A MacArthur Grant Supports VLS Graduate’s Madagascar Law Center
August 3, 2008
As a VLS student Lalaina Rakotoson viewed the Environmental Law Center as a model for what she hoped to create in her native Madagascar, so after receiving her Master of Studies in Environmental Law in 1995 she returned home and founded the Development and Environmental Law Center (DELC). Working with other lawyers, she set out to develop a legal framework that would balance the need for conserving natural resources with the economic development pressures facing the world’s fourth largest island.
Lalaina, who already held law degrees from two universities in Madagascar, became DELC’s project development coordinator. With a strong background in coastal and marine issues as well as forest management, her work focused on shoreline and ecosystem protection plans. In 2002, she helped draft Madagascar’s Policy and Strategy for Sustainable Coastal Zones. She was also involved in an earlier project to develop a Forest Use Agreement for land surrounding Ranomafana National Park.
DELC’s work over that first decade received notice, and in early 2008, the MacArthur Foundation awarded the law center a three-year, $270,000 grant to expand its efforts. The grant will help support partnerships with environmental NGOs and universities working on marine and coastal zone management, governance and environmental justice issues.
“Nearly 98 percent of Madagascar’s land mammals, 91 percent of its reptiles and 80 percent of its flowering plants are found nowhere else on earth,” the MacArthur Foundation’s website says in describing the foundation’s long-standing commitment to the island and its native habitat.
Lalaina, a Fulbright scholar who in 2007 earned her doctoral degree in International Legal Studies from Golden Gate University in San Francisco, says resource scarcity is the most critical challenge facing Madagascar. With huge foreign vessels depleting the fish population off Madagascar’s coast, overfishing is an ever-present threat.
“Fishing is a big industry. It supports our economy, so when the fishermen can’t fish, they go out and clear the forests,” she explained during a recent visit back to VLS. She met with Dean Jeff Shields and some of her former professors to discuss the MacArthur grant and the environmental protection work that it will support in Madagascar.
Key to DELC’s work, she said, is involving local communities in planning for future growth and developing management agreements that will strike the right balance between limited natural resources and economic development in Madagascar.
“There are a lot of legal aspects to cover,” she said. “The idea actually started from here. The Environmental Law Center inspired me.”
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