Crossed paths to Eden: Transnational environmental politics and the Amazon Alliance, 1990--2004

This dissertation is an historical ethnography of the Amazon Alliance, a coalition that originated from a 1990 meeting between Amazonian indigenous groups and US environmental and human rights NGOs (non-governmental organizations). The author traces the development of this coalition from 1990 to 2004 through document analysis and archival review, participant observation, and over thirty in-depth interviews with key informants and coalition members. The study departs from others of its kind in that the focus does not rest exclusively on the local movement as it engages with other actors in a larger network, but on the northern advocacy base for a marginalized population in the South.;The major aims of this research were to (1) understand the genesis of the Amazon Alliance, and (2) explain one of its major developments, that is, the departure of the major conservation groups from the coalition despite their early enthusiasm and participation. In pursuing these goals, the author draws a more complex picture of a transnational network in which larger cultural, economic and political contexts interact with the micro-politics of inter-personal ties and decision-making. The author highlights a series of institutional, personal and ideological mismatches among the US NGOs and between the NGO and indigenous members upon which the coalition was originally built, but which came to the fore under conditions of financial scarcity and organizational strain.;The study contributes to recent geographical and anthropological theorization of scalar "entanglements" by applying the idea to transnational networks among northern environmental and human rights activists and their indigenous allies. The concept avoids the static binary between "the local" and "the global" and highlights the relational aspect of transnational politics. The research illustrates how transnational politics are informed by people's localized experiences and histories, by their relationships to other transnational and local agents, and by the larger structures and contexts that impact the opportunities available to environmental and indigenous rights activists. The transnational networks that so many social movements seek to access in order to expand their reach and demand redress are uneven, unstable, and thoroughly "entangled" social landscapes shaped by power and struggle.