Resource Management and Geography - Theses
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ItemTransitional environmentality: conservation as territoriality in Timor-Leste( 2016)This thesis investigates conservation as a process of state territorialisation amongst customary communities in Timor-Leste and argues for a more nuanced understanding of environmentality that reflects an observed transitional nature. While conservation has been critiqued as a territorialisation process, coherent examination of the rhizomatic form of its interrelated components in an assembled whole is lacking. Furthermore environmentality, the governing of environmental behaviors central to this practice, has been given little critical attention as a dynamic process of transitory uncertainty. In addition to these gaps there has been little examination of livelihood impacts regarding conservation implementation in Timor-Leste. I work to interrogate these issues and in doing so illuminate the socio-environmental and political complexity of resource contestation across different scales and multiple stakeholders in the fragile half-island state. Analysis in this endeavor utilizes a political ecology framework that is equally attentive to the material and discursive dimensions of environmental change in relation to power. Attention is firstly drawn to the political-economic and environmental history of forest management in Timor-Leste. It is demonstrated that the colonial and occupational legacies have strongly shaped current environmental conditions as well as the local social institutions that inform them, while state appropriation of land for ‘conservation’ has historical precedence. At two case study sites (including Timor’s first national park), I explore the similarly significant livelihood impacts occurring despite different intended management approaches. These impacts stem largely from a ‘displacement of access’ to essential resources and customary practices. Through bans on essential livelihood practices including swidden, livelihood opportunities have diminished. Resulting outcomes have been food insecurity; increased land conflicts; marginalization of customary ontology; and a greatly increased susceptibility to disaster events. Analysis shows that while conservation management strove to improve environmental conditions in protected areas it also exacerbated degradation, translocating it to remaining villager land and thereby acting to reproduce demands for itself. The logic of territorial expansion is revealed to occur through a state assembly of multiple new discursive articulations of landscape. These include: landscape as wilderness, the state as technical expert, local users as resource degraders, neoliberalisation of the environment and nationalization of local natures. Central to this are state aspirations of political subjectivity and villager eco-rationalising of the environment which is unsettled by the aforementioned livelihood impacts, weak governance and poor consultation. This unsettling threatens to fracture the very legitimacy of state conservation claims. I argue that this juncture of uncertainty where such processes pool and coalesce, illuminates a new mode of environmentality practiced; one whereby villager environmental behaviors warily reflect adherence to the state’s concerns, but only transitionally or temporarily. Adherence to the demands of state conservation is perched precariously on unstable discursive undergirding by the friction and tension of weakly produced environmental truths. In such a position local acquiescence is sensitive to further experiences of livelihood impacts or state fallibility. These may potentially rupture claims of authority causing slippage, unless the state is able to effectively argue otherwise. It is at these junctures then that local resistance emerges and articulation begins.