The bureaucracy of nature: How integrated resource management excludes the poor

Paraguay is a country rich in water and biodiversity of global significance. Paraguay is also plagued by poverty and corruption. It is within the context of a troubled young democracy threatened by the specter of environmental degradation and widespread poverty that Paraguayan officials, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and technicians from development and conservation agencies like the World Bank's Global Environmental Facility (GEF) and the UNDP are attempting to re-fashion the governance of Paraguay's most precious and vulnerable natural resources -- water and biodiversity -- according to the principles of Integrated Resource Management (IRM). The IRM rule-making model has four basic imperatives: (1) Build public input and local knowledge into policy and project design and implementation. (2) Build IRM-based technical knowledge and conservation techniques into policy and project design and implementation as well as into local practice. (3) Develop environmental zoning plans. (4) Develop market-oriented resource management and development strategies.;Ongoing experiments with the IRM "standardized package" in Paraguay raise a number of questions about how regulatory regimes like IRM operate in practice and what they accomplish socially, politically, and environmentally. Through a multi-sited ethnographic investigation of IRM-based water and biodiversity management schemes in Paraguay, this dissertation offers a contextualized account of the social processes through which the IRM standardized package has come to influence the theory and practice of development and conservation among two groups of actors: development "experts" operating out of Asuncion (Paraguay's capitol) and mestizo and indigenous inhabitants of the remote and extremely biodiverse Pantanal Wetlands. In particular, this study focuses on the acts of translation through which actors with divergent worldviews attempt to use IRM's standardized discourses and spatial technologies in order to compel other actors to support particular interpretations of environmental problems and solutions.;This dissertation makes the case that local people do not benefit from IRM. Under IRM, the local inhabitants of globally significant watersheds and biodiverse landscapes are systematically excluded from the rights and entitlements associated with IRM governance schemes. In fact, the IRM model of "good governance" serves as a tool to rule local people in ways that disadvantages them.