Negotiating Green Space with Landed Interests: The Urban Political Ecology of Greenway in the Pearl River Delta,China

Land‐centred urbanisation has precipitated shortage of green space in Chinese cities. However, in the Pearl River Delta, an ambitious greenway system has recently managed to flourish. It is intriguing to ask how this has become possible. Informed by the perspective of urban political ecology, this paper finds that the greenway project in the Pearl River Delta represents a set of politically realistic endeavours to alleviate urban green space shortage by adapting to, rather than challenging, powerful landed interests. Three interlocking dimensions about land—municipal land quota, rural land use claims, and real estate development—have influenced why, where and how greenways have been created. Based on these findings, we argue that research on China's politics of urban sustainability necessarily needs to understand the country's land politics.     

Respacing for Peace? Resistance to Integration and the Ontopolitics of Rural Planning in Post‐War Burundi

This article investigates the politics and social impact of post‐war ‘respacing for peace’ strategies in Burundi from within a set of contested spatial arrangements — or rather, post‐war socio‐spatial experiments — including peace villages, IDP site clearances and land sharing. The author takes a critical look at these reconfigurations, and the resistances and manipulations that result when people (or their remains) are moved or placed in the name of coexistence, integration and sharing after the war. In this way, the article contributes to a post‐conflict planning literature that is mostly concerned with overcoming segregation and cleansing through integration, by exploring some of the complexities and problems that can arise with unquestioned embrace of the latter. It shows that a very particular and problematic logic of ethnic coexistence and physical integration drives post‐war respacing in Burundi and that people resist it with strategies in both physical and reflexive space. Proceeding through a set of paradoxes — such as the refusal to return and staying put, or re‐emigration as a response to settling — the article explores how and why respacing‐for‐peace might produce, or fail to prevent, the opposite outcome: community conflict, social tension and segregation.     

Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial City

The racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as “vacant”. Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit's “vacant” neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for liberation. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a white businessman's proposal to build the world's largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community‐based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal democracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization.     

Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.     

On the Limits of Liberalism in Participatory Environmental Governance: Conflict and Conservation in Ukraine's Danube Delta

Participatory management techniques are widely promoted in environmental and protected area governance as a means of preventing and mitigating conflict. The World Bank project that created Ukraine's Danube Biosphere Reserve included such ‘community participation’ components. The Reserve, however, has been involved in conflicts and scandals in which rumour, denunciation and prayer have played a prominent part. The cases described in this article demonstrate that the way conflict is escalated or mitigated differs according to foundational assumptions about what ‘the political’ is and what counts as ‘politics’. The contrasting forms of politics at work in the Danube Delta help to explain why a 2005 World Bank assessment report could only see failure in the Reserve's implementation of participatory management, and why liberal participatory management approaches may founder when introduced in settings where relationships are based on non‐liberal political ontologies. The author argues that environmental management needs to be rethought in ways that take ontological differences seriously rather than assuming the universality of liberal assumptions about the individual, the political and politics.     

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.     

Engaging Local Knowledge in Biodiversity Research: Experiences from Large Inter- and Transdisciplinary Projects

Abstract

The management of biodiversity represents a research topic that needs to involve not only several (sub-) disciplines from the natural sciences but, in particular, also the social sciences and humanities. Furthermore, over the last couple of years, the need for the integration of other kinds of knowledge (experience based or indigenous knowledge) is increasingly acknowledged. For instance, the incorporation of such knowledge is indispensable for place-based approaches to sustainable land management, which require that the specific ecological and social context is addressed. However, desirable as it may be, such an engagement of the holders of tacit knowledge is not easy to achieve. It demands reconciling well-established scientific procedural standards with the implicit or explicit criteria of relevance that apply in civil society — a process that typically causes severe tensions and comes up against both habitual as well as institutional constraints. The difficulty of managing such tensions is amplified particularly in large integrated projects and represents a major challenge to project management. At the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research — UFZ, several integrated research projects have been conducted over the past years in which experience has been gained with these specific challenges. This paper presents some of the lessons learned from large integrated projects, with an emphasis on project design and management structure. At the centre of the present contribution are experiences gained in the coordination and management of LEGATO (LEGATO stands for Land-use intensity and Ecological EnGineering — Assessment Tools for risks and Opportunities in irrigated rice based production systems, see www.legato-project.net), an ongoing, large-scale, inter- and transdisciplinary research project dealing with the management of irrigated rice landscapes in Southeast Asia. In this project, local expertise on traditional production systems is absolutely crucial but needs to be integrated with natural and social science research to identify future-proof land management systems.     

Building More Inclusive Solidarities for Socio‐Environmental Change: Lessons in Resistance from Southern Appalachia

It is increasingly recognized that socio‐environmental justice will not be achieved through liberal and cosmopolitical forms of activism alone. Instead, more diverse and inclusive solidarities must be achieved across political ideologies for transformative change. By engaging with one constituency often overlooked by mainstream environmentalists—rural, conservative Americans—we argue for a situated solidarity that can be forged among people whose views of nature, community, and politics differ significantly. This framework rejects totalizing expressions of global ambition that erase important place‐based differences. To explore this ethic, we examine a localized anti‐fracking campaign in western North Carolina to determine how place‐based forms of environmental resistance can be brought in closer connection with the cosmopolitical movement for climate and energy justice. This requires that cosmopolitical movements make room for more customary forms of cultural politics, while conservative movements look beyond their own place‐based struggles to resist mutually experienced forms of oppression.     

Stakeholder engagement with environmental decision support systems: The perspective of end users

Environmental decision support systems (EDSS) are designed to assist natural resource managers and stakeholders to assess problems and select options for change. EDSS that combine community engagement in developing future scenarios with computer‐based land use planning and modelling tools are widely used internationally. However, these EDSS are often not used after the research and development phase. To best understand why the EDSS are not being used in the long term, the end users of the EDSS should be consulted—a perspective that is lacking in the literature. The research reported here presents the perspectives of stakeholders involved in a community climate change adaptation project in western Canada. Evidence from the community suggests that this project was successful in instigating change. However, the EDSS was not used after the project's end. Our findings indicate that, from the end users’ perspective, the project could have had much greater and sustained success had there been ongoing engagement and communication with them, particularly in the form of continued support for the use of EDSS after the development project.     

Private agricultural colonization on a Brazilian frontier, 1970–1980

Private colonization is the use of companies and cooperatives to survey, demarcate and occupy land, build infrastructure, open roads, plan urban areas, and provide health services and education. Although state-directed colonization projects are strongly implicated in recent environmental and social changes in the Brazilian Amazon, areas settled by private colonization were larger than state-led settlement. The paper considers this poorly examined aspect of the region's recent settlement history by focusing upon a colonization cooperative and private company that settled smallholders from southern Brazil to eastern Mato Grosso State between 1970 and 1980. The analysis emphasizes how private colonization cooperatives successfully secured land title, setting the stage for subsequent commercial agricultural development. This study rejects prevailing interpretations of private colonization as a tool of authoritarian government in Brazil. Rather, private colonization secured land tenure and organized an economically viable production system in a frontier environment of unpredictable state bureaucracies, high transaction costs, risk, and precarious markets.     

The post‐politics of transport: establishing a new meeting ground for transport politics

This paper brings together two disparate but critical bodies of literature about contemporary citizen participation in the Australian city: transport politics and post‐politics. The argument is advanced that state and citizen actor relations—as they exist in the governance and management of Australian urban transport—have taken on characteristics of post‐politics. By conceiving of citizen participation in this manner, new ways of understanding it are generated and it is possible to appreciate how such participation is shaped by state actors both across time and in response to the politicisation of transport proposals. The paper illustrates the extent to which citizen engagement has become a new focal point in transport politics, particularly given citizens' capacities to politicise proposals and transport trajectories. It achieves such ends by drawing upon key‐informant interviews conducted between 2013 and 2016 with public transport advocates, select resident groups, and local and state level planning officials from Melbourne, Australia.     

Examining Indigenous perspectives on the health implications of large‐scale agriculture in Jalisco,Mexico

In Mexico, as in many other parts of the world, industrial agriculture is dramatically changing rural landscapes and altering relationships with the land. This paper draws on community‐based research from a collaborative international research project that examined the perceived health implications of the agricultural industry for Indigenous peoples in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. Thirty interviews were conducted in a Nahuas community experiencing expanding agribusiness industries. The results of this study show that the implications of export‐oriented agricultural industry for this Nahuas community are complex and, at times, contradictory: employment in the agricultural industry provides community members with much‐needed sources of income, but it is precarious work. At the same time, community members are concerned about the long‐term health and environmental implications, such as increased exposure to chemicals, depletion of the soil and water, and loss of traditional food and lifeways. These results suggest that to better understand the costs and benefits of large‐scale agriculture for Indigenous health, a broad lens of health that is situated in the context of colonial legacies and the particularities of relationships with the land is required.     

Daily,Immediate Conflicts: an Analysis of Villagers' Arguments about a Multinational Nickel Mining Project in New Caledonia1

Local communities are not the homogenous entities, unanimously opposed to industrial development, that academic and popular literature often portray them to be. In this paper, I discuss my research in New Caledonian villages near a potential mining project. I analyse the diversity of individuals' responses to industrial activities, the intra‐community conflicts that this development triggered or exacerbated, and the discourses that people implemented to support their positions. Specifically, people's statements — and, presumably, beliefs — about dangers from ecological damage and ancestral anger reflected their expectations of the project's consequences for their sub‐group's social status. I argue that, through their interactions with the mining company, what many if not most of these villagers primarily sought was respect of their social positions and control of their own destinies. They especially aspired to determine what happened to their land, the source of their identity and dignity.     

Revamping community‐based conservation through participatory research

Community‐based conservation is experiencing a crisis of identity and purpose as a result of a disappointing track record and unresolved deficiencies. The latter include over‐simplified assumptions and misconceptions of “community,” the imposition of externally designed and driven projects at the community level, a focus on conservation outcomes at the expense of community empowerment and social justice, and limited attention to participatory processes. New approaches are urgently needed to address these weaknesses and to counter a rising trend towards environmental protectionism and a preference for conservation approaches at an eco‐regional scale that threaten the interests of local and Indigenous communities. We propose that three core principles of community‐based participatory research (CBPR)—(1) community‐defined research agenda; (2) collaborative research process; and (3) meaningful research outcomes—hold much promise. Drawing on the experience of a research partnership involving the James Bay Cree community of Wemindji, northern Quebec, and academic researchers from four Canadian universities, we document the process of applying these principles to a community‐based conservation project that uses protected areas as a political strategy to redefine relations with governments in terms of a shared responsibility to care for land and sea. We suggest that basic assumptions of CBPR, including collaborative, equitable partnerships in all phases of the research, promotion of co‐learning and capacity building among all partners, emphasis on local relevance, and commitment to long‐term engagement, can provide the basis for a revamped phase of community‐based conservation that supports environmental protection while strengthening local institutions, building capacity, and contributing to cultural survival.     

Traceable Tasks and Complex Policies: When Politics Matter for Policy Implementation

Implementation represents a key venue for the expression of political conflict. The challenge of illusory implementation, implementing the law's letter but not its spirit, has long vexed scholars and architects of public policy. We develop a political model of policy implementation to predict the kinds of politics—electoral, group, administrative—that different parts of complicated laws activate during implementation. Using original state‐level data on landmark education policy, we assess whether and how these politics render illusory implementation more or less likely for specific policy tasks embedded in complex laws. Consistent with our model, we find electoral politics render illusory implementation less likely for a narrow set of tasks. Group‐based politics and administrative politics bear on illusory implementation for a broader set of tasks in diverse ways. Overall, how policy activates politics during implementation depends on the features of the policy lever, where it is put into practice, and how traceable it is to the bureaucrats who do the implementing. Further, the results underscore how nuanced insights about implementation emerge when one considers individual components of complex laws, rather than treating the laws themselves whole cloth.     

Financing the 450 Year Road: Land Expropriation and Politics ‘All the Way Down’ in Vientiane,Laos

Over the past decade, the Lao government has developed the policy of ‘Turning Land into Capital’ (TLIC), a strategy for generating revenue and economic value from ‘state land’. The 450 Year Road Project built along the periphery of the Laotian capital, Vientiane, linking the national highway with the Thai border, was financed using a TLIC model. Additional land to the side of the road was acquired to be resold at rates significantly higher than the compensation provided to landowners. Prior to construction, however, most of the land had already been purchased by external buyers, who impeded the project's development by refusing to concede their newly purchased plots. This article contributes to the literature on political reactions ‘from below’ to land grabbing by arguing that in order to understand the operational success or failure of land development projects, it is imperative to analyse the politics that pervade such investments ‘all the way down’ — the interrelated roles, interests and relations of involved actors and groups in all positions of power within society. The 450 Year Road project stalled due to its failure to take into account the interests and politics of seemingly compliant actors, particularly landowning farm households and speculative land buyers.     

The Politics of Recognition and Redistribution: Development,Tribal Identity Politics and Distributive Justice in India's Jharkhand

This article illustrates how the potential of recognition‐based politics to achieve distributive justice is determined by political structures and the power relations that constitute them. In response to Nancy Fraser's framework of social justice, it shows that the meaningful coordination of identity‐based claims with distributive justice is constrained — not only by the content of the claims themselves, but also because redistributive demands are subverted through competing pursuits for power and legitimacy between rival political factions. The article describes how the separate‐state movement for Jharkhand in Eastern India was de‐radicalized by three instruments, namely, the reservation system, cultural nationalism and state development discourse. This explains why distributive measures do not feature prominently in the Jharkhand state and why recognition politics has taken a disciplined form in the electoral mainstream while distributive politics continues to be pursued through violent and extra‐parliamentary means.     

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.     

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.     

Wilderness gained,wilderness lost: wildlife management and land occupations in Zimbabwe's southeast lowveld

This paper explores the physical and imaginative construction of the Zimbabwean ‘lowveld’ landscape. A powerful legacy of the colonial encounter with Zimbabwe was the notion that the lowveld is a wilderness. This logic underpinned attempts to preserve or rehabilitate parts of the lowveld landscape as pristine and glorious pieces of national heritage and, more recently, attempts to exploit sustainably ‘wilderness quality’ and wildlife. The landscape has been physically modified accordingly – often to the detriment of many of its inhabitants. This has played out in oxymoronic attempts to manufacture wilderness in a national park, conservancies and game ranches. But this vision has recently come under its most severe attack to date as these new wildernesses have been re-peopled, and the politics of land and the needs of black smallholders, pushed to the top of the national agenda. The land occupations since 2000 by both state-sponsored war veterans and peasant farmers have revealed starkly contrasting ways of seeing and understanding this landscape which have radically different implications for conservation and development policy.