Participation Denied: the Global Environment Facility, its universal blueprint, and the Mexico–Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in Chiapas

Abstract

This article examines the implementation of the Global Environment Facility's (GEF) Mexico–Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in Chiapas, Mexico, in order to explore how stakeholder participation is increasingly employed as a tool of conservation's neoliberalisation. This requires an understanding of participation via the corridor as productive, in that it facilitates the production of new, albeit fictitious, kinds of biodiversity in the commodity form, and of new modes of social reproduction increasingly mediated by market relations, as access to common property resources and the necessities of life are progressively restricted to one's ability to pay. In this way the corridor produces the conditions under which a ‘market citizenship’ can flourish, with participation re-imagined as a means through which this end is achieved.

Notes

This work was carried out with the financial support of a Canada Corps University Partnership Program–Canadian International Development Agency Internship on Environmental Governance, and with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa. Information on the Centre is available at www.idrc.ca. Many thanks go to those individuals and organisations in Chiapas that opened their doors and shared their experiences with the author. She would also like to thank Ananya Mukherjee-Reed, Anna Zalik, Liisa North and Gavin Fridell for their insightful feedback on themes presented in this article.

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