Exclusion and Counter‐exclusion: The Struggle over Shrimp Farming in a Coastal Village in Bangladesh

This article explores the processes whereby control over land and water is exercised in the context of commercial shrimp cultivation in coastal Bangladesh. The authors draw on the insight that the exercise of control over resources implies both inclusion for some and exclusion for others, and that shifting the boundary between the two involves the deployment of four interacting ‘powers of exclusion’ — regulation, the market, force and legitimation — the effectiveness of which depends on specific historical conjunctures. The article uses a case study of a village in Khulna District to explore: (a) the processes by which poor farmers were excluded from their land by large shrimp farmers; (b) the ways in which villagers experienced the changes in land use and social relations associated with the shrimp boom; and (c) the conjunction of internal and external factors that enabled smallholders to collectively mobilize to reverse their exclusion from the land. Understanding these messy and contingent processes of exclusion and counter‐exclusion helps to inform strategies aimed at securing the property rights and livelihoods of the rural poor.     

Property Rights and the Environment in Pastoral China: Evidence from the Field

It is widely perceived that the degradation of China’s rangelands has accelerated since the introduction of rural reforms in the late 1970s. The popular explanation for this phenomenon has been that a ‘tragedy of the commons’ exists, as privately‐owned livestock are being grazed on ‘common’ land. Since the passing of the Rangeland Law in 1985, Chinese pastoral tenure policy has emphasized the establishment of individual household tenure as a necessary condition for improving incentives for sustainable rangeland management. Yet household tenure has yet to be effectively established in many pastoral regions. The first objective of this article is to describe pastoral tenure arrangements in northern Xinjiang‐Uygur Autonomous Region. Its second objective is to explain pastoral tenure arrangements, particularly the observed persistence of collective action. It is argued that there is no ‘tragedy of the commons’ and that it is characteristics of rangeland resources and the social environment that give rise to the particular types of institutional arrangements found.     

THE RIVER HAS NEVER DIVIDED US: BRONZE AGE METALWORK DEPOSITION IN WESTERN BRITAIN

The significant quantities of Bronze Age metalwork recovered from the River Thames have focused archaeological attention on the presence of metalwork from riverine locations and led to the expectation that rivers should contain metalwork. Finds from bogs and marshes have also been considered to be part of this practice of deposition in ‘wet places’. Whilst rivers and bogs can indeed be thought of as ‘wet’, this overlooks the fundamental physical and cosmological differences between these two types of wetland. This paper will consider Bronze Age metalwork finds from rivers in the west of Britain, paying particular attention to Britain's longest river, the Severn. The finds will be compared to those from bogs and marshes, and an attempt will be made to explain these differences in terms of the opposing metaphorical qualities of flowing and standing water, and the landscapes in which these wet places are located.     

The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource: History,Ecology and Locality in a Tank-irrigated Landscape in South India

Today there is a pervasive policy consensus in favour of ‘community management’ approaches to common property resources such as forests and water. This is endorsed and legitimized by theories of collective action which, this article argues, produce distinctively ahistorical and apolitical constructions of ‘locality’, and impose a narrow definition of resources and economic interest. Through an historical and ethnographic exploration of indigenous tank irrigation systems in Tamil Nadu, the article challenges the economic-institutional modelling of common property systems in terms of sets of rules and co-operative equilibrium outcomes internally sustained by a structure of incentives. The article argues for a more historically and politically grounded understanding of resources, rights and entitlements and, using Bourdieu's notion of ‘symbolic capital’, argues for a reconception of common property which recognizes symbolic as well as material interests and resources. Tamil tank systems are viewed not only as sources of irrigation water, but as forming part of a village ‘public domain’ through which social relations are articulated, reproduced and challenged. But the symbolic ‘production of locality’ to which water systems contribute is also shaped by local ecology. The paper examines the historical and cultural production of two distinctive ‘cultural ecologies’. This serves to illustrate the fusion of ecology and social identity, place and person, in local conceptions, and to challenge a currently influential thesis on the ecological-economic determinants of collective action. In short, development discourse and local actors are seen to have very different methods and purposes in the ‘production of locality’. Finally, the article points to some practical implications of this for strategies of ‘local institutional development’ in irrigation.     

Sustainable policy? A public debate about nature development in the Netherlands

This article makes, first, a general argument for ‘sustainable policies.’ This argument will build on the observation that modern societies, of all political guise, find it difficult to cope with the challenges and opportunities posed by science and technology. Classical models of democracy do not seem to be sufficiently equipped to guide the political process in our highly developed societies. Second, this paper will discuss constructivist views on the development of technology in relation to society, and explore possible implications for democratization of technological culture. And finally, the article will present a particular case of experimentation with one alternative form of democracy. This experimental addendum to the existing political repertoires in the Netherlands was a public debate about the issue of ‘nature development’ or ‘nature construction’—the making of new nature, for example by giving back some of the Dutch land to the water of the rivers Rhein and Maas.     

Establishing Development Orthodoxy: Negotiating Masculinities in the Water Sector

Despite important work in development studies on the ‘male bias in the development process’, it is generally recognized that gender and development analyses have been slow to engage with masculinities. Focusing attention on the nexus between identity and globalizing development discourses, this article explores the relationship between masculinities and development through an analysis of the gendering of water paradigms. By analysing the example of the recent Cochabamba water wars in Bolivia, and placing them in historical context, the author explores how gendered representations and language are used to downplay and upgrade particular understandings of modernity as they relate to water management, and examines the mechanisms through which specific gendered identities become associated with the most successful versions of ‘modern’ development.     

Environmental Relations and Biophysical Transition: The Case of Trinket Island

ABSTRACT To what extent is an island economy cut off from the rest of the world? Defined as a mass of land bounded by water, island societies connect and exchange with their surroundings rather intensely. Based on empirical research, this paper explores the role of a ‘remote’ island society on Trinket in generating or sheltering itself from the process of globalisation in which con‐textually given borders are transgressed and displaced. To this end, we apply the concepts of societal metabolism and colonising natural processes operationalised by Material and Energy Flow Analysis (MEFA), and Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP) respectively. Using these biophysical indicators, we describe the transition from a metabolism based upon the natural environment to metabolism based on exchange with other societies. Data presented in this paper further reveal a process of industrialisation and integration into the global market of a so‐called ‘closed’ and ‘inaccessible’ island society.     

The Waikato River: Changing Properties of a Living Māori Ancestor

In Māori cosmology, rivers and other waterways are conceptualised as living ancestors, who have their own life force and spiritual strength. The special status of rivers in Māori society also explains why they are sometimes separated from other Māori claims to natural resources of which they were dispossessed in the 19th century. Until recently, Māori were often eager to contend that ownership of rivers is not their prime interest, but instead, they argued that they feel obliged and responsible to keep rivers fresh, clean, and flowing. This perspective, however, changed under the impact of a new government policy of selling shares in energy corporations that use freshwater and geothermal resources for energy production. In this paper, I provide an ethnohistorical account of the Waikato River and show how conceptions of this ‘ancestral river’ changed in the course of colonial and postcolonial history, more specifically in response to a recent shift in government policy. In 2008, a joint management agreement was signed between the government and Waikato Māori for a ‘clean and healthy river’, leaving the issue of ‘ownership’ undecided. Only two years later, however, Māori felt forced to claim ownership when the government moved to sell shares of power‐generating energy companies located along the river, which effectively transformed their ‘ancestor’ into a property object.     

Climate injustice,criminalisation of land protection and anti-colonial solidarity: Courtroom ethnography in an age of fossil fuel violence

As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the planet, how are geographers to address the criminalisation and prosecution of peaceful acts of defending earth, water and land? Reflecting on a courtroom ethnography and debates spanning legal geography, political ecology and social movements studies, this article explores embodied struggles around oil, ‘justice’ and geographies of caring – discussing how Indigenous youth, grandmothers in their eighties and others were convicted of ‘criminal contempt’ for being on a road near an oil pipeline expansion project. The project (“Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion”) was created to transport unprecedented levels of heavy oil (bitumen) across hundreds of kilometres of Indigenous peoples' territory that was never ceded to settler-colonial authorities in Canada. Focusing on a controversial injunction designed to protect oil industry expansion, the discussion explores the performativity of a judge's exercise of power, including in denying the necessity to act defence, side-lining Indigenous jurisdiction, and escalating prison sentences. Courtroom ethnography offers a unique vantage point for witnessing power at work and vast resources used by state actors to suppress issues fundamental to the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Paris Climate Accord. It also provides a lens into the intersectional solidarity and ethics of care among those who dare to challenge colonialism and hyper-extractivism, inviting engagement with multiple meanings of ‘irreparable harm’ at various scales. The article calls for more attention to power relations, values and affects shaping courtroom dynamics in an age in which fossil fuel interests, climate crisis and settler-colonial control over courts are entwined in evermore-complex violent entanglements.     

A feminist-phenomenology of women’s activism against hydropower plants in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region

Taking a feminist-phenomenological perspective of the body, this article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the embodied subjectivity of women in the movement against hydropower plants (HPPs) in the culturally and spatially specific context of the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Informed by a feminist engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ‘the body-subject’, ‘the flesh’ and Einfühlung, the article places subjectivity within a relational ontology of sentience and intelligence in which corporeal experiences, senses and affects condition cognitive and agential processes. Bodily senses and affects are thus treated as media of subjectivity. The relationship between water and identity, established through memory, heritage and history, is also produced and/or conserved by the embodied relation between women’s bodies and bodies of water, within the connective ‘flesh’ of the physical world. The case of the Eastern Black Sea demonstrates how political subjectivity of women in the movement against HPPs is conditioned by an intimate embodied relationship with river waters that is sustained by a series of sensory-affective experiences. Their statements emphasize, over and over again, an interconnectedness with the rivers, which makes the cause of anti-HPP struggle vital and urgent for them. This feeling of urgency is a source of women’s radicalism in opposing HPPs. The article maintains the female subject as embodied and transversal, and stresses the centrality of corporeal experience, sense and affect in formation of political subjectivity. By developing a body-centred feminist-phenomenological approach to political subjectivity, it introduces a novel way of analysing women’s activisms within and beyond environmental movements.     

Over and under: children navigating terrain in the East Anglian fenlands

ABSTRACT

Drawing on fieldwork in three primary schools in East Cambridgeshire, UK, this paper explores children’s relationships with the places where they live, and the ways in which those relationships are mediated by play, exploration, and narrative imagination. Challenging assumptions of a ‘bubble-wrap generation’ which seem to discount the possibility that children today are able to experience the outdoor environment as a safe space with which they can build a living connection, we explored spaces which children deem particularly important in their lives. Through walks along routes planned by children, we look at how movement over the fens offered them an opportunity to express how and why particular places matter, what they see happening there, and what they expect to happen in the future. We reflect on the mutually constitutive relationship between kinship and experience of place, and argue that children’s sense of the stable and bounded landscape limits their sense of environmental variation in the fens. Yet, this exploration leads to the question: what lies under the surface of the land we move across? We therefore consider the relationship between presentism in children’s lives and the imagination of what lies underfoot.     

Translocational Irish identities in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012)

A rural-urban exodus subsequently followed by overseas migration has characterised geographical movement in Ireland. While Irish women have outnumbered men in their diaspora, physical and symbolic identification with Ireland has been decisive to the polemic of Irish female migration. This article explores how real and symbolic contradictions in Irish women experiencing displacement are reflected in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012). Using translocational positionality as an intersectional research framework, the article reveals the importance of spatiality in the ‘life writings’ of a particular situational subject and its major role in identity construction processes. Furthermore, this article relates the individual biography to the collective and complex construction of identity of Irish women abroad in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis sheds light on many unvoiced experiences shared by female migrants and discloses key aspects of Irish migration that result in a problematic gendered relation with the land still unresolved.     

NGOs as Social Movements: Policy Narratives,Networks and the Performance of Dalit Rights in South India

Donor‐funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co‐opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term ‘NGOization’. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights‐based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs and their funders in agenda setting, specifically in bringing the previously excluded issue of caste discrimination into development policy discourse in the form of a Dalit‐rights approach in Tamil Nadu, south India. The authors explore the institutional processes of policy making and NGO networking involved, the alliances, entanglements of NGOs and social movements, and the performativity of NGO Dalit rights. But at the same time, the article illustrates how NGO institutional systems have constrained or failed to sustain such identity‐based claims to entitlement. In Nancy Fraser's terms, the article explores success and failure in addressing ‘first‐order’ issues of justice, that is rights to resources (in this case, land), and in tackling ‘second‐order’ injustices concerning the framing of who counts (who can make a claim as a rights holder) and how (by what procedures are claims and contests staged and resolved). This draws attention to the important but fragile achievements of NGOs’ discursive framings that give Dalits the ‘right to have rights’.     

‘Motherly Hate’: Gendering Anti–Semitism in the British Union of Fascists

Throughout the interwar period, Britain’s fascist movement was marked by anti–Semitism. That anti–Semitism was such a striking feature of the movement is well known, and studies of British fascism have consequently paid attention to the implications and effects of racial prejudice on Britain’s Jewish community, and on British society more generally. However, the history of women in Britain’s fascist movement has been less well known, and the narrative of racial politics and racial tensions in interwar Britain must now be modified by a consideration of gender relations and women’s activism on the extreme right. The first part of this article is thus concerned with the questions of how British fascist women gave vent to their racial hatreds, the particular tone of their rhetorical invectives against the Jewish community, and the distinctiveness of their expressions of anti–Semitism. From their support for Jew–baiting activities on the streets, to their high level of participation in an anti–war movement dedicated to keeping Britain out of the ‘Jews’ war’, to their choices to educate their young children in the principles of Jew–hating, British fascist women did, in fact, show themselves to be ‘Jew wise’. Their active expression of anti–Semitism certainly challenged the optimistic liberal supposition that the female sex was the more tolerant. The second part of this article is concerned with the theoretical implications of putting women back into the history of British anti–Semitism, and explores how the powerful gender paradigms of feminine tolerance, maternalism, and feminised pacifism were subverted to justify a seemingly incongruous sentiment of ‘motherly hate’.     

Understanding the Helmand campaign: British military operations in Afghanistan

British forces are now engaged in a major operation in southern Afghanistan, the outcome of which is likely to be strategically decisive—especially for the configuration and status of Britain's land forces. Although progress seems to have been made, there has been much criticism of the campaign. Through an analysis of the three‐year Helmand mission (Operation Herrick), this article explores whether, for all the improvements in the campaign in terms of resources and numbers of troops, the basic structure of the campaign established in 2006 has endured. Instead of focusing on an ‘ink‐spot’ from which to expand, British forces have tended to operate from dispersed forward operating bases from which they have insufficient combat power to dominate terrain and secure the population. They are consequently engaged in a seemingly endless round of high‐intensity tactical battles which are normally successful in themselves but do not contribute to the overarching security of the province. The analysis explores the way in which this distinctive campaign lay‐down—the preference for dispersal and high‐intensity fighting—may be a reflection of British military culture and its military doctrine. By highlighting potential unacknowledged aspects of the British military profession, the article aims to contribute to debates about the development of the armed forces.     

Reimagining blockchain in a pluriversal world: Digital land governance in the Global South and the metaverse

Blockchain technologies are increasingly live-tested in experiments aimed at improving governance in a growing range of activities. A key question often lost amongst these efforts is whether such projects redistribute wealth and power, and, if so, in which ways. Examining the case of blockchain-based land governance, this contribution explores the tensions between ambitious visions and their actual scales of implementation around the redistributional promises of distributed ledger technologies. Bringing together the concepts of ‘imaginaries’ and ‘infrastructures’, we analyse land governance blockchainization emerging in the Global South and the metaverse. Identifying a contrast between imaginaries ‘scaling up’ redistributive promises yet tending to materialize in ‘scaled-down’ forms, we argue for more sustained attention to pluriversal perspectives that foreground local concerns and diverse voices.     

Mapping Common Futures: Customary Communities,NGOs and the State in Indonesia's Reform Era

The post‐Suharto ‘Reform Era’ has witnessed explosive revitalization movements among Indonesia's indigenous minorities or ‘customary’(adat) communities attempting to redress the disempowerment they suffered under the former regime. This study considers the current resurgence of customary claims to land and resources in Bali, where the state‐sponsored investment boom of the 1990s had severe social and environmental impacts. It focuses on recent experiments with participatory community mapping, aimed at reframing the relationship between state and local institutions in planning and decision‐making processes. Closely tied to the mapping and planning strategy have been efforts to strengthen local institutions and to confront the problems of land alienation and community control of resources. The diversity of responses to this new intervention reflects both the vitality and limitations of local adat communities, as well as the contributions and constraints of non‐governmental organizations that increasingly mediate their relationships to state and global arenas. This ethnographic study explores participants’ experiences of the community mapping programme and suggests its potential for developing ‘critical localism’ through long‐term, process‐oriented engagements between communities, governments, NGOs, and academic researchers.     

The legacy of fascism in the present: ‘third millennium fascists’ in Italy

New political groups directly or indirectly related to the European fascist past are gaining strength and significance in the political arena of the new millennium. Starting from an analysis of CasaPound in Italy, a movement and party whose activists define themselves as ‘third millennium fascists’, this article explores the legacy of fascism in current Italian politics. Analysing CasaPound’s history, political programme and some of the main features of its organization as a community, the article examines the prominent role the fascist legacy plays in structuring this movement, for which history constitutes a source of legitimization and identity formation. Fascism is not traced as something isolated in history, but instead its history is presented as a legitimate legacy with a significant place in Italy’s political landscape.     

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

This article examines Zimbabwean land politics and the study of rural interventions, including agrarian reform, more broadly, using the analytical framework of territorialized ‘modes of belonging’ and their ‘cultural politics of recognition’. Modes of belonging are the routinized discourses, social practices and institutional arrangements through which people make claims for resources and rights, the ways through which they become ‘incorporated’ in particular places. In these spatialized forms of power and authority, particular cultural politics of recognition operate; these are the cultural styles of interaction that become privileged as proper forms of decorum and morality informing dependencies and interdependencies. The author traces a hegemonic mode of belonging identified as ‘domestic government’, put in place on European farms in Zimbabwe's colonial period, and shows how it was shaped by particular political and economic conjunctures in the first twenty years of Independence after 1980. Domestic government provided a conditional belonging for farm workers in terms of claims to limited resources on commercial farms while positioning them in a way that made them marginal citizens in the nation at large. This is the context for the behaviour of land‐giving authorities which have actively discriminated against farm workers during the politicized and violent land redistribution processes that began in 2000. Most former farm workers are now seeking other forms of dependencies, typically more precarious and generating fewer resources and services than they had accessed on commercial farms, with their own particular cultural politics of recognition, often tied to demonstrating support to the ruling political party.     

Nationalism,Britishness and the ‘Souring’ of Australian National Art

This article investigates the nationalist historiography of the Heidelberg School, an Australian art movement from the Federation period, known for its iconic representations of national life and landscape. Drawing on recent scholarship of Australian nationalism, it questions conventional accounts of the Heidelberg School in Australian art history, especially those based on Bernard Smith’s radical interpretation of this movement. For Bernard Smith, and the generations of Australian art historians he influenced, the nationalism of the 1890s was a progressive force for national culture. Yet, in the post-Federation decades, national art declined (or ‘soured’) into a reactionary form of insular nationalism. By focusing on the ‘souring’ narrative of Australian national art, this article critiques the nationalist interpretation of the Heidelberg School. It explores an apparent contradiction: the role of Britishness in the construction of a distinctly Australian national art.