International conservation ‘volunteering’ and the geographies of global environmental citizenship

Growing numbers of fee-paying ‘volunteers’ leave the UK each year to work on international nature conservation projects. Powerful advocates argue that such volunteering offers active global environmental citizens the opportunity to make a difference, delivering public services through a politically and economically appealing model of social enterprise. This paper reviews the geographies of citizenship performed in international conservation volunteering from the UK to critically examine these claims. It draws on and develops three conceptual approaches from political geography. First, it examines international conservation volunteering as a mode of cosmopolitan global environmental citizenship, guided by the universal framework of natural science across a flat earth of difference making opportunities. Second, it reviews the material reality of conservation volunteering as an illustration of the neoliberal and neo-colonial tendencies within mainstream global environmentalism. Third, it moves beyond these familiar theoretical tropes to present a more-than-human account of international conservation volunteering from the UK. This attends to the material assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies, practices and affects caught up in within these expressions of citizenship. In conclusion the paper critically compares the different materialisations of citizenship offered by these approaches. It finds that the geographies of citizenship performed within the sector are neither ‘global’ or ‘environmental’, nor do they comprise modes of citizenship that embody planetary humanism or panoptic rationalism. Instead, the modes, subjects and spatialities of citizenship performed here are asymmetric, affective and more-than-human. This has important implications for the scope, practices and future of international environmental politics and for the emerging sub-discipline of the geographies of citizenship.     

Commercializing Nature: Mangrove Conservation and Female Oyster Collectors in The Gambia

Abstract: Taking a political ecology approach, this paper offers a critical evaluation of conservation efforts undertaken in Gambia's Tanbi Wetland National Park (TWNP), a “wetland of international importance” as designated by the Ramsar Convention. Focusing on the oyster commercialization component of the World Wildlife Fund's Gambia–Senegal Sustainable Fisheries Program (GSFP) in the TWNP mangrove forests, we identify oystering practices that promote mangrove conservation and others that conflict with sustainable management. The project, which aims to commercialize oyster culture through local women, is entirely production oriented, ignoring the ways in which oysters are prepared for market. As a result, degradation of the very mangrove forests the GSFP aims to conserve may be accelerated. The project selectively engages with local environmental knowledge and fails to consider the implications of expanding the value chains for oysters and their shells. Unless the World Wildlife Fund addresses these issues, its conservation objectives and potential socioeconomic benefits may be compromised.     

“Much in Blood and Money”: Necropolitical Ecology on the Margins of the Uganda Protectorate

Increasingly, political ecologists invoke the concept of “green grabbing” to refer to the ways in which processes of accumulation by dispossession articulate with various imperatives for environmental protection. This paper traces these contemporary processes to their roots in the colonial era, focusing on how dispossession in the name of environmental protection intersects with complex historical geographies of state formation and internal territorialisation. Drawing upon the case of Mount Elgon in Britain's Uganda Protectorate, in particular, we reconstruct the ways in which the interrelated “birth” of both conservation and transcontinental agrarian markets were intimately connected to the emergence and normalisation of the colonial state itself. In doing so, we propose the term necropolitical ecology as a framework to encompass the ways in which contemporary “green grabs” partially emerge from racialised modes of colonial appropriation, the violence of which often still lingers in agencies and institutions of environmental governance in the contemporary postcolony.     

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.     

The understated turn: Emerging interests and themes in Canadian posthumanist geography

Posthumanist geography is a broad tradition incorporating a range of intersecting theoretical approaches including assemblage theory, actor-network theory, new materialisms, affect theory, neo-vitalism, political ecology, post-phenomenology, and non-representational theory—as well as contributions from a number of theoretically progressive subject fields such as new mobilities, relational thinking, sensory and performance studies, biosocial and biopolitics studies, and science and technology studies. The specificities of and differences between these traditions and fields aside, common to posthumanism is a scepticism of human exceptionalism. Here, the sovereign human subject is decentred, and in doing so, posthumanist work acknowledges the agencies of a full array of human and non-human actors and forces. Recognizing that there are important “geographies to (the discipline of) geography,” this paper identifies and reviews some of the key posthumanist interests and themes that have emerged over recent years quietly and organically in Canadian geography, namely posthumanist (i) Indigenous geographies; (ii) animal and natures geographies; (iii) health, wellbeing, and disability geographies; (iv) affective and atmospheric geographies; and (v) non-representational and creative methodologies. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the nature and strengths of Canadian posthumanist geography, and on some possibilities for future advancement.     

Complexity,Dynamism, and Agency: How Can Dialectical Biology Inform Geography?

Dialectical approaches, variously interpreted, have been advocated for by geographers for several decades. At the same time, critical environmental geography has recently become dominated by vital materialist strands of thought, the advocates of which have sometimes framed their own work in opposition to dialectics. Critics perceive two major problems with a dialectical framework; that it cements a nature–society dualism and that it insufficiently accounts for the agency or vitality of non‐human life. This paper seeks to address these criticisms by engaging with work by biologists who have been influenced by dialectical ideas. I outline two examples, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins’ understanding of the way organism and environment mutually construct each other and research by Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer that offers a non‐dualist approach to wildlife conservation in agricultural ecosystems. The article discusses some of the ways in which these understandings might inform contemporary debates in political ecology.     

Reading fair trade: political ecological imaginary and the moral economy of fair trade foods

This paper begins to explore the changing political geographies of alternative development as practiced and envisioned in the global South. Looking specifically at the growing movement and market for fair trade foods, this form of alternative development has become the moral business of latte drinkers and other reflexive consumers in Europe and the US. Fair trade attempts to re-connect producers and consumers economically, politically, and psychologically through the creation of a transnational moral economy. This re-connection is accomplished through material and semiotic commoditization processes that produce fair trade commodities. The semiotic production of these commodities and their traffic in particular ‘political ecological imaginaries’ is essential to the formation of ethical production-consumption links, acting to also politicize consumption and fair trade eaters. Fair trade's moral economy rides the tension between the ethical relationships it fosters and the need for the wily characteristics of enterprise in the construction of transnational trade networks. Bringing recent work on moral geography to bear, constructing this moral economy is an attempt to facilitate a sense of ‘solidarity in difference’ in the experiences of global economic inequalities between North and South and growers and eaters. At the same time, fair trade networks look to produce an expansive ‘spatial dynamics of concern’ in the fashioning of ethical places of production and consumption. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the continuing dilemmas critical for fair trade and suggestions for further empirical study of fair trade provisioning and alternative development networks.     

Police power in green: Furthering political ecologies of the state

The growth of wildlife and environmental crime has catalysed efforts to strengthen state policing to better exert control over activities, flows, and people that threaten states’ desired socio-ecological orders. The expanded role of policing in and over human-environment relations provokes conceptual and empirical imperatives to better centre policing in political ecology and political geography scholarship on state-environment relations. This article begins with the question of how political ecology might better account for and conceptualise policing power, and how doing so can help understand how, where, and through what practices and institutions states exercise power over socio-ecological relations. To capture the role of policing in exerting power and control over socio-ecological orders, this article brings together insights on critical theories of police power, conservation power and state power to develop the concept of police power in green. I argue that police power in green grounds the mechanisms through which state power is exerted over socio-ecological relations in ways that reflect a broader strengthening of state power. I use multi-scalar and ethnographic research to examine three processes that extend and expand police power in green, and related state power. These are: 1) expanding conservation law and criminality beyond conservation spaces to national territory; 2) creating new environmental police bodies; 3) strengthening and expanding traditional policing, enforcement and criminal justice institutions. I end by outlining how police power in green can connect and further critical scholarship on political ecologies of the state and broader debates on policing, the green state and state power.     

Experts,publics and the environment in the UK: twentieth-century translations

Prompted by contemporary concerns in the West over a global vision of nature and society at risk, this paper builds on recent studies of expertise within a broader public culture. By focusing on earlier episodes of social and political uncertainty, the paper argues that there is scope to extend such analysis in terms of historical geographies of specialist knowledge. The paper examines the formative years of British ecology, a discipline which from its beginnings in the wake of urban industrialism more than a century ago, was centrally concerned with the relations of human well-being and the environment. In exploring when, where and how an ecological expertise became defined, it shifts the focus from familiar milestones in the discipline's public recognition. By tracing the discursive and material practices of those who sought to identify and define ecology as a specialism, the paper illustrates the importance of groupings within and beyond accredited expertise in giving it meaning and purpose. In doing so it highlights the fragility and fluidity of the boundaries around ‘expertise’, and the significance of geographical context and connections in shaping its conduct and content. In terms of broader historical geographies, the paper suggests that while ‘expert’ cultures may be projected as giving greater public reassurance, the sense of certainty that this implies disguises complex processes in which the boundaries are imprecise between specialist and lay knowledge and between scientific and public spaces.     

Prosaic geographies of stateness

Despite long-standing calls to rethink the state ‘as a social relation’, reified understandings that view the state as a differentiated institutional realm separate from civil society are notably persistent in academic and political debate. By contrast, this paper focuses on the myriad ways in which everyday life is permeated by the social relations of stateness, and vice versa. The paper reviews the conceptual difficulties in defining ‘the state’ and suggests that these can be addressed in part through a focus on the mundane practices that give rise to ‘state effects’. It considers how the concept of prosaics, based on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, might provide a fruitful approach for studying such practices, their geographies and the geographies of state effects. A case study of the governance of anti-social behaviour in the UK is used to show the potential application of this approach in empirical research. The paper concludes with some reflections on possible future avenues of research.     

Actor-Network Theory as a Critical Approach to Environmental Justice: A Case against Synthesis with Urban Political Ecology

Abstract:  Recent critiques of environmental justice research emphasize its disengagement from theory and its political focus on liberal conceptions of distributional and procedural justice. Marxian urban political ecology has been proposed as an approach that can both contextualize environmental inequalities more productively and provide a basis for a more radical politics of environmental justice. Although this work takes its primary inspiration from historical materialism, it also adapts key concepts from actor-network theory (ANT)—in particular, the agency of nonhumans—while dismissing the rest of ANT as insufficiently critical and explanatory. This paper argues that ANT—specifically, the version articulated by Bruno Latour—provides a basis for an alternative critical approach to environmental justice research and politics. Instead of arguing for a synthesis of ANT and Marxism, I contend that ANT gives us a distinctive conception of the  social  and opens up new questions about the production and justification of environmental inequalities.     

A Britain that everyone is proud to call home? The bedroom tax,political rhetoric and home unmaking in U.K. housing policy

This paper explores the prominence of rhetorics of home in UK politics. Through the analysis of key prime ministerial speeches, I trace the lineage of home in political rhetoric, paying particular attention to the ways in which the imaginary of the homespace has been moralised through tenure type. The paper examines the ways in which both of the country’s major political parties have utilised rhetoric that places homeliness and homemaking at the centre of citizenship construction and nation-building, whilst simultaneously introducing housing policies that contribute to class-based acts of home unmaking. The final section of the paper examines the case study of the bedroom tax as an example of the power and influence of rhetorics of home. I draw on interviews with social tenants affected by the policy to highlight some of the consequences of the moralisation of the home, and the everyday impacts of home unmaking policies. Conceptually, the paper makes a dual contribution to social and cultural geographies. Firstly, I highlight the need for a stronger dialogue between critical geographies of home and geographies of housing literature. Secondly, the paper utilises home unmaking as an integral, and yet relatively underexplored, means of extending critical geographies of home literature.     

从科学到政治:全球变暖问题的历史演变

国际社会在对待全球变暖问题上经历了从科学回应到政治回应的发展过程。一方面,全球变暖科学理论的发展为国际气候科学界达成有关共识提供了基础,同时为政治家的政治决策提供了相关的科学背景知识,从而为全球变暖问题在20世纪80年代的政治化创造了必要的前提条件。另一方面,国际社会对全球变暖问题的政治回应过程反映了更为复杂的国家集团间的利益矛盾,主要包括南北矛盾和北方内部的矛盾,它们的妥协和合作是确保温室气体减排成功的关键因素。     

The Spa‐cial Formation Theory: Transcending the Race–Class Binary in Environmental Justice Literature

Two schools have dominated environmental justice literature: the race school and the class school. The class school tends to explain cases of environmental injustice exclusively from the vantage point of socioeconomic differences. The race school, however, foregrounds racism as an explanatory framework, while still acknowledging the relative role of class in this regard. Both schools tend to base their analyses primarily upon research findings from empirical/geographical studies. This paper joins its voice with the recently growing body of literature that has started to call for the need to transcend this cumbersome race–class dichotomy and move beyond the mundane pattern of case studies research and statistical data gathering. Specifically, it propounds a theory of spa‐cial formation that illuminates the parallel processes of spatial discrimination and racial subjugation, stresses the historical contingency of environmental racism, and highlights the role of the various cultural images, representations and meanings attached to black geographies in laying the moral and ideational foundations facilitating the process of spatial and environmental discrimination against African Americans.     

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.     

Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale

This and the subsequent papers in this special issue set out the contours of Marxian urban political ecology and call for greater research attention to a neglected field of critical research that, given its political importance, requires urgent attention. Notwithstanding the important contributions of other critical perspectives on urban ecology, Marxist urban political ecology provides an integrated and relational approach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political, social and ecological processes that together go to form highly uneven and deeply unjust urban landscapes. Because the power-laden socioecological relations that shape the formation of urban environments constantly shift between groups of actors and scales, historical-geographical insights into these ever-changing urban configurations are necessary for the sake of considering the future of radical political-ecological urban strategies. The social production of urban environments is gaining recognition within radical and historical-materialist geography. The political programme, then, of urban political ecology is to enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental construction by identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a more inclusive mode of environmental production can be achieved.     

Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape,Race and Representation in the Canadian Diamond Industry

Abstract: Canadian diamonds are marketed as “ethical” alternatives to notorious “blood diamonds”. This paper analyzes the specific matrices through which ethical consumption as a discourse is being mobilized to sell diamonds. I argue that consumption operates as a system of social signification in which consuming subjects are positioned as moral subjects. Moreover, I argue that historically accumulated symbolic power, in the form of imagined geographies of benevolent colonialism in the Canadian North versus the exploitation of “dark” Africa, pristine, “white” northern landscapes, modernization via commodity production, and national identity, creates the very field of meaning within which the consuming subject is positioned. The ethicalization of Canadian diamonds also has important normative implications both in terms of the cultural politics of ethical consumption and social and environmental justice in the Canadian North.     

No Net Loss: Wetland Restoration and the Incomplete Capitalization of Nature

The practice of restoration ecology (the creation and restoration of ecosystems)has important implications for theorizing nature in the traditions of O'Connor's'capitalized nature,' Haraway's hybrid socionatures, and other recent work in poststructural approaches to political ecology. The prominent US environmental discourse of 'no net loss of wetlands' has spurred the rapid expansion of restoration practices, which promise to open a new frontier in the commodification and capitalization of nature. Through wetland mitigation and banking, restoration science is representing entire ecosystems as abstract, mobile, and fungible entities; however, a simple reading of a restored landscape as fully capitalized is unsatisfactory. Close attention to the wetland commodification process reveals two important points: 1) the commodification and capitalization of nature is never automatic; rather, the crucial steps of abstraction and valuation are composed of negotiations between and within differentiated segments of the state and civil society, in which there are many spaces for resistance; and 2) the materiality of restoration sites provided important challenges to the commodification process, which are not contemplated within critical approaches to nature as currently constituted. The transformation of restoration sites into sites of commodity provision is incomplete at best. A major challenge for poststructural political ecology will be to specify ecological phenomena and their important role in the social construction of material environments, without falling into an ontological commitment to the primacy of ecological data.