The rules of the United States Congress. The eager advocacy and fundraising of lemur scientists. The constraints of an underfunded, indebted Malagasy government. The poor farmers scratching a living from the land. The agency staffers shuttling from meeting to meeting in Antananarivo. In Corridors of Power, Catherine Corson masterfully shows how a conjuncture of devoted people with diverse interests and operating under institutional restrictions came together to focus US development aid to Madagascar on biodiversity in parks. Yes, that's right, development aid spent on biodiversity in parks.
By undertaking hundreds of interviews and analyzing piles of documents, Corson documents how American ‘environmental aid’ developed in Madagascar over the past four decades. While others might tell the story (naïvely) in terms of a succession of policies and projects, or (critically) as a postcolonial narrative, she succeeds in focusing our attention on the formal and informal ways different participants – shaped and constrained by their institutional, political, and ideological contexts – negotiated and collaborated with each other, contesting events and interventions in the process. The interactions between scientists, agency staffers, conservationists, and others – while constantly reconfigured and renegotiated – consistently produced a similar outcome: priority for biodiversity conservation instead of broader environment and development goals.
This book illustrates several important points. For one, it highlights the side effects of strong conservation on other realms and sectors, including on the Malagasy state (still weak, still dependent), the mining industries (benefiting from a sort of blind eye), and the rural peasants (ignored again). In addition, it unpicks how exactly USAID and conservationists came to depend upon each other. The story is rooted in longstanding Western perceptions of Madagascar as a naturalist's paradise, American domestic politics (Republicans can safely claim ‘green’ credentials supporting parks in far-off places), the global ‘moment’ of interest in sustainable development, and the neoliberal turn in politics that sees civil society organizations as legitimate implementers and lobbyists. As American (and Malagasy) government agencies turned to non-state organizations to implement projects, they became dependent on these organizations to mobilize support for the agendas behind that work, which increased the power of the non-profit entities. Unelected and unaccountable non-state actors thus wield considerable influence, such as the trio of conservation agencies often highlighted in the book: Conservation International, Wildlife Conservation Society, and WWF.
After a series of introductory and historical background chapters, the core of the book features four chapters using different entry points to tell the stories that build the argument outlined above. Chapter Four is a Washington-insider account of how ‘environment’ became a focus of USAID and how this was narrowed over time to ‘biodiversity’. It traces the actors, their institutional constraints, and their ideological working spaces. It shows that biodiversity serves as an uncontentious policy target that is acceptable to a broad coalition including more conservative politicians and corporations; and it shows how neoliberal reforms to USAID helped empower the large conservation organizations who receive much of the funding and effectively lobby for this approach.
Chapter Five focuses on the negotiation of the National Environmental Action Plan in Madagascar in the early 1990s. It demonstrates how protected conservation areas repeatedly floated to the top as a priority intervention, despite other possibilities. Importantly, the chapter highlights what the NEAP did not do. For instance, it did not strengthen or reinforce government capacity to regulate industries based on natural resources, particularly commercial logging and mining. Instead, it built protected areas and, by investing in non-state actors, it weakened the state.
Chapter Six turns the lens towards USAID's Madagascar program, shifting focal lengths between headquarters in Washington, the program office in Antananarivo, and the offices and interests of contractors, implementing agencies, and partners. It illustrates the institutional dynamics that propelled USAID to fund so many biodiversity conservation activities, and unpacks the marriage of convenience between USAID and US-based conservation organizations. These organizations were strengthened through the streams of American funding; in turn, the aid agency relied on their ‘neutral’ lobbying power to secure a continuing large budget for Madagascar.
The ‘point of entry’ of Chapter Seven is the 2003 announcement by President Marc Ravalomanana of a goal to triple the protected areas of the island. It describes the machinations behind this proposal, as well as the ways in which actors with potential conflicting interests were either accommodated (mining companies) or largely ignored (local villagers) in implementing the proposal. In the Conclusion, among other things, Corson judiciously reminds the reader how the events she has portrayed show the relational and dynamic interplay between individual agency and structural power across time and space.
This book joins a select set of research that effectively and deeply investigates how development practice is shaped by the organizations and people doing it – one thinks of David Mosse's Cultivating Development (2005), which investigated a British aid program in India, or Michael Goldman's Imperial Nature (2005), which analysed the World Bank's work in Laos across multiple scales. Corridors of Power is an exemplary book that joins the ranks of those studies.
