ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a better understanding of the present conflicts and impasses occurring in relation to land use, development, rights and representations in southern Belize. It highlights the complexity and multivocality of ecological debates in the current political environment, and investigates the importance of environments and their representations for understandings and articulations of citizenship and development. Toledo has the country's highest measured levels of poverty. A number of governmental and non-governmental initiatives have been implemented in an attempt to rectify this and address obstacles to economic development and poverty alleviation, with varying degrees of success. The legacy of colonisation in Belize has contributed to the ambiguities of contemporary nationalism, land tenure and borders. Britain and Spain argued for many years about the status of British settlement on the margins of Spanish-controlled territory, and sovereignty was finally agreed subject to a road being constructed to link Guatemala to the coast through what is now Belize.
