Environment, Development, and Citizenship: Narrative Processes as Environmental Revolution and Political Change in Post-Colonial Trinidad & Tobago.

Abstract

This research explores how different groups of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) citizens construct meaning about the natural environment, given a national development policy based on natural resource extraction. Environment is conceptualized as a cultural category, a view that is supported by decades of theorizing and empirical research in environmental history and anthropology, American rural sociology, French postmodernism, Caribbean literature, and British and American environmental sociology. Leveraging the works of conflict theorists, I argue that environmental meanings are manufactured through a process of elite narrative contests while less dominant grassroots voices seldom define national understandings of environmental struggles and agendas. Narrative and storytelling, therefore, represent the locus of resistance, opportunities for compromise, hybridity, and adaptation in any given locality and socio-historical moment. Competing stories and narratives about the environment become a defining resource as symbolic environmental capital mobilized primarily by elites to shape development policy and electoral outcomes. I show how what comes to be seen as the truth, with regard to environmental claims in T&T depends upon, not only information that is scientifically negotiated, but deeply embedded culturally specific issues and conflicts that are observable in the competing environmental narratives or stories that are told (constructed) by elite actors in the local milieu. Environmentalism is therefore a contested cultural terrain. Narrative processes are key to illuminating the nature of more fundamental understandings about both environment and development. Though political elites have sought to define environment and development tensions as race, class and political party conflicts in T&T, analysis of local narratives using DICTION 6.14 and data from the World Values Survey demonstrate that more fundamental issues are at play, such as a shift from modernist understandings of environment and development to a more risk and justice-based approach. The research is a case study of present era T&T society. I specifically examine the rise of environmental claims associated with new industrial park development, and efforts to site large, heavy industrial plants, as part of the received, modernist development policy strategy of down-streaming T&T’s oil and gas sector.