1st Edition

Development and Environmental Politics Unmasked Authority, Participation and Equity in East Timor

By Christopher Shepherd Copyright 2013
    304 Pages
    by Routledge

    304 Pages
    by Routledge

    Focusing on rural development and environmental management, this book brings together the detailed history of development in East Timor under two colonial regimes and under the contemporary conditions of national independence. It addresses two comparative areas of development: across the three political regimes and across four case studies of projects delivered by various national or international development agencies in independent East Timor.

    Employing an original classificatory framework for kinds of approaches to development – coercive orders, mandated orders, negotiated orders – the book covers the plantation-centred development of Portuguese Timor as a European colony and the integration-oriented development of ‘Timor Timur’ as Indonesia’s 27th province. It examines the neoliberal ‘democratic’ development of East Timor (or Timor-Leste) in the current context of state and nation-building, before drawing on case studies to investigate how development proceeds as a negotiation between authoritative state, non-state and international actors and local people who need to adapt development and conservation projects to suit their lived realities.

    By using the history of East Timor to explore how particular modes of operationalising development interventions are intimately intertwined with the broader political system, this book makes a valuable contribution to the fields of Development Studies, Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies.

    Introduction Part 1: Histories 1. Pacification and coffee (1769 – 1909) 2. Military colonization and agriculture (1910 – 1945) 3. Third world development and the Cold War (1945 – 1975) 4. Development and ethnocide (1975 – 1999) 5. Postcolonial development and governmentality (1999 +) Part 2: Ethnographic Encounters 6. Volunteering development: technology-driven social idealism 7. Market utopias and fragmented communities 8. Social engineering: a ‘farmer first’ green revolution 9. Conservation, state managerialism and ‘alternative development’ 10. Conclusion

    Biography

    Christopher Shepherd is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the Australian National University. His research interests include politics of development in East Timor and Peru.