Introduction

In the wake of failures to maintain protected areas based on strict exclusion – the ‘fortress’ approach deriving from the Yellowstone model – considerable efforts have been made to involve peoples living in and around such areas in various co-management schemes to invoke their own sense of interest in protecting the natural resources of such areas. However, park managers have increasingly felt that effective deployment of committed participation in local co-management institutions requires fostering a ‘conservation awareness’, a subjectivity of care for the environment. In his exploration of the imposition of a conservationist subjectivity by the Indian government on some of its citizenry, a process that, following Foucault, he labels ‘environmentality’, Agrawal (2005a, b) emphasizes the role of government regulations in fostering a modern subjectivity of care for the environment through the medium of participatory mechanisms such as forest councils. Others (e.g. Severin 1997) have disputed the efficacy of governmental regulations in effecting such a transformation of sensibility, arguing that traditional orientations to the environment enshrined in custom or the exercise of volunteer participation in non-governmental organization (NGO) projects of conservation result in more profound inculcation of custodial attitudes or conservationist sensibility. What this chapter seeks to explore is the formation of other types of cooperation around a protected area of Sulawesi, the Lore Lindu National Park (Taman Nasional Lore Lindu or TNLL), specifically the politics surrounding the formation of conservation agreements and village-level conservation organizations in the region.