A highly regarded academic and former policy analyst and consultant charts the forty-year history of neoliberalism, environmental governance, and resource rights in Madagascar

Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet the island nation's habitats are still in decline. In this important ethnographic study, Catherine Corson illustrates how the effort to attract high-level political attention to conservation by isolating the environment in national parks and blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers has avoided challenging key drivers of Madagascar's deforestation.