Experiences of ‘Community’ in a Gated Residential Estate

Gated residential estates have become common features of the landscapes of cities around the world. The proliferation of these estates has attracted significant critical attention from urban scholars who have focused in particular on their contribution to urban segregation. Many commentators also question the possibility and existence of the neighbourhood‐based community that is promised to potential residents by estates developers. They argue that it cannot be delivered primarily because meaningful community does not form in circumstances of privatism. In this paper, we examine what community means to the residents of Macquarie Links, a gated residential estate in the Australian city of Sydney. To this end, the paper traces the interplay of contradictions that define the expectation and experience of community and argues that rather than being in conflict, the experience of community for many in this gated estate is actually underpinned by the structures of private governance that define the estate. In other words, not only is community said to exist in this neighbourhood, but also it is not homogeneity and everyday neighbouring that are pivotal but the governance structure of the estate.     

Empowering Pyromaniacs in Madagascar: Ideology and Legitimacy in Community‐Based Natural Resource Management

Development practitioners frequently rely on community‐based natural resource management (CBNRM) as an approach to encourage equitable and sustainable environmental resource use. Based on an analysis of the case of grassland and woodland burning in highland Madagascar, this article argues that the success of CBNRM depends upon the real empowerment of local resource users and attention to legitimacy in local institutions. Two key factors — obstructive environmental ideologies (‘received wisdoms’) and the complex political and social arena of ‘community’ governance — challenge empowerment and legitimacy and can transform outcomes. In Madagascar, persistent hesitancy among leaders over the legitimate role of fire has sidetracked a new CBNRM policy called GELOSE away from one of its original purposes — community fire management — towards other applications, such as community management of forest exploitation. In addition, complications with local governance frustrate implementation efforts. As a result, a century‐long political stalemate over fire continues.     

Cadastral Politics: The Making of Community‐Based Resource Management in Zimbabwe and Mozambique

Projects promoting community‐based management of natural resources frequently encourage local smallholders to share flora, fauna, or land forms with state agencies and/or private companies. Ideals of common property and moral economy have inspired this agenda and helped spread it globally. In Southern Africa, however, the general model of shared landscapes has collided with a bitter history of white colonization and land grabbing. This article recounts the rise and fall of one CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) project in eastern Zimbabwe. There, cadastral politics — struggles over the bounding and control of land — overwhelmed negotiations for joint management and eco‐tourism. Across the border, in Mozambique, community‐based resource management has engaged with cadastral politics in a more fruitful fashion. In the midst of latter‐day Afrikaner colonization, this project mapped smallholders’ claims to land. Thus, the Zimbabwean project ignored territorial conflict and ultimately succumbed to it. The Mozambican project jumped into the fray, with some success. On past or current settler frontiers, community‐based management may learn from this lesson: dispense with an ideology of sharing and join the rough‐and‐tumble of cadastral politics.     

Being ‘there’: At the front line of the ‘European refugee crisis’ ‐ part 1

In the course of 2015, Skala Sykamnias, a fishing village and tourist idyll on the northern coast of Lesbos, by accident of its geographical location, has turned into the informal gate into Europe for more than 200.000 refugees. In this article the author analyses the massive flows of people and things that transverse his fieldwork site from different directions: the great diversity of actors enacting what are often dissonant ideals and strategies, the several theatres of operation and reception ‘structures’, both frontline and back stage, and the debates that revolve around humanitarian action in the region. The local community is falling apart whilst to the incoming it represents the gateway to freedom. It is becoming a mini theatre of conflicts that echoes wider debates on the political future of Europe.     

‘White Skins‘, ‘Real People’ and ‘Chinese’ in Some Spatial Transformations of the Western Province,PNG1

To understand more fully contemporary forms of colonialism in PNG I argue we need to move our analysis beyond local narratives of encounters with Europeans to include narratives about non-Europeans. Through a consideration of Kamula accounts of Europeans, especially missionaries, and Chinese I show how the Kamula model two quite different experiences of colonialism. In one, local people are able to transform Europeans into analogues of themselves and in the other, currently more associated with the Chinese, the emphasis is on difference, rather than on commonalities. These interrelated representations of two distinct kinds of colonialists are, in part, complex signifiers of national, and especially local, concerns about ‘development’ based on logging. I outline how these accounts of Europeans and Chinese express the different forms of power which are currently deployed to transform space in the Western Province. I conclude by speculating that to understand these powers adequately we may need to follow Latour and Callon and extend our analysis of colonialism to include non-human agents.     

Managing the Discourse of Resource Management: the Case of Sasi from ‘Southeast’ Maluku,Indonesia

Co-management of protected areas and renewable resources, with its focus upon local community involvement, is often proposed as some form of ‘magic cure’ for environmental ailments and social injustices. Notwithstanding the inherent romanticism of some of the proponents of management from ‘the bottom up’, there is a strong tendency to view this approach in overly utilitarian, ahistorical and often essentialist terms. In the process, the cultural, historical and political specificities and effects of this discourse are either neutralised or totally disregarded. While a number of authors have identified some of the limitations and problems associated with the implementation of community-based, co-management programmes, there is still a general reluctance to question the logic which informs and is constitutive of this discourse. In this paper, I explore the discourse of resource management in relation to the varied practices and perceptions associated with and identified as sasi. This discussion of sasi focuses upon the island of Luang, and the 1800 or so people who inhabit this island located in the southern waters of the Banda sea. The environmental and economic circumstances of Luang make it an ideal context for the investigation of ‘community-based, marine resource management’ strategies. However, while this context seems to comply with some of the truths produced by the discourse of resource management, in this paper I argue that the very canons of this discourse are placed at risk through people's enactment of their own projects and the expression of their own representations.     

‘Working for’ and ‘Working’ among Western Arrernte in Central Australia1

This article discusses some conflicts between kin‐ and market‐based society as they are reflected in the lives of Western Arrernte in and around Ntaria (Hermannsburg). Both political economy and cultural analysis provide accounts of concomitant ‘problems about work’ and training initiatives in remote communities. Neither brings together, however, the issues of economic marginalisation and a history of cultural difference with its own transformations. This discussion takes its departure from the Arrernte's attempts to reconcile kinship service (‘working for’) and paid employment (‘working’) in everyday practice. It demonstrates that this attempt is part of broader change concerning the ways in which hunter‐gatherer people in Australia have been compelled to adapt to a world of cash and commodities, and waged employment. In this discussion, the focus is on remote indigenous Australians today.     

Managing ‘Aboriginal selves’ in South‐Western Sydney1

ABSTRACT This paper explores Aboriginal people's multiple sense of selves in suburban situations. While the Aboriginal self has been usually conceived as forged through relationships with kin, in the contemporary world, Aboriginal lives are constrained by a genealogical understanding of Aboriginality, that is, one based on descent. This understanding is endorsed by the state system, by Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal organisations, and by non‐Aboriginal people. In the suburbs there are different ways in which people come to understand and identify their Aboriginalty. Drawing on ethnographic field‐work in south‐west Sydney, this paper explores these forms of identity, how they are perceived, and the effects this has on their sense of self. The focus is on two individuals with different backgrounds and understandings of what it is to be Aboriginal. The increasing role of Aboriginal organisations to offer new forms of relatedness is also discussed.     

Male ‘Providers’ and Female ‘Housewives’: A Gendered Co‐performance in Rural North India

Problems of measuring and public recognition of women's work are not merely statistical. This article highlights the co‐performance of stereotypical gender roles, where men and women jointly seek to establish the status of women as housewives rather than as farmers and of men as providers, thereby upholding a particular social order and simultaneously reinterpreting the meanings of existing norms to include new realities. Evidence from rural north India demonstrates the discernable disjunctures between social norms, narratives and action. Conscious of the growing insecurities faced by their husbands in the context of a rapidly changing economy, women try to allay rather than aggravate them. Instead of asserting their identities as ‘workers’, their strategies for gaining recognition and reciprocity from their husbands focus on reconstituting gender relations in the household, by expanding individual spaces and making incremental gains within the existing social order, rather than struggling for wider transformative changes.     

Being ‘there’: At the front line of the ‘European refugee crisis’ ‐ part 2

In the course of 2015, Skala Sykamnias, a fishing village and tourist idyll on the northern coast of Lesbos, by accident of its geographical location, became the informal gate into Europe for more than 200.000 refugees. In this article the author analyzes the massive flows of people and things that transverse his fieldwork site from different directions: the great diversity of actors enacting what are often dissonant ideals and strategies; the various theatres of operation and reception ‘structures’; both frontline and back stage; and the debates that revolve around humanitarian action in the region. The local community is falling apart whilst to those incoming it represents a gateway to freedom. It is becoming a mini theatre of conflicts that echo wider debates on the political future of Europe.     

Problematizing ‘Knowledge‐for‐Development’

This article argues that measures designed to improve the availability and accessibility of information as a key strategy to facilitate development have become ends in themselves, de‐linked from their potential to have an impact on Southern knowledge systems that may lead to improved development outcomes. The production and dissemination of ever‐greater volumes of information in response to concerns about the uneven availability of information, particularly for individuals and intermediaries based in the global South, are unable to address the persistent problem of the fragmentation of knowledge systems that result from knowledge for development (K4D) initiatives in which information and knowledge are treated as isolated entities. The article presents the findings of a study into the K4D practices of a network of women/gender information intermediaries. It reveals that attempts to strengthen Southern knowledge systems are forestalled by efforts that merely improve the supply of information rather than engaging with knowledge processes in their entirety, thus limiting their potential to promote improved development outcomes. Proxy measures of success are used that fail to challenge the typically neoliberal underpinnings of the dominant knowledge infrastructure. The author concludes that, if knowledge‐based development interventions are to be made more effective, K4D stakeholders need to find ways to engage not just with the supply but with the demand for information, as part of broader efforts to strengthen entire knowledge systems in ways that take account of concerns around hegemony.     

Recategorizing ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Property in Ghana

In the course of political struggle in northern Ghana, the classification of land and resources has shifted between the two ‘master categories’ of public and private. Despite the fact that master categories may be wholly inadequate in accounting for the actual complexity of property objects, social units and rights, they are not divorced from the agency of people who have something at stake. Laws, rules and by‐laws are referred to as important markers and fashion the local political struggles over the rights to and control over resources. This article offers a general account of conflicts and the recategorization of resources in the property system of small‐scale irrigation. It examines the logics and positioning of the different stakeholders, and discusses how different levels of public policy have provided opportunities for such changes. A case study presents the opportunity to examine the details of a particular controversy demonstrating the social and political powers involved in the recategorization of property.     

Unpacking the ‘Joint’ in Joint Forest Management

This article examines the concept of ‘jointness’ in India’s Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme, understood as an engagement between the state (in this case the Forest Department) and people organized into ‘communities’, with NGOs, where available, acting as the interface. By examining the commonalities between older examples of joint or co‐management of resources and current practices of joint forest management, the article challenges the notion that ‘jointness’ is a new feature of forest policy, or that it represents a resurgence of civil society against the state. Further, insofar as the basic agenda of the programme is pre‐determined, it cannot be considered very participatory in nature. None the less, within the limited degree of choice that JFM allows, there is a new and joint construction of needs.     

‘They have to abide by our laws … and stuff’: ethnonationalism masquerading as civic nationalism

The long established distinction between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism is useful heuristically to understand different dimensions of nationalism and perhaps track a movement from ethnic forms to civic allegiances, though some have challenged its empirical veracity and others question the normative implications of such a distinction. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the two are elided in everyday discourses about migrants in Australia. We argue suspicion of cultural difference, identified more than three decades ago as the new racism, has given way to talk of the need for migrants to ‘follow the law’. This serves rhetorically to reinforce the notion that migrants, often implied to overlap with the category ‘Muslims’, are insisting on breaking the law and/or changing it and are therefore culturally incompatible with a modern liberal democracy. We argue that since ethnic nationalism, like racism, is out of favour normatively, ethnic nationalist arguments are now superficially concealed beneath the acceptable language of civic nationalism. The manner in which this occurs is mapped discursively using data from a corpus of twenty seven focus groups conducted around Australia.