Ethnobiology and Degrowth: A Review of the Opportunities for Collaboration, Generative Inquiry, and Solidarity in Socio-Ecological Research

Conflict over issues of land use in northern Madagascar reveals that political is situational and that rights to resources are ambiguous. In two cases, local farmers, regional royal indigenous leader, and international conservationists struggled to establish and maintain ability to use and manage forested land to west of Ankarana massif. Political provides a theoretical framework for exploring complex political negotiations that are an integral part of all ecological interactions. In recognizing complexity of such interactions, applied attempts to address issues of environmental degradation and disenfranchisement may also become more effective. (Madagascar, political ecology, conservation, conflict) The protected forest of Ankarana Special Reserve, in northern Madagascar, has a history of local tensions over who possesses rights to land use and under what circumstances. Effective over land use is situational more than it is predetermined or consistently executed according to a set standard. The cases reported here reveal land- and resource-use rights to be ambiguous, overlapping, and even contradictory. Examining cases of conflict shows theoretical interdependence of political and ecological analyses by considering how people with different interests and access to power continuously negotiate rights to manage and use environment of Ankarana region. Political ecology, an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates political economy and cultural into one frame of analysis, provides a useful perspective for studying complex dynamics of human interactions with environment. By focusing on links between local, national, and international contexts, scholars have shown that ecological relationships extend beyond local geographical and political boundaries (Campbell and Olson 1991; Grossman 1993; Moore 1993; Jarosz 1993; Sanabria 1993) and that social differentiation is an important factor in resource management, as some possess greater rights to access and manage resources than others (Carney 1993; Schroeder 1993; Johnston 1994; Bryant 1995; Rocheleau et al. 1996). This article contributes to political by focusing on textured analyses of multilevel political interactions and processes, showing their relationship to regulation of and use of biophysical environment. While quantitative analyses have frequently been considered benchmark of studies in ecological anthropology, detailed qualitative analyses of micropolitics and sociocultural processes also reveal important aspects of patterns of human interaction with biophysical environment. Geographers Richard Peet and Michael Watts (1994:240) note the absence of serious treatment of politics in political ecology and call for qualitative studies integrating political action--whether everyday resistance, civic movements, or organized party politics--into questions of resource access and control (Peet and Watts 1994:240). Vayda (1983:271) also points out limitations of quantitative methodologies and advocates methods with a fluidity or flexibility to match that of things and processes we were trying to understand. The following analysis examines cases of conflict to gain insight into how different actors and authorities (the politicoreligious leader, people living on periphery of forest, and conservation organization in tandem with government of Madagascar) vie for access to forested land. Understandings in political go beyond theoretical relevance in their ability to suggest forms of resource management which take into account complexity of political and economic interactions. As Vayda (1983) suggests, ecological writings are most useful if they address some of concerns of policymakers as well as those of academics. …

Toward sustainable and just forest recovery: research gaps and potentials for knowledge integration

This article is a review essay which discusses the inter-disciplinary collection of essays edited by Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch, titled The Question of Space: Interrogating the Spatial Turn between Disciplines (London: Rowman & Littlefield 2017). The book was published as part of the Place, Memory, Affect series, edited by Neil Campbell and Christine Berberich. As well as providing a detailed critical overview of The Question of Space, the article responds to some of the broader questions that the book poses in terms of the radical inter-disciplinary of space and spatiality, relating these firstly to ideas drawn from Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of ‘blind fields’. The review essay then goes on to question what we might understand by the so-called ‘spatial turn’ and whether this itself requires some rethinking in order to better take stock of the developments in and around the inter-disciplinary scholarship on space and spatiality. Following this, the essay engages more directly with the individual chapter contributions in The Question of Space, before drawing together some concluding remarks that speak to the concept of ‘atmosphere’ as an affective and phenomenological quality of space as experiential and embodied ‘spacing’.

This paper explores issues in the expansion of environmental justice rhetoric to the developing world, and propose insights from resilience theory, political ecology, and bioregionalism as supplements. I do this from the frame of the San Diego-Tijuana region, where regional inequalities are stark and global processes have a heavy local footprint. Sharing a broadly-defined natural region, the growing evidence of ecological crisis increasingly calls for collaboration between two communities which often perceive themselves as relatively disconnected. Understanding challenges to social-ecological resilience and environmental justice in the San Diego-Tijuana region, however, also requires understanding it as an inflection point for global economic, military, and human migration flows occurring at many scales. It is in the context of building effective regional collaboration that environmental justice must engage the analyses of scale and political economy contained in political ecology as a challenge. I suggest, however, that any environmental justice discourse informed by political ecology cannot remain abstract from the local context. A “bioregional” community forged around shared ecological systems may serve as an important resource for creating social-ecological resilience in politically divided territory.

Why has political ecology been assigned so little attention in tourism studies, despite its broad and critical interrogation of environment and politics? As the first full-length treatment of a political ecology of tourism, the collection addresses this lacuna and calls for the further establishment of this emerging interdisciplinary subfield. Drawing on recent trends in geography, anthropology, and environmental and tourism studies, Political Ecology of Tourism: Communities, Power and the Environment employs a political ecology approach to the analysis of tourism through three interrelated themes: Communities and Power, Conservation and Control, and Development and Conflict. While geographically broad in scope—with chapters that span Central and South America to Africa, and South, Southeast, and East Asia to Europe and Greenland—the collection illustrates how tourism-related environmental challenges are shared across prodigious geographical distances, while also attending to the nuanced ways they materialize in local contexts and therefore demand the historically situated, place-based and multi-scalar approach of political ecology. This collection advances our understanding of the role of political, economic and environmental concerns in tourism practice. It offers readers a political ecology framework from which to address tourism-related issues and themes such as development, identity politics, environmental subjectivities, environmental degradation, land and resources conflict, and indigenous ecologies. Finally, the collection is bookended by a pair of essays from two of the most distinguished scholars working in the subfield: Rosaleen Duffy (foreword) and James Igoe (afterword). This collection will be valuable reading for scholars and practitioners alike who share a critical interest in the intersection of tourism, politics and the environment

Globalisation, as described by Appadurai, is the term for a process characterised by disjunctive flows that can generate acute problems of social well‐being. One potential positive force that encourages an emancipatory politics of globalisation is the role of the imagination in social life. Globalisation requires rethinking the role of the ‘research imagination’. Based on some critiques developed by Appadurai and some postcolonial and indigenous cultural theorists, and using education policy research in China as an example, this paper shows how research is both colonised and colonising. It selects and analyses publications in an influential scholarly journal in China during 2003–2004 to illustrate how the imagination is badly needed and seriously challenged in China's contemporary education policy research. It ends up with some discussions of the tensions between the global agenda and the local context in decolonising social research.

Although philosophy of ecology was slow to become established as an area of formal philosophical interest, there is a rich history of developing and debating conceptual frameworks in ecological and environmental science. A key challenge in conceptualising ecological complexity is to allow simultaneously for particularity, contingency and structure – structure, moreover, that changes, is internally differentiated, and has problematic boundaries. In contrast to ambitions of earlier decades for identifying general principles about systems and communities, ecologists now widely assert historical contingency, nonequilibrium formulations, local context and individual detail. Given that all organisms – humans included – live in dynamic ecological contexts, philosophy of ecology raises more general questions about conceptualising the positionality of humans and other organisms in the dynamic flux of their intersecting worlds. Key Concepts: Although philosophy of ecology was slow to become established as an area of formal philosophical interest, there is a rich history of developing and debating conceptual frameworks in ecological and environmental science. A challenge faced by all ecologists is to deal with ongoing change in the structure of situations that have built up over time from heterogeneous components and are embedded or situated within wider dynamics. All organisms live in an ecological context that has structure and dynamics, so all philosophy of biology depends on some implicit conceptualization of ecological relations. Ecologists of a particularistic bent question many of community ecology's models, rejecting them when their fit to data was no better than alternative ‘null’ hypotheses or ‘random’ models. Observation and experiment can contribute to the generation of theory in many ways other than through crucial hypothesis tests. Models need not be seen simply as representations intended to capture the necessary and sufficient conditions to explain observed phenomena – exploration of models can produce new concepts, questions and hypotheses. In contrast to ambitions of earlier decades for identifying general principles about systems and communities, ecologists now widely assert historical contingency, nonequilibrium formulations, local context and individual details. Under the label ‘political ecology’, environmental problems can be analysed in terms of intersecting economic, social and ecological processes, which operate across various spatial and temporal scales and are mutually implicated in the production of any outcome and in their own ongoing transformation. Self‐consciousness about the social interactions involved in producing ecological knowledge extends a post‐modernist critique of unified science that argues that people's reasonings can only be rooted in historically specific life practices.

Abstract. Political ecology is a research field comprising studies with a critical perspective on human/nature-relations – critical in both a political and an epistemological sense. Fundamental questions of political ecology, here, are related to just and equal access to resources, their contribution and control, and to the regimes of regulation. The article specifies the empirical and epistemological approaches within political ecology in the last decades. It does not tell a linear history or a single story, because political ecology emerges out of a continuous process of mutual inspirations of academic debates and activist practices. The research strands in political ecology operate with different ideas on how to conceptionalize nature: as social product, technonature, hybrid, or as actant. These conceptualisations are related to different approaches of neo-Marxist and post-structural epistemology. This article discusses the present debate of political ecology in two steps. After introducing a broader perspective of what critique means in political ecology, it gives an account of the various approaches for analysis of both, geographies and materialities of uneven development. The early studies of political ecology explain human/nature-relations as socially produced, related to a Marxist understanding of historical materialism. In recent debates of political ecology, this approach was confronted with a new materialist thinking of more fluid interrelations between nature and non-nature; it also addresses postcolonial studies' claim to decentralize the perspectives on history and geography in order to understand new forms of connectivity of nature and culture.

Practitioners widely acknowledge the importance of including local and Indigenous knowledge in environmental research and decision-making. Nevertheless, it remains a challenge to achieve this integration in a meaningful way. The pilot study reported here was a necessary step toward developing improved methods for communicating local and Indigenous knowledge to decision-makers, with a focus on public sector practitioners as audience and visual content as medium. The proposed methodology extends previous research on climate change adaptation in the Alaskan Arctic, and it examines the effect of a reporting approach that introduces two components outside of general conventions in public sector information dissemination; 1) the application of context-rich images to help convey the social and cultural nuances of place-based information, and 2) multiple evidence base (MEB) reporting which engages information from both Western science and local/Indigenous knowledge systems. Context-rich images  defined here as detailed visuals that address the particularities of specific environments and cultures – are explored given their potential merits in expressing place-based concepts, such as social life and lived experience quickly and concisely when presented in tandem with text. With a focus on practical application, public sector conventions for reporting place-based information to decision-makers are investigated, including the benefits and limitations associated with these conventions. Insights from both theory and practice informed the research methodology, and the design of a sample report and online questionnaire tested with upper-level public sector practitioners who have influence on environmental decision-making. Pilot study results indicated significant benefits of using context-rich images in addition to quotes about lived experience for reporting information about the local context and experience of Northern environmental changes. When presented alongside research from Western science, neither local observations in the form of quotes, nor context-rich images posed negative impacts on the perceived credibility of the report. The pilot study revealed the proposed methodology to be particularly beneficial for a target audience of practitioners who may lack expertise in the local context or field of research being reported. Additionally, several potential improvements to the content and design of research materials were identified for the benefit of future studies.

The main goal of this study is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the complex and diverse dynamics of miscommunication that occur during economic discussions between Arabic and English languages. By exploring this topic, the study aims to shed light on important questions about the origins of these misunderstandings and their effects on economic interactions. To achieve this objective, the research will draw upon valuable insights from previous agreements, intercultural bargaining, and global economic relations. It is crucial to emphasize that economic misunderstandings in conversations arise from various factors, including differences in language structure, disparities in cultural backgrounds, and varying contexts. These elements contribute to the confusion surrounding economic terminology, such as sentence structure, vocabulary and meaning difficulties, and contrasting communication styles. The research also examines the influence of cultural nuances and investigates how past events, cultural practices, and societal legacies shape the understanding of economic terms. The importance of effective communication in promoting trust and facilitating successful economic collaboration cannot be overstated. It goes beyond the economic implications of unfavorable trade terms and strained international relations. This research delves into the challenges faced by interpreters and negotiators, highlighting how technology can either alleviate or exacerbate the issue of miscommunication. Ultimately, it serves as a reminder that managers' misunderstandings play a pivotal role in economic dialogues. In today's interconnected global economy, clear and precise communication is essential for productive negotiations and the maintenance of long-lasting international business relationships. To address this, we propose proactive measures such as supporting training programs, leveraging technology wisely, and demonstrating a strong commitment to intercultural communication. The study underscores the significance of adopting effective communication strategies to navigate complex economic conversations and uphold harmonious global economic relationships in an ever-changing world.

Biogeographies: Transcending anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene

Food, Diet Reform, and Obesity Politics in the American Imagination EATING RIGHT IN AMERICA: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health. By Charlotte Biltekoff. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2013.FAT SHAME: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. By Amy Erdman Farrell. New York: New York University Press. 2011.WEIGHING IN: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. By Julie Guthman. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2011.CULTIVATING FOOD JUSTICE: Race, Class, and Sustainability. Edited by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. 2011.During a 2008 interview with journalist Amy Goodman, University of California, Berkeley, journalism professor Michael Pollan argued, There's an enormous amount of wisdom [. . . and] contained in a cuisine.1 Here, Pollan implies that valuing the localized knowledge embedded in cuisine is one way of rethinking the surrounding food in the most intimate ways; that is, through understanding food sources, growers, growing locations, farmer practices, and values about the food consumers might buy or even grow. However, the interdisciplinary scholarship included in this review essay critically examines the cultural authority embedded in cuisine from entirely different perspectives, engaging the ways in which food, nutritional science, body politics, and dietary health pursuits are constructed within specific social, historical, and economic contexts. This is not to say that the authors do not consider themselves food activists. Each firmly situates themselves within an array of environmental and food activist work. Yet, using diet, body size, and nutritional health as lenses, and working across fields such as food studies, fat studies, critical nutrition studies, and political ecology, each of the texts reveals intersectional identity politics and diverse histories of naturalized social hierarchy.This is a moment of heightened awareness, anxiety, and political engage- ment with the far-reaching social implications of food, diet, and body politics. In the 2009 documentary Food, Inc., Stoneybrooke Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg notes, When we run an item past the supermarket scanner, we're for local or not, organic or not.2 Access to good food is a right not a privilege as Alice Waters suggests. Yet, some of the most prominent proposals and widely recognized faces of food tend to push voting with the wallet and lifestyle shifts-just buy organic grapes at the farmers' market rather than Nike shoes, Alice Waters argues on 60 Minutes; return to the land, eat locally, can your own tomatoes, as Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2008) suggests; cook and prioritize whole foods rather than processed, as Jamie Oliver argues in Jamie's Food Revolution (2011). While these may prove excellent options for some, food politics will remain within privileged, predominantly white, and firmly middle-class frameworks without increased intersectional scholarship and coalition-building to provide counter perspectives, and critically examine the social constructedness of key presumptions embedded in common understandings about food, health, and the body.3 I do not here situate myself against criticisms of industrialized food systems or food movements writ large, nor do I suggest the scholarship included in this review essay claims such a stance. Research by the authors included in this review, Charlotte Biltekoff, Amy Farrell, Julie Guthman, and Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman, pushes for more: from food systems, from dietary reform, from environmental movements, and from presumptions about health and body politics.Amidst continued interdisciplinary scholarly interest in the burgeoning fields of food studies and fat studies, very little studies scholarship has engaged the systemic dimensions of food, health, nutrition, and body politics through a critical lens. …

Comparative Political Theory and Cross-Cultural Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Hwa Yol Jung explores new forms of philosophizing in the age of globalization by challenging the conventional border between the East and the West, as well as the traditional boundaries among different academic disciplines. The essays in this volume examine diverse issues, encompassing globalization, cosmopolitanism, public philosophy, political ecology, ecocriticism, ethics of encounter, and aesthetics of caring. They examine the philosophical traditions of phenomenology of Hursserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger; the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin; the philosophy of mestizaje literature; and Asian philosophical traditions. This rich comparative and cross-cultural investigation of philosophy and political theory demonstrates the importance of cultural and cross-cultural understanding in our reading of philosophical texts, exploring how cross-cultural thinking transforms our understanding of the traditional philosophical paradigm and political theory. This volume honors the scholarship and philosophy of Hwa Yol Jung, who has been a pioneer in the field of comparative political theory, cross-cultural philosophy, and interdisciplinary scholarship. In one of his earliest publications, The Crisis of Political Understanding (1979), Jung described the urgency and necessity of breakthrough in political thinking as a crisis, and he followed up on this issue for his half century of scholarship by introducing Asian philosophy and political thought to Western scholarship, demonstrating the possibility of cross-cultural philosophical thinking. In his most recent publications, Jung refers to this possibility as 'transversality' or 'trans(uni)versality,' a concept which should replace the outmoded Eurocentric universality of modernist philosophy. Jung expounds that in 'transversality,' 'differences are negotiated and compromised rather than effaced and absorbed into sameness.' This volume is a testimony to the very possibility of transversality in our scholarship and thinking.

Dans cette étude, nous avons utilisé un cadre théorique relevant de l'écologie politique afin de construire un modèle critique et systémique pour expliquer comment il est possible de gérer une maladie infectieuse émergente, comme le SRAS, dans notre univers mondialisé. Nous espérons qu'un tel modèle contribuera à la mise en place de politiques de gestion des risques plus réalistes. Nous commençons par établir et analyser les interactions qui, dans l'environnement social et humain, ont facilité l'apparition de l'épidémie de SRAS dans un contexte local, celui de Toronto. Ensuite, nous montrons que cette épidémie a mis en lumière les insuffisances profondément ancrées du système actuel de gestion mondiale de la santé. Nous mettons l'accent sur le fait que, en cette ère de mondialisation, il est imprudent de trop concentrer efforts sur le plan local. L'analyse des épidémies doit plutôt se faire dans une perspective mondiale, et doit tenir compte du fait que les liens entre les pays développés et les pays en développement relèvent de l'écologie politique. We adopt a political ecology framework to delineate a critical and systemic model that explains how an emerging infectious disease (EID), such as SARS, is dealt with in our globalized world. It is our hope that such a model will contribute to the development of more realistic risk-management policies. First, we focus on identifying and analyzing particular social and human-environment interactions that facilitated the spread of SARS within a local Toronto context. Second, we describe how the SARS outbreak brought to light the deeply rooted inadequacies involved in the current system of global health governance. We stress that in our globalized world it is unwise to focus too narrowly on the local context. The analysis of disease outbreaks must adopt a global perspective that considers the political ecological nature of the relationships between the developed and developing world.

This thesis examines power relations in the context of social impact assessment (SIA) as it is applied in the emerging mining industry in Solomon Islands. While the social impacts of large-scale mining in the Global South are well documented, little is known about how and why adverse social impacts continue to occur in the presence of numerous ‘best practice’ policy and planning tools, including SIA. This raises questions on the efficacy of SIA in identifying, contextualising and mitigating potential social impacts on communities affected by mining activity, particularly on traditional lands inhabited by indigenous peoples.This thesis presents a critical analysis of SIA to provide insight on this disparity in policy and practice, and to enhance sociological understanding on the interplay of globally-driven mining projects, the identification of social impacts, and the role of policy and institutions in cross-cultural contexts. The proposed extraction of nickel in Isabel Province, Solomon Islands, serves as the case study for this analysis. Employing the conceptual frameworks of social justice and political ecology, and drawing on six months’ fieldwork in Solomon Islands, qualitative data from individual and group interviews (n=33) and document analysis (n=11) was collected across geopolitical scales - international, national, provincial and local - to compare and analyse perspectives of documents, institutions and people towards SIA and socially just development in the context of potential mining activity. Analysis of these perspectives exposed the extent to which SIA produces, reinforces and/or exacerbates, social injustices.Research findings identified the limits of SIA in: 1) recognising and accounting for indigenous identities and gender roles; 2) the unequal distribution of economic and other resources associated with the development of mining, including the privatisation of land and employment; and 3) representation of project-affected communities through consultation activities associated with SIA, including Free, Prior and Informed Consent. With political ecology as the foundation of this thesis, this thesis argues that these social injustices materialise as a result of a disparity, or mismatch, between knowledge frames across scales. While SIA is bounded to the rhetoric of social justice, consent and participation, this thesis demonstrates that Western expert knowledge and norms are interwoven into the SIA regime, rendering local experiential knowledge marginal. Reflecting this, a multiscale SIA approach is proposed to include consideration of different scales of knowledge systems, with outcomes that might assist to mitigate social injustices, such as those identified in this thesis. Overall, this thesis contributes to the emerging field of sociology of development by providing an original analysis based on empirical evidence to demonstrate the inefficacy of global policy applications in local contexts. It also advances current understandings about mining in Solomon Islands.