(Re)Possessing the Commons: Genealogies, Ancestral Tribal Lands and Conservation in Solomon Islands

Abstract

"The embeddedness of ENGOs in the nature/society binary is clearly visible in the ways in which they attempt to enrol local communities in conventional environmental discourses. This is evident in a recent (and ongoing) conservation project in Makira, Solomon Islands. Using this project as an example, I want to show how this particular project to create a protected area - an attempt to materially separate nature and human society was unable to disengage local understandings of socio-natural spaces and was forced to alter its underlying assumptions. In the end, the project on Makira is an example of how conservation (particularly biodiversity conservation) is inevitably a socio-natural project. This paper draws on recent critical work in geography and other disciplines that challenge the understanding of nature and human society as ontologically and abstractly separate....

"...To show how the Makira conservation project fails to dislodge the interwoven social and natural processes, I examine how genealogy, used as a method to identify 'appropriate' stakeholders (those with customary land right), enabled local villagers to (re)claim not only their rights to the forest commons but to also articulate an understanding of the forest as a socionatural space. To begin, however, I give a brief overview of Makira and the conservation project. Then I discuss the ways in which the project sought to reinforce nature and human society as separate and competing, and how the use of genealogy and the emergent discourses of socio-nature that led to a (re) claiming of the commons and a hybrid, socio- natural project."