Environmental Action,Gender Equity and Women's Participation

For poor households, and especially for the women who own little private land, forests and village commons have always been critical sources of basic necessities in rural India. However, the availability of these resources has been declining rapidly, due both to degradation and to shifts in property rights away from community control and management to State and individual control and management. More recently, though, we are seeing small but notable reversals in these processes toward a re-establishment of greater community control over forests and village commons. Numerous forest management groups have emerged, initiated variously by the State, by village communities, or by non-governmental organizations. However, unlike the old systems of communal property management which recognized the usufruct rights of all villagers, the new ones represent a more formalized system of rights based on membership. In other words, under the new initiatives, membership is replacing citizenship as the defining criterion for establishing rights in the commons. This raises critical questions about participation and equity, especially gender equity. Are the benefits and costs of the emergent institutional arrangements being shared equally by women and men? Or are they creating a system of property rights in communal land which, like existing rights in privatized land, are strongly male centred? What is women's participation in these initiatives? What constrains or facilitates their participation and exercise of agency? This article provides pointers. It also demonstrates the relevance of the feminist environmentalist perspective, as opposed to the ecofeminist perspective, in understanding gendered responses to the environmental crisis. 1 Abbreviations used in this article: FPC=Forest Protection Committee (under JFM); JFM=Joint Forest Management; NGO=Non-Governmental Organization; VCs=Village Commons; VP=Van Panchayat (forest council).
     

The Struggle for La Sierra: Sovereignty,property, and rights in the San Luis Valley

In 2002 the Colorado Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent in Lobato v. Taylor by awarding Hispano heirs to the Mexican-era Sangre de Cristo Land Grant renewed access rights to that grant's former communal land for grazing, timber, and firewood. Placing Lobato in historical context, this paper examines the contingent emergence of sovereignty and private property in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado through acts of violence, land loss, and dispossession. The paper argues that sovereignty and property, as forms of boundary drawing, are unfinished and contested projects rather than abstract, achieved universals. U.S. sovereignty in the San Luis Valley has emerged contingently through the iteration of private property, as struggles over resource access have produced sovereign effects. Such a perspective makes visible how Lobato has reiterated private property rights and U.S. sovereignty in ways that create new exclusions, even as the case returns access rights to the commons.     

Carbon and Cash in Climate Assemblages: The Making of a New Global Citizenship

Climate instruments such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions by Deforestation and Degradation) promise a win–win proposition as villagers in Africa are paid for their efforts to conserve forests and sequester carbon. REDD+ assembles divergent interests at different scales—from bureaucrats to individual villagers. We argue that climate assemblages are shifting the space of the political by regulating practices that previously had local and national provenance. They are producing “state‐like” effects that touch deeply on citizenship. Villagers are drawn into a shifting REDD+ assemblage and subject to new identifications as entrepreneurs and responsible environmental citizens, meant to look after a new global commons. We shift the discussion to deal seriously with questions of a “global” citizenship, not in its utopian sense, but by bringing into light the dark side of global citizenship already in practice in environmental governance. Forests and peoples are in practice made global—we must conceptualize the rights of this “global” citizenship     

The Evolutionary Theory of Land Rights as Applied to Sub-Saharan Africa: A Critical Assessment

The evolutionary theory of land rights can be considered the dominant framework of analysis used by mainstream economists to assess the land tenure situation in developing countries, and to make predictions about its evolution. A central tenet of this theoryis that under the joint impact of increasing population pressure and market integration, land rights spontaneously evolve towards rising individualization and that this evolutioneventually leads rightsholders to press for the creation of duly formalized private property rights — a demand to which the state will have an incentive to respond. This article looks critically at the relevance of the evolutionary theory of land rights as currently applied to Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, the question of whether the establishmentof private property rights is an advisable structural reform in the present circumstancesis examined, in the light of evidence accumulated so far. It will be argued that most of the beneficial effects usually ascribed to such a reform are grossly over-estimated and that, given its high cost, it is generally advisable to look for more appropriate solutions that rely on existing informal mechanisms at community level.     

Negotiating Post‐Socialist Property and State: Struggles over Forests in Albania and Romania

Since the demise of socialism, countries of Central and Eastern Europe have experienced intense negotiations over access and property. This article uses four case studies on struggles over forest in Albania and Romania to examine how these negotiations intersect with processes constituting authority. The cases demonstrate significant variations in the configurations of property and authority regarding forest, but they also reflect the influence of national politics in the two countries. In Albania, custom not only competes with the state as an institution sanctioning rights to forest but actually emerges as an alternative politico‐legal institution contesting state authority more broadly. In Romania, local struggles over forests play out the contestations between personalized and law‐based exercises of state authority at the national level. These insights suggest that due to their radical nature and simultaneous occurrence, negotiations over property and authority have challenged the position of post‐socialist states as primary politico‐legal institutions and have generated different exercises of state authority.     

Fragmented Forests,Fractured Lives: Ethno-territorial Struggles and Development in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia

The culturally and ecologically diverse Pacific lowlands of Colombia are both the locus and product of key political economic and cultural political conjunctures. Twenty-five years after they emerged in their current form, Afro-Colombian ethnic and territorial struggles have become important icons of resistance to development and struggles for social change. But in Colombia as in other parts of the world, the rapid and violent expansion of capitalist accumulation and state power have had devastating consequences for the region's forests and communities—literally and epistemically fragmenting both. Based on long-term fieldwork, this paper examines the ongoing and contentious co-production of the Colombian Pacific region amidst the increasingly violent forces of neoliberal governmentality in the 21^st century. It shows that the Pacific lowlands are an example of “political forests” in the sense that they are a contested site and product of Afro-Colombian cultural politics and state territorialisation.     

Indigenous Autonomy,Delinquent States,and the Limits of Resistance

This paper focuses on struggles by Mexican indigenous communities to defend their patrimony and guarantee their own security in an environment dominated by the parallel power of organized crime, paramilitary violence, impunity, and a neo-extractivist economy. After reviewing the relationships between the radicalization of indigenous autonomy demands and transformations of the Mexican state, analysis focuses on recent developments involving a Nahua community on the Pacific coast of Michoacán state that has a long history of successful defence of its communal lands, alongside a Purépecha community in the central highlands that has been its longstanding ally. The violence of external actors reflects the penetration of all levels of government by organized crime, but violence is not a new historical experience in this region. What has changed is that the capacity of these communities to resist has been affected by their internal disarticulation by the same forces.     

Autonomy,Erasure, and Persistence in the Urban Gardening Commons

Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal's former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualising urban gardens as commons‐in‐the‐making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one hand, and the state erasure, overwriting or construction of top‐down commons on the other. While showing that urban gardening forges commons of varying persistence, we also demonstrate the ways through which the commons are always closely entwined with processes of enclosure. We further argue that urban gardening commons are divergent and cannot be judged against any abstract ideal of the commons. In conclusion, we suggest that urban gardening commons do not have a “common” in common.     

Advocating Workers' Collective Rights: The Prospects and Constraints Facing ‘Collective Bargaining’ NGOs in the Pearl River Delta, 2011–2015

Labour struggles are frequent in China, but because workers’ organizational resources are controlled by the state, these struggles have been fragmented. Targeting this problem, a group of internationally connected labour NGOs emerged in the Pearl River Delta between 2011 and 2015. These organizations sought to advocate workers’ collective rights by helping workers organize outside the state system. Adopting a relational approach to the study of civil society, this article examines the impact of these NGOs. Based on ethnographic research and a unique data set, it argues that although the organizational skills shared by these NGOs could to some extent sustain workers’ collective actions, they could not be used to integrate the fragmented struggles. Due to the lack of institutional guarantees, activists’ interventions can generate more mistrust than solidarity. The preference of the key donor for a more confrontational and independent labour movement further widened the gap between NGOs and workers, and distracted the NGOs from channels that had the potential to influence policy. The study contributes to an understanding of social movements and NGO intervention by emphasizing the necessity of locating advocacy channels within the state, and the importance of recognizing and maintaining the complex ecology of civil society.     

Claiming indigenous rights through participatory mapping and the making of citizenship

This paper considers how participatory mapping, through the notion of indigeneity, is involved in the making of participants' political agency and the possible implications for local struggles over customary land and resources. Empirically, the paper draws on a field study of participatory mapping as a cartographic-legal strategy for the recognition of the customary rights to land and resources of the Dayak, an indigenous ethnic group in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. In this paper, we use citizenship as a basis for our analysis. On this basis, we discuss how the notion of indigeneity has assembled actors across different scales and how this has enabled indigeneity to develop as a site for claiming customary rights to land and resources through participatory mapping. One of our main arguments is the need to understand indigenous citizenship as a process that develops over time and through networks of actors that transcend the borders of the state and expand the formerly exclusive relationship between the state and its citizens in the making of citizenship. We challenge Isin's clear distinction between active and activist approaches to making claims of citizenship, suggesting instead that these approaches are mutually constitutive.     

Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial City

The racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as “vacant”. Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit's “vacant” neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for liberation. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a white businessman's proposal to build the world's largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community‐based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal democracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization.     

Mineral commons: Collective claims to territory in the goldfields of Madagascar

This paper examines how artisanal miners in northern Madagascar have contested state-corporate authority and staked claims to subterranean territory through the production and maintenance of goldfields as mineral commons. Drawing on ethnographic evidence collected over 15 months of field-based research, as well as interviews and archival data, I elaborate how community members in the diggings of Betsiaka have used commoning to resist subsoil enclosure, engender local autonomy, and secure collectivized access to gold as a basis for extended social reproduction. Constructing Betsiaka's mineral commons has relied on three overlapping yet distinct components: (1) the materiality or geological character of deposits, mediated through local understandings of gold's occurrence and (in)exhaustibility; (2) the socio-historical construction of discourse around resource access; and (3) the political-economic organization and management of the goldfields via sedimented institutions of governance. The paper's arguments challenge assumptions across varying domains of commons scholarship that tend to exclude resources deemed “nonrenewable” from discussions of commons, demonstrating both that socio-natural particularities can render mineral deposits effectively “inexhaustible,” and that even subsoil resources perceived as finite can be managed by community members to facilitate collective access and broadly-shared benefit. They furthermore contribute to ongoing discussions regarding territorialization and governance in extractive landscapes, adding commons and commoning to the list of tactics and instruments used by mining communities to avoid dispossession, order activities, and sustain livelihoods. Recognizing mineral commons in Betsiaka and beyond thus has significant implications for enhancing our understanding of local mineral politics—and also for rethinking approaches to formalization and decentralization.     

Engaged Universals and Community Economies: The (Human) Right to Water in Colombia

While the United Nations' sanctioning of the human right to water was widely celebrated, many debate the adequacy and political potency of the rights discourse to frame water justice. Drawing on multi‐sited, ethnographic‐based fieldwork in Colombia in 2010 and 2011, and prioritizing activists' reflexivity, the paper explores how water activists in the 2007–2011 referendum campaign engaged the universal human right while making user‐run community aqueducts more visible as place‐based, not‐for‐profit, culturally attuned, and valid alternatives to the corporate model of water supply. This case study suggests that the human right to water cannot be separated from water commons, and that communal users and activists engage the universal under their own terms. It also suggests we think of these water models as “economic communities” in Gibson‐Graham's sense: ethical spaces to make explicit our social relations with water, and to cultivate selves and practices that enact alternative socio‐natural relations through water's circulations.     

Forestry policy in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe: continuity and change

Using the case of Mafungautsi Forest Reserve, this paper discusses continuities and changes in policy and practice at the communal and reserved forest interface in Zimbabwe. Colonial forestry policy in Zimbabwe has often been labelled as oppressive, as communal area citizens were not allowed to participate effectively in its formulation and implementation. Independence in 1980, it was thought, would usher in an era of greater participation within the forestry sector. However, the hope that local communities would have greater input in the forestry policies and management has largely remained unfulfilled. The state institutions responsible for managing forests have largely remained unsympathetic to the involvement of local communities in the management of forestry resources despite the pre-independence rhetoric. Alongside the co-management attempt to make local peasants citizens through their inclusion in decision-making has been the continuity of the colonial policy that treated local peasants who used resources as criminals destroying trees and forests. This paper examines how the fundamental policy perspective of forestry in Zimbabwe still perceives local peasant farmers to be unsustainable exploiters of forests. The local resource users have not remained passive recipients of the repressive forestry policies and practices based on science but have actively contested them since the 1950s.     

Barrio resurgence in Buenos Aires: Local autonomy claims amid state-sponsored transnationalism

This paper argues that observing neighborhood movements through the lens of territorial state restructuring holds theoretical promise. Contemporary struggles over municipal decentralization need to be located within broader state re-scaling processes. Seeking to contribute a Latin American perspective to the largely Anglo-American field of urban neoliberalization research, this study engages with the emergence of local autonomy claims in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Middle-class activists and organizations advanced such claims against the background of thorough transnationalism, in what may be interpreted as a localist political reaction to the socio-spatial consequences of urban and state restructuring. Field evidence is used to assess the ultimate political efficacy and democratic implications of their political agency, particularly in what concerns municipal decentralization. It is argued that curtailing the empowerment of barrio districts were the following conditions: mayoral opposition to communal reforms; ongoing cross-scalar tensions between the city and national government; and the barrio-centric issue framings of activists, which hampered social recruitment in an increasingly heterogeneous and transnationalized urban space.     

Gender,Identity and Agency in Philippine Upland Development

Conventional feminist political analysis has considered male interests as historically institutionalized by the state, thereby claiming that women are largely ‘edged out’ in state programmes. By studying a state programme of granting ancestral domain tenurial rights to the Kalanguya in the northern Philippines, this article argues instead that women also edge themselves out. Kalanguya village women have linked with markets and are less interested in tenurial struggles with the state since such struggles underscore their indigeneity and their special role as resource managers, an identity they wish to discard. Men, for their part, attach themselves to the past and identify themselves as being ‘indigenous’ to make claims on land in the present, strategically aligning themselves with the state agenda on sustainable resource management. This article explores perspectives that provide more nuanced understandings of the different ways in which women and men may position and identify themselves as ‘indigenous’ as they engage with state programmes and markets, and argues that, under certain conditions, women through their agency may not be the natural constituency for natural resource management‐related programmes that they are often assumed to be.     

The “Blind” State: Government Quest for Formalization and Conflict with Small‐Scale Miners in the Peruvian Amazon

The Peruvian government is attempting to implement a formalization plan to deal with the chaotic expansion of small‐scale mining activities in the Amazon. However, this plan has been contested, delayed and halted by local miners. Why exactly has it been so hard for the government to enforce a formalization plan in Madre de Dios? This article aims to answer this question by analysing both government efforts to establish control over the region and the challenges it faces in enforcing its formalization plan. It is argued that current resistance to and conflict over the formalization process in Madre de Dios reveals a state governance problem due to the region having been historically governed as a zone for exploitation rather than for social and economic development. Similarly, the analysis highlights the absence of major corporations through which the state can establish a basis for governance, as in other parts of the country.     

Customary Tenure and Reciprocal Grazing Arrangements in Eastern Ethiopia

This article examines how customary tenure provides a basis for reciprocal access arrangements and facilitates access to grazing resources in order to adapt to changing conditions. A critical review of the literature on the range ecology and institutions of resource governance guides the overall analysis, while empirical results from three case studies show that internal social relationships and kinship structures still remain important determining factors in facilitating access to the grazing commons. Many forms of institutional arrangements exist, providing different kinds of incentives. For instance, trading of grazing rights at household level provides an important safety‐net for poor pastoral and agropastoral herders, in spite of fears regarding negative externalities for de facto co‐owners of the commons. Evidence from the three studied districts reveals that the influence of resource attributes on institutional choice favours flexibility rather than supporting the axiom of the conventional property rights theory, which considers greater exclusivity to be a natural response to scarcity. Institutions supporting reciprocal grazing relations are characterized by negotiability and by an ambiguity of rights: clan rules facilitating reciprocal grazing are not based on maximization of benefits from own grazing commons, but rather on maximization of security of use rights through investing in relations with others.     

Gender,Traditional Authority,and the Politics of Rural Reform in South Africa

The new South African Constitution, together with later policies and legislation, affirm a commitment to gender rights that is incompatible with the formal recognition afforded to unelected traditional authorities. This contradiction is particularly evident in the case of land reform in many rural areas, where women’s right of access to land is denied through the practice of customary law. This article illustrates the ways in which these constitutional contradictions play out with particular intensity in the ‘former homelands’ through the example of a conflict over land use in Buffelspruit, Mpumalanga province. There, a number of women who had been granted informal access to communal land for the purposes of subsistence cultivation had their rights revoked by the traditional authority. Despite desperate protests, they continue to be marginalized in terms of access to land, while their male counterparts appropriate communal land for commercial farming and cattle grazing. Drawing on this protest, we argue that current South African practice in relation to the pressing issue of gender equity in land reform represents a politics of accommodation and evasion that tends to reinforce gender biases in rural development, and in so doing, undermines the prospects for genuinely radical transformation of the instituted geographies and institutionalized practices bequeathed by the apartheid regime.     

Come rain,or come wells: How access to groundwater affects communal violence

This article empirically analyzes the relationship between groundwater scarcity and incidences of communal violence. Case studies suggest that appropriating water is more likely when resource scarcities are not effectively mitigated and where property rights are disputed. Yet, covering water more broadly remains piecemeal in quantitative research on communal conflict. While water scarcity features in large-N literature on climate variability and nonstate conflicts, such studies rely heavily on rainfall data which covers only one aspect of the hydrological cycle. Employing precipitation data alone neglects the use of groundwater, an important factor for drought resilience and the source for 50% of global drinking water. While rainfall remains key for agriculture, pastoralists and smallscale farmers in particular rely on groundwater as a buffer during dry periods. Thus, analyses on water scarcity and conflict ought to combine measures for groundwater, surface water, and precipitation. While controlling for other sources of water, the lack of groundwater access is hypothesized to increase incidences of violent communal conflict. The effect of groundwater on communal violence is also argued to vary with the presence of drought, low rainfall, in densely populated areas, and with state presence. These propositions are tested through large-N analyses using previously not utilized data on water availability with incidence data on violent conflict for Africa and the Middle East (1990–2014). The results show that lacking access to groundwater is associated with a higher risk of communal violence. Further, the effect of groundwater access on communal violence is conditioned by precipitation levels as well as population density. The results also suggest that the effect of groundwater on violence is smaller in areas with higher state presence.