Water governance in New Mexico: Adjudication,law, and geography

Water rights adjudications lie at the intersection of law, space, and the geography of resource governance, combining elements of field cartography, archival research, and judicial supervision and decree. However, few geographers have examined the water rights adjudications now active in most western US states. Using case material and ethnographic vignettes from a larger geographic project on water rights and governance in New Mexico, I examine water adjudication as a vital instrument in the state’s pursuit of spatial knowledge. Resources and water users are seen by the state through this process, while at the same time, water users may elude or confuse state legibility. In this process, altered forms of governance are produced. Here, I explore how the formalizing of water rights in New Mexico has articulated new legal-spatial relationships, which are often viewed differently by state and local agents. I then examine the products of adjudications and the tension between local and expert knowledge in natural resources governance over being seen and governed by the state and the struggle to retain local autonomy and governance in water management.     

A multi-disciplinary framework for the study of private housing schemes: integrating anthropological,psychological and political levels of theory and analysis

This paper examines the theories and methods involved in the study of the impact of private governance on residents in two distinct kinds of middle class housing schemes: gated community residents in New York and Texas living in single family attached and detached houses, and cooperative apartment dwellers in New York City. The studies employed a range of methodologies drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, psychology and political science. An attempt was made to understand residents lived experiences through a number of disciplinary lenses: theories of community and culture; theories of rationalization and psychological resistance, and theories of moral minimalism and representation. Each of these disciplinary layers added to the analysis, while at the same time, creating epistemological disjunctures and concerns that had to be addressed by the research team on an ongoing basis. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the benefits of this approach in terms of the production of new knowledge about private governance, while offering cautionary comments about undertaking interdisciplinary projects of this nature.     

Hydrocarbons, popular protest and national imaginaries: Ecuador and Bolivia in comparative context

This paper examines contemporary struggles over hydrocarbon governance in Ecuador and Bolivia. Our comparative analysis illustrates the ways that petro-capitalism, nationalist ideologies, popular movements and place conjoin in the governance of oil and natural gas. In the case of Ecuador, state employees drew on their labor relations and political training to oppose the government’s efforts to privatize the state oil company. In Bolivia, urban popular movements opposed the privatization of the hydrocarbons industry and its domination by foreign firms. In both cases, hydrocarbons struggles involved the production of imaginative geographies of the nation and it hydrocarbon resources, which in turn drew on historical memories of nationhood. Whereas neoliberal political and economic restructuring sought to re-organize national hydrocarbons companies, redraw concessions, and draft new resource extraction laws, hydrocarbon movements aimed to counter these processes by re-centering hydrocarbon governance within a populist vision of the nation-state. In contrast to analyses of resource conflict in the environmental security and resource curse literatures, the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia demonstrate that such struggles cannot be reduced to models of opportunity structure, war profiteering, or resource scarcity (or abundance). Rather, these cases show that political economy and cultural politics are inseparable in the context of resource conflicts, which involve struggles over the meanings of development, citizenship and the nation itself.     

Towards ‘hybrid accountability’ in EU biofuels policy? Community grievances and competing water claims in the Central Kalimantan oil palm sector

The EU biofuels market is stimulating expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia. Little research has yet examined the impacts on water resources arising from this large-scale land use conversion to cultivation of biofuel feedstock or positioned contextual water resource governance in Indonesian locales in a wider political ecology of European climate politics. Through the concept of ‘hybrid accountability’, we examine primary evidence from an extensive action research process in Central Kalimantan Province, Indonesian Borneo, to assess whether the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive and existing certification schemes offer a way to improve the accountability of market actors and promote sustainable water resource management. We conclude that these initiatives have had no bearing on safeguarding local livelihoods and the water resources they depend on, with governance mechanisms largely failing to address people’s grievances. Rather, the EU’s policies on biofuels have supported a de-politicisation of what needs to be seen as ‘distributional water politics’. Furthermore, certification schemes such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil offer, at present, only cosmetic tools and are insufficient to address deep structural governance issues. We argue that further hybridisation of market-based certification and governmental regulation should be designed with the purpose of providing new transnational recourse mechanisms and remedies for affected communities.     

Non-linear diffusion: Bison on the hoof and on the rail in the United States

This paper puts forth a non-linear, post-structural conception of geographical diffusion by utilizing the example of American bison. In doing so, this approach stands in contrast to canonical theories of diffusion (notably neoclassical economics and political economy), which portray diffusion as a steady progression of development. In reviewing the history of bison diffusion during the 20th century, the impact of several factors is evident. These include environmental, cultural, economic, governmental, health and material factors. Each of these variables has taken several distinct forms, thereby enlarging the number of actors involved in the species’ redistribution. The impact of each variable has waxed and waned over the years. Consequently, a series of heterogeneous networks has formed, which have simultaneously undercut the importance of certain variables and formed the basis for new channels of bison diffusion. The non-linear nature of diffusion emerges from the different temporalities of these networks. In an alternating fashion, this process of network-building has guided bison onto public, private, and tribal lands.     

Protecting tourism labor? Sustainable labels and private governance

This paper examines the application of private governance through certification labels and industry initiatives in the tourism industry. These efforts are sold as a way to achieve decent working conditions for tourism workers who participate in global value chains in the global South. The question at hand is, are these mechanisms an effective way to support tourism labor? Specifically, this research documents two main findings. First, I evaluate the programs through a tourism global value chain approach and demonstrate how tour operators use language about sustainability and the certification of accommodation suppliers for brand product differentiation and marketing. My findings demonstrate that these programs do not support tourism workers. Second, even with certification and recommendations, the standards are limited and do not include measures to protect against precarious employment, gendered divisions of labor, and emotional labor demands. Thus, these initiatives do not fully protect tourism workers. Finally, I argue a new governance research approach focused on workers’ rights and empowerment provides insights into achieving a more equitable international tourism landscape. This has implications for a governance analysis focused on rights and ‘synergistic’ governance strategies.     

Native Americans water rights in the water scarce Western United States,its causes,consequences and probable solutions

Conclusions The governmental body charged with defining the Indian water rights may be Congress, the courts, or a Federal agency. Regardless which body assumes this responsibility, resolution of particular disputes between private users and Indian reservations must be made against a background of a larger political battle between the states, the Federal Government, Indian tribes, and private enterpreneurs for control over W waters. The Federal-State concerns are supplemented by Indian fears of unfair treatment at the state level and of failure by the Federal Government to meet its fiduciary obligations to the tribes. As a first step in resolving the Indian water dilemma, the nature of the contending interests and the institutional possibilities calls for the Federal courts to protect Indian interests and to reduce uncertainty through definition of the scope of Indian reserved water rights.     

‘White cranes fly over black cranes’: The longue durée of rural–urban migration in Vietnam

The changing nature of rural–urban migration, in the context of transition economies of East and Southeast Asia, is usually interpreted as an outcome of structural transformation, while the longue durée of these migration flows tends to be neglected. Adopting a historical perspective, supported by the ’migration as resistance’ approach, this paper examines the changes in rural–urban migration dynamics in Vietnam from the 1950s to 2010 in relation to the country’s political and economic reforms (Ð?i M?i). Drawing on a case study of female migration between Phu Khe and Hanoi, it analyses how migrants resist and undermine state control over population mobility in order to pursue their movement and migration, and how they develop their migration networks over time. By doing so, the paper highlights a gradual process of the changing nature of rural–urban migration in which migrants themselves, through their resistance to governance of mobility and their establishment of migration networks prior to Ð?i M?i, play an important role.     

Why Delhi cannot plan its ‘new towns’: The case of solid waste management in Noida

Indian metropolises have witnessed the growth of ‘new towns’ on their peripheries over the past two decades, which have attracted investment as well as affluent residents. Most research on new towns examines the contentious politics of land acquisition and development, but less is known about urban governance and everyday life. This article focuses on solid waste management in Noida, a new town on the periphery of Delhi that has been unable to develop a large-scale waste management system, and we have two main foci. First, we show that the municipal government has sought to regulate waste collection, while waste processing and disposal have remained unregulated and this has discouraged the entry of medium and large-scale private enterprises. Second, we explore the contentious politics surrounding actually existing waste management practices that have emerged in the absence of significant public or private investment. Most waste is managed by small- and medium-sized enterprises in the informal sector, so associations that represent the so-called ‘new’ middle class must interact with informal-sector waste workers. These interactions result in moderately high levels of waste collection but waste disposal remains haphazard and this exposes the limits of the new middle class’ control over urban space. Ultimately, we show how municipal governance and the actually existing politics and practices of waste management contribute to the production of Noida’s socio-spatial landscape.     

Producing hybrid forests in the Congo Basin: A political ecology of the landscape approach to conservation

Environmental conservation is increasingly operated through partnerships among state, private, and civil society actors, yet little is known empirically about how such collectives function and with what livelihood and governance outcomes. The landscape approach to conservation (known also as the ecosystem approach) is one such hybrid governance platform. Implemented worldwide over the past decade by international NGOs, the landscape approach employs the ‘ecosystem principles’ of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In spite of its prominence as a conservation and development strategy, little political ecology scholarship has considered the landscape approach. This article offers a case study of a conservation landscape in the Congo Basin, the Tri-National de la Sangha (TNS), which connects tropical forests in Cameroon, Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic. Led by NGOs, the TNS has since 2001 relied on partnerships among logging companies, safari hunters, the state, and local communities. Although the landscape approach purports to facilitate re-negotiations of user rights, resource access patterns in the TNS appear to have molded to pre-existing power relations. Rather than incorporating local concerns and capabilities into management, local knowledge is discredited and livelihoods are marginalized. As a result, management occurs through spatially-demarcated zones, contrasting the fluidity of interactions among diverse groups: both human (loggers, hunter-gatherers, safari guides, NGOs) and non-human (trees, elephants). These findings are situated within a burgeoning literature on neoliberal environmental governance, and suggest that ensuring ecologically and socially positive outcomes will require careful and iterative attention to linkages between ecological processes and evolving power dynamics.     

Volume control: Stormwater and the politics of urban metabolism

This paper engages with emergent conceptualizations of political–industrial ecology to understand the politics surrounding how the volume, composition, and material throughput of stormwater in Los Angeles is calculated and applied by experts. The intent is to examine the unfolding relationship between the volume and material flow of stormwater, and the social, political, and technical practices involved in identifying stormwater as a new and underutilized water resource. Specifically, it seeks to understand how the active processes of calculating the metabolic inflows and outflows of stormwater in Los Angeles serve as a way for the city to render value and meaning to the flows of stormwater. I suggest that the ways urban metabolisms are calculated reflect a volumetric approach to environmental governance that serves to achieve certain political goals. I refer to this type of governance as volume control—a way of organizing technopolitical interventions around overcoming problems related to the volume of resources flowing and circulating into, through, and out of cities and industrial systems. I argue that understanding this form of governance relies on taking a political–industrial ecology approach that accounts for both the social and material dimensions of resource flows. While the categories and motivations of stormwater governance remain contested over time and space, it is shown that stormwater in Los Angeles needs to be understood in relation to the ecological systems and scientific, political, and cultural practices designed to make it into a resource and align with existing patterns of growth and development.     

The intersection of corporate social responsibility guidelines and indigenous rights: Examining neoliberal governance of a proposed mining project in Suriname

With neoliberal reforms and the growth of multinational mining investment in developing countries, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become notable (and debatable) for its potential to fill a social and environmental governance gap. As yet, there has been limited analytical attention paid to the political struggles and power dynamics that get reflected through specific CSR guidelines and their implementation in local contexts; this is particularly apparent with respect to the human rights dimension of CSR, and more specifically, indigenous rights. This study documents the debates, issues of accountability, and different interpretations of CSR between NGOs representing indigenous rights and a mining corporation. These debates focus on environmental impact assessments; indigenous rights to land; and the indigenous right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. These exchanges illustrate the socio-political, as well as economic, positioning of these actors, and the different agendas associated with their positions that determine issues of accountability and shape alternate interpretations of CSR guidelines. The outcomes of these debates also reflect the different degrees of power that these actors hold in such contexts, irrespective of the strength or validity of their arguments about CSR. This dialogue is thereby a lens into the more complex and contentious entanglements that emerge with CSR as a mode of governance, as it plays out ‘on the ground.’ These findings also reinforce questions regarding what we can expect of CSR as a mode of governance for addressing human rights issues with resource extraction projects, particularly within the constraints of overriding political and social structures.     

Private agri-food governance and greenhouse gas abatement: Constructing a corporate carbon economy

Private sector actors are playing an increasingly significant role in the definition and governance of ‘sustainable’ agri-food practices. Yet, to date little attention has been paid by social scientists to how greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are addressed as part of private agri-food governance arrangements. This paper examines how private actors within agri-food supply chains respond to emerging pressure for measures to reduce GHG emissions from agriculture. Drawing upon the Anglo-Foucauldian governmentality literature, we introduce the notion of the corporate carbon economy to conceptualise the practical techniques that enable private agri-food actors to make GHG emissions thinkable and governable in the context of existing market, regulatory, and supply chain pressures. Using a case study of the Australian dairy industry, we argue that private agri-food actors utilise a range of techniques that enable them to respond to existing government environmental regulations, balance current market pressures with future supply chain requirements, and demonstrate improved eco-efficiency along food supply chains. These techniques – which include environmental self-assessment instruments, tools for measuring GHG emissions, and sustainability reporting – have little direct relevance to the ‘international climate regime’ of carbon trading, and carbon markets more broadly, yet individually and in combination they are crucial in enacting an alternative regime of GHG governance. In concluding, we contend that the growing use of sustainability metrics by international food companies is likely to have the most powerful implications for GHG governance in the agri-food sector, with potentially far-reaching consequences for how future action on climate change is rendered thinkable and practicable.     

Power and politics in climate change adaptation efforts: Struggles over authority and recognition in the context of political instability

Throughout the world, climate change adaptation policies supported by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have provided significant sources of funding and technical support to developing countries. Yet often the adaptation responses proposed belie complex political realities, particularly in politically unstable contexts, where power and politics shape adaptation outcomes. In this paper, the concepts of authority and recognition are used to capture power and politics as they play out in struggles over governing changing resources. The case study in Nepal shows how adaptation policy formation and implementation becomes a platform in which actors seek to claim authority and assert more generic rights as political and cultural citizens. Focusing on authority and recognition helps illuminate how resource governance struggles often have very little to do with the resources themselves. Foundational to the argument is how projects which seek to empower actors to manage their resources, produce realignments of power and knowledge that then shape who is invested in what manner in adaptation. The analysis adds to calls for reframing ‘adaptation’ to encompass the socionatural processes that shape vulnerability by contributing theoretical depth to questions of power and politics.     

Trans-scalar embeddedness and governance deficits in global production networks: Crisis in South African fruit

The governance of labour in global production networks (GPNs) has become a critical area of concern amongst academics and policymakers alike. To date, GPN research has focused on the role of private company codes and multi-stakeholder ethical initiatives primarily driven by lead-firms. Other GPN studies highlight the critical role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in challenging lead-firm purchasing practices and shaping regulatory outcomes at local production sites. However, GPN research has not sufficiently incorporated the role of nation states in regulating work through legislative frameworks and enforcement regimes, often referred to in the literature as ‘state’ or ‘public’ governance. This is despite a ‘regulatory renaissance’ taking place across certain developing countries, seeking to strengthen their national regulatory labour institutions (Piore and Schrank, 2008:1).The GPN framework provides an analytical lens through which to conceptualise cross-cutting strands of trans-scalar governance regimes, involving complex networks of state, private and civil society actors operating at multiple scales. Notions of territorial and societal embeddedness are used to elucidate how global ethical standards derived from particular country contexts become enmeshed in national regulatory frameworks and local societal relations, shaping governance outcomes for precarious workers incorporated into GPNs. The paper draws attention to the ‘trans-scalar embeddedness’ of labour governance regimes which interact across geographical scales and, in the case of South African fruit, reflect a ‘trans-scalar governance deficit’ for precarious workers. It is argued that the influence of national regulatory regimes should be more fully incorporated into analytical frameworks for understanding governance outcomes in GPNs.     

Participatory exclusion – Cyclone Sidr and its aftermath

‘Nature does not discriminate, but humans do’ – this deliberately echoed sentiment in an area affected by Cyclone Sidr problematizes the practice of resource distribution in post-disaster situations. While relief and rehabilitation services have the objective of ‘building back better’, the possibility of elite-capture of resource distribution channels, jeopardizes both humanitarian initiatives as well as future development. This paper explores the political economy of post-Sidr interventions from an ethnographic account. The paper establishes links between power networks and access to resources in the study area, finding that marginality is a production of ongoing disaster interventions which favour the relatively well-off over the structurally poor. Ultimately, humanitarian assistance channels resources through established power networks, thus reinforcing them and producing uneven resilience among different social strata. This paper offers important insights for redesigning the distribution of humanitarian assistance.     

Contesting colonial rule: Politics of exile in the Indian Ocean

This paper examines the compulsory relocation of anti-colonial nationalists from other parts of the empire to Seychelles during British colonial rule. It explores how these colonial policies of forced expulsion that were used to contain anti-colonial political activity unintentionally enabled political exiles to create new trans-imperial networks of resistance. From the late 1800s, the British Colonial Government exiled to Seychelles over 500 anti-colonial leaders and their followers from Egypt, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, Palestine and other colonies; the last political exile was Greek Cypriot leader Archbishop Makarios who arrived in Seychelles in 1956. Based on archival and empirical research this paper examines their experiences of exile and how, despite feelings of loss and isolation, they continued to challenge colonial authority by mobilising new forms of contestation. Through a colonial geographical imaginary, Seychelles was constructed as distant, remote and isolated, a place where political agitators could be safely confined and prevented from infecting others with their anti-colonial sentiments. Instead, however, these movements brought colonised people together from across the empire and created spatially extended networks of ideas that became significant in connecting these ‘remote’ islands to other places. Exiles disrupted the authority of the British Colonial Government through mundane and small acts of resistance in which they made constant, almost daily, demands for their right to return home and better living conditions. This study, on a much under-researched form of imperial mobility and confinement, contributes to debates on colonialism, space and resistance by identifying networks produced by colonised people and, through an exploration of translocal subaltern agency and resistance, confounds place-bound notions of politics.     

Neoliberalizing environmental governance? Land trusts, private conservation and nature on the Oak Ridges Moraine

With recent changes in the ways that state agencies are implementing their environmental policies, the line between public and private is becoming increasingly blurred. This includes shifts from state-led implementation of environmental policies to conservation plans that are implemented and managed by multi-sectoral networks of governments, the private sector and environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs). This paper examines land trusts as private conservation initiatives that become part of neoliberal governance arrangements and partnerships that challenge our conceptions of environmental preservation and democratic participation. The paper starts with an examination of the concept of neoliberalized environmental governance. Next, it addresses the shifting social constructions of property and land in the context of protecting large scale ecosystems. Through a case study of the extension of new environmental governance arrangements on the Oak Ridges Moraine in Ontario, we examine the relationships that have formed between different levels of the state and environmental non-governmental organizations. Finally, we analyze the expansion of land trusts and private conservation initiatives that are predicated on private land ownership and the commodification of nature, the emerging discourses and practices of private conservation, and how these are implicated in the privatization and neoliberalization of nature.     

Autonomy in a post-neoliberal era: Community water governance in Cochabamba,Bolivia

Bolivia’s leftward political shift, which is frequently described as “post-neoliberal,” is crucially linked to the ideal of autonomy. While autonomy has a long history among leftist theorists and social movements in Latin America, its contemporary importance is related to an ongoing effort on the part of scholars and activists to identify an alternative organizational form that eschews both state actors and private entities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with a group of community-run water systems in peri-urban Cochabamba, this paper asks what autonomous water governance looks like in practice. By presenting a case in which the community water systems made a series of structurally limited “autonomous” decisions that ultimately bound them more closely to the local state and private sector, the paper argues that autonomy faces socio-ecological limitations when conceptualized as a project of internal self-governance. Socio-ecological processes take place at multiple scales and over long time spans; a radical politics of autonomy therefore necessitates a spatially extroverted project that focuses on building strategic alliances that strengthen community autonomy in the long-term.     

Multi-level governance of climate change adaptation through regional partnerships in Canada and England

Adaptation to climate change is widely recognized as a multi-level governance challenge because expected impacts and respective measures cut across governmental levels, sectors and societal domains. The present paper analyses the role of regional adaptation partnerships in Canada and England in the multi-level governance of climate change adaptation. We describe and compare three partnerships per country with regard to their evolution, membership and governing structures, coordination across levels and societal domains, and their adaptation activities and outputs. Although both partnership schemes represent new collaborative approaches, their genesis and governance differ. While the Canadian collaboratives are a government-centred approach that originated and partly operated top-down through a national programme for the period 2009–2012, the English partnerships follow a more pluralistic stakeholder-centred approach that evolved bottom-up already in the early 2000s. Both schemes have in common that they mediate between governmental levels, foster networking between public and private actors, and eventually build adaptive capacities and inform adaptation policies. We conclude that regional adaptation partnerships represent a new governance approach that facilitates climate change adaptation, albeit with limits. Since state actors play(ed) key roles in both partnership schemes, they do not represent a new sphere of authority outside the state. Instead of blurring or destabilizing governmental levels they complement (and perhaps even stabilise) them with multi-level interactions.