National Science Foundation.
This research was also funded by the National Science Foundation awarded to Lisa Gezon.
“Commodity Chains and Land Use in Northern Madagascar.”
rom the proposal: Studies of the human dimensions of protected area management have tended to focus on local levels of analysis, examining the proximate drivers of land use in and around protected areas. While many conservation agendas have recently embraced a regional, or landscape ecology, approach, systematic links between localized land use patterns and broader political and economic frameworks have yet to be identified. The goal of this research is to help fill that gap by tracing commodity chains of cash crops produced in and around protected areas to their points of consumption. This will contribute to an understanding of some of the specific ways that human-environmental relationships extend beyond the local in patterned interactions with extra-local (regional, national, global) political, economic, and cultural factors of analysis. In particular, this project explores the relationship between urban demand and protected area land use patterns, focusing on the social and cultural factors in production for market (cash crops), distribution, and commodity consumption around the Mt. d’Ambre protected areas of northern Madagascar. On a practical front, this will permit an identification of non-local (dis)incentives for using land in certain ways, which will, in turn, guide planners in designing protected area management schemes that take these factors into consideration.