The political ecology of water memory: Contending narratives of past hydraulic infrastructures in Barcelona (2015–2021)

In the context of ecological emergency and crisis of representation of the capitalist democracy, the battles over water management have become ever more politicised: who is to administer water resources, how, and with what legitimacy? This article examines a disregarded dimension of the recent water conflict in Barcelona by looking into the politics of memory as part of a struggle for legitimacy between the private water company Agbar, and Barcelona en Comú (BeC), the political platform governing the city since 2015, and defending the ‘remunicipalisation’ of water. By combining memory studies and critical discourse analysis we pay attention to the dynamic resignification of the hydraulic infrastructure as spaces or “sites of memory” (lieux de mémoire; Nora, 1998). Barcelona en Comú narrative retrieves a forgotten past of local sites and experiences in public management of water. In contrast, Agbar defends its legitimacy by advancing a narrative of linear progress and social inclusion that re-signifies its 150-year long history and co-opts key “empty signifiers” (Laclau, 2005) from the discourse of the Indignados and BeC. Theoretically, we advance that a temporal turn in political ecology and geography, complementing the concern with spatiality, could usefully draw on memory studies to analyse the growing memorialization of water discourses and sites, as well as their political significance. The article thus investigates a question that has not been systematically explored by political ecologists: how the entanglement of space and historical memory is mobilized in the conflict over the use and management of the environment.     

A Report on a Party and the Guests

“People of protest,” it may be the best name for the men encountering the dictatorship of Qajar dynasty and Reza Shah—The first king of Pahlavi Dynasty (1921–1939) in Iran— the men who paid an expensive price for being protesters: being vanished in the history. In the summer of 2011, we conducted excavation at Neshat Garden and at the house of Kamal ol Molk—the famous painter of Qajarid Iran— two sites dating from the previous century. The interviews indicated the Garden was used for the parties in which numerous guests were invited, but the finds of the archeological investigation represent also a hidden function for the site as well. Studying the agency of garden owners, local villagers and Kamal as well as the remained letters and documents showed the possibility of presence of a political opposition group in the region in 1920s. This essay sheds more light on a process in which the Iranian intellectuals have had to change their ironic protests to armed opposition in 1920s–1940s. Though, the excavation at Neshat Garden offers an illustration of this process of transformation of the nature of political opposition.     

Fast Activism: Resisting Mobile Policies

“Fast” urban policy is increasingly common as city leaders draw on globally mobile policy models to accelerate the policymaking process. Critics have responded with new types of “fast activism” strategies. Fast activists plan temporary and strategically timed campaigns, use relationally local messaging that jumps between global and local political critiques, and organise ideologically diverse coalitions to mobilise quickly against policy proposals. This was observed in protest campaigns against Olympic bids in Boston (USA) and Hamburg (Germany). Protesters successfully opposed mega‐event planning in both cities by combining all three tactics within a short period of time. The paper presents a comparative study of the Boston and Hamburg protests, drawing from qualitative fieldwork on the campaigns in both cities. The paper contributes by conceptualising an emerging mode of urban opposition, and by evaluating how this type of resistance changes local receptions of fast and mobile urban policy.     

Rebel with a Cause: Ahok and Charismatic Leadership in Indonesia

The representation of minority ethnic communities is an acute issue in many countries in East and Southeast Asia. In Muslim-majority Indonesia, the rise of Jakarta’s governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, nicknamed “Ahok”, was a surprising phenomenon given his ethnic and religious minority status as a Christian of Chinese descent. Even more surprising was his initial success as a politician despite a controversial style of communication that appears to contrast with prevailing cultural norms. We argue that the reason for Ahok’s unlikely rise to prominence lay in his ability to reshape the political narrative by shifting the focus of “Indonesian-ness” away from ethnic or religious identity to moral values based on transparency and integrity. Ethnicity and identity remain powerful forces in Indonesian politics, but we argue that Ahok has established a charismatic relationship with followers by positioning himself in opposition to some of the more pressing concerns in contemporary Indonesia.     

Contesting scale: A space of the political in a post-disaster context

Disasters create spaces for the political to unfold. This paper contributes to the recurring debates on space and the political in geography by providing a novel empirical focus: following a fire in Lærdal, Norway in 2014, contesting discourses on how emergency services should be spatially organized revealed themselves. A scalar discourse of the local, situated in discourses on periphery and rurality in Norway, emerged to contest a neoliberal discourse promoted by the government. I illustrate the scalar discourse of the local through four identified narratives in Norwegian newspapers that emphasize different aspects of the local. This demonstrates how scalar categories are meshed with everyday vocabulary, and hence are important to study. Although a space of the political was realized following the fire, in the last part of the paper I reflect on why the scalar discourse of the local has not gained recognition as legitimate contestation, as reforms aiming to centralize and/or merge continue to be rolled out in Norway.     

Local government and the meanings of political representation: A case study of Bologna between 1860 and 1915

Since the early nineteenth century political opposition became a central concept of political representation in constitutional monarchies. While this concept marked the political language of unified Italy on the national level, in local administration the legitimacy of political opposition remained an issue of dispute, as illustrated in this analysis of the political language in Bologna's local council. Local perceptions of national events, like the government's reaction to Garibaldi's unsuccessful Mentana-campaign, assumed major symbolic meaning in local politics and challenged traditional understandings of municipal administration by introducing the concept of political opposition. In Bologna, after Rome the second city of the former Papal State, the Moderates were able to grow into a position of political hegemony after the Unification of Italy and remained the predominant political force also after Italy's “parliamentary revolution” of 1876 and the electoral reforms of the 1880s. As a consequence of its limited influence on the local administration, Bologna's Left defined its ideological profile earlier and more clearly than the Left in other parts of Italy and integrated issues of national importance into local political discourse. Analysing the relationship between central administration and periphery, the article reveals the development of political language and the changing meanings of political representation between Unification and World War One and explains on this basis the escalation of social and political conflict in Finesecolo Italy.     

REGION‐BUILDING IN THE ARCTIC PERIPHERY: THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF A PETROLEUM REGION

As social communities, regions are built through discourses that convey images of what the region is. Regions are built for a variety of reasons, including political and economic ones. This implies that changing economic circumstances have the potential to change the discourses on regional identities. Petroleum discoveries represent such a potential change in the economic circumstances of a region. This study of an emerging petroleum region in the north of Norway shows that a regional identity discourse is used to claim ownership over the petroleum resources in the Barents Sea in order to justify the need for a production plan that maximizes regional economic benefits. In this way, the discovery of petroleum represents an opportunity to reinforce regional identities around a set of common interests. However, “the region” is vaguely defined in this discourse, being used in reference to two different scales: Finnmark and Northern Norway.     

“Let Me Come to Tell You”: Loide Shikongo,the King,and Poetic License in Colonial Ovamboland

In this paper, I explore cultural discourse, gender and the subjectivities of local people on the frontier of empire in mid‐20th century southern Africa. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial “Ovamboland”), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated. The narrative of a remarkable woman’s life and her poetry is told to understand how gender in relation to other forms of identity was constructed in different cultural discourses. I argue that both the Christian mission’s cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration’s efforts to masculinise the “native” political authority gendered Owambo elite women whose identities had previously included “gender” only as a rather contingent component. The example of Loide Shikongo, however, also shows that many Owambo continued to pursue heterogeneous, and sometimes ambiguous, strategies in their claims to Christian models of modernity.     

Approaching a folklore archive: the Irish Folklore Commission and the memory of the Great Famine

Using the Irish Folklore Commission's centenary survey of local accounts of the Great Famine (1845–50), this article posits a tripartite taxonomy of collective memory: the “global,” the “popular” and the “local.” Global memory was structured by meta‐narratives, the explanatory accounts of the Famine derived from the Catholic Church and nationalist political organisations. Local memory dealt with named individuals and places. The intermediate level of popular memory drew on both the local and the global (although the Church's interpretation of the famine had proved more acceptable among the rural, landowning farmers who made up the majority of the Commission's informants), but also on folk narrative tradition to create a coherent system of representation in which motifs were replicated over a large area (and over time).     

Zopilotes,Alacranes, y Hormigas (Vultures,Scorpions, and Ants): Animal Metaphors as Organizational Politics in a Nicaraguan Garbage Crisis

While scholars frequently frame conflicts over urban waste in terms of a politics of infrastructure, this article frames such conflicts in terms of a politics of organization. In 2008, self‐employed recyclers in and around Managua, Nicaragua blockaded local dumps in an effort to secure rights to scavenge for resellable material. Over the course of this “garbage crisis”, a material and semiotic entanglement of human labor organization with animal ecology became politically salient. At different points, recyclers were compared to ants (hormigas), vultures (zopilotes), and scorpions (alacranes). State officials, NGOs, and recyclers themselves used these animal metaphors to describe the organization of waste collection. Drawing on theories of value from political ecology and economic anthropology, as well as analysis of the deployment of these “organic” metaphors, we outline an “organizational politics” of urban waste.     

Hardworking Newcomers and Generations of Poverty: Poverty Discourse in Central Washington State

This research is part of a project that aims to reinterpret geographies of poverty in the American Northwest by focusing on the intersections of cultural and political–economic processes that produce poverty differences. This paper contributes to this aim by unpacking poverty beliefs by race at the local county level. This qualitative analysis is grounded in a brief discussion of the political economy of Kittitas County in Central Washington State, which provides space to analyze the theoretical linkages between structural and cultural constructions of poverty differences. Specifically, this paper argues that first generation “hardworking” Hispanic immigrants embody the “working poor”, while individual explanations of poverty are articulated as the “intergenerational poor”, who are racialized as white and choose poverty as a lifestyle. In this vein, many local residents use the marker of “generation” to distinguish between white, lower class individuals who choose to be poor from a group of Hispanic newcomers whose poverty stems from structural forces such as non‐living‐wage jobs and discrimination. This forms one part of a larger strategy to “blame the individual” for the existence of white poverty. This analysis poses new theoretical insights into the intersection between difference markers such as race, class, and generation and contributes to the literature on racial differences in poverty explanations. The geographical specificity of poverty discourse argues for further grounding of the poverty literature in material conditions, which will allow for more nuanced understanding of the creation and persistence of poverty in poor communities.     

Social Relations and War Remembrance: Second World War Atrocities in Rural Tuscan Villages

This article addresses the issue of how long‐term memory of extreme conditions is socially transformed. It focuses on elements of the social structure and pre‐war habitus that might help understanding of the divided memory of massacres that were perpetrated by the Nazis in three rural Tuscan villages between 1943 and 1944. Within the “mnemonic communities”, discrepancies arise since some of the villagers paradoxically blame the partisans instead of the Nazis. An attempt is made to trace current representations of historical events in the framework of traditional social institutions and political life of these small villages in time of crisis. Battles over memory are seen as a twofold process—that is, as part of “internal”, intra‐village relations as well as a form of reaction toward the “external” world of which they feel victims. The article argues that long‐term memory of past political violence is strictly bound up with local power relations.     

Translating Water Fund Payments for Ecosystem Services in the Ecuadorian Andes

As a form of environmental governance, Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is imbued with ideological values that can conflict with those of participating rural communities. The discursive frame surrounding PES may be contentious, even if the conservation activities promoted by these initiatives are not. Moving PES into practice therefore requires a process of translation from urban-based practitioners to rural communities. Drawing upon an empirical case study of FONAG, a water fund from Ecuador that is often promoted as the ideal type, this article employs data from participant observation, key informant interviews and textual materials to examine this process of translation. The article focuses particularly on the efforts to negotiate the discourse of PES that move the projects into on-the-ground practice. While Ecuador's political context has softened the emphasis on economically valuing ecosystem services, FONAG uses neoliberal conservation narratives that identify rural poverty as the main cause of environmental degradation and target the reform of local people through economic incentives. To enrol communities, however, intermediaries are needed to translate water fund PES to appeal to local perspectives, values and institutions. The author argues that contrasting narratives of PES can exist simultaneously between the entities that are implementing PES and the targets of that implementation.     

“Catching the Yellow Ghost”: A Case Study of Popular Religious Activities and Social Transformation in Rural North China

This article studies the relationship between local society and social change in rural north China from the late Qing dynasty to the People’s Republic of China period through the activity of “Zhuo huanggui” (literally, “Catching the Yellow Ghost”). “Catching the Yellow Ghost” is a ritual activity in Guyi village, Wu’an county, Hebei province. According to villagers there, “Catching the Yellow Ghost” has been celebrated since the late Qing dynasty. However, due to political pressures in the 1950s, it was not until the 1980s that “Catching the Yellow Ghost” began to be revitalized. Since that time, “Catching the Yellow Ghost” has gained rapid popularity and fame in north China. Through the lens of the “Catching the Yellow Ghost” ritual, this article explores social transformation in China from the late 19th to the early 21st century. By analyzing the continuity and discontinuity of “Catching the Yellow Ghost,” this article offers a new understanding of the relationship between local society and social change in rural north China.     

Wardens of Civilisation: The Political Ecology of Australian Far-Right Civilisationism

The notion of a superior “civilisation” has been a hallmark of the politics of Western institutions and fringe white supremacists alike. Known ideologically as “civilisationism”, it has occupied a prominent position in the ideology of the Australian far-right. Paying tribute to their settler-colonial origins, the far-right has consistently promoted “white civilisation”, even inspiring terrorist attacks. Despite this propensity for violence, far-right civilisationism remains largely unexplored. Through investigating a dataset of Australian far-right content, this paper reveals civilisationism as a significant part of their ideology, an ideology which relies on the idealisation of European technologies and environments to render Indigenous land and people uncivilised. A critical narrative analysis of the data illustrates the ways that these ecological factors are drawn into narrative to articulate Australian far-right civilisationism, an ideology inseparable from the political ecology of European history and colonialism, that today represents a particularly virulent version of its legacy.     

Climate Testimonies and Climate-crisis Narratives. Inuit Delegated to Speak on Behalf of the Climate

Abstract

The empirical data analysed in this essay will focus on several Greenlanders who were invited to the COP15 parallel event Klimaforum09, held in Copenhagen in December 2009, as well as their experiences with the venue and the dilemmas they confronted as both local and global witnesses. This essay challenges the use of climate testimonies in the international climate-change debate. Specifically, what is drawn upon in these personal experiences with the environment, and how is it useful in a public, political, or scientific context? In the conclusion of this article, it is argued that dominant climate-crisis narratives have framed “the Greenlandic case” in a certain way, which consequently freezes arguments and possible agency. However, at the same time as there is a global framing of climate change and a specific position in this narrative for “local witnesses”, there is also room for an alternative empowerment and ways of engaging in and talking about global and local natures.     

Battles in Seattle Redux: Transnational Resistance to a Neoliberal Trade Agreement

Abstract: This paper examines the possibilities and complexities of transnationalism through an analysis of political protests organized in Seattle against the Korea–US Free Trade Agreement, arguably the most significant bilateral trade negotiations involving the US state today. By studying the political practices of the Korean farmers' movement through participant research in Seattle from 4 to 9 September 2006, and revisiting the analysis of the 1999 “battles of Seattle” in recent work by Hardt and Negri, we argue that the concept “transnationalism” is potentially applicable to activists and subaltern social groups as much as states and elites, although these groups do not transnationalize through the same practices or in the same spaces. Our analysis of the protests aims to clarify the essentially spatial nature of political articulation (in Laclau's sense) that make the transnationalization of social movements possible.     

Conservative Journalists’ Myth Making in South Korea: Use of the Past in News Coverage of the 2008 Korean Candlelight Vigil

This article explores the role of three conservative newspapers in South Korea as storytellers that create and maintain the collective memory of Korean conservatives through textual analysis of news stories on one particular recent event, the 2008 Korean Candlelight Vigil. Several protests since the 1980s in which the democratic-progressives were a leading force have been used as a source of historical analogies that have helped conservative journalists to interpret contemporary events and issues, including the 2008 vigil. These past protests were framed as anti-American, pro-North Korean leftist actions in the news stories. Some aspects of these past events were omitted – for example, former democratic-progressive activists’ contribution to the democratisation process – while other aspects were emphasised, notably the violent nature of the earlier generation of activists. In addition, conservative journalists constructed a revisionist version of one particular past protest, the 2002 Korean Candlelight Vigil, and used it to serve present political purposes, conflating the rhetoric and language of the earlier protests into their reporting of the current protest. These discourse strategies helped to incorporate the current protest into a larger discourse of “the threat posed by the leftists”, which is embedded in the collective memory of Korean conservatives.     

Collaboration for Local Economic Development: Business Networks,Politics and Universities in Two Swedish Cities

In this article we want to show how conceptions about collaboration for local eocnomic development in Sweden are constructed on national and local levels. We also show how these conceptions have been realized in two different company networks; in the city of Östersund (“Odenskog företagsstaden”) and in the city of Karlskrona (“Telecom City”). In politics and research, local collaboration or cluster formation are viewed as important tools and levers for local economic development. However, we argue that the local labour markets and unemployment rates in our case studies do not differ significantly, despite very different strategies for collaboration. Therefore, we suspect that the political focus on collaboration is a way of legitimizing the change in regional policy rather than a delegation of real power to the local level. If this continues, we fear that the current regional policy is reduced to a discourse of popular concepts rather than a real instrument for local economic development.     

The emerging of "female citizen": The subject identity of modern Chinese women through literary practices

The construction of “citizen-state” relations in the intellectual world of modern China and the establishment of individual citizenship in political discourse have opened up a political and discourse sphere for modern women to strive for new identities, wherein some intellectually advanced women have managed to establish their individual identity as “female citizen” by carrying the debate on the relationship between women and the state with regard to their rights and responsibilities, and on the relationship between gender role and citizenship. Though the idea of “female citizen” was not provided with a political theory of practical significance, the subject identity of women, however, was repeatedly spoken about and strengthened in brand-new literary practices, resulting in a dynamic discourse of “female citizen”; in the meantime, disagreements concerning the concepts of “female rights,” “civil rights,” and “natural rights” have all helped create significant tension inside the related discourse sphere.