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Browsing Theses and Dissertations by Author "Afioma, Gregorius, author"

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    Political dimensions of livelihood transformation of the Indigenous Ata Modo people in Komodo National Park, Indonesia
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Afioma, Gregorius, author; Galvin, Kathleen A., advisor; Kwiatkowski, Lynn, committee member; Stevis, Dimitris, committee member
    This paper examines the political dimensions of the livelihood changes of the Indigenous Ata Modo people in Komodo National Park (KNP), Indonesia. Established in 1980, KNP is well-known as the natural habitat of the renowned Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis). What is less known is that KNP is also the home of the local communities of Ata Modo. The Ata Modo people have changed their livelihoods from hunting, gathering, and farming to fishing and the tourism economy in response to processes of enclosure, dispossession, and dissolution of the protected area through various interventions from colonial times to recent years. Political economy critique tends to overlook the local dynamic, while the institutional framework of livelihood analysis tends to depoliticize livelihood adaptation as the economic survival mechanism. Using the framework of political ecology, this paper explores the political dimensions of livelihood transformation and the subject-making process of the Ata Modo people. Through livelihood adaptations, I emphasize the individual and collective agency in navigating their access and control over the resources around the park. This research is based on the ethnographic materials I collected during 2016-2022. Through the study of Indigenous Ata Modo's agency and their engagement with various regimes of conservation in KNP, I argue that the Indigenous Ata Modo's livelihood adaptation is an act of positioning in relation to the power dynamics of conservation and neoliberal conservation and ecotourism project. While continuously marginalized by the fortress and neoliberal models of conservation, the Indigenous Ata Modo continue to define and build their livelihoods through everyday and spectacular acts of resistance, occupation, and incorporation. By focusing on the struggle and livelihood adaptations of the Indigenous Ata Modo, this paper contributes to the study of the interlinkage between conservation, ecotourism, and community engagement in development.