MSU Researchers Study Globalization with NSF Grant
By Andy McGlashen
10/23/08
MSU researchers have received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s program in Coupled Natural and Human Systems to study the effects of globalization on remote communities.
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Photo courtesy of Gerald Urquhart
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The researchers will conduct a five-year study of “globalization from the perspective of households,” said principal investigator Dan Kramer, an assistant professor jointly appointed by Fisheries and Wildlife and James Madison College.
Also working on the project are Andrea Allen, Anthropology; Aaron McCright, Lyman Briggs College and Sociology; Jiaguo Qi, Geography; and Gerald Urquhart, Lyman Briggs College.
The study focuses on a group of villages on the “Mosquito Coast” of Nicaragua. Kramer said that before a road linking one of them to the capital, Managua was completed in 2007, it took a charter flight followed by a long boat ride to reach any of the villages. The group will study the road’s effects on household resource use, farming and fishing, through comparisons to baseline data collected before the road was built.
Kramer said the group has already observed changes in the villagers’ attitudes about development. When news initially spread that a Japanese aid agency had put up money for building the road, the majority of villagers were “very, very excited,” he said. But more recently, “there was more negative feeling, as they saw things they hadn’t anticipated,” like damage to the road from heavy trucks and an influx of vendors selling their wares on the roadside. Cell phone towers have even begun popping up in the area.
Urquhart said another proposed road has met with hostility from villagers.
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Photo courtesy of Gerald Urquhart |
“The people in the town of Monkey Point have been really resistant to it,” he said. When government officials arrived in the village to discuss plans for the road, their helicopter was “pretty much attacked.”
There have also been noticeable changes in local markets, Kramer said. Produce vendors now bring fruits and vegetables from Managua markets to sell to the villagers. Local fishermen have quit selling their shrimp to wholesalers, and instead gather on the roadside to sell to buyers from the capital. Kramer said easier access to markets could adversely impact local ecosystems by encouraging farmers to plant crops that are “suited to export, but not suited to being grown in that part of Nicaragua.”
Other studies have focused on globalization’s effects on nations or regions, and have ignored the “really complex set of drivers” that cause changes in households, Kramer said. The MSU study will more closely examine factors like market access, technological change and migration between communities.
Kramer said the group’s findings could have real world applications. By studying the effects of globalization, he said, they hope to “assist communities in anticipating those effects. We’re hoping that some policy changes come out of this.”
Urquhart said the project will also show “how globalization is affecting the last wild places on earth. That’s where we stand to lose the most species.”
For more on the project, visit www.globalchange.msu.edu/nicaragua.
Andy McGlashen is the news writer for ESPP. He can be reached at mcglash3@msu.edu
