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.     

Unequal Access to Payments for Ecosystem Services: The Case of Costa Rica

Using Costa Rica's experience with its payments for ecosystem services (PES) programme, this article examines how and why some groups come to be excluded from participating in the programme. It demonstrates that Costa Rica's PES programme results in payments that generally go to larger landowners and tend to exclude certain kinds of smallholders, and that these patterns occur despite concerted state efforts to include the rural poor. The author argues that access exclusions found in PES are the result of historical patterns of agrarian settlement interacting with the state's inability to recognize certain forms of property claims in the context of PES, with the latter condition emerging through ongoing efforts to transform the administration of the nation's property regime in ways that will render it more legible to markets. This case study shows the importance of understanding how access restrictions emerge from the complex relations between multiple state institutions and agrarian producers in the implementation of PES.     

Troubled Encounters: Payments for Ecosystem Services in Chiapas,Mexico

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is a well-established conservation policy approach worldwide. Where forests are owned and managed by rural and indigenous communities, PES initiatives often aim to incentivize the joint adoption of forest protection and sustainable management practices. However, not all communities might have the will or capacity to maintain such practices over the long term. This article examines a PES programme in a rural community of Chiapas, Mexico. It shows that while a majority of the community's landowners have engaged in PES through two distinct working groups, a large share of the community forests remain outside the PES programme, and many landowners resist the extension of PES rules to non-targeted forests. The authors argue that this incipient form of fragmented collective action on forest management results from challenged leaderships, and from PES accommodating a history of increasing individuation of the commons. This accommodation, however, has ignited social conflict, reified tenure inequalities, and failed to strengthen local institutions to enable them to legitimately deal with the contested interests that underpin the fate of community forests. This article shows the limits of PES when parachuted into a context of uneven land tenure, weak collective action and contested leaderships.     

Poles apart: comparative resource sector governance in Australia and Norway

This article contrasts the resource policy performance of Norway and Australia. Australia has not established a long-term sovereign wealth fund or a medium-term stabilisation fund to save windfall revenue during boom times and its resource sector is characterised by relatively modest rates of taxation. In contrast, Norway has established the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world and imposed very high rates of taxation shortly after discovering its resource wealth. This article argues that Norway's consensual approach to industry development and regulation are the primary causes of its success in capitalising on its resource wealth. The difference between the two countries’ approaches is exacerbated by Australia's federal system, which has created less effective governance of resource industries.     

Social Reproduction,Ecological Dispossession and Dependency: Life Beside the Río Santiago in Mexico

This article uses an integrated social reproduction theory (SRT) framework to highlight the interrelation between all non-wage forms of survival, such as debt, community and the environment. The analysis demonstrates how Mexico's unregulated industrialization and social housing policies have created new forms of poverty and market dependency. The article relies on a comprehensive literature review and extensive fieldwork carried out in El Salto, one of Mexico's industrial peripheries, and shows how vulnerable populations become trapped, in this case on the banks of the Río Santiago, one of Mexico's most contaminated rivers. Parallel developments of industrial and housing policies contextualize the conditions unfolding throughout Mexico where populations are relocated to areas without adequate water and where drinking water is supplied by bottled water companies. This contribution highlights why an expanded SRT framework is valuable for understanding the relationship between ecological dispossession and the forced reliance on markets and debt.     

When the personal becomes political: using legal reform to combat violence against women in Ethiopia

This article focuses on Ethiopia's first civil society organisation, the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA), which has been campaigning for legal reform to secure women's rights and address violence against women. Implementing legal changes to benefit women in Ethiopia is impeded by difficulties in using the formal legal system, by poverty and deeply embedded gender inequalities, by plural legal systems, and by entrenched cultural norms. However, the article argues that the most significant challenge is the increasing degree of authoritarianism in Ethiopian state politics, that this is crucial in determining the space for activism, and that this shapes the successful implementation of legal change. The research shows how women's activism around personal rights challenges public/private and personal/political boundaries and can be seen as a political threat by governments in contexts where democracy and rule of the law are not embedded, leading to repression of women's activism and hindering the implementation of measures to protect women's rights when states become more authoritarian. Little is known empirically about the impact of democratisation on the implementation of measures to protect women's rights in Africa. This article shows how the emergence of democracy and legal reform intersects with the emergence of women's rights, especially with respect to gender-based violence. It shows how trying to secure women's personal right to be free from violence through the law is profoundly political and argues that the nature of democratisation really matters in terms of the implementation of measures such as legal changes designed to protect women's rights.     

Competitive Advantage in the Irish Indigenous Software Industry and the Role of Inward Foreign Direct Investment

Since the mid-1980s, the software industry has been one of the fastest growing sectors of the Irish economy. This article examines the causes of the degree of success which the Irish indigenous software industry has attained in terms of growth and international competitiveness. In exploring the development of its competitive advantage we examine, in turn, the role of Irish factor conditions, domestic demand conditions, related and supporting industries, and firm strategy, structure and rivalry, in accordance with Porter's (1990) 'diamond' model. In doing this, we pay close attention to the role of foreign-owned transnational corporations (TNCs) in Ireland in influencing the development and competitive advantage of the indigenous software industry. This is a relevant issue in view of the simultaneous rapid development of the indigenous and foreign-owned branches of the industry, and also the strong growth among other, possibly related, TNC-dominated sectors such as computers and telecommunications equipment. This paper shows that the Irish indigenous software industry has had a strong competitive performance. There is no single outstanding reason for this; rather, causes can be found in all four of Porter's suggested determinants of competitive advantage, so that it is the combination of a range of favourable influences that has proved effective. However, the case of the Irish indigenous software industry shows how foreign TNCs can indeed have a significant positive influence on indigenous competitive advantage.     

Outward Appearance of Children in Medieval Muslim Legal Texts: Modesty,Adornment and Gender

This article focuses on some aspects of boys' and girls' outward appearance in pre-modern Muslim societies according to medieval legal sources. These compendiums are analysed as the product of a continuing, two-way dialogue between law and reality, and as reflecting the desired norms side by side with existing customs. They were not created in a vacuum but are anchored in a local, socio-economic, cultural and political reality. Muslim jurists followed the physical and psychological changes of children, classified them, and concluded that these changes will be followed by changes in their outward appearance. They have constructed children's appropriate outward appearance according to age, gender distinctions, norms of modesty and manners of adornment. A careful examination of this legal discussion presents a case study of pre-modern traditional societies in which components of outward appearance reflect and construct at the same time norms of modesty, means of adornment and gendered socialisation of children's outward appearance.     

Tuna Dreams: Resource Nationalism and the Pacific Islands' Tuna Industry

The 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea was expected by many to lead to a drastic redistribution of income from the world's fisheries. This article explores the extent to which this happened by examining the case of the Pacific Islands' tuna industry. The analysis shows that even though these developing countries gained legal jurisdiction over some of the largest tuna stocks in the world, they encountered tremendous obstacles when they attempted to convert those tenure rights into concrete economic gains. Notwithstanding their success in organizing and co-operating amongst themselves, the Pacific Island countries (PICs) were unable to compel the distant water fishing nations to pay them more than a nominal access fee. When the PICs tried instead to develop their own tuna industries, they were disadvantaged by being located at the raw material end of the commodity chain. This case study suggests that a change in property rights is only a starting point for achieving increased equity in a global natural resource industry; not only do the new resource owners have to develop expertise in managing their ‘property’; they also need to develop a good understanding of the organization and operation of these natural resource industries.     

Dress-code: gender performance and misbehavior in the manor

This article is a queer reading of the architecture of Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf's mansion Mårbacka. Through a combination of performativity theory and architecture theory, the article addresses social and historical constructions of gender and sexuality, complicit with the entities age, class and nationality, through architecture. Architecture is explored ‘on the one hand’ as a representation of social norms and ‘on the other hand’ as a practice which can subvert them. Departing from a performative perspective on identity, the term cross-cladding is introduced as a tool to interpret architecture as dressing and thereby its complex, layered and manifold performances of gender and sexualities. The article writes a social and architectural history of what has been called ‘the most famous manor in Sweden and of Swedish manors the most famous in the world’ (Sterner 1935, 4). Mårbacka was not simply the home of Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) and her kin but also a public display of this Nobel Prize-winning first woman of the Swedish Academy – a national monument. Lagerlöf continuously worked on the main building. In 1919–1924, it was transformed with the help of the architects' office of Isak Gustaf Clason. It also appears in Lagerlöf's novels and throughout the building there are references to her books and biography. There is something queer here. The master of Mårbacka was a woman who loved women and made room for a household of women. This article discusses how architecture can represent a gendered disguise and reveals Mårbacka as an excessive, patriarchal ‘power suit’, which enabled a lifestyle that deviated from the norms of society.     

Young women and public leisure spaces in contemporary Beijing: recreating (with) gender,tradition, and place

Feminist geographers and leisure scholars have long argued that one critical way to understand gendered norms and expectations is through examining women's access to and experiences of leisure activities. Set in the context of the rapid economic, political, and social changes that have taken place in Beijing over the past half century, this article draws on in-depth interviews and extensive participant observation to explore the role of newly available public leisure spaces in the lives and leisure of young women in Beijing, in particular by examining the way that these spaces provide an opportunity for the negotiation of new gender norms and identities. Through an analysis of the interaction of gender norms and practices with women's use of and behavior in public leisure spaces, we argue that women's behavior in public leisure spaces in contemporary Beijing remains strongly circumscribed by gendered norms. Rather than their presence itself constituting a challenge to gender expectations, in many cases their leisure behavior and experiences serve to reinforce the social norms that masculinize public leisure spaces. In spite of this, however, the findings of this research suggest that public leisure spaces may, in some cases, provide women with a place from which to challenge gender norms.     

Medical Technology's Source of Innovation

This article presents research based on a case study of Bern University Hospital and the Greater Bern Area that analyses the hospital's influence on innovation in the regional medical device industry. The study draws upon the concept of sectoral innovation systems enlarged with a space-oriented model of agents' innovation-related behaviour. Its main data stem from semi-structured interviews with representatives from regional companies and the hospital. The findings confirm the systemic character of innovation in medical technology and the role of university hospitals as the main functional source of medical device innovation. At the inception of the medical device industry, innovations were implemented in a regional setting, but with the maturation of the industry, this setting has yielded to an almost global setting for innovation. This international setting became prevalent largely due to the marketing considerations of the industry, showing that from an industrial management point of view, product innovation and the diffusion of innovation are heavily interlinked activities. The article concludes that the hospital's relevant influence at a regional level lies not in the present but in the past, when timely innovative impulses from physicians enabled this regional industry's successful participation in the emerging medical device sector.     

The Structure of ‘Revealed‘ Preference: Race,Community and Female Labour Supply in the London Clothing Industry

This article takes as its starting point the overwhelming concentration of Bangladeshi women in the homeworking sector of the clothing industry in London. This pattern forms a contrast to the large numbers of male Bangladeshi workers also concentrated in the garment industry but who are to be found mainly in the factories and sweatshops. The article uses the accounts given by the Bangladeshi homeworkers themselves for their concentration in this form of work to explore different theoretical explanations of female labour supply behaviour, focusing in particular on questions of choice and constraint, culture and economy. The study suggests that the ‘preferences' revealed by the labour market behaviour of Bangladeshi women cannot be attributed solely to them, but must be seen in terms of bargaining and negotiation with other, more powerful members of the family. Furthermore, the intra-household decision-making process is itself embedded within a broader institutional environment which determines the access enjoyed by different groups to socially-valued resources. For Bangladeshis, a key factor in this broader environment is the operation of racially-based forms of exclusion from the mainstream opportunities. Consequently, community solidarity and networks represent important symbolic and material resources for members. However, these resources are distributed in highly gender-specific ways, with very clear implications for women's place within the community. The article argues therefore that any attempt to explain Bangladeshi women's concentration in homework has to move beyond a focus on either individual circumstances or cultural norms to an exploration of the interaction of racism, community identity and gender relations in shaping women's labour market options.     

Contexts and debates: Environmental intervention and water resource management in the history of the Mezzogiorno

This article shows how the discovery of electrical energy that could be transmitted and used in industry triggered a huge effort to take advantage of Southern Italy's water resources and improve its natural environment. In the early years of the twentieth century, primarily through the initiative of Francesco Saverio Nitti, the great statesman and environmental expert, the rivers and forests of the South became an object of particular attention in that they were to be the central element in conservation measures whose aim was to produce cheap electricity, but which also necessarily involved reforestation, state control of forestry, the embankment of rivers and other changes. For southern reformers such plans were envisaged as the way to launch industrialization in the South.     

Situated Payments for Ecosystem Services: Local Agencies in the Implementation of the Sloping Land Conversion Programme in Southwest China

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an innovative initiative to use market instruments for conservation that has spread across the world since the late 1990s. In assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of PES initiatives, global scholarship has focused on an outcome-oriented approach. This has led to debate on PES programmes’ contributions to, and the trade-offs between, conservation and development. Taking the Sloping Land Conversion Programme (SLCP) in China as an example, this article uses a process-oriented analytical approach to provide novel understandings of PES as a specific type of development practice. The article shows how notions of equity and justice, local knowledge and local institutions have played a role in shaping the processes and outcomes of the SLCP. The actions of local stakeholders in an interplay with the state created a space for negotiating, adapting and adjusting PES implementation, which eventually contributed to a local development pathway for meeting both national conservation interests and local economic development needs. This indicates that attention to situated agency can help illuminate how PES can be smoothly implemented and effectively negotiated in developing countries.     

Cartoon epic heroes in indigenous Siberian revival: The meaning of ethnicity in Putin's Russia (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

This article outlines a motivation for the Russian Federation's incursion into the Crimea, which concerns the Putin administration's relationship with Russia's citizens, rather than the outside world. I use a case study from Siberia – the Sakha people's revival of their national epic, the Olongkho – to explore the possibility that Putin's behaviour during the Ukrainian crisis serves to legitimate his authority within Russia, by appealing to conceptions of ethnicity that have their roots in Soviet‐era social engineering. Rather than deducing the Putin administration's motives from the events and relationships they immediately concern, I explore motivations emerging from the configuration of values, perceptions, and conventions that shapes and reproduces social difference in Russia. The Sakha Olongkho revival shows how the perceptions of ethnicity fostered during the Soviet era have become powerful indexes of morality and authority. Individual Sakha citizens now demonstrate their identities and values through adopting a stance towards a reified conception of Sakha ethnicity expressed in their choices of recreation, fashion and consumption. Sakha ethnicity has become integrated into the process whereby hierarchical social groupings emerge within Sakha society according to their avowal of specific tastes and norms. The relatively small size of the Sakha population – which is nevertheless the dominant ethnic group in their republic, Sakha (Yakutia) – enables us to see trends affecting the rest of Russia in microcosm. Thus, I suggest that former Soviet ethnicity has become so closely woven into Russia's morality that Putin's invasions of foreign states, in the name of the ethnic Russian community, bolster his claim to be a moral person and a legitimate and authoritative national leader.     

Rubber and Carbon: Opportunity Costs,Incentives and Ecosystem Services in Acre,Brazil

The concept of ‘opportunity costs’ has been important in theoretical discussions of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). It focuses attention on economic trade-offs of individual landholders and can make providing ecosystem services, such as tropical forest carbon sequestration, appear to be a cost-effective way to reduce near-term carbon emissions. Yet in practice, the concept may be less useful. This article examines how a programme in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil, has moved away from the concept of opportunity costs, challenging its theoretical importance. Instead of payments, the Acre programme offers ‘incentives’ intended to make rural people produce more whilst deforesting less. It resonates with the neoliberal commodification of carbon and the dominant valorization of intensive agriculture. Yet it also enlists lessons from Acre's history of rubber production and its rubber tapper-led social movement, namely that the living forest can be monetarily valuable and that its use can facilitate its protection. This article shows how local history and culture can be used to reshape PES.     

Dealing with the past and planning the future: the urban renewal of Rome and Barcelona through the Olympic Games

Is there a link between Rome and Barcelona's past and their Olympic legacies? This article sheds further light on the two cities' urban renewals through the Olympics on the basis of a historical and comparative analysis, as well as through the lenses of regime theory. It argues that Rome's modest outcome and Barcelona's success can be linked to their capacity to deal with their controversial past. The article shows that this capacity played a major role in shaping the composition and equilibrium of the two cities' informal networks of local elected officials, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs who planned and implemented the Games (‘growth regimes’). The difficulties of Rome in coping with the Fascist experience resulted in a growth regime in which weak and divided public actors – split along the Fascist/anti-Fascist and Communist/anti-Communist lines – were unable to counterbalance private agents' interests. In contrast, Barcelona's ability to reconcile itself with the past – facilitated by the Spanish entry in the European Economic Community and by the end of the Cold War – eased the Francoist/anti-Francoist and the centralist/Catalan divides, hence allowing the public actors to promote a coalition around a project of ‘democratic restoration’ of the city which involved planners, local businessmen and citizens.     

THE IMPLICATIONS OF ROBERT BRANDOM'S INFERENTIALISM FOR INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Quentin Skinner's appropriation of speech act theory for intellectual history has been extremely influential. Even as the model continues to be important for historians, however, philosophers now regard the original speech act theory paradigm as dated. Are there more recent initiatives that might reignite theoretical work in this area? This article argues that the inferentialism of Robert Brandom is one of the most interesting contemporary philosophical projects with historical implications. It shows how Brandom's work emerged out of the broad shift in the philosophy of language from semantics to pragmatics that also informed speech act theory. The article then goes on to unpack the rich implications of Brandom's inferentialism for the theory and practice of intellectual history. It contends that inferentialism clarifies, legitimizes, and informs intellectual historical practice, and it concludes with a consideration of the challenges faced by inferentialist intellectual history, together with an argument for the broader implications of Brandom's work.