“Saving Soqotra”: Biography of a Conservation and Development Experiment

Abstract

This chapter presents a comprehensive biography of the actual implementation process of Soqotra’s conservation experiment that was launched in 1997 with funding from the Global Environment Facility and its partner agencies at the United Nations. This chapter builds on the previous one, which offered a retrospective analysis of the formulation process of this conservation experiment. This experiment was pursued for the next two decades through multiple reincarnations of that inaugural project to conserve Soqotra’s endemic biodiversity and to institutionalize its sustainable development. This biography explores the evolving articulation of development and conservation that has led to an impasse where conservation is ineffectually being pursued through a preventive environmental management regime. This chapter chronicles the implementation process by UN agencies of this virtually conceived conservation and development vision for Soqotra. Accordingly, it highlights this conservation experiment’s animating vision and the constraints it imposed on the islanders’ local pursuit of socioeconomic mobility. It describes the formulation of the “Socotra Archipelago Master Plan,” which engendered by default the strategy of sustainable underdevelopment for Soqotra: the maximal conservation of Soqotra’s ecological endowments and the minimal development of both its physical environment and human population. It explores the ramifications of this strategy through a systematic analysis of the implementation of the five major biodiversity conservation projects that were supposed to transform Soqotra into an ecocentric community and evaluate their effects on the island and its inhabitants.