Regionalism as resistance: Governance and identity in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt

Extensive rural regions are facing major socio-economic, political and environmental change from the dual effects of agricultural restructuring and environmental degradation. While central governments often rely on regional level policy responses, local actors, such as rural local governments may resist these ‘top-down’ initiatives. This paper examines the oppositional response of 34 rural local governments to state-led regionalisation for economic development and natural resource management in the extensive and sparely populated Wheatbelt region of Western Australia. The analysis explores how state threats of amalgamation; shifting national policy empathies in rural development; and, local preferences for horizontal rather than vertical forms of cooperation are influential in catalysing a brand of defensive regionalism amongst local government actors. Adopting this defensive posture allowed local actors to both buffer state intervention and improve the effectiveness of their own cooperative planning and management activities for sustainable development. These observations are interpreted through concepts of collective identity formation, providing an analytical perspective that is sensitive to the inter-scalar politics in rural governance.     

Culture, religion and economy in the American southwest: Zuni Pueblo and Laguna Pueblo

Despite glittering casinos, supermarkets, pick-up trucks, trailer homes, satellite dishes, and all the other influences of the dominant Euro-American mainstream society which can be seen everywhere in the American Indian Pueblos of the Southwest, everyday life continues to be strongly characterized by specific Pueblo values, standards of behavior and ideals which are not necessarily in line with those of their Euro-American environment??and sometimes stand in sharp contrast to them. The juxtaposition of poverty and success raises many questions about the relationship between culture, place and economy, and the prospects for sustainable futures in American Indian communities of the Southwest. This paper considers the ways in which social and cultural values in Zuni and Laguna Pueblos influence economic behavior of individuals and community institutions and the implications for governance and development in the region.     

Enclave oil development and the rearticulation of citizenship in Turkana,Kenya: Exploring ‘crude citizenship’

Turkana County, located in the arid region of northwestern Kenya, has long been imagined as backwards and unproductive. As a result, successive governments have neglected to provide adequate social services and investments in the county, leaving Turkanas to rely on humanitarian organisations for access to rights and protections traditionally associated with citizenship. Yet when oil was discovered in Turkana in 2012, the county was thrust into the international spotlight. The oil exploration and development activities that followed the oil discovery have already begun to impact life in Turkana. Accordingly, this paper focuses on changing social and political relationships in light of emergent spaces of enclave oil development in Turkana. Our analysis draws from key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and field observations carried out in Kenya between October 2014 and May 2015. Specifically, we demonstrate that the Kenyan state’s historically hands-off approach to governing this region has led some Turkanas to seek recognition, legitimization, and fulfillment for their rights from oil companies, rather than the state. We argue that this is drawing oil companies and rural communities into an uneasy citizen-state-like relationship, altering the experiences and practices of citizenship in Turkana. We conclude that while the presence of oil companies in Turkana may benefit some, it also works to the detriment of others, introducing new forms of inequality and marginalization – a process we refer to as ‘crude citizenship’.     

Navigating the tensions in collaborative watershed governance: Water governance and Indigenous communities in British Columbia,Canada

First Nations in British Columbia (BC), Canada, have historically been—and largely continue to be—excluded from colonial governments’ decision-making and management frameworks for fresh water. However, in light of recent legal and legislative changes, and also changes in water governance and policy, there is growing emphasis in scholarship and among legal, policy and advocacy communities on shifting water governance away from a centralized single authority towards an approach that is watershed-based, collaborative, and involves First Nations as central to decision-making processes. Drawing on community-based research, interviews with First Nations natural resource staff and community members, and document review, the paper analyzes the tensions in collaborative water governance, by identifying First Nations’ concerns within the current water governance system and exploring how a move towards collaborative watershed governance may serve to either address, or further entrench, these concerns. This paper concludes with recommendations for collaborative water governance frameworks which are specifically focused on British Columbia, but which have relevance to broader debates over Indigenous water governance.     

Brutal presence or convenient absence: The role of the state in the politics of flooding in informal Accra,Ghana

This paper argues that human vulnerability to flood hazards in urban slums in developing countries is greatly affected by the positioning and activities of their city governments. As a result, the paper explores the central role of city authorities in the production of flood vulnerability in selected informal settlements in Accra, Ghana. Using a case study research design, the study draws on multiple qualitative methods to gather evidence including: document review, focus group discussions, flood victims’ interviews, institutional consultation and field observation. The paper reveals two main positions of state and city authorities in Accra’s perennial floods: first, being present and complicit in informal urbanization through their involvement in the politics of land management in flood prone zones; and second, being absent through their inaction in informal growth in flood-risk areas. To each of these positions of the urban state, there are emerging responses from residents and other non-state actors operating within and outside these informal communities. The paper proposes a re-examination of the current structure and processes of urban governance, state-community engagements and urban citizenship in informal communities.     

Tradeoffs in carbon commodification: A political ecology of common property forest governance

Carbon markets have gained traction worldwide as an ostensibly win–win solution to climate change, providing low-cost emission reductions in the Global North and sustainable development in the Global South. However, sustainable development and livelihood co-benefits have largely failed to materialize in a range of carbon offset projects, particularly those in forest communities. While some scholars explain this failure as an outcome of fundamental tradeoffs between market efficiency and sustainable development, others argue that institutions of common property land tenure can resolve tradeoffs and generate important co-benefits for local communities. Using a political ecology approach, integrating insights of Karl Polanyi and Noel Castree on the commodification of nature and evidence from a carbon forestry project in Chiapas, Mexico, this article grapples with the ways in which carbon market requirements shape forest governance within common property tenure arrangements. I argue that the centralization of forest governance and decision making into the hands of project implementers and brokers, the necessity for legible land rights and boundaries, and the technical requirements for measurement, calculation, and monitoring of carbon have reshaped forest governance in ways that have undermined the social and ecological benefits often associated with common property management schemes. This research therefore demonstrates that so-called tradeoffs between market efficiency and equitable sustainable development goals may not be inherent to carbon forestry and calls into question the reliance on disembedding market mechanisms for climate change mitigation in forest ecosystems. As such, this work has important implications for REDD+.     

Place-based learning and knowing: critical pedagogies grounded in Indigeneity

For Indigenous peoples, knowledge and science are written onto the landscapes our languages ??talk into being?? through the ??individual and collective consciousness of our communities (Cajete 2000, 284).?? Our landscapes are the storied histories, cosmogonies, philosophies and sciences of those Indigenous knowledges which are increasingly being pushed aside by the ??gray uniformity?? of globalization and its progenitor, European colonization. It is within storied places that we can still glimpse alternatives to this gray uniformity of globalization which brings with it a rhetoric of capitalism, modernism, abstract space and Western science. It is this rhetoric produced through globalization which erases the storied landscapes, destroying the libraries embedded within Indigenous toponyms, creating a terra nullius: an empty land awaiting a colonial/neo-colonial history and economy. As Paulo Freire has challenged us to see, critical consciousness requires us to ??read our world,?? decoding the images of our own concrete, situated experiences with the world (Freire and Macedo 1987, 35). A critical pedagogy of place recognizes the concrete experiences of communities grounded in shared histories, stories and challenges based within a politics of place. A critical pedagogy of place seeks to decolonize and reinhabit the storied landscape through ??reading?? the ways in which Indigenous peoples?? places and environment have been injured and exploited. This paper seeks to discuss how through reading the places in the world as ??political texts,?? one may engage in reflection and praxis in order to understand, and where necessary, to change the world.     

Reducing hazard vulnerability through local government engagement and action

The concept of a natural hazard is a human construct. It is the interaction with human communities and settlements that defines a natural phenomenon as a natural hazard. Thus the end point of hazard mitigation and hazard vulnerability assessment must involve an attempt to reduce, or mitigate, the impact of the natural hazard on human communities. The responsibility to mitigate hazard impact falls primarily upon governments and closely connected non-government and private institutional agencies. In particular, it is most often local government that takes the responsibility for safeguarding its own communities, infrastructure and people. Hazard vulnerability of specific local communities is best assessed by the local government or council, which then faces the responsibility to translate that assessment into community education and infrastructural safeguards for hazard mitigation. This paper illustrates the process of local government engagement in hazard mitigation in Australia, through the Natural Disaster Risk Management Studies, as a first step towards natural disaster reduction.     

Urban environmental services and the state in East Africa; between neo-developmental and network governance approaches

Although governments are generally expected to provide environmental services such as sanitation and solid waste collection for their citizens, most (municipal) governments in Sub-Saharan Africa seem hardly able to take up this task. Without ignoring the lack of material resources resulting from poverty, there are other structural causes for this failure as well and related to the role of the state. Since independence, the state in Africa has been debated in political as well as in academic circles and opposing views can still be discerned today. While some promote a strong interventionist state which can effectively enhance development, others consider introducing network governance by involving various societal actors in combination with different levels of government a more promising alternative. After presenting an historical overview, in this paper I will summarize this debate and discuss future options for East African authorities for providing more effective and sustainable urban environmental infrastructures and services.     

The vulnerability of the elderly to hurricane hazards in Sarasota, Florida

Although the elderly are commonly thought to be disproportionately vulnerable to natural hazards, the elderly populations of coastal communities are continuing to grow. Because there is little to no empirical hazards work specifically addressing the vulnerable elderly in coastal communities, this paper uses Sarasota County, Florida, as a case study to analyze how vulnerable the elderly are to hurricane hazards and whether all elderly people are equally vulnerable. To explore the spatial variations in degree and composition of vulnerability among this population, the analysis maps physical exposure to hurricane storm-surge inundation and precipitation-induced flooding and creates social vulnerability indices by applying principal components analysis to census block group data in a geographic information system. The results show that elderly inhabitants of barrier islands face a considerable physical threat from hurricane-induced storm surge and flooding but are less socially vulnerable because of their wealth; the elderly living inland are far less physically vulnerable but are poorer and consequently demonstrate high socioeconomic sensitivity and limited adaptive capacity to these hurricane hazards. The paper concludes that the elderly are not equally vulnerable: there are many different types of elderly living in many different locations, and their vulnerability varies by type and over space. Effective vulnerability reduction measures should account for these differences between the elderly populations.     

Climate (in)justice,vulnerability and livelihoods in the Caribbean: The case of the indigenous Caribs in northeastern St. Vincent

This paper examines climate justice from the perspective of three remote indigenous Carib communities located in northeastern St. Vincent, amidst their vulnerability to climatic hazards. The study contributes to the growing body of literature that explores the impacts climate-induced changes are having on Indigenous peoples through its explicit focus on this distinctive social group. The paper entails a detail case study of the particular ways the recent onset of two consecutive extreme weather events have impacted livelihood activities in these traditional farming villages. Primary data were collected in the aftermath of a severe drought that was followed by Hurricane Tomas in 2010, using a mixed method approach involving a questionnaire survey of 311 households, 70 unstructured interviews and 2 focus group sessions held in each of the three communities. The combined impact of these extreme weather events not only brought to light how exposed and sensitive these communities are to climatic hazards, but also illustrated some of the underlying issues driving vulnerability at the local scale that must be dealt with if climate justice is to be achieved. We argue that the factors driving vulnerability within these communities are partly a function of centuries of economic neglect and political marginalization and are also strongly related to the communities’ characteristically lower-socio economic status, geographic location, heavy reliance on land-based resources, coupled with a range of cognitive barriers that affect residents’ capacity to adapt to a changing and variable regional climate regime.     

Water governance in New Mexico: Adjudication,law, and geography

Water rights adjudications lie at the intersection of law, space, and the geography of resource governance, combining elements of field cartography, archival research, and judicial supervision and decree. However, few geographers have examined the water rights adjudications now active in most western US states. Using case material and ethnographic vignettes from a larger geographic project on water rights and governance in New Mexico, I examine water adjudication as a vital instrument in the state’s pursuit of spatial knowledge. Resources and water users are seen by the state through this process, while at the same time, water users may elude or confuse state legibility. In this process, altered forms of governance are produced. Here, I explore how the formalizing of water rights in New Mexico has articulated new legal-spatial relationships, which are often viewed differently by state and local agents. I then examine the products of adjudications and the tension between local and expert knowledge in natural resources governance over being seen and governed by the state and the struggle to retain local autonomy and governance in water management.     

The indigenous ecotourism and social development in Taroko National Park area and San-Chan tribe, Taiwan

This paper explores the socio-cultural influence of the newly established ecotourism, which integrates cultural revitalization, ecological conservation and social development, in both Taroko National Park area and San-Chan aboriginal community. Many cases in different parts of the world indicate that the Indigenous peoples have developed patterns of resource use and management practices that reflect detailed knowledge of local geography and ecosystem, and contribute to the natural conservation through their living practices. The guidelines of Indigenous knowledge and culture lay the base for the development of ecotourism. A critical evaluation of the conceptualization of Indigenous knowledge is therefore, essential to the success of an alternative strategy to development for aboriginal communities. Participatory observation in the field of ecotourism activities and brief interviews are the major study methods, with several workshops conducted to supplement data collection for the two case studies. The Taroko area came into contact with tourists in a relative early era due to its famous natural features and national park. Its growing ecotourism is the result of cooperation among local residents, environmentalists, and academics, each with very different concepts of ecotourism operation. The national park and public sectors have also played significant role in shaping the content of ecotourism. In San-Chan community, due to the negative impacts generated by the unregulated mass tourism expansion, the local Indigenous people decide to close the public access to the attractive creek for 3?years, while at the same time promote ecotourism for poverty alleviation. These two cases embrace the ??Nature?? as an important element in their construction of new place identity and community development. However, their spatial location in- or outside the national park produces significant differences and sociopolitical implications on the operations of ecotourism.     

Rethinking the relationships of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation from a disaster risk perspective

Vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation are three fundamentally inter-related concepts among such research communities as global environmental/climatic change, social–ecological and disaster risk science. However, their mutual relationships are still unclear so far particularly in the field of disaster risk reduction, which to some extent blocks the reasonable risk analysis and scientific decision making. This paper performed a brief overview on the basic definitions and evolution processes of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation, and tentatively categorized past diverse thoughts of their relationships into three modalities, such as, vulnerability preference, resilience preference, and overlapped relationships. From a “hit-damage-recovery-learning cycle” insight and based on an empirical case study, we put forward two conceptual frameworks to address the relationships of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation within the disaster risk domain, and we further discussed their broader implications in terms of disaster risk management and social–ecological sustainability. In an attempt to bring together the analytical frameworks of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation, this study indicates that a sustainable adaptation strategy to the unavoidable disasters or changes should not only seek to reduce the vulnerability of a social–ecological system, but also to foster its resilience and adaptive capacity to future uncertainties and potential risks.     

Stewardship of things: The radical potential of product stewardship for re-framing responsibilities and relationships to products and materials

In the context of broad-based concerns about the need to move towards a more sustainable materials economy, particularly as they are expressed in debates around Ecological Modernisation (EM), we argue that product stewardship has radical potential as a means to promote significant change in the relationship between society and the material world. We focus on two important dimensions that have been neglected in approaches to product stewardship to date. Firstly, we argue that immanent within the basic concept of stewardship is a problematisation of dominant understandings of property ownership in neoliberal market economies. In the space opened up by notions of stewardship, different ways of enacting both rights and responsibilities to products and materials emerge which have potential to advance the sustainability of material economies. Secondly, through exploration of existing expressions of product stewardship, we uncover a neglected scale of action. Both policy and dominant articulations of EM focus primarily on the efficiency of production processes; and secondarily, the attitudes and behaviours of individual consumers. Missing from this is the ‘meso-scale’ of social collectives including households, neighbourhoods, more distributed communities and small scale social enterprises. Based on a review of existing research from Australia and the UK, including our own, we argue that understanding of embedded practices of material responsibility at the household scale can both reinvigorate the concept of product stewardship as a potentially radical intervention, and reveal the potential of the meso-scale as a challenging but worthwhile realm of policy intervention.     

Multi-criteria vulnerability analysis to earthquake hazard of Bucharest, Romania

The expansive infrastructure, along with the high population density, makes cities highly vulnerable to the severe impacts of natural hazards. In the context of an explosive increase in value of the damage caused by natural disasters, the need for evaluating and visualizing the vulnerability of urban areas becomes a necessity in helping practitioners and stakeholders in their decision-making processes. The paper presented is a piece of exploratory research. The overall aim is to develop a spatial vulnerability approach to address earthquake risk, using a semi-quantitative model. The model uses the analytical framework of a spatial GIS-based multi-criteria analysis. For this approach, we have chosen Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, based on its high vulnerability to earthquakes due to a rapid urban growth and the advanced state of decay of the buildings (most of the building stock were built between 1940 and 1977). The spatial result reveals a circular pattern, pinpointing as hot spots the Bucharest historic centre (located on a meadow and river terrace, and with aged building stock) and peripheral areas (isolated from the emergency centers and defined by precarious social and economic conditions). In a sustainable development perspective, the example of Bucharest shows how spatial patterns shape the ??vulnerability profile?? of the city, based on which decision makers could develop proper prediction and mitigation strategies and enhance the resilience of cities against the risks resulting from the earthquake hazard.     

A Study of Global Change Population and Economic System Risk Forming Mechanism and Assessment

Global climate change featured with warming has created serious challenge to world sustainable development and human security. It has become an important consensus of the international society to assess global change risk at the global scale and carry out tailored governance and risk-based adaptation. National Key Research and Development Program “Study on global change population and economic system risk forming mechanism and assessment” aims at quantitatively predicting future global climate change and population and economic system exposure and vulnerability change, developing global change population and economic system risk assessment model based on complex system dynamics, synthesizing risk assessment model with proprietary intellectual property rights, assess global change population and economic system risk of the near and mid future at the global scale, and compiling the atlas of global change population and economic system risk. The outcomes intend to serve the participation of global risk governance and international climate negotiation, and to provide scientific support to the implementation of international disaster risk reduction strategy.     

The relationship between fire behaviour measures and community loss: an exploratory analysis for developing a bushfire severity scale

Current fire danger scales do not adequately reflect the potential destructive force of a bushfire in Australia and, therefore, do not provide fire prone communities with an adequate warning for the potential loss of human life and property. To determine options for developing a bushfire severity scale based on community impact and whether a link exists between the energy release rate (power) of a fire and community loss, this paper reviewed observations of 79 wildfires (from 1939 to 2009) across Victoria and other southern states of Australia. A methodology for estimating fire power based on fuel loading, fire size and progression rate is presented. McArthur??s existing fire danger indices (FDIs) as well as fuel- and slope-adjusted FDIs were calculated using fire weather data. Analysis of possible relationships between fire power, FDIs, rate of spread and Byram??s fireline intensity and community loss was performed using exposure as a covariate. Preliminary results showed that a stronger relationship exists between community loss and the power of the fire than between loss and FDI, although fuel-adjusted FDI was also a good predictor of loss. The database developed for this study and the relationships established are essential for undertaking future studies that require observations of past fire behaviour and losses and also to form the basis of developing a new severity scale.     

Sovereignty and subterranean resources: An institutional ethnography of Repsol’s corporate social responsibility programs in Ecuador

State mandated corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs emerged in Ecuador in the 1990s, following indigenous protests rooted in social and environmental impacts of oil extraction. CSR programs aim to deflect blame for a company’s operations, by providing development or infrastructural improvements in indigenous communities, including micro-credit projects, potable water systems, and electricity. Through an institutional ethnography of CSR programs of the Spanish owned multinational oil company, Repsol, I explore how companies intervene in transformations of social life challenging the roles of the state in securing its territorial sovereignty linked to subterranean oil resources. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis of company and state documents, my analysis demonstrates how CSR programs allow companies to secure their presence in the region, even in the face of shifting regimes of governance. In this article, I provide more insight into Ecuador’s transition from neoliberal to post-neoliberal eras, by calling attention to social processes that seek to legitimize expansion of corporate capital in spaces of sovereignty. If state control over subterranean resources is still crucial to understanding forms of sovereignty, then the extension of that control via CSR programs represents new relationships of power that construct the company as an expert in the region. Exploring the everyday processes of these legal relationships of sovereignty through an institutional ethnography of CSR programs uncovers the programs’ impacts and effects that seek to consolidate power in the company, undermine indigenous rights, and discipline the state.     

Of questionable value: The role of practitioners in building sustainable cities

The reshaping of South African cities is being guided by policies aiming to build socially and environmentally just communities. Despite widespread commitment to this goal, there is little consensus on what it means and how it should and could translate into practice. The paper shows that despite the emphasis on environmental justice and building sustainable communities in policy, the institutional context for implementation (including expert driven and deliberative approaches) do not always deliver on this mandate. Consequently, policy outcomes do not reflect those of the communities and households it is meant to serve, raising challenging moral and ethical questions for institutions involved in environmental governance. This paper shows how the institutional context of environmental assessment combined with the role played by the values held by environmental practitioners charged with influencing decision-making result in the perpetuation of environmental injustices. The lack of a clearly defined profession and professional body, reflecting a diversity of values, debating, regulating, defining and defending a set of principles to guide decision-making in cities is identified as a possible reason for the lack of congruence between the values reflected in policy with those held by the communities these interventions are intended to serve. The resulting value added by sustainable cities interventions in the light of this mismatch is therefore questionable, raising challenges regarding international calls for local action as well as an increasing policy focus in South Africa on the local level as the agent of political and spatial transformation of cities.