Green Aid in India and Zimbabwe - Conserving Whose Community?

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the GEF is an innovative multilateral aid fund to channel `incremental' finance for `global environmental benefits', i.e. to pay the extra costs of making aid projects compatible with treaties on climate change and biodiversity, `thereby... contributing to sustainable development' (GEF, 1994).

This formal language is spoken in global institutions and at international fora: far away from most of the people and places invoked in the World Bank's publications. To implement global values in local situations, environmental professionals might be expected to bridge this geographical, cultural and socio-economic gap. Yet civil servants, academics and NGOs are unelected groups taking public money for projects and consultancy. Is this elite international community able to bring global governance and grassroots realities together both fairly and effectively?

Even before Blaikie and Brookfield introduced the field to a wider audience, studies of interventions in `political ecology' ...

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in differing ways, these projects both aim to combine decentralised rural development with community participation in the management of globally valued natural resources. Yet echoing Neumann (1995) in the context of Tanzania, these links are shaped - often unbalanced - by differing access to power and resources, also the ethnicity and geographical position of the peoples involved.

Even the process of writing this paper shows up some of the differences. Two students at the University of Hull's Department of Geography originally drafted this paper: a British PhD student, Zoe Young, examined `India Ecodevelopment' in Nagarhole, South India, and a Zimbabwean Masters student, George Makoni, ...

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