bibliographies - University of California, Berkeleyglobetrotter.berkeley.edu/bwep/greengovernance/... · across cultures (Arnold 1996; Descola and Pálsson 1996). The boundary between

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Yoon-Jung Lee

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Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1

An Examination of Key Terms ................................................................................................... 1

Community and Environment ........................................................................................................ 4

Nature and Society, Nature and Culture .................................................................................... 4

Community and Civil Society ................................................................................................. 11

Environment and Governance ...................................................................................................... 18

Participation and Representation ............................................................................................. 18

Property Relations ................................................................................................................... 26

States and Markets ................................................................................................................. 35

Global Environmental Governance .......................................................................................... 42

The Landscape of Empowerment .................................................................................................. 56

Justice ................................................................................................................................. 56

Science and Technology ........................................................................................................... 67

May 2002

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:

Yoon-Jung LeeDepartment of Cultural and Social Anthropology

Stanford University

An Examination of Key Terms

Focusing on two notions of place, community and the environment, the texts featured in this bibli-ography explore a variety of alternative ways of framing ecology and power. Skeptical of state-led andmarket-driven resource extraction, these works focus on the interaction of communities with theirenvironments (see Western, Wright, and Strum 1994). Unlike past rhetorical participatory approachesto development or conservation programs, the advocacy of community as a primary locus of environ-mental management critically examines several key assumptions that have informed environmentaldiscussions. Among the popular beliefs called into question are: the thesis of “the tragedy of thecommons”; the bipolar view of environmental concerns and economic needs; the dualism of Natureand Culture; and the oppositional notion of “experts” versus a “lay public.” (Cronon 1995; Guha1997; Lash, Szerszynsk, and Wynne 1996; Ostrom 1999). Community might be considered a placewhere these assumed gaps are bridged. First, community is a place where communal institutions canconnect individual self-interests to the common good. Second, within a community, issues of socialjustice and environmental sustainability can be considered in questions of resource access and riskcontrol. Finally, intertwined social and ecological histories of a community make the issue of naturepart of everyday life demystifying the idea that nature is an object to be addressed through neutral,expert knowledge.

The appreciation for the significance of communities in environmental matters is a place tobegin rather than a conclusion. Instead of limiting the focus to one agent of resource management,the works included in this bibliography, for the most part, pay attention to the interplay betweendiverse social actors and their political, economic, cultural, and ecological contexts. The concept ofgovernance provides for a view that maintains a sensitivity to social contestation and socialarrangements that condition and, at the same time, are built by human practice. In comparison withthe concept “government,” which centers on a hierarchical system of organization, “governance”highlights “rules of the game” (Young 1994) or “rules-in use” (Watts 2000), which are “as dependenton intersubjective meanings as on formally sanctioned constitutions and charters” (Rosenau 1992:4).In other words, “governance” points to a complex of relations ordered through the interaction of apanoply of governing and mutually influencing actors (Kooiman and Van Viet 1993:64). This mayseem demonstrate a shift in the balance between the state and civil society, evoking the image of adecentralized (and presumably less regulated) society, where a variety of interested actors seekcommon ground and develop shared solutions (Gates 1999). However, the popularity of the conceptmay also point to more various efforts for the regulation of our lives and therefore the expansion of

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space for governmentality—a cluster of institutions, procedures, and tactics that apply techniques ofinstrumental rationality to the arts of everyday management with the goal of introducing economyto political practice (Foucault 1991; Gupta 1998; Luke 1995).

The term “environmental management” has several significant aspects. First, it illustrates theawareness that most environmental resources are easy to deplete and should be managed carefully,even if it means limiting economic growth. Second, it indicates a more holistic and long-termapproach than does the concept of “natural resource management” which is more concerned with theexploitation of specific components of the earth mainly in the benefit of certain special- interestgroups, companies or governments (Barrow 1999:2). Third, it reflects a change in the view of therelation between human subsistence activities and nature. For example, the emerging appreciationfor the sophisticated systems of traditional knowledge upon which nonagricultural subsistencepractices are based has led to the acknowledgement that even seemingly primitive people have quitepurposively managed their environments (Blackburn and Anderson 1993; Padoch and Peluso 1996).This understanding might lead to the view of local people as “environmental stewards,” as well aschallenge the notion of “wilderness” that tends to remove the place of human from nature (Weber,Burtler and Larson 2000; Cronon 1995).

The notion of “environmental management” has some problematic elements as well. First, onemay criticize this “managerialism” by pointing out the potential danger of “displacing the politicalfrom the domain of the environment” through the envelopment of grassroots environmentalmovements within institutions for environmental governance (Brosius 1999:50). In this light, theconcept of “sustainable development” might be interpreted as the idea that economic growth shouldbe sustained through the management of the environment (Escobar 1995:195). Further, it has beennoted that sustainability becomes a “discourse about exerting power over life” (Luke 1995:76),providing an avenue to a new global regime of discipline that is related to the reorganization ofcapitalism (Gupta 1998:321). The clash between local people who oppose coercive conservation andthe state or environmental communities, which assume the “universality” and “neutrality” of thelanguage of conservation, demonstrates the powerful effects of the claims of “sustainability” (Milton1996; Peluso 1993).

While it is problematic to draw a clear line between social movements and institutions, to theextent that this decision presumes a pure and isolated space for the movements, the warnings againstauthoritative and technocratic environmentalism remind us that environmental movements haveinvolved cultural struggles and political work (Lash, Szerszynsk, and Wynne 1996). Consider thecase of local resistance against certain resource-exploitative activities of a government-supportedbusiness. These struggles often confront oppressive political structures which impose a certainidentity and mode of life on the “subject” population and deploy the languages of “development”and “science.” Hence, contestants in this conflict, such as local residents and a network of translocalor transnational activist groups opposing the projects, challenge dominant power relationships byproposing “alternative life and society models” (Escobar 2001:162). In this sense, “the politics ofplace” based on the links between “community” and “environment” with the aim to explore“grassroots forms of governance” (Escobar 2001:149; originally Parajuli 1996) may be understood aswhat Touraine (1977) has termed “battles for historicity.”

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Bibliographic Themes and Organization

The remainder of this bibliography is divided into three parts, addressing the main themes listedbelow. In addition, each part is further subdivided into two or four discussions with the followingsections: Overview, References, Annotated Bibliography, and Additional Readings.

Community and the Environment: The new appreciation for the relationship between nature andhuman society, and the concepts of community in environmental discussion.

1. Nature and Society, Nature and Culture2. Community and Civil Society

Environment and Governance: The interrelationship between environmental management and socialinstitutions which collectively speak to the issue of governance, such as, a system of political repre-sentation, property relations, states and markets.

1. Participation and Representation2 Property Relations3. States and Markets4. Global Environmental Governance

The Landscape of Empowerment: The issues of justice and science as bases of disenfranchisement aswell as empowerment.

1. Justice2. Science and Technology

The annotated bibliography in each discussion is organized in the following way:

CITATION: Author, Year of Publication, Title, Publishing Data.ABSTRACT: Synopsis of the article or book by the original author or editor.SUMMARY: Summary by the compiler.

All works cited in the introductory essay and overviews are listed in the sections AnnotatedBibliography or Additional Readings. In the case of works which appear in two or more sections,footnotes were added to refer to the page number for annotations.

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Nature and Society, Nature and Culture

Overview

In the current literature on sustainable development and conservation, community is increasinglyrecognized as a key agent of environmental management. Several factors have been suggested toexplain this shift toward participatory approaches: the unrealized promise of centrally planned develop-ment programs to alleviate poverty; the failure of national or international conservation projects toreconcile human needs and conservation at the local level; the rise of social movements and democra-tization process which propelled local demand for a greater voice in resource management decisionmaking; shrinking state budgets; and the tradition of participatory approaches in rural development(Escobar 1995; Ostrom 1999; Western, Wright, and Strum 1994). Yet there is another factor to linkthese to the new advocacy of community in conservation: the reconsideration of the idea of “pristine”nature and “despoiling” human community (Agrawal and Gibson 1999; Fairhead and Leach 1998).

The oppositional notion of nature and human society has increasingly been problematized inthe face of the evidence of a long history of human manipulation of the environment and of thesophisticated nature of non-industrial or non-agricultural economies. Appreciation for “indigenousknowledge” thus becomes one main ideological ground of recent participatory environmentalmanagement (Agrawal and Gibson 1999; Blackburn and Anderson 1993). Furthermore, studies ofenvironmental history and human ecology have shown that concepts of nature vary over time andacross cultures (Arnold 1996; Descola and Pálsson 1996). The boundary between culture and natureis blurred in this context: “the way we describe and understand that world [non-human world] is soentangled with our own values and assumptions that the two can never be fully separated”(Cronon1995:25). Grounded in this conceptual revision, current environmental studies critically engage withenvironmentalisms asking the following questions:

• How should the popular notion of nature as naïve reality, moral imperative, and theOther be changed? What is an ethical, sustainable and honorable human place innature? How can we take the positive values we associate with wilderness and bringthem closer to home? How does environmentalism seem opposed to work? How canenvironmental concerns and social justice considerations merge through ideas andpractices of community? (Cronon 1995;White 1995; Di Chiro 1995)

• Will the blurring of the nature-culture opposition in certain sectors of contemporaryscience imply a redefinition of traditional western cosmological and ontologicalcategories? Do non-Western cultures offer alternative models to the dualism of natureand society? (Descola and Pálsson 1996)

• What role do cultural models of nature play in the history of colonialism? How doesthe institutional and social context of forestry play a role in the representation ofdeforestation in such areas as West Africa? What are the consequences for forestpolicy, state formation, and social change when a standard management regime isintroduced in very different ecological zones? (Arnold 1996; Fairhead and Leach1998; Sivaramakrishnan 1999).

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References

Agrawal, Arun and Clark C. Gibson. 1999. “Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role ofCommunity in Natural Resource Conservation.” World Development 27(4):629.1

Arnold, David. 1996. The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion. Cam-bridge: Blackwell.

Blackburn, Thomas C. and Kat Anderson, eds. 1993. Before the Wilderness: Environmental Manage-ment by Native Californians. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press.

Cronon, William. 1995. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” inUncommon Ground. William Cronon ed. London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Descola, Philippe and Pálsson Gísli. 1996. Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. Londonand New York: Routledge.

Di Chiro, Giovanna. 1995. “Nature and Community: The Convergence of Environment and SocialJustice,” in Uncommon Ground. William Cronon ed. London and New York: W. W. Norton &Company.

Escobar, Arturo. 1995. “Power and Visibility: Tales of Peasants, Women, and the Environment” inEncountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.2

Fairhead, James and Melissa Leach. 1998. Reframing Deforestation: Global Analysis and Local Realities:Studies in West Africa. London and New York: Routledge.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1999. “Self-Governance and Forest Resources.” Center for International ForestryResearch. Occasional Paper, No. 20.3

Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1999. Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in ColonialEastern India. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Western, David, Michael Wright, and Shirley Strum. eds. 1994. Natural Connections: Perspectives inCommunity–Based Conservation. Washington D.C.: Island Press.4

White, Richard. 1995. “Are you an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” in UncommonGround. William Cronon ed. London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

1. See p. 13 for annotation.




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Annotated Bibliography

Arnold, David. 1996. The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Ex-pansion. Cambridge: Blackwell.

SUMMARY

One person’s wilderness might be another person’s Eden. For some people, forests have beenhome, supplying their every need and comfort; for others, they have been places of darknessand barbarism, fit only to be cut down in the cause of progress, prosperity and good order. Theenvironment has been not just a place, but also an arena in which conflicting ideologies andcultures might become locked in bitter contention [3].

For some historians, environmentalism uniquely opens up an understanding of history as aglobal phenomenon as if viewed from space: a history of the world’s unification by disease, forits remorseless transformation through deforestation and settled agriculture. But environmen-talist ideas have also been invoked to explain difference and to divide up the world judgmentallybetween the chosen and the damned—between nations and races, between such broad aggrega-tions of people and places as the Orient and the West, the ‘Neo-Europe’ and tropics, or simplybetween civilization and savagery [189].

While some consider environmentalism the recent invention in late- or post- industrial society,Arnold traces in this book how “environmentalist paradigm—the idea that the environment has beena powerful force in human history and, conversely, that humankind has played a major part inrefashioning nature—has been employed in different ways” from the early fourteenth century to theearly twentieth century (189). By probing the inter-linkage between European expansion and thegrowth of Western ideas about different environments and the people who inhabited them, hereveals how ideas of nature served to justify or defy colonization and racism. The past five centuriesmarked a new ecological age, Arnold argues. “It represents the globalization of certain key environ-mental factors—disease, for instance—and of certain Western attitudes to the environment. It alsorepresents the transition from what has been seen as Europe’s deep environmental crisis in thefourteenth century and fifteenth century to the technological and ideological mastery of nature inthe early twentieth century” (8). Then, what would be the historical significance of current environ-mentalism? According to Arnold, we are beginning a new cycle. He states, “the close of the periodsignifies, too, the beginnings of the first fully articulated doubts about the human impact upon theenvironment and the first sustained conservationist moves” (8).

Blackburn, Thomas C. and Kat Anderson, eds. 1993. Before the Wilderness: Environmen-tal Management by Native Californians. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press.

SUMMARY

The editors begin by pointing out that there has been a significant transformation in the studyof human subsistence system. “A new appreciation for the diversity and potential complexity ofnonagricultural economies, in conjunction with a better understanding of the often sophisticatedsystems of traditional knowledge upon which they are based,” they state, has led to a recognition that

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the traditional dichotomy between the seemingly passive “food procurement” lifestyle of “huntergatherers” and the “food production” adaptation of “agriculturists” is inappropriate (15).This bookattempts to bring this emergent discussion to the context of native California. One general conclu-sion emerging from contributions to this volume is that the “extremely rich, diverse, and apparently‘wild’ landscape that so impressed Europeans at the time of contact and which has been considered asa ‘natural untrammeled wilderness’ was to some extent actually a product of deliberate humanintervention” (18). Thus, the California Indians in this book are depicted as “horticulturists,” ratherthan “hunter-gatherers.”

One of the main focuses of this book is Native American burning as a tool for manipulating theenvironment. This shift in the view of burning from destructive and criminal behavior to one kindof environmental management reflects a change in the emphasis in ecological research from equilib-rium to disequilibrium and instability. Among other topics are acorn economy as proto-agriculture,American Indian basket weavers’ gathering techniques which contribute to environmentalsustainability, fuel use, and ritual management of fish resources. Contributions to this book collec-tively challenge the idea of “wilderness,” as far as it erases the interaction between the seemingly“untouched” environment and inhabitants, at least some of whose harvest techniques contribute toenvironmental sustainability.

Cronon, William. ed. 1995. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New Yorkand London: W.W. Norton & Company

SUMMARY

The authors of this book take as point of departure two insights that have emerged over thepast quarter: first, “the natural world is far more dynamic, far more changeable, and far more en-tangled with human history than popular beliefs about ‘the balance of nature’ have typically ac-knowledged” (24); second, “we can never know at first hand the world ‘out there’—the ‘nature’ weseek to understand and protect—but instead must always encounter that world through the lens ofour won ideas and imaginings” (25). Yet this is not merely an epistemological issue. Rather, theauthors are concerned with the problematic implications and consequences of the notion of nature asstable entity and distant Other. For instance, William Cronon’s chapter, “The Trouble with Wilder-ness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” raises the issue of “an escape from the responsibility”reflected in the idea of wilderness (80-81):

Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which weactually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home. Most of our most seriousenvironmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems, weneed an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it[85].

Richard White’s chapter, “Are you an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living,” focusesmore on the place of productive work in environmentalism.

Environmentalists must come to terms with work because its effects are so widespread andbecause work itself offers both a fundamental way of knowing nature and perhaps our deepest

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connection with the natural world. If the issue of work is left to the enemies of environmental-ism, to movements such as wise use, with its single minded devotion to propertied interests,then work will simply be reified into property and property rights [174].

Meanwhile, Giovanna Di Chiro’s chapter, “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Envi-ronmental and Social Justice,” introduces readers to a notion of “nature and environment as thoseplaces and sets of relationship that sustain a local community’s way of life” (310).

Environmental justice groups, while strongly criticizing mainstream conceptions of nature,also produce a distinct theoretical and material connection between human/nature, human/environmental relations through their notions of ‘community.’ Community becomes at oncethe idea, the place, and the relations and practices that generate what these activists considermore socially just and ecologically sound human/environment configurations [310].

No one among the authors is content with simply emphasizing relativism or constructivism,however. “The non-human world is not just our creation,” Cronon argues, “but nature is.” By askingthe question of “what counts as nature” (457), the authors attend to the building of dominantcultural forms that naturalizes power relationships. Thus, for the authors, nature is “the meetingplace between the world ‘out there’ and the culturally constructed ideas and beliefs and values weproject onto that world” (458).

Descola, Philippe and Pálsson Gísli. 1996. Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspec-tives. London and New York: Routledge.

SUMMARY

This volume explores the place of nature and the environment in social discourse. Drawing onrecent developments in social theory, biology, ethnography, epistemology, the sociology of science,and a wide array of ethnographic case studies, it shows that the nature-culture dualism is inadequate1) in understanding some local cosmologies in which non-human beings are endowed with con-sciousness and/or considered to constitute together a wider community of living beings and 2) inaccounting for actual practice of modern science. Among the issues addressed in this volume are: theidea of the “optical forager” in evolutionary ecology; the contextualist paradigm for human ecology;paradigms with respect to human-environmental relations; the question of nature and culture inregard to symbolic ecology; the categorical status of nature; non-dualist notion of nature and culture(case studies); and the idea of nature in science and technology.

Fairhead, James and Melissa Leach. 1998. Reframing Deforestation: Global Analysis andLocal Realities: Studies in West Africa. London and New York: Routledge.

SUMMARY

In this book, the authors argue that the extent of forest loss in West Africa during the twentiethcentury has been exaggerated. On the basis of historical data, they contend that “much of the forestthat has been lost during the twentieth century covered land which had earlier been populated and

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farmed” (xiv). In fact, they continue, it has sometimes been “people, their settlement and their landuse which have been responsible for the development of forest vegetation where it was previouslylacking”(xiv). Thus, the people who have been living in the forest zone of West Africa are owed anapology:

They have been blamed for damage which they have not caused and have paid heavily for thisin policies aimed to control their so-called environmental “vandalism,” and to remove theircontrol over resources in favor of national and international guardians… Inhabitants are deniednot only their claims and control over valued resources, but also their own understandings ofvegetation dynamics and the ecological and social histories with which these are entwined [192].

Why and how did this happen? The authors point out the embeddedness of scientific practicesin political and institutional contexts, which set the “baselines” against which to assess forest loss ordeterioration (194):

In many cases foresters on the ground have been forced to take such historically groundedclaims [e.g., terurial claims by local people] into account owing to the political realities inwhich they work. The problem comes in articulating this recognition with the priorities set atnational and above all international level, which have a very different vision of forest status. Foras we have seen, conceptions of uninhabited forest as “nature,” undisturbed by people, haveprovided tenurial grounds on the basis of vacancy for national and international guardians tointervene in habitat protection. Views of forest as an ecosystem at, or potentially at, equilib-rium with climatic conditions in the absence of human disturbance have provided moral andscientific grounds for external management to override the disruptive effect of local popula-tions. Added to these are moral arguments based on the notions of forest areas as global com-mons or national patrimony, to be protected in an undisturbed state for a larger, future good.

The authors end the book by emphasizing historical and local perspectives, as opposed to theuncritical use of statistics:

We have shown that the forestry statistics in international circulation are the epiphenomena ofpower relations with long historical roots. Their reiteration is far from neutral, but serves toreinforce those power relations in ways, and with effects, from which their proponents mightprefer to be dissociated [197].

Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1999. Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change inColonial Eastern India. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

SUMMARY

This is a study of the emergence of modern forest management in Bengal as a form ofgovernmentality or governmental rationality (272). The study has three purposes: first, to show theinfluence of regional political and social history on environmental change and forest management;second, to show a dialectical relationship between patterns of human engagement with non-humanenvironments and patterns of change in those environments as they influence sociopolitical out-comes of human endeavor; third, to examine the distinctive ways in which a contested history of sal(shorea robusta) forest management emerged in the colonial period (xv-xvi). In Part One,Sivaramakrishnan documents the ways in which the East India Company raj initiated modes of

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knowing and disciplining political society. In Part Two, he explores the changes brought by theintroduction of formal forest management and scientific forestry.

This book also critiques some tendencies in environmental writing and resistance literature.Environmental history, Sivaramakrishnan argues, remains caught up in two constraining legacies: theinfluence of the nature-culture dualism and the preoccupation with colonialism as a watershed inSouth Asian environmental history (13). Hence, an amended approach, he suggests, not onlyproblematizes the dualism of “nature” and “culture” but also favors a mosaic approach that accountsfor the stochastic effects of local ecological factors, social conflicts, events, and culture. As for histori-cal anthropology’s focus on practice and political economy, he points out that two discrete worldsappear in these works—one inhabited by local culture and resistance and the other by universalreason and state power (17). He takes an alternative approach by dealing with a triangle of relations:first, those between ethnohistory and the past it represents; second, those between this past and thesocial forms of the present that are its outcome; and third, those between the present social form andthe representation of the past for whose production the present provides a context (18). Groundingthese perspectives, this book critically engages with the literature on forests and colonialism in Asia,emphasizing previously underestimated regional variations in forest management and challenging thetypical view of scientific forestry as received doctrine (23).

Additional Readings

Escobar, Arturo. 1999. “After Nature.” Current Anthropology 40(1):1

Padoch, Christine and Nancy Lee Peluso. 1996. Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation,and Development. New York: Oxford University Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1980. “Ideas of Nature,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture. London:Verso.

Wilson, Randall K. 1999. “Placing Nature: the Politics of Collaboration and Representation in theStruggle for La Sierra in San Luis, Colorado.” Ecumene 6(1).

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Community and Civil Society

Overview

Given the skepticism that the state and the market are appropriate loci for resource management, theconcept “community” in environmental discussion has risen in popularity, offering two alternativeperspectives. First, it emphasizes the participation of local communities in environmental manage-ment, as opposed to top-down, center-driven development or conservation programs (Western,Wright, and Strum 1994). Second, it points to a social space that is not completely governed ordetermined by the logic of the state or the economy. It is no accident that the current stress on“community” is often conjoined by an attention to “civil society,” the arena of associational lifebetween the individual and the state, but also increasingly beyond the state (Wapner 1996:4).

The conventional concept of community as a somewhat small, homogeneous and harmoniousentity, has been challenged by the awareness that multiple actors with different interests constitutelocal communities and that communities are embedded in larger contexts (Agrawal and Gibson1999, Peluso, Turner and Fortmann 1994; Western, Wright, and Strum 1994). Indeed, communityis constituted and operates in and through contestation. Often-noted conflict over inclusion andexclusion in the politics of representation highlights that community is “always shot through withpower and authority”(Watts 2000:37). Furthermore, as insinuated by the links between the localcommunity and civil society, community is not necessarily local or territorial. For example, manyrecent “community-based resource management” programs are carried out by a wide web of socialactors, including “local communities,” translocal or transnational “environmental communities,”who are considered one main component of “civil society,” governments at various levels and inter-national agencies (see Western, Wright and Strum 1994). As a whole, they constitute “global com-munity” with environmental commons that are both particularistic and global.

Discussions about the concepts of community and civil society are concerned primarily withthree issues. First, they are concerned with the use of the concept in development/environmentaldiscourses. Second, the problems of social strata and the contested boundaries of communities, thatis, the politics of inclusion and exclusion is also a major issue. Third, translocal and transnationalnetworks of organizations and arrangements are also a main focus. These issues are investigated withthe following questions:

• What is the history of the use of the concept of community? What notions of com-munity are informing current environmental discourse? What are the purposes andconsequences of the deployments of “local” and “community” by powerful institu-tions? How do communities seize and transform transnational movements into localopportunities? (Agrawal and Gibson 1999; Zerner 2000).

• What are the cultural, class, and ideological cleavages, as well as, the points of articu-lation both within and between communities at a variety of levels? How can theconcept of community be broadened to include culture in transition on the onehand, and often-neglected community members, such as immigrants, on the other?How do various actors with different interests influence decision-making? (Westernand Wright 1994;Watts 2000; Zerner 2000)

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• How do the internal and external institutions shape the decision-making processregarding certain locales? How can local groups be empowered to negotiate withtranslocal groups, including the state? How can reasonable processes of decision-making be implemented? (Agrawal and Gibson 1999)

• What kinds of images of community are being produced in community-basednatural resource management programs? To what extent might the “invention ofcommunity” by NGOs as their “advocates” have positive or problematic conse-quences? How have descriptions of local communities, culture, law and environmen-tal management been creatively shaped to fit larger institutional intersts? (Brosius,Tsing and Zerner. 1999)

• What are the merits of expanding our concept of community to networks of activist groups,global civil society, or transnational eco-communities? (Fisher 1997; Mathews 1996).

References

Agrawal, Arun and Clark C. Gibson. 1999. “Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role ofCommunity in Natural Resource Conservation.” World Development 27(4):629.

Brosius, Peter, Anna Tsing, and Charles Zerner. 1999. “Assessing Community-Based Natural Re-source Management.” Ambio 28(2).5

Fieldname, Shelley. 1997. “NGOs and Civil Society.” Annals of the American Academy of Political andSocial Science 554:46.

Gates, Christopher. 1999. “Community Governance.” Futures 31:519.

Peluso, Nancy Lee, Matt Turner and Louise Fortmann. 1994. Introducing Community Forestry:Annotated Listing of Topics and Readings. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.

Wapner, Paul. 1996. Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics. State University of New York Press.6

Watts, Michael. 2000. “Contested Communities, Malignant Markets, and Gilded Governance:Justice, Resource Extraction, and Conservation in the Tropics,” in People, Plants, and Justice:The Politics of Conservation. Charles Zerner ed. New York: Columbia University Press.7

Western, David, Michael Wright, and Shirley Strum. eds. 1994. Natural Connections: Perspectives inCommunity–Based Conservation. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Zerner, Charles. 2000. People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Conservation. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.8



7. See Zerner 2000 on p. 65 for annotation.


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Agrawal, Arun and Clark C. Gibson. 1999. “Enchantment and Disenchantment: TheRole of Community in Natural Resource Conservation.” World Development 27(4):629.

ABSTRACT

The poor conservation outcomes that followed decades of intrusive resource managementstrategies and planned development have forced policy makers and scholars to reconsider the role ofcommunity in resource use and conservation. In a break from previous work on development, whichconsidered communities a hindrance to progressive social change, current writings champion the roleof community in bringing about decentralization, meaningful participation, and conservation. Butdespite its recent popularity, the concept of community is rarely defined or carefully examined bythose concerned with resource use and management. We seek to redress this omission by investigat-ing “community” in work concerning resource conservation and management.

We explore the conceptual origins of community, and the ways the term has been deployed inwritings on resource use. We then analyze those aspects of community most important to advocatesfor community’s role in resource management—community as a small spatial unit, as a homoge-neous; social structure, and as shared norms—and indicate the weaknesses of these approaches.Finally, we suggest a more political approach: community must be examined in the context ofdevelopment and conservation by focusing on the multiple interests and actors within communities;on how these actors influence decision-making; and on the internal and external institutions thatshape the decision-making process. A focus on institutions rather than “community” is likely to bemore fruitful for those interested in community-based natural resource management.

SUMMARY

Through an historical inquiry of the concept of community, the authors show that “commu-nity” has been constructed against market forces and the state. What was entailed by this history,they continue, is the romantic idea of community that emphasizes homogeneity, harmony and stasis.Rather than depending on a “mythical” idea of community, the authors advocate an institutionalapproach. This approach focuses on the ability of communities to create and to enforce rules, whileidentifying multiple and overlapping rules, the groups affected by such rules, and the processes bywhich the particular sets of rules change in a given situation. At the end of this article is presentedsome guidance on community- based conservation. First, such projects should be founded on prin-ciples of checks and balances among various parties. Second, as local groups are usually the leastpowerful among the different parties interested in conservation, advocates for community-basedconservation should make efforts to channel greater authority and power toward local groups. Third,a reasonable process of decision-making should be implemented. Finally, local groups should haveaccess to adequate funds for implementing the rules they create; and this fund should come fromuser contributions rather than central government grants.

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Fieldname, Shelley. 1997. “NGOs and Civil Society.” Annals of the American Academy ofPolitical and Social Science 554:46.

ABSTRACT

While nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are recognized for the important role they playin development planning, particularly as sites for democratic change, little attention is given to howthey prefigure the economic and social reorganization of everyday life and provide a venue forprivatization and the liberalization of previously nationalized economies. This article examines thetransformation of NGOs in Bangladesh since independence against the backdrop of struggles be-tween NGOs and the conservative religious party, Jama’at-I-Islami. Highlighting the competinginterests of the donor community and a heterogeneous cadre of development workers, the contradic-tory interests and outcomes of NGO activities are identified in the context of the neoliberal agendaof contemporary development assistance. As women mark the politics of both the Jama‘at-I-Islamiand the NGOs, they provide a crucial empirical referent for observing the transformation of civilsociety, or the space “between the state and its citizens,” in contemporary Bangladesh.

Gates, Christopher. 1999. “Community Governance.” Futures 31:519.

ABSTRACT

American politics, especially at the national level, has become dysfunctional; citizens are deeplyfrustrated with their political leaders and feel that political institutions are unresponsive and corruptedby entrenched power and money. Government leaders must bear the brunt of this anger and distrust,and subsequently feel a sense of disconnection between themselves and those they serve. Ironically, atthe same time as the ability of local government to solve problems is severely hindered due to this“disconnect,” devolution at the federal and state level is forcing local government to take more andmore responsibility for resolving local challenges. This essay argues that the solution to this impasselies in reinventing the way communities operate—we need to make a shift from government to gover-nance. The dominant model of local politics, which fit the political landscape of the 1940s-1970s,vested decision-making authority solely with governmental leadership; citizens voted and governorsgoverned. This essay describes a new mode of operation, one where nongovernmental actors are“granted a seat at the table.” In this model the goal of political struggles is no longer to defeat yourenemy, but to reach a collaborative, consensus-based decision; government, business, communitygroups and citizens work together; and leaders share power, working to enable others to decide issues.

Peluso, Nancy Lee, Matt Turner and Louise Fortmann. 1994. Introducing CommunityForestry: Annotated Listing of Topics and Readings. Food and Agricultural Organization ofthe United Nations.

SUMMARY

Starting with the premise that “forestry planning without the involvement of the communitiesliving in the forest areas is unlikely to lead to successful and sustainable development” (iii), this

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volume provides a proposed course outline in Part One, and about 200 bibliographical citations ofthe readings on community forestry in Part Two. Main points presented in Part One are as follows:

• Community forestry “specifically refers to the promotion of self-help managementand use of trees and perennials to sustainably improve the livelihoods of local people,especially the poor, generally using methodologies (called “participatory”) whichinvolve beneficiaries in project design and implementation” (9).

• The analysis of how people use forests is organized around five questions: “Whatspecies of trees do people use, and from which specific tree and forest products dothey derive benefits?”; “Who are the people involved in using the forest and trees?”;“How do local people manage tree and forest resources?”; “What is the land and treetenure situation governing the use of these resources?”; “What has been the history oftree and forest use in the community” (10-11)?

• “Participatory techniques presume that everyone, local person and professional alike,possess considerable knowledge, skills, and expertise that can be utilized and shouldbe respected.” This approach, “while correcting the traditional view that only theprofessional has valid technical knowledge, does not make the reverse error andassume that only the local inhabitant has relevant knowledge and skills” (14).

• “People working in community forestry must try to remove constraints which pre-vent local people from receiving these benefits from forestry activities.” They shouldprovide local people with honest explanations of potential constraints to delivery andthe opportunities and risks involved. Since villagers must sometimes forego the use offorest while the community forestry activity is set up and trees grow, it is critical tocalculate how quickly the benefits can begin to accrue (16).

• “Community forestry is concerned with identifying levels of differentiation withinand between communities, in order to address the needs and potentials of each groupappropriately.” Moreover, the relationships of local residents with other groups atvarious levels, who are sometimes called “stakeholders,” should be explored andunderstood by community forestry workers.

• In regard to organizational structure of the forester’s agency, two factors influence theprofessional’s effectiveness in performing his/her job: the facility with which ideas canbe circulated and discussed in the organization as well as the professional’s hierarchi-cal position within the organization.

• Uncontrollable outside events can have serious impact on a community forestryproject. Thus, there is a need for planning for contingencies by being equipped withalternative strategies (21).

• “One of the main goals of a community forestry program is to secure local people’sclaims to forests and trees. It is critical that the rules giving local people control oraccess to these resources be established in a form recognized by the state.”

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Western, David, Michael Wright, and Shirley Strum. eds. 1994. Natural Connections:Perspectives in Community-Based Conservation. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

SUMMARY

Focusing on the issue of the integration of human needs and conservation at the local level, thisedited volume addresses various aspects of community-based conservation. The First chapter byDavid Western examines the historical context of this new type of conservation effort as well as somekey issues related to its definitions and prospects, such as, the complexity of community and theiruncertain management capacities. Thirteen case studies from around the world follow this introduc-tion. On the basis of this empirical research, part three explores the following themes in relation tocommunity-based conservation: cultural traditions, local participation, land-tenure rights, thenational policy context, the role of institutions, economic dimensions, ecological factors, and rolesfor outside organizations. The last part presents summaries of a workshop in which the authors ofthis volume discussed lessons, challenges, and visions of community-based conservation.

Particularly pertinent to the issue of participation is Peter Little’s chapter, titled “The Linkbetween Local Participation and Improved Conservation: A Review of Issues and Experiences.” Ittraces a history of rural development, in which the paradigm of community-based resource manage-ment has been developed, and then clarifies the following elements of local participation:

• Who participates?: the complexity of “community” and gender issue.

• Conflict resolution: the questions of co-optation and the authority to sanctionoffenders.

• Sharing in the definition of a problem: the incorporation of the community’s con-cerns and the communication of problems in meaningful local terms.

• The wider political and institutional context: the question of decentralization.

• Design and implementation: a danger that too expensive or labor intensive technolo-gies preclude local participation.

• Local empowerment: community participation in financial decision making and itsauthority to negotiate with external bodies, and power to sanction resource offenders.

• Local organizations: the questions of whether the organizations are truly representa-tive of local interests and whether they are still viable under current circumstances.

• The economics of participation: the linkage between interventions for conservationon the one hand and production and income gains on the other.

• Monitoring and evaluation: the need for improved understanding of economicbenefits and for timely information that is necessary for flexible program implemen-tation.

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Daniel Bromley’s chapter, titled “Economic Dimensions of Community-based Conservation”also offers help in understanding the theme of community governance. After examining two types ofproperty regimes in which local people can be vested with a long-run interest, joint management andcommon property, the chapter offers the following list of imperatives: first, “to develop criteriawhereby the policy dialogue on biological conservation can be properly located in a vertical dimen-sion”; second, “to understand the proper role for executive, legislative, and judicial decisions”: third,to induce participation at minimal cost by making clear the link between individual economic agentsand the new policy environment; finally, to develop environmental assessment criteria and decide alogical sequence of steps (440-441).

In the last chapter, “Vision of the Future: The New Focus of Conservation,” Western claimsthat community-based conservation is “more revolutionary then evolutionary” as it “calls for a turnaround in entrenched political norms” (553). It also “calls for a brave new vision rooted in intercon-nections” between nature and society; between locales, and between generations (554). Against thebackdrop of this spirit of holism, he finally concludes: “how well we succeed in embedding conserva-tion in daily practices depends on the extent to which its precepts become basic rights and freedomswe value and insist upon” (554).

Additional Readings

Calhoun, John M. ed.1998. Forest Policy: Ready for Renaissance. Seattle: College of Forest Resources.

Keohane, Robert O. and Elinor Ostrom. ed. 1995. Local Commons and Global Interdependence :Heterogeneity and Cooperation in Two Domains. London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: SagePublications. (Previously published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Theoretical Politics. Vol.6(1994). No 4.)

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Participation and Representation

Overview

One main approach in current development and conservation programs, “community-based naturalresource management,” centers on the concept of local participation. What is meant by “localparticipation,” however, varies. It may emphasize the involvement of local people in decision makingprocess, the incorporation of local knowledge and practices into standard environmental manage-ment, or the integration of economic development and conservation. The question of what consti-tutes local participation can be approached by 1) clarifying the elements of the concept of “participa-tion” in particular contexts, 2) determining key players in the decision making process, and/or 3)probing the mechanisms whereby some groups represent others and different interests are “recon-ciled” (Barrow 1999; Little 1994; Stonich 2000; Zerner 2000). Among such mechanisms aregendered political election systems, racially and ethically based social organizations constituting civilsociety, the building of recipient elite communities in the development or conservation process(Abramson 1999; Ribot 2000; Stonich 2000). While many researchers identify the question ofdemocratic environmental decision-making process with the question of political representation,some call into question liberal representative democracy itself. Some of the following questions guidethe exploration of democracy and environmental management:

• Who participates? What constitutes local participation? What factors account for thesuccess or failure of community-based conservation project? (Little 1994; Westernand Wright 1994).

• How do class, gender, and patronage inequalities limit co-management of eco-tourism associations? (Belsky 1999)

• What will be devolved to whom in order to constitute community participation inresource management? Does “indigenous” or “local” necessarily mean representativeor fair? How do the customary forms of resource use relate to some form of politicalrepresentation and accountability? Who get the benefits generated by particularenvironmental entitlements? (Ribot 2000).

• How are certain recipient communities created in the development process? How dolocal people interpret and construct the meaning of NGOs? What are the conse-quences of the negation of the state in the construction of civil society? (Abramson1999).

• What is the optical framework for environmental reform? Do liberal forms of parlia-mentary democracy adequately address the challenge posed by the current environ-mental crisis? (Mathews 1996).

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References

Abramson, David M. 1999. “A Critical Look at NGOs and Civil Society as Means to an End inUzbekistan.” in Human Organization 58(3):240.

Barrow, Christopher J. 1999. Environmental Management: Principles and Practice. London and NewYork: Routledge.

Belsky, Jill M. 1999. “Misrepresenting Communities: The Politics of Community-Based RuralEcotourism in Gales Point Manatee, Belize.” Rural Sociology 64(4):641.

Fisher, William F. 1997. “Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices.” AnnualReview of Anthropology 26: 439.

Mathews, Freya, ed. 1996. Ecology and Democracy. London: Frank Cass.

Little, Peter. 1994. “The Link Between Local Participation and Improved Conservation: A Review ofIssues and Experience,” in Natural Connections. David Western and Michael Wright eds.Washington:Island Press.9

Poffenberger Mark. 1996. Grassroots Forest Protection. Asia Forest Network. Research NetworkReport, No. 7, March.

Ribot, Jesse. 2000. “Rebellion, Representation, and Enfranchisement in the Forest villages ofMakacoulibantang, Eastern Senegal,” in People, Plants, Justice: The Politics of Conservation.Charles Zerner ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

Stonich, Susan C. 2000. The Other Side of Paradise: Tourism, Conservation, and Development in theBay Islands. New York: Cognizant Communication Corp.10

Zerner, Charles. 2000. People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Conservation. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.11

9. See Western, Wright, and Strum on p. 16 for annotation.



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Abramson, David M. 1999. “A Critical Look at NGOs and Civil Society as Means to anEnd in Uzbekistan.” in Human Organization 58(3):240.

ABSTRACT

Drawing on fieldwork in Uzbekistan and Washington, D.C., the author illustrates how concep-tual ambiguities in development work can lead to the corruption of aid projects by structuring arecipient community of elites, and thereby, generating new forms of knowledge and practice, align-ment and interest. The author then examines the dialectic of the acceptance and subversion of NGOideals by local recipients. In this process, the concept of civil society loses its utility as a conceptualcategory and gains the potential to become an instrument for dissembling structures and relations ofpower between different interest groups at subnational, national, and transnational levels.

SUMMARY

Seeking to go beyond merely celebrating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in regards toalternative development programs, Abramson raises three issues: the creation of elite recipient com-munities in the development process; the local interpretation and construction of the meaning ofNGOs; and the consequences of the negation of the state in the construction of civil society. Follow-ing William Fisher (see entry in this bibliography), he alerts us to a problematic trend which con-ceives of civil society as an “open society built on anti-politics” (246). “Nonentities, such as non-profits and NGOs,” he argues, “are undeniably vehicles of deliberate social and economic transfor-mation: the process of thwarting attempts to attach a political label to the ultimate goals of develop-ment is undoubtedly a political one” (246).

Barrow, Christopher J. 1999. Environmental Management: Principles and Practice. Lon-don and New York: Routledge.

SUMMARY

This book provides an accessible introduction to the field of environmental management. Inparticular, Barrow’s even-handed writing of controversies surrounding this evolving discipline pro-vides readers with a contextualized overview of environmental management as a research area.Stressing the idea of environmental stewardship and a multidisciplinary approach which integratesecology, policy-making, planning and social development , Barrow explores and advocates thefollowing principles:

• a goal of sustainable development

• support for long-term planning

• support for the “polluter-pays” principle

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• adherence to the “precautionary principle”

• an awareness of the need to change the ethics of peoples, businesses, and govern-ments.

In this book, Barrow makes two general claims. First, there are growing calls to reshape environ-mental management to emphasize social aspects, so that it cannot be divorced from the key issue ofhuman-environment interaction (4). Second, environmental management is a politicized process (267).

Particularly relevant to the issue of community are the “social impact assessment” and “partici-patory assessment” sections in Chapter 6, as well as Chapter 12, which identifies six groups ofparticipants in environmental management. This discussion of a variety of parties in environmentalmanagement reflects Barrow’s main argument that environmental management is a multi-layeredprocess (267).

Belsky, Jill M. 1999. “Misrepresenting Communities: The Politics of Community-BasedRural Ecotourism in Gales Point Manatee, Belize.” Rural Sociology 64(4):641.

ABSTRACT

While the celebration of community in conservation provides legitimization to contest centristand coercive protected area management strategies, representations of community in resource man-agement writings and in particular strategies such as ecotourism, are often based on simplistic imagesand generic models that ignore politics. The paper, which is based on research in a community-basedrural ecotourism project in Gales Point Manatee, Belize, from 1992-1998, provides concrete ex-amples of how the politics of class, gender, and patronage inequities limit the co-management ofecotourism associations, equitable distribution of ecotourism income, and support for conservationregulations across the community. Attention to multiple interests and identities within rural commu-nities and their relationships to external actors, political institutions, and national policies are criticalto understanding the challenges facing community-based conservation in Belize. This attention isshown to be relevant elsewhere.

Fisher, William F. 1997. “Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Prac-tices.” Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 439.

ABSTRACT

This review surveys current literature concerned with the growing numbers, changing func-tions, and intensifying networks of nongovernmental organizations which have had significantimpacts upon globalization, international and national politics, and local lives. Studies of thesechanges illuminate understandings of translocal flows of ideas, knowledge, funding, and people; shedlight on changing relationships among citizenry, associations, and the state; and encourage a recon-sideration of connections between the personal and the political. Attention is given to the politicalimplications of discourses about NGOs, the complex micropolitics of these associations, and the

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importance of situating them as evolving processes within complexes of competing and overlappingpractices and discourses.

SUMMARY

Fisher begins by pointing out that much of the literature on NGOs is replete with sweepingand optimistic generalizations about NGOs’ potential for implementing alternative developmentprojects and facilitating democratization (441). In his view, what is needed are detailed studies ofwhat happens in specific places and times above and beyond the stated intentions and goals ofdevelopment practitioners and NGOs (443, 449). He then suggests three sets of issues that helpunpack the literature on NGOs: first, “how discourses about NGOs create knowledge, define sets ofappropriate practices, and facilitate and encourage NGO behavior as appropriate;” second, “howcomplex sets of relationships among various kinds of associations have had an impact in specificlocales at specific times;” and third, “how we can avoid reductionist views of NGOs as fixed andgeneralizable entities with essential characteristics and contextualize them within evolving processesof associating”(441-2). Each of these questions is explored in the four sections that follow the intro-duction.

In the first section, “Imagining NGOs,” Fisher looks at how NGOs are differently conceived bytwo camps of development critics. The first group, he notes, “views contemporary developmentprocesses as flawed but basically positive and inevitable,” and considers NGOs as “apolitical tools” tofurther various modified development goals and overcome impediments to development, such ascosts of developing countries’ institutional weaknesses (443-444). In comparison, the second groupseeks alternatives to the dominant development paradigm. For them, local voluntary associations arevaluable because they are “part of a process that is capable of transforming the state and society”(445).

In the next three sections, entitled “Conceptually Locating NGOs,” “Linking the Local and theGlobal,” and “The Micropolitics of NGOs,” he presents the following points regarding the questionof how to approach NGOs:

• NGOs should be seen as an “arena within which battles from society at large areinternalized, rather than as a set of entities,” and as “fragmented sites that havemultiple connections nationally and transnationally,” not as “local wholes subsumedwithin larger national and global political contexts” (449-450).

• “NGOs often initiate or sustain social movements” or “are the institutional vehiclesthat articulate protest and collective action”

• “While the moniker ‘nongovernment organizations’ suggests autonomy from govern-mental organizations, NGOs are often intimately connected with their home govern-ments in relationships that are both ambivalent and dynamic” (451).

• One main research question to be explored is “when and why local struggles becomeinternational and in which cases they do not; what encourages and constrains theinternationalization of local interventions; and how the international and the local

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appropriate, commodify, and affect one another.” The “translocal and transnationalconnections entail risk as well as opportunity,” however, “they may offer SouthernNGOs increased leverage and autonomy in their struggle with national governments,while on the other hand, they expose these NGOs to direction or control by othersources”(453).

• Is the tendency of organizations to drift from participatory to oligarchic politicalstructures inevitable? One way to answer this question is “through a conception ofcivil society not as a sector that contests the will of governments but as a ‘vector ofantagonistic contentions over governmental relations’ (Gordon 1991:23). Thisemphasis on the way NGOs contribute to civil society by fueling ongoing conten-tions rather than merely through the multiplication and differentiation of structuresrefocuses our attention on the processes and not merely the institutions of civilsociety”(456).

• “The framing of calls for sustainable development and social justice is an instance ofwhat Foucault has called the strategic reversibility of power relations, a means bywhich the terms of governmental practice can be turned into focuses of resistance.”Personal and social emancipation requires individuals and groups to “struggle for thefreedom to define themselves and their relationships with others on their own terms.”“The work of some empowerment NGOs contributes to this emancipatory processthrough the politicization of previously depoliticized realms and issues—for exampleissues concerning gender or the environment. They turn issues that directly engagethe self, subjective experience, and daily life into crucial sites of political contestation.The identity politics that emerge from this process are a means by which local groupsmaintain tenuous autonomy and reduce their susceptibility to co-optation andcolonization by external political actors” (457-458).

• “The objective of empowerment or liberty may not be served by institution buildingor perpetuating existent organizations, and may even be undermined by bureaucrati-zation.” “We might look for permanence in the rebellious process from which manyNGOs emerge and within which some NGOs remain engaged. NGOs and socialmovements may come and go, but the space created in their passing may contributeto new activism that builds up after them” (458-459).

In the last section, Fisher anticipates that further research of NGOs will provide insights into“conception of communities, local and translocal networks, technologies of control, and the politicalrole of intellectuals.” He ends by summarizing the main task of students of NGOs. He states, “thechallenge is to consider nongovernmental organizations one specific possible form of collective actionand human community and to set the stage for a comparative analysis of the different configurationsthese forms of collective action have taken and are taking in a complexly woven field of translocalflows” (459). Overall, this is an insightful review article which tries to advance the discussion ofNGOs by incorporating a Foucauldian discussion of power—particularly of governmentality and ofthe linkage between ethics and politics. It also demonstrates how ethnographic research of transfor-mative social movements and disciplining institutions can be used to study NGOs.

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Mathews, Freya, ed. 1996. Ecology and Democracy. London: Frank Cass.

SUMMARY

Three questions are posed as problem areas for this book-project to address. First, can a demo-cratic system respond adequately to crisis when the crisis is not directly visible, that is, when it isidentifiable to experts and to persons specially briefed, but not to ordinary citizens? Second, what isthe relation of ethics to democracy? Are democratic systems based on moral values or on self-interest?Finally, what constitutes the best political scenario for environmental reform? Are liberal democra-cies, even in principle, capable of responding adequately to the environmental challenge in theirregional and global dimensions?

Pondering these questions, the contributors to this book are particularly concerned with twothemes: first, the relation between ecological morality and political structures or procedures; second,the issue of centralization/decentralization and the idea of democracy without traditional boundaries.Varying in their evaluations of liberalism from qualified defense to extensive critique, the authorssuggest various models of “unbounded democracy:” “communicative democracy” (John Dryzek), anew world society of flexible structures, as insinuated by current transnational activist networks andNGOs (Janna Thompson); “demarcy” which distributes power along functional rather than regionallines (John Burnheim); unbounded transnational eco-communities accommodating difference (FreyaMathews and Ian Barns).

Yet, the prospects for these alternative political models are not determined merely by theirtheoretical merits. Rather, the most challenging issue is how such experimental forms of democracycan flourish in the current market-oriented economic environment. This book thus ends withBronwyn Hayward’s article that evaluates theories of participatory democracy in the context ofenvironmental management in New Zealand. Casting a critical eye on the faith of radical ecologistsin a pre-established “fit” between ecology and participatory democracy, Hayward argues that thefollowing issues require more research: ecological rationality, community diversity, representingfuture generations, and intrinsic values.

Poffenberger Mark. 1996. Grassroots Forest Protection. Asia Forest Network. ResearchNetwork Report, No. 7, March.

SUMMARY

According to the author, there has been a spread of community forestry in India. AsPoffenberger puts it, India seems to offer good opportunities to learn about past and future methodsof forest management, as its history illustrates a shift from forest nationalization, which often in-volved conflict over forest access among rural communities, private sector interests, and the state, torecent devolution. After documenting several case histories, Poffenberger raises some issues that needfurther attention: the likelihood that forest protection committee (FPC) organizations can be ma-nipulated by outside interests; the relationship between small community resource managementgroups and local governance structures; women’s limited participation in local councils and FPCs;

25

the displacement of some low-income fuelwood collectors by forest closure (73).

Ribot, Jess. 2000. “Rebellion, Representation, and Enfranchisement in the Forest vil-lages of Makacoulibantang, Eastern Senegal,” in People, Plants, Justice: The Politics ofConservation. Charles Zerner ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

In this essay, Ribot presents a case in which local chiefs have a lack of political accountabilitydue to certain patterns of electoral system. On the basis of this case study, he argues that enfranchise-ment, not merely devolution, is a core element of community participation in environmental man-agement (136). He also criticizes a trend to reify property, pointing out that it is only one mecha-nism that determine who can benefit from or protect natural resources. He concludes, “justice in thecontext of participatory natural resource management is concerned with what is devolved to whom:

The what must include the devolution of powers over the disposition of forests, of means togarner financial resources to operate with, of access to labor opportunities and markets, and ofaccess to political processes… The whom involves the problem of representation. Indigenou orlocal does not necessarily mean representative or fair. Some process of inclusion or some formof accountable representation must be constructed if the notion of community—which is al-ways a stratified ensemble of persons with different needs and powers—is to have a collectivemeaning [154].

Additional Readings

Agrawal, Arun and Ribot, Jesse. 1999. “Accountability in decentralization: A framework with SouthAsian and West African cases.” Journal of Developing Areas 33(4): 473

Alley, Kelly D, Charles E. Faupel and Conner Bailey. 1995. “The Historical Transformations of aGrassroots Environmental Group.” Human Organization. 54(4): 410.

Sundberg, Juanita. 1998. “NGO Landscapes in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala.” Geo-graphical Review 88(3):388.

26

Property Relations

Overview

Studies of common-pool resources and common property tackle a challenging question confrontingcommunity-based resource management projects: can users groups effectively manage natural re-sources overcoming the temptations to overharvest? (Ostrom 1999) Noting that community empow-erment is not achieved simply by “the decentralization of authority over natural resources from thecentral government to ‘a community’”(Agrawal and Gibson 1999:637), these studies focus on thesphere of institutions for self- regulation of resource use, particularly property relations. While onestream of this research focuses on the conditions under which such institutions can be established,another stream pay more attention to the historical and cultural dimensions of property relations(Castro 1995; Peluso 1996). Yet another line of research in this area explores the relationship be-tween property relations and other institutions, such as the law. The links between property relationsand self-governance are examined through the following inquiries:

• What are the conditions conducive to effective self-governance of resources? How doinstitutions facilitate or hamper the construction of community members’ values?(Ostrom 1999; Gibson, McKean and Ostrom 2000; Gibson and Tomas 1998).

• What is the legal basis for common property? How can the integration of parallelsystems of customary and statutory land law be possible? (Bruce 1999).

• In what way do formal “owners” of natural resources seek to privatize collective userights of all community members? What factors account for the success or failure ofthis attempt? (Potkanski and Adams 1998).

• What are the social and cultural bases of communal controls? What historical condi-tions propel internal differentiation to undermine traditional land use regulations?How does a historically grounded set of meanings attached to a resource criticallymediate both exclusionary and incentive-based rights structures? How does locallyperceived ethic of resource access help many people resist the divisive aspects ofcommodification? (Castro 1995; Goebel 1999; Peluso 1996).

• In addition to property rights to land, what social arrangements involve controllingforest resources? What factors affect the cooperation level in the management ofcommons? What limitations does a typology of common-pool resources have when itis primarily based on the physical attributes of the resources and their flows? (Day-ton-Johnson 2000; Ribot 2000; Swallow 1995).

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References

Agrawal, Arun and Clark C. Gibson. 1999. “Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role ofCommunity in Natural Resource Conservation.” World Development 27(4):629.12

Bruce, John W. 1999. “Legal Bases for the Management of Forest Resources as Common Property.”Community Forestry Note No.14. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the UnitedNations. (http://www.fao.org/forestry/fon/fonp/cfu/pub/en/fn/abfn14-e.stm)

Castro, Alfonso. 1995. Facing Kirinyaga: A Social History of Forest Commons in Southern MountKenya. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, Ltd.

Dayton-Johnson, Jeff. 2000. “Determinants of Collective Action on the Local Commons: A ModelEvidence from Mexico.” Journal of Development Economics 62(1):181.

Gibson, Clark, Margaret McKean, and Elinor Ostrom, eds. 2000. People and Forests. Massachusetts:Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Gibson, Clark C. and Tomas Koontz. 1998. “When “Community” is Not Enough: Institutions andValues in Community-Based Forest Management in Southern Indiana.” Human Ecology: AnInterdisciplinary Journal 26(4):621.

Goebel, Allison. 1999. “‘Then It’s Clear Who Owns the Trees’: Common Property and PrivateControl in the Social Forest in a Zimbabwean Resettlement Area.” Rural Sociology 64(4):624.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1999. “Self-Governance and Forest Resources.” Center for International ForestryResearch. Occasional Paper, No.20. (http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/publications/pdf_files/OccPapers/OP-20.pdf )

Peluso, Nancy Lee. 1996. “Fruit trees and family trees in an anthropogenic forest: ethics of access,property zones and environmental change in Indonesia.” Comparative Studies in Society andHistory. 38 (3):510.

Potkanski, Tomasz and William M. Adams. 1998. “Water Scarcity, Property Regimes and IrrigationManagement in Tanzania.” Journal of Development Studies 34(4):86.

Swallow, Brent M. 1995. “Mobile Flows, Storage, and Self-Organized Institutions for GoverningCommon-Pool Resources: Comment.” Land Economics 71(4):537.


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Bruce, John W. 1999. “Legal Bases for the Management of Forest Resources as CommonProperty.” Community Forestry Note No.14. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organizationof the United Nations. (http://www.fao.org/forestry/fon/fonp/cfu/pub/en/fn/abfn14-e.stm)

SUMMARY

In this article, Bruce makes two points with regard to current discussions on common propertyresource(CPR). First, the pervasiveness of conflict and competition in both the creation and mainte-nance of CPRs has not been adequately treated. Second, there has been little apparent attention toproviding a firm legal basis for common property. Among several reasons for such lack of a firm legalbasis, Bruce focuses on the issue of the poor integration of parallel systems of customary and statu-tory land law, which is related to colonial history. This poorly ntegrated legal pluralism, Bruceargues, causes local communities that seek to sustain their CPR to face a difficult choice amongseveral unsatisfactory legal solutions: “Can the community rely solely on its own custom as the legalbasis for common property management?” Or, “Should the community resort to national statutes tofind ‘modern’ forms of common property that the national state may more readily recognize?”(10)

Bruce attempts to answer these questions by bridging two perspectives: one of local communityand the other of those involved in national legislation. First, for communities and NGOs, he sug-gests the following track: first, conserve the tradition of community land use management overtraditional territories; then, create CPR to formalize and protect community control of forests; andfinally, create organizational structures for the management of the resource. Regarding a new modelof national law, he has several proposals: There should be constitutional protection for CPR; Laws onnatural resource management should recognize cases of existing indigenous forms of CPR andorganizations for managing them; there should be a co-management regime available, recognized inthe forestry law; the forestry law should allow the state to delegate control over forest resources andallow for a negotiation process resulting in a contractual solution; Gender issues must be addressed.

Castro, Alfonso. 1995. Facing Kirinyaga: A Social History of Forest Commons in SouthernMount Kenya. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, Ltd.

SUMMARY

In this history of state-local conflicts over the use and management of the southern MountKenya forest, Castro presents an effective critique of Garett Hardin’s thesis of “the tragedy of thecommons.” Hardin’s image of the “tragic commons” assumes that traditional resource use is typifiedby an open access regime, lacking well-defined property rights or social controls. In contrast, theinstitutional arrangements for managing common property resources in pre-colonial Ndia andGichugh were explicit, sophisticated, and effective in maintaining trees on the land. These commu-nal controls were based on conditions of social predictability rooted in kinship, neighborhoodrelations, and religious customs. The arrangements ensured widespread access to forests, as well as

29

farmland and pasture, but also entailed individual obligations regarding resource use. Social andsupernatural sanctions served as means of enforcing communal controls.

Traditional communal controls at Njukiine forest collapsed in the 1930s. At a glance, thesituation of the time may resemble some aspects of Hardin’s “tragic commons,”—competing indi-viduals tried to clear the forest as fast as possible to stake claim to farmland. Once again, however,one must view this event in the context of political and socio-economic change in the district and thewider society. The indigenous common property regime at Njukiine was overwhelmed by the influxof Gikuyu immigrants from Kiambu and Nyeri, themselves the victims of colonial land appropria-tion in their home districts. As in the case of the sacred groves, internal socio-cultural and economicdifferentiation propelled by colonialism also helped to erode traditional land use regulations (142).

Thus, Castro agrees with Robert Brightman(1987) that the decline of communal controls wasless related to “tragedies of the commons” than tragedies of invasions. Yet this book is not a merelament over the demise of the indigenous common property regime due to colonial rule. Notingconflicts among colonial interests and their need to negotiate with local people, Castro highlights therole of the local native council under colonial rule, particularly its successful control over a smallforest called Njukiine from 1937 to 1948: On the one hand, the council benefited the colonial stateby serving as a “safety valve” for local frustration.” On the other hand, the council, a vehicle forquestioning or denouncing state forestry, became a mechanism through which people resisted ForestDepartment proposals to take over local woodland (64-65). The system of community resourcemanagement developed by this council was an “innovative arrangement.” Castro argues that “itblended customary rights with bureaucratic administration” and “thus, legal predictability based oncolonial institutions was combined with social predictability rooted in local socio-cultural relations”(142).

Particularly interesting is Chapter Nine, where an analysis of “links between religious ideology,socio-economic and political change, and shifts in the use and management of one kind of commu-nal property, that is, sacred groves,” is provided (108). In the last section of the book, Castro pro-vides a list of lessons drawn from the history of conflicts over the Kirinyaga forests:

• While local institutions for forest resource management often offer a mechanism forconserving woodland and trees, this should not be taken as a conservation effort inits Western sense. The protection of forests and trees by local people in this case wasbased on practical and religious considerations (143).

• The question of what extent to which local strategies for managing forest resourcesare combined with global conservationist goals should be answered according tospecific situations. Yet it should be remembered that a large cognitive gap can exist inthe way villagers and conservationists conceptualize the use of forest resources. Whilethe conservationists consider themselves keeper of the forest, the villagers think ofthemselves as under its protection (143).

• As shown in the case of the Embu council’s trusteeship, even when communalcontrols are breaking down, they can form the foundation for a managerial regimethat is locally responsive and environmentally sustainable (143-144).

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• Major obstacles to a shift toward local control include the reluctance of public forestadministrations to recognize community control over commercially valued woodlandresources, and professionalism which prevents appreciation for local knowledge of,and rights to, forest resources (144).

Dayton-Johnson, Jeff. 2000. “Determinants of Collective Action on the Local Com-mons: A Model Evidence from Mexico.” Journal of Development Economics 62(1): 181.

ABSTRACT

I develop a model of cooperation in small irrigation systems. I give conditions under which anequalizing redistribution of wealth increases the level of equilibrium cooperation, but also showthat some redistribution that increase inequality can also increase cooperation. The distributiverule, a combination of arrangements for maintenance-cost sharing and water allocation, alsoaffects the cooperation level. I estimate statistical models of cooperation for three maintenanceindicators using field data from a study of Mexican irrigation societies. Social heterogeneity andlandholding inequality are significantly associated with lower maintenance. Distributive rulesthat allocate water proportionally to landholding size likewise reduce maintenance

Gibson, Clark, Margaret McKean, and Elinor Ostrom, eds. 2000. People and Forests.Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

SUMMARY

What are the main factors affecting deforestation? How should we approach this phenomenon,witnessed from the local to the global scale? Taking micro and comparative studies as its methodol-ogy, this volume explores the conditions under which local forest users can devise rules regulatingaccess and use in order to contribute to sustainable forest management. The first two chaptersprovide theoretical perspectives that guide the six following case studies. Among the points presentedin the conceptual discussion are:

• “Forests are associated with multiple products” and “multiple user groups” (5).

• “Institutional environment is a key factor in accounting for a forest’s condition”(19).

• “Forest management is intensely local” and “national legislation can be modified,ignored, or enforced by local communities to fit their circumstances” (21).

• The prevalent confusion of the private and public natures of goods, rights, andowners of rights should be corrected for three reasons. First, the dyad of private goodsand public goods lead us to overlook common-pool goods, a category into whichmost environmental resources fall. Second, the conceptual separation of goods fromproperty rights helps improve the match between property rights and goods, effec-tively problematizing an attempt to create fully individualized and parceled privateproperty rights on common-pool resources or to construct common-property regimes

31

to govern perfectly private goods. Third, “definitional clarity is a prerequisite forunderstanding how a group of individuals might be a private owner that can shareproperty rights and thus create a regime of common property rights for managingcommon pool goods”(32).

• “Common-property arrangements offer a way of parceling the flow of skimmable orharvestable income (the interest) from an interactive resource system without parcel-ing the stock or the principal itself ”(37). Common property regimes are desirablewhen: i) resources are physically indivisible (e.g., the stratosphere or water); ii)productive zones are not easily located; iii) uses in one zone immediately affect usesand productivity in another; or iv) it is costly for the society to create a large courtsystem to enforce individual land titles.

While drawing on the same research design, called an “Institutional Analysis and Development”framework, empirical studies in this volume highlight different aspects of local communities asimportant factors in managing forest resources: the size of local organizations regulating forest use inrelation to ecosystem size (chapter three); security of tenure and level of enforcement of rules (chap-ter four); the spatial configuration of institutions and human action as well as the geographic proper-ties of the natural resource (chapter five); forest use patterns and incentives of user groups (chaptersix); the interrelationship between game animals and fruiting trees, and between those food itemsand commercial timber interests (chapter seven); arrangements for identifying genuine users, deter-mining harvest amounts and timing, and active monitoring by users (chapter eight).

In the last chapter, the editors identify two sets of factors that enhance the “likelihood thatforest-resource users will organize themselves in the first place, and continue to experiment withrevised rules, to avoid the social losses associated with ineffective rules in-use to the use of a com-mon-pool resource”(230). The first set refers to the attributes of the resource: feasible improvement;indicators (the change in forest products that provide information about the condition of the forest);predictability; spatial location, terrain, and extent. The second refers to the attributes of the users ofthat resource: salience (the dependency of users on the forest for their livelihood); common under-standing; discount rate (users’ low discount rate in relation to future benefits to be achieved from theforest); trust and reciprocity; autonomy; prior organizational experience and local leadership.

Gibson, Clark C. and Tomas Koontz. 1998. “When “Community” is Not Enough: In-stitutions and Values in Community-Based Forest Management in Southern Indiana.”Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26(4):621.

ABSTRACT

Community-based management is increasingly viewed as the most appropriate arrangement forpromoting sustainable development of natural resources. A common assumption is that the values ofcommunity members, often assumed to be homogeneous, foster successful outcomes. However,analysts often treat these values and their homogeneity as exogenous factors, ignoring thecommunity’s potential role in managing members’ values. This study of community-based forest

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management in two southern Indiana sites examines how the members of the two communitiescreated institutions to screen, maintain, and defend their values. Analysis reveals that differentinstitutions shaped members’ preferences and led to different levels of community stability, conflictmanagement, and natural resource condition. We argue that understanding community-basedmanagement processes and outcomes requires careful attention to how institutions facilitate orhamper the construction of community members’ values.

Goebel, Allison. 1999. “‘Then It’s Clear Who Owns the Trees’: Common Property andPrivate Control in the Social Forest in a Zimbabwean Resettlement Area.” Rural Sociol-ogy 64(4):624-41.

ABSTRACT

The woodlands in the Resettlement Areas of post-Independence Zimbabwe are under severestress. The recent Land Tenure Commission identified the problem as the common property man-agement system in the woodlands, and recommended a change to private tenure. The government ofZimbabwe has accepted this recommendation. This paper explores the common property woodlandmanagement system in a case study of a Model A resettlement scheme in order to consider thispolicy shift. Key institutional inadequacies and widespread “poaching” of resources by neighboringcommunities emerge as the major macro causes for deforestation in common property areas. Inaddition, private control in some areas of the woodlands appears to have positive effects. While thesedynamics at first appear to support the shift to private tenure, doubts emerge when the woodlandmanagement system is placed in historical cultural context, and the poaching problem is seen as anaspect of the macro context of overall inequity in land and resource distribution.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1999. “Self-Governance and Forest Resources.” Center for InternationalForestry Research. Occasional Paper, No.20. (http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/publications/pdf_files/OccPapers/OP-20.pdf )

SUMMARY

Conventional theories of common-pool resources have presumed that resource users wereincapable of organizing to overcome the temptation to over-harvest, so that external authorities wereneeded. Ostrom challenges this traditional view by pointing out that extensive empirical research hasshown that resource users, particularly forest users, actually have devised rules to regulate the harvestand to ensure the sustainability of resource use. She also develops a set of conceptual tools that canbe used to predict when collective action institutions will be effective. She summarizes the attributesof resources and users that encourage cost-effective organization of local groups:

Forest users are more likely to devise their own rules when they use a forest that is starting todeteriorate but has not substantially disappeared, when some forest products provide early warn-ing concerning forest conditions, when forest products are predictably available, and when theforest is sufficiently small that users can develop accurate knowledge of conditions. Self-organi-zation is more likely to occur when forest resources are highly salient to users, when users have

33

a common understanding of the problems they face, when users have a low discount rate, whenusers trust one another, when users have autonomy to make some of their own rules, and whenusers have prior organizational experience [1].

In addition, Ostrom identifies a series of design principles of long-surviving self-governingcommon-pool resource institutions (7). These principles include clearly defined boundaries, thecongruence of distributed benefits from appropriation rules and the costs imposed by provision rules,collective-choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict-resolution of rights toorganize, and nested enterprises. She ends by calling for further empirical research to test the rel-evance and explanatory power of this proposal for existing forests.

Peluso, Nancy Lee. 1996. “Fruit trees and family trees in an anthropogenic forest: ethicsof access, property zones and environmental change in Indonesia.” Comparative Studiesin Society and History. 38 (3):510.

ABSTRACT

The effects of changing property and access conventions in an anthropogenic forest in WestKalimantan, Indonesia, are studied. It is shown that state intervention in property rights and land-scape compositions leads to social and environmental change. The creation of new spatial land-usezones and the redefinition of land use and access rights has resulted in degradation and poverty forlocal peoples. However, they have also adapted to these changes by building a new social and ecologi-cal landscape based on their former land use system

SUMMARY

In this essay, Peluso highlights the entangled historical, cultural, and ecological dimensions ofnatural resources. For instance, she introduces readers to the durian tree, a type of fruit tree, which isoften named after some event and therefore becomes part of village social history. Peluso also cap-tures environmental agency by showing that a tree’s biological characteristics influence propertyrights. Further, by using the concept of zoning in a temporal sense as well as a spatial sense, she tracesthe changing ethics of access to one tree through several generations. Overall, this essay effectivelyproposes a notion of property and landscape as a social process that interacts with ecological factors.

Potkanski, Tomasz and William M. Adams. 1998. “Water Scarcity, Property Regimesand Irrigation Management in Tanzania.” Journal of Development Studies 34(4):86.

ABSTRACT

This article explores the dynamics of property rights in irrigation water in Sonjo, Tanzania. Itanalyses an unsuccessful attempt by the ruling political group to change the institutional arrange-ments of water control to serve better their private goals. This example shows that not all internalinstitutional innovations in the field of utilizing natural resources lead to increased efficiency of thesystem from the point of view of the whole community. We draw on New Institutional Economics

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(NIE) and Common Property Resource Management (CPRM) theory to analyze the way in which itwas possible that those few within Sonjo society who are formally/nominally ‘the owners’ of watersought to privatize de facto collective use rights of all community members. We consider why this wasdone in some, but not all, Sonjo communities, and we describe why this process has eventually failed.

Swallow, Brent M. 1995. “Mobile Flows, Storage, and Self-Organized Institutions forGoverning Common-Pool Resources: Comment.” Land Economics 71(4):537.

ABSTRACT

Schlager, Blomquist and Tang (SBT) argued in their article, which appeared in the Aug. 1994issue of Land Economics, that mobility and storage of flows are critical features of common-poolresources. They proposed a typology of common-pool resources based on these two characteristics.Unfortunately, the study has several limitations that can undermine its application. For one, thelanguage and concepts employed emphasize the physical attributes of the resources and their flows,although these are supposedly not the authors’ main concerns. Moreover, they ignore the contribu-tions of other researchers on common property regimes, who have identified many other motivationsfor common property. Further, SBT did not consider “spatial and temporal variability” in resourceflows as much as mobility of flows, reducing the applicability of the results. Lastly, their conclusionthat storage availability reduces incentives to take part in first capture strategies is problematic.

Additional Readings

Leach, Melissa, Robin Mearns, and Ian Scoones. 1999. “Environmental Entitlements: Dynamics andInstitutions in Community-Based Natural Resource Management.” World Development27(2):225.

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States and Markets

Overview

Who should the local community turn to when the legitimacy of its claim is challenged by outsid-ers? (Bromley 1994:437) In the case of large and transboundary resource systems used by highlyheterogeneous groups, what type of resource management would be appropriate? (Singleton 1998)These questions invite a system of co-management by local communities and governments. On theother hand, the question of incentives and benefits in environmental projects foreground market-based resource management initiatives, such as eco-tourism and bioprospecting. Focusing on theissues of power and justice, studies of this nexus of development, conservation and democracy askthe following questions:

• What roles do state agencies and local communities play in the co-managementregime? Do institutions that emerge in settings where individuals and groups arerelatively autonomous reflect principles of allocative efficiency and serve to maxi-mize aggregate wealth? (Singleton 1998, 2000)

• What kinds of communites and citizenships are evoked in joint forest managementprojects? What frameworks of state and society are deployed in resource manage-ment programs? (Sivaramakrishnan 2000)

• Does participation in community-based tourism and conservation provide anopportunity for empowerment and improving the quality of life while also main-taining a healthy environment? What is the relationship between cultural survival,conservation efforts, and tourism? How does local history shape the context inwhich contemporary tourism is taking place? What is the role of internationalfunding agencies and NGOs in contexts of state-sponsored or sanctioned humanrights abuses related to tourism and conservation efforts? (Stonich 2000)

• Does bioprospecting provide voice to indigenous people? What constrains thenegotiating space for indigenous people? (Brush 1999)

• What kinds of rights does the Convention on Biological Diversity recognize to bepertinent to communities that contribute raw materials for bioprospecting pro-grams? Why do many bioprospecting programs lack direct ties with local communi-ties? How can local communities benefit from multinational biodiversity projects?(Miller 1997)

• How is value created in biological resources and how do the values of genetic re-sources increase exponentially as they leave their site of origin? (Parry 2000)

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References

Bromley 1994. “Economic Dimensions of Community and Conservation,” in Natural Connections.David Western and Michael Wright eds. Washington D.C.: Island Press.13

Brush, Stephen B. 1999. “Bioprospecting the Public Domain.” Cultural Anthropology 14(4): 535.

Miller, James S. 1997. “Ensuring Community Based Benefits in Multinational Bioprospecting.”American Journal of Botany 84(6):112.

Singleton, Sara. 1998. Constructing Cooperation : The Evolution of Institutions of Comanagement. AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press.

——, 2000. “Co-operation or Capture? The Paradox of Co-management and Community Participa-tion in Natural Resources Management and Environmental Policy-making.” EnvironmentalPolitics. 9(2):1

Sivaramakrishnan, K. 2000. “Crafting the Public Sphere in the Forests of West Bengal: Democracy,Development, and Political Action.” American Ethnologist 27(2):431.

Stonich, Susan C. 2000. The Other Side of Paradise: Tourism, Conservation, and Development in theBay Islands. New York: Cognizant Communication Corp.

13. See Western, Wright and Strum on p. 16 for annotation.

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Brush, Stephen B. 1999. “Bioprospecting the Public Domain.” Cultural Anthropology14(4): 535.

SUMMARY

In this paper, Brush asks how bioprospecting contracts address the inequality implied in thedisparity between communities that are economically poor but biologically affluent and others withthe opposite attributes (537). Taking the management of potato diversity by Peruvian peasantfarmers as his case, he contends that “the contract mode and its ensuing relationships for obtainingbiological resources are incongruent with the nature of indigenous knowledge and management ofbiological resources”(537). In his view, bioprospecting gives voice to indigenous people “only in theidioms of a dominating market rather than idioms that indigenous people might themselves pre-fer”(549). Moreover, “the loci and time frame of negotiation, ambiguities in the terrain of intellectualproperty, the protean and diffuse nature of knowledge and biological resources, and disorganizationamong indigenous groups” in all constrain the “negotiating space for indigenous people” (549).Although indigenous people already became vocal, Brush argues, their voice should be more audiblein national discourse that have more impact on legislation or executive action than in internationalrealism. As an alternative to “bioprospecting,” Bruce proposes the concept of “bio-cooperation” andthe notion of biological resources as public goods to be defended.

Miller, James S. 1997. “Ensuring Community Based Benefits in MultinationalBioprospecting.” American Journal of Botany 84(6):112.

ABSTRACT

The Convention on Biological Diversity recognizes that the developing countries of the tropics,contributing the raw materials for bioprospecting programs, have two kinds of rights. Informationprovided by indigenous groups about the traditional use of plants is protected by intellectual prop-erty rights, but the Convention also recognizes the sovereign right of countries to claim ownership ofthe plants that grow within their borders. Large-scale, high-throughput bioprospecting programsoften operate in more than a single country, and usually in many regions within each. Furthermore,in order to obtain large numbers of samples they are often taxonomically driven, rather than relyingon information from local informants. Therefore, while such programs must respect the sovereignrights of participating countries, they usually lack the direct ties with local communities that charac-terize ethnobotanically driven programs. Existing intellectual property rights mechanisms allownegotiation of contracts at the governmental level that insure community-based benefits discoveriesin the program. The development of Ancistrocladus korupensis, a Cameroonian vine that is thesource of an alkaloid active against HIV, provides an example of how local communities may benefitin multinational programs.

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Singleton, Sara. 1998. Constructing Cooperation : The Evolution of Institutions ofComanagement. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

SUMMARY

This book is a theoretical and empirical investigation into the evolution of institutions of self-governance in the area of natural resource management. The theoretical emphasis is on prob-lems of collective action and the evolution of rules and practices centered on the resolution ofsuch action. The empirical focus is on a regulatory regime in which 20 Pacific Northwest In-dian tribes co-manage the area’s salmon fisheries, along with the Washington State Departmentof Fish and Wildlife and various other federal and international regulatory bodies. This innova-tive system of joint decision-making has been a model for other groups seeking more localizedcontrol over resource policy and is of considerable interest to public policy practitioners andscholars interested in issues of natural resource management, institutional design, and partici-patory democracy [1].

Throughout the book, Singleton probes two questions. First, can user groups effectively managenatural resource systems? Second, are the institutions that are created at state-tribal, intertribal, andintratribal levels effective in helping the relevant groups solve collective action problems? (141) Sheconcludes that comanagement is costly but reduces monitoring and enforcement costs by increasingthe legitimacy of the system of management. She also finds that distributive concerns, which arerelated to transaction costs associated with bargaining problems, are critical to the adoption anddevelopment of this co-management program (148).

Singleton, Sara. 2000. “Co-operation or capture? The paradox of co-management andcommunity participation in natural resource management and environmental policy-making.” Environmental Politics 9(2) :1

ABSTRACT

This article examines the conditions under which community-based management or co-man-agement is likely to result in either (I) successful collaboration between a state agency and a localcommunity or (ii) ‘capture’ of a public agency by private or special interest. This article focuses onthe role of state agencies in the creation and maintenance of successful co-management regimes anddiscusses how state agencies can facilitate the creation of social trust while retaining independenceand a concern for broader public interests. The author argues that a combination of bureaucraticautonomy and an effective, independent judiciary is an important institutional component forsuccess. The argument is illustrated with the case of a co-management regime for salmon fisheries inthe US Pacific Northwest.

SUMMARY

According to Singleton, there are three categories of actions states should take to enhance thepossibility of successful co-management or community-based management. First, a state mustdemonstrate its commitment to genuine co-management. It must “create career incentives for statemanagers to consider the well-being of communities as an important measure of successful manage-

39

ment” (16). Second, given that there is often considerable scientific uncertainty associated withenvironmental outcomes, it is important for a state to build confidence among community membersin the competency of its management practices. Public information campaigns are critical in thisrespect. Third, a state has to create mechanisms that strengthen accountability. Among such mecha-nisms are to attach penalties to failures to live up to previously agreed yearly harvest targets, andperiodic independent audits of state and community management practices.

Singleton presents three reasons for the appeal of co-management(6). First, “local knowledgeabout the functioning of a particular ecosystem can be combined with scientific knowledge producedby state agency scientists to produce a more complete, finely-tuned set of information upon which tobase management decisions.” Second, “monitoring and enforcement can be more effective by virtueof being local, while oversight by state regulators interjects some measure of accountability to thelarger collectivity.” Third, “the legitimacy of the system is enhanced by involvement of user-groupsand community members, which may result in people being more willing to comply voluntarily withand even exceed the requirements placed upon them.” Yet Singleton does not blindly celebrate co-management. Rather, she ends her essay with one caveat: “while co-management can reorder rela-tions between different sets of actions in a variety of ways, it should be viewed as a continuation ofconflicts, rather than a resolution of them” (18).

Sivaramakrishnan, K. 2000. “Crafting the Public Sphere in the Forests of West Bengal:Democracy, Development, and Political Action.” American Ethnologist 27(2):431.

ABSTRACT

Participatory conservation and development initiatives have proliferated all over the world asthe 1990s became the decade for restructuring states and celebrating civil society. Examining onesuch major effort, called joint forest management, I propose several new directions for the anthropol-ogy of modernity, development, and environment. I scrutinize processes of local state-making in theforests of southern West Bengal, India, to reveal key tensions between development and democratiza-tion through an ethnography of political action.

SUMMARY

According to the author, over the last ten years, joint forest management in India has receivedmore than $200 million from various multilateral agencies and it has become the centerpiece ofparticipatory forestry on over 1.5 million hectares of land in 20 Indian states (434).Sivaramakrishnan sees in this program somewhat contradictory processes of statemaking and “creat-ing new localized communities based on constructed notions of local autonomy and resource sover-eignty”(433). “Statemaking,” a key concept in her work, is explained as follows:

With the term “statemaking” I refer to the ways in which institutions of government and ideasof governance are negotiated in specific contexts by local actors and agents of central design orbearers of official ideologies. Statemaking refers also to the power of the central government topenetrate rural society, exact compliance, and invoke commitment. This power rests on a deli-cate balance between autonomy and control in the relationship between state and society [Siu1989:9]. Statemaking is fundamentally about defining the forms and legitimations of govern-

40

ment and governmentality [433].

For Sivaramakrishnan, no village community is a natural grassroots unit. “It is a product ofseveral microlevel specifications associated with power gradients within and across small scale units ofsociety” (449). Focusing on the making of citizenship at the nexus of conservation, development,and democracy, he presents in this essay two points about forest management. First, forestry isconstituted through local contestation. Second, the composite of forest management emerges as apowerful social technology bearing the distinctive stamp of the places in which it is produced (434).

Stonich, Susan C. 2000. The Other Side of Paradise: Tourism, Conservation, and Develop-ment in the Bay Islands. New York: Cognizant Communication Corp.

SUMMARY

Focusing on the issue of equitable development and conservation programs, Stonich traces theorigins of current threats to the people, environment, and natural resources of the Bay Islands,Honduras. After providing a good guide to participatory approaches in chapter 1, she examines thehistorical background of current conflict and tourism development in chapter 2. In the followingthree chapters, she discusses the development of tourism on the island and its effects. Chapter 6focuses on community participation in resource management, identifying obstacles to and incentivesfor such participatory approaches. In the last chapter, she emphasizes history, power relations, andcultural survival issues.

Thorburn, Craig C. 2000. “Changing Customary Marine Resource Management Prac-tice and the Case of Sasi Lola in the Kei Islands, Indonesia.” World Development28(8):1461.

ABSTRACT

Sasi, the spatial and temporal closure of fields, forests, reefs fishing grounds, is a conspicuousfeature of many Moluccan. Despite increasing domestic and international awareness and praise bymany analysts who consider it to be an exemplary indigenous conservation tradition, the practice isin decline in many parts of Thousand Island province, and in many villages has disappeared. Thisstudy examines the practice of managing Trochus niloticus harvests in Ohoirenan, a village on theeastern coast of Kei Besar District of Southeast Maluku. Trochus is one of the most importantsources of cash income for Kei villagers, and until recently, for the government as well. Since 1987,trochus has been classified as an endangered species in Indonesia, and regulations have been issued toregulate cultivation, harvest and transport of this and other protected species. This article brieflyintroduces Kei customary law and property followed by a description of sasi and its application toreef trochus harvests. Examining a territorial conflict between neighboring villages, and more recentcontentions arising from efforts to protect the species, the article explores issues of society-nature andstate-society relations as pertain to natural management in Indonesia. Sasi continues to function asan exemplary community property resource (CPR) management institution in Ohoirenan, demon-strating equitable distribution of the benefits deriving from control of a local resource. But, erratic

41

and uneven enforcement of “one-size-fits-all” centralized conservation policy and law, collusion andself-interest on the part of various parties, combine to threaten both the resource and the institutionsthat have sustained it in this region. Within the context of a centralized, state-led natural resourcemanagement system, the species protection precludes the establishment of sensible, beneficial co-management regimes that could serve the interests and the inherent knowledge and capabilities oflocal communities and government agents.

Additional Readings

Grafton, R. Quentin. 2000. “Governance of the commons: a role for the state?” Land Economics76(4):504

Lipschutz, Ronnie and Ken Conca eds. The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics.1993. New York: Columbia University Press.

Noel, Erin. “Foreword (Government Activity).” Ecology Law Quarterly 25(4)

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Global Environmental Governance

Overview

As with the literature on local common-pool resources, international relations literature suggeststhat self-governance is possible. Noting the rapid development of a global environmental regime andalso the remarkable role nonstate actors play in environmental matters, the research in global envi-ronmental commons highlight the idea of governance without government (Rosenau 1992). Turningto “global civil society” as an alternative locus and agent of environmental management to the state,the literature attends to civic politics, as well as inter-governmental agreements, concerning globalcommons. The rise of a global environmental regime is not welcomed unconditionally, however.Some researchers see in this institutional development the formation of a new global disciplinaryregime which is still mainly concerned with economic growth (Escobar 1995; Gupta 1998). Yetsome focus on the issue of cultural encounters in the wake of the globalization of environmentalism.Indeed, the realm of environmental movements is becoming extremely cross-cultural space, wherecommunication between different notions of nature and human agency are facilitated, cross-cuttinggeographical boundaries. These different themes are explored through some of the following inquir-ies:

• Where should we locate the responsibility for environmental sustainability? How is itpossible to reorient human activities on the global scale and order of complexity?Why are the efforts of states to address environmental issues insufficient? How dotransnational activist groups effect change? (Wapner 1996, 2000)

• What are determinants of success or failure in efforts to establish internationalinstitutions for environmental issues? What are the factors affecting the effectivenessof such institutions? What are the interactions and linkages between social institu-tions and governments? Is it normal for the resultant organizations to build linkagesamong issue areas so that they eventually come to resemble our conventional idea ofgovernment? (Young 1994)

• How can we understand a global civil society rooted in a highly particularistic Natureand place? (Lipschutz and Mayer 1996)

• How should the envelopment of environmental politics by the institutions forenvironmental governance be addressed? Does this growth of global environmentalinstitutions point to the formation of new global disciplinary regime which is mainlyconcerned with the reorganization of capitalism? (Brosius 1999a,b; Escobar 1995;Gupta 1998)

• Is environmentalism, as currently understood in some Western societies, universal?(Milton 1995)

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References

Brosius, J. Peter. 1999a. “Green Dots, Pink Hearts: Displacing Politics From the Malaysian RainForest.” American Anthropologist 101(1):36.

——-, 1999b. “Analyses and Interventions.” Current Anthropology 40(3):277.

Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gupta, Akhil. 1998. Postcolonial Developments; Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham:Duke University Press.

Hewitt de Alcantara, Cynthia. 1998. “Uses and Abuses of the Concept of Governance.” InternationalSocial Science Journal 50(1):105.

Lipschutz, Ronnie D. and Judith Mayer. 1996. Global Civil Society and Global Environmental Gover-nance: The Politics of Nature from Place to Planet. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Milton, Kay. 1996. Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology inEnvironmental Discourse. London and New York: Routledge.

Rosenau, James and Ernst-Otto Czempiel ed. 1992. Governance Without Government: Order andChange in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Potter, David, ed. 1996. Special Issue on NGOs and Environmental Politics: Asia and Africa. TheJournal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 34(1). London: Frank Vass & Co., Ltd.

Stonich, Susan C. and Conner Bailey. 2000. “Resisting the Blue Revolution: Contending CoalitionsSurrounding Industrial Shrimp Farming.” Human Organization 59(1):23.

Stoker, Gerry. 1998. “Governance as Theory: Five Propositions.” International Social Science Journal(Governance Issue) 50(1):17.

Wapner, Paul. 1996. Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics. State University of New YorkPress.

Wapner, Paul and Lester Ruiz, eds. 2000. Principled World Politics: The Challenge of NormativeInternational Relations. Lanham: Rowman & Lettlefield Publishers, Inc.

Young, Oran. 1994. International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society.Itacha and London: Cornell University Press.

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Brosius, J. Peter. 1999a. “Green Dots, Pink Hearts: Displacing Politics From the Malay-sian Rain Forest.” American Anthropologist 101(1):36.

ABSTRACT

Recent years have witnessed the progressive envelopment of environmental politics withininstitutions for local, national, and global environmental governance. Such institutions inscribeparticular forms of discourse, simultaneously creating certain possibilities and precluding others,privileging certain actors and marginalizing others. Apparently designed to ameliorate environmentaldestruction, these institutions may in fact obstruct meaningful change through endless negotiation,legalistic evasion, and compromise among “stakeholders.” More importantly, however, they insinuateand naturalize a discourse that excludes moral or political imperatives in favor of indifferent bureau-cratic and technoscientific forms of institutionally created and validated intervention. Drawing onRappaport’s insights about “the subordination of the fundamental to the contingent and instrumen-tal” (in “The Anthropology of Trouble”), I examine this process of institutional development withreference to an international rain forest campaign that focused on Sarawak, East Malaysia, from thelate-1980s to the mid-1990s.

Brosius, J. Peter 1999b. “Analyses and Interventions.” Current Anthropology 40(3):277.

ABSTRACT

Recent years have witnessed the rapid proliferation and growth of local, national, and transnationalenvironmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), national bureaucracies concerned withenvironmental management and transnational institutions charged with implementing various formsof global environmental governance. This proliferation and recent theoretical trends within the disciplinehave contributed to a dramatic upsurge in interest among anthropologists in analyzing this phenomenon.The present discussion is an attempt to take stock of this current research trend within anthropologyand to contextualize it within a larger set of topical and theoretical concerns. I examine some of thetheoretical and practical sources of our interest in environmentalism and review a series of recenttrends in the anthropological analysis of environmental movements, rhetorics, and representations. I alsoidentify a set of other issues that I believe a critically informed anthropology might address in theproduction of future ethnographic accounts of environmental discourses, movements, and institutions.

SUMMARY

In this article, Brosius identifies three recent trends in the anthropological analysis of environ-mentalism. First, the anthropology of environmentalism offers a critique of romantic andessentialized images (of indigenous communities, for instance). Second, it emphasizes contestation .Third, it demonstrates an interest in globalization as well as transnational movements and discourses.Brosius then suggests a set of other issues to be explored in future studies of environmental dis-courses, movements, and institutions:

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• The discursive (re)production of particular topologies, such as that of globality,locality, wilderness, and the North and the South (281-282).

• “Diverse forms of temporality that underlie the ways in which particular environ-mental issues unfold”(283).

• Different degrees and forms of the perception of risk upon which environmentaldebates rely (284).

• National political cultures—particularly “national topologies of citizenship”—andessentialist “linkages between national communities and natural communities” (285).

• The images of the environment circulated in the public sphere (286).

• “The progressive envelopment of environmental politics by institutions for nationaland global environmental governance”(286).

Some more specific points of suggestion in relation to the research issues are as follows:

• We are witnessing the emergence of globalized political space in the growth of envi-ronmental NGOs as well as national and transnational institutions for environmentalgovernance.

• Environmental debates are not merely zones of contestation but zones of constantlyshifting positionality.

• A critical eye should be cast on the concept of community, which might lead tofurther discussion of culture, identity, and place.

• We have been so fixed on local social movements, transnational NGOs, and globaliz-ing processes that we have overlooked the need to understand how national politicalcultures might mediate. For example, to what extent are government decisions aboutthe siting of mines or timber concessions premised on assumptions about communi-ties that exist in those areas?

• To the extent that we equate environmentalism with environmental movements andcampaigns, we tend to ignore the progressive envelopment of environmental politicsby institutions for national and global environmental governance.

Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of theThird World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

SUMMARY

Escobar’s approach to development seems to resonate with three key works on discourse andpower: Edward Said’s study of Orientalism, Donzelot’s examination of the history of “the social,” and

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James Ferguson’s discussion of development as an “anti-politics machine.” Like “orientalism,” thedevelopment discourse is a hegemonic form of understanding and representing certain parts of theworld, particularly as an antithesis (or “rejected self ”) of the other parts, as shown in the terms “non-Western” and “Third World” (not First World). According to Escobar, the development discourseemerged in response to the problematization of poverty in the early post-World War II period. Themanagement of poverty, which resulted in panoply of interventions, was accountable for the creationof “the social,” which culminated in the twentieth century in the consolidation of the welfare stateand the ensemble of techniques encompassed under the rubric of social work. The most significantaspect of this “government of the social” is “the setting into place of apparatuses of knowledge andpower that took it upon themselves to optimize life by producing it under modern, scientific condi-tions”(23). In particular, the effects of the development discourse can be summarized as follows:

• The construction of the poor and underdeveloped as universal, pre-constitutedsubjects.

• The exercise of power over the Third World through discursive homogenization.

• The establishment of a view of social life as a technical problem, erasing its politicaland cultural aspects.

While the first four chapters concern the establishment of the development discourse and theway it works, the last two chapters address recent significant changes within the discursive formationof development: the inclusion of the peasantry, women, and the environment as new “client” groupsin the development discourse. Especially interesting is the section, “the death of nature and the riseof environment,” where Escobar pointedly criticizes the sustainable development discourse. Askingwhy sustainable development appears as a panacea to the conflict between economic growth and theenvironment, Escobar identifies four aspects regulating this “reconciliation of old enemies:”

• A recent, broader process of the problematization of global survival. The term “glo-bal,” which tends to emphasize equal responsibility, hides great differences andinequalities in resources between countries, regions and classes.

• The economy of visibility fostered by the sustainable development discourse. Theblame for environmental degradation was taken away from the large industrialpolluters in the North and South and from the predatory way of life fostered bycapitalism and development. Instead, blame is placed on poor peasants and their“backward” practices, such as swidden agriculture.

• The reproduction of the central aspects of economism and developmentalism. Underthe current framework of sustainable development, it is growth—not the environ-ment—that has to be sustained.

• The transformation of nature into environment longer does nature denotes an entitywith its own agency, a source of life and discourse. Along with the physical deteriora-tion of nature, we are witnessing its symbolic death. That which moves, creates,inspires—that is, the organizing principle of life—now resides in the environment,

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while nature is confined to an ever more passive role.

What, then, is the alternative to development? Refusing to search for a grand and universalsolution, Escobar proposes two approaches; first, to look for alternative practices in the grassrootsgroups resisting dominant interventions, and second, to get insights from ethnographies about thecirculation of the discourses and practices of modernity and development. Ultimately, Escobar seescultural difference at the bottom of the investigation of an alternative. For him, cultural differenceembodies the possibility of transforming the politics of representation. He states, “The greatestpolitical promise of minority cultures is their potential for resisting and subverting the axiomatics ofcapitalism and modernity in their hegemonic form” (225). Cultural difference is also at the root ofpost-development, in the sense that it can lead to the unmaking of the Third World. Therefore, achallenge to the Western historical mode in which the entire globe seems to be held captive.

Gupta, Akhil. 1998. Postcolonial Developments; Agriculture in the Making of Modern In-dia. Durham: Duke University Press

SUMMARY

In this book, Gupta seeks to capture the current conjuncture in which many existing elementsof colonialism and of the spatial order of nation-states are reconfigured into novel models of gover-nance (293). He finds the post-colonial condition in a somewhat unexpected place: rural northernIndia. By exploring the juxtaposition of seemingly incommensurable discourses in the lives of peas-ants in the area, such as the coexistence of “modern” technology and “traditional” knowledge, he callsinto question the notions of “backwardness” and “indigenousness” which have been cultivated in theAge of Development.

For Gupta, the recent emergence global environmentalism is “part of a qualitative transforma-tion of the world economy,” which helps “unbundle territorially based sovereignty” (22, 293). Yet heputs a different slant on the literature on globalism which tends to view “the global” as “non- local.”While “the directionality of change is usually depicted as being from the West to the rest,” he argues,“the global too originates from some locations”: “Euro-centric assumptions are thus smuggled in atthe same time that they are being theoretically disavowed”(24-25). He goes further, pointing out thatsuch duality is shaped and at the same time naturalizes nation-state (25).

Particularly in chapter five, titled “Peasants and Global Environmentalism,” Gupta focuses onthe rise of a global environmental regime and its corresponding modes of resistance. In analyzingvarious discourses and protests surrounding the Earth Summit in Rio, he notes that those who feelvulnerable to the new disciplinary mechanisms express their criticisms within “contradictory logics”:“familiar analogies with nationalist struggles against colonial power” and “nongovernmental,postnational organizing in new “unbundled” space (328). It is this ‘“unbundled’” space, he con-cludes, that characterizes ‘the post colonial condition’ providing room for alternative projects tocolonialism and nationalism (329).

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Hewitt de Alcantara, Cynthia. 1998. “Uses and Abuses of the Concept of Governance.”International Social Science Journal 50(1):105.

SUMMARY

How do various groups within the development community understand the concept of “gover-nance”? What purposes are served by using it? In this article, we attempt to answer these ques-tions by exploring some of the reasons for the new popularity of the term and considering theway it shapes policy in different development settings [150].

In particular, six areas of development theory and practice in which the concepts of “gover-nance” and “good governance” currently play a central role are examined: first, the attempt to with-draw from the dead-end of economistic thinking (while still managing to discuss social and politicalissues in relatively technical terms); second, the attempt to shift power from public to private sectors,reducing the role of the state and increasing that of civil society; third, the need to deal with require-ments for administrative and institutional reform within the public sector of Third World countries,without appearing to intervene too deeply in their internal affairs; fourth, a new insistence ondemocratization and human rights; fifth, and the terrible challenges confronted in situations of post-conflict reconstruction; finally, discussions of globalization and supranational organization . As“governance” suggests creating structures of authority at various levels of society, within the state andoutside it, above the state and below it, the term is considered appropriate for coming to grips withtransnational processes that require a creative institutional response (110).

Yet the author alerts readers to the possible abuse of the concept, governance by pointing outthat a process of “institutional change” that Latin America undergoes currently is different from whathas been expected in the literature on “good governance.” Thus the author suggests that the dis-course on governance move in the following directions (114):

• away from the search for standard blueprints of ‘good governance’, applicable any-where, and towards encouraging the creativity and originality of people in concretesocial settings;

• away from the ‘technification’ of institutional reform and towards a more opendialogue on the needs for change in specific institutions and programmes;

• away from a tendency to draw unrealistic lines between ‘state’ and ‘civil society’, andtowards greater efforts to strengthen the public sphere and to reward contributions tothe common good. This might be considered a new attempt to develop a discourse ofcitizenship;

• away from the preference for analysing institutional reform and macroeconomicpolicy separately, and towards a more explicit recognition of the necessary interrela-tion between these spheres; and

• away from the artificial separation of governance issues between national and interna-tional levels.

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Lipschutz, Ronnie D. and Judith Mayer. 1996. Global Civil Society and Global Environ-mental Governance: The Politics of Nature from Place to Planet. Albany: State University ofNew York Press.

SUMMARY

The “thing” that we call the “global environment” is, in many ways, a mosaic rather than aseamless picture. The mosaic adds up to a whole, but the whole is not dependent on everysingle piece of the mosaic being in place…More than this…the responsibility lies, instead, withthose who are able to find their ‘place’ in each individual piece, and turn it into Nature… Theresponsibility [for environmental sustainability], ultimately, will have to rest on social institu-tions, such as common-pool property resource systems or bioregions or restoration projects,developed and run by groups of stakeholders based in the “civil societies.” As the empiricalchapters in this book illustrate, moreover, while these groups are in specific places, they are notisolated from one another. The networks of knowledge and practice are extensive and dense. Tothe extent, therefore, that this local civil society emerges in many different parts of the world,and makes material contact with its counterparts in other places in the world, it comes torepresent a “global” civil society with a concern for both local and global environment. Theapparent paradox—a global civil society rooted in a highly particularistic Nature and place—isnot as paradoxical as it might seem at first glance. [233]

For Lipshutz, the environmentally oriented sector of global civil society engages in a project tomodify the underlying constitutive rule basis of modern civilization while developing new modes oflocal as well as transnational governance (2). Through the examination of environmental practices inCalifornia, Hungary, and Indonesia (chapters 4, 5, and 6), he suggests that the reconstruction ofcollective behavioral and social relations mostly occur at the local and regional levels, the level of theoperating resource regime itself (40). This leads to one of the main arguments of the book: environ-mental sustainability depends on the knowledge and practices of thousands of renegotiated local andregional resource regimes (e.g., common-pool property resource systems), rather than on “managingPlanet Earth” through a complex, centralized panopticon (217).

Milton, Kay. 1996. Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthro-pology in Environmental Discourse. London and New York: Routledge.

SUMMARY

Milton begins this book by pointing out several trends since the 1980s which advanced theengagement between social science and environmental discussions: the recognition of non-techno-logical factors affecting the environment (e.g., some financial policies of national governments andinternational funding agencies); the addition of human rights issues to environmental concerns; andthe rise of green consumerism. These newly perceived dimensions to environmental problems,Milton contends, helped reshape “what began (in so far as a beginning can be identified) as problemsof nature, ... as problems of technology, of resource management, of health, of economics, of interna-tional policies and of ideology”(4). Anthropological insights in particular are valuable in this arena,since the discipline has developed an understanding of diverse ways people perceive and interact withtheir environment. It allows one not only to learn local knowledge regarding the environment but

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also to see environmentalism as a “particular way of understanding:”

I should also stress that I see it [environmentalism] as a concern to protect the environmentthrough human effort and responsibility, rather than simply a concern that the environment beprotected. Given the various ways in which the environment itself is culturally defined, it ispossible to envisage a society in which a concern for the environment is strongly held, but inwhich agents other than human beings are seen as responsible for its protection: ancestral spir-its, for instance, or an all-powerful divine being [33].

Even where the protection of the environment is seen as being in human hands, these agentsmay require human obedience and respect in return for their protection. In these circum-stances, responsibility for the environment is in human hands, but may be implemented throughactions which, from the view point of industrial society, would not be easily be recognized asenvironmentalist: acts of worship, for instance, or the daily maintenance of certain standards ofbehavior (fulfillment of kinship obligations, avoidance of incest or adultery) [34].

This notion of environmentalism as “a type of cultural perspective” (33) is well supported inchapter 4, where Milton discusses the issue of cultural diversity and environmental concern.Through cross-cultural comparison of perspectives on the environment, she calls into question themyth of primitive ecological wisdom and advises environmentalists to be cautious in selecting theirmodels for sustainable living from the non-industrial world. “The identification of environmentallysustainable cultures,” she contends, “is a complex and uncertain business.” Instead, she emphasizesprotecting cultural diversity as an important resource for the long-term survival of the human species(141).

Another main theme in this book is that environmentalism is a transcultural and globalizingdiscourse (170-171). In analyzing the cultural content of environmental discourse in chapter 6,Milton focuses on the tension between the globalist and the anti-globalist perspective, and betweenconservative and “radical”(ecocentric) positions on the environment. Yet her intention here is not tofix boundaries among environmental ideologies. While diagnosing differences among them inregards to the issues of the primacy of development, the North-South divide, “global management,”and the notion of the environment as a resource for human use, she also notes the inconsistency ofenvironmental perspectives and some converging points among them. She ultimately reaches theconclusion that environmentalism is a more fluid and complex discourse than is portrayed by mostsocial scientific analysis (212).

Potter, David, ed. 1996. Special Issue on NGOs and Environmental Politics: Asia andAfrica. The Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics Vol. 34(1). London: FrankVass & Co., Ltd.

SUMMARY

This collection addresses aspects of one main question: Why are NGOs influential in affectingthe development of certain policies related to global environmental problems (1)? In particular, thediscussion includes structural factors, that is, constraints and opportunities that shape what NGOscan do and determine the content of their demands. First, any NGO attempting to influence anenvironmental policy inherits the particular environmental issue to which the policy relates. Many

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NGOs work on one particular environmental issue at a time, and if the issue is not intrinsicallyamenable to NGO influence, their advocacy work is greatly constrained. The second constraint is thecharacter of the target organizations NGOs confront. For instance, a secretive organization represent-ing very powerful interests and hostile to an NGO’s policy agenda is a tough target. Third, NGOscannot choose the domestic political context in which they find themselves. In general, it is assumedthat NGOs have more opportunities to be influential when operating in democratic political con-texts. Fourth, beyond the local and national levels, global power structures shape what NGOs canand cannot achieve by way of influencing environmental policies leading to difficulties achievingshort-term change.

Within this framework, the first two papers focus on democracy questions. Are environmentalNGOs more influential when they work in more democratic political contexts? The first papercompares NGO advocacy work in India and Indonesia, paying special attention to different aspectsof the policy process, while the second paper compares NGO advocacy work in Zimbabwe in regardsto four forms of policy influence—collaboration, confrontation, complementary activities, andconsciousness-raising. Their research, in conclusion, suggests that the extent of NGO influence onforest policy may not be directly determined by the extent to which the domestic political context isdemocratic. Rather, they found that NGOs in both democratic and non-democratic political con-texts may have little direct influence on policy choices, but more influence on policy implementa-tion.

In addition to theoretical development, this book has another aim: to promote sensitivity to theissue of North and South and to produce a concentrated discussion of Southern NGOs, which theprevious literature on NGO advocacy and environmental policy hastened to neglect. The third paperfocuses on these issues by examining the difference in the perception of transnational linkagesbetween Northern and Southern NGOs. The last three papers compose a unified discussion in thatboth the fifth and sixth papers draw on regime theory, elaborated in the fourth paper, to examine thework of NGOs in developing forest and desertification conventions. The geographical references,however, are different. While the fifth paper focuses on the role of Southern NGOs in the politicalprocesses involved in the Global Forest Convention, especially in Malaysia, the sixth paper examinesthe role of mainly African NGOs in the political process of a Convention on Desertification.

Rosenau, James and Ernst-Otto Czempiel ed. 1992. Governance Without Government:Order and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

SUMMARY

Governance, in other words, is a more encompassing phenomenon than government. It em-braces governmental institutions, but it also subsumes informal, non-governmental mecha-nisms whereby those persons and organizations within its purview move ahead, satisfy theirneeds, and fulfill their wants [5].

Governance is thus a system of rule that is as dependent on intersubjective meanings as onformally sanctioned constitutions and charters. Put more emphatically, governance is a systemof rule that works only if it is accepted by the majority (or, at least, by the most powerful ofthose it affects), whereas governments can function even in the face of widespread opposition to

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their politics. In this sense governance is always effective in performing the functions necessaryto systemic persistence, else it is not conceived to exist (since instead of referring to ineffectivegovernance, one speaks of anarchy or chaos). Governments, on the other hand, can be quiteineffective without being regarded as non-existent (they are viewed simply as “weak”). Thus it ispossible to conceive of governance without government—of regulatory mechanisms in a sphereof activity which function effectively even though they are not endowed with formal authority[5].

Stoker, Gerry. 1998. “Governance as Theory: Five Propositions.” International SocialScience Journal (Governance Issue) 50(1):17.

SUMMARY

Although the term “governance” is used in various ways, Stoker argues, there is a baselineargument: it refers to” the development of governing styles in which boundaries between and withinpublic and private sectors have become bluffed … the essence of governance is its focus on governingmechanisms which do not rest on recourse to the authority and sanctions of government” (18).

Stoker suggests five aspects of governance and related dilemmas for consideration:

• Governance refers to a set of institutions and actors that are drawn from, but also, gobeyond government.

There is a divorce between the complex reality of decision-making associated withgovernance and the normative codes used to explain and justify government.

• Governance identifies the blurring of boundaries and responsibilities in the task of tack-ling social and economic issues.

The blurring of responsibilities can lead to blame, avoidance, or scapegoating.

• Governance identifies the power dependence involved in the relationships between institu-tions involved in collective action.

Power dependence exacerbates the problem of unintended consequences for govern-ment.

• Governance is about autonomous self-governing networks of actors.

The emergence of self-governing networks raises difficulties over accountability.

• Governance recognizes the capacity to get things done which does not rest on the power ofgovernment to command or use its authority. It sees government as able to use new toolsand techniques to steer and guide.

Even where governments operate in a flexible way to steer collective action, failure ingovernance may occur.

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Stonich, Susan C. and Conner Bailey. 2000. “Resisting the Blue Revolution: Contend-ing Coalitions Surrounding Industrial Shrimp Farming.” Human Organization 59(1):23.

ABSTRACT

Multinational corporations, national governments, and international development agencies arepromoting the expansion of industrial shrimp farming in tropical, coastal zones of Asia, LatinAmerica, and Africa. Support is based on the belief that shrimp farming can contribute to the world’sfood supply by compensating for declines in capture fisheries, generate significant foreign exchangeearnings, and enhance employment opportunities and incomes in poor, coastal communities. How-ever, the explosive growth of the industry is generating mounting criticisms over its social, economic,and environmental consequences. The escalating conflicts between critics and supporters of indus-trial shrimp farming have transcended local and national arenas. They have catalyzed the formationof global alliances of environmental and peasant-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)opposed to shrimp farming and of industry groups seeking to counter the claims and campaigns ofthis resistance coalition. This paper uses a political ecology approach to examine the formation ofthese contending global coalitions and the establishment of a global environmental and politicalarena around shrimp farming. The paper contributes to an understanding of the dynamic roles ofNGOs in transnational advocacy networks and the extent to which transnational networks cantranscend traditional sources of weakness of local organizations.

Wapner, Paul. 1996. Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics. State University ofNew York Press.

SUMMARY

In this book, Wapner assumes a critical stance toward some “state-centered” approaches tononstate actors in world politics. The significance of NGOs, he points out, should not be deter-mined merely in terms of their influence on state behavior. What instead deserve attention is theirrelationship with the “larger collectivities throughout the world,” that is, “global civil society”(10).He then presents three case studies: Greenpeace’s work in the global cultural realm; Friends of theEarth’s engagement with local people in environmentally stressed areas; and World Wildlife Fund’sprojects at the interface between states and global civil society. Analyzing how and in what socialspace the transnational environmental groups effect change, Wapner reaches the conclusion that themechanisms environmental groups activate are forms of governance. In the last chapter, Wapnerhighlights two limitations of the traditional understanding of world politics. First, “world” shouldnot be equated with “state system.” What appears in the gap is the space for world civic politics ledby nonstate actors. Second, politics is not only confined to the realm of governments. There isnonstatist modes of governance, that is, “forms of power associated with norms, rules, and discoursesthat actually shape people’s desires, conceptions, understandings of the self, and, ultimately, behaviorwithout recourse to law or the threat of physical coercion”(163).

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Wapner, Paul and Lester Ruiz, eds. 2000. Principled World Politics: The Challenge of Nor-mative International Relations. Lanham: Rowman & Lettlefield Publishers, Inc.

SUMMARY

Aiming to “advance the achievement of a just, peaceful, ecologically sound, and economicallyviable world order”(4), the authors of this book explore how new normative approaches to interna-tional relations should engage the three challenges of this era: globalization; poststructuralism; and asearch for a new vision for political agency. Their responses seem to boil down to an interest in“governance both below and above the arena of the state system and world economy” (15), mostlyappearing in the realms of transnational social movements, global civil society, local movements, andsmall-scale community-based politics. While parts one, two, and seven examine the theoretical placeand history of normative thought in the international relations literature, the rest of the parts aremainly concerned with particular political practices that try to configure international relationsaround the agendas of social justice (part three), economic well-being (part four), peace (part five), orhumane governance (part six). Particularly interesting is chapter 18 of part 6, entitled “The Norma-tive Promise of Nonstate Actors: A Theoretical Account of Global Civil Society,” which provides abrief history of the idea of civil society and a conceptual investigation of the relationship betweencivil society and governance, both at the domestic and global level.

Young, Oran. 1994. International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a State-less Society. Itacha and London: Cornell University Press

SUMMARY

In this book, Young advocates institutional explanations in accounting for collective outcomesin international society. He begins by distinguishing institutions and organizations, and governanceand government. “Governance,” he states, “involves the establishment and operation of social insti-tutions capable of resolving conflicts, facilitating cooperation, or, more generally, alleviating collec-tive-action problems in a world of interdependent actors”(15). In chapters two and three, Youngdiscusses the formation and the effectiveness of an international governance system using two cases: aglobal climate regime and a collection of shared natural resources that are regional at scope. Buildingon these empirical analyses, he explores in the following three chapters the issues of institutionalbargaining, the difference between structural power and bargaining leverage, and the effectiveness ofgovernance systems in international society. The last two chapters are devoted to the clarification ofthe difference between international governance systems and international organizations as well as tothe understanding of specific governance systems as legal regimes.

In particular, taking the Arctic’s shared natural resources as his case, Young emphasizes thefollowing points in regards to the determinants of robust and effective governance: first, a properbalance between inclusiveness and workability, that is, the reconciliation between a need for theexpansion of the scope of governance systems to encompass differentiable but inter-related humanactivities and a need to cope with the question of distant manager’s legitimacy; second, flexibility, or,the capacity of a governance system to adapt to changing circumstances without losing its identity;

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and finally, sensitivity to occurrences in the broader political and socioeconmic settings in which theyoperate (75-77).

Additional Readings

Anderson, James and Chris Brook, Alland Cochrane. 1995. A Global World?: Re-ordering PoliticalSpace. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Edwards, Michael and David Hulme. 1996. Beyond the Magic Bullet: NGO Performance and Account-ability in the Post-Cold War World. West Hartford, CT:Kumarian Press.

Foucault 1991. “Governmentality,” in The Foucault effect: Studies in Governmentality. Burchell,Gordon, and Miller ed. Burchell Graham, Gordon Colin, Miller Peter eds. University of Chi-cago Press.

Gibson, Clark C., Elinor Ostrom, T.K. Ahn. 2000. “The Concept of Scale and the Human Dimen-sion of Global Change: A Survey.” Ecological Economics 32:217

Keck, Margaret and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in InternationalPolitics. Itacha and London: Cornell University Press.

Kooiman J and Van Vliet .1993. “Governance and Public Management,” in Managing Public Orga-nizations. Kooiman ed. London: Sage.

Luke, Timothy W. 1995. “On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discoursesof Contemporary Environmentalism.” Cultural Critique 31.

O’Neill, Kate 2000. Waste Trading among Rich Nations: Building a New Theory of EnvironmentalRegulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

——-, 1997. Along the Domestic-Foreign Fornteer: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sturgeon, Noel. 1999. “Ecofeminist Appropriations and Transnational Environmentalisms.” Identi-ties 6(2-3):255.

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Justice

Overview

In their 1987 report, titled “Our Common Future,” The World Commission on Environment andDevelopment articulated the links between common interest and justice: “our inability to promotethe common interest in sustainable development is often a product of the relative neglect of eco-nomic and social justice within and amongst nations.” Currently, questions of justice seem to runthrough various arenas of environmental movements. While the notion of justice in environmentaldiscussion tended to be confined to the engagement of environmental sustainability with humanrights, civil rights, or equitable economic benefits, efforts to broaden room for the integration ofenvironmental concerns and the agendas of justice and democracy are emerging. The recent rise of“place politics,” which forges the cultural and ecological links with “identity politics,” may be onepromising avenue toward multidimensional justice which is not limited to economic equity or equallegal right (Escobar 2001; Harvey 1996). Some questions guiding studies in this area are:

• What are the common concerns of conservation organizations and indigenouspeoples? How can they collaborate effectively? Why do human rights and self-determination matter to conservationists? (Weber, Burtler, and Larson 2000).

• How is social inequality interwoven with environmental inequality? What motivatesdisenfranchised people to put their concern about health and safety into activism?How does the history of particular communities inform people’s perception ofenvironmental risks and political agency? (Bullard 2000)

• What potential problems exist for civil society and citizenship when community-based natural resource management movements are linked to initiative based onethnicity and territory? How can the language of environmental justice be articulatedin ways that simultaneously support affirmations of regional particularity at the sametime that they encourage emergent understandings of common ground for construc-tive struggle and collaboration across North-South borders? (Brosius, Tsing andZerner 1999; Zerner 2000)

• How can the concept of justice be developed in ways that emphasize the heterogene-ity of experience of injustice and yet capture the moments in which multiple forms ofoppression coalesce? (Harvey 1996)

• How has “place” become an important object of struggle in the strategies of socialmovements? What are our visions of post-development grassroots form of politics?(Escobar 2001; Harvey 1996; Massey and Jess 1995; Parajuli 1996)

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References

Brosius, Peter, Anna Tsing, and Charles Zerner. 1999. “Assessing Community-Based Natural Re-source Management.” Ambio 28(2).

Bullard, Robert D. 2000(1990). Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder:Westview Press.

Cole, Luke W. 1998. “The theory and reality of community-based environmental decision-making:the failure of California’s Tanner Act and its implications for environmental justice.” EcologyLaw Quarterly 25(4): 733

Cole, Luke W. 1995. “Roots Activists: Three Models of Environmental Advocacy.” Virginia Environ-mental Law Journal. 14(4):686

Escobar, Arturo. 2001. “Culture Sits in Place: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies ofLocalization.” Political Geography 20(1):139.

Guha, Ramachandra and Juan Martinez-Alier. 1997. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North andSouth. Earthscan Publications, Ltd.

Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publishers, Inc.

Zerner, Charles. 2000. People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Conservation. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Weber, Ron, John Burtler, and Patty Larson. 2000. Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organiza-tions: Experiences in collaboration. World Wildlife Fund.

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Brosius, Peter, Anna Tsing, and Charles Zerner. 1999. “Assessing Community BasedNatural-Resource Management.” Ambio 28(2).

SUMMARY

This article succinctly summarizes discussions from the conference, “Representing Communi-ties: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Resource Management,” held in 1997 with thesupport of the Ford Foundation. The premise of the discussions was that “a loosely woven transna-tional movement has emerged, based particularly on advocacy by nongovernmental organizationsworking with local groups and communities, on the one hand, and national and transnationalorganizations, on the other, to build and extend new versions of environmental and social advocacy,which link social justice and environmental management agendas”(197). In particular, the mainfocus rests on community-based natural-resource management (CBNRM) programs. Questionsposed include: Can CBNRM reconcile the goals of social justice and environmental sustainability?;What opportunities for democratization and for effective environmental management does CBNRMoffer?; What are the possibilities that CBNRM may be appropriated or manipulated by actors whoseinterests are antithetical to the goals of social justice and environmental sustainability?; What poten-tial problems exist for civil society and citizenship when CBNRM movements are linked to initia-tives based on ethnicity and territory?

The following are some important conclusions from the conference presented in this article:

• In advocating CBNRM programs, it is necessary to be alert to the cultural, politicaland historical contingencies that exist at any specific site, and to make every effort tobuild up from existing practices to support locally appropriate, equitable and sustain-able CBNRM.

• CBNRM should be built in self-conscious relation to mobilizations for nationaldemocracy, on the one hand, and local aspirations for resource tenure rights andpolitical voice, on the other.

• In the model of top-down CBNRM, it is likely that communities are tapped as asource of labor rather than a source of resource management design, with the conser-vation and/or resource management outcomes driven toward the possibility ofbureaucratic or military coercion.

The longer version of this discussion appeared as an article entitled, “Representing Communi-ties: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Resource Management.” 1998. Society and NaturalResources 11(2). In this article, the same authors outline a series of themes, questions, and concernsthat they believe should be addressed both in the work of scholars engaged in analyzing the issue ofsocial justice and resource management, and in the efforts of advocates and donor institutions whoare engaged in designing and implementing CBNRM programs.

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Bullard, Robert D. 2000(1990). Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality.Boulder: Westview Press.

SUMMARY

Why does race matter in environmental discourse? Bullard contends that the question ofenvironmental justice can hardly be reduced to a poverty issue, since middle-income African Ameri-can communities are confronted with many of the same land-use disputes and environmental threatsas their lower-income counterparts. In this study, his survey sample group consists of both middle-income and lower-income black households. Concerning the issue of economic trade-off, Bullardadmits that the appeal of industry’s promise to bring jobs to predominantly minority communities ispowerful, especially when people’s primary concern is sustaining their lives. However, he also stressesthat the job issue does not always overwhelm the issues of health and safety.

What, then, motivates people to put their concern about health and safety into activism?Bullard suggests that the answers may be in notions of social equity and the history of activism. First,people’s concerns about health and safety should be crystallized as a question of social equity, linkingenvironmental activism to feelings of deprivation. Second, the history of activism in black communi-ties is important in terms of locally based feelings of trust and power to mobilize people locally.Working against mobilization theory, he points out that the power to mobilize local citizens on anenvironmental issue are often acquired in institutions indigenous to the black community, whereblacks, themselves, are in decision-making positions.

Some general characteristics of the environmental justice framework are provided in ChapterSix, titled “Environmental Justice as a Working Model.” He argues that the framework should:

• “Incorporate the principle of the right of all individuals to be protected from envi-ronmental degradation.” This is a demand for “legislation creating a Fair Environ-mental Protection Act modeled after the various civil rights acts that promote nondis-crimination in such areas as housing and employment”(122).

• “Adopt a public health model of prevention as the preferred strategy.” This meansthat “affected communities should not have to wait until causation or conclusive‘proof ’ is established before preventive action is taken”(122).

• “Shift the burden of proof to polluters and dischargers who do harm, discriminate, ordo not give equal protection to racial and ethnic minorities and other ‘protected’classes” (123).

• “Allow disparate impact and statistical weight, as opposed to ‘intent,’ to infer dis-crimination”(123).

• “Redress disproportionate impact through ‘targeted’ action and resources” (123).(format: to be indented)

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Cole, Luke W. 1998. “The theory and reality of community-based environmental deci-sion-making: the failure of California’s Tanner Act and its implications for environmen-tal justice.” Ecology Law Quarterly 25(4): 733

SUMMARY

This article examines a California law, popularly known as the Tanner Act, which purports togive those bearing the brunt of a decision to permit a toxic waste facility some say in thatdecision. By looking at the actual experiences of three communities which have encounteredthe Tanner Act’s the decision-making process, the Article tries to determine what makes a localprocess work or fail for the affected community. Examining the reality behind the theory ofcommunity involvement is essential for designing and using laws to achieve environmentaljustice [733].

According to Cole, the irony of the case studies is that local residents had to appeal to state andfederal power sources when they were denied a role in local decision-making. Another irony is thatthe very formality of the legal process provides community residents more protection than theinformal Tanner Act process when the process is run by racist or insensitive decisionmakers. Coleproposes political solutions: local residents should force into reality the goal of environmental justicemovement, that is, local input into and control of land use decisions, either by pressuring theirlegislatures to put some teeth into the Tanner Act, or by electing officials accountable to their con-stituents.

Cole, Luke W. 1995. “Roots Activists: Three Models of Environmental Advocacy.” Vir-ginia Environmental Law Journal. 14(4):686

SUMMARY

In this article, Cole presents three models of environmental advocacy, which offer contrastingapproaches to “lawyering for environmental justice”(688). First, the “professional model” is based onthe idea that the attorney is an expert and thus best represents a group’s interest during the permit-ting process. Second, the “participatory model” seeks to maximize community involvement in theadministrative permitting process. According to this model, the most important public input ispublic comment on the Environment Impact Report (EIR). This model presumes that environmen-tal decision making would be fairer if people had more access to the system. In contrast, the thirdmodel, “power model,” tends to be skeptical about the system and believe that no amount of partici-pation by itself will change the relations of power to which environmental degradation is attributed.As such, practitioners of the “power model” focus on the issue of “powerlessness”—the root ofcommunity problems. However, this model has one significant problem. If a community group hasignored the administrative process and the decision-makers approve the project, the group will beprecluded from pursuing a lawsuit.

Of the three models, Cole gives priority to the last two models and argues that their relation-ship is complementary. While the “participatory model” advocates gaining information about aproject and giving people a voice, the “power model” favors pressuring decision-makers to be more

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receptive to hearing community groups. In this light, Cole finally stresses that strategic use of publicparticipation provisions in environmental laws can help relieve the burden of environmental dangerson low-income communities and communities of color, while bringing those communities togetherto exercise their collective power.

Escobar, Arturo. 2001. “Culture Sits in Place: Reflections on Globalism and SubalternStrategies of Localization.” Political Geography 20(1):139.

ABSTRACT

The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the concept of place in anthropology,geography, and political ecology. “Place”—or, more accurately, the defense of constructions ofplace—has also become an important object of struggle in the strategies of social movements. Thispaper is situated at the intersection of conversations in the disciplines about globalization and place,on the one hand, and conversation in social movements about place and political strategy, on theother. By arguing against a certain globalocentrism in the disciplines that tends to effect an erasure ofplace, the paper suggests ways in which the defense of place by social movements might be consti-tuted as a rallying point for both theory construction and political action. The paper proposes thatplace-based struggles might be seen as multi-scale, network-oriented subaltern strategies of localiza-tion. The argument is illustrated with the case of the social movement of black communities of thePacific rainforest region of Colombia.

SUMMARY

In this paper, Escobar is concerned with “the post-development politics” based on the defenseof place. By presenting some innovative projects of the Process of Black Communities and theBiodiversity Conservation project in Colombian Pacific, he convincingly argues that the constructionof the entire Pacific rainforest region as a “region-territory of ethnic groups” is a “strategy ofsustainability and vice versa: sustainability is also a strategy for the construction and defense of theregion-territory”(162). He continues:

The region-territory can thus be said to articulate the life project of the communities with thepolitical project of the social movement. The struggle for territory is thus a cultural struggle forautonomy and self-determination. This explains why for many people of the Pacific the loss ofterritory would amount to a return to slavery, or, worse perhaps, to becoming ‘common citi-zens’ [162].

Yet places are connected, selectively, thus creating “glocalities”(166).

They [networks] create flows that link sites which, operating more like fractal structures thanfixed architectures, enable diverse couplings (structural, strategic, conjunctural] with other sitesand networks. This is why I say that the meaning of the politics of place can be found at theintersection of the scaling effects of networks and the strategies of the emergent identities. AsRocheleau put it eloquently, this calls for an interest in ‘the combination of people-in-place andpeople-in-networks, and the portability (or not] of people’s ways of being-in-place and being-in-relation with humans and other beings’ (D. Rocheleau, personal communication) [170].

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Escobar finally invites studies in anthropology, political geography and political ecology to the“critique of the privilege of space over place, of capitalism over non-capitalism, of global cultures andnatures over local ones”(170), suggesting several questions for further research. Among them: “whichforms of “the global” can be imagined from multiple place-based perspectives?”; “what notions ofpolitics, democracy and the economy are needed to release the affectivity of the local in all of itsmultiplicity and contradictions?”; What role will various social actors—including technologies oldand new—have to play in order to create networks on which manifold forms of the local can rely intheir encounter with the multiple manifestations of the global?” (171).

Guha, Ramachandra and Juan Martinez-Alier. 1997. Varieties of Environmentalism: Es-says North and South. Earthscan Publications, Ltd.

SUMMARY

This book is a polemic against the conventional belief that poverty is the main cause of environ-mental degradation. The critique of the assumption of “incompatibility” between environmentalismand poverty is carried out along two interconnected lines. First, as shown in many local strugglesover the access to and control over natural resources, the poor are concerned about environmentaldegradation that threatens their life worlds. Second, the relationship between poverty and environ-mental degradation should be considered in light of the fact that poverty arises from unequal eco-nomic and ecological distribution. Then, social movements against the rich, privatization, and/ormarket system can be understood as ecological movements, even if the subordinated groups do notidentify themselves as environmentalists.

These arguments are supported by the authors’ examination of the differences in environmen-talism in First and Third World contexts (see the following table).

Northern Environmentalism Southern Environmentalism

Origin and Motivation “Quality of life” issues (the post- A clash over productive resources materialist/industrialist thesis) by the environmentally destructive

process of development

Methods The social movement organization Direct action on the basis of tradi- with its own cadre tional networks of organizationAppeal to the law

Ideologies The wilderness movement, originating A third kind of class conflict: the outside the production process, calling “red and green” movement for a change in attitudes in systems A defense of the locality and the local of production or distribution community against the nation

A thoroughgoing critique of uncon- trolled economic development

Environmental Justice Movement

Northern versus Southern environmentalism as illustrated in Varieties of Environmentalism

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However, the authors note that this division in environmental discourses becomes blurred bytwo (positive) trends: the emergence of the environmental justice movement and social ecology. Forthe development of these trends, the authors suggest the following:

• The political tasks of the environmental justice movement are to connect withenvironmental movements of the poor in other countries as well as to connect withmainstream “Western” environmental movements.

• Social ecology, a synthesis of the idea of diversity, the ideal of sustainability, and thevalue of equity, can be augmented by cross-cultural communication on environmen-tal ethics.

The last chapter, “The Forgotten American Environmentalist,” poses another interestingquestion: why do American environmentalists consider John Muir and Aldo Leopold their “patronsaints,” while they ignore Lewis Mumford in their genealogy? Answers provided by the authorsreflect their notion of the character of mainstream American environmentalism. In addition to thefact that Mumford was a socialist and his work was not confined to environmental issues, his ap-proach was not accepted widely because he focused on internal social reform. He recognized that theenemy is “us,” rather than providing a scapegoat “out there.” Furthermore, he did not have thenarrow nationalist perspective of the founders who saw the wilderness movement as a nationalistcrusade to preserve “monuments” of nature not found in Europe.

Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publish-ers, Inc.

SUMMARY

Harvey’s theoretical agenda in this book is to build a social theory about space, place, and theenvironment in this “post-modern” era, which he admits to be a risky undertaking. Why does placematter? Harvey turns to Raymond Williams:

[P]lace has been shown to be a crucial element in the bonding process… by the explosion ofthe international economy and the destructive effects of deindustrialization upon old commu-nities. When capital has moved on, the importance of place is more clearly revealed [29; origi-nally, Williams 1989:242]

Harvey’s political agenda is to find a way to lay a ground for the alliance between differentplace-based “militant particularisms,” capable of collectively challenging capitalism. With such anaim, Harvey reexamines the concepts of time, space, place, and justice, which constitute the frame-work of our lives.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I, titled “Orientation,” describes various forms of“militant particularism” (or some form of place politics), and introduces the reader to the mode ofdialectical thinking. Part II, “The Nature of Environment” traces the history of thinking aboutnature and environment, and Part III, “Space, Time, and Place” provides conceptual discussion ontime-space and place in regards to industrial capitalism. In Part IV, “Justice, Difference, and Politics,”

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Harvey explores multidimensional justice, building on Young’s idea of five faces of oppression:exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence (349). He thenanalyzes four forms of dominant environmental discourse (see the following table).

The Approach to Main Agents ofEnvironmental Problems Environmental Management The Main Issue

The Standard View After the event The state A zero-sum trade-offof Environmental between economicManagement Case-by-case basis growth and environ-

mental quality

Ecological Modernization Prevention The nation state, “Win-win”: ecologicalSystematic set of policies international organizations, modernization can be centered around the local governments profitable concept of sustainability

The “Wise Use” Private property as an Each owner Strong defense ofMovement incentive to maintain private property

and sustain the ecological Right to jobs over the conditions of productivity rights of nature

Environmental Improvement through Communities: InequalitiesJustice empowerment of the “particularism” Survival of the poor

poor and working class and marginalized

Dominant Forms of Environmental–Ecological Discourses, as illustrated in Justice, Nature and the Geography ofDifference

Harvey ultimately tries to add the question of urbanization or of the urban world to currentenvironmental discussion. He thus ends with a dialectical discussion of the city and environment.

Weber, Ron, John Burtler, and Patty Larson. 2000. Indigenous Peoples and ConservationOrganizations: Experiences in collaboration. World Wildlife Fund.

SUMMARY

This is a review of WWF’s engagement with indigenous communities based on the followingpremises:

Environmental human rights are linked to the right to a decent quality of life and to otherrelated rights recognized in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and CulturalRights. WWF and other conservation organizations recognize that indigenous groups cannotbe expected to commit themselves to conservation if their livelihoods are in peril from lack ofsecure tenure to land and resources. Indeed, it is the strength of their claim to the land, coupledwith long histories of managing it wisely, that makes them attractive potential partners forenvironmental stewardship. They cannot play this role under conditions of political oppressionand marginalization [14].

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Zerner, Charles. 2000. People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Conservation. New York:Columbia University Press

SUMMARY

While a large body of work in the field of participatory environmental management focus onthe relationship between states and communities with little analysis of the relationship betweencommunities and markets, this edited volume confronts the issue of markets in environmentalism. Inexamining market-based conservation programs such as bioprospecting and eco-tourism, it particu-larly tries to look at the intersections of concerns for power, justice, market, resources and territory.Two propositions constitute common ground of this collective project. “Democracy and justice gohand in hand with effective environmental management and conservation”(14). Furthermore, thereis no single market operating at a fixed scale but multiple markets to be articulated with divergentparticular contexts (4). The volume is divided into two parts. Part I is comprised of three chapters inwhich main issues regarding resource management and conservation are insightfully discussed. PartII consists of thirteen casestudies in various locations. Among several issues discussed in Part I, newvisions of justice issue are suggested as follows:

• “We need a vision of environmental justice broad enough to encompass the migrant,the urban indigent, and the peasant agriculturist, as well as the metropolitan, middle-class consumer and the indigene. The developing optic of environmental justice,moreover, needs to be articulated in ways that simultaneously support affirmations ofregional particularity at the same time that they encourage emerging understandingsof common ground for constructive struggle and collaboration across North-Southborders” (15).

• One way to think about environmental justice is to see the conflicts and movementsdocumented in this volume as expressions of resistance to the ways in which environ-mental externalities are being internalized (if at all)” (46).

• “An exclusive emphasis on distributive justice mechanisms overlooks, and potentiallyundermines, a wide range of fundamental claims to resources, place-based identities,and livelihoods.” “Conservation groups that mistake the gesture of benefit sharing forgenuine engagment with the demands of social justice accordingly pay the price,directly or indirectly, of continued resistance from the resident groups whose re-sources management practices they seek to influence”(64).

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Additional Readings

Brown, Wendy. States of Injury : Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. 1995. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Dawson, Jane. 2000. “The two faces of environmental justice: lessons from the eco-nationalistphenomenon.” Environmental Politics 9(2):22.

Jennett, Christine and Randal G. Stewart. 1989. Politics of the Future: The Role of Social Movements.Melbourne: Macmillan Company of Australia.

Luke, Timothy. 1999. Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx. Urbana and Chi-cago: University of Illinois Press.

Massey, Doreen and Pat Jess. 1995. A Place in the World?: Places, Cultures and Globalization. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Parahuli, Pramod. 1996. Ecological Ethnicity in the Making: Developmentalist Hegemnies andEmergent Identities in India. Identities 3(1-2):15

Touriane, Alain. 1977. The Self Production of Society. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press.

The World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. Oxfordand New York: Oxford University Press

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Science and Technology

Overview

Disenfranchisement is not only based on race, ethnicity, gender, or class. Participation in decision-making regarding environmental matters is also constrained by access to scientific expertise. To theextent that environmental issues are characterized in scientific terms, questions of knowledge-rela-tions become critical as they relate to the potential for citizens to take control of their own lives,health, and environment (Irwin 1995; Lash, Szerszynsk, Wynne 1996). Studies of indigenous knowl-edge and/or of modern science-technology have raised the following questions in relation to environ-mental problems:

• In what ways might groups of citizens play an active role in the redefinition of expertknowledge and the process of knowledge dissemination (Irwin 1995; Wynne 1996).

• Does the normalization of ecological discourse lead to the further rationalization ofmodernity’s public sphere, or to a sidelining of the capacity of environmentalism as amedium for critical reflection about modern society? (Beck 1992; Lash, Szerszynsk,and Wynne 1996).

• How do environmental activists challenge the dominant epistemology of science?(Berglund 1999).

• What clusters of identity and knowledge are deployed in social conflict over naturalresources? (Flanders 1998; Gupta 1998)

References

Berglund, Eeva. 1998. Knowing Nature and Knowing Science: An Ethnography of Three EnvironmentalActivism. Cambridge: The White Horse Press.

Flanders, Nicholas E. 1998. “Native American Sovereignty and Natural Resource Management.”Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26(3):425.

Gupta, Akhil. 1998. “‘Indigenous’ Knowledges: Agronomy,” “‘Indigenous’ Knowledges: Ecology” inPostcolonial Developments; Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham: Duke UniversityPress.14

Irwin, Alan. 1995. Citizen Science. London and New York: Routledge.

Lash, Scott, Bronislaw Szerszynsk and Brian Wynne. 1996. Risk, Environment and Modernity. Lon-don: Sage Publications.


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Berglund, Eeva. 1998. Knowing Nature and Knowing Science: An Ethnography of ThreeEnvironmental Activism. Cambridge: The White Horse Press.

SUMMARY

In this ethnographic study of environmental activism in a border town between West and EastGermany, Berglund examines the relationship between the strategies of environmental groups andtheir views of nature and science. She first raises the question of how and why Hessberg-BI depositopponents remain an exclusive environmental group and attribute such certainty to assessment ofinformation that is in fact debatable. She finds that their trust in science is related to the sense of“manageability:”

There is something insidious and cunning about the whole notion of toxic waste, something soproblematic to define. The certainty attributed to scientific knowledge is part of making thishuge and politically sensitive problem more manageable…. When protest itself is frustratingand the issue also, it need not surprise us that those dealing with it make it more manageable bytalking as if things were certain and categories clearly bounded [74].

She then asks what is common ground among diverse environmentalist groups who form acoalition against a new motorway near the town. She attends to their concept of nature:

All activists treat nature in the abstract as needing protection from human encroachments; inwhatever way the concept of humanity as part of nature operates in specific contexts, the mosteasily shared conceptualization of nature does remove people from it… It becomes empty land-scape… Since such a conceptualization excludes the competing and perhaps sinister interests ofhumans from the domain at issue, it works as common ground for everyone’s agenda, but onlyso long as it is in fact nobody’s ground. As soon as humans enter this space, the debate has tobecome explicitly political, but there can be no a priori reason for these politics to take anyparticular form rather than another [105].

Finally, Berglund looks at how power-line protesters use their understanding of technoscienceto establish their political claims.

Energiewende and the BI-Baden activists [power-line protesters] are consciously using energyproduction as an avenue for challenging the political power vested in current structures ofgovernment and the anti-ecological ethos of the times... Despite their obvious technical com-petence, both Energiewende and the BI-Baden’s work is overtly driven by moral values. Mostobviously they identify dishonesty in government and corporate claims to be able to controlenvironmental change as a moral failing. More broadly, however, they can articulate moraldeficiencies in the whole way “we” think… the current ethos which sees nature as merely aresource to exploit is eloquently criticized. To varying degrees and in different situations, themoral impetus is sometimes driven by explicitly including disempowered people within theiroverall analysis of conceptualizing their criticism as a social one [156].

Running throughout the activities of these environmental groups is a challenge to the episte-mology of science and to the notion of nature as amenable to expert scrutiny (163). In posingquestions about science, Berglund contends, activists are forging a space in which they can debatethe legitimacy not only of a certain kind of knowledge, but also of unspoken commitments to

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broader social institutions (164). This is possible because science in modern society has been consid-ered a vehicle for representing the world and thus achieved more in the way of social control than inpredicting the future or solving problems (163).

Flanders, Nicholas E. 1998. “Native American Sovereignty and Natural Resource Man-agement.” Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26(3):425.

ABSTRACT

The relationship between Native Americans and the Euro-American settlers has evolved fromthe latter seeking to end the separate identity of the former to one in which the U.S. governmentuses Native rights to control large-scale resource problems. This new relationship arose out of a needto control water in Western states for irrigation, but has expanded into other areas. The Navajo sheepreductions of the 1930s and 1940s may be seen as an instance of this relationship. Concerns aboutsiltation behind the Hoover Dam justified a program that dramatically transformed the Navajoeconomy. A second case concerns conflict over a caribou herd in northwestern Alaska. The conflicteventually led to the Federal government taking management of fish and game on Federal lands backfrom the state government. Both these cases show the development of a technocracy, based onFederal trusteeship over Native resources, concerned with the control of nature similar to that ob-served in Wittfogel’s writings on Chinese irrigation.

Irwin, Alan. 1995. Citizen Science London and New York: Routledge.

SUMMARY

This book addresses the issue of “the public understanding of science and the scientific under-standing of the public” (ix). By using the term “citizen science,” Irwin intends to evoke two senses ofthe relationship between knowledge and the public: “a science which assists the needs and concernsof citizens” and “a form of science developed and enacted by citizens themselves… outside of formalscientific institutions”(xi). “Citizen science” thus brings to the fore new social and knowledge rela-tions which are 1) “willing to engage with non-scientifically generated understandings andexpertises,” 2) “heterogeneous in form rather than trying to impose a unitary view,” 3)”prepared toengage with the ‘problem situations’ which give rise to citizen concerns rather than merely attempt-ing to filter out science from non-science,” 4) “reflexive in terms of the uncertainties and limitationsbut also the constructive possibilities for science within everyday life,” 5) “institutionally flexible andopen to change” (167).

Lash, Scott, Bronislaw Szerszynsk and Brian Wynne. 1996. Risk, Environment and Mo-dernity. London:Sage Publications.

SUMMARY

This collection gains insight from, and yet critically responds to, Ulrich Beck’s thesis of “risksociety,” a late modern society structured around the distribution of “bads”(2). Following Beck’s

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main themes, the volume addresses three issues: “environmental discourse as technology” (Part I),subjectivity and individualization at a time of rapid environmental, technological and culturalchange (Part II), and “the transformation and cultural renewal of the political” (Part III) (2-3). Somemain arguments presented in each section follow:

• “The truth of the environmental crisis is one that has not sprung directly fromnature or even from the purely technical activities of scientists whose role it might beto represent that nature. It has crucially depended on the creative cognitive andsymbolic activity of social movements” (22).

• The absolute distinction between expert and lay knowledge, as suggested by An-thony Giddens and Ulrich Beck in their thesis of reflexive modernity, is problematicin that it “forecloses the open issue of what is to count as good science in publicdomains and preempts fundamental questions about the indeterminacy of the humanand natural orders”(77).

• “The environment and risk debates around which much of modern politics has beenshaped are quintessentially tied up with the larger crises of legitimacy of moderneconomic, scientific-technical and political institutions, and the search for new formsof legitimate order and authority” (78)

• Ecological modernization in such Western European countries as Germany or theNetherlands, where a broad societal coalition working on the institutionalization ofecomodernist ideas, has had four effects: first, “the rationalization of ecology”; sec-ond, “the technization of ecology”; third, “the ecologisation of the social,” as demon-strated by “new regionalism” or the “politics of place”; finally, the “socialization ofecology”—a context in which the issues of social justice, democracy, responsibility,human/nature relations, and the role of technology can be addressed. Strengtheningthe fourth perspective can begin with the reinvention of democracy with democraticcontrol over technology and expertise. (261-265).

As a whole, this volume revolves around the question of whether environmental issues becamenormalized and environmental politics were institutionalized in Western Europe. Wary of simplepictures of the earlier environmental movements as pure, critical spaces and aware of new grass-rootsmovements in the arena of radical local protest (22), this volume stresses that more efforts are neededto produce environmental studies that are “sensitive to culture and indeterminacy” (25).

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Additional Readings

Stephen B. Brush and Doreen Stabinsky, eds. 1996. Valuing Local Knowledge : Indigenous People andIntellectual Property Rights. Washington, D.C. : Island Press.

Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society : Towards a New Modernity. London ; Newbury Park, Calif. : SagePublications, 1992

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press.

——, 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass. : HarvardUniversity Press.

Leff, Enrique. 1995. Green Production: Toward an Environmental Rationality. New York and London:the Guilford Press.

Mol, Arthur and David Sonnenfeld, eds. 2000. Ecological Modernisation Around the World: Perspec-tives and Critical Debates. Portland: Frank Cass. (Previously published as a Special Issue ofEnvironmental Politics. Vol.9, No.1. )

Rinkevicius, Leonardas. 2000. “ecological Modernization as Cultural Politics: Transformations ofCivic Environmental Activism in Lituhuania. Environmental Politics 9(1).

Takacs, David. 1996. The Idea of Biodiversity: Philosophies of Paradise. Baltimore: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press.

- is a doctoral candidate in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University.

Founded in late 1996, the emergedfrom a long-standing commitment to environmental studies on the Berkeley campus and from thepresence of a core group of faculty whose research and scholarly interests linked environment,culture, and political economy. The workshop draws together over fifty faculty and doctoral studentsfrom San Francisco Bay Area institutions (the University of California campuses at Berkeley, SantaCruz, and Davis, and Stanford University) who share a common concern with problems that standat the intersection of the environmental and social sciences, the humanities and law. The BerkeleyWorkshop on Environmental Politics has three broad functions:

✦ to assist graduate training and scholarly research by deepening the theoretical and methodologicaltoolkit appropriate to understanding environmental concerns in an increasingly globalized world;

✦ to bring together constituencies of local and international scholars, activists, and policy makers fortransnational conversations on environmental issues; and,

✦ to bring community activists and policymakers to Berkeley as Residential Fellows, thus providingsynergistic possibilities for developing new learning and research communities.

The Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics is funded by the Ford Foundation, the HewlettFoundation, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, the MacArthur Foundation, and theRockefeller Foundation.

was established in to promote interdiscipli-nary research in international, comparative, and policy studies on the Berkeley campus of the Uni-versity of California. The current emphasis is on the following intellectual themes: peace and securityafter the Cold War; environment, demography, and sustainable development; development andcomparative modernities across regions; and globalization and the transformation of the globaleconomy. The Institute has several major research programs, and provides support to Berkeley facultyand fellowships to Berkeley graduate students. Ongoing research colloquia bring together faculty,advanced graduate students, and visiting scholars for discussions. The Institute hosts distinguishedvisiting fellows who participate in Institute programs while in residence at Berkeley. Its public out-reach programs include lectures, forums, conferences, interviews, and the Connecting Students to theWorld program. The Institute publishes Policy Papers in International Affairs, Insights in InternationalAffairs, Currents, and the Globetrotter website <http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu>.

Documents

bibliographies - University of California, Berkeleyglobetrotter.berkeley.edu/bwep/greengovernance/... · across cultures (Arnold 1996; Descola and Pálsson 1996). The boundary between