Concluding Thoughts 323
and benevolent endeavours of those committed to advancing the c ommunities’
positions. The ethnographic work conducted in Madagascar by Manohisoa
Rakotondrabe and Fabien Girard confirms what Louisa Parks had already
observed in her previous work, namely the “NGOization” of “many non-state
actors that build relationships with local communities” (Parks, 2019, p. 195).
These “brokers”, albeit acting as go-betweens or mediators (ibid.), are increasingly
part of transnational networks that are not only geographically extensive
and tie global institutions, ideas, discourses and professionals to national
and local places but [are] also institutional in that they link various international, national, local, governmental, non-governmental, for-profit and
non-profit institutions, disciplines, technologies frameworks, knowledge
systems and professionals.
(Sharma, 2016, p. 5)
Furthermore, as funds are allocated through competitive bids issued by international aid agencies, global NGOs appropriate the lion’s share of international
funding. Furthermore, new aid frameworks are increasingly evidence-based or
results-based and subjected to far-reaching goals such as the “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) assessed against targets and global development indicators.
Meanwhile, the project’s “outcomes” and “outputs” are monitored through logframes, value for money indicators, theory of change diagrams, and so on (ibid.,
7). This new quantitative paradigm creates biases. The hegemony of global brokers
may exacerbate the mismatch between local realities and representations of “the
local” by those actors “whose competence is not place-based” (Demeulenaere,
2016). To be sure, these global brokers can still contract projects and programmes
out – as Bioversity International did with Natural Justice in Madagascar and Benin
– to NGOs far more experienced in operating on a local footing and deploying
solutions tailored to on-the-ground realities. However, at the end of the aid chain,
service providers (such as local NGOs acting as facilitators or sub-contractors) are
“shaped” and “constrained” by the rules imposed on international brokers, and
then they “[…] pass these constraints on to local communities […]” (Parks, 2019, p.
82). As epitomised in the Malagasy case, it may also be the case that disagreements
around the goals and representations of communities’ role between the “principal”
(broker) and the sub-contractor cause continued tensions and result in the community being caught between competing and largely irreconcilable aims.
The last point worth considering brings us back to one of the most disputed
and contentious issues that arose amid community-based natural resource management programmes: “what makes community?”. Two decades ago, Arun
Agrawal and Clark Gibson (Agrawal & Gibson, 1999, p. 633) warned “commons” scholars that:
[t]he vision of small, integrated communities using locally-evolved norms
and rules to manage resources sustainably and equitably is powerful. But
and benevolent endeavours of those committed to advancing the c ommunities’
positions. The ethnographic work conducted in Madagascar by Manohisoa
Rakotondrabe and Fabien Girard confirms what Louisa Parks had already
observed in her previous work, namely the “NGOization” of “many non-state
actors that build relationships with local communities” (Parks, 2019, p. 195).
These “brokers”, albeit acting as go-betweens or mediators (ibid.), are increasingly
part of transnational networks that are not only geographically extensive
and tie global institutions, ideas, discourses and professionals to national
and local places but [are] also institutional in that they link various international, national, local, governmental, non-governmental, for-profit and
non-profit institutions, disciplines, technologies frameworks, knowledge
systems and professionals.
(Sharma, 2016, p. 5)
Furthermore, as funds are allocated through competitive bids issued by international aid agencies, global NGOs appropriate the lion’s share of international
funding. Furthermore, new aid frameworks are increasingly evidence-based or
results-based and subjected to far-reaching goals such as the “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) assessed against targets and global development indicators.
Meanwhile, the project’s “outcomes” and “outputs” are monitored through logframes, value for money indicators, theory of change diagrams, and so on (ibid.,
7). This new quantitative paradigm creates biases. The hegemony of global brokers
may exacerbate the mismatch between local realities and representations of “the
local” by those actors “whose competence is not place-based” (Demeulenaere,
2016). To be sure, these global brokers can still contract projects and programmes
out – as Bioversity International did with Natural Justice in Madagascar and Benin
– to NGOs far more experienced in operating on a local footing and deploying
solutions tailored to on-the-ground realities. However, at the end of the aid chain,
service providers (such as local NGOs acting as facilitators or sub-contractors) are
“shaped” and “constrained” by the rules imposed on international brokers, and
then they “[…] pass these constraints on to local communities […]” (Parks, 2019, p.
82). As epitomised in the Malagasy case, it may also be the case that disagreements
around the goals and representations of communities’ role between the “principal”
(broker) and the sub-contractor cause continued tensions and result in the community being caught between competing and largely irreconcilable aims.
The last point worth considering brings us back to one of the most disputed
and contentious issues that arose amid community-based natural resource management programmes: “what makes community?”. Two decades ago, Arun
Agrawal and Clark Gibson (Agrawal & Gibson, 1999, p. 633) warned “commons” scholars that:
[t]he vision of small, integrated communities using locally-evolved norms
and rules to manage resources sustainably and equitably is powerful. But