The researcher examines the intersection between new biodiversity conservation projects and ongoing government efforts to regulate minority populations. Research will be conducted at the site of an internationally funded conservation project on Palawan Island, a place long known as the Philippines' "last frontier" and now recognized globally as a "biodiversity hotspot." Under existing laws, indigenous leaders in Palawan are expected to help enforce new environmental regulations, but their authority to do so remains in question due to uncertainty over whether it has any basis in indigenous custom. As a result, the participation of these leaders is uneven and their legitimacy contested. This study asks (1) how differing ideas about indigenous political authority shape the implementation of new environmental regulations and (2) how this variation relates to broader processes of social and environmental change. To explore these questions, the researcher will use social science methods, including archival research, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and social network analysis.
Scientists and policy-makers increasingly stress the need for local participation in the establishment and enforcement of environmental institutions, but efforts to heed their calls often meet with unanticipated political and cultural complications. This study will offer an ethnographic account of how such complications develop in a context where profound differences of culture and power separate minority populations from the officials who seek their cooperation.
This research has examined the changing role of minority populations in environmental governance in the Philippines. Currently, some cultural minority populations in the Philippines are legally recognized as "indigenous people" and afforded special rights in a number of areas, including environmental regulation and resource management. These rights entail obligations that result more intensive contact with governmental institutions. For example, Philippine law requires the leaders of recognized indigenous groups to participate in the formulation and implementation of new conservation measures, such as those that accompany the establishment of national parks and other protected areas. On Palawan Island, however, the status of indigenous leaders is rendered uncertain by overlapping bureaucratic agencies, competing claims to resources, and indigenous practices that conflict with official expectations. In light of this uncertainty, this research has posed two primary questions: First, how do indigenous leaders in Palawan adopt, rework, and challenge differing ideas about their role in environmental regulation as they navigate interventions by the state, NGOs, and business interests? Second, how do these responses affect their constituents, who may face new forces of social differentiation and environmental change as a result of those shifting alliances? To answer these questions, the research has proceeded in two phases. During the first phase, the researcher interviewed government officials, personnel of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and indigenous representatives directly involved in environmental governance. These inquiries revealed competing ideas about the role of indigenous people in environmental change and offered insight into how those ideas shape the implementation of new conservation measures. The researcher found a lack of consensus over what role indigenous people play in environmental change and governance. Sometimes they are imagined as the protectors of the forest, other times as the primary threats to it, creating a context in which their representatives must navigate multiple, overlapping, and often contradictory interventions. During the second phase of research, the researcher conducted in-depth interviews, household surveys, and intensive participant observation of everyday life within the indigenous population. These methods revealed indigenous responses to the changing institutional landscape and offered insight into processes of social, cultural, and environmental change at the local level. The researcher documented how indigenous people develop their own narratives about their role in environmental change and then use those narratives to forge new institutional alliances, challenge external interventions into their affairs, and defend the authority of customary law. Preliminary findings indicate that certain leaders have been better positioned than others when it comes to coping with these changes. For example, interventions based on misconceptions about the hereditary, hierarchical nature of indigenous leadership may further marginalize segments of the population that do not emphasize heredity or fail to conform to new institutional commitments made by externally recognized leaders. Thus, new conservation measures may unintentionally contribute to ongoing processes of social differentiation and related environmental problems. Scientists and policy-makers have stressed the need for local participation in environmental regulation, but efforts to heed their calls often meet with unanticipated political and cultural complications. This research offers an ethnographic account of how such complications develop in a context where profound differences of culture and power separate minority populations from the officials who seek their cooperation. In this way, this study contributes to scholarship on the anthropology of statecraft, the political ecology of environmental regulation, and the cross-regional study of indigeneity. It also helps to shed light on the challenges faced by policymakers as they seek more equitable ways of integrating marginalized populations into social, political, and environmental institutions.
