Book Reviews
Corson, Catherine A. (2016). Corridors of Power: The Politics of Environmental Aid to
Madagascar. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Reviewed by Merrill Baker-Médard
Middlebury College
Millions of dollars are spent globally on biodiversity conservation each year.
Despite prolonged financial and institutional support, biodiversity decline con-
tinues at a rapid rate. Catherine Corson’s Corridors of Power: The Politics of Environ-
mental Aid to Madagascar helps explain the complex social, political, economic,
and discursive drivers of conservation failure in one of the world’s most treasured
biodiversity hotspots: Madagascar.
Corridors of Power provides a deep dive into the history and inner work-
ings of transnational environmental politics. It is an ideal read for graduate
students and scholars interested in conservation governance, international aid,
and the role of science in policy-making. While the book focuses specifically on
Madagascar, it highlights power dynamics and processes endemic to most inter-
national conservation and development efforts. Corson digs into the dynamics
of who is invited to the policy-making table, who benefits most from decisions
made at the table, and who builds the table—that is, who frames the problem
being addressed.
The title’s double entendre draws attention to how the size and location of
protected areas in key ecological corridors in Madagascar (forested areas with
high concentrations of biodiversity) stem directly from high-level negotiations
and decision-making occurring at international conferences and the head-
quarters of conservation organizations. By highlighting this connection, Corson
argues that throughout Madagascar’s history, foreign interests and ideas have
shaped how resources have been used, as well as who benefits most from their
use.
Corson brings insider status to this work, having held positions at the
White House, State Department, and USAID. This perspective allows her to trace
the formal and informal processes that shifted environmental management
away from comprehensive integrated conservation and development to a more
narrow focus on biodiversity research and the establishment of protected areas.
This narrowing of the conservation agenda was enabled by the neoliberal push
to reduce the role of the state, in combination with the participatory turn in
international development that empowered nongovernmental, largely foreign-
run, organizations to determine the goals and strategies of conservation in
Madagascar.
Global Environmental Politics 17:3, August 2017
© 2017 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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148 (cid:129) Book Reviews
Corson asserts that the network of international conservation organiza-
tions, donors, philanthropists, celebrities, and private companies, something
she calls the “conservation enterprise,” has not only taken decision-making au-
thority away from local resource users, but has also led to fewer funds making
their way into the rural reaches of Madagascar. She illustrates how financial and
technical expertise are concentrated at the highest levels, funding the creation of
reports, brochures, maps, and meetings that take place primarily internationally
or in Madagascar’s capital city.
A significant portion of the book concentrates on the role of the United
States in conservation efforts in Madagascar. USAID has been one of the
largest financial supporters and intellectual architects of conservation efforts
in Madagascar, something that Corson argues was enabled by the lobbying
efforts of organizations in the United States to influence legislators who were
more likely to fund environmental protection efforts overseas than within the
United States, precisely because it wouldn’t impact the constituents of con-
gressional representatives. This dynamic illustrates another take-home message
of the book: a fundamental injustice stems from the fact that the successes of
conservation projects in Madagascar have been measured by a narrow set of
biodiversity indicators established by distant funding organizations, instead
of by those most intimately impacted by the projects. Biodiversity conservation
has had consistent support from all US administrations since the 1980s; there-
fore, environmental organizations with much broader mandates learned to fit
their missions into this more narrowly defined objective. This mandate inhib-
ited organizations from taking on underlying structural issues pertaining to
conservation governance or the deeper economic and social drivers contributing
to biodiversity loss.
Corson specifically explores some of the more problematic components
of the “Durban Vision,” a commitment made by Madagascar’s President
Ravalomanana in 2003 to triple the area under protection in Madagascar by
2008. To do so, she draws on field research in two ecological corridors in eastern
Madagascar. She shows that the hasty timeline undermined meaningful engage-
ment with local resource users. Mayors were brought to large regional meetings
where they were encouraged to accept the ecologically driven protected area
boundaries, with little to no consideration for traditional users, sacred sites, or
the potential socio-economic impacts of the new protected areas on local people.
One of the book’s strengths is also one of its shortcomings. Corridors of
Power is primarily an institutional ethnography; it traces the key players and
negotiations at a level few authors currently cover concerning Madagascar. At
the same time, little space is dedicated to showing how the key decisions made
at the international and national levels play out on the ground from the per-
spective of local people. A small section in chapter 7 highlights more regional
representatives, such as mayors, and local resource users. Given the book’s
assertion that local interests and needs were not adequately considered in the
majority of conservation strategy decision-making, the book would have benefited
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Joshua C. Gellers
(cid:129) 149
from a few more examples grounded in interviews and opinions from individuals
living in proposed or existing protected areas.
This minor shortcoming aside, Corson’s critical and deeply historicized
analysis of environmental policy in Madagascar affords readers unique insight
into processes often shrouded in secrecy. Some of the more important financial
and political decisions, as Corson points out, were negotiated behind closed
doors or informally between strategically positioned actors. Corson’s work is
detailed, pulling from an impressive number of interviews and archival sources.
As a result, this book will be the definitive source on Madagascar’s conservation
aid history for years to come.
Boer, Ben, Philip Hirsh, Fleur Johns, Ben Saul, and Natalia Scurrah. 2016. The Mekong: A
Socio-Legal Approach to River Basin Development. New York: Routledge.
Reviewed by Joshua C. Gellers
University of North Florida
How is law deployed, understood, and (re)produced by actors operating in,
around, and far afield from the Mekong river basin (MRB)? How does revealing
the plurality of legal and governance structures at work in this area offer greater
clarity regarding the sources of, and solutions to, transboundary water conflicts?
In The Mekong: A Socio-Legal Approach to River Basin Development, Ben Boer and
an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Australian universities respond to
these queries in a brilliantly singular voice through an impressively compre-
hensive charting of regional riparian legal undercurrents.
Using a socio-legal lens, the book drills down to great depths to uncover
the unsettled and complex nature of water governance in four of the states that
make up the lower MRB—Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. These main
cases join with case studies of interstate “dam suites” (p. 36) to showcase the
cross-cutting applications of law and sources of legal influence at varying levels
of governance. This ethnographic effort includes more than fifty in-depth inter-
views, with actors ranging from villagers to representatives from NGOs to high-
level decision-makers in business and government. At its heart, The Mekong
seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that development along the river
requires progressive adherence to hard law. As the authors amply demonstrate,
the manifestations of and directions taken by law in the MRB are as varied and
tortuous as the river itself.
The book begins with a thorough geographic overview of the Mekong and
its riparian neighbors. Here also the authors introduce actors, institutions, and
interests found along the river, characterized as elements in a metaphorical
drama. The authors also describe an analytical framework that arrays law along
the hard/soft and international/regional/national/subnational dimensions. They
describe the book’s purpose as not to empirically reveal law’s shortcomings, but
rather to challenge the assumptions that more law is needed to manage complex
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150 (cid:129) Book Reviews
issues in the region and that law can produce consistent outcomes. An addi-
tional historical primer urges the reader to consider context when evaluating
the trajectory taken by law, a strategy that helps explain why changes in the law
“have had mixed and unpredictable results” (p. 85).
The latter section of the book constitutes the analytical proving ground
for the socio-legal approach. In line with the authors’ pluralist portrayal of the
law, this part of the book focuses on technico-legal aspects of governance in the
MRB—an intergovernmental institution (the Mekong River Commission), an
environmental regulatory process (environmental assessment), and a demo-
cratic norm (transparency). The diversity of the arenas explored illustrates
the ability of socio-legal analysis to span geographic scales and levels of ab-
straction. Each chapter in this section offers a compelling and extensive assess-
ment of a particular socio-legal domain relevant to the Mekong that scholars
can appreciate for its individual merits.
The Mekong closes with several summarized “contributions and displace-
ments” (p. 188) emanating from the preceding analysis. The authors reiterate
their earlier declarations: law in the MRB is complex, ever-present in social life,
unreliable, and forged creatively and unexpectedly out of local experience and
foreign influence.
Despite its great depth, the book suffers from a couple of acute short-
comings. First, it scarcely moves the ball forward with respect to theory. While
the authors make passing mention of Michel Foucault’s governmentality and
pay brief homage to Marxism and several democratic theorists on the subject
of transparency, the book lacks theoretical anchoring. As such, the effort
appears more concerned with proving the novel application of an analytical lens
than with enhancing knowledge about the causes and impacts of, and solutions
to, transboundary water issues. Second, the interviews figure variably through-
out the book, making it difficult to track the extent to which the conclusions
reached reflect empirically derived insights from the actors deemed so integral
to understanding the indeterminacy of law and politics in the MRB. It would
have been useful if the authors had spent more time highlighting the experi-
ences of those most vulnerable to the political and economic forces swirling
about them.
The Mekong remains a stunning accomplishment that deftly zooms in and
out of various levels of governance to provide a pluralist view not only of the
law, but of the actors and institutions affecting or affected by riparian technico-
legal decision-making. It opens the door to fresh practical and scholarly ques-
tions regarding the efficacy of hard versus soft law, how to account for the
indeterminacy of law in resolving transboundary water issues, and what strate-
gies civil society should adopt to overcome the power differentials embedded in
legal and political systems. By illuminating the pitfalls of popular assumptions
about law and development, the authors recover the agency of people previ-
ously deemed unwitting bystanders in a world of complex governance, while
challenging the view that legal reform should proceed in linear fashion. As such,
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The Mekong offers a preview of the analytical possibilities that inhere in a socio-
legal approach to water politics.
Jennifer Clapp
(cid:129) 151
Howard, Philip H. 2016. Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What
We Eat? New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Reviewed by Jennifer Clapp
University of Waterloo
How often do we pause to consider the social and environmental costs asso-
ciated with bagged salad? Philip Howard’s Concentration and Power in the Food
System challenges us to think about the broader consequences of corporate
control over the food we eat. His excellent and engaging book examines both
how the global food system has come to be dominated by a small number of
truly giant firms and the wider environmental and social implications of this
trend.
Howard adopts a critical approach to analyzing the problem of corporate
concentration in the food sector, focusing on how firms maximize not just
profits but also power in the marketplace. In the food system, corporate con-
centration has reached considerable levels at all stages, from farm to plate. As
Howard documents, just six firms control over 75 percent of the global seed and
agrochemical market, and this number is set to drop to just four firms if the
recently proposed agribusiness megamergers are given the green light by regu-
lators. Only four firms control over 70 percent of the world’s trade in grain. And
in the retail sector, the top four firms control over half of the US grocery market,
with just one firm—Walmart—capturing a whopping 33 percent of that market.
Most economists consider sectors in which the top four firms control more than
40–50 percent of the market to be uncompetitive.
Howard’s insightful analysis reveals multiple strategies used by large agri-
business firms to maximize their power. These strategies are employed in dis-
tinct ways in different nodes of the food supply chain. Food retail companies,
for example, have actively engaged in campaigns to weaken antitrust legislation
in the United States, which has allowed them to dominate huge swaths of the
market. This dominant position has enabled them to further consolidate their
power through practices such as demanding lower prices from their suppliers.
Food-processing companies have worked to engineer demand for highly pro-
cessed or packaged foods. Commodity-trading firms use their market power to
manipulate prices in ways that enable them to gain financially. Large-scale farms
are situated to receive the lion’s share of government subsidies, enabling them
to further expand. And the seed and chemical industry has pushed for more
stringent intellectual property rights to protect their innovations and prevent
other firms from entering the market.
The environmental and social consequences of these corporate strategies
are significant. To return to bagged salad, firms such as Dole and Chiquita have
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152 (cid:129) Book Reviews
taken what were previously unbranded greens and packaged them into a branded
convenience item with a market worth over $4 billion per year. Beyond the
obvious profit grab of branding lettuce, the product itself contains a huge
amount of virtual water that is then transported far and wide through
the grocery retail networks. The large-scale salad operations have also been impli-
cated in instances of bacterial contamination that spread widely through these
networks. Relying on prewashed and processed salad also has a broader “des-
killing” effect in society, as even the simple task of making a salad “from
scratch” is framed and marketed by firms as somehow being difficult and time-
consuming.
In the input sector, corporate concentration has contributed to a narrow-
ing of crop genetic diversity and a growing use of certain agrochemicals asso-
ciated with genetically modified seeds produced by the same companies. The
loss of biodiversity reduces the resilience of agricultural production systems,
making them more vulnerable to shocks such as climate change. Commodity-
trading firms profit from food aid programs that serve to undercut prices for
local farmers in poor countries, while at the same time framing their role as
“feeding the world” (or what Howard dubs “grainwashing”). Because of their
capacity to speculate on commodity markets, they also profited handsomely
during the 2008 food price crisis when food prices fluctuated sharply. Even
the organics sector has been subject to the trend of increased concentration.
Many organic food brands have been purchased by large food-processing com-
panies who operate as “stealth owners” that continue to use the name brand of
the firms that they have purchased.
What to do? Like many books on the food system, this book ends with a
half hopeful chapter suggesting that small-scale alternative food movements
might be able to tame the beast. While such alternatives are necessary to show
that another food system is possible, the book’s analysis itself does not leave
a lot of room for optimism. Howard also suggests that the growing size of cor-
porations may be their own undoing, as the public becomes more aware of the
inequalities and impacts associated with their dominance. The book could have
said more about the potential leverage points for broader policy change, such as
more stringent regulations at the state and international levels to curb corporate
concentration and its effects.
Howard gives us much to ponder regarding the problem of corporate
control in the food system. In presenting his analysis, he supplements his argu-
ments using visualizations that provide powerful ways to illustrate the trends he
examines. His analysis is sophisticated, yet highly accessible—an approach that
will appeal to scholars across different disciplines. The book is sure to become
essential reading for students of the global environmental politics of food.
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