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

本博士论文研究项目考察了促使美国在马达加斯加对外援助议程中为环境提供资金的关键因素。考虑到全球生物多样性保护运动的背景，以及马达加斯加政府与农村流动种植者之间的历史斗争，美国的资助对马达加斯加的国家环境计划施加了强大的影响。具体而言，本研究分析了与可持续发展和生物多样性保护相关的理念和实践是如何通过华盛顿特区的决策过程以及在马达加斯加就国家环境计划和当代森林保护措施进行的谈判而演变的。通过这一案例研究，该研究通过追踪跨越发达国家和发展中国家决策地点的权力网络制定发展议程，解决了政治生态学和后发展文献中的一个空白。它响应了这两个领域中通过官僚民族志方法获得的经验知识的呼吁，通过利用历史知情的文本分析和在华盛顿特区和马达加斯加的关键线人访谈。在应用批判性人文地理学的概念来启发对官僚功能和政策过程的理解时，该研究超越了对项目结果的传统发展批评，转而关注复杂的政策过程。它追溯了思想和计划是如何在组织网络和联盟中产生的，并研究了这些思想和实践如何以及为什么在特定的时间和空间点上表达出来。其目标是为政策制定者和学者澄清发展理念是如何在整个政策过程中产生和转化的，是什么影响了这一轨迹，以及美国和海外的政策制定者面临哪些选择和限制。

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.