Another political ecology of civil society reflexiveness against urban industrial risks for environmental justice: The case of the Bisasar landfill,Durban, South Africa

The concerns of political ecology since its beginnings as a field have been predominantly set in rural areas with limited focus on urban industrial risks. Further, debates on the global South (often from Anglo‐American perspectives) have not fully appreciated the divergent and differentiated perceptions of urban risks and, therefore, everyday forms of resistance within civil society. Instead, work has mainly focused on civil society power relations against the state and industry that are driven by coherent populist political agendas. Against this setting, this paper's contribution aims to better contextualize ‘other’ third world localities in political ecology through a case study of urban industrial risks in the upper/middle income (as opposed to rural, low/lower middle income) country, South Africa. In doing so, the paper sheds light on the derelict aspect of civil society contestation, especially along class and ethnic lines, over urban landfill infrastructure as a livelihood resource or a health hazard. The paper draws upon frameworks of self‐reflexivity and reflexive localism as complementary to the mainstream political ecology to illuminate differentiated civil society reflexiveness and therefore, aims to advance the discussion of other political ecologies. The case study of the largest formal landfill site in Africa, the Bisasar landfill situated in Durban, highlights differences underlying power relations and constraints within civil society (in leadership, social networking, resources and mistrust) that have implications for mainstream political ecology notions of civil society coherence.     

Economic diversification and second‐tier political conflict: Assessing bitumen political ecologies in southwest Nigeria

Since its emergence as a research field in the 1980s, political ecology has provided a useful tool to explicate violent environments, notably as hallmarks of natural resource‐dependent economies. Practitioners regularly address what might be called ‘charismatic’ natural resources such as oil and other precious minerals to describe contestation over access and control of natural resources. Yet, where this focus exists, the political ecology of less economically valuable or ‘noncharismatic’ resources is thereby obscured. Thus, Nigeria's dependency on oil production has generated much scholarly attention with its unstable political economy described as a rentier state. In contrast, this paper draws on extensive field experience and knowledge about the country to assess in a preliminary manner some of the dimensions and ramifications of a less well known second‐tier natural resource commodity that is gaining attention as part of a possible national economic diversification strategy. Using the case of bitumen, a viscous hydrocarbon mainly used in road surfacing and roofing work, I assess the trajectory of this relatively overlooked resource, thereby opening a window onto the political ecology of a noncharismatic resource. In contrast to the ubiquitous violence in the oil‐based Niger Delta, I suggest that bitumen political ecologies, while also provoking political conflict and debate, nonetheless seem to being marked by new power dynamics that might augur a less violence prone path in terms of Nigeria's political economy of natural resource production.     

Land grabs and labour: Vietnamese workers on rubber plantations in southern Laos

Since the early 2000s the Lao government has dramatically increased the number of large‐scale land concessions issued for agribusinesses. While studies have documented the social and environmental impacts of land dispossession, the role of Vietnamese labour on these Vietnamese‐owned rubber plantations has not previously been investigated. Taking a political ecology approach, we situate this study at the intersection between ‘land grabbing’ studies and work on ‘labour geographies’. Most of the remittances generated from Vietnamese working in Laos are used for non‐agricultural purposes, with people purposely choosing to not invest in agriculture in Vietnam. Vietnamese labour on Lao plantations still has significant spatial implications, both in Laos and in Vietnam, including through the norms, formal rules and practices introduced at rubber plantations by Vietnamese workers and management, but also through labour regime changes in Vietnam. In Laos, one of the most significant results has been to make certain spaces less welcoming to Lao labour. This study particularly points to the importance of geopolitics, as the close political relationship between Laos and Vietnam, and the fact that Vietnamese companies and managers are involved, is crucial for understanding the particular nature of the labour geographies associated with Vietnamese rubber plantations in Laos.     

Constructing Risk: multi-scale change,livelihoods and vulnerability in the Mekong Delta,Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Change has been at the heart of the livelihoods concept since its inception, allowing for a clear focus on how people perceive, respond to and experience risk. The ardent focus on ‘the local’ within livelihoods work, both in research and programmatic terms, has to some extent overshadowed attention on the role of wider-scale political economic and environmental processes in generating change and determining responses to change. Livelihoods in the Mekong Delta have never been ‘local’, having long been historically embedded in international, regional and national economic, political and environmental transformations. Drivers of change at these wider scales have intensified, complicating local responses to change, whether through economic, social or political means. A more nuanced appreciation of how scaled relations can be supported is required to better anticipate and respond to the political ecology of risk.     

Decentring poverty studies: Middle class alliances and the social construction of poverty

Editors' Note: The following is the tenth in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography Lecture Series. It is based on the plenary presentation of 13 April at the AAG held in Seattle in 2011. In this essay I explore relational poverty analysis to take seriously the spatially varied intersections of political‐economic, social ordering and cultural‐political processes in shaping understandings of poverty. My work as part of the Middle Class Poverty Politics Research Group employs a relational comparative methodology to theorize where, when and under what circumstances those framed as ‘middle class’ act in opposition to or in solidarity with those named as ‘poor’. Our approach focuses on the exploitative effects of capital accumulation, processes of unequal sociospatial categorization and political and discursive systems that limit or exclude the poor. Our research focuses on places experiencing capitalist crisis because intense periods of restructuring highlight material and discursive struggles over poverty. We conclude by identifying a research agenda focused on the ways in which poverty politics are constituted by the nonpoor through place and in the articulation of places with processes of political economy, governance and cultural politics.     

Urban landscape as mirror of ethnicity: trees of the South Plains

The literatures on urban forestry, environmental justice, and Marxist urban political ecology are considered through empirical attention to the localized racial and ethnic politics which spatially differentiate urban socio-natural landscapes. In the American Southwest, urban landscapes reflect a history in which Anglo Whites were able to distance themselves from spaces of production while gaining access to superior residences and environmental amenities in spaces of reproduction; ethnoracially marginalized Others were treated as necessary yet disfavored populations, thus constituting a segregated mode of production. In this study, we investigate the association between tree canopy cover and the location of urban ethnic minority populations with a focus on the arid Southern High Plains city of Lubbock, Texas. Using data from color infrared aerial photography and block-group demographic indicators from the 2010 US Census, we analyze the city’s arboreal landscape with a mix of methods—hierarchical regression, archival research, and field observation. Results confirm that a lack of tree cover in minority neighborhoods is a symptom of broader environmental inequalities in which contemporary segregation patterns reflect a history of residential and land-use zoning with the socio-natural relations of planting and sustaining urban trees.     

Racism and Intolerance in Eastern Australia: a geographic perspective

Racism has become a fact of life in Australia over the past decade or so, yet there are relatively few studies of its nature or extent, and still fewer on its geography. Using a social constructivist approach, this study draws on a survey of 5056 respondents to investigate attitudes to racism and cultural diversity in New South Wales and Queensland, and of perceptions of out-groups as instances of ‘strangers in our midst’. On racism, results show the presence of a continuum of attitudes ranging from generally tolerant to generally intolerant, a presence which cuts across compositional (social or aspatial) characteristics to emphasise the existence of a distinctive geography, an everywhere different nature to racist and non-racist attitudes which transcends urban–rural and traditional social layers. On the other hand, perceptions of out-groups are not uniformly correlated with presence or absence of cultural diversity. In many cases, the ability to make judgements about significant ‘others’ or out-groups has been shown to relate more to abstract notions of self and national identity, reproduced in public by mainstream news media and political leaders. In particular, it may reflect an Anglo (or Anglo-Celtic) view on nationalism, which is a hallmark of the ‘new racism’: an assimilationist or ethnocultural view of Australian society which is different from the ‘civic nation’ ideal envisaged by multiculturalism. That the geography of attitudes and perceptions people have towards and about different cultural groups is so ‘everywhere different’ has important implications for attempts to address and redress issues of intolerance in Australia.     

Alternative framings of alternative food: A typology of practice

‘Alternative’ food initiatives (AFIs) are often interpreted as political movements, constructed as defiant alternatives to industrial agri‐food relations, and represented by a performance of singular alterity. This understanding of alternative collapses into a mere politics of identity, criticised in the literature for its oversimplification. In this paper, we utilise an established methodological framework that retains AFI diversity, to create a novel typology of AFIs by diverse and embodied practice rather than animating political project. In doing so, we point to the political potential for AFIs to ‘do’ food otherwise and make different worlds.     

Planning Melbourne's water supply system

The Australian water industry has now entered what has been called a ‘mature’ phase of its evolution. This is characterised by a greater emphasis on water conservation, recycling, realistic pricing and demand management, rather than on the construction of large‐scale, capital‐intensive, supply projects, as in the past. A review is presented of some recent Australian and overseas writings on this changed policy direction and specific attention is paid to the way in which the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works has, in recent years, responded to the uncertain economic and political environment of the 1980s. The concepts of ‘linear’ and ‘circular’ water systems are introduced and it is argued that the planning trend towards the latter is inevitable.     

State‐led talent return migration programme and the doubly neglected ‘Malaysian diaspora’: Whose diaspora,what citizenship,whose development?

This paper questions the assumptions of ‘diaspora’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘development’ underlying diaspora strategies targeting a specific pool of overseas Malaysian ‘talent’ migrants. I examine the Malaysian state's discursive attempts to construct a carefully contained economic ‘diaspora'—the ‘Malaysian diaspora'—through its talent return migration programme. In this process, there is a portion of the ‘Malaysian diaspora’, especially non‐bumiputeras (sons of soil), who are doubly neglected and excluded: first, from access to full and equal citizenship (which arguably contributed to their emigration in the first place); and second, from eligibility and recognition to participate in Malaysia's talent return migration programme. However, recent political activism calling for electoral reform and overseas voting rights challenges state‐constructed visions of the ‘diaspora’ and their expected roles in advancing ‘development’. This paper concludes by highlighting questions raised by the Malaysian case, linking these explicitly to how diaspora strategies—as they have been conceived, practised and contested—challenge the broader Migration and Development paradigm.     

西方政治生态学的地理学研究进展与启示

随着全球生态环境问题的日益凸显,政治生态学以关注造成环境问题的政治因素为研究内核,成为不同学科共同探索的研究领域。地理学以人地关系为立足点,深化政治生态学研究的空间性和政治性。论文首先通过对西方政治生态学理论脉络进行梳理,发现政治生态学根源于早期环境批判思想、西方马克思主义、后结构主义以及后人类主义理论,并与地理学的发展相辅相成。其次,对近30年西方地理学与政治生态学的相关研究成果进行分析发现,现有的研究议题主要聚焦于生态经济与绿色发展、生态治理与环境保育、生态身份与微观政治及生态客体与能动性4个方面。在此基础上,论文总结了相关研究对中国地理学进行政治生态学研究的借鉴意义,并进一步提出立足中国本土进行政治生态学研究未来需要关注的方向。     

Managing migration in the Greater Mekong Subregion: Regulation,extra‐legal relation and extortion

One major aim of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) integration programme, supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), is to foster regional ‘community’ for sharing resources, people and financial flows. This ‘community’ is the target of both economic growth and poverty reduction. The emphasis on ‘community’ in the ADB's mushrooming quantity of documents raises important questions about what kinds of people are included, in what roles and with what kinds of support and protection. This paper explores these questions in relation to the political economy of regulating ethnic migrants from Myanmar working in Thailand. This paper argues that extra‐legal relations between migrants and state/para‐state agents constitute a crucial part of regulation. In transferring the regulation of migration to the national scale, the ADB inadvertently reinforces national differences between Thais and cross‐border people. Additionally, the complicated and fluctuating implementation of national regulations in both countries leaves migrants subject to violence and extortion from state and quasi‐state agents in Thailand. This paper shows that the dynamics of global capitalism require ‘deportable labour’ supplied by ethnic migrants who are included in the GMS community as the most invisible, vulnerable and exploited members.     

Enlivening development: Water management in post‐conflict Baucau city,Timor‐Leste

This paper explores how the state and others involved in the ‘development enterprise’ in Timor‐Leste are (mis)recognizing the potential of the existing environmental governance and exchange capacities of local customary institutions and practices in relation to water supply and management. Examining the problematic of water supply in a particular place‐based instance – more specifically, the intermesh of the customary, state and market sectors – it ponders how customary institutions might be better supported to extend their range of political and economic credibility and contribute to a reconfiguration of dominant community managed water supply models. Drawing out the workings of a ‘diverse economy’ where a customary economy is enmeshed with, and to some extent undermining, a weak capitalist sector, the paper argues that a failure to address issues of resource ownership and control and to engage the strengths and import of local customary institutions will have serious ramifications for the successful implementation of national development objectives in post‐conflict Baucau city and elsewhere in Timor‐Leste. Instead, it argues for an enlivened development approach wherein locally socialized landscapes are recognized as credible political sites with which ‘development’ can engage and power relations can shift.     

跨学科视角下“地缘政治”概念及其研究范式

分析1982—2019年中国核心学术刊物和著作，梳理地理学和政治学对于“地缘政治”概念和研究范式的不同理解。研究发现：① 地理学和政治学有很多相似之处，包括对“地缘战略”等概念的关注，对“大国安全与崛起”等议题的探讨，以及在分析框架中对案例和质性分析方法的强调等；② 地理学和政治学有各具特色，地理学衍生“地缘环境”等概念，政治学也衍生“地缘安全”等概念；地理学在议题上更具空间和系统思维，对海洋地缘政治等话题更偏好，而政治学更强调时事性，侧重于分析时事政治及其地缘政治逻辑等；在分析框架上，地理学受计量革命的影响深远，对质性和定量分析都有所关注，而政治学对案例分析和质性分析的依赖度更高。这些发现说明了当前学科分工并没有改变地理学中的“地缘政治”概念和政治学中的“地缘政治”概念源出一脉的事实，同时也发现，其中的差异正是学科壁垒形成关键所在。     

Political Ecologies of Dynamic Wetlands: Hydrosocial Waterscapes in the Okavango Delta

Research within geography and related disciplines has directed much attention to the coupled interactions between social and ecological systems. These studies have usefully analyzed the multifaceted, temporal, and scalar dimensions of human–environment interactions and how future environmental change will continue to challenge human resource needs. Political ecology research has also made contributions in this regard, particularly by emphasizing livelihood systems, impacts of conservation and development, agricultural production, and environmental governance. Yet although political ecology research has contributed to socioecological systems scholarship, much of this work has been situated within dryland environments or marine ecosystems that have particular biophysical features. Comparatively, wetland environments that experience dynamic flooding regimes warrant further attention from political ecology. This article engages with the findings from an ongoing research project that is evaluating the impacts of flooding variability for rural livelihoods in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. We outline some of the main findings from this work by concentrating on two themes central to political ecology: access and governance. We conclude by arguing that the Okavango Delta should be understood as a hydrosocial waterscape that encompasses a variety of socioecological relationships within the region, as well as the power relations operating at a variety of scales that both produce and govern them.     

Reliving off The Swamp: A Cajun Tourism Commodity

The development of ethnic tourism involves a process of community‐ and individual‐level objectification and commodification. To be attractive to outsiders, planners and tourism professionals often present local lifeways as unique and local while and contrasting them to an external globalized world. Using a political economic approach, this paper shows that this process of self‐commodification may give tourism professionals some control over how ethnic cultures are is presented, but does so within the parameters of state oversight and consumers’ desires. A case study of Louisiana Cajun tourism reveals how a specific narrative of swamp subsistence is deployed by individual tour guides and through the tourism planning process. This “heritage ecology” is used to romanticize a Cajun cultural ecology as “living off of the swamp” despite the fact that swamp commodities have almost always been produced for external markets. Similar to past commodities, swamp tourism still involves the production of Cajun‐swamp culture for outside consumers. This type of tourism paradoxically presents the image of a physically and socially disconnected ethnic group by fostering connections with outsiders while in the swamp.     

Temporality of disasters: The politics of women's livelihoods ‘after’ the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka

The devastation caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka is represented as a ‘natural disaster’. Yet, the tsunami did not occur in a sociopolitical and historical vacuum. How people responded to the tsunami, the challenges of and attitudes to relocation and post‐tsunami livelihoods, were/are shaped by uneven development, social exclusion and ethnonationalist war. All these responses are embedded in structures of gender, caste, class, and ethnicity. The tsunami, thus, brought to the forefront preexisting inequalities, showing up complexities in the temporality of disasters. Drawn from fieldwork in two coastal areas in the Southern and Eastern provinces, this paper shows how gendered structures within the local political economy influenced the ways that institutional actors as well as the displaced communities and women initially devised livelihood strategies. These reactions show how place matters as much as preexisting gendered political economy conditions and reveal the complex ways in which women continue to mediate and negotiate everyday responses in the aftermath of a ‘natural’ disaster.     

Towards a genealogy of tropical architecture: Historical fragments of power‐knowledge,built environment and climate in the British colonial territories

In this paper, we trace the history of tropical architecture beyond its supposed founding moment, that is, its institutionalization and naming‐as‐such, in the mid‐twentieth century. We note that many of the planning principles, spatial configurations and environmental technologies of tropical architecture could be traced to knowledge and practices from the eighteenth century onwards, and we explore three pre‐1950s moments of ‘tropical architecture’ in the British empire through building types such as the bungalow, military barrack and labourers' housing in the tropics. Unlike the depoliticized technical discourse of tropical architecture in the mid‐twentieth century, this earlier history shows that so‐called tropical architecture was inextricably entangled with medical and racial discourses, biopolitics and the political economy of colonialism. We argue that tropical architecture should not be understood as an entity with a fixed essence that is overdetermined by a timeless and unchanging external tropical nature. Rather, tropical architecture should be understood as a set of shifting discourses that privilege tropical nature, especially climate, in various ways as the prime determinant of built form according to different constellations of sociocultural and technoscientific conditions. We thus see ‘tropical architecture’ not as a depoliticized entity but as a power‐knowledge configuration inextricably linked to asymmetrical colonial power relations.     

Doors and fences: Controlling Indonesia's porous borders and policing asylum seekers

Although the partial outsourcing of state border control to non‐state actors is not a new phenomenon, Indonesia is an interesting case study. Border control in an archipelago consisting of more than 17 000 islands is particularly challenging for state authorities. In addition to contending with the exceptional geography, Indonesia's state authorities are also challenged by the political constellation with Australia in regard to irregular cross‐border movements of asylum seekers that has become a controversial issue in recent history. As an important transit country for asylum seekers and refugees en route to Australia, Indonesia's porous borders have rendered it possible to enter and exit the country relatively easily. Given Australia's political pressure and the financial incentives offered to Indonesia to act as a ‘final bulwark’ and control irregular migration flows more effectively, border control nowadays has gained more significance in Indonesia than in the past. Yet, financial constraints and, more importantly, a lack of political will to host asylum seekers in its own territories for the long term remain as obstacles. Fieldwork observations show that due to ongoing funding restrictions for state‐led border control, state‐society cooperation for border surveillance has increased. Civilians in many hotspots for irregular border crossings have been encouraged to report on ‘suspicious foreigners’. State‐society cooperation for border control, however, offers new opportunities for people smugglers to pay off civilian spies or corrupt border authorities.     

Notisartikkel – Short article

The Department of Geography at the University of Oslo has for some time been the place for cross-national and comparative research concerning structural economic change and industrialization. Attempts are being made to submit economic and industrial development in selected countries to causal analysis by means of ‘retroduction’ (as construed in a recent work by Anthony Sayer 1984): to search for factors which have compounded to produce what are conventionally described as economic growth and stagnation, a ‘tertiarization’ or ‘quaternarization’ of the labour force, public sector growth, industrialization, ‘de-industrialization’ and ‘re-industrialization’, to name some topics covered by actual and planned research. The editor of the NGT has kindly given me the opportunity to present in brief my own ‘macro-geographic’ studies in this field, to use a term which suggests their methodological resemblance to ‘macro-geography’, or ‘historical social analysis’ (Skocpol 1984). (See also the contribution of B. T. Asheim (1988) in this issue of NGT, ‘Macro-geography II: Technological change and capitalist development’.) I will therefore spend a few pages on two research projects.