ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on community participation (CP) as a global discourse that entered the field of biodiversity protection and enquires into its local power effects. It reviews dependency, governmentality, and hegemony strands of critical theories to examine which best applies to what one observe with regards to the local power effects of CP as a global discourse. The qualitative research project adopts a qualitative approach on local case studies, as this method alone enables the in-depth exploration of local power relations that is required to compare macro-narratives to micro-facts. The case study has to do with CP in coral reef protection in a small coastal town called Soufrire, on the Caribbean island of St Lucia. The proposal for a Pantanal Regional Park (PRP) was a fundamental step in the participatory discourse in the region. The multiple containment processes identified in the PRP project were facilitated by and impacted the local social capital.
