Doctoral Dissertation Research: Agents of the Environmental State: Indigenous Authority and Environmental Regulation on the Philippines' "Last Frontier"

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Doctoral Dissertation Research: Agents of the Environmental State: Indigenous Authority and Environmental Regulation on the Philippines' "Last Frontier"The researcher examines the intersection between new biodiversity conservation projects and ongoing government efforts to regulate minority populations. Research will be conducted at the site of an internationally funded conservation project on Palawan Island, a place long known as the Philippines' "last frontier" and now recognized globally as a "biodiversity hotspot." Under existing laws, indigenous leaders in Palawan are expected to help enforce new environmental regulations, but their authority to do so remains in question due to uncertainty over whether it has any basis in indigenous custom. As a result, the participation of these leaders is uneven and their legitimacy contested. This study asks (1) how differing ideas about indigenous political authority shape the implementation of new environmental regulations and (2) how this variation relates to broader processes of social and environmental change. To explore these questions, the researcher will use social science methods, including archival research, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and social network analysis. Scientists and policy-makers increasingly stress the need for local participation in the establishment and enforcement of environmental institutions, but efforts to heed their calls often meet with unanticipated political and cultural complications. This study will offer an ethnographic account of how such complications develop in a context where profound differences of culture and power separate minority populations from the officials who seek their cooperation.