Towards Decolonisation of Australia's Protected Area Management: the Nantawarrina Indigenous Protected Area Experience

Management of Australia's National Parks and Protected Areas originally developed according to the United State's ‘Yellowstone’ model. Aimed primarily at preserving ‘wilderness’ areas, this form of protected area management has excluded indigenous habitation and land management, effectively colonising these landscapes. Since the 1980s indigenous exclusion from protected area management has been contested in the public sphere. Indigenous peoples have become involved in protected area management in various ways, such as the joint management of national parks. However, greater indigenous control is necessary to truly decolonise protected area landscapes and fully recognise the importance of indigenous Australians in land management. This paper explores a new initiative in protected area management: the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) program. IPAs are established through voluntary declaration of indigenous land with the aim of enhancing indigenous control of protected area landscapes. Nantawarrina, the first declared IPA, is considered as a case study. Although some manifestations of colonialism are still evident in the Nantawarrina IPA, the program has made some significant contributions to the decolonisation of protected area management in Australia.     

Wilderness use,conservation and tourism: what do we protect and for and from whom?

For many people today, the idea of wilderness conjures up meanings and images referring to wild, remote, and untrammeled natural areas, which need protection from human presence and utilization. Institutionally, the first Wilderness Act was prescribed in the United States over 50 years ago and the wilderness conservation originates from the establishment of the first national parks in North America in the nineteenth century. First conservation and wilderness areas and related legal acts provided a model on how to organize and manage conservation areas globally. However, this created ‘fortress’ model of global conservation thinking, separating wilderness, and nature from culture and people, has recently been increasingly challenged by views calling for more people-centered approaches in natural resource management. In addition, the tourism industry has become an increasingly important user and socioeconomic element of change in wilderness areas, which has created new kinds of utilization needs for the remaining wild environments. Thus, there are different ways to understand what wilderness is and for and from whom we are protecting those areas. This paper aims to overview some of the key perspectives on how wilderness environment are contextualized, used, and contested: as units of strict conservation; resources for livelihoods and raw materials, and/or tourist products. The purpose is to point out that while we have different and often conflicting understandings of what wilderness is and what it is for, there are also potentially symbiotic relations between different views which could help us to protect the remaining wilderness areas. This is the case especially in the Global South, where the sociopolitical pressures of economic utilization of the remaining wilderness environments are currently the sharpest.     

Land Tenures as Policy Instruments: Transitions on Cape York Peninsula

Over the last four decades, Australia's most remote marginal lands have provided an expansive space towards realisation of emergent national goals, involving recognition of Aboriginal land rights together with protection of ‘wilderness’ and semi‐natural ecosystems. This has been achieved by the revival of land tenures as instruments for the delivery of public policy, requiring innovative federal and state legislation, often driven by judicial determinations. More so than any other bioregion, Cape York Peninsula has experienced radical shifts in landownership, land titles, and property rights, reflecting its pivotal role as an arena in which emerging national goals are contested. The most immediately visible evidence of these changes is depicted in the tenure maps for 1970, 1990, and 2010. However, these maps provide an incomplete account of tenure changes, including new titles such as non‐transferable communal freehold and common‐law recognition of traditional native title, requiring belated responses by state and federal governments. The three benchmark maps provide a starting point for an examination of the currently resurrected role of land titles and land rights as policy instruments. The time‐specific attributes of each tenure category are discussed and linked to the policies underpinning each tenure and to the communities, political constituencies, resources, enterprises, and national values engaged with each tenure. Land titles and land rights are pivotal in political contests about regional futures, with the peninsula acting as a crucible in shaping wider national directions.     

Land,Life and Labour: Indo‐Fijian Claims to Citizenship in a Changing Fiji

Since the coup of May 2000 an estimated 24,000 Indo‐Fijians have left Fiji, the majority of them moving to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Those who remain in Fiji have faced increasing marginalisation as the government of Prime Minister Qarase has proposed significant reforms to both the administration of land and Constitutional arrangements of political representation. The situation has been further compounded through Qarase's recently proposed ‘Unity Bill’, which would grant amnesty to some of those responsible for the 2000 coup. These reforms are all part of an effort to ensure the ‘paramountcy’ of indigenous Fijians as well as to limit Indo‐Fijian participation in Fijian national politics. In this paper, I employ Greenhouse's concept of ‘empirical citizenship’ to analyse Indo‐Fijian responses to their political marginalisation in Fiji. After considering how national identities and sentiments of belonging are expressed in Indo‐Fijian discourse through the symbolic inter‐connection of the land and the Indo‐Fijian body, I argue that even if Indo‐Fijians are openly willing to recognize indigenous Fijian supremacy in national politics and the project of nation‐making, assertions of their right to live and labour on Fijian land constitute claims to ‘citizenship’ that are highly contestable in Fiji's current political climate.     

Agroforestry Land Use: The Concept and Practice

In Australia, the term ‘agroforestry’ is understood in a variety of ways. Although it has often been used to describe land use characterised by productive trees over pasture this is only one form of agroforestry. Recently, more expansive interpretations have arisen in which the term is seen as synomonous with ‘trees-on-farms’, and in some instances, rural forestation in general. This paper attempts to clarify the nature of agroforestry and stimulate interest in a potentially important rural land use.     

The Discourse that Silences: Beneficiaries' Ambivalence Towards Redistributive Land Reform in the Philippines

This article argues that the persistence of non-capitalist dimensions within land relations in the Philippines is basic to rural livelihood strategies, and has been a major but widely-neglected factor in the failure of land reform programmes. Addressing the issue of non-capitalist relationships brings into focus the indigenous or ‘customary’ land tenure relationships that exist in lowland land tenure arrangements, with the result that the conventional dichotomy between lowland and upland ‘cultural minority’ land relations becomes spurious. The article offers some suggestions as to why, for the major part of this century, the indigenous norms of lowlanders have been overlooked, with a discussion which links up to issues of national identity and nation building.     

The Indian State in a Liberalizing Landscape

There has been much discussion recently on the ‘great Indian land grab’, that is, the acquisition of productive land by the government, and the handing over of this land to large‐scale industry. What do these ongoing land transfers tell us about the nature of the state? This article builds a picture of the state in a liberalizing landscape based on empirical evidence. It outlines the role of the state in Kutch during a transfer of 30 km² of forest and coastal land to a cement manufacturing and exporting operation ‘Karkhana Ltd.’ (pseudonym). Karkhana's experience does not evince a state in withdrawal. Nor do we witness a regulatory state that watches a changing economy from the legal and coercive sidelines. Instead, the case study is able to reinforce heterodox perspectives that place the state at the centre of India's new economy as a close ally of big capital. Taking these views forward, the author suggests that the state's role in this alliance is that of a normative legitimator of liberalization, a buffer in the contentious politics of land, and an institutional promoter of and manoeuvrer through the new land regime. A multifaceted state is indispensable to India's liberalizing landscape.     

Transport Infrastructure in the Mountains: Why and How to Protect Landscape with Human Activity as Part of its Heritage

In mountain areas without permanent settlements, human activity is entirely dependent on spatial interaction. For centuries, local and regional traffic has followed livestock trails and footpaths. Mainly during the 20th century, new public and private roads changed this situation significantly in large parts of Norway. While mountain summer farming decreased, hydropower development and leisure use became dominant. Protected areas have been established to preserve possibilities for outdoor recreation and ‘wilderness’. However, seasonal farming activity is still an important upholder of cultural heritage. In the investigated area in western Norway, parallels between accessibility and human activity on mountain summer farmsteads have been identified with the abandonment of dairy production between ca 1905 and 1973, recent use by landowners and hikers’ use of publicly accessible tourist cabins. Increased differences in accessibility and protection status have resulted in diversification of human activity in different locations. Custom and tradition represent different principles according to which cultural landscape can be maintained—with emphasis on dynamics or invariance, respectively. Recent landscape protection focuses primarily on tradition. The necessity of easy access to maintain the living cultural heritage in addition to ‘wilderness’ areas, however, requires taking both concepts into account, most probably treated as geographically separate.     

Re‐locating Moroccan Women’s identities in a transnational world: the ‘woman question’ in question

This article considers the situation of women in politics and the overall politicization of the ‘woman question’ in Morocco in its historical context in order to suggest why, despite enormous changes in women’s daily lives and roles in society, continued attempts to gain greater rights for Moroccan women and improve their status have been met with strong resistance by certain political groups. Working with interviews conducted with activists during fieldwork in Morocco, I focus on an analysis of two recent sets of events—debates around the Plan for Action to Integrate Women into Development and the Moroccan March 2000 for Women in Rabat and its counter‐march in Casablanca—to discuss how the various oppositional positions on the ‘woman question’ have developed and persisted in Morocco. I argue that unresolved and renewed national conflicts in Morocco, which in part are fueled by the success of transnational feminisms and fundamentalisms, perpetuate the manipulation of the ‘woman question’ for short‐term political gains in such a way that significant progress on this issue has been repeatedly thwarted. I address the tension in transnational feminism between ‘universalist’ and ‘cultural difference’ positions as they have been manifested in the Moroccan context and suggest that a way forward involves problematizing both poles of this dichotomy.     

The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape

Before the rise of digital new media technology in 2002, ‘old’ media at its heart displayed a fundamental division between sender and receiver, a division which for a long time had structurally, materially and politically conditioned the nature of the relationship between ‘old’ media and war. Within the recently emerging digital new media technology, however, this age-old separation between sender and receiver has been eroded. Thus, alongside traditional media platforms, an entirely new form of media technology has arisen. This development has transformed the hitherto multipolar nature of the old media landscape and has led to a heteropolar global media landscape, in which the relationship between media and war has been altered. By exploring how digital new media poles are forming and old media poles are evolving, this article examines how this seismic shift in the global media landscape requires a redefinition of the understanding of the nature of the relationship between media and conflict today.     

Pots,pens and ‘eating out the body’: cuisine and the gendering of African nations*

Whether cooking in a pot in the back yard, or in a modern kitchen, African women have generally prepared food for their men. More recently, they have collated and written cookery books both in the West and in Africa so that the ruling elites, mostly all men, have been able to display their new ‘national cuisines’ on their states’ official websites. This article reviews how ‘national cuisines’ have emerged recently in parts of Africa and then examines how these emerging cuisines might contribute to the gendering of African nations. It will also contrast Western notions of ‘the slender body’ with some African notions, of ‘eating out the body’, building a respectable but large body to construct an ‘authentic physical masculinity’ on the one hand, and a healthy and fertile wife and mother on the other. The article investigates how this might be reflected in African national cuisines.     

创建荒野:印第安人的移徙与美国国家公园

当代环境保护运动是从美国对自然环境变化、全球工业化扩张与政治现代化过程的独特响应中发展起来的。从环保运动中涌现出了一种全新的自然观念,其中包含着基于种族移徙的荒野思想。这种荒野观允许白人为了娱乐消遣和静默冥想的目的而排他性地占用人迹杳然的荒野,并且将这种做法视为天经地义。把人类活动排除在外的荒野观对于美国和国际社会的国家公园和荒野区域的建立影响深远。当世界各地的土著居民们宣称拥有公园土地所有权和资源使用权时,前述荒野观便引发了诸多冲突。     

In Search of the Authentic Nation: Landscape and National Identity in Canada and Switzerland

Abstract. While the study of nationalism and national identity has flourished in the last decade, little attention has been devoted to the conditions under which natural environments acquire significance in definitions of nationhood. This article examines the identity-forming role of landscape depictions in two polyethnic nation-states: Canada and Switzerland. Two types of geographical national identity are identified. The first – what we call the ‘nationalisation of nature’– portrays zarticular landscapes as expressions of national authenticity. The second pattern – what we refer to as the ‘naturalisation of the nation’– rests upon a notion of geographical determinism that depicts specific landscapes as forces capable of determining national identity. The authors offer two reasons why the second pattern came to prevail in the cases under consideration: (1) the affinity between wild landscape and the Romantic ideal of pure, rugged nature, and (2) a divergence between the nationalist ideal of ethnic homogeneity and the polyethnic composition of the two societies under consideration.     

The economics of reconciliation: tracing investment in Indigenous–settler relations

The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler state remains fraught due to ongoing violence and mistrust. Numerous attempts have been made to ‘reconcile’ this beleaguered relationship over the past three decades. Indigenous peoples have advocated for the decolonization of the settler state and a suitable land base using the language of public investment. In response, settler governments reframe these requests as opportunities for economic investment that is guaranteed to produce self-esteem and social inclusion for Indigenous peoples. This article documents and problematizes an ideological shift whereby holistic decolonial approaches to reconciliation give way to an investment rationale that is used to bypass demands for Indigenous peoples’ jurisdiction and self-determination. The ramifications of this shift are examined in three ‘eras of reconciliation' (Section 37 Constitutional Talks, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, reparations for Indian residential school [IRS] Survivors) that also coincide with three types of investment: a) national; b) social; and c) therapeutic.     

SPACE,SCALE AND LOCALITY*

The importance of spatial variations for social behaviour has recently been re-established in social theory. But, paradoxically, space does not exist in the sense of being an object that can have properties and effects. How, then, are these two axioms to be reconciled? Recent attempts to solve this question have been centred around the concept of ‘locality’. In this paper we subject this concept to critical evaluation. First, we consider in abstract terms the way in which spatial variation affects social phenomena. Subsequently, we discuss the implications of this, focusing around the use of ‘locale’ and ‘local labour market’ as operationalisations of ‘locality’. Next, we review and comment on the debate on locality in the light of this discussion. The upshot is that locality is shown to provide an inadequate conceptual scheme for dealing with spatial patterning.     

Canada's history wars: indigenous genocide and public memory in the United States,Australia and Canada

In this article, I explore the slow development of a national debate in Canada about genocide in the Indian residential schools, which I compare to earlier ‘history wars’ in Australia and the United States. In the first section I begin with a brief introduction to the history of the IRS system and some of its legacies, as well as attempts at redress. These include financial compensation through the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement, an official apology and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which has been a nodal point for articulating claims of genocide. I follow this in the second section with an analysis of the history wars in the United States and Australia over indigenous genocide, before engaging in the third section with debates about genocide in Canada. Overt debates about genocide have been relatively slow in developing, in part because of the creation of a TRC, mandated with collecting the ‘truth’ about the IRS system while similarly engaging in ‘reconciliation’ (a contested term) with settler Canadians. While Canada's history wars may seem slow in getting off the ground, the TRC's more ‘balanced’ approach and wide-ranging engagement with non-Aboriginal societal actors may have a greater effect in stimulating national awareness than in the United States and Australia.     

‘Lockout’ laws or ‘rock out’ laws? Governing Sydney’s night-time economy and implications for the ‘music city’

‘Lockout laws’ are not new in Australia – variants exist and have been trialled or continue to operate in Newcastle (since 2008), Melbourne (abandoned in 2008), and Adelaide (since 2013) and Darwin (since 2007). In February 2014, the New South Wales O’Farrell Coalition government introduced 1.30 am lockout and 3 am last drink laws for the Sydney CBD (Central Business District), among a series of other measures. The subsequent controversies about the ‘lockout laws’ in Sydney have provoked a curious and vivid set of debates encompassing crime, medical, moral, social, libertarian, cultural and industrial discourses. In this paper I wish to assess the new regulatory landscape within historical and contemporary perspectives of nightlife economies increasingly privileging cultural and entertainment city uses. Beyond unpacking the ‘lockout’ debate in terms of ‘liveability’ and ‘cultural city’ meanings as practised by Australian cities, this article will focus on the implications for Sydney’s ability to maintain its national and global status as a music city.     

Agricultural Investment in Ethiopia: Undermining National Sovereignty or Tool for State Building?

The media discourse on recent agricultural investments — frequently referred to as the ‘global land grab’ — has been quick to label these deals as ‘neo‐colonial’, implying that these kinds of investments undermine national sovereignty. For the most part, the emerging academic literature on the ‘land grab’ has not critically examined this assumption. This article draws on the literature on state building and agrarian relations in Africa to construct a framework that can be used to analyse the impact of agricultural investment on state–society relations and state sovereignty. The article then uses this framework to examine the case of Ethiopia, illustrating how the Ethiopian state has directed investors to peripheral lowlands and, in doing so, has enhanced, rather than diminished, state sovereignty. As such, while the erosion of sovereignty is certainly one possible outcome of agricultural investment, it is by no means the only one, and is an assumption that should be subjected to critical analysis.     

‘The land and its people’: reflections on artistic identification in an age of nations and nationalism

From the late eighteenth century onwards, increasing numbers of visual artists came to identify with their nations and with the homeland and its people. This development was strongly influenced by growing national cultural support and regulation of the arts by academies, art schools, museums and art markets in Western Europe. On a subjective level, the Rousseauan movement of a ‘return to Nature’, Herder's espousal of vernacular cultural self‐expression and, above all, the widespread Romantic cult of authenticity, were potent influences on the inner self‐identification of visual artists after 1800, and were manifested in the novel importance accorded to landscape and rural genre painting in Western Europe. Here I consider the role of national sentiment, the ‘return to Nature’ and the cult of authenticity, first in landscape paintings by Paul Sandby, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable in early nineteenth‐century Britain, and then in the rural genre paintings of Jean‐Francois Millet and Jules Breton in nineteenth‐century France and Josef Israels, Anton Mauve and Vincent Van Gogh in the later nineteenth‐century Netherlands. Their work reveals how nineteenth‐century visual artists became inwardly identified with the ‘land and its people’, and how they in turn contributed, especially through prints and engravings, to the dissemination of national imagery and a cultural nationalism.