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.     

Unequal Knowledges in Jharkhand,India: De‐Romanticizing Women’s Agroecological Expertise

Taking the Jharkhand region of India as a case study, this article uses empirical data to intervene in ‘women, environment and development’ and ecofeminist debates regarding women’s environmental knowledge. The article first outlines the adoption of gender/environmental issues into development planning and considers the dangers of overestimating women’s agroecological knowledges and assuming that they can easily participate in development projects. It then highlights the local complexities of environmental knowledge possession and control with reference to gender and other variations in agricultural participation, decision‐making and knowledge transfers between villagers’ natal and marital places. Particular emphasis is placed on the economic, socio‐cultural and ‘actor’ related factors that supplement gender as an influence on task allocation, decision‐making, knowledge distribution and knowledge articulation. The article concludes that given the socio‐cultural constraints women face in accumulating and vocalizing environmental knowledge, simplistic participatory approaches are unlikely to empower them. Instead, more flexible, site‐specific development initiatives (coupled with wider structural change) are required if opportunities are to be created for women to develop and use their agroecological knowledges.     

Process,Perception and Power: Notes from ‘Participatory’ Research in a Zimbabwean Resettlement Area

The increased popularity of ‘participatory’ methods in research, development projects, and rural extension in developing countries, has not consistently been accompanied by a critical evaluation of the quality and reliability of knowledge created and extracted in the process. In this article, the author employs her own research using Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) in a Zimbabwean Resettlement Area, to examine how knowledge is created through this type of research act, and how later research may be used to turn back and ‘make sense’ of PRA data. The article explores how power relations among participants are both revealed and concealed in PRA, focusing specifically on the implications for gendered perspectives. The paper also highlights the dynamic, contested and often contradictory nature of ‘local knowledge’ itself. Apparently transparent chunks of ‘local reality’ gleaned through PRA can turn out to be part of complex webs of multiple ideologies and practices. The author argues that while participatory methodologies may offer effective ways of beginning a research project, adoption of short PRA workshops in academic or project related research could lead to dangerously faulty representations of complex social worlds.     

Redefining ‘Aid’ in the China–Africa Context

Discussions on the politics of Chinese engagement with African development have been marked by increasing concern over Chinese use of aid in exchange for preferential energy deals. Normative liberal discourse criticizes the Chinese for disbursing ‘rogue aid’ and undermining good governance in the African continent. These criticisms not only ignore the longer‐term motivations and modalities of Chinese aid and the historical diversity of Chinese relations with Africa, but also uncritically assume ‘Western’ aid to be morally ‘superior’ and ‘more effective’ in terms of development outcomes. This paper consists of three parts. First, it will discuss the debates surrounding Chinese engagement in Africa, especially around aid and development issues. Second, the paper maps the historical development of China–Africa engagement and investigates the impacts of the changing modalities of Chinese aid with reference to case studies of two countries: Angola and Ghana. It then offers a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences between these two cases. The principal argument is that Chinese and Western donors employ different ideologies and practices of governance to conceal their own interests and political discourses in the African continent.     

The Discourse of Maendeleo and the Politics of Women’s Participation on Mount Kilimanjaro

Studies of participatory development and empowerment often fail to place people’s actions and motivations within their wider cultural, social, political and economic context. Drawing on fieldwork which looked at village‐based women’s groups on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, this article deconstructs the dominant discourse of development on the mountain (maendeleo) to show how women’s participation in their local organizations is used as a strategy to boost their social status and financial gains. Local, national and global discourses on development, modernity and gender are reappropriated by Chagga men and women to produce a normative Chagga developmental subjectivity which women can demonstrate by participating in women’s groups. The over‐representation of better‐off and higher‐status women in these groups suggests that, in excluding the poorest women, participation in women’s groups is serving to legitimate, and perpetuate, existing inequalities within Chagga society.     

A POWER TO INTRIGUE? EXPLORING THE ‘TIMELESS’ QUALITIES OF THE SO‐CALLED ‘GROTESQUE’ IRON AGE TORC FROM SNETTISHAM,NORFOLK

Sometimes we come across objects that truly intrigue us. Not necessarily because they are great examples of art, or because they are made of precious materials, but because there is some other quality which captures our attention. One of these can be age. Just as age adds character to people’s faces, the patina of an object or visible signs of damage and use instils an object with a certain ‘charisma’ or ‘aura’. This paper examines in detail the so‐called grotesque torc, a neck‐ring dating to the Iron Age which has been extensively repaired. The repairs are crude and obvious, which gives the object its distinctive appearance. It is argued that these signs of age, inscribed onto the artefact through its life, imbued the torc with a timeless ‘anachronic’ quality: its visible age manifests a certain charisma or aura, helping facilitate a plural relationship with time.     

Beyond ‘State Ibuism’: Empowerment Effects in State‐led Development in Indonesia

This article examines the ways women's processes of self‐formation are indicative (or not) of new possibilities for women's gendered selves in the post‐Reformasi period in Indonesia. It focuses on the development arena to reveal how shifts in state rhetoric, from top‐down guidance based on a patriarchal familial model to bottom‐up, inclusive development based on empowerment, have transformed what is referred to as the ‘topography for self’. The article draws upon theories of personhood a) to show how gendered selves emerge and are contested within particular historical conditions; and b) to develop an alternative framework of ‘empowerment’ that focuses not on capabilities and choice, but on an expansion in the possibilities for self. It argues that models of community‐driven development have provided new opportunities for women to hold and enact socially recognizable subject positions. This constitutes a form of empowerment for individual women but does not necessarily reflect challenges to patriarchy in Indonesia.     

From ‘Global’ to ‘Revolutionary’ Development

This article argues that Horner and Hulme's call for moving towards ‘global development’ to do justice to changing 21^st century development geographies neither contributes to advancing our understanding of contemporary development challenges nor helps articulate realistic responses to tackle them. A key problem is that they try to explain several general trends in the geography of development with reference to mainstream statistics without appropriate critical reflection or adequate theorization. Focusing specifically on the environmental and conservation aspects of development, this article contends that these omissions not only confuse the debate on the current state and geographies of development, they risk something more serious, namely the reinforcement of a generic development narrative which will intensify 21^st century development challenges. The article concludes that what we need is not global development but revolutionary development.     

Towards relational geometries of public participation and hydropower governance in the Lower Mekong River Basin

The Lao People's Democratic Republic's aspirations to become the ‘battery’ of Southeast Asia has involved plans for a cascade of hydropower dams on the mainstream of the transboundary Mekong River. This has triggered the unprecedented undertaking of public stakeholder consultations under the Mekong River Commission's Procedures for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA). This paper focuses on PNPCA stakeholder consultations organized in Thailand and Cambodia, and seeks to understand how these stakeholder consultations, despite their merits in information sharing, have come to be criticized by civil society as a ‘rubber stamp’ for ‘participation’ in Lao hydropower development. Building upon the literature on public participation in development, critical hydropolitics, and stakeholder engagement in Mekong water governance, we seek to conceptualize a critical politics of public participation by adopting a relational approach towards identifying the key challenges relating to participation. We suggest that a relational approach must consider how the interrelations between the multiple formal and informal tracks of stakeholder engagement shape one another and overall opportunities for participation, and how power relations within these spaces impact on perceptions towards public participation. Distrust towards state-organized participatory spaces can be traced from the state-organized participatory spaces to another key interrelation: the power relations between state and nonstate actors in the multi-scalar political spaces that extend beyond participatory spaces. This paper examines how anti-participatory forces pose a challenge to the emergence of both state and nonstate participatory spaces, providing additional insights into the state-society dynamics that influence environmental outcomes around large-scale infrastructural development.     

The Malleability of Participation: The Politics of Agricultural Research under Neoliberalism in Bolivia

This article analyses how neoliberal restructuring encouraged the use of participatory methods in agricultural research in Bolivia and how, at a later stage, participatory development initiatives had to be adapted to prevent conflicts with the post‐neoliberal views of farmer organizations. The article contributes to the debate on the normalization of participatory methods in agrarian development. Engaging with Foucault's work on governmentality and neoliberalism, our analysis goes beyond interpretations of participation which conceptualize it exclusively as a technology of power to discipline subjects. Drawing on a distinction between a liberal and a neoliberal moment in the restructuring of agricultural research, we study the case of PROINPA (Foundation for the Promotion and Research of Andean Products), a national NGO that was once part of the state system for agricultural research but was then privatized. Although PROINPA employed participation mainly to enhance managerial effectiveness, it also facilitated moments of participation from below. We argue that participation designed by this type of NGO is not just ‘technical’ as PROINPA professionals would like to perceive it, nor is it simply ‘political’ as critical views on participation hold. Instead it is malleable in the sense that each actor is involved in finding a new balance between technical, economic and political considerations.     

British Muslims,multiculturalism and UK foreign policy: ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’ in and beyond the state

After the 7 July and 21 July 2005 attacks on London the government‐sponsored effort to ‘prevent extremism together’ has repeatedly acknowledged the central role of anger at UK foreign policy in the radicalization of some British Muslims. This acknowledgement has been incorporated into a ‘comprehensive framework for action’ centring upon the need for increased ‘integration’ and an effort, critically, to re‐work British multiculturalism as a means to combat terrorism. Examining the history of multiculturalism in Britain and the tradition of living and acting ‘together’ that it suggests, however, raises a set of questions about the society into which integration is supposed to occur, what integration might involve and its real efficacy for combating terrorists. In addressing these issues, this article suggests that the debate over contemporary multiculturalism should be situated within a much wider social and political crisis over the meaning of ‘community’ in the UK, to which questions of global order and foreign policy are central. Comparing the ‘ethical’ basis of Al‐Qaeda's attacks with Tony Blair's invocation of ‘values’ as the foundation for military intervention reveals that both seek to realize models of community through violence and a shared process of ‘radicalization’ which in both cases precedes 9/11 and which might be traced back to the Gulf War of 1991. The article concludes that debate over the future of multiculturalism in the UK is being conducted alongside and is implicated within a second, violent global conflict over community: one which is central to, but essentially unarticulated within the domestic context.     

‘Scientific’ nationalism

This paper investigates how the discursive battle for the Flemish nation is waged in the Flemish mass media by politicians of the Flemish nationalist party, the New Flemish Alliance (N‐VA). I focus on the ‘new nationalism’ that N‐VA politicians advocate as a means to ‘banalise’ a hot Flemish nationalism. I establish that N‐VA spokespeople and especially their chairman Bart De Wever invoke discursive alliances with established scholars such as Anderson, Hroch, Calhoun and Billig. On the one hand, these alliances are used to sell their nationalism as a non‐ideological or non‐discursive project. On the other hand, the analyses of these intellectuals are used as manuals to ‘banalise’ a hot nationalism. The concept of ‘scientific’ nationalism refers to the entextualisation of scientific discourses in order to legitimate and banalise the nationalist project of the party as ‘in line with science’.     

The ‘Dividual Androgyne’ and Me: a Personal Affair

In the 25 years since Marilyn Strathern published The Gender of the Gift (1988) its signature concepts of the ‘dividual androgyne’ and ‘sociality’ have received almost no criticism in the anthropological literature and are now widely accepted as true. The ‘dividual’ is considered to be ‘a new, non‐unitary model of embodiment and … one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20^th Century’ despite the fact that it erases affect, agency, identity and other essential features of human beings (Lipset 2008). The present critique of Strathern's concept of the androgynous ‘dividual’ challenges its legitimacy as a Melanesian or any other ‘premodern’ form of personhood and suggests that it expresses the wish of academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to locate an indigenous model for androgyny and to characterise patriarchy, misogyny and sexual segregation as peculiarly Western. The article explores aspects of Gimi myth, ritual and exchange which Strathern claims helped her to formulate the concept of the ‘dividual’ (especially those surrounding men's sacred bamboo flutes) and concludes that she mistook a virulently anti‐female ideology – including a fantasy in which men may subsume or incorporate certain aspects of female anatomy – for benign accommodation between the sexes. The ‘dividual’ does not correspond to social reality among the Gimi and paradoxically affirms Lévi‐Strauss' classic demonstration in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that ‘the gender of the gift’ is invariably female.     

Partnerships for Social Change in the Canadian North: Revisiting the Insider–Outsider Dialectic

In the two decades since Alexander Lockhart's seminal article on the insider–outsider dialectic in native socioeconomic development, a great deal of change has occurred in the Canadian North and new challenges have emerged for community‐based participatory research and development. This is particularly the case in the Northwest Territories, where Aboriginal communities are facing for the first time the triple challenges of Aboriginal land claims implementation, Aboriginal self‐government, and a boom in mining and petroleum development. Increasingly, participatory methods in research and community development are being co‐opted to serve state or corporate interests, far from their radical origins in movements for social change. A historical analysis is called for that accounts for the contradictory and contested social contexts in which participatory activities are imbedded. This article suggests that a return to the roots of the participatory method requires the creation of a new autonomous space of resistance. The academic outsider is uniquely positioned to facilitate critical interventions in both community and university contexts. The resulting convergence of critical outsider and insider has great potential in the forging of new knowledge that can contribute to self‐determination beyond the bounds of the state.     

‘High Politics’ and its Intellectual Contexts*

Recent interest in the historiography of ‘high politics’ has centred mainly on historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s, above all Maurice Cowling. Less attention has been paid to the modified agendas pursued by the next generation of scholars. This essay explores some pioneering attempts to make sense of the structural relationships between 19th‐century British ‘high politics’ and its ‘intellectual’ contexts, focusing on a cluster of seminal 1980s studies by the historians Michael Bentley, Richard Brent, Boyd Hilton, and Jonathan Parry. Together, these works demanded a fundamental rethinking of how Victorian politics operated.     

The Irish question and the concept ‘identity’ in the 1980s1

ABSTRACT. This article critically investigates the social construction of ‘identity talk’ in relation to the Irish Question in the 1980s. Our contention is that the utilisation of ‘identity’ imagined people as bounded groups in a particular way – as the two traditions or communities in Northern Ireland – and that this way of imagining people was deployed against ‘will’‐based conceptions of politics. The first part of the article places the emergence of ‘identity’ as a concept in its historical context and suggests four phases in the use of ‘identity’. The second part focuses on ‘identity’ as a concept and locates its emergence within the meta‐conflict regarding Northern Ireland. The article concludes by reflecting on Brubaker and Cooper's (2000) analysis of ‘identity’ as a category of analysis in light of our case study of ‘identity’ as a category of practice regarding the Irish Question.     

Participation and Power: Poor People's Engagement with India's Employment Assurance Scheme

‘Participation’ has become an essential part of good developmental practice for Southern governments, NGOs and international agencies alike. In this article we reflect critically on this shift by investigating how a ‘participatory’ development programme — India's Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS) — intersects with poor people's existing social networks. By placing the formalized process of participation in the EAS within the context of these varied and uneven village–level relationships, we raise a number of important issues for participatory development practice. We note the importance of local power brokers and the heterogeneity of ‘grassroots’ (dis)empowerment, and question ideas of power reversals used within the participatory development literature.     

When Governance Gets Going: Certifying ‘Better Cotton’ and ‘Better Sugarcane’

As many new certification systems for commodities have been established over the past decade, scholars have devoted sustained attention to the ways that these multi‐stakeholder governance initiatives have transformed the industries in which they were launched. With a few notable exceptions, studies in this area have continued to focus on the development and impacts of new governance mechanisms, and on the sectoral or industrial changes that have ensued. In contrast to these ‘inside‐out’ perspectives on governance innovation and change, this article considers how two prominent yet relatively under‐studied commodity governance initiatives have been shaped by the broader political economic order in which they operate. To offer an ‘outside‐in’ account of the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) and Bonsucro (formerly the Better Sugarcane Initiative), the article details recent changes in what the author terms the ‘world commodity order’, and situates the BCI and Bonsucro within this order. From this vantage point, the author ultimately makes two analytical claims: (i) that the world commodity order has not precluded the differential institutionalization of these initiatives; and (ii) that aspects of the order have circumscribed the potential of the BCI and Bonsucro to deliver pro‐poor business practices.     

Identity,class and civil society in Scotland’s neo‐nationalism

Civil society has become a central and contested concept in the study of Scottish nationalism. This article aims to scrutinise and qualify the concept by relating it to Weber’s model of classes, status groups and parties, and by exploring the development of Scotland’s civil society along with the welfare state in the twentieth century. It argues that civil society needs to be understood as a zone of status‐group formation, and that attempts to relate ‘class’ and ‘identity’ to support for constitutional change in Scotland need to be complemented by attention to the role of status groups in civil society. It concludes with the suggestion that such an approach might be fruitful in the study of other cases of neo‐nationalism.     

Refractions and recombinations of the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’: a personalized reflection on challenges by—and to—feminist urban geographies

This invited essay responds to requests by the Suzanne Mackenzie Memorial Lecture Nominating Committee and by the former Editor of this journal to take stock of and provide intellectual‐historical context for the major preoccupations that characterized feminist urban geography in its early years, by means of a personalized reflection in light of the author's own positioning in those debates and interventions. The thread running through the article is that of the relationship between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ in urban geography. The last section briefly considers new challenges that neoliberalism poses for critical feminist urban geographies.