Nature and progress in rural Creole Belize: Rethinking sustainable development.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the meanings of the realms of nature and progress, and the practices associated with each in a rural Afro-Caribbean community in northern Belize. The Belizean Creole community of Crooked Tree sits on an island in the middle of a lagoon. The waterways around the village were declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1984, and a small-scale locally-owned and managed ecotourism industry, based on the sanctuary, has been developing in the village since the 1970s. On the surface, the community and its surrounding natural areas seem to embody the ideal melding of conservation and development: here is sustainable development in action. In reality, there is a good deal of conflict in the community over the sanctuary, and to a lesser degree the tourism industry, and villagers resent the restrictions placed by the government (and the transnational conservation organizations which fund the sanctuary) on their use of the natural world, despite the revenue generated by tourism. In order to understand this conflict, I examine how nature and progress are constructed differently by the different groups of people (villagers, government officials, national conservation organizations, transnational conservation organizations) interested in conservation and development in Crooked Tree, tracing the developments of these constructions through time, and looking at them as local articulations of global institutions. I argue that hybrid understandings of nature and progress are emerging in Crooked Tree as a result of the history and transnational linkages that characterize the community. These new hybrid understandings might allow room for a successful integration of sustainability and progress, and might entail redefining these concepts to better suit all of the people interested in the future of rural communities.