Nature for Money: The Configuration of Transnational Institutional Space for Environmental Governance (The Gloss of Harmony: The Politics of Policy-Making in Multilateral Organisations.)

Abstract

In this chapter I link the translocal spaces and actors involved in a seemingly simple conservation project in northern Pakistan to stress that a focus on the scalar dimensions of power relations is integral to understanding the role of agency in the ideological production of nature and the material practices that derive from it. Central to understanding these relations is a process of longitudinal ethnographic research that relies on a multi-scaled and multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1998). As people and environments, localised in space, become increasingly subject to the demands of so-called global organisations, like the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and as the practice of these organisations is structured by institutions like the CBD, it becomes necessary to understand a great deal more about the politics, processes and practices that shape the agenda of these institutions.