Decentralization and the cultural politics of natural resource management in Kerala,India

The state of Kerala in India is known for its active civil society and the massive decentralization campaign launched in 1996. However marginalization of tribal communities hampers the state's decentralized environmental management strategies. The proposed construction of a dam along the Chalakkudy River will displace two colonies of the Kadar tribe in Chalakkudy and Athirapilly towns, destroy habitats of local wildlife and devastate unique riverine vegetation endemic to the region. This brings to light issues of social and environmental justice as well as a wider responsibility to protect and preserve unique flora and fauna. The state's decentralization strategies, as they relate to tribal communities, lack consideration of local power distribution and cultural conditioning. This raises questions about the state's role in social justice as well as biodiversity conservation. In 2010 and 2011, the author's interviews in Chalakkudy and Athirapilly towns reveal that tribal communities perceive that their place in society restricts their contribution regarding natural resource management and use. The paper suggests that unless the culture of planning and decision making in the state are changed, decentralized strategies will be ineffective, resulting in a predominately top‐down approach towards natural resource management, and will negate Kerala's goal of democratic decentralization.     

社区参与旅游发展的研究进展

随着旅游业的蓬勃发展,越来越多的学者关注并研究社区参与旅游发展相关问题,是社区可持续旅游的必要问题。文献搜索方面,外文文献以Web of Science中2007~2017年480篇相关文献为研究对象;中文文献以CNKI中2007~2017年490篇相关文献为研究对象,并利用信息可视化软件CiteSpace 对所收集的数据分析关键词共现网络知识图谱,并分析社区参与旅游发展中研究者们所关注的相关问题与热点。国外文献主要包括社区参与旅游主体、居民参与感知、态度和影响以及管理等方面;国内主要包括社区参与旅游模式、相关理论、社区参与权利、居民参与、存在的问题与影响等5个方面。最后从研究理论、研究方法、社区增权以及研究主体等方面进行国内外研究比较。     

西双版纳纳板河流域生物圈保护区建设研究

通过对面积约2.6万公顷的西双版纳纳板河流域的综合考察,运用流域和生物圈保护区有关概念与方法,探讨了在该地区建立小流域生物圈保护区的可行性。以小流域为基本空间单元,采用地理景观的分室对策和开发与保护上的协调对策,对该保护区进行了初步规划。目标是对热带山地自然资源实行保护、开发、科研、科普和生态环境监测等的多功能科学管理,使该区的经济与自然资源能协调发展,以达到经济、生态和社会三大效益的统一。     

Loving Water,Resenting Regulation: Sense of Place and Water Management in the Willamette Watershed

Although the Pacific Northwest is often associated with abundant water and images of wide, salmon-filled rivers, water-related conflicts throughout the region are not uncommon as adequate supplies fall short of increasing demand. This article investigates water stakeholders’ perceptions of local waters and their water-related behaviors within the Willamette watershed of western Oregon. I conducted 25 interviews with key users of the Willamette watershed's water supply. My analyses of these data suggest that stakeholders perceive water as a scarce resource. In addition, the participants indicated strong attachments to local water bodies but demonstrated little incentive in making personal sacrifices to safeguard these “scarce” water supplies. Given that equitable water distribution is a present and growing concern, this case study contributes to a body of knowledge that legitimizes direct experience in shaping resource management, as well as illuminates the complicated relationship between place attachment and environmental behaviors.     

PUBLIC MEMORY AND POLITICAL POWER IN GUATEMALA'S POSTCONFLICT LANDSCAPE

ABSTRACT. Landscape interpretation, or “reading” the landscape, is one of cultural geography's standard practices. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to reading landscapes transformed by insurgency movements or civil wars. Those landscapes can tell us a great deal about past and present political and social relationships as well as continuing power struggles. Guatemala presents a complicated postwar landscape “text” in which the struggle for power continues by many means and media, including how the war is portrayed on memorials, and in which the Catholic Church and the military/state are the two main competing powers. This essay explores some of the images and the text presented in Guatemala's postconflict landscape through contrasting landmarks and memorials associated with the country's thirty‐six‐year‐long civil war that formally ended in 1996.     

The Relationship of Place Re-Making and Watershed Group Participation in Appalachia

This article explores how participation in watershed groups creates a social space that mediates the relationship between biophysical places and place-protective action. We analyze qualitative data from a survey of more than 200 watershed group volunteers in the Appalachian region of the United States who were asked to describe experiences that encouraged or discouraged their participation. “Place” emerged as a key theme, with further delineations between made places (those highly affected by human activity, including coal extraction); natural places; and re-made places (those restored by the efforts of the watershed-group participants). Our findings suggest that the places themselves—and the natural, institutional, and social resources in these places—are more than a backdrop or setting for the volunteer activities; they also inspire, enhance, and are transformed by the act of volunteering.     

IN THE WAY OF DEVELOPMENT: INDIGENOUS LAND‐RIGHTS ISSUES IN MALAYSIA*

The Malaysian government regards the country's indigenous peoples as “backward” and in need of “modernization.” It aims to assimilate them into the so‐called mainstream society and to incorporate their lands and resources into national and global markets. These policy objectives leave little scope for indigenous groups to pursue their own life projects. Indigenous communities want to share in the benefits of economic development, but they are not prepared to give up their lands, cultures, and identities to obtain them. They have attempted to ward off the negative consequences of development projects by forming advocacy nongovernmental organizations, engaging in various forms of resistance, and seeking redress of their grievances in the courts. Most of all, they want recognition of their rights to land and place. The efficacy of their agency is severely hampered by a battery of repressive laws and by their own political weakness.     

The Spaces of Conservation and Development around Lake Nakuru National Park,Kenya

Geographically or sociologically defined resource management units, such as buffer zones or community resource management territories, seek to harmonize local land–use practices with protected–area management objectives. The geographically restricted nature of these models often results in simplistic representations of society–nature relations over time and space. Conservation areas are misrepresented as ecologically and socially homogeneous, as well as politically neutral. This study examines the limits of a spatially defined conservation and development project designed around the physical geographical unit of the watershed at Lake Nakuru National Park, Kenya. It argues that politically motivated violence that has plagued the area since the early 1990s has severely undermined the suitability of such narrowly defined conservation territories. Specifically, the case study points to the permeability of the Lake Nakuru watershed to national and regional political forces that ultimately constrain participation in conservation activities. The spaces of conservation and development must be enlarged to include these extralocal arenas and processes if environmental problems are to be effectively addressed.     

云南省旅游资源与生态安全协调发展的时空演化特征及障碍因子分析

自然、经济和社会构成的复合生态系统为旅游资源的赋存和开发提供条件,而丰富的旅游资源不仅能够促进旅游业发展,也为推动社会经济发展和自然环境保护提供了重要力量.运用线性加权法、耦合协调度模型和趋势分析等方法探究了云南省16个州市旅游资源与生态安全耦合协调发展现状及其障碍因子,研究发现:①尽管云南87.50％的州市旅游资源与...     

REMAKING MOSCOW: NEW PLACES,NEW SELVES*

ABSTRACT. The erratic course of the “transition” in Russia today undermines hope for the establishment of a genuine democracy supported by institutions of civil society. The West must accept that the outcome of the transition is unknown. Whether public space is emerging where the practices of civil society have been able to take root is not clear at the moment. However, important transitions in daily life and everyday places are occurring, especially as a result of consumerism. If public space does take shape, it will have to be rooted in Moscow's new places. This study draws on the conceptual framework of Robert David Sack in an exploration of changes in places and selves in Moscow.     

Globalisation, Regionalisation and Local Voices: The Asian Development Bank and Rescaled Politics of Environment in the Mekong Region

Globalisation is manifested in the Mekong Region both through processes and discourses that reflect the ideology of a borderless world allowing easy passage of capital and commodities, and through resistance to such processes in an increasingly transnationalised civil society movement. However, more immediately significant supranational integrative agendas take the form of regionalisation, a process that has received less attention but which raises analogous concerns of re-scaled governance. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has been a catalysing force for regionalisation amidst a host of regional processes and initiatives; as such it has found itself the object of critique as an institution and through the specific projects it has supported that have impacted on local communities and ecosystems. Meanwhile, local and NGO voices associated with the emergence of a vibrant civil society in Thailand and nascent civil society responses in neighbouring countries have challenged claims on resources made in the name of national development and regional integration.
This paper considers some key issues of re-scaling resource and environmental politics in the Mekong Region, and the extent to which challenges have been recast from national to regional development agendas. Politics of environment are shown to exist as a general rather than exceptional response to the region's development direction, and it is suggested that equitable and sustainable development increasingly needs to address simultaneously the re-scaling and reconfigurations of power in both environmental politics and the "infrapolitics" of environment. The paper is illustrated with case studies of dams in Laos and Thailand.     

THE NATURE‐CULTURE BOUNDARY AND OCEAN POLICY: GREAT BARRIER ISLAND,NEW ZEALAND*

ABSTRACT. This article analyzes New Zealand's rights‐based system of fisheries management from the perspective of local stakeholders on northern Great Barrier Island. The research identified differing perspectives through use of the concept of “boundary construction,” not only in terms of society and nature but also among societal institutions. Great Barrier Island participants exhibited significant differences, especially between staff of the local Department of Conservation and local Maori, both of whom were engaged in negotiating policy implementation at the local level. These differences expressed themselves in conceptions of both societal boundaries—the scale at which community was envisioned—and conceptions of the boundary between nature and culture. The findings confirm the need for the continued development of models of community‐based resource management as well as for the conceptual integration of society and nature in the realm of policy construction.     

EXPRESSING “LOCAL CULTURE” IN HAWAI'I*

ABSTRACT. Detached from the mainland and with a distinct historical ethnic geography, the conquered kingdom of Hawai'i, now the fiftieth state, is the only U.S. state with an Asian and Pacific Islander majority as well as the highest percentage of racial and ethnic intermarriage. Hawai'i's population reflects the tensions between the culturally pluralistic “spirit of aloha” and the ethnic‐cum‐social stratification that has evolved from its historical economic geographies. In this article I focus on one of these strata—what is referred to as “local” culture—discussing its ethnogenesis and contemporary manifestations, and I apply Jonathan Okamura's 1981 model of situational ethnicity to examine how locals and new immigrants negotiate the ethnic dynamics and social expectations of their daily lives. I also discuss various ways in which “localness” is represented on O'ahu's economic landscape, with an analysis of the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet, as a holistic expression of local culture.     

社会变革和制度文化制约下的“多尺度嵌入”——以缅甸莱比塘铜矿项目为例

“一带一路”倡议的深入推进加速了中国企业对外投资的步伐。而对于这些“走出去”的企业而言,往往面临着东道国社会环境及治理结构变革、制度制约、文化冲突等多重挑战。此前经济地理学提出的“主动嵌入”和“被动嵌入”,并不能完全解释“一带一路”倡议背景下中国企业在“走出去”过程中所呈现的“外资”与东道国治理结构、地方制度文化环境之间的复杂相互作用关系。本研究构建了“全球-国家-地方”多尺度嵌入的分析框架,以缅甸莱比塘铜矿为例,阐释企业如何通过多样化制度创新,顺应东道国的社会变革,突破制度和文化的制约,从而取得政府、企业、当地社区“多赢”局面的合作模式,从而从新的视角理解制度的多尺度性和尺度之间的相互作用。研究发现：尺度要素之间存在耦合关联作用,且作用模式有不同的组合,同时多个尺度要素的嵌入和影响过程也存在时序效应。最后,结合莱比塘案例,为中国企业“走出去”提出了政策建议。     

Biodiversity,land degradation,and climate change: Participatory planning in Romania

This paper considers the role of stakeholder participation in drawing together the three Rio Conventions, exploring how participatory activities to combat desertification in southern Romania can both support and hinder efforts to conserve biodiversity and mitigate the effects of climate change. It suggests that Romania's growing civil society sector has a potentially vital role to play in promoting synergy through participation, and that participatory processes act as an important mechanism for harnessing multiple benefits. The paper argues that participation needs to be further institutionalised within the Romanian context and in doing so, should emphasise empowerment, equity, trust and learning, integrating different knowledge bases to allow the development of sustainable and synergistic environmental solutions.     

MORAL GEOGRAPHY IN HIGH PLAINS HISTORY

ABSTRACT. When American society, through deliberate government action, intervenes to preserve the family farm as the locus of “good” human values and “authentic” environmental conditions, the result can be described as a moral geography. Nowhere is this clearer than in the protection of traditional farming on the High, or Great, Plains through federal funding and programs. Protection began during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s; federal support came to a close with the passage of the 1996 farm bill. These shifts deserve assessment of historic American interests in the protection of an agricultural institution and of a region at risk.     

Choosing the Right Policy Tools to Encourage Watershed Stewardship through the Study of Attitude

Recently, a number of “Payment for Watershed Services” programs have aimed to engage private landowners in watershed stewardship initiatives by offering financial incentives for adopting watershed best management practices. However, a growing field of research suggests that financial incentives alone may be of limited utility to encourage widespread and long-standing behavior change, and other policy tools may be required. This research examines how attitudes may influence enrollment in watershed stewardship programs to shed light the application of incentive, capacity building, and symbolic policy tools. We distributed a questionnaire to rural landowners in the Clackamas River watershed, OR, and received 281 valid responses (29% response rate). We found that attitudes associated with trust, ecological understanding, and technical capacity played more fundamental roles compared with financial considerations. We interpret these findings by evaluating the likely efficacy of various policy tools, and stress the importance of engaging landowners by building capacity and trust.     

Trump's America or the People's America? A View from the Periphery

My overarching argument in this article is that the United States is no different than any other country in the world in that its population has elected good leaders and bad. As in other places, global and national neoliberal economic reforms have affected the U.S. economy, hallowing out the manufacturing sector, shrinking government and social safety nets, and fostering income inequality. This has left various U.S. publics struggling to make ends meet and vulnerable to demagoguery. Although the country prides itself on the strength of its institutions, institutions are no more than social contracts that need to be assiduously maintained by civil society. Although there is a strong “ivory tower” tradition in U.S. academe, the republic needs scholars—acting as public intellectuals—to fully participate in civic debates if it is to have a sufficiently robust civil society that maintains and defends its democracy and institutions. This article is divided into three sections. First, I briefly review the Trump administration's proposals for international development and diplomacy, giving particular attention to these issues in the African context. Second, I present an argument for why the United States needs public intellectuals now more than ever. Third, I share some concrete advice on how geographers might better connect with various publics.     

塔里木河流域人水和谐定量评价及调控对策

针对人水和谐难以量化的难点问题及塔里木河流域缺乏定量评价研究的现状,详细介绍一套完整和系统的人水和谐量化方法体系,并在典型干旱区的塔里木河流域进行了详细的应用实例研究。通过实例的应用及分析,该方法经过定量计算得到了塔里木河流域的人水和谐度,比较客观的反映该流域的人水和谐程度。本文所做的工作丰富了人水和谐量化理论的研究,将人水和谐理念付诸于水资源管理实践有一定的理论和应用意义。     

REGIONAL PATTERNS OF FEMALE PARTICIPATION IN THE LABOR FORCE OF URBAN INDIA

Using 1971 census data, this paper looks at variations in the level of female participation in the urban labor force in four states of India: Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. Contrary to a general notion, women belonging to both high and low strata of the caste hierarchy are subject to the same region-specific set of societal attitudes regarding their participation in the labor force. In the South there is greater acceptance of female participation in the public domain than in the North. Cultural and historical processes appear to account in subtle ways for this regional variation.