developmentalism with the needs of states to be legible.
The result is the crushing of all sense of popular
creativity and the loss of metis, the sorts of subaltern
practice that might hold out alternative models of
human advancement.
5 There is strong continuity here between Escobar and
the cultural emphasis in the work of Kothari (1988)
(and his stress on alternative modes of thought) and in
Ashis Nandy's (1987) work on 'cultural frames' and
critical traditionalism.
6 Kingsbury (2000) has shown how the contested nature
of indigeneity and community has a counterpoint in
international law. The UN, the ILO and the World
Bank have, as he shows, differing approaches to the
definition of indigenous peoples. The complexity of
legal debate raised around the category is reflected in
the vast panoply of national, international and inter
state institutional mechanisms deployed, and the on-
going debates over the three key criteria of non-
dominance, special connections with land/territory, and
continuity based on historical priority. These criteria
obviously strike to the heart of the community debate,
and carry the additional problems of the normative
claims which stem from them (rights of indigenous
peoples, rights of individual members of such groups,
and the duties and obligations of states). Whatever the
current institutional problems of dealing with the
claims of non-state groups at the international level
(and there are knotty legal problems, as Kingsbury
demonstrates), the very fact of the complexity of issues
surrounding ‘the indigenous community’ makes for at
the very least what Kingsbury calls ‘a flexible approach
to definition’, and at worst a litigious nightmare.
7 This is a particularly interesting case because we
know that in other settings and around other issues –
for example transnational green networks (Keck,
1995) – the outcome was quite different. Brosius
(1997) shows how activists can be guided by self-
centered interests in program building that rest on mis-
leadingstereotypes of the community, just as Tsing
(1999) decuments the ways in which Meratu commu-
nity leaders play to a ‘fantasy’ of tribal green wisdom
to mobilize international attention (see Zerner, 1994;
2000). A number of the large transnational NGOs
(TNGOs) have themselves been shaped by the chang-
ing political and market-driven winds in the west, pro-
ducing a sort of in-house corporate environmentalism
(‘green corporatism’) within the larger TNGO com-
munity (Bailey, 2000). This itself raises the question
of how large TNGOs as major donors change the
domestic politics and structure of the local NGO com-
munities in the south, and how foreign and local
NGOs actually build political strategy and alliances.
In these cases, transnational NGO networks produced
something much more akin to Ferguson’s ‘anti-politics
machine’, but worse. Here the likes of the World
Wildlife Fund and their ‘green corporatism’ were able
to impose an agenda on weak local green social green
social movements and NGOs, and indeed they weak-
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