Conference: Marine Environmental Politics in the 21st Century: MacArthur Program on Multilateral Governance, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Paper Abstracts:
George Leddy
Department of Geography, UCLA
The limits and failures in the transfer marine resource conservation and coastal zone development models from the U. S. to the developing world are examined as peculiar extensions of North American regulatory regimes that are ill-fitted to the "client" states that adopt them. The U.S. model has nonetheless been globalized by means of international treaties and through projects spawned by multilateral development and environment agencies. The assumptions of the model and its regulatory instruments emphasize the North American experience in regulation, providing opportunities for high technology transfers in such areas as information science, remote sensing and GIS. A political ecology of coastal and marine resource use and conservation explores the assumptions of the U.S. model and identifies its technological and informational emphasis as problematic and poorly adapted to conditions and trends in South coastal and island states. Emphasis on inventory-taking and conventional sequencing (problem-identification, conservation biology and local capacity in institutions, personnel and regulatory instruments) facilitates and legitimates North American institutions at the expense of a more localized construction of a problem-focused approach. The latter must confront the separation between conservation models and global economic structures that are inherent in technocratic approaches.
Next abstract:
Becky Mansfield: Fisheries Development or Open Access?
© Copyright 1999, Regents of the University of California