GIS AND COLLABORATIVE URBAN GOVERNANCE: UNDERSTANDING THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR COMMUNITY ACTION AND POWER

Through recent changes in urban governance practices, citizens and community organizations assume ever-greater responsibility for local-level planning and service delivery. Scholars have debated whether this shift disempowers community organizations by subsuming their plans and priorities into state planning imperatives or empowers them through inclusion of community priorities and local knowledge. In carrying out their new responsibilities, many community organizations are adopting tools such as GIS. Strikingly similar questions have been raised about empowerment, disempowennent, incorporation, and autonomy; but relatively little work has systematically documented the ways in which GIS use alters community-level decision-making efforts. In this paper, I show how GIS use fosters changes in the language, practices, and paradigms of community planning, particularly strengthening an instrumental rational approach to community planning and revitalization. Drawing on research with a Minneapolis, Minnesota, neighborhood organization, I argue that these impacts of GIS use on community planning practices complicate and intensify a dynamic tension between incorporation and autonomy that community organizations experience within collaborative governance approaches. [Key words: community-based planning, GIS, urban governance.]     

Healthier Geographies: Mediating the Gaps between the Needs of People Living with HIV and AIDS and Health Care in Chiang Mai,Thailand

In this article, I contribute to our understanding of the plurality of approaches that construct the geographies of health care through an examination of the distribution of health care services for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. In particular, I focus on the development of a network of support groups for PLWHA in order to examine the differences in the sociospatial organization of these groups, the practices of social actors participating in the groups' activities, and how these activities are mediated through place-based social relations. The first section of the article analyzes the spatial distribution of PLWHA support groups in relation to the distribution of AIDS cases over two time periods, 1994 and 1997. The second section goes below the surface of the spatial distribution, examining similarities and differences in PLWHA support groups through an analysis of survey data collected on thirty-five groups in 1997. The final section deepens this examination through an analysis of ethnographic data collected on the outreach efforts of one nongovernmental organization (NGO) and one PLWHA support group with which it worked. Each section offers opportunities for the extension of our understanding of the development of PLWHA support groups, their distribution in relation to the spread of AIDS cases, and their place-based meanings.     

环保组织的社区领域建构策略及其环境治理影响

现有的环境政治文献多关注环境治理中多元主体之间的互动和策略,尤其是国家与环保组织之间的权力关系,但对权力在空间上的领域特征及其实践影响探讨不足。通过对一个国际环保组织乡村水资源保育项目的田野观察,分析了该组织在近十年的社区领域建构策略演化,并探讨动态的领域化过程如何影响环境治理的形式、范围和效果。研究发现：（1）环保组织通过与不同层级政府建立差异化联系,能够在农村社区中建构相对独立的社会领域,自主开展环保活动,但与农村社区之间的隔离也限制了环保项目进一步发展的空间;（2）环保组织通过融入本土社会关系网络的策略调整,重新建构了更具流动性、融合性的社会领域,为项目发展提供了新的动力;（3）面对长期的资源挑战,环保组织通过培育本土组织来保持自身在社区“飞地”的长期影响,但“代理人”在融合后的新领域空间内却难以再维持独立性和专业性,从而制约了公众参与环保的范围和效果。通过动态的领域化过程及其影响,解释了环境治理和环保组织发展的规律,为认识国家-环保组织-社区之间的关系提供了新视角。     

Lost in translation: conflicting views of deforestation, land use and identity in western Madagascar

This paper focuses on the interplay between environmental narratives, identity politics and the management of forest resources in Madagascar. While efforts to conserve the island's biological diversity have centred primarily on the designation of protected areas, policies have increasingly focused on local communities. The experiences of the last 20 years have shown that community-based approaches to conservation offer considerable challenges due to the complex politics of natural resource use, which involve multiple and diverse stakeholders, often with very different and sometimes conflicting values. In this paper, I focus on the environmental perceptions and values of two groups in the Central Menabe region of western Madagascar – conservation organisations and rural households – revealing a contrasting set of views regarding the region's forest. I show that the conservation discourse has changed over time, increasingly emphasising the biological diversity of the region's tropical dry-deciduous forest and prioritising non-consumptive uses of natural resources. Although policy has changed in response to changing values, I show that it has been underpinned by the notion that hatsake (‘slash-and-burn’ agriculture) is an irrational practice driven by necessity rather than choice. Policy has thus sought to provide livelihood alternatives, firstly through forestry, then through changes in cultivation and increasingly through tourism. This misunderstands the local view of the forest, which sees hatsake as a way to make the land productive, as long as it is carried out responsibly according to local fady (taboos). As well as facing problems of translating conservation goals into local values and misunderstanding the motives for forest clearance, policy has been based on a narrative that attaches particular land use practices to ethnic identities. I argue that this ignores the history and fluid reality of both identity and land use.     

Lesbian and Queer Sustainable Farmer Networks in the Midwest

Heteropatriarchy underpins contemporary U.S. agriculture, even within the alternative sector. This paper builds on the legacies of women farmers and farmers of color creating peer networks to circumvent heteropatriarchal hurdles by investigating how lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer (LBTQ) sustainable farmers access human resources. If and how did the farmers encounter or resist heteropatriarchy in this process? Drawing on four years of ethnographic research with 40 LBTQ Midwest sustainable farmers, I argue that resources through government agencies, neighborhood farmers, and like-minded practitioners did not necessarily align with LBTQ farmers’ sustainable practices or queer identities. LBTQ farmers convened with others at the intersections of their queerness and sustainable practices formally, informally, and through the labor market to access human resources removed from heteropatriarchal domination. I conclude that LBTQ farmer networks bolster human resources in sustainable agriculture and conservation practices.     

Review article: Silt and the future development of China's Yellow River

Silt loading is a critical problem in the use of the Yellow River for irrigation, domestic, and industrial water supplies. Nearly all of the silt comes in runoff from the immense and highly erodible Loess Plateau. Salinity has a secondary but widespread effect on irrigation development and groundwater quality. Engineering structures and expanded irrigation have reduced the silt load in the lower reach of the river by half over the last 50 years. Still, the level of the river bed continues to rise higher above the surrounding North China Plain. Millions of rural and urban lives are threatened by the possibility that an embankment will break and unleash a horrendous flood, as had happened numerous times prior to 1949. Earthquakes could cause similar castrophes. Increased populations in cities, expansion of irrigated land, and rapid industrialization have brought about locally severe water shortages. This, in turn, has led to surface and groundwater pollution by salt and heavy metals, lowering of groundwater levels, land subsidence, and salt water intrusion from the Bo Sea. Interbasin water transfers from the Yangtze River in the south to relieve water shortages in the north have been proposed for decades but remain controversial. The high cost of dams, canals, tunnels, pumping, and water control systems needed for the transfer has been a major objection. Other factors have been the adverse environmental impact in both the Yellow and Yangtze river watersheds of transfers and, importantly, the questionable need of the transfers if water conservation practices were used widely and effectively.     

A Comparison of Awareness,Attitudes, and Usage of Water Quality Conservation Practices Between Amish and Non-Amish Farmers

This study provides a unique examination of Amish farmers’ awareness of water quality issues and their attitudes toward and use of agricultural conservation practices compared with small non-Amish farmers in Northeastern Indiana. There is minimal research about the conservation beliefs and behaviors of this growing and highly diverse ethnoreligious minority, who have faith-based technological restrictions and are often hesitant to work with community outsiders, especially the government. We find that, compared with non-Amish farmers, Amish farmers have limited awareness of the linkages between common agricultural practices and broader water quality problems and lower levels of adoption of conservation practices, with the exception of cover crops. This information is essential for conservation practitioners who need to work with a diverse range of agricultural producers to increase the uptake of conservation practices that address critical water quality concerns.     

Understanding the Past and Present and Predicting the Future: Farmers’ Use of Multiple Nutrient Best Management Practices in the Upper Midwest

Understanding what drives farmers’ voluntary adoption of nutrient and soil best management practices has important consequences for many environmental outcomes including water quality. We build on research revealing the need for simultaneous use of multiple nitrogen best management practices to achieve water quality improvement goals. Using social, economic and attitudinal variables we predict the use of multiple nitrogen best management practices at three time points: current use (2013), past use (before 2013), and likelihood of use on their largest field in the next three years. Our empirical analysis uses structural equation modeling with latent variables and 2014 farmer survey data from three Midwestern US states. Most farmers in our sample used at least one of the six best management practices. Our results reveal that farmers’ attitudes, use of information sources, and conservation program participation affect the number of nitrogen best management practices concurrently in use at multiple time points.     

Farming and environmental degradation in Zambia: the human dimension

Farming and environmental degradation are inextricably linked through a complex of political, social, economic and physical forces. A connection is drawn between the initiation and maintenance of distinct farming systems (commercial, emergent and subsistence) by largely human influences, and the effect these farming systems have in turn on the environment. There are important implications for the environment through indirect effects on plant cover, cultivation methods and systems of bush fallowing. In many respects subsistence cultivation is probably the safest.A case study from Mkushi District, Central Province exemplifies the influence of external factors on environmental degradation in general, and soil erosion in particular. In the survey, traditional practices show fewer signs of soil erosion than commercial farming because of rational decisions taken by each group of farmers. The implication for conservation strategies is briefly reviewed.     

Healthier Geographies: Mediating the Gaps between the Needs of People Living with HIV and AIDS and Health Care in Chiang Mai,Thailand

In this article, I contribute to our understanding of the plurality of approaches that construct the geographies of health care through an examination of the distribution of health care services for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. In particular, I focus on the development of a network of support groups for PLWHA in order to examine the differences in the sociospatial organization of these groups, the practices of social actors participating in the groups' activities, and how these activities are mediated through place‐based social relations. The first section of the article analyzes the spatial distribution of PLWHA support groups in relation to the distribution of AIDS cases over two time periods, 1994 and 1997. The second section goes below the surface of the spatial distribution, examining similarities and differences in PLWHA support groups through an analysis of survey data collected on thirty‐five groups in 1997. The final section deepens this examination through an analysis of ethnographic data collected on the outreach efforts of one nongovernmental organization (NGO) and one PLWHA support group with which it worked. Each section offers opportunities for the extension of our understanding of the development of PLWHA support groups, their distribution in relation to the spread of AIDS cases, and their place‐based meanings.     

Explaining complexities of environmental management in developing countries: lessons from the Fiji Islands

Development assistance agencies have long urged developing countries to adopt environmental management techniques used in industrialized countries. They have ascribed shortcomings in the way developing states use those techniques to insufficient training, environmental matters being poorly integrated into economic decision making, other institutional weaknesses and lack of capacity. These reductionist explanations ignore the influence that socio-political and economic factors may have on state environmental management. They afford only a limited understanding of environmental practice in the Fiji Islands, a South Pacific archipelago and republic. The attempts of Fijian chiefly élite to maintain their power base – achieved through political participation in the state and economic development activities as much as through maintaining the communal system – shape the state's environmental management practices. Those practices have far less rational and democratic bases than one would expect either from the underlying logic of the techniques used (such as environmental impact assessment, environmental planning and protected areas), or from the way those techniques are applied in western, industrialized countries.     

Between coercion and consent: the politics of “Cooperative Governance” at a time of “Austerity Localism” in London

At a time of “austerity localism”, this paper explores how local authorities in London, England, are simultaneously addressing the dual pressures of delivering fiscal retrenchment and of enrolling citizens in new participatory public service arrangements, asking whether “these trends pull against one another, in opposite directions, or whether they are the tough and tender dimensions of a singular process: austerian management” Drawing on empirical research into the London Borough of Lambeth’s Cooperative Council agenda, as well as Foucauldian and Gramscian critiques of participatory network governance theories and practice, this paper shows how participatory forms of governance can be folded into the logic of hierarchy and coercion through various governmental technologies of performance and agency (consent), and through tactics of administrative domination (coercion). As budget cuts continue to affect local government in England, this paper concludes that although small experiments in participatory governance may persist, the dominant mode of governance is likely to shift towards more hierarchical and coercive forms.     

中国生态脆弱带人地关系行为机制模型及应用

以农牧交错带为研究对象,通过建立人地关系行为机制模型,探讨外部社会经济因素影响土地退化的机制,并重点就当前正在实施的退耕还林还草政策所带来的生态经济效果进行分析。模型拟合结果显示,利用玉米及农作物秸秆作为饲料,扩大舍饲动物饲养,或者扩大种植葵花或油料作物等商品作物以替代自给性作物糜子,将可以在不加剧水土流失的前提下增加农户收入。模型结果还显示,非农就业机会增加时,农户会减少坡地垦殖。这表明推进农村工业化和城镇化发展,增加农民非农就业机会,鼓励农民进城的政策对于黄土高原的水土保持也是有促进作用的。     

Sustainable Utilisation of Fisheries as Governmentality: Constraining the Potential for Ecosystems‐Based Management?

This paper examines the constitution of ‘sustainable management’ within the context of the New Zealand marine environment. Firstly this paper examines the difference between ‘sustainable ecosystems’ and ‘sustainable utilisation’. The distinction is important if we are to make sense of the different ways in which various stakeholders (fishers, fisheries companies, scientists, fisheries managers and environmental groups) use ‘sustainability’ in the management of New Zealand's marine environment. We then examine how contestation results in sustainable management becoming a governmentality. We propose that such contestation transforms stakeholders into subjects whose everyday practices and relationships are influenced by seemingly incommensurable understandings of the lexicon that surrounds sustainable management. We conclude try considering how the potential revelation of new unknowns may be needed in order for disparate stakeholders to forge a unified approach to New Zealand's marine management.     

Political ecology of tiger conservation in India: Adverse effects of banning customary practices in a protected area

Protected areas have had significant impacts on local communities primarily through the physical removal of people. In some instances, people continue to live within protected areas due to the inability of the state to evict them. The restrictions on livelihoods placed on people living inside protected areas lead to in situ displacement. We show how conservation enclosures in the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Tiger Reserve have produced a class of people that the state ‘lets die’ by banning customary practices such as fire use, hunting and harvesting of forest produce. Using longitudinal ethnographic, socio‐economic and ecological data, we demonstrate that conservation policy has alienated indigenous forest dwellers from their agricultural and forest‐land. The outcomes of conservation policy include dispossession through increased crop losses, reduced income from agriculture and forest produce, as well as a forest that is dominated by weeds due to fire suppression. The ban on hunting in particular has increased wildlife densities, which has enabled the state to accumulate revenues through the establishment of wildlife tourism facilities. All in all, centralized protected area governance has changed the relationships among people, forest and the state in a way that has produced adverse effects for both livelihoods and the ecosystem.     

Governing cities through participation—a Foucauldian analysis of CityPlan Vancouver

In 1995 Vancouver City Council approved new policy guidelines for future urban development that departed from the traditional model of suburban growth, instead prioritizing urban intensification. Theoretically guided by the Foucauldian governmentality approach, I argue in this paper that this shift towards intensification can be understood through an analysis of Vancouver’s extensive participatory planning process known as CityPlan. Created as an answer to conflicts around the intensification of historically evolved urban neighbourhoods, CityPlan Vancouver exemplifies a specific form of urban governance that has been understudied in geography and participation research: a governance consisting of conducting the conduct of citizens through participatory processes. The paper examines this “governing through participation” by carrying out a microanalysis of the problematizations, rationalities, and technologies of CityPlan. Such an analysis differs significantly from an evaluation of participatory planning processes against normative ideals, and thus enriches critical research on participation in urban governance.     

Resource management and agriculture in the periurban interface of Kumasi,Ghana: Problems and prospects

This paper outlines pressures on agricultural land in periurban Kumasi, Ghana. A survey of agricultural practices underlines the recent and rapid transition from agricultural to urban land use in the periurban interface, and shows how farmers are reacting by reducing fallow periods. Farmers are also intensifying agriculture near streams and rivers through increased use of irrigation, in response to growing urban markets for a wider range of vegetables. We identify specific problems of water resource pollution and waste management, with particular reference to farmland irrigation. We report results of composting interventions as a community‐based waste management strategy. We consider integrated organic waste recycling as a generic strategy to help protect periurban natural resources, to enhance food production through nutrient recycling, and to improve community sanitation.     

Climate change policy and practice in regional New Zealand: How are actors negotiating science and policy?

Regional governance to address climate change is being constituted in New Zealand through domestic policy measures and international discourses. We examine climate change responses in two regions: Marlborough and Waikato. Informants expressed a desire for more transparent government policy; that planning for climate change makes good business sense for farmers and other businesses; that technology is sought to increase productivity and decrease environmental impact; and research networks build capacity for local action, linking sectors and organisations. Often conflicting, these responses to climate change were informed by a mix of discourses shaping New Zealand, including participatory democracy, the knowledge economy and sustainable development.     

Paving the Way for Social Learning When Governance Is Weak: Supporting Dialogue Between Stakeholders to Face a Groundwater Crisis in Morocco

Approaches to improve the governance of social–ecological systems are difficult to define in situations where governance is weak, that is, involving limited interactions between the actors and weak management of natural resources. This article analyzes an action research process implemented in the Chaouia coastal region of Morocco, where weak governance of the social–ecological system led to a groundwater and agricultural crisis. A dialogue between local actors was set up with the aim of identifying strategies to address the crisis. First separately and then together, farmers’ groups and staff members of public organizations analyzed the existing situation, scenarios for the future of the area, and strategies to cope with the crisis. Contrary to the expectations of the participants, farmers and staff members of public organizations had productive discussions. This approach clarified how social learning can be achieved and governance improved in this situation of weak governance.