Madagascar’s Environmental Mediators: Decentralizing and Democratizing Government under the International Biodiversity Regime

Biodiversity is central to the contemporary development and environmental discourses, although the complexity of problems such as deforestation and soil erosion, and the multiple actors and interests involved in attempts to manage them, make current international negotiations highly politicized. The stated aims of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are to regulate access to biological and genetic resources in order to ensure their sustainable use and the equitable sharing of benefits within host countries and among the latter and corporate interests. Based on general principles such as in the CBD, working rules are being formulated in a dynamic process between local, state, and international actors. Yet rather than to express a consensus on the common interest of all stakeholders, these rules tend to reflect what internationally powerful actors perceive as such. Illegitimate working rules are likely to foster local conflict and insecurity, thereby increasing ecological risk.
The research project intends to show that in order to be effective, law reform in developing countries should be rooted in the specific socio-economic and institutional trajectories of those societies. Field research will be conducted in the form of a case study on the evolution of Madagascar’s environmental policy. Like many among the developing countries, Madagascar has to cope with unsustainable pressure on resources, including illegal occupation and deforestation of protected areas. The protected areas scheme has cut off local communities’ territories and generated de facto open access to biological and genetic resources. After recognizing that in the present socio-economic context, the intention to exclude the population from their livelihoods is unrealistic, the Malagasy government provided in 1996 for a negotiated procedure to allocate limited but exclusive use rights to village communitiesang1024 on land held as State property. In a way similar to an ombudsman, independent environmental mediators consider on a common basis the different perceptions and interests of concerned parties, namely State (development) agencies, territorial government units, village communities, NGOs. The new resource management framework is expected to stop environmental degradation, but implementation has so far been limited and heavily dependent on local political factors. The question how peasant communities can be successfully involved in sustainable management still awaits clarification.