Brokers and intermediaries in environmental governance, Southern Sri Lanka

Since the end of the civil war in 2009, rural Southern Sri Lanka is facing growing tensions between fast economic development and the conservation of biodiversity, which contributes to the notoriety of the island. In order to preserve the green areas of the country, both the government and international institutions have made great efforts to implement projects combining biodiversity protection and poverty reduction as their objectives.

Within that context, this paper focuses on a specific category of stakeholders, emerging from the implementation of the aforementioned projects: a wide range of intermediaries between local communities and the State, or international institutions. Based on an ethnographic study of two protected areas in Southern Sri Lanka, the paper will examine the role of those intermediaries in the implementation of environmental governance models and ideologies in local arenas. I will also analyze the complex relationships between those brokers and other categories of individuals or groups within the community: people living in protected areas, traditional figures of power, social and political elites, etc. Using fieldwork illustrations, I will stress how the emergence of brokers and intermediaries in the context of nature conservation may lead to the reorganization of social and political relationships at the local scale.