Co-opting conservation: migrant resource control and access to national park management in the Philippine uplands
2005
Dressler, W.H.
Often the history of political and economic inequality in forest villages can shape how and why resource use conflicts arise during the evolution of national parks management. Increasingly in the Philippine uplands, indigenous people and migrant settlers co-exist and compete over forest resources and, in the process, have shaped how conservationists preserve resources through national parks. This paper examines how migrants have claimed lands and shaped production and exchange relations among the indigenous Tagbanua to built on, shape and benefit from otherwise coercive park management on Palawan Islands, the Philippines. Migrant control over productive resources has shaped who among each group could sustain agriculture in the face of the state`s dominant conservation narrative: valorizing migrant paddy rice and criminalizing Tagbanua swidden cultivation. Upon settling, migrant farmers used new political and economic strength to tap into provincial political networks to be eventually hired at Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. As a result, migrants shaped conservation to support paddy rice while criminalizing the cultivation od swidden among Tagbanua and poorer migrants. While state conservation policy shapes how parks influence local resource access and use, older political economic inequalities in forest villages build on such policies, thereby influencing how management affects poor households.
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