Trojan Environmentalism: Ecological Gentrification of an Island Community

Abstract

This chapter offers a detailed narrative reconstruction of the formulation process of an internationally-led environmental adjustment regime, which annexed the totality of Soqotra’s territory. This regime imposed new forms of regulation on the island’s human-environment relations and sought to inculcate a new environmental subjectivity among the local population, and to promote an eco-centric communal polity. The chapter situates the virtual formulation and local imposition of this regime within the context of the emergence and dissemination of the Global Environment Facility’s hegemonic travelling policy regime of biodiversity conservation that mutated from a utilitarian sustainable development ideal to a financialized green economy paradigm. Subsequently, it focuses on the nature and impact of the mediation of international actors and factors in the local articulation of the phenomenon of Trojan environmentalism. The latter entails the subordination of all aspects of communal life under the binding jurisdiction of a global regulatory framework supervised by globe-trotting ecocrats prescriptively enforcing a virtually conceived environmental adjustment regime. The chapter exhaustively explores the ecological gentrification effects engendered by the managerial hegemony of international agencies through their symbolic appropriation and arbitrary reconfiguration of the island’s territorial totality, and their external determination of the aspirational horizon of an entire community.