‘Fair trade gold’: Antecedents, prospects and challenges

This paper critically examines the challenges with, and impacts of, adopting the models in place for fair trade agriculture in the artisanal gold mining sector. Over the past two years, an NGO-led ‘fair trade gold’ movement has surfaced, its crystallization fuelled by a burgeoning body of evidence that points to impoverished artisanal miners in developing countries receiving low payments for their gold, as well as working in hazardous and unsanitary conditions. Proponents of fair trade gold contest that increased interaction between artisanal miners and Western jewellers could facilitate the former receiving fairer prices for gold, accessing support services, and ultimately, improving their quality of life. In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, however, the gold being mined on an artisanal scale does not supply Western retailers as perhaps believed; it is rather an important source of foreign exchange, which host governments employ buyers to collect for their coffers. It is maintained here that if the underlying purpose of fair trade is to improve the livelihoods and well-being of subsistence producers in developing countries, then the models that have proved so successful in alleviating the hardships of agro-producers of ‘tropical’ commodities such as coffee, tea, bananas and cocoa, should be adapted to artisanal gold mining in sub-Saharan Africa. Campaigns promoting ‘fair trade gold’ in the region should view host governments, and not Western retailers, as the ‘end consumer’, and focus on improving governance at the grassroots, organizing informal operators into working cooperatives, and addressing complications with purchasing arrangements - all of which would go a long way toward improving the livelihoods of subsistence artisanal miners. A case study of Noyem, Ghana, the location of a sprawling illegal gold mining community, is presented, which magnifies these challenges further and provides perspective on how they can be overcome.     

Market triumphalism and the CBNRM ‘crises’ at the South African section of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

Transfrontier conservation has taken Southern Africa by storm, where the modus operandi remains simple and intuitive: by dissolving boundaries, local benefits grow as conservation and development spread regionally. However, in the case of South Africa’s section of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, political and economic change redirects benefits to support ‘modern’ economies at the expense of rural livelihoods through community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). Neo-liberal agendas promoted by government and the transfrontier park derail efforts at decentralizing CBNRM initiatives beyond markets and state control. This paper argues that ‘hybrid neoliberal’ CBNRM has arisen in private and public sector delivery of devolved conservation and poverty relief projects as ‘tertiary production’ for regional development. As a result, ‘CBNRM’ projects related to and independent of transfrontier conservation support private sector interests rather than the resource base of rural livelihoods. Concluding sections assert that CBNRM can counter this neoliberal trend by supporting the land-based economy of local users living near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.     

Eco-localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change - A sympathetic critique

This paper critically but sympathetically examines eco-localisation as a response to ‘peak oil’ and to reduce the emission of CO₂ to avoid dangerous climate change. Rather than seeing the politics of climate change and peak oil as in some way ‘post-political’, the paper argues that protagonists of localised economies are developing radical new conceptions of livelihood and economy that directly cut against the logic of growth-based capitalist economic strategies and elite conceptualisations of economic development. Building on development theory, the paper develops a conceptualisation of ‘immanent’ and ‘intentional’ localisation, with the former a simple move by businesses of economic activities that have high transport costs closer to their markets. Advocates of intentional localisation are working more pro actively at grassroots level to develop local solutions to peak oil and climate change based on developing less resource-intensive yet enjoyable and fulfilling livelihoods in more localised economies. In discussing the contested nature of localisation, the paper engages with critiques of eco-localisation from neoliberal advocates and from the left, before concluding that localisation should be seen more as a different calculation of where economic activities would be located, which aims to reduce oil consumption and CO₂ emissions, rather than a call for autarky. The paper concludes by arguing that analyses of the scale of economic networks need to pay more attention of the materiality of oil consumption and CO₂ emissions, and that scales cannot be seen as socially constructed.     

Oil ‘futures’: Shell’s Scenarios and the social constitution of the global oil market

This article explores the relationship between the oil industry’s representation of operating conditions in key sites of extraction and the constitution of oil futures markets. An analysis of Shell Oil’s recent Scenarios publications, the ‘Trilemma Scenarios to 2025’ and subsequent ‘Scramble and Blueprints Scenarios to 2050’, provides insight into both the (global) social construction of oil prices and the oil industry’s reaction to social resistance in its operating environment - whether in the form of movements for resource sovereignty or climate change activism. Examining the implications of these two Scenario publications for key sites of Shell investment, the Nigerian Niger Delta and the Canadian Tar Sands, the article demonstrates that understanding the discursive implications of ‘peak oil’ for the petroleum industry requires contextualizing discussions of ‘scarcity’ within business agents role in shaping oil futures markets, and private industry’s interest in the ongoing development of unconventional fossil fuel sources. While the role of deregulated futures trading receives little attention in the Shell Scenarios, speculative trading - and thus perception concerning supply among business agents - is central to shaping global oil prices and thus the social conditions of the oil market.     

Mucky carrots and other proxies: Problematising the knowledge-fix for sustainable and ethical consumption

This paper uses evidence from focus groups in England to consider how consumers think about and, more importantly, distinguish foods by both primary and secondary qualities, using both their own judgement but also advice produced by various organisations acting as ‘knowledge intermediaries’, such as independent certification bodies. We thus consider the ‘sorting out’ that consumers do with food, particularly in developing typologies of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’, and the cues on which they base these judgements, from the material immediacy of ‘mucky carrots’ to the abstract remoteness of organic certification. In particular, we problematise the ‘knowledge-fix’ that underlies attempts to provide knowledge to promote more sustainable and ethical consumption. This raises problems of how consumers give assurance schemes meaning, how ethical and sustainable schemes are subject to re-fetishization and how consumers tend towards increasing scepticism and distrust of such claims, thus making a ‘politics of reconnection’ far from easy.     

History and regional development. A controversy over the ‘right’ interpretation of the role of history in the development of the Polish regions

There is currently a lively discussion on the role of historic memories and the re-visiting of historic legacies in post-communist countries. Using the example of Poland and its legacy of the tripartite division of the 19th century, this paper aims to illustrate how symbolic conflicts over identity politics and the interpretation of history may critically influence discourses on the debates on, and portrayals of, variations in regional development. The paper thus discusses the post-war history of Poland in the context of the so-called left-right political cleavage, and the varying related debates on the ‘quality’ of regional development as part of Poland’s post-communist restructuring. These discussions include varying projections of the nature and role of social capital and its relative ‘usefulness’ for a successful development Poland’s after communism. And there are clear political overtones to these contrasting portrayals of Poland’s history and its regionally varying legacy. Drawing on different definitions of the notion of social capital, the paper then discusses how different legacies, such as an introspective and extrovert outlook of population and institutions, and the degree of cohesion among them, circumscribes a region’s economic development prospects.     

What is a forest? Competing meanings and the politics of forest classification in Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand

Based on a case study in a Thai forest reserve, this article compares two modes of ‘reading’ the forest - official and local forest classification systems - and discusses how they imply different ideas about the forest, and how these competing knowledges interact with the politics of forest governance. Forest classification conventions are shown to slip, as ‘facts’ about the forest, from their origins in extraction-oriented forestry to the realm of conservation. Through a comparison of conventional vegetation classifications used in the state’s governance of the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary in Thailand, with the classificatory systems of resident Pwo Karen communities, this paper examines the slippage of conventional classifications through various uses and the emphases placed by competing representations of the forest within the context of conservation politics in Thailand. It was found that conventional classifications continued to prioritise the silvicultural potential of trees within a conservation context, downplaying other notions of forests - such as their importance to livelihoods and as lived spaces - which are present in Karen classifications.     

Wildlife management and land reform in southeastern Zimbabwe: a compatible pairing or a contradiction in terms?

This paper examines the melding of two discourses in southeastern Zimbabwe: land reform and wildlife management. The former seeks to redistribute large, ‘under-utilized’ landholdings to smallholders whilst the latter needs extensive land holdings to be viable. These two discourses are rooted in very different models of development. The land reform exercise emphasizes direct redistribution, equity and land for crops; whilst the wildlife management discourse tends to stress maximizing foreign exchange earnings, encouraging public-private partnerships and trickle down. Yet there has been a recent flurry of interest in the development of ‘wildlife models’ for land reform which would combine the two. This paper investigates whether the competing discourses about land for smallholders and wildlife-based land reform are compatible or can be successfully reconciled. It traces the ways they have come together in Zimbabwe’s southeast lowveld and examines the ‘science’ and politics underlying their melding. Finally it explores the potential implications for rural people’s livelihoods of this development. It concludes that land reform and wildlife management can be reconciled, but probably not in a particularly equitable way: it is more likely to provide an opening for an equitable land reform agenda to be usurped by local and non-local elites with wildlife interests.     

Conspicuous redemption? Reflections on the promises and perils of the ‘Celebritization’ of climate change

With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science-policy-celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze climate policy cooperation. However, critics posit that increased involvement from the entertainment industry has not served to influence substantive long-term advancements in these arenas; rather, it has instead reduced the politics of climate change to the domain of fashion and fad, devoid of political and public saliency. Through tracking media coverage in Australia, Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, we map out the terrain of a ‘Politicized Celebrity System’ in attempts to cut through dualistic characterizations of celebrity involvement in politics. We develop a classification system of the various types of climate change celebrity activities, and situate movements in contemporary consumer- and spectacle-driven carbon-based society. Through these analyses, we place dynamic and contested interactions in a spatially and temporally-sensitive ‘Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities’ model. In so doing, first we explore how these newly ‘authorized’ speakers and ‘experts’ might open up spaces in the public sphere and the science/policy nexus through ‘celebritization’ effects. Second, we examine how the celebrity as the ‘heroic individual’ seeking ‘conspicuous redemption’ may focus climate change actions through individualist frames. Overall, this paper explores potential promises, pitfalls and contradictions of this increasingly entrenched set of ‘agents’ in the cultural politics of climate change. Thus, as a form of climate change action, we consider whether it is more effective to ‘plant’ celebrities instead of trees.     

Globalisation in practice: On the politics of boiling pigswill

This paper is about ‘material politics’. It argues that this may be understood as a material ordering of the world in a way that contrasts this with other and equally possible alternative modes of ordering. It also suggests that while material politics may well involve words, it is not discursive in kind. This argument is made for the mundane and material practice of boiling pigswill that the 2001 UK foot and mouth outbreak showed to have a layered importance. Boiling pigswill was a political technique in at least three different ways. First it made difference, dividing the rich from the poor by separating disease free countries from those in which foot and mouth is endemic. Second, it joined times and places by linking past agricultural practices with those of the contemporary world, and linking Britain with the world. And third, it also showed a way of limiting food scarcity on a world wide scale because it allowed food to be recycled, albeit on a small scale, in a region of plenty. ‘Politics’ is often linked to debate, discussion, or explicit contestation. Alternatively, it is sometimes seen as being embedded in and carried by artefacts. For the case of boiling pigswill neither approach is satisfactory. The first privileges the life of the mind while in the second politics is linked too strongly to a single order. The version of politics presented here foregrounds both materiality and difference. And it involves articulation: the question is not whether something is political all by itself but whether it can be called political as part of the process of analysing it.     

Imagining ‘home’: Diasporic landscapes of the Greek-German second generation

This article presents research on second-generation Greek-Germans, both those living in diaspora, and those who have ‘returned’ to Greece. The research is multi-sited, with fieldwork in Berlin, Athens, central and northern Greece. After defining and problematising the notions of ‘second generation’ and ‘return’ - especially complex in this context - we focus on the second generation’s diasporic imaginings of ‘home’, particularly their experiences and narrative framings of landscape, space and place. In their narratives, participants ‘remember’ their parents’ narratives about the homeland, and narrate their own experiences of returning to the diasporic hearth. Contrasts are drawn across diverse diasporic landscape imaginings and experiences: between received diasporic memories and ‘pragmatic’ experiences; holiday visits and long-term return; urban, rural and other spaces; and different sites in the diaspora, such as the place of upbringing and the ancestral home.     

Geomoney: An option on frost, going long on clouds

The paper adopts a cultural economy approach to explore the emergence of a market in so-called weather derivatives, referred to in the paper as a form of ‘geomoney’. These are specially designed financial products that allow firms to protect their profits against the impact of changing weather conditions. The paper approaches the emergence of this market, and the issues its growth raises, in three interlinked stages. Weather derivatives are located amongst the hybrid collective that is contemporary finance and are analysed through the conceptual apparatus afforded by a cultural economy approach to finance. The paper employs this analytical line to examine the assumptions and models that enable the weather to be turned into a risk and then be transported and traded within capital markets. Through specific examples of weather products together with a discussion of the International Finance Corporation’s recent involvement in this market, the paper suggests something of the ‘world making’ capabilities of finance theory and the politics of finance often hidden beneath the mathematical models. The paper concludes by highlighting not only the usefulness of a cultural economy of finance to geographers but, in light of the examples discussed, the need for cultural economy to recognise and to engage critically in its analysis the politics that such a conceptual approach to the making of financial markets exposes.     

The Politics of Nature in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest

Environmental politics, argues French philosopher Bruno Latour, have been a ‘disappointment’. Rather than trying to bring environmental concerns into a political world split into two - between Nature/Science and politics/society - Latour argues that environmental movements ought to focus on destroying this two-house collective, and develop ‘an understanding of ecological crises that no longer uses nature to account for the tasks to be accomplished’. In this paper I put my research on the politics and science of the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR), a large tract of temperate rainforest on the central and north coast of British Columbia, into direct conversation with Latour’s arguments about science, epistemology and environmental politics. The GBR was a site of intense political struggle focused predominantly on the scale and scope of industrial forestry, a struggle which ‘ended’ in 2006 with what some call a historic compromise between some high-profile environmental groups, First Nations, the Provincial government, and the forest industry. This paper focuses on two interlinked questions: do the environmental organizations at the centre of the struggle demonstrate the maladies identified by Latour; are they too preoccupied with representing Nature through Science? And second, do these maladies help us explain or understand the politics over the GBR? Were the politics of the GBR limited by environmentalist invocations of a singular Nature through Science, what Latour calls ‘Naturpolitik’? The encounter between theory and practice leads to a more cautious and critical assessment of the environmental politics in the GBR, but also tempers Latour’s arguments. Environmentalists in the GBR do exhibit Latour’s maladies, but in tracing the Politics of Nature there, it seems that Naturpolitik is not as powerful as Latour argues.     

Enacting environmental justice in Singapore: Performative justice and the Green Volunteer Network

Environmental justice research has of late expanded beyond its’ original focus on the distribution of environmental ‘bads’ to debate injustices at a wide array of sites and scales. Despite this expansion, the applicability of an environmental justice framework to seemingly apolitical and banal expressions of environmental concerns remains open to question. This paper argues that environmental justice struggles can be located in the mundane environmental politics of Singapore, by employing a performative rather than rights-based approach to both justice and politics. It draws on qualitative research into volunteers’ practices in one Singaporean environmental organisation, and asserts that through their focus on experiential learning and re-inscribing ‘developmental’ spaces as spaces of care and justice, volunteers seek to redress the social, political and environmental injustices replete within the spatial politics of Singapore.     

Searching for (un)sustainabilty in pangasius aquaculture: A political economy of quality in European retail

Drawing on a political economy of food quality, this paper investigates the main sources of uncertainty over the environmental sustainability of Vietnamese pangasius catfish in European markets and how retailers subsequently respond to these uncertainties. Based on media survey and interviews with supermarket retailers across Europe between 2008 and 2010, the analysis focuses on the claims and counterclaims over the sustainability of pangasius aquaculture, how retailers have dealt with the uncertainty these claims have engendered about the fish, and what effect this uncertainty has had on the potential of marketing ‘sustainable pangasius’ in European supermarkets. The paper concludes that successful claims around new food qualities like sustainability by retailers are dependent on the ability of regulatory networks to overcome any perceived illegitimacy of imported products in the face of continuing uncertainty and the wider politics of market protectionism.     

‘Body training’: Investigating the embodied training choices of/for mothers in West London

Framed by the UK Government’s efforts to combat social exclusion by encouraging a shift from welfare to work through (re)training, this paper explores the types of training courses being offered to and taken by women with young children in West London. Drawing upon qualitative research, the paper explores the actual and desired uptake of ‘body training’ courses among mothers, linked, in part, to the current ‘body work’ skills gap in the local economy. The encouragement given to women and the interest they have in engaging in ‘body training’ is, we suggest, linked to the discursive construction and performance of a highly feminised and, often, maternal identity, which emphasises women’s caring role and the caring self. By probing the body/training nexus through the motivations and choices of mothers in West London the paper raises questions about gender identity and stereotyping in relation to training-for-work policies and the role of training in (re)inforcing the woman-body coupling within Western dualistic thought.     

Manufacturing rural finance in Asia: Institutional assemblages, market societies, entrepreneurial subjects

This paper takes up the proposition that institutions mediate market formation, through a comparative study of rural finance in Nepal and Vietnam. It explores how microfinance, as an iconic institution of ‘roll-out neoliberalism’, articulates political-economic and cultural-political milieux—with particular emphasis given to the ways in which the Vietnamese Party-state has engaged rural finance to further the socialist transition even as it has undergone significant ‘economic renovation’. In so doing, the paper adopts a processual interpretation of institutions not as bounded structures, but as arenas of ongoing debate over culturally constructed meanings and ‘practices of assemblage’ [Li, T.M., 2007a. Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society 36 (2), 263–293] that are inextricably linked with wider-scale political-economic and cultural-political formations. A comparative approach is pursued here to emphasize spatio-temporal contingencies in the articulation of a market-led development institution with specific national regulatory frameworks and political cultures. A critical-geographical orientation helps to deepen Polanyi’s proposition that the economy is an instituted process, to challenge the prevailing binary opposition between state- and market-led development, account for the multiple scales at which power and interest reside in the formation of markets, and highlight the variable ways in which markets are embodied and enacted in particular places.     

Making Alzheimer’s disease matter. Enacting, interfering and doing politics of nature

This article contributes to recent discussions about the politics of nature by exploring how Alzheimer’s disease is being shaped as a ‘matter of concern’. Drawing on work on differences in medicine from science and technology studies, and from the geographies of naturecultures, it explores the ‘mattering’ of this disease in a number of locations including: an international Alzheimer’s patients’ movement; a medical textbook; laboratory science; daily care practice; an advertisement for anti-dementia medication; general practice; parliamentary politics; and a conference on dementia. It explores how these locations interfere and co-exist with one another and argues against the ‘science centrism’ of science and technology studies which contributes to the dominance of science and medicine by granting these analytical privilege. The same problem is posed in the recent STS turn from science to politics - the danger is that politics is similarly privileged.     

Sustainability begins at home? An ecological exploration of sub/urban Australian community-focused housing initiatives

This paper responds to challenges made by Castree [Castree, N., 2004. Environmental issues: signals in the noise? Progress in Human Geography 28 (1), 79-90] and Sneddon [Sneddon, C., 2000. ‘Sustainability’ in ecological economics, ecology and livelihoods: a review. Progress in Human Geography 24 (4), 521-549] for human geography to clarify its contribution to environmental debates and engage with recent formulations of sustainability as informed by the ‘new ecology’. This approach focuses on resilience, functional diversity, flexibility and complexity, here used to examine housing sustainability within an industrialised sub/urban context in terms of design philosophy, ownership, management bases, community engagement and funding mechanisms. This framework highlights areas of concern for enhancing the functional diversity of housing systems, echoing recent assertions that challenges for sustainability arise more from trust and power sharing issues, than from physical design and maintenance issues. It is argued that it is precisely human geography’s place-by-place consideration of power, embeddedness, scale and politics that can lend new ecology the social relevance it requires.     

‘Letting them go’ - Agricultural retirement and human-livestock relations

Through a focus on agricultural retirement, this paper extends on the recent work considering human-livestock relations. Drawing on research conducted in Hampshire and West Sussex (UK), the paper utilises farmers’ narratives of farm work and retirement to explore the themes of [dis]connection between farmers and their dairy cattle. The paper attempts to add complexity and nuance to assumptions about the nature and extent of animal objectification with commercial dairy farming, and consider the intricate moral geographies [re]created within the individual farm. The discursive and material ‘placings’ of animals are considered alongside an exploration of how the intricate temporality and spatiality of these are disturbed and disrupted by the move to retirement. In discussing these relations the paper examines how animals are central to the everyday lives and identities of farmers and how separation from them alters farmers’ attachment to particular practices, places and social networks.