Explaining complexities of environmental management in developing countries: lessons from the Fiji Islands

Development assistance agencies have long urged developing countries to adopt environmental management techniques used in industrialized countries. They have ascribed shortcomings in the way developing states use those techniques to insufficient training, environmental matters being poorly integrated into economic decision making, other institutional weaknesses and lack of capacity. These reductionist explanations ignore the influence that socio-political and economic factors may have on state environmental management. They afford only a limited understanding of environmental practice in the Fiji Islands, a South Pacific archipelago and republic. The attempts of Fijian chiefly élite to maintain their power base – achieved through political participation in the state and economic development activities as much as through maintaining the communal system – shape the state's environmental management practices. Those practices have far less rational and democratic bases than one would expect either from the underlying logic of the techniques used (such as environmental impact assessment, environmental planning and protected areas), or from the way those techniques are applied in western, industrialized countries.