Up until the advent of the colonial era, the traditional social structure in Malagasy society that bound diverse communities together for generations had been known as the Fokonolona. Deriving from the word foko (tribe) and olona (human), the social system had served to protect villages and their surrounding ecosystems throughout Madagascar’s rich history of human migration and settlement. At the turn of the Twenty-first Century, faced with an escalating trend in deforestation driven largely by foreign interests, the government of Madagasc...