is there something about the present that generates false nostalgia? What convergence exists between academic urges to de-romanticize indigeneity and cynicism from within communities? How are agencies concerned with environment and development programs responding to these currents? We hope interdisciplinary and interregional discussion will engage real places and broader issues simultaneously.