Changing public accountability mechanisms in the governance of Dutch urban regeneration*

Contemporary urban planning dynamics are based on negotiation and contractual relations, creating fragmented planning processes. On the one hand, they trigger technocratic forms of governance, which require the ‘legal instrumentalisation’ of planning in a piecemeal approach ensuring legal certainty. On the other hand, these processes require flexibility to enable easy, fast and efficient forms of implementation due to the increasing involvement of private sector actors in urban development. This article unravels the influence of these conflicting dynamics on the fundamentals of urban planning practices by focusing on changing public accountability mechanisms created through contractual relationships between public and private sector agencies. Dutch urban regeneration has demonstrated changing governance principles and dynamics in the last three decades. Representing instrumental and institutional measures, we connect accountability mechanisms to these changes and argue that they ‘co-exist’ in multiple forms across different contexts. This article embeds this evolution in wider theoretical discussions on the changing relationships between public and private sector actors in urban governance relative to the changing role of the state, and it addresses questions on who can be held accountable, and to what extent, when public sector actors are increasingly retreating from regulatory practices while private sector actors play increasingly prominent roles.     

Maintaining Centralized Control in Community‐based Forestry: Policy Construction in the Philippines

Community‐based forestry management is emerging as an important component of forest policies in the developing world. Using the Philippines as a case‐study, this article critically examines the way in which community‐based forestry is constructed and understood among government policy makers. The author suggests that the new policy discourse of community‐based forestry policy in the Philippines is still shaped by efforts to maintain centralized control over forest management and a political economy orientated towards commercial timber production using the principles of ‘scientific management’. While timber production and the technical aspects of forest management are emphasized, social and environmental considerations remain neglected.     

Eco-socialism and the political ecology of forest conservation in the Greater Khingan Range,China

State-owned forestry enterprises (SOFEs) in China, established during the Maoist era for forest exploitation, have undergone significant reorganization under the Natural Forest Conservation Program (NFCP). In this study, drawing on the perspectives of political ecology and a case study from a SOFE in the Greater Khingan Range in northeast China, we develop an eco-socialist perspective to understand this particular approach to forest conservation. The concept of eco-socialism is mobilized to describe how, as a form of all-encompassing social organization with overwhelming political, social, and economic power in the forestry regions, the eco-restructuring of SOFEs is key to the success of forest conservation. Four eco-restructuring processes have been identified: (1) declining timber sales and increasing central subsidies; (2) restructuring of work-units; (3) creating redundancies; and (4) developing new sustainable economic activities. Furthermore, these eco-restructuring processes, both mandated and supported by the central government, have a significant impact on state-society relationship. While the resources given by the central government allow SOFEs to maintain a stable relationship with some workers by providing them a relatively stable livelihood, the laid-off workers are the major victims of the process, as they suffer from loss of income, economic stability, and social self-esteem. This study enriches the literature by incorporating eco-socialist governmentality into the political ecology of forest conservation and illustrating how the political ecology perspective can be a powerful tool in the collective effort to craft sustainable and socially just futures in China.     

Intervention,Facilitation and Self‐development: Strategies and Practices in Forestry Cooperation in Bolivia

Aid encounters in three community forestry endeavours reveal different strategies of development cooperation. The first, intervention, is a unilaterally designed aid strategy where the external intervening party takes the lead, sets goals, draws up plans, etc. The second, facilitation, is a mutually designed strategy of cooperation which focuses on collective action and mutual learning. The third, encouragement of self‐development, is a unilaterally designed strategy where local actors take the lead in development endeavours. This article analyses these three distinctive strategies with reference to social, discursive, political and performative practices found in development cooperation. This provides an integrated framework for assessing local community situations which could guide strategic decisions and promote effective development cooperation.     

As the drone flies: Configuring a vertical politics of contestation within forest conservation

This paper explores how the use of new monitoring technologies, including drones, are being incorporated into forest conservation, with emphasis on what is at stake politically for forest-based communities. This is a critical area to consider, as the cheapness and easy availability of drones has fostered their rapid proliferation in conservation practices, for activities as diverse as wildlife counting and fire prevention. Many have raised political concerns about these technological developments, and their potential to be used for the surveillance and spatial discipline of minority groups. For example, recent scholarship within political ecology, human geography and conflict studies makes clear that the regulatory frameworks of international conservation are being appropriated by states to pursue racialised agendas of social exclusion in former conflict zones – often with the support of international environmental actors. By justifying increased military presence; surveillance technologies; and stop-and-searches, conservation frameworks have facilitated the containment of “risky” populations and the production of new kinds of borders. However, few have yet explored what it will mean to incorporate drones into the production of territorial claims that can protect commons-based livelihoods and resist new forms of spatial enclosure. By examining the introduction of drones in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR) in the Petén region of Guatemala, I reveal how satellite technologies and drones are also being used as part of community-led resistance to dispossession. Here, drones are used as part of everyday conservation practices, as part of a socio-legal process that I describe as the configuration of a vertical politics of contestation. Following the history of technological innovation in the MBR leads me to show how, despite their associations with military containment, such technologies can be used to rework spatial orders imposed by states, international actors, the army and the national elite.     

Development Discourses and Peasant–Forest Relations: Natural Resource Utilization as Social Process

This article analyses the changing role of forests and the practices of peasants toward them in a Costa Rican rural community, drawing on an analytical perspective of political ecology, combined with cultural interpretations. The study underlines the complex articulation of local processes and global forces in tropical forest struggles. Deforestation is seen as a process of development and power involving multiple social actors, from politicians and development experts to a heterogeneous group of local peasants. The local people are not passive victims of global challenges, but are instead directly involved in the changes concerning their production systems and livelihood strategies. In the light of historical changes in natural resource utilization, the article underlines the multiplicity of the causes of tropical deforestation, and the intricate links between global discourses on environment and development and local forest relations.     

Forest crisis narratives: Illegal logging,datafication and the conservation frontier in the Romanian Carpathian Mountains

Environmental crisis narratives escalate around the world. Their production and consequences demand scholarly attention. Drawing on the analytical tools of political ecology and highlighting long-term historical developments, this article examines the shift to a new narrative of conservation in forestry, which displaces older structures of state forest management. In particular, we explore the emergence and unfolding of a crisis narrative of illegal logging, which escalated in Romania in the last thirty years. Based on long-term research of digital sources, interviews and fieldwork, we analyze the contents of this narrative, the way it produced heroes and villains, and its entanglements with processes of datafication, criminalization, and the surge of forest violence. We argue that (1) the genealogies of the forest crisis narrative can be understood in relation to frontier-specific processes of deregulation and re-territorialization, which generate acute struggles for forest control and legitimacy; (2) the narrative of illegal logging unravells as a media spectacle surrounding the production of data by a plurality of state and non-state actors (3) in the attempts to curtail illegal logging, the emphasis on law, surveillance and criminalization posits forest conservation one step short of militarization, fuelling the trends for global environmental law enforcement and securitization of conservation.     

Impacts of Market Liberalization on Regulatory Network: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Swiss Telecommunications Sector

This article looks at the reconfiguration of the regulatory actors' network, as induced by the liberalization and reregulation processes in utility sectors. It investigates the changes in governance structures and patterns of collaborative ties between actors resulting from these processes. Applying stochastic actor‐oriented modeling (SAOM) to data on the liberalization of the Swiss telecommunications sector over two decades, we test whether and to what extent structural changes driven by liberalization and reregulation express themselves through network effects, that is, through changing patterns of interactions between political authorities, regulators, regulatees, and interest groups. Our empirical tests highlight a rearrangement of the regulatory network and a reorganization of relational patterns around new actors, such as the sector‐specific regulatory agency, coregulators, and new operators.     

Domestic timber auctions and flexibly specialized forestry in Japan

In Japan, a well-established, widespread system of local timber market auctions, featuring the exchange of privately owned logs, is increasingly threatened by imports organized according to mass production principles. This article assesses the evolution, rationale, and functions of Japan's timber auctions that were primarily created in post-war Japan to provide key roles linking small-scale (private) forest owners to flexibly specialized value chains that are consummated in Japanese homes. The conceptual point of departure for the analysis is flexible specialization theory's interpretation of industrialization as a contest between mass production and small-scale production. We extend this discussion by giving analytical priority to markets as an institution distinct from firms and by interpreting markets from the perspectives of transaction costs and embeddedness, concepts normally deemed antagonistic to one another. Empirically, four case studies of timber auctions located in central and southern Japan are analyzed based on personal interviews with auction managers and participants within the context of broader trends in forestry. Three auctions feature 'silent' bidding and one involves open bidding. While the auctions exhibit varying characteristics, they continue to be the fulcrum of localized forestry systems, even as they are threatened by declining prices driven by imported wood and by restructurings within the Japanese solid wood sector. The continued resiliency of the flexible specialization model, and the auctions that are at its core, has important implications for forestry throughout Japan.     

State power and protected areas: Dynamics and contradictions of forest conservation in Madhya Pradesh, India

The traditionally coercive and state-controlled governance of protected areas for nature conservation in developing countries has in many cases undergone change in the context of widespread decentralization and liberalization. This article examines an emerging “mixed” (coercive, community- and market-oriented) conservation approach in managed-resource protected areas and its effects on state power through a case study on forest protection in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The findings suggest that imperfect decentralization and partial liberalization resulted in changed forms, rather than uniform loss, of state power. A forest co-management program paradoxically strengthened local capacity and influence of the Forest Department, which generally maintained its territorial and knowledge-based control over forests and timber management. Furthermore, deregulation and reregulation enabled the state to withdraw from uneconomic activities but also implied reduced place-based control of non-timber forest products. Generally, the new policies and programs contributed to the separation of livelihoods and forests in Madhya Pradesh. The article concludes that regulatory, community- and market-based initiatives would need to be better coordinated to lead to more effective nature conservation and positive livelihood outcomes.     

Network topologies as collective social capital in cities and regions: a critical review of empirical studies

This paper outlines a theoretical framework to study collective social capital at the local scale using social network analysis. To do so, it develops a review on empirical research that found evidence regarding the impact of networks on the performance of cities and regions. Eight network topologies are identified with collective social capital: size and composition, connectivity, closeness, clustering, small world, openness, centralization and heterophily. The paper inquires into the effects of these properties concluding that they influence two aspects that are highly relevant for territorial development: they facilitate the diffusion of information and they foster cooperation among actors. Results help tracing roots among three different academic fields: literature on social capital, local and regional economics, and social network analysis. Furthermore, the article suggests a framework to obtain relevant conclusions regarding political and economic aspects of territorial capacities.     

Corridors of Power: Assembling US Environmental Foreign Aid

Using the US Agency for International Development's environmental program in Madagascar as a lens, I offer a historically grounded, relational, and multi-sited methodology for understanding the transnational processes that constitute political forests in the contemporary era. I argue that neoliberal reforms conditioned the emergence of a public–private–non-profit alliance, which promoted biodiversity conservation as a US foreign aid priority. As these reforms weakened state capacity and liberalised economies, the downsized Madagascar and US governments became reliant on conservation actors to mobilise political support for their programs. This reinforced the need to maintain strategic relationships with capital-city actors, undermining prior efforts to devolve forest management to local communities. By isolating deforestation as a peasant problem “over there” and by expanding protected areas to meet global biodiversity targets, the conservation alliance created an avenue to be green that did not threaten extractive industries or key constituents. In this manner, saving the environment via protected areas expansion offered politicians a pathway through the inherent contradictions of green neoliberalism.     

Who Shapes the Politics of Expertise? Co-Production and Authoritative Knowledge in Thailand's Political Forests

Expert environmental knowledge has often been described as a governmental rationality that reduces political debate and facilitates state control. In this paper, I argue instead that this line of reasoning simplifies how knowledge gains political authority, especially when expertise is shared and left unchallenged by diverse actors, including those in conflict with each other. Using the framework of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS), I apply this argument to conflicts over the supposed watershed functions of forests in Thailand, where simplified narratives about the impacts of land use on water supply are used as justifications for territorialisation and restrictions on forest land. In particular, I focus on local resistance to the proposed Kaeng Sua Ten dam in northern Thailand in order to demonstrate how protestors have deliberately reproduced formal expertise to empower themselves, but by so doing also reinforcing simplified visions of watershed science and community culture. I argue that exposing the co-production of authoritative knowledge and visions of social order offer greater opportunities for understanding the role of expertise as a political force than analysing competing assemblages based on oppositions of state-led expert knowledge and traditional local practices.     

Environmental Narratives on Protection and Production: Nature‐based Conflicts in R7iacute;o San Juan,Nicaragua

This article focuses on local processes and global forces in the struggle over the fate of forests and over the contested claims of protection and production in a protected area buffer zone of Río San Juan, Nicaragua. The struggle over control of local natural resources is seen as a multifaceted process of development and power involving diverse social actors, from agrarian politicians and development agents to a heterogeneous group of local settlers, absentee cattle raisers, timber dealers, transnational corporations, and non‐governmental organizations. The initial interest is in the local resource‐related discourses and actions; the analysis then broadens to include the larger political‐economic processes and environment‐development discourses that affect the local systems of production and systems of signification. The article underlines environmental resource conflicts as one of the major challenges in subjecting structures of social power to critical analysis.     

The Transnationalisation of Competing State Projects: Carbon Offsetting and Development in Sumatra's Coastal Peat Swamps

Indonesia's peatlands can be considered as conflict arenas where different state projects and actors compete. The case presented here stands for a new conservation controversy. The Berbak Carbon Initiatives overlap with a settlement project, inducing struggles among different state apparatuses, transnational actors, and peasants. This article is based on a novel conceptual approach building on political ecology, politics of scale and state theory for investigating divergent and transnationalised state projects. Empirically we draw on qualitative research conducted in the province of Jambi, Sumatra. We argue that the territorial conflicts mirror the contradictory interests of different state apparatuses influenced by conservation‐oriented and development‐oriented actors in society but also by supra‐national planning institutions. In our case, the contestation becomes visible through inconsistent notions of development and property. We show how political change challenges the implementation of a forest carbon project, illustrating the high risks of mitigating climate change through offsetting.     

Shared Social License: Mining and Conservation in the Peruvian Andes

Over the last two decades financial relationships between conservation and extraction have become conspicuously close. Both sectors unabashedly publicized these business deals as a form of greening extraction and marketizing conservation. This essay uses a case study in Perú to propose a tentative theory of how this seemingly incompatible but very profitable union unfolds on the ground. The development of fictitious commodities in nature for each sector is examined and the labor theory of value is combined with the labor of persuasive work to expose a fundamental shared need in both sectors: in Perú's contemporary political and economic context extractive and conservation actors increasingly must persuade landowners—usually indigenous communities—to allow for specific forms of capital to flow through their territory. In some cases this need to secure the “social license” is shared across sectors and the labor to secure the license can be undertaken together.     

Local Decisionmaking and Management in Czechoslovakia: 1990–19921

This article discusses the local government and decisionmaking system which emerged in the post-communist era in the former Czechoslovakia as a result of sweeping political, economic, and social change. The legal, institutional, and financial framework put in place following on rapid decentralization and deregulation is outlined; also discussed are problems associated with fragmentation, role definition, and uncertainty, as well as lack of management experience, strategic planning stills, training (both of local officials and elected representatives), and money.     

Scaling Post‐Industrial Forestry: The Complex Implementation of National Forestry Regimes in the Southern Valleys of Wales

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed increased geographical interest in the changing nature of forestry in the UK. Critical attention has been given to a transition from a previously dominant regime of industrial forestry, primarily concerned with the mass production of timber, to a post‐industrial regime, within which timber production sits alongside a broader range of social, economic and environmental objectives. Investigations of this transition, however, have been largely restricted to analyses of national policy discourse, with relatively little attention given to the implementation of post‐industrial forestry in regional and local spaces. In this paper, we argue that the emergence of this new forestry regime has been associated with a great deal of spatial complexity. Drawing on findings from recent research in the southern valleys of Wales, we highlight the complex geographies bound up with the implementation of national regimes of forestry in the UK, and the significant roles played by the local socio‐natural context in facilitating and resisting the implementation of new forestry regimes in particular spaces.