Environmental Values and Water Policy

The emergence of water markets has heralded the prospect of increased efficiency in the use of the resource for extractive purposes. However, water markets have not encompassed all elements of demand for the resource. Notably, demands for the environmental public goods provided by river flows have not been revealed in markets. State Governments have instituted regulations requiring ‘environmental flows’ to be quarantined from the market allocation process. This policy has triggered negative responses from irrigators and conservationists. Lobby groups have found that the process of determining environmental flows is a prospective site for rent seeking. To avoid policy being driven by rent seeking, information on the costs and benefits of environmental flows is useful. Whereas the costs of environmental flows are readily assessed through reference to market data on irrigators’ surpluses foregone, the benefits must be estimated through the use of non‐market, stated preference valuation techniques. These techniques — including contingent valuation and choice modelling — remain controversial. Some argue that they should not be used on ethical grounds. Others argue that they cannot be used on technical grounds. These arguments are discussed in this paper, using the context of the water policy debate. The evidence is that stated preference techniques are being used, and applications have been performed in Australia in the context of riverine health. However their use remains restricted relative to the scale of the Australian natural resource management task. Some possible explanations for this limited up‐take are provided along with some suggested ways forward.     

The production of diaspora: Algerian emigration from colonialism to neo-colonialism (1840-1970)

The extensive literature on migration within a Marxist framework tends to focus on the difficulties migrants face in labor markets of "receiving countries." This paper adopts a different approach, arguing that more attention should be paid to the historical production of diaspora, rather than the continued analysis of the problems of "integration." It suggests that articulation of modes of production theory set within the transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism offers an appropriate means to reverse this analytical lens; further, that to understand contemporary "post-colonial" concerns such as hybridity or migrancy, we need an economic approach which is itself hybrid. An historical narrative exploring the processes of emigration and immigration between Algeria and France shows the emergence of an industrial, and more particularly an automobile diaspora.     

A Market Road to Sustainable Agriculture? Ecological Agriculture,Green Food and Organic Agriculture in China

To the extent that free markets show little concern for the existence of externalities, they are unlikely to produce optimum outcomes with regard to the protection and enhancement of the natural environment. Accordingly, the increasing emphasis on markets to deliver development in China under Deng Xiaoping and his successors has the capacity to threaten the long‐term environmental sustainability of that development. While there are good reasons to remain sceptical about the ability of market mechanisms to promote sustainable rural development in many respects, market reforms in China and the opening of the country to the outside world have nevertheless provided opportunities for farmers to engage in ecologically sensitive agriculture in the form of ‘green’ food and organic farming. Given that these forms of agriculture reduce farmers’ use of chemicals compared to conventional farming — chemicals which are costly to produce and environmentally degrading to use — they contribute to ensuring a more environmentally sustainable future for Chinese farming, post‐WTO entry, whilst providing opportunities for farmers to enrich themselves at the same time: a ‘win–win’ state of affairs. This will remain the case, however, only so long as the state is prepared to create and reinforce appropriate institutional arrangements.     

Growth in the International Reserves of Russia,China, and India: A Comparison of Underlying Mechanisms

A noted international specialist on the Russian economy compares the different mechanisms by which the emerging powerful economies of Russia, China, and India accumulated substantial foreign reserves during the 2000s in the lead-up to the global financial crisis. He also investigates the costs incurred by these countries of intervention into exchange markets to maintain exchange rate regimes supporting such accumulation, as well as measures undertaken after the crisis to address sudden and massive outflows of foreign private capital and considerable decreases in demand for imports in developed countries. The author argues that each of the three countries can be viewed as a prototype for a particular means of reserve accumulation among emerging market countries that has led to the revival of the Bretton Woods international monetary system.     

Environmental governance and private actors: enrolling insurers in international maritime regulation

Government programmes have always relied on the enrolment of intermediate actors, both public and private, in the regulatory process. An increasing recognition that the form of implementation is as important as the passing of new legislation means that these actors are increasingly the focus, rather than just the means to an end, of regulatory programmes. This is particularly the case in international maritime environmental regulation. In this paper I examine how the enrolment of private actors takes place, both discursively and through the use of incentives and sanctions. I focus in particular on the use of liability and compulsory insurance and examine the conditions necessary for an environmental insurance market to function. I then take one set of private actors—Protection and Indemnity (P&I) Clubs which insure shipowners' third party liabilities—and look how international government institutions create (dis)incentives and discourses that encourage the P&I Clubs to act in favour of regulatory goals. The contingent nature of regulation means there is an increasing feedback in which P&I Clubs are allowed to contribute to the framing of specific government programmes in the name of practical implementation, but this must be balanced against the risk of allowing private interests to determine ultimate policy objectives.     

Theorizing Access: Forest Profits along Senegal's Charcoal Commodity Chain

The questions at the centre of this article are: who profits from commercial forestry, and how? Through access mapping with commodity chain analysis, this study examines the distribution of benefits from Senegal's charcoal trade and the multiple market mechanisms underpinning that distribution. Benefits from charcoal are derived from direct control over forest access, as well as through access to markets, labour opportunities, capital, and state agents and officials. Access to these arenas is based on a number of inter-related mechanisms including legal property, social identity, social relations, coercion and information control. A commodity chain is the series of relations through which an item passes, from extraction through conversion, exchange, transport, distribution and final use. Access mapping involves evaluating the distribution of benefits along the chain, and tracing out the mechanisms by which access to benefits is maintained. It sheds light on the limited role of property, the embedded nature of markets, and the role of extra-legal structures and mechanisms in shaping equity and efficiency in resource use. It does so in a socially situated, multi-local manner, spanning the geographic spread of production and exchange. It also illuminates the practical issues surrounding establishment of community participation in benefits from and control over natural resources.     

Marine resource intensification in Viking Age Europe: the molluscan evidence from Quoygrew,Orkney

This paper addresses whether molluscan evidence from Orkney can shed light on the hypothesis that there was a trend towards the intensification of marine resource use at the end of the first millennium AD. The stratified middens of Quoygrew, which date from approximately the 10th to the 13th centuries, are shown to contain predominantly limpets, which may have been used for baiting fish. From metrical data it is shown that these limpets reduce in size through time. In order to test whether this observation is related to intensification in exploitation, analysis of limpet shoreline location was carried out. In addition, age data were used to demonstrate a lowering of average age which suggests intensification in gathering rather than environmental influences, particularly during the 11th–12th centuries at this site.     

Naturalizing the state and symbolizing power in Russian agricultural land use

Land is intertwined with politics: both as a sine qua non for the territorial state, as well as a spatially limited natural resource through which geopolitical power and advantage are articulated and enacted. This remains the case, notwithstanding the emergence of global and planetary frameworks for land management towards collective environmental and developmental goals. Indeed, such frameworks contend with narratives and practices that not only treat land as a strategic national resource, but entangle it with the very ontology of statehood itself. This study examines such state-natures through the case of Russian agricultural land use. Analyzing governmental discourse from 2000 to 2020, it examines how in the extensive cultivation of agricultural land has come to be a hallmark of twenty-first century vertical and horizontal symbolic state-making: both as an instrumental means of enhancing the state's geopolitical power, as well as a means by which state is reified as environmentally sovereign and self-subsistent. So doing, the study complements a growing body of work in critical environmental geopolitics that has tended to eschew state-based analysis, or else leave the state underproblematized. As I argue, considering how the state is made natural, in turn helps to understand how nature is politically if not ontologically entangled in geopolitical thought and practice—in ways that attempts to act upon and indeed bring about wider-scale environmental subjects must contend.     

The state of environmental protection in the Russian Federation: a review of the post-Soviet era

Abstract

In the 25 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, sweeping political, economic, and social changes have profoundly influenced environmental protection in Russia, the world’s largest country and one of global importance with respect to natural resources, biodiversity conservation, wilderness preservation, and climate change mitigation. This paper reviews the state of the environment by assessing post-Soviet era changes to legislation, government regulatory institutions, and civil society. A gulf exists between Russia’s formal environmental laws and state agency capacity and interest in enforcing them. This stems, in part, from repeated bureaucratic reorganizations that have progressively eroded environmental institutions. The Russian environmental movement, which blossomed during Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s, struggled in the 1990s to mobilize the broader public due to economic hardship and political instability. Since then, the Putin administration has labeled many environmental groups “anti-Russian” and used aggressive tactics such as raiding NGO offices, intimidating journalists, and instituting severe legislative measures to quash advocacy and dissent. Post-Soviet environmental successes have been relatively few, with expansion of the protected area system and forest certification notable exceptions. These successes can partially be attributed to efforts by large environmental organizations, but expansion of certification and corporate social responsibility is also tied to Russian business interests dependent on natural resource export to global markets increasingly sensitive to environmental concerns. The paper concludes by illustrating how corruption, poor enforcement, and the muzzling of civil society render the state incapable of resolving arguably its most significant environmental challenge: illegal and unregulated resource use.     

Tourism and Sustainable Development on the Isle of Eigg,Scotland

Although the concept of sustainability has long permeated the literature on tourism and its development, the research on sustainability in tourism rarely reaches beyond the industry level to examine how tourism contributes to the sustainable development of a given destination in wider terms and how effective such processes can be in different economic, environmental and socio-cultural settings. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this important, yet under-developed, research agenda. The paper focuses on the Isle of Eigg – a remote community-owned Scottish island that has recently committed itself to becoming more sustainable and that seeks to rely on inbound tourism as the most important means to this end. It is demonstrated that tourism plays a key role in enhancing the economic stature of Eigg residents and that, rather than undermining, it strengthens the community cohesion on the island. Despite this, its contribution to the island's environmental sustainability cannot always be taken for granted and some trade-offs between these three kinds of sustainability cannot therefore be avoided. Moreover, economic sustainability on Eigg should not be considered synonymous with economic self-sufficiency.     

Discovering Price in All the Wrong Places: The Work of Commodity Definition and Price under Neoliberal Environmental Policy

Abstract: Price plays a unique role in neoliberal economic theory, quantifying value and providing markets with the information needed to produce equilibrium conditions and optimal social welfare. While the role of price is clear, the mechanisms by which prices are discovered, and by which the commodities they value are defined, are left obscure in neoliberal theory. Automatic price discovery, and self‐evident commodity identities, are assumed. Observation of newly created markets in ecosystem services suggests that this is a moment of significant tension within neoliberal practice, as potential market participants seek guidance from the state on appropriate commodity measures and pricing practices. Bureaucrats and economists, following the neoliberal preference for governance over government, turn the task back onto civil society. The invocation of abstract rules, instead of the formulation of practical guidance, by policymakers means that the neoliberal marketization of non‐market public goods is a contingent and sometimes rudderless task for those who must make markets work on the ground. This presents many opportunities for constructive engagement on the part of geographers and other critics of neoliberal strategy.     

Conflict in Water Use in Victoria,Australia: Bolte's Divide

In 1964, the Premier of Victoria, Australia, Henry Bolte, announced that, in order to protect irrigation interests in the north of the state, he would prevent Melbourne from developing new water resources from the north of Victoria's Great Divide. Neither the water resource needs of Melbourne, the need for irrigation development nor the changing economic structure of the state provides a satisfactory explanation for this decision. Instead, Bolte's policy appears simply to have provided a means of improving the parliamentary position of the Victorian Liberal government. Bolte's principle has never been formally revoked and continues to influence water resource planning in the state. In order to make the most appropriate use of Victoria's limited natural resources, it is imperative that ‘Bolte's divide’ should not continue to influence future resource development and allocation.     

How do Local Institutions Mediate Market and Population Pressures on Resources? Forest Panchayats in Kumaon,India

This article addresses one of the most controversial issues in resource management: how do population and market pressures affect resource use? After examining some shortcomings in several major approaches to the issue, the authors use structural equation analysis to decipher the relative and reciprocal influence of population pressures, markets, and institutional arrangements on forest use in the Kumaon Himalaya in India. By deploying an approach which investigates comparatively the effects of these factors, the article attempts to find a way out of the stultifying positions that participants in the debate on overpopulation and environmental change are forced to adopt. The results presented in the second half of the article are especially interesting, showing that local institutions created by the state play a critical role in mediating the influence of structural and socio-economic variables. The findings thus possess significant implications for all who are interested in co-management of renewable resources by the state and the community.     

Gender,Identity and Agency in Philippine Upland Development

Conventional feminist political analysis has considered male interests as historically institutionalized by the state, thereby claiming that women are largely ‘edged out’ in state programmes. By studying a state programme of granting ancestral domain tenurial rights to the Kalanguya in the northern Philippines, this article argues instead that women also edge themselves out. Kalanguya village women have linked with markets and are less interested in tenurial struggles with the state since such struggles underscore their indigeneity and their special role as resource managers, an identity they wish to discard. Men, for their part, attach themselves to the past and identify themselves as being ‘indigenous’ to make claims on land in the present, strategically aligning themselves with the state agenda on sustainable resource management. This article explores perspectives that provide more nuanced understandings of the different ways in which women and men may position and identify themselves as ‘indigenous’ as they engage with state programmes and markets, and argues that, under certain conditions, women through their agency may not be the natural constituency for natural resource management‐related programmes that they are often assumed to be.     

Gambling,Resource Distribution,and Racial Economy: An Examination of Poker Machine Expenditure in Three Remote Australian Towns

Our aim in this paper is to examine the ways in which electronic gaming machines (EGMs) redistribute resources to and from three remote towns in the Northern Territory (NT), namely Katherine, Tennant Creek and Nhulunbuy. We describe EGM expenditure levels in each town at the level of the individual venue, examine patterns of socioeconomic status within each town, explore the ways in which EGM markets are racialised through venue gate‐keeping practices and spatially‐based alcohol regulations, and examine the effects of resource redistribution mechanisms designed to return a proportion of EGM profits to host communities. The ability of venues to draw resources from extremely disadvantaged groups from the remote periphery is of central concern when attempting to assess the societal consequences of gambling in remote towns, both in terms of individual harm and the adequacy of resource redistribution. Existing mechanisms for resource redistribution are both selective and relatively meagre, pointing to a political and racial economy of EGM gambling that transfers resources from remote towns to sites of centralised ‘white’ power. We conclude that political economy in the context of remote NT towns may not be understood outside a consideration of racial economy and the way that constructed notions of race operate to legitimate existing processes of economic exploitation and resource redistribution.     

Community‐Based Resource Management in Turkey: ‘Je Participe,Tu Participes,Il Participe… Ils Profitent’1

The current discourse and practice of natural resource management rest on the assumption that participatory decision‐making mechanisms offer efficient and equitable policy solutions. There is increasing recognition, however, that such mechanisms might fail in ensuring effective participation of all stakeholders and, consequently, be prone to (re)producing inequalities and remaining ineffective in environmental protection. Taking this observation as a backdrop, this study addresses the under‐investigated implications of state–society relationships on the operation of participatory processes. By employing a unique combination of data provided by focus groups, in‐depth interviews, and a survey administered to 377 individuals, it analyses the ‘failure’ of participatory decision making within the context of an internationally‐funded environmental conservation project in Sultan Sazl???, Turkey. The article argues that the specific manifestations of state–society relationships and the political economy dynamics at the local level account for this failure. It shows that local materializations of state behaviour, interacting with local inequalities and perceptions of the decision‐making process, impinge on effective participation. In emphasizing that the capability of different groups to participate is shaped by the state in important ways, this article calls for more research on the political economy of state–society relationships and community‐based resource management.     

‘Born in an atomic test tube’: landscapes of cyclonic development at Uranium City,Saskatchewan

Drawing together insights from neo‐Innisian geography and environmental history, this paper explores the landscape and environmental changes engendered by ‘cyclonic’ patterns of development associated with uranium production at Uranium City, Saskatchewan. Strong postwar demand for uranium led to the establishment and rapid expansion of Uranium City on the north shore of Lake Athabasca as a ‘yellowcake town’, dedicated to producing uranium oxide concentrate to supply federal government contracts with the US military. In spite of optimistic assessments for the region's industrial future, the new settlement remained inherently unstable, tied to shifting institutional arrangements and external markets, and haunted by the spectre of resource depletion. The planning and development of the townsite at Uranium City reflected both neocolonial desires to open the north to Euro‐Canadian settlement and efforts by the state to buffer the stormy effects of resource dependency. Ultimately, however, quixotic government efforts to implant an outpost of industrial modernity in the Athabasca Region failed to forestall the inevitable winds of change, which left in their wake destructive legacies of social dislocation and environmental degradation, already evident with the near‐collapse of the uranium export market by the early 1960s.     

Renovating the Landscape and Packaging the Penguin: Culture and Nature on Summerland Peninsula,Phillip Island,Victoria, Australia

Changes in settler impacts on Summerland Peninsula, Phillip Island are examined, with an emphasis on the recent program of environmental restoration associated with the Penguin Parade, one of Victoria’s largest tourist attractions. Management strategies construct nature around an ideal of human absence, expressed in, for example, removal of residents and residential buildings; representations of the Aboriginal presence as both prehistoric and part of nature; and formalised rather than experiential environmental education. Paradoxically this encourages intensified tourism and its associated impacts, such that the economics of environmental preservation are dependent on its commodification. This paper draws on two traditions of cultural geography, with components undertaken more than 20 years apart. I argue that a combination of Sauerian and deconstructive approaches can be productively applied to many current environmental issues.