Situating local experience of risk: Peripherality, marginality and place identity in the UK foot and mouth disease crisis

Research into exposure to, and experience of, environmental risk that has an explicitly spatial focus can be broadly differentiated into two strands. The first strand focuses on the responses of communities of exposure (or the threat of exposure) to some form of environmental hazard and to the policies put in place by institutional actors to manage the hazard. The second strand addresses social inequalities in exposure to environmental hazards and seeks to correlate uneven spatial distributions of risk across different social groups. It is argued that both strands are limited by their respective understandings of space - and that the way in which vulnerable communities experience environmental risk and its management will be shaped significantly by the complex interactions of different spatialisations or constructions of space. We explore this process by examining accounts of local experience of the UK’s 2001 foot and mouth disease crisis and its management in terms of the interplay of two different spatialisations: socio-cultural marginality and political-economic peripherality. We trace the relationship between these cultural and political-economic spatialisations through an analysis of the discursive mobilisation of contrasting place rhetorics. We conclude that focusing on these rhetorics can enhance our understanding of the spatial processes which are constitutive of place identity and in turn mediate the experience of environmental risk and its management.     

Locating the transgenic landscape: Animal biotechnology and politics of place in Massachusetts

The first major wave in the conflict over modern biotechnologies took place in the United States at the federal level. Biotechnology proponents were able to capture the federal regulatory structure, so today, a second wave of anti-biotech activism focused at the local and state levels is emerging. This article examines what enables or constrains place-based anti-biotech activism through a case study of the conflict over genetically engineered (GE) animals in Massachusetts. I demonstrate how, in spite of a highly visible animal advocacy and anti-GE presence, GE animal proponents have mobilized effective politics of place strategies to suppress local debate by exercising territorial control in relation to two places – the state of Massachusetts as a whole and the animal research laboratory specifically.     

Everywhere different? Globalisation and the impact of international migration on Sydney and Melbourne

Using a new approach to classifying migrant group concentrations, we test for evidence of the effects of globalisation, associated by some with ‘protopostmodernity’, on two Australian cities. Sydney is characterised as an emergent world city and a focus of ‘new economy’ activities. Melbourne is associated with ‘old economy’ activities, dominated by manufacturing. In the Australian context, the onset of globalisation also coincided with significant changes to immigration policy: the end of a ‘white Australia’ policy in the early 1970s in favour of a skills-based policy, regardless of race or ethnicity. We argue that the evidence of the spatial behaviour of ethnic groups for these two cities highlights the essential continuity of ethnic segregation and spatial assimilation processes in two cities where segregation levels and experience are fundamentally different from many overseas examples. We further argue for a need to recognise that context, and the ethnic experience, are everywhere different, both intra- and internationally.     

There’s nothing inherent about scale: political ecology, the local trap, and the politics of development in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper argues that research in political ecology would benefit from more explicit and careful attention to the question of scale and scalar politics. Although political ecologists have extensively considered scale as a methodological question, they have yet to develop an explicit theoretical approach to scale as an object of inquiry. We highlight one principal drawback to this underdeveloped approach to scale: what we call “the local trap” in which political ecologists assume that organization, policies, and action at the local scale are inherently more likely to have desired social and ecological effects than activities organized at other scales. Over the past 10 years or so, an increasingly sophisticated literature on scale has been developing among scholars in geography working in the political economy tradition. This literature has argued that scale is socially produced rather than ontologically given. Therefore, there is nothing inherent about any scale, and so the local scale cannot be intrinsically more desirable than other scales. We suggest that a greater engagement with this scale literature offers political ecology a theoretical way out of the local trap. As a first approximation of the kind of scalar analysis we advocate, we present a case study that examines the scalar politics that have shaped environmental change in the Brazilian Amazon.     

Sharing as sociomaterial practice: Car sharing and the material reconstitution of automobility

Sharing has become one of the buzzwords of contemporary urban life and scholarship, as cities and social lives are transformed by the share economy and collaborative consumption. This paper advances critical analysis of sharing economies through an investigation of the ways in which objects are mobilized in the practice of sharing. Drawing on an empirical base of 35 interviews conducted with Sydney residents using car sharing as a form of transport, we explicate the material entanglements that constitute car sharing in order to highlight the complex intersections of the object being shared, the constellations of objects brought into the orbit of the practice, and the code that flows through each. Bringing together a material-focused analysis into conversation with the concepts of share economies as both performed and hybrid, we advance the concepts of sharing as a set of socio-material entanglements. We argue that the divergent spatialities and temporalities of objects and humans both hold together and tear apart the experiences of sharing, which in turn underpins car sharing’s implications for the reconstitution of automobility.     

The city-text in post-communist Budapest: street names,memorials, and the politics of commemoration

As in most parts of Central and Eastern Europe, there is a tradition in Hungary of changing street names and memorials in the wake of major political transitions. This article focuses on the change of street names and memorials, i.e. the city-text, in Hungary’s political capital, Budapest, between 1985 and 2001. The city-text in Budapest became a locus of dispute between different political authorities, including the nation state, the metropolitan municipality, and the district, each bearing different political ideals during and after the fall of communism. Discursive changes in the post-communist city-text emerged expressing specific conceptions of national sovereignty, but the direction of the changes were debated. Different levels of administration in Budapest and Hungary had divergent visions of what the new discourse on national sovereignty should be. The changes, therefore, did not express a simple transition to an agreed-upon post-communist value system, but were the result of a symbolic struggle between different levels of administration over what should be commemorated in the city-text.     

Producing/consuming memoryscapes: the genesis/politics of Second World War commemoration in Singapore

Despite the salience of the Second World War in paving the way for Singapore to attain formal independent status in 1965, it was not until the 1990s that war events were inserted into the state’s narratives, and ‘mapped’ onto its spaces as visible national fodder to bind citizens together. Since then, memoryscapes in many forms have proliferated over the state’s cityscape. After tracing the genesis of official war commemorative gestures within Singapore, the paper examines the ways in which Singaporeans have responded to them. Specifically, the paper argues that, while Singaporeans recognize the importance of remembering the war as nationally significant, this has not translated into any physical attempt or desire—beyond the discursive—to participate in the state’s commemorative endeavours. In analyzing factors that may have hindered the actual bodily practice of war remembrance in Singapore, nationalized war memoryscapes are also seen as embodying numerous politics due to tensions arising from a collision between what the state and its people perceive to be ideal means of remembering and representing the war within national discourses in the context of the present.     

The politics of barstool biology: Environmental knowledge and power in greater Northern Yellowstone

Critical researchers of underdevelopment have established a well-known record celebrating the environmental knowledges of subsistence communities in contested wildlife conservation zones. Similar battles are being fought over science, uncertainty, and wild animals in the American west, however, with far less attention to local epistemologies. Often dismissed as “barstool biology”, the ecological knowledges of local hunters in the Northern Yellowstone ecosystem are rooted in environmental experience and situated politics. How does local hunter knowledge diverge or converge with that of state officials, environmentalists, ranchers, and other constituencies, and to what effect on wildlife management policy? This paper seeks to answer that question, reviewing recent research amongst local resource users, managers, and activists in Montana. By rendering empirical the question of local knowledge around America’s oldest national park, rather than trying to “read it off” political affiliation, education, or livelihood, a clearer picture of power, knowledge, and conservation emerges. The results suggest that emerging management policies have developed from the discursive alliance of landowners, outfitters, and environmentalists, shifting priorities towards enclosure and exclusion in wildlife at the expense of other silent constituencies.     

Wasting the rural: Meat,manure, and the politics of agro-industrialization in contemporary China

This paper uses pork as a lens on China’s rural transformations. Taking the industrialization of pig farming in the reform era as a trace on broader processes of social and environmental change, it advances three arguments. First, the massive increase in pork production and consumption since 1978 has been propelled by an industrial meat regime. A party-state led and agribusiness-operated regime, it articulates modernist notions of meat-as-progress with the relentless drive for capital accumulation. Second, using Marx’s concept of metabolic rift, the paper examines how processes of concentration in the industrial meat regime are at the same time processes of separation. This dialectical approach highlights the contradictions inherent in ongoing attempts to disembed capitalist production from biological and social relations. Finally, while official party-state discourse conceptualizes “the rural” as a production base for surplus value, and/or as a site for preserving environmental integrity, the paper’s analysis reveals a further unofficial recasting of the rural: in the process of agroindustrialization, the rural is also a sink for offloading capitalist crises. Between the rivers of manure that flow from industrial livestock operations and contaminate rural waterways; the loss of soil nutrients and food calories in the inefficient conversion of grains and oilseeds into industrial meat; the erosion of agricultural knowledge and practice that accompanies the dispossession of China’s farmers; and the shifting values of pigs, pork, and manure, this is a system that “wastes” the rural in service of capital.     

Ecologies of actor-networks and (non)social labor within the urban political economies of nature

On September 16th, 2005 the United States began restricting the entry of commodities shipped from abroad in wood packaging materials that do not conform to phytosanitation measures meant to prevent the spread of pests and pathogens. This action results from expensive lessons learned as global commerce facilitates pandemics like Dutch elm disease. Marxist political ecology is well suited to investigate such scenarios with its emphasis on the social production of nature within accumulation regimes. Some scholars contend, however, that Marxist accounts of the contradictions that result from nature’s commodification relegate nonhuman organisms to an apolitical role in environmental transformation while reinforcing the nature/society dichotomy. Often viewed as antithetical to Marxism, actor-network theory or ANT emphasizes the ability of actants (both human and nonhuman) to enroll other actants into heterogeneous assemblages or networks. Thus, it is claimed that nonhuman organisms can be attributed ontological status in processes of environmental change, much like their human counterparts. Despite this apparent theoretical discord, political ecologists are increasingly integrating aspects of both Marx and ANT into their analyses. But a more explicit articulation of the ontological basis and epistemic import of theoretical synthesis is warranted. This paper therefore prioritizes and links the ontological status of labor in both of these theories in order to expand the definition of urban environmental politics to include the role of nonhuman organisms. By demonstrating the laboring capacity of Dutch elm disease within the networks of urban political economy, the epistemology of environmental politics is thus expanded.     

The rise of territorial eco-certifications: New politics of transnational sustainability governance in the fishery sector

Eco-certifications have become an important site of power struggles in commodity sectors such as forestry, fisheries, aquaculture, palm oil, and soy. In each, multiple eco-certification initiatives have been developed and resisted through interactions among non-governmental organizations, governments, and commercial actors. This paper contributes to understanding how power is embodied in certifications by exploring how territoriality manifests in the international struggle over defining what products are ‘sustainable’ and which producers will have access to markets that require ‘sustainable’ products. Focusing on the wild capture fisheries sector in which the non-governmental Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) administers the preeminent eco-certification initiative, we explore the emergence of new fisheries eco-certification initiatives in Japan, Iceland, Alaska, Canada, and the US that insist there is no transnational monopoly on judgments over fisheries sustainability. We argue that these new eco-certifications attempt to defend and embed territorial social and regulatory relations of production within the contested domain of transnational sustainability governance. The initiatives accommodate both the territorially embedded material interests, institutions, and discursive strategies of producers (and their state supporting agencies) and transnationally embedded governance norms for assessing and communicating sustainability. They also counter the globally applicable institutions of the MSC in favor of making space for state and non-state actors to contend with demands for sustainability in the global seafood market by combining place-specific attributes with transnational governance norms.     

War and the commons: Assessing the changing politics of violence, access and entitlements in Sri Lanka

There are two antagonistic, but equally influential traditions in the study of the nexus between resource use and violent conflict. One works through a Malthusian frame linking resource scarcity with violence, the other school of thought establishes a nexus between resource abundance and the incentives to use violence for rent monopolisation in a political economy of war or markets of violence. The tacit essentialism inherent in both schools of thought has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by geographers and anthropologists. To escape such essentialism requires a more detailed study of the dynamism of the political economy of (civil) war and its spatial dynamics, the political geographies of violence. In this paper, we study endowments and entitlements of people depending on common-pool or open-access resources in war-affected areas of Sri Lanka. Rural spaces in the war-affected areas became both a strategic retreat for fighters and an important common-pool resource on which a large part of the rural populace depended for their survival. Our research illustrates how the political geographies of war affect access regimes and entitlements to common-pool resources and thereby confine the livelihood opportunities of resource users. These dynamics of the political economy of war cross different scales and go beyond simple place-based struggles, for they are rooted in broader spatial dynamics of warfare creating place-space tensions in the sense that spatial dynamics of military control impinge changing access regimes upon specific places.     

The ebb and flow of power: British flood risk management and the politics of scale

This paper examines the rescaling of flood risk management (FRM) in Britain over the past 70+ years. Drawing on recent research in geography and elsewhere – which has engaged the politics of scale literature with the rescaling of water and environmental governance – we seek to illustrate the mis-match between the rescaling of the geographical unit of management and the nexus of power and control of those engaged in FRM. For those seeking positive examples of multi-level decentralised governance in water resource management, where power is shared across the spatial scales, our historical analysis struggles to find evidence. Rather, despite attempts to ‘hollow-out’ the state through the scaling ‘out’ and ‘down’ of FRM responsibilities, our evidence suggests that the control over key decision-making tools, resources and other modalities of power remains in the hands of a few key national-level decision-makers; it is the responsibility that has been decentralised, not least to those at risk of flooding. The application of the politics of scale theorising in a FRM context is innovative and, importantly, our case study demonstrates that such politics does not have to involve open conflict but is much more subtle in its deployment of power.     

Contesting expertise: The politics of environmental knowledge in northern Indian groundwater practices

The world is facing a severe water crisis. According to the UN, by 2025 50% of the world’s population will face water scarcity. In India, where 70% of irrigation and 80% of domestic needs are met with groundwater, demand for this resource is expected to exceed supply by 2020. This has led to recent calls for groundwater governance reforms within India, and specifically within the state of Rajasthan, where no regulation exists today. The success of these reforms hinges on the interaction of the state and its agents with local users and managers of groundwater resources. Underpinning these encounters, though, are tensions between local and state forms of groundwater knowledges. The question analyzed here is in what ways do conflicting environmental knowledges adversely affect the management of overexploited groundwater resources in water-scarce India? To address this question, I examine the coevolution of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence groundwater and irrigation knowledges and technologies in Rajasthan, India to expose the ways that they are produced, contested, legitimated, and hybridized. The paper argues the following three claims. First, the relationship between the state and local producers of groundwater knowledge practices is non-linear and porous. For instance, the way that state subjects experience the state is uneven because within and in-between historical moments the state may attempt to assimilate, reorganize, plagiarize, or disparage local knowledge. Second, these attempts produce or exacerbate existing historically rooted tensions between farmers and state groundwater engineers. But in response, farmers often seek out non-state avenues of expertise, such as tubewell drilling firms. This results in the further hybridization of knowledge practices and also in the present-day marginalization of the state. Third, the relationship between farmers and the state is further strained because of a current lack of state visibility in the study area and also because the state continues to “see like a state”. These shifting meanings and power relations around groundwater and irrigation knowledges produce tensions that will undoubtedly negatively impact future groundwater governance strategies.     

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.     

Some things old, some things new: The spatial representations and politics of change of the peak oil relocalisation movement

Despite continued uncertainty about the physical realities and political, economic and social implications of peak oil, combined concerns about oil scarcity, climate change and globalisation has spawned an energetic relocalisation movement dedicated to achieving a comprehensive reduction in oil dependency through community-scale initiatives. This paper uses a discourse approach to examine the emergence, geographical spread and practices of the Transition Network, a UK-originated relocalisation movement now involving 186 local initiatives in the UK and other countries. We trace the movement’s drawing upon, and innovation from, discourses and techniques used by other grassroots environmental movements to promote a spatial representation of peak oil as an inevitable and geographically undiscriminating problem, and its use of addiction metaphors and participatory techniques to promote personal and community-scale energy descent initiatives as a viable and necessary alternative to globalisation. We also analyse the spatial representations and techniques used in the Network’s “rhizomic” spread across multiple localities around the world and embedding in communities where relocalisation initiatives are established. We conclude by examining the future challenges these spatial constructions of peak oil pose for the relocalisation movement.     

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.     

Nation building and resource management: The politics of ‘nature’ in Timor Leste

This paper examines the role of custom and tradition in the process of nation building and resource management in post-independence Timor Leste (East Timor). While customary land tenure is alluded to but not explicitly recognized under the Timorese Constitution, it is clearly stated that all natural resources are owned by the State. However, this paper argues that rather than waiting for the government to create land and resource management related laws, local people in Timor Leste are making and remaking their own laws, mobilizing their customary practices and, increasingly, ‘performing’ their traditions in public demonstrations of their extant capacities. In part, this process can be read as a way of enticing in outsiders, making them a party to the law making process, a witness to its legitimacy. Often critical to such processes, is the ability of local level leaders to draw in outsiders through their engagements with the idea of ‘nature’ – a concept which allows diverse interests to come together in conversation and build relationships despite what is often a dissonance in the meanings and priorities attributed to the concept (see Tsing, A.L., 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford). The paper focuses on a view from the margins – Tutuala in the far east of the country – and ways in which this community is attempting to both resist and embrace the developmental hegemony of a centrist state. This, it is argued, is a case which demonstrates the power of the local (both ritually and politically) to shape and intervene in the national development process and the associated discourses of nature preservation.     

A critical portrait of hate crime/incident reporting in North East England: The value of statistical data and the politics of recording in an age of austerity

This paper contributes to research on the reporting of hate crime/incidents from a critical socio-spatial perspective. It outlines an analysis of third party reporting of hate crimes/incidents in the North East of England, based upon the work of Arch (a third party hate crime/incident reporting system). The data set is one of the largest of its kind in the UK and therefore presents a unique opportunity to explore patterns of reporting across different types of hate crimes/incidents through a system designed to go beyond criminal justice responses. Whilst not downplaying the significance of the harmful experiences to which this data refers, we are very aware of the limitations of quantitative and de-humanised approaches to understanding forms of discrimination. Therefore the paper adopts a critical position, emphasising that interpretation of the data provides a partial, yet important, insight into everyday exclusions, but also cultures and politics of reporting. While the data records incidents across the main ‘monitored strands’, analysis here particularly focuses on those incidents recorded on the basis of ‘race’ and religion. Our analysis allows us to both cautiously consider the value of such data in understanding and addressing such damaging experiences - but also to appreciate how such an analysis may connect with the changing landscape of reporting and the politics of austerity.