See conference website.
Deadline: 30th of November, 2pm UK time
Panel title – ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE IN SOUTH ASIA: DISCURSIVE POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMMES
Panel abstract
The politicization of environmental issues since the 1970s has led to a proliferation of powerful, often north-based, environmental ‘experts’ who assert their ‘knowledge’ about the inter-relationship between environment, economy and society onto global platforms and construct/(re-)shape global narratives about environmental governance. In recent years, the Global South has been increasingly pushed to manage its environment via ‘sustainable development’, by utilising its ‘local’ knowledge – offered by Northern ‘experts’ as a counterpoint to their own dominance. However, despite a populist edge, this discourse perpetuates North to South knowledge transfer, neoliberalism and essentialism. South-based scholars have thus not only called for the dismantling of hegemonic northern environmental knowledge systems but also challenging fixed-space and romanticised representations of ‘local and southern’. This panel seeks to answer such calls for decolonising sustainable development, challenging the ‘naturalness’ implied in it, and analysing varied power-hierarchies existent within southern communities by utilising a discursive political ecology lens. This panel welcomes theoretical and empirical papers focused on South Asia which answer questions like: How is environmental knowledge constructed and whose knowledge is valued and whose is excluded? What are the impacts of environmental programs when they interplay with race, ethnicity, class, caste, gender and economic inequalities/hierarchies? What kinds of conflicts and resistances arise in the wake of sustainable environmental programs?
Please submit your abstract (100-150 words) by Monday 30th November, 2pm UK time, to:
POLLEN 