i Patrick W. Staib Anthropology This dissertation is approved, and it ...

Nicaragua, the interaction between development experts and peasants is socially
constructed. “The local situation is inevitably transcended and objectified as it is
translated into documentary and conceptual forms that can be recognized by the
institutions” (Escobar 1991:667).
For Escobar, social scientists (and anthropologists in particular) who work in the
development industry operate in the service of power (1991:659). In his words:
Development projects are part and parcel of how the world is put together so as to
insure certain processes of ruling. . . . Development has functioned as a
mechanism of power for the production and management of the Third World
through the systematic elaboration of forms of knowledge concerning all aspects
of importance in Third World societies (Escobar 1991:674).
Barbara Rose Johnston (1997:19) asks, “Who participates in shaping the
development agenda?” Johnston employs a rights-based approach to the dynamics of
development and environmentalist efforts in the developing world. Her work in the
“political ecology of development” (1997) targets the distribution of resources for
environmental conservation. “‘Developing’ or ‘managing’ the resources of previously
peripheral regions requires a reformulation of resource relations, transferring the loci of
power over resource value, access, use, and control from resident peoples to external
power structures” (Johnston 1997:18).
Development economist Joni Valkila (2007) questions whether Fair Trade organic
coffee production is a sustainable form of development or “a poverty trap.” The United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development Sustainable Development
organized the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro around the themes of ecological
conservation and social justice in the Third World. Participant nations and international
lending agencies recognized the need to develop impoverished communities without
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