A conceptual investigation of the ontological commensurability of spatial data infrastructures among different cultures

Humans think and communicate in very flexible and schematic ways, and a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for the Amazon and associated information system ontologies should reflect this flexibility and the adaptive nature of human cognition in order to achieve semantic interoperability. In this paper I offer a conceptual investigation of SDI and explore the nature of cultural schemas as expressions of indigenous ontologies and the challenges of semantic interoperability across cultures. Cultural schemas are, in essence, our ontologies, but they are markedly different than classical formal ontologies. They shape our ontological commitments to what exists in the world as well as the ways in which we approach and engage the world. And while they help structure our understanding of the world in which we are embedded, they are associative and flexible. They help to focus our attention to particular details of our experiences and give them salience, yet they cannot be simply reduced to a series of extracted features. They allow us to make meaning of the contextualized, cultural experience in which we are always immersed. An SDI is a shared social-technological-informational structure that, if it is to be useful and successful for sustainability in the Amazon, must incorporate and use indigenous cultural schemas. Indigenous communities must have the ability to contribute to the collection of geospatial data and their contributions recognized as legitimate forms of knowledge. In order for the SDI to work, it must recognize the larger cultural landscape to which cultural schemas can connect to the ready-to-hand elements of salient cultural experiences.     

Defining the forest,defending the forest: Political ecology,territoriality, and resistance to a protected area in the Dominican Republic

Political ecologists have considered the social and economic impacts that nature reserves, national parks and other forms of protected area can have on neighbouring communities, and how this can generate conflicts between them. This paper analyses such conflicts through the lens of territoriality, considering how the way protected area territories are created, delineated, and defined is linked to the social impacts experienced by local people. Conflicts between locals and conservation authorities over protected areas are about rival attempts to define the boundaries of protected areas, who the land should belong to, what it should be used for, and what its purpose is. Yet the ability of local people or conservation authorities to impose their meaning is unequal. It illustrates these processes with the example of a scientific reserve in the Dominican Republic, and a decades-long conflict to define what the reserve should mean, what it should look like, and who it should belong to.     

The emerging Islamic State: Terror,territoriality, and the agenda of social transformation

The world has recently been witness to the emergence of a new contemporary geopolitical phenomenon: the declaration of Islamic States by specific Islamic organizations. This phenomenon has the potential to dramatically transform the geopolitical setting of the Middle East and to have farreaching effects on a global level. Of these most prominent, however, has undoubtedly been the June 2014 declaration by the “Islamic State” organization of a “caliphate” covering large areas of the two war-torn states of Syria and Iraq. The aim of this article is to interrogate the territorial aspects of the Islamic State and to discern what makes it unique and exceptional in comparison to the many other Islamic political organizations that have emerged in recent years. In order to facilitate a better understanding of territoriality, I distinguish here between two major dimensions: conceptions of territoriality and tactics of territoriality. My working assumption is that by distinguishing between conceptions and tactics of territoriality, we can compare the exercise of territoriality by states and, in the present case, organizations. In this article, I argue that the Islamic State poses a challenge to both the conceptual and tactical dimensions of the contemporary territory and territoriality of modern states. Yet, while its conception of territoriality may be widely shared by other political Islamic organizations, its uniqueness lies in its tactics and strategies. Indeed, it is the brutal tactics of the Islamic State that are less acceptable to many Muslims around the world, not its political conception, which enjoys considerable support in the Muslim arena. Yet, when comparing it with modern states, the Islamic State poses a challenge to the territory and territoriality in both conception and tactics.     

The political ecology of ecosystem services

The dominance of “ecosystem services” as a guiding concept for environmental management – where it appears as a neutral, obvious, taken-for-granted concept – hides the fact that there are choices implicit in its framing and in its application. In other words, it is a highly political concept, and its utility depends on the arena in which it is used and what it is used for. Following a political ecology framework, and based on a literature review, bibliometric analyses, and brief examples from two tropical rainforest countries, this review investigates four moments in the construction and application of the ecosystem services idea: socio-historical (the emergence of the discourse), ontological (what knowledge does the concept allow?), scientific (difficulties in its practical application), and political (who wins, who loses?). We show how the concept is a boundary object with widespread appeal, trace the discursive and institutional context within which it gained traction, and argue that choices of scale, definition, and method in measuring ecosystem services frustrate its straightforward application. As a result, it is used in diverse ways by different interests to justify different kinds of interventions that at times might be totally opposed. In Madagascar, the ecosystem services idea is mainly used to justify forest conservation in ways open to critique for its neoliberalization of nature or disempowerment of communities. In contrast, in the Brazilian Amazon, the discourse of ecosystem services has served the agendas of traditional populations and family farm lobbies. Ecosystem services, as an idea and tool, are mobilized by diverse actors in real-life situations that lead to complex, regionally particular and fundamentally political outcomes.     

Through the aqueduct and the courts: An analysis of the human right to water and indigenous water rights in Northwestern Mexico

This article examines the relationship between the human right to water and indigenous water rights as articulated in the legal strategies of indigenous Yaqui (Yoemem) leadership in Mexico, and in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights System. Accelerated urban growth and climate change in the area of study are rekindling historical water conflicts between rural indigenous communities and state authorities encouraging urban development. This configuration is not unique to Northwestern Mexico and, thus, offers an instructive case for exploring contradictions and alignments between indigenous right claims and the human right to water. This article addresses the following questions: What role does the human right to water play in the competing claims of state authorities and indigenous Yaqui leadership in Mexico? To what extent can the human right to water be reconciled with the collective rights of indigenous peoples? And in particular, what can be learned from international jurisprudence in this regard? Through content analysis of legal documents and media sources I show that even when Yaqui claims over water are advanced in the arena of international human rights, the human right to water does not have a primary role in framing their demands. In fact, I show that the human right to water was primarily mobilized to uphold rural-to-urban water transfers and undermine indigenous opposition to large-scale infrastructure development. This article produces new empirical knowledge to contribute to scholarship examining what a human right to water means in practice. This line of research is particularly timely as the human right to water becomes institutionalized in the context of growing public debate and legal discussions on collective indigenous rights.     

“I’m not trying to save fish,I’m trying to save dinner”: Media,celebrity and sustainable seafood as a solution to environmental limits

This paper explores the circulation of images and words about fish that has been certified or endorsed as ‘sustainable seafood’. Specifically, our discourse analysis – of data collected from online, magazine, and television media sources targeted at North Americans – interrogates the constitution of sustainable seafood as a tenable solution to fisheries limits. We reveal three narratives populated by different messages and personalities that describe spaces of fish harvest, crisis, and consumption. By exploring the multifaceted ways that prominent organization National Geographic mediates sustainable seafood, we also show that the narratives rest easily with each other, and when taken together, present what seems like a cohesive set of cultural instructions for viewers and readers. Throughout, we question what is not present in the narratives and highlight how sustainable seafood as a cultural phenomenon opens up new material and political-economic opportunities for some. In sum, we trace a cultural politics that constitutes sustainable seafood as a tenable solution to fisheries limits, obscures the complexities of industrial fisheries, and generates new opportunities for accumulation. Our analysis and discussion pushes research regarding the contemporary cultural politics of sustainability towards an array of media organizations and formats and encourages further consideration of intimate identity politics.     

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.     

Flow variability and the biophysical vitality of river systems

We illustrate the fundamental importance of fluctuations in natural water flows to the long-term sustainability and productivity of riverine ecosystems and their riparian areas. Natural flows are characterized by temporal and spatial heterogeneity in the magnitude, frequency, duration, timing, rate of change, and predictability of discharge. These characteristics, for a specific river or a collection of rivers within a defined region, shape species life histories over evolutionary (millennial) time scales as well as structure the ecological processes and productivity of aquatic and riparian communities. Extreme events – uncommon floods or droughts – are especially important in that they either reset or alter physical and chemical conditions underpinning the long-term development of biotic communities. We present the theoretical rationale for maintaining flow variability to sustain ecological communities and processes, and illustrate the importance of flow variability in two case studies – one from a semi-arid savanna river in South Africa and the other from a temperate rainforest river in North America. We then discuss the scientific challenges of determining the discharge patterns needed for environmental sustainability in a world where rivers, increasingly harnessed for human uses, are experiencing substantially altered flow characteristics relative to their natural states.     

Rural women and technology in South Africa: Case studies from KwaZulu-Natal Province

This article contributes to a greater understanding of the linkages between women's roles, responsibilities and their use of technology in poor rural communities. The ways in which poor rural women conceptualize technology is examined. Furthermore, how they use their knowledge and skills to develop, modify and adapt the techniques and technical processes in which they are involved are also explored. Additionally, the links between indigenous and modern technologies in relation to gender considerations in poor rural contexts are examined. This article draws from findings of primary research undertaken in two marginalized rural communities in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. The study reveals that the use of technologies are highly gendered and differentiated among women. Poor rural women utilize a range of technologies in both productive and reproductive activities which are central to their livelihood strategies, especially at the household level. Furthermore, although women are adapting and innovating technologies their expertise remains largely unrecognized. A range of problems and constraints exist which limit women's access to and use of technologies. A key tension identified in the study is that between the use of locally-based, indigenous technologies and modern, external technologies. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The governance of nature as development and the erasure of the Pygmies of Cameroon

The Pygmies are among the remaining ‘savages’ in West and Central Africa. This paper demonstrates how the governance of nature through sedentarization, the creation of national parks as a mechanism of forestry conservation and the failure to endorse standard environmental safeguards in the creation of the Tchad-Cameroon pipeline project have led to the devastation of the livelihood of the indigenous pygmies. Simultaneously, by categorizing the Pygmies as a ‘primitive other’ despite the very dynamism of the concept of culture, the state of Cameroon has excluded them from the benefits of postmodernist development. I demonstrate that projects aimed at modernizing them, and achieving sustainability have instead accentuated their exclusion because of their presumed cultural isolation, led to their deep entrenchment in poverty and resulted in complete erasure. The failure of these projects is due to the clash between global and local perspectives and interests over the Western protectionism and nature aesthetics that underpin conservation and development schemes, and the government’s failure to ensure that developers fulfill their obligations to affected communities, as well as the non-recognition of the multiplex relationships between hunter-gatherers and farmers that is based on cultural, historical and political ecology. Against this backdrop, development has thus, become a process of erasure in which the livelihood of the Pygmies has been balkanized and their cultural existence and identity, negated.     

“You kill the dam,you are killing a part of me”: Dam removal and the environmental politics of river restoration

River restoration through dam removal provides an opportunity to investigate the changing nature of environmental conflicts and politics in long-humanized landscapes. In New England, where over 14,000 dams fragment the region’s rivers, dam removals are often highly contested. This is due, in part, to how the intertwined roles of history, identity, and aesthetics coalesce to create attachment to place and inspire the defense of dammed landscapes. Dam removal provides a useful lens to consider the following: How do the historical and geographical contingencies of this region shape and alter conflicts over dam removal in specific ways? In instances where conflicts emerge, what do the conflicts reveal about the politics of ecological restoration in highly altered landscapes? We use a political ecology approach to reveal how complex cultural dynamics, competing interpretations of science and the environment, micropolitics, and the role of multiple actors generate and shape conflicts over dam removal. We show that the historical geography of New England influence conflicts over removal in important ways, particularly with regard to the roles of aesthetics and identity in landscapes that are characterized largely by consumptive as opposed to productive uses. Our findings also suggest that restoration in long-humanized landscapes will embroil new constellations of human and nonhuman actors, requiring attention to the political and cultural, as well as the ecological, dimensions of restoration. This paper contributes to research on the political and social dimensions of dam removal, as well as to research at the nexus of ecological restoration and environmental politics.     

Practicing costumbres and the decommodification of nature: The Chilean water markets and the Atacameño people

Scholars who have critically analyzed the commodification of nature have explored how the specific biophysical features of the objects to be commodified can shape the outcome of the commodification process. Thus, the establishment and behavior of a market system is closer to a political struggle than it is a simple technical and spontaneous process. Despite their contributions, these approaches have not focused on the resistance that cultural exegesis, self-identification, and the affective connection between the human and non-human pose to market systems. In this paper, I show how the Atacameño people from the Atacama Desert (Chile) have subverted the radical pro-water market model imposed by the Chilean military dictatorship in 1981 by relying on their water-related cultural values. In some Atacameño communities, the water market has not operated to ensure that water rights are put to those uses with the highest economic value (e.g., mining or urban water consumption). Indeed, in these communities, internal rules both forbid the sale of water rights to the mining sector and regulate the distribution of water within the community in terms that operate as barriers to other transactions. These rules form part of a moral economy of water that is a concrete ethic based on shared values and affective connections between humans and non-humans, mandating how people should relate to one another in relation to water. Together, these relations have decommodified water and contradict the neoliberal explanation of how a free water market should work.     

甘肃夏河—合作成矿带早子沟金矿绿色矿山建设分析

建设绿色矿山是新形势下保证矿业可持续健康发展的必由之路,是在恢复生态系统基础上实现自然、经济和社会系统共同发展的必然选择。早子沟金矿是甘南藏族自治州第一个国家级绿色矿山。在绿色矿山建设过程中,树立了绿色发展理念,在采矿、选矿、资源高效综合利用、节能减排、安全生产等方面均进行了科技创新,确保了矿山开发、生态环境、地方群众的和谐统一,形成了具有开采方式科学化、生产工艺环保化、资源利用高效化、企业管理规范化、矿山及社区环境生态化的高标准绿色矿山企业,可为区域绿色矿业发展提供参考。     

Trade unions, coalitions and communities: Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and the international stakeholder campaign against Rio Tinto

There is a growing geographical literature on the significance of organised labour. A key theoretical and political question concerns the extent and nature of the engagement between trade unions and other groups in the broader community. The paper seeks to contribute to this debate by focusing specifically on the ways in which trade unions engage collaboratively with such interest groups over international corporate campaign issues. It draws upon a case study of the encounter between Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and Rio Tinto, one of the largest privately owned mining companies in the world. This was conducted through a loose alliance co-ordinated by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers Unions (ICEM). The campaign included the use of stakeholder reports aimed at influencing corporate shareholders. The main issues concerned the rights of indigenous peoples, environmental consequences of mining operations, and human rights in the workplace. The attempt to change these aspects of corporate culture led to union-inspired resolutions at the firm’s May 2000 Annual General Meeting, the first attempt to challenge a company through international union-led action in this manner. Although defeated, the resolutions were backed by a significant minority of leading institutional shareholders. The paper interprets this campaign in terms of broader debates over the spatiality of organised labour and the role of trade unions, at a time when increased significance has been attached to alternative political movements. It seeks to theorise the specific implications of internationally-grounded interest-based campaigns and take into account the ways in which these are both constrained by, and draw strength from, their constitution at this spatial scale.     

Dodging alligators,rattlesnakes, and backyard docks: a political ecology of sweetgrass basket-making and conservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry,USA

There is growing recognition among political ecologists of the need to examine shifting natural resource regimes and their effects on livelihoods in “First World” places. This emerging literature has variously examined the “Third World within,” the persistence of “subsistence activities” in the “First World,” and the “reterritorialization” of land tenure and access. However, much of this work has tended to focus on traditional extractive industries in the American West, indigenous claims to lands and resources in the U.S. and Canada, and non-timber resources on public lands. In contrast, we use a case study of African-American sweetgrass basket-makers, associated with the Gullah culture, in South Carolina’s lowcountry to examine the ways in which ongoing amenity-driven residential development is fundamentally reshaping resource access on private lands. Historically, basket-makers harvested the materials (primarily sweetgrass or Mulenbergia filipes) needed for their culturally important art form from accessible, rural, and privately held tracts of land in close proximity to their communities, but development pressures and changes in resident interpretation of property rights has decreased access to basket-making resources. The case is particularly illuminating, as it examines the emergence of ‘conservation subdivisions’ in the region and raises important questions about what “rural uses” and users are being conserved through responses to exurban, suburban, and urban development in formerly rural areas.     

Social license and the fear of Mineras Interruptus

This review article offers a critique of the social license concept, and of the debate surrounding it. In order to best understand what is meant by “social license”, one must look beyond its constituent terminology and instead examine the core drivers of contemporary mining practice. The working assumption inside the industry is that if disapproval becomes too intense there is a chance that members of the community will interrupt mining activities. This is what I refer to as ‘the fear of Mineras Interruptus’. If there is any meaning to attribute to the term ‘social license to operate’ – it is to be found in the fear of losing access – because other factors relating to social performance or benefits are considered peripheral. The author argues that the mining industry’s adoption and application of the concept should be viewed critically and not promoted on face value.     

Social change and land tenure regimes in Mexico

This paper argues that the changing land tenure legislation in Mexico is a concrete reflection of generalized societal attitudes towards indigenous and traditional peasants. It contends that the 1992 neoliberal land-reform mimics the progress-oriented liberal project of the ninettenth century and continues a market-centered modernization process underway since the 1940s, which has been legitimized by an overt institutional disdain and discrimination against indigenous people, peasants and their ways of life. It concludes that this process of assimilation or eradication of traditional agro-ecosystems, cultural diversity and social organization will further increase the vulnerability of Mexican peasants to economic and cultural change. As peasants engage in market-controlled business ventures in the rural areas, migrate to cities, rent or sell their lands, they simultaneously adapt to new values and envision new strategies for subsistence that are increasingly mediated by political-economic forces largely beyond their sphere of influence.     

Windfalls for whom? The evolving notion of ‘community’ in community benefit provisions from wind farms

This paper investigates the increasing provision of ‘community benefits’ – i.e. financial or material benefits to communities affected by wind energy development – with a focus on on-shore wind projects in Wales. The paper argues that as community benefits are becoming more significant in scale, so pressures are mounting on what have hitherto been largely ad hoc arrangements for their disbursement. The paper finds that previously dominant definitions of communities as places directly affected by and within close proximity to wind farm development, are being challenged by the tendency to define ‘affected’ communities as broader entities characterised by more indirect and widely dispersed claims to benefit entitlement. This redefinition of the recipient community is causing conflict, much of it focused on debates about how community benefits should be governed. Evidence suggests that any re-scaling of relations around community benefits – from local compensation towards wider development goals – may be more consensually achieved in communities with previous experience in handling these funds, and where growing income streams allow multiple constituencies to be satisfied.     

Ecological restoration, cultural preferences and the negotiation of ‘nativeness’ in Australia

The paper addresses cultural assumptions about ‘nativeness’ and ‘belonging’ to place as they are implicated in notions of ‘ecological restoration’. Given the centrality of complex notions of ‘indigeneity’ to the issue of what ecological ‘restoration’ means in Australia, this is a rich area for cultural and historical analysis. Case materials illustrate the negotiated and ambiguous nature of Australian ideas about what ‘belongs’ ecologically and culturally across the broad continent of this relatively young post-Settler nation. We seek to foreground these issues through consideration of what ‘restoring’ nature might mean in the context of debates about native plants, the re-introduction of an iconic species of ground dwelling bird, the removal of cane toads that are demonised as highly ‘alien’, and the multiple ways in which the dingo is regarded ambiguously as both native and a ‘pest’ that needs to be controlled and culled. By showing how ‘restoration’ can be understood and mobilised in a variety of ways – in terms of the ‘re-naturing’, ‘re-valuing’ and/or ‘repatriating’ of indigenous species, as well as impassioned rejection of ‘exotics’ – we emphasise the importance of social science for building a well-grounded sense of how environmental management priorities and approaches are informed by a wider set of cultural assumptions.     

EIAs,power and political ecology: Situating resource struggles and the techno-politics of small-scale mining

Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines the changing social significance of EIAs during and after a nationwide police operation that was framed by authorities as targeting non-compliance with environmental policy, illegal mining and illicit trading. Among other articulations of dissent, small-scale miners associations protested that EIA enforcement rhetoric served unjustly as a rationale for halting livelihoods and extracting rent from miners in times of economic difficulty. The article challenges EIA narratives that focus narrowly on risk management or governance failure, exploring technocratic obfuscations and how enforcement rhetoric was perceived in relation to criminalisation and coercion, expert environmental consultancy cultures and adapted legacies of colonial practice in contemporary dynamics of rule. Heavy-handed policing under the banner of enforcing order impinged on livelihoods and had counterproductive effects in addressing environmental problems, while complying with expensive EIA report-producing requirements was far beyond the means of most small-scale miners. The article rethinks how technical EIA rhetoric becomes entangled in spaces of contentious politics, the perils of looking only at particular scales of relations to the exclusion of others, and what it means to re-engage Donald Moore’s notion of “shifting alignments and contingent constellations of power.” Suggesting future directions in political ecology theorising in relation to extractive sectors, it calls for careful attention to the situated politics of EIAs – situated in time and space, amid varying relations of power – and how multiple hegemonic practices are conceptualised and challenged.