Development, Knowledge, Partnership, and ChangeIn Search of Collaborative Approaches to Environmental Governance Peter Leigh Taylor (bio) Minería, movimientos sociales y respuestas campesinas: Una ecología política de transformaciones territoriales. Edited by Anthony Bebbington. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales, 2007. Pp. 349. $22.00 paper. Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests: Rural Encounters with Gender, Ecotourism, and International Aid in the Dominican Republic. By Light Carruyo. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2007. Pp. viii + 128. $45.00 cloth. Development with Identity: Community, Culture, and Sustainability in the Andes. Edited by Robert Rhoades. Wallingford, U.K.: CABI Publishing, 2006. Pp. v + 325. $115.00 cloth. Partnerships in Sustainable Forest Resource Management: Learning from Latin America. Edited by Mirjam A. F. Ros-Tonen, Heleen Van Den Hoombergh, and Annelies Zoomers. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Pp. xv + 329. $66.00 paper. Over the past two decades, researchers and practitioners have raised profound questions about environmental governance and development in rural Latin America, about the role of scientific research, and about the place of collaboration among social actors across multiple scales in pursuit of ecologically and socially sustainable livelihoods. How and by whom should development be defined, and whom should it serve? What possibilities exist for more positive relationships between traditional Western science and traditional indigenous knowledge? What is the potential for effective collaboration among diverse social actors, and what are the challenges and trade-offs of managing the interests of development and environment? What possibilities exist for real change, given the larger political economy of established interests, practices, and ways of describing what is possible and impossible? This review essay explores the contributions [End Page 262] of four recent books that deal, each in different ways, with development, knowledge, and partnerships as they relate to reshaping the landscape of social and environmental change in rural Latin America. Environmental Governance In an importance sense, all four books are about environmental governance in Latin America today. Environmental governance not only refers to state regulation and enforcement of conservation laws but also includes the political, organizational, and cultural frameworks through which highly diverse social actors and interests in natural and cultural resources are coordinated and controlled.1 Environmental governance shapes not only which social groups participate in and control development but also how the concept of development itself may be conceived and reconceived. Carruyo's case study, Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests, explores how women and men in La Ciénaga, a community bordering the Dominican Republic's Armando Bermúdez National Park, engage development, create knowledge, and pursue their own well-being and that of their families. The twenty-one chapters of Development with Identity present a diverse set of natural and social science studies from a five-year collaborative research project in Cotacachi, Ecuador. Partnerships in Sustainable Forest Resource Management explores, in fourteen chapters, the possibilities and problems of the growing turn toward multiactor, cross-scale partnerships in international forest management. The seven chapters of Minería, movimientos sociales y respuestas campesinas provide both a critical theoretical framework and a detailed empirical examination of the territorial transformation set into motion by large-scale mining in Peru, Ecuador, and Guatemala. Critiquing Development In recent years, a broad range of research has highlighted widespread disillusionment with traditional approaches to development. Building on critiques of modernization theory by Andre Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, and Immanuel Wallerstein, among others, researchers have deconstructed the centralized methodology, objectives, and definition of development drawn from idealized understandings of [End Page 263] the industrialized global North.2 Other researchers have analyzed the related and growing rejection of neoliberalism, privatization, and the privileging of global markets as a neutral allocator of costs and benefits.3 Carruyo frames her study within this critical literature. She draws especially on Gita Sen and Karen Grown's structural analysis of the gendered nature of development and on Arturo Escobar's contention that development itself is a first-world cultural construct.4 Following the recommendation of both of these works to turn to the local, Carruyo focuses on women so as to understand how alternative development might be identified through ethnographic analysis of local practices. Carruyo studies people who...