University of Kentucky doctoral candidate Ryan Anderson, supervised by Dr. Sarah Lyon, will undertake research on the local ecological effects of conflicts about development projects. Anderson will focus on tensions that may arise between economic values, on the one hand, and moral and cultural values on the others. He will carry out the research on the East Cape of Baja California Sur, Mexico, where preliminary research indicates that a large-scale development project has residents deeply divided. The research is designed to explore connections between the social production of cultural, ethical, and economic value and how people use, understand, exploit, and shape the geographic and ecological spaces in which they live.
Anderson will conduct 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with two communities in the region. He will employ a multi-faceted research design that includes participant observation, open-ended and semi-structured interviews, GPS mapping, and photographic documentation. These data will allow him to 1) document the range of resident responses; 2) understand the relationship between competing social values and design and use of tourism destinations; and 3) and identify connections between the larger political economy of tourism and local impacts on culture, society, and access to critical resources such as public space and water.
Findings from this research will contribute to social scientific understanding of how different kinds of values affect and are affected by local economic development projects and tourism projects in particular. In addition to supporting the training of a social scientist, this research will be significant for community members, academics, and policymakers at both the local and global level.
University of Kentucky doctoral candidate Ryan Anderson completed twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork on the East Cape of Baja California Sur, where he investigated an ongoing social battle about the impending development of this once isolated place. Focusing his research on the community of Cabo Pulmo, which sits alongside the Cabo Pulmo National Park, Anderson’s research how residents responded to the possibility of large-scale tourism and residential development. Over the past several years, the residents of Cabo Pulmo have been engaged in an extended campaign to prevent several incarnations of a project that would effectively create a new tourism city in the heart of the sparsely populated East Cape. Many residents feared that such development would bring environmental degradation, increased crime, dispossession, and a loss of economic livelihoods. But other residents—especially in surrounding communities—remained optimistic about the potential of large-scale development in the region, primary because of an expectation that such projects will bring employment and other economic opportunities. But this isn’t simply a story about people either being for or against development. One of Anderson’s findings is that many residents of Cabo Pulmo who are strongly against large-scale development also adamantly express their support for an alternative development model that avoids the pitfalls of places such as Cancun and Los Cabos. Many advocate smaller-scale, "sustainable" development that can bring beneficial changes without radically altering their current way of life. So the challenge, for these residents, isn’t fighting against development as much as it is defining what development means for them. Toward that goal, a group of Cabo Pulmo’s residents, led by a local community organization, has been working to build stronger relationships with surrounding East Cape communities in order to create a regional development plan. But these efforts have been hindered by one undeniable fact: everyone is fighting over the land itself. One of Anderson’s primary conclusions is that disputes over land ownership—especially in placed such as Cabo Pulmo—stand in the way of efforts to promote regional solidarity. In the end, development is a matter of who has the right to control what happens to a given place of piece of land. The development future of Cabo Pulmo—and the East Cape as a whole—rests upon the clarification of land tenure. Sustainable development will be next to impossible if local residents’ rights to the land itself remain tenuous, unclear, and undefined.
