Doctoral Dissertation Research: Disentangling the All-Powerful Development Machine: The Political Dynamics Behind Saving Madagascar's Biodiversity

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This doctoral dissertation research project examines key factors that have catalyzed U.S. funding for environment within its foreign aid agenda in Madagascar. Given the context of the global biodiversity conservation movement and a historical struggle between the Malagasy state and rural shifting cultivators, U.S. funding exerts a powerful influence on Madagascar's national environmental program. Specifically, this research analyzes how ideas and practices associated with sustainable development and biodiversity conservation have evolved through the Washington, D.C. policy-making process, as well as through negotiations in Madagascar over the national environment program and contemporary forest protection measures. With this case study, the research addresses a lacuna in political ecology and post-development literature by tracing the production of a development agenda through power-laden networks that span policy-making sites across the developed and developing worlds. It responds to a call within both fields for empirical knowledge garnered through the methods of bureaucratic ethnography, by utilizing historically-informed textual analysis and key informant interviews in Washington, D.C. and Madagascar. In applying concepts from critical human geography to enlighten understanding of bureaucratic function and the policy process, the research moves beyond traditional development critiques of project outcomes to focus on the complex policy process. It traces how ideas and programs are created across networks and alliances of organizations, and it examines how and why these ideas and practices articulate at specific points in time and space. Its goal is to clarify for policy makers and academics alike how development ideas are created and translated throughout the policy process, what influences this trajectory and what choices and constraints policy makers face both in the United States and overseas.