'…take matters into their own hands'. 3 When asked why they do not just call the police (gendarmes), another grower, Henri, grumbled: 'we do not trust the gendarmes…they are the ones who sell guns to the dahalo [local bandits]'. We then asked what they do if they caught a 1 The 'we' here includes the first and fourth author, only. The northeast coastal towns of Sambava, Antalaha, Vohemar and Andapa (SAVA) are center of vanilla-production in Madagascar. 2 It is the country's primary export crop with proceeds of up to $800 million. For more on the material effects on local consumption patterns of the vanilla price spike see Zhu 2018. 3 Anonymous interviews (July 16 2017).

High-value agricultural commodities face substantial economic, environmental and social sustainability challenges. As a result, commodity industries are adopting sustainable supply-and value-chain models to make production more efficient, traceable and risk-averse. These top-down models often focus on giving higher prices to smallholder producers. While an important component of sustainability, this focus on farm-gate prices has shown mixed results in part because they are less effective in highlighting the asymmetrical power relationships and the socioeconomic and ecological complexity in high-value commodity production. Here, we use a novel method to measure and visualise changes in smallholder power in Madagascar's northeast 'vanilla triangle'-home to about 80% of the world's high quality vanilla. Our results reveal the paradox that during the recent price surge an overall increase in smallholders' multi-dimensional power to access economic benefits was accompanied by a decrease in many other equally important measures of sustainability. This illustrates how effective models for understanding global sustainable commodity chains should incorporate smallholders' perspectives that often emphasise complexity and uncertainty, and which aims to increase power and access for producers across both high and low price points.

Community conservation initiatives have long struggled to forge productive relationships with the people living in and around protected areas. Currently, there is enthusiasm among conservation researchers and practitioners regarding local cultural taboos, which often appear to conserve species and landscapes of ecological importance. However, in incorporating local taboos into conservation programmes, there is the risk that these culturally sophisticated institutions are used in a highly reductionist manner. Drawing from ethnographic work in Madagascar, this article highlights how the simplification of cultural taboos can exasperate already fraught relationships between communities and conservation organizations, and undermine the very environmental outcomes that groups seek to promote. This reductionist approach can also lead to the harmful appropriation of local meanings and resources. Overall, while working with local taboos may potentially offer an alternative to neoliberal models of conservation, scholars and practitioners should recognize the dynamic and interconnected processes connected with taboos, instead of regarding them as static and interchangeable products.

No abstract

Is -diversity‖ a modern concept, like indigeneity or biodiversity, which is conceived precisely at the time that it seems to be threatened and on the verge of disappearing? In the face of perceived threats to diversity, projects and policies have been crafted to protect, promote, or conserve diversity, but in doing so they have often demonstrated a paradoxical propensity toward purity and authority in representations of diversity. Perceptions of -pure‖ natural diversity might represent native forests comprised solely of native species; -pure‖ cultural diversity might represent indigenous peoples who still speak indigenous languages and wear native dress. If purity is emblematic of diversity, what, then, is the place of hybrid landscapes and peoples? In our study, we draw on a range of examples-of agrobiodiversity conservation in Bolivia, satellite mapping initiatives in Madagascar and Ecuador, scientific authority about anthropogenic climate change, indigenous language and identity in Peru, and a comparison of the Amazon and Atlantic Forest in Brazil-to demonstrate gaps between representations of diversity, and the heterogeneous local realities they obscure. We suggest that hybridity is a form of diversity unto itself-albeit a form of diversity that is more complex, and thus harder to codify and categorize. OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2013, 5 2496