Development and Environmental Politics Unmasked: Authority, Participation and Equity in East Timor by Christopher Shephard (review)

Popular historical narratives in East Timor consider the country to have experienced 450 years of neglect, Chris Shephard writes in the introduction to Development and Environmental Politics Unmasked. That narrative would justify the numerous development investments in the country after its independence in 1999/2002. Shephard’s book, however, shows it to be incorrect. Initiatives to develop the country, in particular the agricultural sector, had been launched ever since East Timor’s colonization by the Portuguese, and they continued after the Indonesian invasion of 1975 up until today. What colonial and postcolonial development initiatives have in common, Shephard argues, is the creation of different “development orders,” motivated by power and dominance. He elaborates the argument with the help of Actor-Network Theory and the model of boundary objects, combined into what Shephard calls “boundary assemblages” (p. 26).

Shephard presents his book as a contribution to the field of development anthropology. The first part, however, is historical. Five solid chapters present the various attempts to change Timor’s rural economy from the late eighteenth century until independence in 1999/2002. The Portuguese suppressed “ancient” farming, particularly the shifting-cultivation methods of the Timorese, and introduced “modern” farming with fixed fields for food crops and large-scale plantations for cash crops. The Portuguese mainly focused on coffee production. To make farmers grow coffee they created a system of indirect rule whereby liurai, village chiefs, had to instruct local farmers, create plantations, and employ farm laborers. In the nineteenth century this was mainly an administrative arrangement; from halfway through the 1910s, support through research, model farms, and advice to farmers was added.

According to Shephard, coffee was a boundary object in the colonial system (p. 41). More specifically, coffee established a connection between the Portuguese and the liurai through their shared objective of exploiting farmers and laborers. Unsurprisingly, the people toiling on the fields were more than reluctant to engage with the colonial enterprise. The various forms of silent protest through evasion, which political scientist/anthropologist James Scott termed the “weapons of the weak,” fueled the colonizers’ racial stereotyping of indolent indigenous farmers. Although the system was adjusted and its sharpest edges smoothed in later decades, the power structure of these colonial development programs was militarized, repressive, and ineffective in improving agriculture for the benefit of Timorese farmers.

This approach was continued energetically by Indonesian private companies liaised to the military during the “New Order” rule. Military-style “development” companies tended toward plunder with minimal investment of profits (p. 108). The Indonesian rulers also achieved what the Portuguese aspired to but never realized: large-scale migration of (Indonesian) nationals to Timor to run the economy. The resistance of the Timorese to the combined military and economic occupation became more and more explicit and violent, ultimately resulting in a vast majority voting for independence in the 1999 referendum.

Part II covers the first twelve years of independence through a detailed account of four development initiatives. The reader is first taken to the eastern province of Lautém where a dairy farm, attached to an agricultural college, was set up by a group of Australian philanthropists and farmers. Chapter 7 deals with a hill town greenhouse project run by two agricultural technicians and funded by an international bilateral agency. The next chapter describes the experimental fields of a project named Seeds of Life, sponsored by an Australian international aid agency and connecting several international agricultural research organizations. Chapter 9 presents an NGO introducing organic farming in a coastal community.

The overall argument about “development orders” provides some conceptual connections between parts I and II, but striking differences remain. In particular, the prominence of the voices of local farmers and the author’s eye for technical details in part II enables the conceptual framework to work much better there than in part I, where farmers appear mostly as a general category and much less detail about (adjustments of) farming methods is...