Feminist Conservation: Politics and Power in Madagascar’s Marine Commons is a theoretically innovative and empirically grounded analysis of conservation aid. As an incisive contribution to critical human geography, feminist studies, and critical conservation studies, it draws on decolonial, intersectional, and care-based approaches to bring a feminist lens to Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work on common property. In her theory of feminist conservation, Dr. Baker-Médard draws attention to the gendered power relations of resource management. She advocates for commoning as a process that understands community resource use, rights, and management as dynamic rather than the commons as a set of material resources.
Madagascar is popularly known as both one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots and one of the world’s poorest countries, and thus it is a site of significant tension between conservation and development. The sense of urgency that many conservationists feel to save Madagascar’s biodiversity encourages rapid assessments and project implementation, which often lead to shortchanged community consultations.
This book details the everyday practices through which coercive community consultations and gendered participation transpire. In its constant attention to the interplay between proximate and ultimate drivers of environmental degradation, it sets a high standard for ethnographers of community natural resource management. It is meticulously empirically grounded in long-term, immersive ethnographic field work. Over 13 years, Dr. Baker-Médard conducted 889 surveys across 19 villages, 92 semi-structured interviews, and 26 oral histories in addition to utilizing conversational methodology and participant observation. Speaking multiple Malagasy dialects, she obtained critical knowledge about resource use patterns. Further, her commitment to collaboration with Malagasy academics is of note, given the challeges faced by academic institutions in Madagascar.
The book draws across multiple disciplines, combining a postcolonial intersectional approach with racial capitalism and critical race theory. In reminding us how colonialization shaped and continues to shape conservation, Dr. Baker-Médard captures the everyday experiences of gender and whiteness and the moments of inclusion and exclusion entailed therein. She illustrates how historically grounded racist perceptions of Madagascar and Malagasy continue to shape conservationist perceptions of communities as isolated, backward, and inefficient. Disrupting so-called gender neutral, race, and class-blind conservation endeavors, she argues that conservation can overcome its imperialist and masculinist history by focusing on commoning.
In this way, she also translates her theoretical critique into practical recommendations, bridging conservation science and critical conservation studies. As she demonstrates so clearly, the fundamental flaw of conservation is its tendency to ignore power. She shows how the formalization of rights often reinforces racial, class-based, and gendered inequities. Likewise, she illustrates how metrics such as professionalization and the privileging of boats over feet, fisher cards, and fishing closures, combined with narratives of community management and women’s empowerment, obscure intra- and intercommunity power dynamics. As a result, well-intended marine conservation efforts reinforce gendered labor relations while simultaneously eliding the ultimate drivers of biodiversity loss. Her detailed field research shows how, in their haste to conquer the marine frontier in time to meet global biodiversity targets, conservation organizations make promises to communities for consultation and empowerment that they then abandon. Ultimately, she argues that to be successful, conservation has to fundamentally shift how power is negotiated across scales and among its players.
The theory of feminist conservation is an expansive, ambitious call for a complete transformation in the way that conservation is done. Rather than reviewing the theory in its entirety, because everyone should read the book, I will focus on a few key aspects.
First, Dr. Baker-Médard perceptively challenges Ostrom’s principles for their lack of engagement with gendered and class-based power dynamics. Bringing dynamism, relationality, and situated perspective to theories of common property, feminist conservation asserts that boundaries are not always clearly defined, nor should they be, given the mobility of species. It highlights the impact of enclosures of common pool resources, including knowledge, and most importantly, underscores how one’s worldview shapes one’s understanding of the conditions for which rules are created.
Second, the theory engages the structural drivers of oppression and ecological decline, including climate change, on a broader scale. In challenging the dichotomy between traditional and export fishing, it argues that a focus on the local is insufficient for effective conservation. Dr. Baker-Médard writes, “by focusing on changing or stopping fishing methods used by women and poor fishers, conservation organizations relinquish responsibility to address larger systemic drivers, which tend to be politically fraught, multiscale and temporally complex” (p. 45). While this is not a new argument, it is one that has fallen on deaf ears for decades under colonial, capitalist conservation interventions.
Third, it advocates for just and effective participation in decision-making, underscoring not just the importance of who is at the decision-making table but also the need to redress the constraints that might keep them from being there. It argues for compensating people for time from normal labor demands. It advocates for procedural justice in the form of inclusive and representative decision-making that is centered on participants’ own cosmologies and ontologies. This approach forces conservationists and development agents to confront their own racial and colonial biases that discount other peoples’ time. It commits to rights-based approaches and decolonialization not just in reports, but in the everyday experiences of human lives.
Fourth, feminist conservation promotes the decolonization of resource management regimes. In careful detail, the book illustrates how aid organizations bind identities and select characteristics that align with Western notions. These approaches tend to favor men and place a disproportionate burden on women. For example, it documents how conservation organizations invoke dina—or Malagasy customary law—when convenient in order to justify particular outcomes. I was particularly struck by the sentence, “In all of the coastal research sites I visited … no dina regarding marine resource use existed before the recent establishment of a marine protected area” (p. 149).
Finally, the theory advocates for “Sea” grass-roots networking and commoning that centers care, social reproduction, and place-based social relationships among humans and with more than human species. Such commoning builds national and transnational networks that recognize the strength of connection and difference and of being contingent rather than fixed.
Dr. Baker-Médard’s vision of feminist conservation is inspiring and hard to argue with, but also challenging to implement. The financial and technology sectors are increasingly influential in global conservation policy, which is now ensconced in the embrace of green capitalism to reach ambitious global targets. Achieving feminist conservation will require a transformation in power relations across scales within and beyond conservation. This challenge raises some questions.
Theoretically, how does the theory of feminist conservation incorporate temporal dynamism and specifically recognize the historical roots of contemporary gendered resource relations? For example, I found myself wondering how political transformations such as French to English colonization and the overtaking of American aid by Chinese investment have transformed small-holder export fishing markets over time.
Likewise, the book is published in the late James Scott’s Agrarian Studies Series. Everyday forms of resistance are a longstanding way of preserving rights around the world, and the book documents how women surreptitiously resist attempts to limit their resource uses, revealing, unsurprisingly, that unofficial understandings as to where extraction can occur do not align with official maps of community conservation areas. I wondered how sea-grass-roots networking could intersect with expanding transnational networks that are advancing rights-based conservation and how rights-based approaches might figure in feminist conservation.
But no book can do everything, and this one already does a lot. In sum, Feminist Conservation: Politics and Power in Madagascar’s Marine Commons offers an exceptional, theoretically and empirically grounded critique of the gendered nature of conservation and a hopeful pathway forward. It is a must-read for conservation and development scholars of all disciplines.
