As sites of global environmental degradation continue to emerge and pose significant threats to life on the planet, the world's natural resource managers persist in attempts to mitigate and reverse this degradation. While approaches to conservation have evolved over the years to include locals in the policy-making process, the experiences of those policies by locals - once in place - are often overlooked. This dissertation examines the socioeconomic and political changes associated with conservation projects from the perspectives and experiences of the people most affected by these projects. Through 128 individual interviews, 25 focus group discussions, and participant observation, I compare two approaches to Irrawaddy dolphin conservation: one in Myanmar that focuses on preservation of livelihoods and the other in Cambodia that focuses on economic development. I endeavor to bring local experiences and perceptions of these projects to the forefront to examine their impacts on livelihoods and to help identify potential gaps in policy intentions and effects. I also draw on political ecology theory to assess and critique the relationship of capitalism to international conservation. After explaining the unique issues and barriers associated with this project, I lay out the direct socioeconomic and ecological effects of each conservation project by comparing participant experiences and perceptions of the projects with those of conservation officials. I then compare conservation projects to examine the indirect effects of each approach. I trace the pathway of the capitalist conception of nature as commodities upward from 'developed' countries to its global institutionalization through the process of eco-governmentality and then downward to 'developing' countries through the delivery system of NGO governmentality. I explain how Myanmar blocked this delivery system while Cambodia embraced it and attribute the apparent shift from a 'communal ideology' to a 'consumerist ideology' in Cambodia, and lack of such a shift in Myanmar, to these opposing tactics. I then focus on the capitalist approach to conservation in Cambodia and show how this approach has led to the subsequent exacerbation of environmental and social problems it intended to fix. Lastly, I offer specific recommendations for each project, as well for international conservation in general, based on findings.

This thesis deals with the conflict of nature and the landscape protection with recreational use of nature. This conflict is examined in relation to "conservationist subject" and "bivouacking subject" in the context of ecogovernmentality, i.e. the shift of nature to the government sphere. The aim of this thesis is to introduce more of cosmology of nature protection, besides the dominant one - conservational, and to understand their relation. The thesis is divided into two parts - a theoretical part and an empirical part. The theoretical part is devoted to the theory of subjectivity and the concept of ecogovernmentality in the context of chosen ethnographic studies. The empirical part is dedicated to ethnographic research of bivouacking subjects. The results of the research are based on the comparison of data acquired from the ethnographic research with abstracted figures of "conservationist subject" - as defined by visitor rules of the protected areas and the law of nature and landscape protection and "bivouacking subject" - made by stays in nature or scout education. The result of this thesis is the discovery of similarity of both subjects, which in large extent overlap, however not completely. Bivouacking subjects get into conflict with tourists, against which they delimit themselves, rather than...