| Summary: | Initially designed as tools of restriction, protected areas now go together with decentralisation. Their new goals for local democracy and economic development participate of a globalized evolution of public administration, from « sovereignty » to « governmentality». An study of large protected areas shows how conservation complements state redeployment. In French Guyana and in the Brazilian state of Amapá, it comes after sovereign function strategies maintained on a distant Amazonia, switching between paternalistic attitude and delegation of authority to local elite groups. On these « abnormal » territories, conservation institutions are trying to reconcile different legitimacies. In bringing together local communities, public officials and economic players, administrators organise spaces of state governance that go along with regional autonomy. These concertation places are aiming to restrain the development of social and political gaps, in creating new mobilities on territories. Environmental protection justifies a frugal type of governance, by multiplying counter powers and surveillance entrenchments between stakeholders of a common space. When inciting the emergence of a new « civil society » in barely administered back lands, this creates new rivalries and spreads managing rationale of responsibility.
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