Rethinking Southern Environmentalism: Iranian Environmental Movement and its Premises

Abstract

Environmentalism of the South qua environmentalism of the poor Scholarly attempts to understand the differences between environmental struggles of the South and their Northern counterparts started in the 1990s. Scholars conceptualized the existence of conflicts around environmental issues as livelihood struggles of poor and marginalized communities (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997; Peet and Watts 1996; Redclift and Sage 1998). These attempts created a discussion around the extent to which environmental movements in the global South and North diverge and the implications of this divergence for development discourse and North/South relations. In 1997 Guha and Martinez-Alier argued that unlike the environmentalism of the North, which mostly relies on social movement organizations and is engaged with post-industrial or post-material issues, nature-based conflicts are still the most important forms of environmental conflict and direct action is the most dominant form of political practice because of large rural populations. They provided an example from India and showed that different groups of marginalized populations such as hill peasants, tribal communities and fishermen, who were neglected by political parties and the government, were struggling to safeguard their livelihood which was threatened by excessive use of environmental resources (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). They termed the direct action of these communities “environmentalism of the poor” (Guha 2000; Martinez-Alier2002), and this has remained the dominant approach of theorizing environmental movements in the global South (see Haynes 1999; Nixon 2011). In a more recent attempt to theorize varieties of environmentalism Doyle and MacGregor (2013) have likened the existence of different kinds of environmentalism around the world as a “green kaleidoscope.” They argue that environmental activism can be divided to three separate geographical areas: Europe, the New World and the global South. According to their model European environmentalism is concerned with post-industrial issues; in North America and Australia (i.e., “the New World”) post-materialist issues prevail; and in the global South “the green concerns are cast in light of the colonizer versus the colonized; the dichotomous world of affluence and poverty” (Doyle and MacGregor 2013: 6). In summary, Southern environmental politics has been understood as political-economic contestation whose protagonists are poor and marginalized communities struggling against the ever-increasing encroachment of their means of subsistence such as land, water and forests. Dwivedi (2001) criticizes the livelihood approach for ignoring the multidimensionality of these struggles in terms of actors, themes, stakes and practices. On the one hand he argues that “whether threatened by development projects and activities or by measures of environmental protection as in the case of the Zapatista rebellion, these mobilizations denote struggles for protecting environmental conditions of livelihoods and sustenance of directly affected local communities” (Dwivedi 2001: 17). Yet he emphasizes that “environmental mobilization involves actors other than local communities and actions other than those geared towards defensive pursuits of livelihood” (Dwivedi 2001: 17). Although Dwivedi recognizes the multiplicity of actors and issues involved in Southern environmentalism, his analysis remains limited to explaining these movements as struggles which are being done on behalf of “the poor,” but carried on by multiple actors (e.g., the middle classes or “knowledge classes”) within the framework of North-South nexus (i.e., with collaborative actions of international, national and local groups). In her study of urban environmental movements in Delhi Amita Baviskar (2003, 2011) argues that these movements are best described as “bourgeoisie environmentalism.” She argues that these movements are driven by the middle class and seek to remake the city by aggressively dispossessing the poor. Hence she urges us to remain critical of the class dynamics of environmental movements driven by affluent urban middle classes. Baviskar’s analysis provides a very useful framework for understanding the negative potential of middle-class environmental activism in cities in the South. However, it remains limited to focusing on conservative aspects of middle-class environmentalism and its relationship with the poor. This scholarship has overshadowed activism of middleclass environmentalists of India who are either pro-poor or neutral in their attitudes toward the poor (Fadaee 2014). It has been argued that environmental movements in the global South on many occasions have political goals given the fact that their governments usually ignore such problems or issues (Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Guha and MartinezAlier 1997; Haynes 1999). However, the vibrant potential forms of progressiveenvironmental politics and their political goals whose focus is not livelihoods have not been explored comprehensively in the global South. In this chapter I aim to shift scholarship on Southern environmentalism from its almost exclusive coupling with a focus on the poor, and recognize progressive Southern environmentalism whose political goals must be understood within a specific political and social context. This chapter draws on research conducted from 2007 to 2008 and on an ongoing research project since 2014.