Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS

The oceans are not only being transformed through privatization as management moves towards market mechanisms, the oceans are also being “zoned”, with zoning increasingly proposed as the ideal conduit for weighting different uses of the ocean. This is concomitant with a move towards ecosystem-based management that also partakes in a policy environment imbued with the commodification of nature, in which environmental services are ranked and valued according to neoliberal percepts. Crucial to these projects are the utilization of GIS technologies. This paper considers these zones of preservation and sites of conflict through an ethnographic case study of the scallop fisheries of New England, examining conflicts between harvesters, different projects to map the fishery, and ongoing efforts to reseed scallop beds. The paper explores how participants themselves articulate the changing practices of fishing and farming, redefining boundaries of nature and culture. While reseeding projects, for example, arguably participate in the market logic of neoliberalism, at the same time they may resist and redefine the terms, as communities see themselves sowing the seeds of their own sustainability and changing the terms of what counts, literally, as nature.     

“I Still Have the Old Tradition”: The co-production of sweetgrass basketry and coastal development

Scholars working around the world have drawn attention to the physical and social changes associated with rural gentrification. Case studies from the United States have focused on how these patterns lead to the cultural displacement and replacement of land-based livelihoods, including non-timber forest product (NTFP) practices. Scholars have also documented the persistence of culturally and economically important NTFP practices in urban and suburban areas. We reconcile these disparate outcomes, displacement on the one hand and persistence on the other, by focusing on the social relationships that co-produce land use and livelihood change. Our case investigates how African American sweetgrass basketmakers in Mount Pleasant South Carolina negotiate the complex terrain of a rapidly urbanizing and gentrifying landscape.Analysis of interviews with basketmakers and participant observation at public meetings suggests that gathering materials and selling baskets occur across spaces not typically considered important for NTFP practices. Access to these sites depends upon continually reinforced and negotiated social relationships between a variety of actors. Findings illustrate that, by themselves, development and gentrification are insufficient for explaining livelihood and land use patterns that emerge in places experiencing intensive development. Using a co-production framework, we acknowledge the wide variety of complex trajectories and local power dynamics shaping land use and livelihoods. Findings also have implications for connecting global research on housing, employment, and demographic transitions associated with rural gentrification, to international NTFP research, which is increasingly turning to rural–urban interfaces for insights on how livelihoods are linked to land development and migration.     

Improving fisheries management in New Zealand: Developing dialogue between fisheries science and management (FSM) and ecosystem science and management (ESM)

This paper attempts to overcome the dichotomy between the broadly different and largely separate fisheries science and management (FSM) and ecosystem science and management (ESM) knowledge systems that characterise the international literature and are found in fisheries management practice in different countries. The paper argues that the construction of a heuristic we term the fisheries problematic, around issues and contexts, reveals the breadth of international fisheries management concerns and the variety of contexts in which these concerns are being faced. Adopting a political economy informed nature-society approach the paper considers ecological and socio-economic processes in their institutional settings in an attempt to shift from the either/or arguments around fish or ecosystems found in the FSM or ESM literatures to investigation that is grounded in understandings of the historically and geographically specific trajectories of fisheries related interactions and understandings of how knowledge about the trajectories and their interactions is fashioned. Drawing on recent conceptual innovations in the field, the paper develops a matrix-centred approach to explore ecological, industry, community and policy domains in New Zealand’s Quota Management System (QMS) and Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) fisheries management regime. The extended framework prioritises scrutiny of the interaction amongst the four domains, as a strategy to help develop institutional frameworks that facilitate behaviours that are societally inclusive. The paper offers three conclusions. First, the landscape of New Zealand fisheries issues is very much a product of the contingent interaction of the QMS, a management regime designed around the principles of a FSM approach and laid down in a neo-liberal political environment and Maori aspirations encompassing the fisheries sector. Second, the conceptual mapping of FSM and ESM perspectives over New Zealand’s fisheries management experience highlights that a number of management issues have been down played by the commitment to FSM, a situation that has led to on-going tensions between commercial, recreational and customary stakeholders regarding fisheries management. Put another way, there is more to running a sustainable fishery (as defined in the Fisheries Act 1996) than QMS and other tools and dialogue about the development of these should be a priority. Third and more generally, improved dialogue on fisheries questions is likely to be most expeditiously advanced by studies that explicitly conceptualise and contextualise ecological and socio-economic processes and their institutional arrangements.     

Two-dimensional maps in multi-dimensional worlds: A case of community-based mapping in Northern Thailand

Community-based mapping has become a necessary tool for development work worldwide - its adoption is near hegemonic. Mapping community land, however, can have unforeseen consequences in part due to its tendency to render what are complex configurations of social-ecological relationships into two-dimensional form. I argue that one of the key limitations to commonly practiced community-based mapping is the assumption that the spatial organization of resource use and management is an abstract entity that can be mapped independent of the social relations that produce it. This paper uses a case study from Northern Thailand to show how mapping techniques that fix and simplify fluid and complex associations can inadvertently prescribe changes to how residents manage their land, effectively becoming not only a tool for securing land tenure but also a tool for the spatial re-organization of land-use and management.     

Locating benefits: Decision-spaces, resource access and equity in US community-based forestry

In the US, the Ford Foundation’s Community-based Forestry Demonstration Program (2000-2005) promoted an internationally prominent model of community forestry centered on the simultaneous, balanced pursuit of ecological, economic and social goals (often symbolized as the “three-legged stool,” or “triple bottom line”). This paper develops an alternative framework for analysis that emphasizes the causal precedence of shifts in power relations, specifically the devolution of resource access and decision-making authority, rather than environmental, social and economic outcomes. These outcomes are not necessarily beneficial, and any benefits realized seldom occur simultaneously. Rather, they can be envisioned as the floors of a house erected sequentially on a foundation of resource access and control. While no universal claim is made, the “house” model proves an apt fit for many community-based forestry initiatives, including the two case studies presented. Who among the differentiated social groups within a community gained access to resources and decision-making influence largely predicted who gained individually. Nonetheless, indirect benefits felt at community and higher scales were significant. The findings further indicate that community forestry generally will not advance social equity unless it specifically targets marginalized groups. Crucially, equity is understood to embrace not only distributional justice, but also capacity-building and empowerment.     

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.     

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

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

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.     

Capital on the move: The changing relation between livestock and labor in Mali, West Africa

In dryland areas of the Africa, livestock play important economic roles as commodities, wealth stores, producers of products, and agents of environmental change. Conventional depictions of livestock economies in this region have focused (in support or against) on the need for greater engagement of livestock producers with markets supplying meat to urban areas. This paper argues this singular focus has led analysts to ignore two important aspects of livestock economies: livestock as a preferred store of wealth across a wide range of social groups and the need for specialized labor to manage these livestock across open pastures to maintain their productivity and limit their negative environmental impacts. In the West African Sahel, the capital-like nature of livestock wealth has become more clear with a growing fraction of the region’s livestock owned by investors with little connection to livestock husbandry. Livestock investments are maintained on a day-to-day basis by hired herders who facilitate access to ephemeral pastures and water. A particular concern is the changing geographies of livestock ownership and the herding labor in relationship to regional pastures (to economic and environmental ends). This relationship will be explored using the case study of the Maasina region of central Mali - a historically important livestock region, which is now undergoing significant labor emigration. Building from a long-term ethnographic engagement with local livestock owners and herders, the results of ownership surveys of livestock herds across a 14-year period and interviews of urban-based emigrants from the study area about investment decisions will be used to analyze the changing geographies of livestock investment and herding labor in the Maasina.     

Bounding difference: Intersectionality and the material production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal

Current theorising in human geography draws attention to the relational emergence of space and society, challenging ideas of difference that rely on fixed identities and emphasising the importance of the everyday in the production of social inequalities. Similarly, feminist political ecology has emphasised the role of ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ in the production of subjectivities such that ideas of gender and nature arise in relation to each other. In this paper I build from these insights to explore the ways in which the embodied performance of gender, caste and other aspects of social difference collapse the distinction between the material and the symbolic. Symbolic ideas of difference are produced and expressed through embodied interactions that are firmly material. Through this kind of conceptualisation, I hope to push forward debates in geography on nature and feminist political ecology on how to understand the intersectional emergence of subjectivities, difference and socio-natures. Importantly, it is the symbolic meanings of particular spaces, practices and bodies that are (re)produced through everyday activities including forest harvesting, agricultural work, food preparation and consumption, all of which have consequences for both ecological processes and social difference. Through the performance of everyday tasks, not only are ideas of gender, caste and social difference brought into view, but the embodied nature of difference that extends beyond the body and into the spaces of everyday life is evident. I use ethnographic evidence from rural Nepal to explore the ways in which boundaries between bodies, spaces, ecologies and symbolic meanings of difference are produced and maintained relationally through practices of work and ritual.     

The ‘leisuring’ of rural landscapes in Barbados: New spatialities and the implications for sustainability in small island states

The transformation of rural areas into up-scale leisure amenity landscapes has become a global phenomenon. Small islands, especially in tropical and subtropical regions, are particularly attractive magnets for this kind of development. Yet it involves land use changes that challenge the sustainability of small island development as set out in the United Nations program for Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (SDIDS). Through a case study of Barbados this paper critically examines the ‘leisuring’ of rural landscapes on small islands. It ties together Lefebvrian concepts of the production of space with the perspective of political ecology to argue that the agendas of global capital impose new spatialities involving social constructions of space and socio-environmental transformations by an offshore elite who are insensitive to local interests as well as the smallness of small islands. This creates conflict between space and place - between the spaces produced by the global leisure economy and the places that have purpose and meaning for local people. It challenges the possibility of local, community-based development solutions and imposes serious constraints on the implementation of the SDIDS agenda. More research into the nature of the new leisure spaces and how they are perceived and experienced by local populations is needed.     

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 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.     

Nature–society and development: social, cultural and ecological change in Nepal

This paper presents a theoretical framework for analyzing human–environment issues that examines shifting, dialectical relationships between social and power relations, cultural beliefs and practices, and ecological processes to allow an interdisciplinary, complex assessment of social and environmental change in Nepal. The purpose of this analysis is to capture the complexity and non-static nature of environmental and social change in the context of uneven development. Drawing from political ecology and feminist geography, this framework brings together scholarship on aspects of human–environment issues that are often pursued in isolation, yet all three processes, social–political relations, cultural practices and ecological conditions, have been acknowledged as important in shaping the trajectory of social and ecological change. I argue that a consideration of the articulations between them is necessary to understand first, how specific land management regimes arise and are dominant over time in specific places. And second, I examine the extent to which these regimes distribute resources equitably within communities, promote economic development and sustain ecological resilience. In this analysis, ecological processes are conceptualised as co-productive of social and cultural processes to explore their role in land management regimes without resorting to environmental determinist or similarly reductive paradigms. I present this framework through the example of natural resource management, specifically community forestry in Nepal, as it offers a rich case study of the relationships between the political economy of land use and the ecological effects of natural resource extraction.     

Greening the Dam: The case of the San Roque Multi-purpose Project in the Philippines

This article aims to illustrate the extent and ways in which a traditional development aid project became the focus of a ‘greening’ process in the 1990s (and beyond). The article examines the San Roque Multi-purpose Project in the Philippines - a major Japanese bilateral international cooperation project - from a political ecology perspective. The analysis highlights how a complex story of contemporary aid dynamics in the bilateral Japan-Philippines relationship influenced this ‘greening’ process. The article interrogates critically and empirically the stated greening of a proto-type development aid project. This specific example of the practices of the Japanese aid industry is set within the context of the wider political economy of both donor and recipient elite interests.     

The limits to good governance and the state of exception: A case study of North Sea fisheries

This paper explores a series of maxims, widely known in policy and academic circles as the ‘principles of good governance’, which state that policymaking in the European Union (EU) should be participatory, conducted as close to citizens as practicable, transparent, accountable, effective and coherent. These maxims were introduced into EU fisheries management as part of a radical reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in 2002. This reform was instituted in response to criticisms of a prevailing management regime alleged to be inefficient, undemocratic, and potentially responsible for an environmental crisis: the exhaustion of key fish stocks. The research for this work has found that there are limits to the actual achievement of good governance in EU fisheries. In practice governance innovations are very often contradictory and rife with tensions. I reason that such problems result not merely from policy implementation failures; they constitute a more endemic feature of the CFP reforms. We can begin to understand these limits to good governance principles by looking to Agamben’s permanent state of exception thesis. Agamben’s theory helps to show how these contradictions and tensions occur under new governance regimes, because the relationship between democratic norms (like good governance) and political power is no longer clear. I argue that this blurring has been exploited by groups seeking influence in these new regimes. They do this through citing a supposed need for emergency measures to mitigate crisis. Although this research broadly supports the state of exception thesis, my analysis leads me to question some aspects of its application in contemporary governance spaces.     

The dilemma of decontamination: A Gramscian analysis of the Mexican transgenic maize dispute

An intense environmental dispute surrounds the maize-fields of Mexico. Mexican maize traditional varieties (or ‘landraces’) constitute a global genetic resource that may well be critical to future agricultural development and corn breeding. Many environmentalists, farmers, and consumers in Mexico are therefore concerned that their maize landraces may have been ‘contaminated’ by imported transgenic maize, grown in the USA. The criticisms of this transgenic technology are complex and call into question the nature of the boundary between political and ecological (i.e. scientific) disputes. Our paper surveys these criticisms, and this political-scientific boundary, in a three-part analysis. First, we turn to Gramsci’s notes on science from his eleventh prison notebook to rethink the political ecology of transgenic maize, i.e., the way the ecological analysis of transgenic introgression is treated as politics. Second, we present the multiple criticisms of transgenic maize as scalar phenomena. Third, we review the recent scientific literature on transgene introgression to evaluate recent calls for the ‘decontamination’ of Mexican maize. Our reading illustrates two dilemmas facing the group that occupies the hegemonic subject-position in this dispute, ecological scientists. First, the popular desire to ‘decontaminate’ Mexican maize exceeds their capacities (due to complications involved with sampling). Second, although the political debate surrounding ‘contaminated’ Mexican maize exceeds science, the boundary between the dispute’s scientific and parascientific elements cannot be adjudicated scientifically. In other words, the boundary between science and politics is porous. Thus in two respects the dispute is ecological, yet beyond the capacity of this science to resolve. Yet, following Gramsci, these findings should not lead us to see science as mere ideology, or apolitical, or encourage a retreat into metaphysics. Rather it points to the need for a social transformation that sees science as “humanity forging its methods of research … in other words, culture, the conception of the world.” By exploring the dilemmas of decontamination, the dispute over transgene introgression in Mexican maize-fields provides an opportunity to elaborate upon Gramsci’s neglected insights into the politics of science.     

The political ecology of poverty alleviation in Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE)

The CAMPFIRE program in Zimbabwe is one of a `new breed' of strategies designed to tackle environmental management at the grassroots level. CAMPFIRE aims to help rural communities to manage their resources, especially wildlife, for their own local development. The program's central objective is to alleviate rural poverty by giving rural communities autonomy over resource management and to demonstrate to them that wildlife is not necessarily a hindrance to arable agriculture, “but a resource that could be managed and `cultivated' to provide income and food”. In this paper, we assess two important elements of CAMPFIRE: poverty alleviation and local empowerment and comment on the program's performance in achieving these highly interconnected objectives. We analyze the program's achievements in poverty alleviation by exploring tenurial patterns, resource ownership and the allocation of proceeds from resource exploitation; and its progress in local empowerment by examining its administrative and decision making structures. We conclude that the program cannot effectively achieve the goal of poverty alleviation without first addressing the administrative and legal structures that underlie the country's political ecology.     

Ranching and the new global range: Amazônia in the 21st century

This paper seeks to understand how the Brazilian Amazon, which many thought unsuitable for agricultural development, has yielded to a dynamic cattle economy in only a few decades. It does so by embedding the Thunian model of location rents within the regime of capital accumulation that has driven the Brazilian economy since the mid-20th century. The paper addresses policies that have created location rents in Amazônia, the effect of these rents on land managers, and the spatial implications of their behavior on forests. Thus, the paper connects macro-processes and structures to agents on the ground, in providing a political ecological explanation relevant to land change science. The policy discussion focuses on reductions in transportation costs, improvements in animal health, and monetary and trade reforms. To illustrate the impact of policy, the paper presents data on the geography of Amazonian herd expansion, on the growth of Amazonian exports, and on the profitability of the region’s cattle economy. It follows the empirical presentation with more abstract consideration of the spatial relations between cattle ranching and soy farming, and implications for deforestation. The paper concludes on a speculative note by considering the likelihood of forest transition in the region, given the transformation of Amazônia into a global resource frontier.