Abstract
Environmentality has proven an enduring framework for interrogating issues around environmental behaviours and discourse as a means of subject governance and citizen-making. However, its application often insufficiently reflects the temporal nuances of environmental (eco) logics as transient, emergent and differentiated amongst ‘citizens’. This is particularly the case in post-conflict zones of transition where the fluidity, friction and fractural nature of socio-political relations between state and subject are often overlooked. By examining community experiences in the establishment of Timor-Leste’s first national park, this article highlights the inadequate attention directed towards addressing these concerns. It proposes ‘transitional’ environmentality as a novel framework that first, better reflects the ever-transient nature of environmental behaviour and regulation; and second, recognizes the prevalence for this in post-conflict landscapes. Transitional environmentality emphasizes the temporal fragility of environmental authority structures and its potential for renegotiation of resource management between the frictions of the state and the subjects it seeks to make.
Introduction
Recent scholarship has shown environmentality to be particularly potent in the critique of conservation processes that mediate territoriality, citizen identity, state bio-power and axiomatic policing of the environmental self (Cortes-Vazquez and Ruiz-Ballesteros, 2018; Fletcher, 2010; Gregory and Vaccaro, 2015). Whether examining classic fortress conservation models, participatory community approaches or orientation towards payment for environmental services, the concept of environmentality has been productive with regard to interrogating environmental behaviours and discourse as subject governance (Agrawal, 2005; Dressler, 2013). However, contemporary research has raised growing concerns regarding theoretical gaps that misread localized politics and ontologies of subject-making. This is most evident where governance and the knowledge work that underpin its authority are dynamic, weak, uncertain and contested. In this regard, environmentality may insufficiently reflect the nuances of subject (un)becoming and the transient nature of environmental authority that regulates the post-conflict self.
To work through this concern, I examine the implementation of Timor-Leste’s first national park in the period following independence from Indonesia. In doing so, I propose a novel framework that better reflects the dynamic uncertainty of environmental authority in relation to its production and regulation in the post-conflict moment. I highlight the insufficient attention directed towards ‘transitionality’ or flux as a characteristic of eco-governance during subject-making in two key ways: First, transition has been ignored as the structural state of unsettled (and ever-changing) contestations shaping landscape discourses that may legitimate authority over environmental management and behaviours; And second, how this dynamic unsettledness is heightened under periods of transition, such as the post-conflict moment, when formal governance is often weak.
By examining these concerns in the context of the Nino Konis Santana National Park (NKSNP) in far eastern Timor-Leste, the conceptual foundations and potency of transitional environmentality are articulated. This includes the signposting of possible resistance that may challenge state environmental authority and its logic by alternative or localized ‘eco-rationalities’, landscapes and subjectivities. Following a brutal 25-year occupation, Timor-Leste struggled to develop formalized governance institutions while trying to meet a litany of pressing development demands. For this reason, the formal declaration of the country’s first national park, merely six years after the restoration of independence, was celebrated as great progress. Under the auspices of ecological renewal, demands for forest exclusion and a prohibition of activities central to local livelihoods produced significant and widespread impacts. Despite little actual State policing, communities within the park warily acceded to the new conservation regime.
This general acquiescence to new state regulation shows the perceived discursive power of environmental logic, or what could be termed ‘eco-logic’, emergent in the re-ordering of state–community relations at the Timorese national margins. It is environmental knowledge-power mobilized for and through interventions of subject and territory. Eco-logic is not necessarily environmental rationalities that are highly persuasive through their understanding by subjects, but rather is perceived as dominant and thus powerful in ordering environmental behaviours and management. As landscape discourse it underpins and renders normative the rationale for political regulation of natural spaces.
Similar to other rural areas, in the post-independent period the park area lacked replacement of robust formal institutions. This had encouraged local Fatuluku peoples’ investment in re-emergent forms of localized customary governance supressed during Indonesian occupation (Fitzpatrick et al., 2013; Marquardt et al., 2002). The eco-logic of conservation imperatives provided a seemingly apolitical conduit for the State to assert governance over the rural far-east. Through the national park emerged new environmental subjectivities, behaviours and discursive norms, or what can be understood as environmentality. Given the change in behaviours with little coercive policing, the new environmentality present in the national park initially appeared formidable and was claimed so by the State forestry department.
To interrogate this claim, this paper will first engage with the conceptual and theoretical environmentality literature, noting contemporary gaps that signpost a need for an approach focused on transitional states and flux. Next the paper will turn to a contextualization of the NKSNP over its first four years. Attention to local Fatuluku realities reveals an unfolding uncertainty and fracturing of community deference to conservation authority as livelihood pressures mounted, and eco-logic faltered. By examining these elements, it is questioned whether traditional approaches to environmentality capture or articulate ongoing contestations of discourse, regulation and subjectivity as aspects under transition. Finally, the paper will seek to account for these aspects in the Timorese experience. It is argued that a transitional environmentality approach strives for this by foregrounding the temporal and spatial environmentality discrepancies experienced by individual subjects and their communities, as well as their lived discursive contradictions. In doing so, the possibilities of alternative environmental subjectivities and resource regulation emerge.
These junctures of environmental subject uncertainty, where such processes pool and coalesce, illuminate a new mode of environmentality. Villager behaviours warily reflect adherence to the State’s concerns, but only transitionally or temporarily. They are instead rendered unstable by the frictions and tensions of superficially realized environmental truths. These tensions are further heightened by the provisional nature of post-conflict governance in newly sovereign margins. Examining Fatuluku experiences within the national park through such a lens brings into focus an understanding of environmentality during periods of territorial and institutional transition, such as the post-conflict moment. As such, the eco-logic assembled to command political authority in the Timorese landscape becomes transitional and fragile. They are illuminated as ongoing, fractious negotiations for nature between the State and the subjects it seeks to make.
Fieldwork research in the NKSNP was conducted during 2010 and 2011 with intermittent follow-up in 2014 using data gathered from over 70 interviews and 200 surveys. The park serves as a pertinent case study for examining modes and scales of environmentality emergent in post-conflict conservation implementation where state perceptions of success differ from on-site realities. Through exploration of this fractured landscape of environmental power (and assertions to it), transitional environmentality is postulated as a useful critical framework for understanding local environmental realities, and thereby also illuminating spaces for local resistance.
Contextualizing environmentality theory
Environmentality emerged in the early 2000s as a framework for understanding power in the regulation of environmental subjects through a Foucauldian analysis of governmentality (Malette, 2009; Valdivia, 2015). Governmentality encapsulates how governing occurs, or an understanding that powerful states (or other entities) apply particular methods in the production of citizens. These seek to normalize habits of living suited to prescribed policies and practice. Foucault describes governmentality in terms of the capabilities of privileged agents and institutions for worldly division of reality and representation. This imbues certain subject positions and behaviours in the present with power (Foucault, 1991). The technique of managing people as a group through technologies of power he termed bio-power, which through governmental concerns for fostering life, produces a generalized disciplinary society and makes possible the workings of the modern nation state (Foucault, 2012). The foundational precepts of environmentality are the application of these two concepts (governmentality and bio-power) to analyse how social interactions with the natural world (the environment) are regulated.
Yet, the environment is not a naturally given sphere of all-encompassing ecological processes, but rather an historical artefact that is openly constructed, with particular discourses rooted to particular sites and peculiar forces (Luke, 1995). Therefore, environmental subjects are ‘those for whom the environment constitutes a critical domain of thought and action’ (Agrawal, 2005). Subject actions and livelihoods influence how they think about the environment, which in turn influences the construction of identity (Robbins, 2004). Government agencies together with expert knowledge produce environments, materially and discursively, that facilitate governance and subject-making. This construction entails both: the creation and deployment of management and interventions within a space, and a specific object of knowledge. In turn ‘the environment’ expedites further government power over constituent lives through the types of management necessitated. In summation, environmentality is the discourse of nature and ecology as disciplinary articulations of knowledge to generate systems of power for governance (Luke, 1995).
Effective environmental management is contingent upon the propagation and internalization of this knowledge and power. Science works as an environmental claims-making activity, to construct environmental risk, thus requiring state intervention or specific citizen behaviour (Darier, 1999). This leads to a decentred network which self-polices, and where interests are aligned and amalgamated with those of the state. NGOs acting to empower local communities in the arena of biodiversity sovereignty, often (unintentionally) facilitate state governance over such groups through advocating inclusivity. This occurs by encouraging the incorporation of marginal people and biological material into spheres of state and elite political rationality, control and surveillance (Bryant, 2002). Here attention to ontology, an analysis of the nature of being and existence that reflects shared group knowledge (Harvey, 2006; Jessop, 2014; Jones, 2004), is pertinent, as the ontology of the State differs markedly from that of spatially marginalized indigenous communities. Affected indigenous peoples are required to adhere to the state’s ontological framings of nature (Brigg, 2007; Gombay, 2014).
In this manner environmentality builds upon the foundation of Foucault’s conceptual work of governmentality (Foucault, 1991). But in addition, applies it to a socio-political context of environmental relations, interrogating issues around environmental behaviours and discourse as means of subject governance and citizen-making (Agrawal, 2005; Ward, 2013). Environmentality adds critique to a growing body of scholarship concerned with analysing environmental crises through institutions of power and the post-structural political ecology toolkit. This has proved powerful as a means of critiquing biodiversity conservation processes (Fletcher, 2010; Snodgrass et al., 2008).
Environmental technologies such as environmental impact assessments (Rutherford, 1999; Scott, 2014) and forestry legal code (Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001) work to totalize state control as the singularly dominant source of authority over the environmental arena and subjects within. These processes centre expert knowledge production as the foundational evidence for the power to discipline and extend governmentality into the ‘natural world’. This is evident in protected area implementation when operating under neo-liberal expert ecological technicians, planners, economists and their technological apparatus (Büscher and Fletcher, 2014). Even when environmental authority or knowledge appears to be decentred as in co-management conservation, sensitivity and success often reflect a robust yet veiled environmentality. The requisite extensive consultation creates local sympathies with conservation rationalities, eliciting forms of environmental subjectivity (Thakadu, 2005). Elsewhere, community initiation of conservation and formalized power gained from co-management participation entails their articulation and prioritization of core conservation precepts (Berkes, 2009; Measham and Lumbasi, 2013).
Explaining environmental subject-becoming
While powerful in illuminating conservation as subject-making, environmentality often insufficiently reflects the nuances of subject (un)becoming and the transient nature of eco-logic that regulates the self. This is a residual issue inherited from governmentality where there is an absence of an explicit political position on how the altering of relations of power might occur (Valdivia, 2015). Some have argued environmentality infers a totality of subject-making which is often not observable amongst participants of co-management regimes (Cepek, 2011; Ward, 2013). Additionally, it privileges technologies of power while paying little attention to the affective labour of conservation that transform subjectivities (Singh, 2013). Environmentality thereby often insufficiently reflects nuances in the temporal and ever-transient state of environmental behaviours. The fluidity, friction and fractural nature of socio-political relations mediated through environmental discourse between state and subject are commonly overlooked.
Contemporary governmentality has a specifically neo-liberal form that is troublesome to some societies (Joseph, 2012), such as traditional or indigenous communities that do not have advanced neo-liberal economies. International organizations such as the World Bank and international conservation organizations attempt to export governmentality techniques through conservation programmes as part of global governance agenda (Goldman, 2004). Yet it is important to understand environmentality as unbound and multiple (Fletcher, 2017), whereby classic critiques of mainstream conservation might also be viewed as another act of environmentality, concerned first and foremost with social justice (Fletcher, 2010). According to Cepek (2011) this may risk misunderstanding or denying discourse, practice and politics of local people in conservation projects.
These conceptual critiques of environmentality posit a blurry understanding of environmental subjectivity. Environmentality should not be thought of as fixed or totalizing, since this obscures the dynamic change of environmental relations when ontologies of varied strengths clash socially, politically, economically or institutionally. Critique can often be preoccupied with the power exerted by one group over another, rather than examining how oppositional actors may share certain authoritative knowledge or agree on certain visions of social ordering (Forsyth and Walker, 2014). Monolithic interpretations of environmentality that focus too closely on the centralized production of power denies the agency of individual actors and other forms of collective action (Day and Reynolds, 2000; Sangren, 1995; Singh, 2012). This is particularly pertinent for the post-conflict experience where state power is often diffuse.
Environmentality as a transitional process
Recognizing these gaps, transitional environmentality argues for reconciliation at the middle ground; environmentality processes are always occurring and under continual negotiation where they are internalized, but also amalgamated with local behavioural norms. It does not simply materialize when rule-making models are introduced, but instead emerges as individuals engage with and resist against the ‘objects’ that hold conservation policy together, thereby facilitating navigation through existent yet changing policy frameworks (Ward, 2013). In their pioneering work that espouses environmentality as a theoretical framework Agrawal shows in Kumaon, India a shift from destructive fires in protest of colonial regulations to careful localized forest management that now mirrors these same regulations. They suggest the decentralization of decision-making ensured local peoples instigated forest governance themselves, instead of oppressive management directed by hegemonic and insensitive authority (Agrawal, 2005). Nonetheless, Agrawal concedes that through environmentality too little attention is paid to the lives and individuality of Kumaonis; yet it is at this scale that the emergence and changing nature of transitional environmentality can be observed.
Transitional environmentality directs attention to ongoing user contestations and negotiations of state eco-logic that frames environmental norms. Understanding environmentality as a transitional process presents opportunities to critique how and why environmental behaviour is internalized (even if only temporarily). While previous research has identified international conservation policy and institutions as instilling certain eco-rationalities in local state administrators (Goldman, 2004), the concurrent shifting forms of localized subject formation and their relation to landscape are missing. Transitional environmentality seeks to address this, recognizing differentiated understandings of the environment and related behavioural expectations are in a constant state of flux or transition. Lax performance or renewal of eco-logic renders it slippery and uncertain. Furthermore, this ‘transitionality’ is heightened in post-conflict or fragile state areas such as Timor’s rural margins. In such areas, political and social transition encourages a proclivity of weak governance. To further explore and illustrate transitional environmentality, the paper now turns to examining this in the context of the NKSNP.
Eco-logic and the NKSNP
In 2008 the Timorese Government declared its first national park in the country’s lush eastern extremity, enclosing 680 square kilometres of high biodiversity lowland, tropical and monsoon forest. Included in the NKSNP are the important wetland Iralalauru, rich coral beach areas and the Paichao Mountains. The region known locally as Ponte-Leste is also the home of six ethnic Fatuluku villages. It was their forests that were largely ground zero for guerrilla resistance against Indonesian occupation. For 24 years many of the now 15,000 villagers fought and lost relatives in the armed struggle. The area remains a mosaic patchwork of mostly secondary forest, the result of carefully managed swidden agroforestry. Almost all villager livelihoods relied on land and forest access governed through customary institutions. The establishment of the park was intended to conserve this rich terrestrial and marine biodiversity while assisting in community development and tourism promotion. However, of equal importance to the Government was a pivot towards the landscape and its nature as a new dimension of collective identity and national heritage (McWilliam, 2019).
Reconciling local customary governance and state administrative authority has not been uncomplicated post-independence. As an emerging fragile state, development and political control was concentrated in the capital Dili with formal institutional power diminishing in rural margins. Localized customary institutions remain more significant to everyday Fatuluku lives (McWilliam, 2008). They mediate a complex political tapestry of socio-environmental relations, while situating and re-making contemporary ethnic identity in relation to ancestral origin. Timorese citizenship is secondary (and remains centred on shared experiences of colonial and occupational violence by an ‘other’) (Arthur, 2018). For the Government, part of fostering national stability and political legitimacy is envisioned by building projects that invert this hierarchy, and by doing so produce governable citizens invested in its institutions. The NKSNP afforded such opportunity by formalizing Fatuluku landscapes and biomaterial as shared national imaginary.
Park declaration occurred with much fanfare and encouragement from international development organizations and conservationists alike. Centralized Dili managers envisioned a strongly devolved co-management system that would generate eco-tourism income. Complicating the delivery of this vision were meagre infrastructural, technical, policing and financial resources, rendering such a system as aspirational. Current pressing socio-economic deficiencies usually capture the State’s attention, while environmental concerns are perceived as second tier. With budgets directed to infrastructure and mega-projects elsewhere in 2008 (Meitzner Yoder, 2015) there was even less support for environmental concerns. Poor consultation (Cryan, 2013) and insufficient planning further compounded a lack of government comprehension relating to conservation concepts and on-ground realities. With co-management unprepared for park implementation, simplified (so-called) temporary rules were instead enacted. These included specific prohibitions of swidden-farming, hunting and logging, with the informal assurance these rules were temporary until park management was finalized.
The prohibitions critically impacted communities, whose livelihoods were entwined in forest access (Cullen, 2012), with few alternative options. Frequent field rotations and vegetative burning are essential for sufficient crop harvests in Ponte Leste because of the nutrient poor soils. The rules banned these activities and villagers were forcibly displaced from their forest gardens to poorer, cleared land close to settlements. Forty-three per cent of villagers experienced a loss of cropping land. Conflicts over this remaining accessible land (45% of villagers) increased as powerful customary owners sought to retain ownership. State expectations of sedentary farming were unsupported by training or input promises. The food insecurity issues stemming from the swidden ban were compounded in 2010 by a La Nina year of non-stop rain that ruined remaining crop plantings causing a decrease in harvests by 89%. Families were placed in an increasingly risky position, unable to expand new fields into their traditional forested lands. As little as three years after park declaration, many communities were not planting crops as harvests yielded less than the effort expended on them. As one villager summarized ‘It’s been two years since we’ve been able to make a garden. People have left for Dili to find work while most are eating forest foods rather than grains. They are hungry and selling livestock to feed their families.’ Family timber plantations that acted as long-term savings for such emergencies were now inaccessible, and this impacted education, marriage, usufruct claims and the ability to meet cultural obligations. Remarkably, considering the lack of formal conservation presence, communities continued in theory to support the park.
In spite of being banned, clandestine hunting increased markedly in some areas to supplement the crop losses. To park managers this confirmed communities were unsustainable users and became a primary rationalization for introducing government forest guards into each village. Still lacking financial and institutional support, the training and deployment of the guards occurred gradually. They had little power for meaningful enforcement of the rules, but nonetheless many villagers worried about the possibility of arrest now the guards were on site.
Around this time the State began to increasingly employ a complex new vocabulary of environmental sustainability and ecological science in discussions with residents regarding management and regulation. As a government worker outlined, ‘This area has the highest biodiversity with many rare and important birds, and we must protect it … we have already made reports of this. The Government needs to lead.’ These arguments also suggested that an increase in tourism to the park would compensate for the community’s diminished farming activities. Most villagers, however, remained confused by the details of biodiversity, climate change and the need for exclusionary conservation practices to address these issues. As one farmer said, ‘We still don’t know or understand what the benefits are, but the Government says in the future a lot of tourists will come and we may receive a lot of money.’ Another observed increased ‘greening’ which they said improved rainfall and the community’s understanding of the importance of forest protection. But elaborating on this importance proved difficult, instead revealing a fear of food insecurity and possible protest.
Halting forest usage had brought no increase to the existing (minimal) tourism, nor the promised job creation. The lack of consultation before or after declaration meant locals did not competently understand the new conservation eco-logic, nor feel adequately invested in its values. Those environmental aims that were understood were beginning to be noted as poorly met, further demonstrating a fallibility of State eco-logic. For instance, hunting was continuing, soil quality in the old fields was deteriorating and people were unsure if there was an increase in wild animals. The poor consultation also meant local livelihood distress was exacerbated by centralized decision-making in Dili that lacked an adequate grasp of situations on the ground, or the local knowledge forms that residents used to understand such changes.
Considering the impact on the community, instead of resisting the park, many villagers tentatively acquiesced to State demands for maintaining the protected area. One informant related that, ‘There is a pervading opinion amongst us that we would like to respect the Government desires in terms of land management and restrictions … Nature is important for future generations … but the livelihood pressures are high now.’ Rather than organizing resistance to the meagre park enforcement, villagers waited for promised improvements in livelihood conditions. In fact, the State seemed to enjoy allegiances from communities in these areas. So why was this, and how to explain such contradictions of governance and subjectivity?
Articulating modes of Timorese environmentality
To answer the above question and begin drawing the contours of transitional environmentality, it is necessary first to describe the practices of environmental subject-making in the Timorese context. In the State’s interests are improved authority and citizen regulation in spaces such as Ponte-Leste where its presence is weak. Beyond material development, post-conflict state-building seeks cohesive national identities for productive and legitimate governance. This is particularly relevant in Timor-Leste where residual notions of Timorese identity were commonly expressed through opposition to an Indonesian Other that is now no longer an occupier. Furthermore, multi-ethnicities with over 15 separate languages exist and have in the past fractured into easterner–westerner divisions which discursively drove the 2006–8 crisis (Scambary, 2009). This itself delayed the implementation of the national park by a year.
For the State, new environmental behaviours and subjectivities may be actualized through two modes, often entangled. The first is more explicit, involving coercion through disciplinary tools such as legal technologies and police, as well as other practices (or threats) of violence. The second requires the production of local environmental behaviours through self-disciplinary norms and codes encouraged by new powerful discourses (or eco-logic). The diaphanous governance resources and weak government presence in the post-conflict margins (Kirk, 2015) favour greater investment in the latter (axiomatic disciplining), rather than the former (coercive violence).
For governments to instigate and expand power over individuals, more than coercion or threat of reprimand is required (Luke, 1995). State subjects must accept themselves as such and internalize behavioural logic that aligns with state desired outcomes (Foucault, 1991). This outcome occurs both implicitly and explicitly through social structures encouraging practices, and knowledge transfers so that eco-rationale decision-making crystalizes into accepted social norms. From this emerge socially regulated behaviours that echo state conservation discourses, landscape identities and modes of self-policing, diminishing the need for coercive disciplinary resources that the State lacks.
Agrawal (2005) argues that it is through the devolution of power to forest communities, that they are able to imagine their pursuit of state environmental goals as their own. This is partially reflected in the NKSNP where encouragement of environmental self-policing is required to elicit community behaviours desired by the State to protect the park.
At the same time by internalizing conservation norms, the primacy of localized power and identity tied to customary relations and territorial performance is dislodged. These and other local village administrative structures are far more robust and integral to community lives than the formalized state (Cummins, 2010; Palmer and De Carvalho, 2008). However, the introduction of biodiversity values and discourses, as well as eco-tourism aspirations, mediate new state directed relations to the environment, enabling territorialization.
Furthermore, villagers could identify the State as the environmental specialist capable of ensuring management that would bring future economic benefits through eco-tourism. Casual observance of environmental behaviours in the national park suggested government success in this regard, with some villagers espousing its benefits as now ‘central to the identity of the country’. However, as noted previously, communities were adhering to conservation demands for the moment, and somewhat tenuously. Their grasp of the logic underpinning new articulations of the environment was infirm and uncertain, reflecting the weakness of governance processes intended to encourage state eco-logic. This indicated that overall behaviour changes lay not in the logic of a new biodiversity discourse, but outside of conservation.
Support instead stemmed from a pervading belief that overall, government decisions were being made for the good of the community, even if the reasoning for this was not understood or required temporary burdens. For instance, one interviewee remarked, ‘Before people were a bit against the national park, but the Government has told them to be mature. Though we are struggling I’m sure the park will be good one day.’ This echoes a commonly expressed faith and dignity in the structures of the modern Timorese Government, even when they appear weak, problematic or antagonistic to immediate livelihood needs. Villagers are fiercely defensive of the democratic freedoms of sovereign independence gained by the collective resistance and shared suffering under occupation. Self-rule is a recent phenomenon, profoundly rooted in a celebration of the resistance for which great personal costs were born and modern Timorese identity is ingrained (Babo-Soares, 2003; Niner, 2013). Because of this, many feel an obligation to state leaders and profess faith in their governance and development directives. Residual sentiments that the government and its vision are deserving of opportunity despite perceived gaps in performance was common amongst villagers. Prior to park declaration, Fatuluku communities in particular sympathized with state aspirations, because of comparatively greater participation in the guerrilla fighting centred in their area.
This acquiescence to state rule in Timor is co-produced in Austronesian customary notions of the ‘stranger-king’ (Sahlins, 1981). Anthropologists have noted the enduring local proclivity for the installation of conquering powerful outsiders by local customary institutions (McClean, 2014; Traube, 2007). Through submission to secular, administrative authority (and knowledge systems) of the incorporated ‘stranger-king’, local kingdoms and customary structures are preserved. Meanwhile, they themselves retain cosmological knowledge and power over higher, more potent spiritual matters. In this manner, citizen submission to state rule and its epistemologies have historical precedence. Acquiescence is grounded in a moral economy that obligates leaders to ensure secular Fatuluku well-being, especially with respect to the resistance sacrifices made to bring this rule into being.
In spite of their loss of land, residents still recognize the potential livelihood opportunities afforded by the Timorese State, such as improved service access through health and education initiatives, disaster assistance or paid labour on aspirational infrastructure projects. This shows environmentality also works to produce subjects sympathetic to government interests when the government is able to exert a perceived positive influence on their lives (Alagappa, 1995). In doing so, it builds social structures that reduce the incitement to resistance, shaping behaviours and internalizing sympathy for the authorities in transient states of consolidating rule. State ‘potency’, as Singh (2012) describes it, is discernible in visions of development and more concretely in potential government food aid to alleviate the impacts resulting from reduced harvests. But little ‘potency’ or sympathy for government rule was located or articulated by local communities as originating from its conservation implementation.
However, they did recognize the potency of the authority generated by the conservation discourse. Communities reflected elements of state environmental discourses in discussions, due to the partial recognition of a token entitlement to land as traditional owners (but not as contemporary users or managers). Primary identity and cosmological health remain invested in connection to origin land which was feared to be completely removed under a coming national land law (Fitzpatrick et al., 2013). This softened opposition to the park, which preserved at least symbolically attachment to ancestral land. Although villager internalization or comprehension of new scientific eco-knowledge had been weak, the State had however been successful in propagating this as the legitimate discursive framework for debating protected area natures. The potency embedded in the State’s contention of technical superiority and scientific discourse has spurred wary and uncertain deference to authority enacted through this knowledge. Villagers have initially demonstrated passive respect for these new eco-knowledges that the State professes to possess, but as yet they remain difficult to reconcile with local ontologies.
This helps explain why NKSNP’s management had precipitated changes in environmental behaviours such as a halting of forest use, forest gardens, timber cutting and some hunting. It was not because the importance of biodiversity was now apparent to villagers, nor because of a fear of violence or legal implications. Looking at the importance of power differentials between villagers and the State prompts considerations for the localized dimensions of environmentality (its modes and scale), reaffirming acquiescence to the protected area project as located largely outside the conservation paradigm. This however is tainted by the by-products of this process, such as food security impacts, that ensure over time Timorese conservation territoriality processes will unsettle the very legitimacy of rule the park’s enactment seeks to invoke.
Uncertainty will claim itself
All is flux, nothing stays still – Heraclitus (Plato in Cratylus, 402a)
The precariousness of the environmentality in NKSNP is observed through the uncertainty of Fatuluku adherence to the conservation programme. And on closer inspection shows itself as processes that ultimately undo its aims of environmental subject-making. Much of the new management systems promised by the State (or threats to ensure compliance) have been seldom enacted. In the face of this weak policing, livelihood unsustainability and incomprehensible logic, most villagers had nonetheless altered their environmental behaviours to the demands of the new conservation regime. Yet this position of environmental subjectivity also seemed tenuous, and it was likely that in this transitional moment further threats to community livelihoods would likely cause it to fracture. This illuminates the multiple (and sometimes contradictory) dimensions of apparent acquiescence to state environmental rule despite the territorial outcomes that impede it.
By the end of 2011 most community members were expressing sadness and confusion about the national park. In addition to food insecurity, land conflicts had risen and customary practices and conceptions of landscape were under threat. Villagers began to perceive an unequally localized burden for benefits enjoyed nationally or by elites in the capital Dili. As one villager put it, The national park benefits the rest of Timor, but not us. Since our ancestor’s time the forest has been our life. We make fields, collect firewood, build houses, visit for ceremonies and use it for everything. Why does the Government think of nature but not the lives of the people?
Through the national park, the State had sought new environmental behaviours and improved citizenship of the community, building upon independence sympathies. These were expected despite deficient resources for adequate community engagement or policy implementation. However, the process of territorialization through conservation simplifies complex socio-economic and environmental dynamics (a process Li (2007) calls ‘rendering technical’), producing unintended outcomes that serve to destabilize environmentality and inevitably weaken the territorial project. The result has been poor social outcomes for many village members, and therefore diminishing sympathy for government directives. One respondent summarized, ‘There is a pervading opinion that we would like to respect the Government's desires … but livelihood pressures result in the need to cut trees and sell them for timber or firewood.’ The differing sentiments concerning adherence to government rule expressed by stakeholders are deeply entwined with the changing social and environmental relations within the park. Key aspects affecting adherence included poorer livelihood outcomes, new aspirations of national identity and the ineffectiveness of programmes to inspire environmental perspectives conducive to state conservation aims amongst villagers. Fear of arrest permeated communities leading to alterations of some environmental behaviour. Effective and prolonged disciplinary control has been constrained by the lack of resources and technologies available. Local transgressions, such as continuing to hunt, remain likely to increase without active demonstrations of enforcement. As the Timorese State is weak, the continuation of the conservation project requires community support and adherence to the professed ideals to enact the policing.
The State already carries significant favour from many villagers due to their pride in political independence and the potential to deliver local livelihood benefits through development. This has proven powerful in encouraging adherence to some new environmental behaviours. However, without their internalization of state environmental rationality, normalization of conservation practices are unlikely to fully materialize. This environmentality is weak, because the territorialization practices entangled in processes of environmental subject-making act to rupture the very discourses they were instigated to reproduce. This point of tension in which environmental subjectivity appears but remains vulnerable to fracture or ‘slippage’ is where the paper now turns.
Postulating transitional environmentality in Timor-Leste
The position of unstable and tenuous environmentality provides a new perspective on forms of environmentality, pointing to one that is ‘transitional’. Transitional environmentality entails transitory acquiescence to new authoritative environmental norms. This is especially apparent when the political subjectivity of citizens is fractious due to ineffective environmentality processes and incompleteness of environmental truths. In effect, environmental behaviours amongst autonomous subjects (at least) partially reflect state desires but rely upon sympathies located in alternative discourses of authority. Quoting one community member, ‘With the national park we support the Government by protecting the environment. So, they should support us.’ Sympathy and acquiescence to the State's demands stems from lingering (but diminishing) post-independence optimism in self-government and improved livelihoods.
Back in Dili government authority to enact environmental governance is buoyed by the self-surety of global environmental toolkits, development experts and NGO support (see Goldman, 2004) from UNESCO, USAID and most prominently Birdlife International. The Chief Executive of Birdlife International applauded the NKSNP as ‘… an incredibly forward-thinking decision, made all the more spectacular by the fact that this is such a young nation’ (Wildlife Extra, 2007). Such sentiments were gravid in the Forestry Department’s rationalizing of its authority in which it also alluded to its responsibilities to the international community and global heritage. The Director of the Department for the Environment iterated similar sentiments when discussing challenging social outcomes of the national park: ‘Respect for customary resource management and co-management is needed for problems. But … the Government should lead and act as “parents” to the local population.’ The mustering of authority, it appears, is central for the government-donor complex to enact the property decisions that produce conservation (Lund, 2011). However, rather than passive reception by village communities, the power differentials and distance between themselves and Dili centred bureaucracy have resulted in a forced, clumsy delivery of environmentality. While delivery has been inept, it has pierced though to some extent (and effect), yet remains unsettled due to its weakness.
Therefore, modes of environmentality exist, but only provisionally until destabilized under mounting livelihood impacts or the observed failures of the State conservation discourse. The fluid, delicate and transitional nature of such environmentality results in a frailty, open to increased local scrutiny, as conservation impacts on livelihoods mount.
At such junctures environmentalities are vulnerable to renegotiation. At these ‘points of interruption’, subjects may vocalize and act with a greater primacy of input in the production of environmental behavioural and sovereignty norms (Hobson, 2011). Li (2007) discusses how expert discourse is punctured by a challenge that it cannot contain, such as when subjects of expert programmes critique the issue itself exposing limits and the incompleteness of environmental truths. Events that contribute to such a challenge in this context include: the La Nina weather and associated crop failures, forced displacement from gardens or community conflicts, failures of stated tourism employment generation, an inability to perform rituals, ongoing hunting and lack of education funds gleaned from timber harvesting. These ‘critical moments’ (Khan, 2013) inform the unfolding political ecologies of conservation processes. It is through identifying and understanding these key events that a fluid picture and framework for its analysis can be assembled. But unlike attention to ‘critical moments’ of the past, transitional environmentality directs attention to the variegated potential of their future occurrence that exist in a subject’s temporary or momentary abeyance. Furthermore, it questions how this potential informs processes of environmentality and the related limits of their discourse.
These momentary states of subject uncertainty are opportunities for the emergence of localized reassertions and resistance. However, at these transitory moments potential also exists for the State environmentality to strengthen subject capture either implicitly or explicitly. As villager deference to the NKSNP conservation plan began to waver, it set about training forest guards to be based in each village, and reaffirmed intentions to set up village committees to better manage and ‘educate’ resource users. Here the emerging local articulations of resistance compelled the State to act and it did so in order to negate them. At such junctures, if the State seeks to maintain forms of previous control, further production of eco-logic norms and a demonstration of authority must occur. Being under-resourced, the Timorese State is challenged in this regard. Furthermore, Timorese customary groups are resilient and practiced at incorporating new forms of knowledge/power and utilizing it for their own articulations of social governance and claims to landscape (Fitzpatrick et al., 2013). They can re-tool such discourses to renegotiate resource rights and wrestle arrangements of environmental control from the State (Li, 1996). It is at these temporary, uncertain junctures (from which may unfold the prospective pathways of multivariate potentialities of future governance, discourse and political subjectivity) that transitional environmentality collects, becomes emergent and may be located. Precariously lingering at such junctures are not only the residents of NKSNP but also state actors who themselves are informed and shaped by the weak environmentality processes they enact. It is at these junctures that slippage of hegemonic discourses that guide social norms and behaviours is possible.
Transitionality and opportunities of resistance
The unsettled nature of this transitional environmentality offers opportunity for resistance. The poor environmental outcomes, deficient consultation, uneven burdening of social costs and weak formal governance compound to signify to the Fatuluku a weak, and transitory environmentality. These have already spurred varied expressions of dissent amongst some villagers, and if not addressed by the State, future conflict with villagers is likely. Kull (2004) calls the resistance experienced by those that break the rules knowingly ‘implicit resistance’ and in this manner their legitimacy (and those that imposed them) is challenged. For now, dissatisfaction amongst villagers is largely expressed through non-combative means (reflecting existing sympathies with state rule). However, they are wary of the power of new scientific and economic understandings of landscape in delimiting current debate.
Present state assertions to conservation territory are assembled through an authority drawn from a global toolkit that dictates the legitimacy of biodiversity frameworks for engagement with landscape. Therefore, for Ponta-Leste communities, struggles over their land and resources are grounded in struggles over meanings (Li, 1996; Walker and Peters, 2001). Through definitions of Timorese forests as scientifically natural categories of land cover and political territory, the Government and affiliated conservation organizations are ‘reshaping the basic terrain’ (Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001) of future struggles regarding their role in managing such resources. However, what is concurrently defined are the ways that future concepts and imaginaries of nature/landscape will occur.
Local resource users are acutely aware of how powerful elites portray them as poor and unskilled managers, who stayed in the ‘village’ while their leaders left and took up Indonesian education opportunities. This they perceive has enabled government employment and authority grounded in hierarchies of ‘formalized’ knowing that marginalizes local knowledge as ‘backward’. They recognize the power of the conservation discourse but find it difficult to readily argue against the environmental degradation they experience through the NKSNP. To deflect blame attributed to them by the State, they invoke apolitical reasoning to explain degradation. Many of those whose land featured erosion were quick to identify bad weather as the culprit, rather than their own decisions to concentrate farming in unstable, marginal areas. The occurrence of a ‘natural’ disaster was essentially an unfortunate event, the ‘will of god’ or an outcome of neglected ancestral rituals, and therefore warranted state assistance. Likewise blame was rarely directly placed on state actions either, so as not to jeopardize potential emergency government funding.
State arguments for conservation regimes have been effective locally, partly because the scientific epistemologies used are respected, but little comprehended. Many park residents were unhappy with the new resource management arrangements, but felt unable to challenge the government because the new concepts of the nature and environment proved difficult to understand. So far, what has proved much easier and successful for the State to communicate to villagers was a narrative of potential tourist income. ‘We still don’t know what the benefits from the national park are, but the Government says in the future a lot of tourists will come and we may receive a lot of money’, said one optimistic informant. Yet when asked why a person would pay to see animals he replied that he did not know. Once villagers have better comprehension of state eco-logic (and its nuances), they will be better equipped to argue for renegotiations over its political control.
The current experiences in Timor-Leste contrast with examples elsewhere, such as in the Andes where local or indigenous political argument around similar contestations has had time to grow more overtly sophisticated in meeting preconceived notions of environment and navigating this paradigmatic arena (Escobar, 1998; Greene, 2006; Himley, 2009). A strategic deployment of essentialized indigeneity by certain customary groups has proved advantageous in gaining political agency where propriety and resource claims have been sought (Conklin and Graham, 1995; Raymond, 2007; Sylvain, 2002). It is not unfathomable that a similar deployment reconciled with a more developed understanding of the conservation discourse could soon be similarly achieved in Timor-Leste. Many residing within the national park have retained the conservation vocabulary utilized by the State. They are able to recite it in reference to certain phenomena. However, it is not yet well understood by the residents or by low ranking forestry officials. Nonetheless, respondents are not totally submissive to state arguments, but instead are searching for new navigation tools to traverse the unfamiliar conceptual ground.
Timorese customary mechanisms and tradition are not singular, nor are they static, and instead are varied by historical, cultural and political factors. Since cultural and local knowledge arguments grounded in traditional ontologies have had little success so far, other epistemological avenues are likely to be sought for resource control negotiation (Cullen, 2015). Communities have previously promoted certain representations of themselves to strategically strengthen property claims (but likewise the Government are capable of doing the same) (Li, 1996). Considering the power of the sustainable management discourse it is possible local resource users may begin to utilize scientific epistemologies themselves to re-assert control over land access. This could occur by villagers characterizing authoritative cultural practices and resource management as inherently sustainable. This is already common amongst certain NGO proponents of community driven environmental management who claim the potential of ritual prohibition as a means of limiting over harvesting or hunting (McWilliam et al., 2014; Miyazawa, 2013). Through learning the power of new vocabulary deployed by state officials (e.g. biodiversity, climate change, nature and conservation), local users can reinterpret local knowledge through these concepts and thereby seek to re-assert control and resource management.
Conclusion
In examining the establishment of NKSNP, this article has argued that environmentality inadequately accounts for the complex precariousness of subject-making experienced in the Fatuluku landscape. Environmentality as an aspect of conservation territoriality attempts to escalate the integration of villagers as subjects of the State, constructing an emphatic territorialization (materially and behaviourally). A weakness of government disciplinary and organizational technologies necessitates environmentality processes encouraging self-policing of villager behaviours for sustaining long-term protected area management. For this to occur, the State needs conservation eco-rationalities or willing advocacy for it to be internalized by villagers. Otherwise, conservation will fail, and the State itself will lack grassroots support. This need for continual renegotiation of discursive legitimacy that upholds wavering environmental authority illuminates a ‘transitional’ environmentality.
Despite frail governance influence on local livelihoods in comparison to robust customary institutions, villagers are warily adhering to state assertions and the associated demands of the conservation project. This paper sought to deepen understanding of this contradiction and explain how current territorialization outcomes dismantle state aims of subject-making. Poor engagement with communities has resulted in difficulty comprehending, and therefore aligning, with the conservation discourse. For now, many community members are adhering to conservation demands because of the potential for future government benefits and residual pride in self-rule. Delivery of livelihood improvements or beneficial policy outcomes may further build legitimacy.
However, if benefits do not eventuate, this may provoke intercession or resistance. While constant negotiation between stakeholder groups is part of the process of environmentality, poor community internalization of eco-rationality raises doubts regarding the strength of local support for the State’s park management requirements. This infers a weak environmentality of which the outcomes are far from totalizing and are better understood as transitory. These perceived deficiencies reflect a transitional environmental subjectivity that is prone to fracture over time. Fractures may lead to localized resistance and demands for the renegotiation of expected environmental behaviours and management.
The Government has established a conservation discourse as the authoritative ontological arena for negotiation over protected areas. Scientific understanding of forest use is key to its discursive authority and control. This has occurred despite local inability to grasp many of these new environmental concepts and its related impacts on their livelihood. In addition, resistance has been subdued by the communities’ inability to articulate arguments for local resource control through an environmental discourse. Nonetheless, customary groups are beginning to express concerns. While many locals do not fully comprehend the logic and intricacies of the conservation discourse yet, they are adept at incorporating new knowledges and the associated vocabulary and will begin to deploy them to their advantage. Unless the Government can deliver benefits or further persuade local communities a growth in local community resistance is likely, either passively or through clandestine transgression.
This is not to infer that territorial processes such as the NKSNP are inevitably destined to fracture under weak environmentality. Rather, the experiences of communities within the national park demonstrate there is a need for a nuanced and graduated analytical approach to understanding emerging state–village relations and the making of environmental subjects.
Transitional environmentality emphasizes states of flux, a condition heightened in post-conflict transition. It shows NKSNP stakeholder engagement was superficial but had emboldened state and international conservation organizations to induce much of the population to abide by new environmental behaviour norms. However, instead of uncritical popular acceptance, analysis unveiled a wavering fragility of authority that is enmeshed in multiple processes of renegotiation. The legitimacy of NKSNP is unstable in post-conflict Timor-Leste as it is articulated through weak formal governance and derived from logic outside of eco-concerns. This makes it prone to erosion and fracture. The concerns of many residents demonstrate the internalization of state eco-logic is challenged by conservation outcomes that upset the political subjectivity they intend to produce. These included: poor and incomplete environmental outcomes; local costs perceived to be ineffectively offset by conservation gains; a disconnection between policy formation and implementation; and perhaps most saliently, meagre consultation.
To conclude, the processes and goals of this State environmentality are transitional, in that they simultaneously work to unsettle its own aspirations of ecological citizenship. They threaten a fracture of the very legitimacy the State's conservation seeks to claim. It is argued that a ‘transitional environmentality’ works as a powerful framework to explain these processes, eco-behaviours and the temporal fluctuations in technologies of power that produces weak legitimacies of environmental regulation.
Highlights
Argues conservation in Timorese National Parks as processes of environmental citizen-making at the rural margins where formal governance was previously weak. Identifies the construction and mobilization of discursive environmental authority that legitimates governance as eco-logic. Proposes ‘transitional environmentality’ as a novel framework for nuanced conceptual analysis that recognizes the precariousness and liminality of eco-logic amongst Timorese conservation subjects. In transitional post-conflict environments, state processes of environmentality and subject-making can actively work to undo themselves. Transitional environmentality’s attention to the precariousness of eco-logical authority suggests points of slippage where local environmental knowledge discourses may be leveraged to argue for localized resource control.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge Dr Lisa Palmer and Dr Robert Fletcher for their helpful suggestions and assistance in reviewing this paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.