“You kill the dam,you are killing a part of me”: Dam removal and the environmental politics of river restoration

River restoration through dam removal provides an opportunity to investigate the changing nature of environmental conflicts and politics in long-humanized landscapes. In New England, where over 14,000 dams fragment the region’s rivers, dam removals are often highly contested. This is due, in part, to how the intertwined roles of history, identity, and aesthetics coalesce to create attachment to place and inspire the defense of dammed landscapes. Dam removal provides a useful lens to consider the following: How do the historical and geographical contingencies of this region shape and alter conflicts over dam removal in specific ways? In instances where conflicts emerge, what do the conflicts reveal about the politics of ecological restoration in highly altered landscapes? We use a political ecology approach to reveal how complex cultural dynamics, competing interpretations of science and the environment, micropolitics, and the role of multiple actors generate and shape conflicts over dam removal. We show that the historical geography of New England influence conflicts over removal in important ways, particularly with regard to the roles of aesthetics and identity in landscapes that are characterized largely by consumptive as opposed to productive uses. Our findings also suggest that restoration in long-humanized landscapes will embroil new constellations of human and nonhuman actors, requiring attention to the political and cultural, as well as the ecological, dimensions of restoration. This paper contributes to research on the political and social dimensions of dam removal, as well as to research at the nexus of ecological restoration and environmental politics.     

Conservation planning, boundary-making and border terrains: The desire for forest and order in the Gran Sabana, Venezuela

Conflicts surrounding protected area management often emerge from contested processes of boundary-making. Such productions of bounded conservation spaces are contingent in part on processes of identity formation, where some social groups are legitimized as belonging to conservation units, while others are constructed as out-of-place. This article draws on the literature in postmodern geopolitics and the political ecology of fire to interrogate processes of boundary-making and identity formation in the savanna landscape of Canaima National Park, Venezuela. The institutional culture of the environmental management agency EDELCA is in part premised on narratives of history and indigeneity coupled with a desire for an imagined, forested landscape. Because of the social constructions shaping this institutional culture, the agency maintains an approach to fire management that emphasizes fire suppression. However, an ecological field study suggests that fire suppression is leading to increased fuel loads, especially in ecologically significant boundaries between grasslands and forest. Although these boundary zones are the focus of indigenous practices of prescribed burning, they fall in-between the state management categories of forest and ecotone. As a result, these interstitial spaces become theaters for performances of domination and resistance, leading to contradictory and inconsistent approaches to fire management that place gallery forests at risk.     

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.     

Producing hybrid forests in the Congo Basin: A political ecology of the landscape approach to conservation

Environmental conservation is increasingly operated through partnerships among state, private, and civil society actors, yet little is known empirically about how such collectives function and with what livelihood and governance outcomes. The landscape approach to conservation (known also as the ecosystem approach) is one such hybrid governance platform. Implemented worldwide over the past decade by international NGOs, the landscape approach employs the ‘ecosystem principles’ of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In spite of its prominence as a conservation and development strategy, little political ecology scholarship has considered the landscape approach. This article offers a case study of a conservation landscape in the Congo Basin, the Tri-National de la Sangha (TNS), which connects tropical forests in Cameroon, Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic. Led by NGOs, the TNS has since 2001 relied on partnerships among logging companies, safari hunters, the state, and local communities. Although the landscape approach purports to facilitate re-negotiations of user rights, resource access patterns in the TNS appear to have molded to pre-existing power relations. Rather than incorporating local concerns and capabilities into management, local knowledge is discredited and livelihoods are marginalized. As a result, management occurs through spatially-demarcated zones, contrasting the fluidity of interactions among diverse groups: both human (loggers, hunter-gatherers, safari guides, NGOs) and non-human (trees, elephants). These findings are situated within a burgeoning literature on neoliberal environmental governance, and suggest that ensuring ecologically and socially positive outcomes will require careful and iterative attention to linkages between ecological processes and evolving power dynamics.     

The cultural politics of local economic development: meaning-making, place-making, and the urban policy process

A major concern of work in urban and political geography in recent decades has been to analyze how and in whose interests local space economies are produced and reproduced. A common focus is on the role local elites play in gathering support for their development agendas. Drawing from these literatures, this paper focuses on how various visions of the future of localities are contested in the local policy process. It argues that this struggle can be usefully understood as a cultural politics in which meanings are defined and struggled over, where social values are naturalized, and by which `common sense' is constructed and contested. The use of the term `cultural politics of local economic development' is, then, intended to indicate that meaning-making and place-making occur simultaneously in struggles over the future of space economies. It is also an attempt to overcome the problematic distinction between `culture' and `economy' that continues to haunt a great deal of work on urban politics. Through a case study of urban politics in Lexington, Kentucky in which discursive strategies are highlighted, it is argued that this approach is useful in that it provides insight into non-elite perspectives on local economic development and that it underscores the role played by everyday life in constituting political action. The paper concludes by suggesting that any problematization of the conceptual distinction between `culture' and `economy' must be carried out in and through detailed analyses of how groups involved in social struggle frequently construct rhetorical strategies in reference to it.     

Substitution and scalar politics: negotiating environmental compensation in Cardiff Bay

One of the most contested dimensions of sustainable development is the issue of substitutability--the extent to which environmental qualities can be substituted, either for human-made assets, or for some equivalent environmental function. The main argument of this paper is that dominant economic discourses of sustainability neglect long-standing geographical concerns with scale, embeddedness and abstraction that are inevitably embroiled in the practical negotiation of substitutability. In particular, it seeks to demonstrate how relations of ecological and political scale frame the ‘decision space’ within which debates about substitution take place. These arguments are developed by analysing conflicts over the development of an amenity barrage across the Taff-Ely estuary in Cardiff, South Wales, and the provision of new wetlands to compensate for the resulting loss of wildlife habitat. This case shows that the scale at which environmental ‘assets’ are constructed--whether local, national or global--can reveal or obscure distributive effects incurred in maintaining environmental capital through compensatory measures. It also demonstrates how the re-scaling of governance arrangements (in this case to the European Commission) can empower the delivery of environmental management measures but simultaneously re-structures the objects of sustainability, rendering habitats and wildlife populations as disembedded symbols.     

The politics of identity: Ethnicity, minority and nationalism in Soviet Estonia

Identity has become one of the core concepts of political geography. This reflects the wide recognition of a post-structural conception of society and space, as well as the acknowledgement of the political character of identity. The present article focuses on the politics of identity, and discusses the politicized forms of identity as related to the Soviet state building policies and the Estonian spaces of resistance. It will be argued that neither identity nor the political demand in Soviet Estonia can be viewed in isolation from their historical and social contexts. Both Soviet state politics and the Estonian spaces of resistance reflected the prevailing conceptions of past and the contemporary political realities. This article examines those preconceptions of the political and territorial development in Soviet Estonia, and also illustrates the interdependent character of state politics and non-state activism. The first part of the article concentrates on the Soviet state building practices – the use of power, symbols, education – and the second part examines the various forms of non-state activism of Estonians.     

Where the buffalo roam: Boundaries and the politics of scale in the yellowstone region

For more than twenty years, the state of Montana has pursued a controversial policy of lethal control to manage winter migrations of bison from Yellowstone National Park. In the late 1990s, as the state and a number of federal agencies attempted to cooperatively outline a more palatable scenario for bison management, local environmental groups became active participants in the debate. This paper examines the strategies pursued by these organizations in the course of their attempt to construct a new, ecosystem-level territorial space and jurisdictional scale for bison, and places their struggle within the context of existing work in geography on the politics of scale. Ultimately, the failure of their efforts illustrates some of the important constraints faced by social groups that attempt to create new territorial regimes and new scales of resistance in the interstices of existing political structures.     

Rethinking the nature of urban environmental politics: Security, subjectivity, and the non-human

The growing field of urban political ecology (UPE) has greatly advanced understandings of the socio-ecological transformations through which urban economies and environments are produced. However, this field has thus far failed to fully consider subjective (and subject-forming) dimensions of urban environmental struggle. I argue that this can be overcome through bringing urban political ecology into conversation with both post-structural political ecology and critical geopolitics. Bridging these literatures focuses attention on practices of socio-ecological exclusion and attachment through which environmental subjectivities are formed. This argument is drawn out through a case study of the politics of local economic development and conservation within the watershed of the Big Darby Creek near Columbus, Ohio. This struggle was driven by a preservationist movement that coalesced around a shared understanding of socio-ecological hybridity as a source of metaphysical insecurity. Hybridity appears here as a site of political and ethical struggle over social and ecological exclusions produced in the pursuit of security. This case study demonstrates a paradox of environmental politics: the non-human is at once a site of constituent possibilities for identity and subjectivity as well as forces which seek to foreclose this radical openness. Recognizing the paradoxical nature of environmental struggle allows for a more complex and nuanced account of the multifarious forces that shape the formation of environmental subjectivities.     

Canadian Inuit,digital Qanuqtuurunnarniq,and emerging geographic imaginations

Using the Canadian Arctic as a case study this paper explores how Internet-based research can be used to advance area studies in an era of rapid global change. Regions of the world are rapidly changing due to social, technological, and environmental processes, and traditionally marginalized groups are increasingly using digital tools to help shape new geographical imaginations of these regions. Digital research is uniquely capable of analyzing these political uses of digital technologies, to produce a better understanding of how many different stakeholders are shaping emerging geographical imaginations. The Canadian Arctic offers a particularly powerful case study to understand these processes both because it represents a geographic region that is complex, multi-scalar, and rapidly evolving, and also because it is a region in which traditionally marginalized indigenous groups are using the Internet to increase the visibility of their perspectives. This paper develops an innovative methodology, combining computational analysis of ‘big data’ along with traditional forms of qualitative analysis, to analyze representations of the Arctic across the websites of five different organizations. These organizational websites were chosen because each of the organizations has a different relationship to the Arctic, operates at a different geographic scale, has some relevance to areas of the Canadian Arctic in which Inuit live, and has a large website. The analysis successfully reveals how these different organizations use the web to shape different types of geographic imaginations of the Arctic, as well as the types of discursive politics being used by the organizations to push forward their own political goals. The result is a powerful form of area studies capable of highlighting the geographic imaginations and re-imaginations of a complex set of actors operating at many different scales.     

‘Our city is our identity!’: a field study on Kurdish local government experiences in Diyarbakır

In this paper, I analysed the neoliberal and socio-spatial transformations occurring in Diyarbak?r, the largest Kurdish city of Turkey. Rather than discussing the involvement of various national and international actors in those transformation processes, I tried to focus on the attitudes of the local social and political dynamics that create strong discursive counter-arguments against these processes. The study aims to demonstrate that dissident libertarian and egalitarian local groups can also become the supporters of and the actors in the neoliberal space strategies. In this regard, I examined the transformation of space in Diyarbak?r considering the tense and opposed relationship between neoliberal strategies and the local political formations mobilized by the demands for collective identity. Data acquired from the field study on the local governance experience in Diyarbak?r demonstrate that populist calls based on cultural existence became the focal point of local government. The slogan of “Our city is our identity!” functions as a meta-narrative that articulates the different class identities into neoliberal urban reality and becomes a discursive centre which normalizes the exclusive occupations over space.

     

Contested claims over space and identity between fishers and the oil industry in Mexico

This essay examines neoliberal forms of resource governance and emerging struggles over control of sea space between coastal fishers, the para-statal oil industry and government authorities in the State of Tabasco, Mexico. The analysis focuses on the changing mechanisms of resource governance and networking related to contested claims over rights to offshore space. The study is based on material collected during ethnographic field research in Tabasco in 2011–2014. By linking a post-Foucauldian approach to governmentality with a Deleuzian perspective on networks, our research examines resource governance as a socio-political arena, constructed in negotiation between multiple governmental, private and civil society actors, including heterogeneous groups from local populations. The study demonstrates how hybrid techniques of resource governance lead to fishers’ socio-spatial displacement, marginalization in the fields of political representation and subjection to ideas of aquaculture entrepreneurship. The ensemble of private regulation and governmental control provides a venue for drawing fishers into clientelist practices of governing while it diffuses questions of responsibility. These modes of governance fragment the fishers’ efforts to mobilize politically, making them rely on less visible networks of contestation shaped by heterogeneous fishing groups, with varying access to resources and political representation. Recent transformations in environmental legislation and the fishers’ mobile tactics of networking may offer opportunities for them to reclaim their resource rights.     

Spatial relations and the materialities of political conflict: the construction of entangled political identities in the London and Newcastle Port Strikes of 1768

This paper engages with the material geographies of political conflict. It applies the concerns of actor-network theory around the entangled character of material/social relations to the geographies of subaltern politics. It explores how interconnected strikes of riverside labourers and sailors in the London and Newcastle Port Strikes of 1768 contested the terms on which materials were enrolled into mercantile capitalist networks. The dynamic geographies of these strikes are used to unsettle constructions of subaltern spaces of politics as bounded and localised. The paper then demonstrates how labourers crafted multiple antagonisms through negotiating their location in materially heterogeneous networks. It uses this concern with contested material geographies to engage with the entangled construction of political identities. The paper concludes that interrogating the materialities of political conflict does not just add a neglected technical dimension to the study of political activity; it provides considerable resources for engaging with the inventiveness of subaltern political activity and agency [Barry, A., Political Machines: Governing A Technological Society, Continuum Publications, London, 2001].     

Beyond the numbers: Understanding the value of vegetation to rural livelihoods in Africa

Different types of vegetation found in local environments are of value to rural livelihoods of many African households. However, the dominant way of expressing this value, which is mainly through economic valuation studies, is potentially limiting this knowledge’s usefulness in policy and research, due to the inability to present full picture. Using literature review and insights from field work, the paper argues that realized and notional values of vegetation to rural livelihoods are socially constructed and contested, and - in addition to understanding local livelihood context, which include social difference, and ecological dynamics - a focus on social institutions as terrains of negotiation is crucial. This means that resource value in rural livelihoods can be realized through contested and negotiated access arrangements that are mediated by complex institutions at local and external levels.     

Volume control: Stormwater and the politics of urban metabolism

This paper engages with emergent conceptualizations of political–industrial ecology to understand the politics surrounding how the volume, composition, and material throughput of stormwater in Los Angeles is calculated and applied by experts. The intent is to examine the unfolding relationship between the volume and material flow of stormwater, and the social, political, and technical practices involved in identifying stormwater as a new and underutilized water resource. Specifically, it seeks to understand how the active processes of calculating the metabolic inflows and outflows of stormwater in Los Angeles serve as a way for the city to render value and meaning to the flows of stormwater. I suggest that the ways urban metabolisms are calculated reflect a volumetric approach to environmental governance that serves to achieve certain political goals. I refer to this type of governance as volume control—a way of organizing technopolitical interventions around overcoming problems related to the volume of resources flowing and circulating into, through, and out of cities and industrial systems. I argue that understanding this form of governance relies on taking a political–industrial ecology approach that accounts for both the social and material dimensions of resource flows. While the categories and motivations of stormwater governance remain contested over time and space, it is shown that stormwater in Los Angeles needs to be understood in relation to the ecological systems and scientific, political, and cultural practices designed to make it into a resource and align with existing patterns of growth and development.     

Multi-national iconographies in Macedonia

The authority of Marshall Tito and his newly crafted iconography of `brotherhood and unity' temporarily marginalized the ethnic deographies of the peoples in the Yugoslav Federation. In the 1990s this Yugoslavia was run over by time. The Republic of Macedonia was among the newly emerging states. In Macedonia the multi-ethnic mosaic was complicated by the confusion of old and new iconographic impulses. In 2001 the Macedonian crisis developed as a result of the spread of the new regional Albanian identity spread by the domino effect to the areas with mixed population in the Balkans after the events in Kosovo. Differences between Macedonians and Albanians are analyzed in terms of family structure, religion and ethnic and national affiliation. The politics based on these cleavages and their ensuing, contested iconographies are set out.     

Multi-national iconographies in Macedonia

The authority of Marshall Tito and his newly crafted iconography of `brotherhood and unity' temporarily marginalized the ethnic deographies of the peoples in the Yugoslav Federation. In the 1990s this Yugoslavia was run over by time. The Republic of Macedonia was among the newly emerging states. In Macedonia the multi-ethnic mosaic was complicated by the confusion of old and new iconographic impulses. In 2001 the Macedonian crisis developed as a result of the spread of the new regional Albanian identity spread by the domino effect to the areas with mixed population in the Balkans after the events in Kosovo. Differences between Macedonians and Albanians are analyzed in terms of family structure, religion and ethnic and national affiliation. The politics based on these cleavages and their ensuing, contested iconographies are set out.     

Reworking and resisting globalising influences: Cape Town hip-hop

Global cultural flows have emerged as key influences in driving changes in local consumer behaviour, identities and social relations. These flows are negotiated and contested in the local context. This article considers how local hip-hop artists in Cape Town, South Africa, challenge and disrupt the dominant images of success linked to consumerism and individualism in popular American music imports. Drawing on Katz’s (Signs 26(4):1213–1234, 2001a, Antipode 33(4):709–728, 2001b) thinking around topographies and counter-topographies, this article suggests that local political hip-hop can be used to develop powerful critiques of the outcomes of globalisation.     

Centralized power and divided space: `Fractured regions' in the Israeli `ethnocracy'

This paper uses a critical political-geographical perspective to account for the high centrality of power found in Israel. It suggests that the concentration of power have not been solely caused by national solidarity and integration or by metropolitan development, as commonly explained, but also by the territorial `fracturing' of the main social and ethnic groups in Israel/Palestine. This has prevented the emergence of effective pressure for regional devolution. Israel's character as a settler and settling state, and its central project of Judaizing contested territories, enabled the Israeli `ethnocracy' and its (mainly Ashkenazi and secular) elites to create a political geography of `fractured ethnic and social regions'. Dispersing minorities and legitimizing segregation and inequality, all in the name of the `national interest', achieved this. The Israeli political landscape is therefore organized as `fractured regions', each representing a distinct and interconnected, yet geographically dispersed, set of localities, and resembling a `chain of beads'. The logic of dispersal and segregation, in turn, has also influenced patterns of development and residential separation within Israel's main urban areas. Thus, ethnic and social fragmentation and conflict, and not a putative process of national or metropolitan integration, can explain much of Israel's highly centralized power structure.     

An ecological grading of human settlements

This paper attempts to place within an ecological framework the way in which man has appropriated and changed landscape. The ecosystem concept is used in order to facilitate a realistic examination of the ever changing relationship of man and nature. The resultant ecological grading of human settlements covers the full range of environments from “wild” to “urban”. It is hoped that such an approach will help to alert, educate, and instruct planners and decision makers as to the ecological cost of a number of problems which are normally viewed in economic, political, or social terms.