250 Fabien Girard and Manohisoa Rakotondrabe
be other than those of the donors, technical and financial partners. If you
look at the reports as well in fact, if we had to add budget to the Darwin
project, it was because of the community protocols [laughs], because I was
stubborn actually […].
22
From the viewpoint of Bioversity International and the project leader, there is no
doubt that deepening the boundary work with the community and refocusing the
BCP on ABS and bioprospection were misguided. As the project leader told us in a
semi-directed interview, although he was eventually able to secure additional funds,
at the request of the facilitator, to be invested in further developing the protocol and
capacity-building activities such as a community seed bank and a community registry, he had no doubt that the process was headed in the wrong direction:
I mean the other problem with all these protocols from the Nagoya point
of view is you can build a fence around all kinds of things and that doesn’t
create a demand for it and that doesn’t make it useful. You just build a fence
around it and it remains ignored, and it is allowed to continue to drop off
the face of the Earth and a lack of investment in it. […]
You know where in communities where it’s purely agricultural, they’re
working on crops, from other centres of origin and put a lot of effort in
developing a protocol but if there’s no interest in getting stuff from them
[…] it’s another thing.
23
The Emergence of a Hidden Script
The boundary work undertaken by Natural Justice on the ground was further
hindered by the emergence of another script, this time a hidden one, that the
Ministry of Agriculture was able to deploy on account of the indeterminacy that
affected the aims of the projects. This script is that of “IPLCs as premoderns”
and is further described in Chapter 11 of this volume.
In terms of concrete effect on the boundary work, the competing public scripts
yielded a certain indeterminacy or blurriness, which itself opened up a hermeneutic space that was first used to influence the choice of sites for the implementation of the Darwin project. While the choice of the Analavory commune
was officially presented as being a collective decision of the Expert Guidance
Group
24 which oversaw the whole project, our work shows that it was decisively
influenced by the former heads of the National Agency for the Official Control
of Seed and Plant Material (now known as the Official Service for Certification
of Seeds and Plant Material, SOC). Importantly, the choice of Analavory, apart
from it being close to the capital and served by well-maintained roads, offers benefits that are threefold, and incidentally ensured a triple convergence of interests:
• the Darwin Initiative has supported several projects in the area and is familiar
with Analavory;
be other than those of the donors, technical and financial partners. If you
look at the reports as well in fact, if we had to add budget to the Darwin
project, it was because of the community protocols [laughs], because I was
stubborn actually […].
22
From the viewpoint of Bioversity International and the project leader, there is no
doubt that deepening the boundary work with the community and refocusing the
BCP on ABS and bioprospection were misguided. As the project leader told us in a
semi-directed interview, although he was eventually able to secure additional funds,
at the request of the facilitator, to be invested in further developing the protocol and
capacity-building activities such as a community seed bank and a community registry, he had no doubt that the process was headed in the wrong direction:
I mean the other problem with all these protocols from the Nagoya point
of view is you can build a fence around all kinds of things and that doesn’t
create a demand for it and that doesn’t make it useful. You just build a fence
around it and it remains ignored, and it is allowed to continue to drop off
the face of the Earth and a lack of investment in it. […]
You know where in communities where it’s purely agricultural, they’re
working on crops, from other centres of origin and put a lot of effort in
developing a protocol but if there’s no interest in getting stuff from them
[…] it’s another thing.
23
The Emergence of a Hidden Script
The boundary work undertaken by Natural Justice on the ground was further
hindered by the emergence of another script, this time a hidden one, that the
Ministry of Agriculture was able to deploy on account of the indeterminacy that
affected the aims of the projects. This script is that of “IPLCs as premoderns”
and is further described in Chapter 11 of this volume.
In terms of concrete effect on the boundary work, the competing public scripts
yielded a certain indeterminacy or blurriness, which itself opened up a hermeneutic space that was first used to influence the choice of sites for the implementation of the Darwin project. While the choice of the Analavory commune
was officially presented as being a collective decision of the Expert Guidance
Group
24 which oversaw the whole project, our work shows that it was decisively
influenced by the former heads of the National Agency for the Official Control
of Seed and Plant Material (now known as the Official Service for Certification
of Seeds and Plant Material, SOC). Importantly, the choice of Analavory, apart
from it being close to the capital and served by well-maintained roads, offers benefits that are threefold, and incidentally ensured a triple convergence of interests:
• the Darwin Initiative has supported several projects in the area and is familiar
with Analavory;