Social license to operate: Not a proxy for accountability in water governance

With the emergence of more collaborative, watershed governance arrangements and the engagement of various actors in decision-making processes, new questions emerge about the potential roles for these organizations and agencies in both upholding accountability, and in being held accountable. Therefore, this study explores the intersection between alternative collaborative watershed governance approaches, and the simultaneous emergence of the concept of social license as an accountability instrument in relation to water governance. Based on an empirical analysis of a case study in southeast British Columbia, where water quality contamination is primarily the result of coal mining, this study seeks to: (1) examine how social license is understood by a range of watershed actors; (2) better understand whether social license may be useful as a watershed-based or community accountability instrument as new collaborative modes of watershed governance emerge; and, (3) explore how social license may be enforced or enabled. Findings show how industry efforts to earn social license have created benefits, such as enabling community-based water monitoring, thereby building capacity for deeper community engagement in governance processes and a greater ability for the community to uphold accountability. However, we confirm that social license is not a proxy or silver bullet for enhancing accountability in collaborative watershed governance. Our findings reveal four specific limitations regarding the use of social license as a principle for accountability in collaborative watershed governance.     

From “cartoneros” to “recolectores urbanos”. The changing rhetoric and urban waste management policies in neoliberal Buenos Aires

This study contributes to the existent literature on neoliberal urban governance examining the process-based character of this formation. I maintain that neoliberal governance is a fluid and evolving formation which is continuously being constructed and reconstructed beneath a rhetorical veneer of inevitable emergence and permanence. In this context, this work examines the interconnections between neoliberal urban ascendancy, changing rhetoric and urban waste management policies, and waste pickers (cartoneros), in a case study setting, Buenos Aires. Since 2002, the neoliberal urban governance in Buenos Aires (its institutions, programs and policies) has mobilized different rhetoric and policies to negotiate the waste pickers’ “disturbing” and “dirty” presence in the streets. In that process, the waste pickers, originally marginalized and stigmatized by the neoliberal discourse, have been regulated and disciplined into legal and “well behaved” workers. I would argue that, regulating this activity does not entail giving the waste pickers an opportunity to become central actors in the future of urban waste management in the city. Rather, it is compatible with the logic of the local neoliberal urban projects, focused on disciplining the city’s physical and social landscape as new opportunities for growth and development continue to emerge.     

Re-reading remittances through solidarity: Mexican hometown associations in New York City

This paper analyzes how Mexican hometown associations in New York City practice solidarity so that they might best meet the needs of the transnational communities that they serve. Commonly formed by immigrants in the United States, hometown associations are organizations which send money collectively to their home countries, supporting public infrastructure and community projects. Scholars have debated both the merits of remittance programs that channel migrant funds as economic development and the agency of immigrant economies in neoliberal development structures. Through primary data collected from interviews in New York City, I review the frustrations that hometown associations have with one such program: Mexico's programa tres por uno para migrantes. Concurrently, I examine how the same hometown associations engage ethical economic practices of collective remittance sending and community service provision in New York City. Drawing on feminist literature on diverse economies, I argue that the solidarity work of hometown associations disrupts the dominant remittance as development discourse. Migrants are not content to participate in tres por uno and through practicing solidarity they distance themselves from this neoliberal policy.     

"Welcome in my backyard"…but on my terms: making sense of homeless exclusion from renewed urban spaces in Copenhagen

Based on a Danish case study of urban renewal in Copenhagen’s Sundholm District, this paper examines, (a) how present urban regeneration efforts in a historically welfare-driven, but increasingly neoliberalized state context, is contributing to more or less spatial exclusion of the homeless, and (b) to what extent this may be associated with a revanchist/punitive stance of the Danish state. Using an urban political ecological lens, this paper highlights a relational understanding of the apparently dualistic/competing public and civic discourses shaping the Danish urban regeneration program. Revealing the complex ways that public socio-environmental policies and middle-class civic environmentalism/activism intersect with state-entrepreneurialism within such regeneration efforts, this paper presents an instance of a historically and geographically distinct process of neoliberal disciplining of the poor in Sundholm District. The paper shows that while such disciplining of the homeless is not driven by a purely punitive state, it results in soft, green-coded, nonetheless exclusionary implications for the homeless and their socio-spatial practices within the renewed urban spaces.     

From feeding the locals to selling the locale: Adapting local sustainable food projects in Niagara to neocommunitarianism and neoliberalism

This paper traces attempts to foster local, sustainable food projects in Niagara, Canada as part of community economic development (CED) projects during two distinct periods of provincial governance. In the first period (1990-1995), social democratic government support for local sustainable food projects through CED can be understood as neocommunitarian in nature. During this time there was a concerted attempt to link local people with access to local food and also to support a relationship between local food projects and agri-tourism. I argue that this neocommunitarian policy was an accommodation to a wider and more global neoliberal hegemony and was underlain by a romanticism of petty commodity production and a tenuous link to social and ecological sustainability. In the second period of governance (beginning in 1995) the progressive conservative government led by Mike Harris pursued particularly virulent, revanchist forms of neoliberal governance. With many of their state supports slashed, Niagara NGOs and activists turned, and were pushed, to more market-led, elitist forms of local food projects and agri-tourism. In these latter food projects, the practices of ecological and social sustainability were significantly hollowed out and their local and light green nature was harnessed as accumulation strategies. The paper is based on interviews conducted in the year 2003 with people involved in various urban and rural food projects (including community gardening, community supported agriculture, local/seasonal cuisine, organic/ecological farming and food box programs).     

Renewable energy in Iran: Challenges and opportunities for sustainable development

Around the globe, developing countries have reported different cases of successfully implemented Renewable Energy (RE) program supported by bilateral or multilateral funding. In developing countries subsidy has played a big role in RE program marketing and whether this will lead to sustainable development is yet to be determined. The adoption of implementation strategies that will support sustainable development and overcoming barriers that hinder expansion of Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs) still remains as a big challenge to stakeholders involved in promotion of RE resources in developing countries. In this respect, developing countries need to re-examine their environmental policy for promotion of RETs in order to define its role in revitalization of their economies. This paper reviews the policy incentives for promotion of RETs in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Setting-up international collaborative business ventures between local industry in Iran and RE companies in developed countries is proposed as an implementation strategy that will appropriate diffusion of RETs in the country. An organizational framework that may help to attain this objective is discussed and a structural model for RE business partnership is presented. It is concluded that with appropriate policy formulations and strategies, RETs can bring about the required socio-economic development in Iran.     

Differential citizenship in the shadow state

State restructuring through decentralization, privatization, and related processes has prompted the growth of the non-profit sector as a `shadow state' increasingly responsible for social service delivery and community development. In this context, the question arises as to how citizenship, defined as inclusion in a polity through the distribution of rights and resources, is realized within the shadow state. If non-profit organizations are assuming functions of the state but access to the shadow state is unevenly distributed, the result may be selective disenfranchisement or differential citizenship. This paper examines the nature of differential access to citizenship within the shadow state by looking at the practices and contexts of non-profit community development corporations (CDCs) in the city of Newark, New Jersey. The shadow state is affected by structural and contextual influences including financial, policy, and political factors that produce differential organizational capacity, uneven spatial coverage, client selectivity, inadequate program support, unrecognized need, and unconsidered clients' preferences. These contextualized practices in turn result in differential access to citizenship in the shadow state. Solutions to the problem of differential citizenship require improvements in the structural and contextual conditions influencing the scope and capacity of the non-profit sector.     

Innovating resource regimes: Water, wastewater, and the institutional dynamics of urban hydraulic reach in northwest Mexico

The twin facets of urban hydraulic reach - cities’ appropriation of water from surrounding regions and irrigation use of urban wastewater over a growing rural footprint - form an emerging global policy challenge, especially as democratizing societies seek institutional means to address both urban growth and water scarcity. A central concern of this paper is to demonstrate that policy regionalism, as a process-based understanding of institutions and decision-making, better explains the causes, forms, and outcomes of hydraulic reach than do more structural approaches. Hermosillo, Mexico presents an unfolding case of rural-urban tension for control over rivers and aquifers as well as the infrastructure for water capture, storage, conveyance, and wastewater release. The analysis employs process documentation of water transfer and wastewater negotiations through interviews, review of primary documents, and field observations. Hermosillo’s recourse to negotiated agreements and quasi-market transactions, led by an emerging group of public sector innovators, advances understanding of water policy in Mexico by moving beyond prevailing concerns with the water reform’s neoliberal underpinnings to exploration of rapidly changing urban-centered experimentation. We conclude that evolving urban-rural power disparities and water resource landscapes of urban growth will drive continued expansion of hydraulic reach in water-scarce regions globally.     

Campus sustainability at the edges: Emotions,relations, and bio-cultural connections

The university campus is often considered a key site for the development of environmental sustainability initiatives. At the same time, the concept and practice of sustainability has been critiqued for its lack of conceptual clarity and its proneness to co-optation by neoliberal institutions and organizations. Using a just sustainabilities framework, this article strives to respond to this tension by exploring the possibility of a campus sustainability at the edges, one that is interested in engaging the broader socio-spatial context of a university as well as in tapping into the emotional and relational realms of fostering more sustainable socio-ecological assemblages. Through a case study analysis of the Philadelphia Urban Creators (PUC), a youth-led organization operating within the Temple University-North Philadelphia interface, I find that grassroots sustainability actors possess important knowledge for understanding how sustainability can be a tool for restoring emotional affinity with the environment as well as for enacting transformative socio-ecological change in the urban university context and beyond. Through these explorations, my purpose is twofold: (1) to envision a more diverse, inclusive, and meaningful campus sustainability model that seeks to confront urban crises such as gentrification, racialized poverty, and mass incarceration, and (2) to incorporate emotion and affect geographies into the just sustainabilities research agenda.     

Cultivating alternative spaces – Zagreb’s community gardens in transition: From socialist to post-socialist perspective

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of community gardens in a (post)socialist setting during a time of key changes in their perception and management. Community gardens in Zagreb emerged in two specific economic and socio-cultural contexts and a diachronous approach to the study of urban gardens offers a unique insight into differences and similarities reflecting and contrasting those periods. Semi-structured interviews and non-participatory observation were employed. Results show that community gardens in Zagreb are multilayered places which satisfy diverse needs of the urban residents, including home grown food, socializing, recreation, contact with the nature, and supplementation for low pensions. They can also be seen as examples of heterotopias or alternative spaces during both examined periods. In the socialist period they were secluded, private, pseudo-rural places in a semi-authoritarian, communal, and (supposedly) urban and industrial society. In post-socialist Zagreb, characterized by an uncontrolled and unplanned spatial context reliant on neoliberal market-oriented principles, social insensitivity and exclusion, the new gardens are depicted as beacons of communal involvement, grassroots movements, and the ability of citizens to stand together and make their voices heard.     

Gramsci in green: Neoliberal hegemony through urban forestry and the potential for a political ecology of praxis

The US Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources coordinate the distribution of urban forestry grants to nonprofits and citizen groups. These granting agencies increased state funding during a period of neoliberal, fiscal austerity in order to channel ecosystem services provided by urban forests. Increased funding is an instance of rollout neoliberalism whereby the fiscally austere state builds market capacity to harness these services as part of an ecologically modernist agenda. A Gramscian perspective and data gathered from 20 in-depth interviews with foresters are used in this paper to theorize how rollout policy is deployed through urban forestry to extend market hegemony to new geographies. This is anything but a smooth process because the public’s perception of urban trees is highly varied. State bureaucracies must build civil sector capacity to educate people about the ecosystem services trees provide as market commodities. In doing so the state’s market-oriented regulatory legitimacy is consolidated through the apparently benign act of promoting urban forestry. This dialectical process limits participation in urban forestry because markets are inherently selective. Yet it potentially gives rise to an alternative political ecology of praxis beyond market ideology when grant recipients participate in the production of urban ecology and recognize their relationship with nature.     

Coping with natural hazards and disasters in megacities: Perspectives on the Twenty-First Century

Changes in global urbanization and emerging patterns of disaster losses suggest that it may now be time to refocus the hazards research agenda on problems of very large cities. The resolution of urban disaster issues will require development of new collaborative strategies between victims, researchers, managers, policy makers and stakeholders in the hazards community and their counterparts in other urban interest groups. The experience of megacities in the United States and elsewhere that have been affected by recent major disasters and continuing hazards is examined to identify opportunities for initiating new policies and programs. Implications for hazard research and the concept of urban sustainability are noted.This paper is based on presentations to the International Symposium on Urban Growth and Natural Hazards, Universite Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France, December 2–3 and the annual conference of the Institute of British Geographers, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 3–4 January, 1995. It also draws on material which is more fully reported in the forthcoming bookMegacity and Natural Disasters to be published by the United Nations University Press.     

The actualization of neoliberal space and the loss of housing affordability in Santa Monica,California

This paper reveals the contingent aspect associated with the actualization of a neoliberal space. The paper examines the material, institutional, and economic conditions necessary for a neoliberal agenda to transform its urban policy objectives into a material reality. The study follows changes in housing conditions in Santa Monica, California from 1990 to 2008. During this period, the confluence of three sets of events led to the actualization of a neoliberal space. First, housing damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake removed “dead capital” from the housing sector. Second, subsequent administrative actions at the local level and more importantly deregulation legislation at the state level eliminated rent control regulations and created market incentives that favored upscale development. Finally, the state’s economic recovery generated a substantial flow of private investments into the real estate market. These combined factors led not only to the dismantling of affordable housing in Santa Monica, but also to the erosion of residents’ and local authorities’ ability to manage housing choices and, consequently, to a historic restructuring of Santa Monica’s physical and social space. These changes had a disproportionately and negative effect on low-income and minority renters.     

Easing conservation? Conservation easements, public accountability and neoliberalism

This paper examines the use of conservation easements, with a focus on California. Conservation easements are now the dominant tool used for private land conservation in the United States. Easements are in many ways a paradigmatic neoliberal environmental policy tool. They privatize and re-scale a great deal of land conservation decision-making authority; they are market-based; they provide financial incentives for participation rather than punishment for non-compliance; and they commodify new property rights. However, these neoliberalisms are incorporated in uneven, and sometimes contradictory, ways that emphasize the gulf between neoliberal ideologies and “actually existing neoliberalisms.” Most critically, as a result of extensive public funding and management, conservation easements are not nearly as private (and thus not as neatly neoliberal) as they sometimes seem. Conservation easements are often heralded as a “win–win” land conservation strategy. I argue that the extent to which conservation easements may be construed as win–win solutions depends a great deal on who is included in the calculation of winners and losers. I contend that using and governing easements as if they are private elides complex questions about larger public costs and benefits. This obscures the large number of people and institutions (both state and private) that will likely need to be involved in governing conservation easements in the long term.     

Neoliberal development through technical assistance: Constructing communities of entrepreneurial subjects in Oaxaca, Mexico

Technical assistance (TA) has a long and varied history as a development practice. It initially emerged as a set of ‘hard’ programs, tools, and technologies delivered to developing countries by imported First World experts, typically in the agricultural and resource sectors. Later, in response to critical and antidevelopment theories, TA morphed into its ‘soft’ version, attempting to empower marginalized people in the Global South by delivering the know-how - often collaboratively generated - sufficient to produce forms of development ‘from below’. In spite of this shift in the politics and practices of TA, it remains susceptible to neoliberal styles of development that have proceeded apace with withdrawal of state institutions in the funding and operation of social and economic development programs, and with the concomitant rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).In this paper, we follow the operation of one TA program operated by an intermediary NGO in Oaxaca, Mexico. We find that the program intersects with neoliberalization in two prominent ways, relying on a form of governmentality that codifies and prescribes: (a) the social spaces of action and need, and (b) learning subjects deficient in entrepreneurial initiative and know-how. We conclude by commenting on the political economic conditions that continue to underwrite TA as a development practice in spite of a decade or more of criticism directed at it and we consider the possibilities for its subversion.     

Public participation in China’s green communities: Mobilizing memories and structuring incentives

In recent years, there has been heightened interest in creating more environmentally sustainable forms of urban development in China. Central in these greening initiatives has been increased attention on promoting public participation in community-based environmental activities. Focusing on China’s green community initiatives, we examine the production and effects of participation in a state-led development program. Our analysis considers how incentives for program organizers and participants are structured by broader political and economic imperatives facing Chinese cities. We also consider what influence China’s history of neighborhood-based mobilization campaigns had on the meanings and methods of participation in green communities. To understand how urban development processes and memories of mobilization influence participation at the local level, we present two examples of the community greening process from the city of Guangzhou, comparing policy outcomes between a new and older neighborhood. This article seeks to demonstrate that the participatory processes associated with such an urban environmental initiative cannot be adequately understood without reference to earlier participatory practices and broader policy priorities guiding development in Chinese cities.     

Contesting racialization in a neoliberal city: cross-cultural collective formation as a strategy among alternative social planning organizations in Toronto

Many cities in the twenty-first century are increasingly culturally diverse and neoliberal due to processes of political, economic, and cultural globalization. While the need to examine the disjuncture between neoliberal ideology and practice remains paramount (Brenner and Theodore in Antipode 34(3):349–379, 2002), the implications of neoliberal policy on the actual experiences and activities of diverse groups in the city require further study (Hackworth in The neoliberal city: governance, ideology, and development in American urbanism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2007). This article contributes to urban studies engaging discourses about the practical rather than purely ideological aspects of neoliberalism, and discourses about the experiences of racialization in North American cities. Through a case study of social planning practices in contemporary Toronto, the author shows how neoliberal policies have shaped social planning in Toronto since 1998, and how several cross-cultural organizations representing Chinese, continental-African, Latino-Hispanic and South Asian communities were compelled to develop a collective to jointly contest the racialization of their communities. The cross-cultural collective’s work forces a reconsideration of what constitutes mainstream Toronto and offers an alternative approach to the dominant social planning in the city; however, it is not sufficient to replace the pervasive neoliberal hegemony as long as it remains caught up within its structures.     

Violent morphologies: Landscape, border and scale in Ahmedabad conflict

Conflicts produce violence through death, confinement, torture, and control of spaces of everyday life. This paper investigates how spatial morphologies, like landscapes, borders and scales, are re-ordered and re-imagined to materialize violence. A Hindu–Muslim conflict in the globalizing city of Ahmedabad, India in 2002 is used as a case study. The conflict unfolded in a dying industrial city, now being re-envisioned through neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism into a ‘global city’. During and after the riots, the majority Hindu community, and the local Hindu fundamentalist government, annihilated the life spaces of the minority Muslim community. Through a combination of Hindu rioting and urban renewal, landscapes were destroyed, new spaces produced, borders re-imagined, and new ones imprinted on the landscape, to segregate previously co-existing communities. Local government and Hindu ideologues creatively juxtaposed neoliberal economic polices, global discourses of Islamophobia, local ethnocentrism to alter the spatial morphologies of Ahmedabad. Justice entails the democratization of space by altering the violent morphologies of Ahmedabad.     

Hybrid drinking water governance: Community participation and ongoing neoliberal reforms in rural Rajasthan,India

This paper examines a Rajasthan (India) drinking water supply project that relied on hybrid governance reforms in its original design. Decentralization and marketization, combined with a participatory approach, were intended to facilitate an empowering shift in state-citizen relationships. Paying citizens were expected to make quantity and quality demands of the state as consumers, not welfare beneficiaries. Research on the project 3 years after its completion revealed that although payment for water and community participation were intended to compel the state to provide clean water, they failed in this regard. The problem of an unreliable state supply was solved through small scale privatization, a decision ‘independently’ reached at the local scale, but one that served to further undermine the state’s ability to provide clean water.In this paper, we trace the shifts in regulation that evolved in the post-project phase at both the state and village scale that resulted in the delivery of contaminated water. Ethnographic research indicates that community participation was introduced as a set of institutions that would govern how villagers interacted with the state and its water supply, but villagers altered community participation by introducing reforms in water governance as a way of coping with an unresponsive state and increased work burden. Community participation evolved in contradictory ways as the impacts of neoliberal environmental governance were felt. The paper contributes to understandings of neoliberalization processes’ local impacts by analyzing their ongoing hybridization at multiple scales. It further calls into question foundational notions that community participation in resource governance is the appropriate solution to drinking water supply.