Challenging power from the bottom up? Community protocols,benefit-sharing,and the challenge of dominant discourses

This article discusses the ways in which community protocols might challenge the dominant discourses that guide environmental law and policy at the local, national and international levels and makes suggestions about the conditions that need to be fulfilled if such a challenge is to be effective. Community protocols have attracted the attention of many scholars as they are recognised in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Nagoya Protocol. They are argued to hold the potential to achieve fair and equitable benefit-sharing by allowing local community voices to express their customary law, worldviews, and ideas of benefit and development among other things. While much of the existing literature discusses community protocols as legal tools, they are also tools that may challenge the dominant discourses argued to guide environmental law and policy. The article takes up this question on the basis of findings from five original case studies. It is argued that community protocols may challenge dominant discourses by: facilitating and articulating the recognition of local communities and indigenous peoples; providing a source for understanding their worldviews; and by empowering them in the long term. In order to achieve these outcomes, community protocol must be understood as processes and pay attention to legal and political contexts, how communities organise, the role of supporting actors, and the articulation of benefits.     

Struggles over family land? Tree crops,land and labour in Ghana’s Brong-Ahafo region

Agricultural land use in much of Brong-Ahafo region, Ghana has been shifting from the production of food crops towards increased cashew nut cultivation in recent years. This article explores everyday, less visible, gendered and generational struggles over family farms in West Africa, based on qualitative, participatory research in a rural community that is becoming increasingly integrated into the global capitalist system. As a tree crop, cashew was regarded as an individual man’s property to be passed on to his wife and children rather than to extended family members, which differed from the communal land tenure arrangements governing food crop cultivation. The tendency for land, cash crops and income to be controlled by men, despite women’s and young people’s significant labour contributions to family farms, and for women to rely on food crop production for their main source of income and for household food security, means that women and girls are more likely to lose out when cashew plantations are expanded to the detriment of land for food crops. Intergenerational tensions emerged when young people felt that their parents and elders were neglecting their views and concerns. The research provides important insights into gendered and generational power relations regarding land access, property rights and intra-household decision-making processes. Greater dialogue between genders and generations may help to tackle unequal power relations and lead to shared decision-making processes that build the resilience of rural communities.     

Oil pipeline construction in Eastern Siberia: Implications for indigenous people

Traditional economic activities, lifestyles and customs of many indigenous peoples in the Russian North, such as reindeer herding, hunting and fishing, are closely linked to quality of the natural environment. These traditional activities that constitute the core of indigenous cultures are impacted by extractive sector activities conducted in and around traditional territories of indigenous peoples. This paper examines implications of an oil pipeline development in Eastern Siberia on the Evenki community in the Aldan district of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). It examines community concerns about potential environmental damage and impacts on traditional livelihood. The paper analyses the interaction of indigenous communities with the pipeline project through interrogation of elements such as impact assessment, consultation, compensation, benefits, communication and public activism. The paper discusses how state policy and industry’s approach towards land rights and public participation affects the position of indigenous peoples and discusses barriers for their effective engagement. The analysis shows a number of policy failures in the protection of traditional natural resource use of indigenous peoples and provision of benefits with regards to the extractive sector that leave indigenous peoples marginalised in the process of development. There is a need to involve indigenous peoples on the basis of dialogue and partnership, improve regulation and shift industry’s approach towards consideration and engagement.     

Land access constraints for communities affected by large-scale land acquisition in Southern Sierra Leone

While national figures of land availability are used to justify accepting large-scale land investors, not very much is known about the local level realities of land availability. By combining remotely sensed data with fieldwork, system dynamics modelling and qualitative research methods, we examine local level realities of land use and availability in the Malen Chiefdom of Southern Sierra Leone. Here, local communities are experiencing the outcomes of large-scale investments in oil palm for biodiesel and other industrial purposes by the SOCFIN Agricultural Company. We find that beyond agricultural production, there are other land uses that are vital for the socio-cultural, economic and environmental realities of communities. The Company does not respect engagements promised to local people to set aside buffer zones around living areas to serve as biodiversity corridors. Local communities are severely deprived of agricultural land and other land resources. The operations of SOCFIN do not take account of present or future land needs of local people. A baseline requirement of food crop land should be set aside for each community, to ensure the attainment of food security in communities affected by land acquisitions. Such baseline requirement should be augmented with local level needs assessments to meet new demand for cropland necessitated by changing demography. This model of land planning can be applied to other land use and additional engagements of large-scale land investors.     

Communities,abandonment and ‘recognition’: The case of post-state funding community bodies

Communities have increasingly been internalised as subjects with responsibilities in the delivery of urban policy and involvement in broader urban governance. A prominent example is the English New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme that ran between 2001 and 2012. Towards the end of government funding, NDCs were required to develop succession strategies that would leave a ‘legacy’ for their communities. This involved the development of social enterprise bodies that would continue to support community involvement and regeneration efforts through ownership of capital assets, acquisition of public service contracts, and partnership working with mainstream service providers. This paper examines the influence of communities on post-NDC bodies, and the relationship between these organisations and local government, which was a critical agent in the management of the previous NDC bodies. The ‘recognition’ perspective of Honneth (1995), which is concerned with the self-actualisation of actors through inter-subjective relations based on forms of recognition (e.g. respect), is deployed in the analysis of post-NDC bodies. The paper concludes that long term community representatives’ have incorporated market values as a means in which to acquire ‘respect’ from social enterprise professionals, and that there is a lack of recognition by state agents of the role of post-NDC bodies in contemporary urban governance.     

Addressing the impacts of large-scale land investments: Re-engaging with livelihood research

What started as a media-driven hype about the global land rush has developed into a well-established academic debate on land governance and an important domain for policy intervention. Research over the past decade has deepened our understanding of how land, water and forests, which were once considered to be local assets and the sources of livelihoods, are transformed into global goods and the focus of capital investments. We are now clearly aware that such transformation generates significant impacts on the livelihood security of vulnerable groups. In response to this, a variety of policy interventions have been devised to minimize the negative impacts (‘do not harm’) and create new opportunities (‘do good’). Yet, it is still unclear how actual policy implementations play out on the ground, what the real impacts are at the local level and whether these interventions help people to improve their livelihoods. In this paper, we present an overview of the existing intervention approaches and their theoretical underpinnings, and discuss how to optimize the developmental outcomes. We argue that the once popular livelihood research framework should be revised and then incorporated more robustly in the existing intervention approaches, as it could help investors and governmental actors to engage in making their investments more relevant to local development.     

A Portfolio Approach to Evaluating Natural Hazard Mitigation Policies: An Application to Lateral-Spread Ground Failure in Coastal California

In the past, efforts to prevent catastrophic losses from natural hazards have largely been undertaken by individual property owners based on site—specific evaluations of risks to particular buildings. Public efforts to assess community vulnerability and encourage mitigation have focused on either aggregating site—specific estimates or adopting standards based upon broad assumptions about regional risks. This paper develops an alternative, intermediate—scale approach to regional risk assessment and the evaluation of community mitigation policies. Properties are grouped into types with similar land uses and levels of hazard, and hypothetical community mitigation strategies for protecting these properties are modeled like investment portfolios. The portfolios consist of investments in mitigation against the risk to a community posed by a specific natural hazard. and are defined by a community's mitigation budget and the proportion of the budget invested in locations of each type.

The usefulness of this approach is demonstrated through an integrated assessment of earthquake—induced lateral—spread ground failure risk in the Watsonville, California area. Data from the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 are used to model lateral—spread ground failure susceptibility. Earth science and economic data are combined and analyzed in a Geographic Information System (CIS). The portfolio model is then used to evaluate the benefits of mitigating the risk in different locations. Two mitigation policies, one that prioritizes mitigation by land use type and the other by hazard zone, are compared with a status quo policy of doing no further mitigation beyond that which already exists. The portfolio representing the hazard zone rule yields a higher expected return than the land use portfolio does; however, the hazard zone portfolio experiences a higher standard deviation. Therefore, neither portfolio is clearly preferred. The two mitigation policies both reduce expected losses and increase overall expected community wealth compared to the status quo policy.     

Social Cohesion; Is it sufficient? Migrant communities in two disadvantaged neighborhoods in Istanbul

Planners assume that old neighbourhoods have an atmosphere in which social relations can easily flourish. They also regard the strong social ties within a neighborhood as the guarantee for the success of housing rehabilitation. This article argues that existence of social cohesion in a neighbourhood is not necessarily an advantage in a process of modernisation and rehabilitation. In some cases the community may constitute a closed `island' especially in places where communities have historically inherited an hierarchical character. The article is based on a recent research project dealing with urban communities in inner city areas of Istanbul, especially those containing migrant populations which seemingly have strong community ties. The historical background of the community from the Ottoman period is examined in the first part of the article. The roots of the community as a territorial administrative unit (mahalle) and its modification in contemporary migrant communities are analysed. The second part of the article presents the results of two case studies. One of the case studies is a social housing district where the migrant community is mixed and social relations with the rest of the city are relatively well developed. The other case study area is an historical district where strong social ties create an introverted character of the community in spite of its central location. The result of the study reveals that urban `communities' in a city like Istanbul have both negative and positive aspects. Primarily it is important to assess and understand the degree of `opennes' of the community to the outer world. In any action to be taken planners should look not only inside the community, but also at its 'outer' relations.     

Effects of the forced resettlement of a community from an agricultural settlement to a high-rise building

The objective of this study was to understand the implications of forced displacement and resettlement of a rural community to an extremely different built environment in urban setting. Based on the Inglehart’s theory of cultural shifts we were able to delineate the process by which changes in physical environment caused significant changes in the community social structure and community members’ cultural identities. The collective characteristics that had once united and strengthened the community’s social structure began to dwindle. Meanwhile, a growing tendency towards individualistic characteristics gradually increased, causing the weakening and eventual dissolution of both the community and its social structure. The gradual process of community changes was reflected in the subjective narratives presented by community residents in a series of in-depth interviews conducted 4 years after the evacuation, in their new homes. Till that time, the community finally broke up, most of its members spreading out to live in various other areas. The study findings will be incorporated into a framework for resettlement policy on appropriate housing for resettled communities.     

Tigers, trees and Tharu: An analysis of community forestry in the buffer zone of the Royal Chitwan National Park, Nepal

In the buffer zone of the Royal Chitwan National Park (RCNP), community forests represent a key land use to meet the objectives of the buffer zone concept. This article examines three diverse community forests surrounding the national park and explores how national policy has been mediated by emerging community forestry institutions to create different levels of resource access and benefit distribution both within and between local user groups. Mindful of recent critiques of community-based conservation, the analysis gives considerable attention to the dynamics of power relations and inequality. The extent to which property rights have been transferred to the local level is evaluated and to whom power has been devolved in the process is assessed. The distribution of benefits arising from community forestry is critically examined. It seems that the current system for community forestry creates sufficient incentives for local cooperation due to the potential for increased access to important resources and a high perception of ownership of community forests among the communities. However, emerging institutions vary in the extent to which they reproduce favourable resource access conditions for elites and benefit distribution does seem to be skewed in favour of the wealthy and higher castes, even where management practices on the surface appear fair. National policy creates sufficient but not necessary conditions for achieving downward accountability, transparency and fairness. Greater attention to these issues is needed for buffer zone community forestry to better serve the poor and marginalised populations within user groups.     

Payments for environmental services as neoliberal market-based forest conservation in Vietnam: Panacea or problem?

Recently in Vietnam, a coalition of international NGOs, donors and government officials have been promoting market-based forest conservation projects in the form of payments for environmental services (PES) as a win–win for both conservation and development objectives; Vietnam is now the first country in Southeast Asia with a national law on PES. This article provides a macro survey of how market-based instruments for forest conservation have expanded in Vietnam, particularly in relation to a long dominant state sector. Yet an assessment of Vietnam’s PES pilot projects indicates that they do not follow predicted orthodox “neoliberalization of nature” approaches in their use of market instruments, particularly in regards to privatization, retreat of the state, and capitalization of commodities. The article explores how it is that a strong state role in forest management can continue to dominate even in more market-oriented approaches. Finally, the article analyzes PES’s potential for success or failure in tackling the underlying causes for forest degradation. Ultimately, the article argues that PES is likely to be unable to tackle several of the key underlying causes for deforestation, namely, uneven land tenure and a lack of participation by local communities in conservation, given that PES is unlikely to be considerably different than past attempts at forest management.     

Community resilience,globalization, and transitional pathways of decision-making

This article investigates the impacts of globalization processes on community resilience. It argues that theoretical concepts such as transition theory can provide a lens through which resilience pathways at community level can be better understood, and proposes a framework focused on a social resilience approach for understanding community resilience as the conceptual space at the intersection between economic, social and environmental capital. It argues that certain types of communities are losing resilience through increased embeddedness into globalized pathways of decision-making, while other communities may be gaining resilience, although not one system is either totally resilient or totally vulnerable. Striking the right ‘balance’ between communities and their scalar interactions with the global level is key for maximization of community resilience: while too much isolation of a community may be bad in light of over-dependency on local resources, skills and people, ‘over-globalization’, with possible loss of autonomy and identity, may be equally fraught with problems. In particular, relocalized communities have, so far, not shown much tangible success, as almost all members of the relocalization process at community level are simultaneously embedded within the global capitalist system through their dependencies on global economic processes.     

“This is the mess that we are living in”: residents everyday life experiences of living in a stigmatized community

This paper is part of a larger community health study aimed at delineating the determinants of health in Sarnia. The paper specifically investigates Sarnia residents’ daily lived experiences, perceptions of and responses to living within the St. Clair River “Area of Concern” (AOC) as designated by the federal government based on the hypothesis that relatively high levels of environmental pollution in the region are negatively influencing human health. Results from in-depth interviews (N = 27) show that residents of Sarnia are conflicted by the elevation of awareness about environmental health threats by being labelled within an AOC. Residents use their emotional and sensual experiences to adopt appropriate coping strategies to live within a contaminated community. In contextualizing their everyday lived realities, residents argued that living in an AOC demands personal acceptance of the conditions in Sarnia and awareness of “bad air days” to cope with pollution exposure. Yet, residents were not willing to abandon Sarnia because of their cultural, social, and economical attachments to the place they call home. These findings suggest the need for local health policies that incorporate local concerns and perceptions of how environmental pollution affects people’s experiences and well-being. There is a necessity to involve community members as central participants in the process of policy making.     

Land-use planning for natural hazards in New Zealand: the setting,barriers, ‘burning issues’ and priority actions

Land-use planners have a critical role to play in building vibrant, sustainable and hazard resilient communities in New Zealand. The policy and legal setting for natural hazards planning provides a solid foundation for good practice. But there are many examples of ‘bad practice’ that result in unnecessary risks and, in some cases, exposure to repeat events and potentially devastating impacts. Much, therefore, remains to be done to improve hazards planning policy and practice in New Zealand. This article explores the questions: What role does land-use planning play in managing hazard risks in New Zealand; and what needs to be done to reduce hazard risks and build community resilience? The article starts by describing the milieu within which natural hazards planning takes place. It goes onto outline the stakeholders and institutional and legal setting for natural hazards planning in New Zealand, including barriers to realising the potential of natural hazards planning. This synthesis reveals a number of ‘burning issues’, including the need to: (a) Improve understanding about the nature of hazards; (b) Prioritise risk avoidance (reduction) measures; (c) Provide national guidance for communities exposed to repeat events and address the relocation issue and (d) Mainstream climate change adaptation. Each ‘burning issue’ is discussed, and priority actions are recommended to realise the potential of land-use planning to reduce natural hazard risks and build community resilience in New Zealand. Ultimately, the challenge is to develop a cooperative hazards governance approach that is founded on coordinated policies, laws and institutions, cooperative professional practice and collaborative communities.     

Development from within: an evaluative research on economic development strategies

Research on the practice of adopting local economic development (LED) strategies is important to understand our local world as it is and what it might be made to be as a place for community. This article on economic development strategies (EDS) highlights the results from a survey of 82 small communities representing the Yukon Territory and ten provinces in Canada. The purpose was to evaluate the positive and additive effects of past local action and community initiatives so as to understand the variation in the adoption of local economic development strategies of Canada’s small towns and local municipalities. Using a questionnaire as instrument for data collection, the study employed hierarchical regression analysis and principal component analysis (PCA) as method for factor extraction and composite assessment on the effects of adopting EDS for community. The PCA solution was applied to evaluate the structure of correlation between the community characteristics as control variables in the baseline model for regression analysis and the past local action and community initiatives as independent variables. The results of the hierarchical regression analysis showed that local initiatives have significant and additive effects on the adoption of EDS by small communities. The study findings offer some insights into some perspectives of ‘development from within’ to mean the local economic development practice in Canadian communities.     

Making the landscape “home”: Narratives of bushfire and place in Australia

This study investigated how the meaning of ‘home’ influences the social construction of bushfire in two Australian communities at high risk. An increasing number of Australians are living in proximity to areas of high bushfire risk due to climate, vegetation and demographic changes. Land and Fire Management Agencies recognise an urgent need to understand what motivates residents to take action to mitigate bushfire risk, and individual decisions whether or not to evacuate when bushfire is imminent. In bushfire policy and management, the home is considered to be synonymous with the house and associated built structures. Using a combination of visual and ethnographic research methods, we ‘mapped’ residents’ understanding of ‘home’. The findings suggest that the concept of ‘home’ embraces more than the private spaces of house and garden. Landscape practices such as gardening with indigenous plant species, ecological restoration, and habitual walking extend the home territory beyond the house and garden and into public landscapes. Physical elements of the landscape such as mountains and locally significant species of trees form part of the ‘imaginary’ of home. These findings are important to the on-going study of the meaning of home. The implications are also significant for land and bushfire managers as they suggest that community education programs that focus solely on the house may fail to connect with people’s wider sense of home in the landscape.     

Violence and conservation: Beyond unintended consequences and unfortunate coincidences

While the relationship between violence and conservation has gained increasing attention in both academic and activist circles, official and public discourses often portray their entanglements as (unlucky) overlapping phenomena. In this article, we show how, under specific practices of state territorialization, conservation becomes both the means and reasons for violence. Based on ethnographic research in Colombia’s emblematic Tayrona National Natural Park, we detail how both the war on drugs and tourism promotion shape these state practices, and how they have translated into everyday, yet powerful, means of dispossession in the name of conservation. By analyzing the effects of the production of peasants as environmental predators, illegal occupants and collateral damage, we show how official conservation strategies have justified local communities’ political and material erasure, and how they have resulted in the destruction of their lived ecologies and the erosion of their livelihood strategies.     

Soil erosion, policy and people's perceptions in a rural community in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

In South Africa the science and practice of soil conservation have been dominated by a technical approach which does not take into account the perceptions, knowledge and needs of people living in rural areas. Attempts to incorporate land users into soil conservation programmes have not had much influence on conservation policies. In order to compare the scientifically-based physical appraisals of an area with the community's perceptions of soil erosion on their land, a project was established in a rural area of KwaZulu/Natal. This paper briefly reviews soil conservation policy in former homeland areas. It then considers the historical development of the community of Cornfields and their responses to changing government policies. The research indicates that rural dwellers have valuable knowledge concerning soil conservation, but that the neglest of such communities by agricultural and conservation authorities has led to the unsustainable use of the land. The area is severely eroded and soils in the area are amongst the most highly erodible in the province. Therefore levels of degradation would be high even without dense human occupation. This evidence is clearly important in future conservation planning and recommendations are made regarding a policy for the management of soil resources in rural areas.     

Putting adaptive capacity into the context of people’s lives: a case study of two flood-prone communities in Puerto Rico

Recent developments in the vulnerability literature have contested the use of technical solutions as the sole adaptive strategies to reduce natural hazard impact; this literature emphasizes the need to attend to the wider everyday risks to which people are exposed and that aggravate hazard vulnerability. Using a case study of two flood-prone communities in Puerto Rico, this article supports and enhances that literature by placing floods within a wider context of other risks and determining how everyday risks influence people’s perceptions of and capacity to adapt to floods. Participatory methods are used to elicit the everyday risks that concern community members. The analysis reveals that participants perceive floods as one of their risks, but they see them as neither the most important nor most severe risk in their lives. Instead, they find other concerns—health conditions, family well-being, economic factors, and land tenure—more pressing. These competing risks limit adaptive capacity and increase vulnerability to natural hazards. The results suggest that addressing these multiple risks, mainstreaming flood management and adaptation into the wider context of people’s general well being, and increasing risk perception will strengthen adaptive capacity to present and future floods.     

Collaborative geomatics and the Mushkegowuk Cree First Nations: Fostering adaptive capacity for community-based sub-arctic natural resource management

The remote First Nation (FN) communities of the Mushkegowuk Territory on the west coast of James Bay, Ontario, Canada are currently facing increased development pressures and the imposition of a government land use planning process. The land use planning process is mandated in the Far North Act (received Royal Assent on September 23, 2010). There is a need for capacity enhancement for community-based natural resource planning and management in the Territory. A number of frameworks are emerging for addressing change brought on by resource development and building resilience to such change at the community level. Among these include the concept of adaptive capacity. In collaboration with FN community leaders, we explored the use of “collaborative geomatics” tools to foster adaptive capacity. Our action research suggests that collaborative geomatics technologies should enhance the Mushkegowuk First Nations’ adaptive capacity to address environmental and policy change by allowing them to collect and manage data collaboratively (e.g., traditional environmental knowledge, western science) to create opportunities for innovative community development, including natural resource development and management.