Conserving Nature in Culture: Case Studies From Southeast Asia (Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monograph Series)

This volume presents the results of an international, multi-year, collaborative project designed to transcend orthodox thinking about environmental conservation. It was prompted by the widespread acknowledgment of the failure of global conservation programs, to which the project participants' response was not simply to propose new and improved programs but to first ask why conservation programs have failed so consistently?

The thesis that underpins this volume is that the principal conservation paradigm has been flawed in the way that it construes the relationship between local communities and their environments. The contributors to this volume reverse the popular problematic that assigns responsibility for environmental degradation to proximate communities and asks how the global conservation community can help these communities to reform. Instead, the contributors first ask what local communities are already doing that contributes to environmental conservation and then ask how the global community can avoid undermining these efforts and perhaps even support them.