| Offsetting carbon emissions by financing tree-planting projects in the Amazon has become an important strategy in current efforts to foster sustainable development. This study examines how this "sustainability discourse" is implemented by both outsiders and villagers in a local agroforestry project managed by a British environmental foundation in a poor village in the Peruvian Amazon. Research was undertaken over a period of three months through archival research, participant observation and interviews with project staff, volunteers, and local farmers. This study finds that the relationship between outsiders and villagers corresponds to the process of orientalism, which makes the agroforestry project neocolonial and durable at the macro scale, yet ineffective at fostering sustainability in the village. This study also provides recommendations that planners could use to make their project more egalitarian, while keeping in mind that neocolonialism cannot be challenged without large-scale systemic changes to the global economy. |
