The power of transnational environmental governance: biodiversity conservation in North-South context

This paper examines the North-South power relationships involved in transnational environmental governance. It investigates the ways that the global conservation movement can transform particular places in the South: landscapes can be redesigned, local social relationships with nature might be disrupted and the political arrangements within countries can be changed in fundamental ways. These transformations are clear when we examine transnational environmental management in the context of North-South relations; it is clear that we need to develop a nuanced understanding of how apparently well intentioned and reasonable global aims can produce new dynamics that can be detrimental to some of the poorest and most marginalised communities in the world. The transformations produce new challenges and opportunities, and it is important for us to ask who benefits, how and why, and who is disadvantaged, how and why. In this paper I examine the case of biodiversity conservation to draw out how Northern inspired environmental agendas have the capacity to fundamentally re-draw national policy frameworks, national governance arrangements and develop new and potentially destructive relationships between local communities and the environment. The transboundary nature of global environmental change has meant that it has become a key site for global environmental governance. Oceans, forests, wildlife, the atmosphere and so on all cross human constructed national boundaries. Good environmental management has largely been defined in terms of supranational conventions, policies and agreements. The environment has clearly become a key area for governance of local resources at the global level because numerous international regimes are deemed to operate for the ???global good???. However, an examination of these global environmental regimes reveals that they embody multiple and competing interest groups rather than representing a common global view that can be effectively implemented at the local level. This paper will examine the challenges posed to transnational environmental governance by local, national and North-South dynamics. International conservation frameworks are defined by broader struggles over definitions of nature, appropriate management and who has the right to use nature and in what ways. This paper will firstly examine the growth in the powers of transnational environmental NGOs; secondly it will set out the idea of governance states; and thirdly it will use the changing nature if governance mechanisms in Madagascar to draw out how global framings of and funding of biodiversity conservation has the capacity to transform relationships at the local, national and international scales.