Tag: governance

CfP POLLEN20 – Blurred Boundaries and their Political Ecologies: Parties, patronage and bureaucratic practice

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN 20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organizers

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Elsie Lewison, Rebecca McMillan and Zach Anderson at elsie.lewison@mail.utoronto.ca, rebecca.mcmillan@mail.utoronto.ca and z.anderson@utoronto.ca by November 19, 2019.

Session description

Over the past decade, political ecology has seen increasingly nuanced theoretical and methodological engagements with the state. From the proliferation of work on neoliberal environments to theorizations of the state as a socio-environmental relation and more recent explorations of authoritarian and populist trends in environmental governance, political ecologists have responded enthusiastically to calls to de-fetishize the state and build on political geography’s attention to scale, territory, and power. More recently, we also find growing interest in anthropological approaches to the state, particularly in its everyday, bureaucratic forms.

Yet, although party politics and bureaucratic practices that “blur” the line between state and non-state actors appear frequently in ethnographic descriptions of natural resource management and socio-ecological struggles, they are rarely foregrounded in political ecological analysis. Attention to such dynamics is more common in work on violent environments, rentier states and regimes of dispossession. However, as Robbins highlighted almost two decades ago, bureaucratic transgressions often follow systems of “normalized rules” that structure everyday state practice and ecological relations. At the same time, neoliberal reforms that subcontract governance activities to community groups, the private sector, and unelected consultants and technical advisors have further blurred state-non-state and public-private boundaries in bureaucratic spaces (while generally being exempted from the label of ‘corruption’). Attention to everyday practices in these spaces is essential for political ecologists concerned with possibilities for more democratic, anti-capitalist, socio-natural relations because it is often through people’s mundane encounters with bureaucracy that the state becomes socially effective or ‘powerful’ and that political subjectivities are (re)produced or transformed.

In this paper session we are interested in exploring how (post)neoliberal environmental governance is disrupted, reproduced, and reworked through its articulation with the political logics of networked or clientelist relations and the blurring of public-private boundaries in spaces of bureaucratic practice. Key questions include:

  • How do pre-existing patron/client networks and forms of rule map onto or subvert neoliberal environmental governance reforms (e.g. commodification, marketization, privatization, decentralization)? And how are geometries of power along such lines as class, caste, race, ethnicity, and gender reshaped through this articulation?
  • How has the participatory turn in (post)neoliberal environmental governance reinforced or undermined patron-client relations? Has participation worked to uproot practices that may be seen as “corrupt” or to further entrench existing power imbalances within and beyond the state?
  • What forms of political subjectivity emerge at the intersection of neoliberalism and other logics of rule?
  • How are environmental governance practices understood (e.g. as public/private or illegitimate/legitimate/corrupt), by whom, and with what effects?
  • In what ways do efforts to eradicate corruption and patronage politics serve to underwrite or reproduce, or alternatively, disrupt or undermine the legitimacy of state and non-state actors? What do these efforts mean for democratic accountability?

References

Bear, L. & Mathur, N. (2015). Introduction: Remaking the Public Good: A New Anthropology of Bureaucracy. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 33(1).

Corbridge, S., Williams, G., Srivastava, M., & Véron, R. (2005). Seeing the state: Governance and governmentality in India (Vol. 10). Cambridge University Press.

Gupta, A. (2012). Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham and London: Duke University Press

Gupta, A. (1995). Blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state. American ethnologist, 22(2), 375-402.

Harris, L. M. (2017). Political ecologies of the state: Recent interventions and questions going forward. Political Geography, 58(May), 90-92.

Loftus, A. (2018). Political ecology II: Whither the state?. Progress in Human Geography, 0309132518803421.

Lund, C. (2006). Twilight Institutions: Public authority and local politics in Africa. Development and Change, 37(4), 685-705.

Muir, S. & Gupta, A. (2018). Rethinking the Anthropology of Corruption: An Introduction to Supplement 18. Current Anthropology, 59(suppl. 18), S4-S15.

Omeje, K. (Ed.). (2013). Extractive economies and conflicts in the global south: Multi-regional perspectives on rentier politics. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd..

Robbins, P. (2008). The state in political ecology: A postcard to political geography from the field. The SAGE handbook of political geography, 205-218.

Robbins, P. (2000). The rotten institution: corruption in natural resource management. Political Geography, 19(4), 423-443.

Robertson, M. (2015). Political ecology and the state. The Routledge handbook of political ecology, 457.

Watts, M. (2001). Petro-violence: community, extraction, and political ecology of a mythic commodity. Violent environments, 189-212.

Williams, A., & Le Billon, P. (Eds.). (2017). Corruption, natural resources and development: From resource curse to political ecology. Edward Elgar Publishing.

CfP POLLEN20 – Irrigation issues in emerging economies

Amber Huff

The Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organisers

This session is being organized by Adnan Mirhanoglu (adnan.mirhanoglu@kuleuven.be) and Maarten Loopmans (Maarten.Loopmans@kuleuven.be). Please submit abstracts between 250 and 500 words and full contact details to both organizers by the 28 of October 2019 15 of November 2019

Session description

In countries like China, India, Turkey, Brazil, Ethiopia, rapid social and economic changes are affecting the countryside. Rural-to-urban migration, agricultural modernization and the emergence of new economic sectors are all changing the demography and socio-economic relations in rural areas. Whereas new large scale irrigation projects create social, environmental and political tensions on their own (Madramootoo and Fyles, 2010; Boelens, Shah & Bruins, 2019), traditional irrigation systems are equally facing new challenges, as demands for water change, climate change is affecting availability, new water users appear on the scene, and political and infrastructural changes are demanding new forms of water governance (Gany, Sharma & Singh, 2019). In this session, we want to discuss and theorize the particular issues, conflicts and challenges related to irrigation water governance in emerging economies.

Irrigation systems have always been fraught with power imbalances and conflicts of interest, and poses particular theoretical challenges to theory-making (.e.g Ostrom & Gardner, 1993). Present-day socio-economic  transitions exacerbate these tensions, and presents us with new practical and theoretical dilemma’s (Playan, Sagardoy & Castillo, 2018; Ahlborg & Nightingale, 2018;) which we hope to discuss in this session. We invite both theoretical and empirical papers on irrigation governance and economic expansion in emerging economies. We are particularly keen on discussing multiscalar analyses linking interpersonal, water network and national/global political economy. The following topics (non-exhaustive) can be considered:

  • small and large scale irrigation infrastructures and water justice
  • head- and tail-ender conflicts under global market pressure
  • gendered and racialized politics of irrigation
  • infrastructural modernization and changing power relations
  • climate change, land use change and irrigation politics

References

Ahlborg, H. and A.J. Nightingale 2018. Theorizing power in political ecology: the where of power in resource governance projects. Journal of Political Ecology 25: 381-401.

Boelens, R., A. Shah & B. Bruins (2019) Contested knowledges: large dams and mega-hydraulic development, Water 11: 416-443.

Gany, A. H. A., Sharma, P., & Singh, S. (2019). Global Review of Institutional Reforms in the Irrigation Sector for Sustainable Agricultural Water Management, Including Water Users’ Associations. Irrigation and Drainage, 68(1), 84-97.

Harris, L. M. (2006). Irrigation, gender, and social geographies of the changing waterscapes of southeastern Anatolia. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24(2), 187-213.

Madramootoo, C. A., & Fyles, H. (2010). Irrigation in the context of today’s global food crisis. Irrigation and Drainage: The journal of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, 59(1), 40-52.

Ostrom, Elinor, Roy Gardner. (1993) “Coping with Assymetries in the Commons: Self-Governing Irrigation Systems Can Work”. Journal of Economic Perspectives – Vol 7, Number 4, pp.93-112.

Playán, E., Sagardoy, J., & Castillo, R. (2018). Irrigation governance in developing countries: Current problems and solutions. Water, 10(9), 1118.

Köpke, S., Withanachchi, S. S., Pathiranage, R., Withanachchi, C. R., & Ploeger, A. (2019). Social–ecological dynamics in irrigated agriculture in dry zone Sri Lanka: a political ecology. Sustainable Water Resources Management, 5(2), 629-637.

 

CfP POLLEN 20 – Papers, procedures, and plants: Expanding the political ecology of bureaucracy

Amber Huff

Session organizers

Scott Freeman (American University) and Raquel Machaqueiro (George Washington University). Please, send your abstract (250 words) by October 25 to Scott Freeman (freeman@american.edu) and Raquel Machaqueiro (rrmachaqueiro@gmail.com).

Session description

Interdisciplinary political ecology has exposed environmental conservation efforts as a domain in which multiple conceptualizations of space, time, and nature intersect and are forged (Neumann 1998; Hughes 2005; West 2006). The institutions involved in these intersections are broad and varied: states, multi-laterals, non-governmental actors, grassroots organizations and combinations therein all contribute to the broad effects of conservation practice. What unites much of conservation practice, regardless of the organizations involved, is the negotiation and continuous deployment of bureaucracy.

In this panel, we interrogate the bureaucratic practices within conservation, and the social worlds that are produced as a result. Bureaucracies do not neutrally encounter an objective world, but interpret and create, defining problems and making them amenable to bureaucratic intervention (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). Accordingly, bureaucracies are machines for the production of documents, inscriptions which are then used to stabilize particular problematizations and interpretations of the world (Gupta 2012, Hull 2012). Such practices produce their own authority through regularity and repetition that may include the mundane filing of forms, ticking of boxes, or writing of formulaic reports according to standardized templates (Feldman 2008). In doing so, bureaucracies respond to calls for transparency, audit, or fiscal discipline, but may simultaneously produce social exclusion and precarity (Bear and Mathur 2015, Hetherington 2011). Rather than producing visibility, they may propagate secrecy and ignorances about the world (Weber 1973, Sanders and West 2003).

As bureaucracy comes to bare on conservation practice, new forms of environmental governance emerge and new social realms are produced. The needs of populations and their environmental problems are defined through environmental regulatory regimes (Goldman 2001). Yet the implementation of conservation through states is rarely monolithic. Environmental projects and policies are often faced with the “mundane set of everyday failures by local government” (Brockington 2007: 845), whose practices illuminate the inherent contradictory nature of state bureaucracies (Neumann 2001). In examining environmental bureaucracy, even the role of policy is limited, as bureaucratic forms like the project become far more important for implementers (Li 2016).

This panel explores both the many facets of bureaucracy and the conflicts, contestations, and negotiations that occur as bureaucratic governance unfolds. We hope to examine the way in which documents as well as soils and forests become sites for negotiation, and how practitioners as well as beneficiaries navigate projects. We are equally intrigued by the ways that time and space are forged through bureaucratic practices. In particular, we will address the following questions:

  • What kinds of powers, possibilities, and prefigurations are produced by bureaucracy within environmental conservation?
  • What types of ignorance, injustices, and irrationalities are produced by environmental bureaucracies?
  • What is the role of bureaucracy in the construction of “successful” environmental interventions?
  • How are space and time produced through the demands of documentation and measurement of conservation projects?
  • How are bureaucracies negotiated from within and outside of conservation organizations?

Papers may also address:

  • Bureaucratic expert knowledge (and its deployment)
  • Participation/enrollment of different stakeholders (practitioners, donors, local authorities, beneficiaries) in bureaucratic procedures
  • Forms of power/authority produced by bureaucratic procedures (including funding)
  • Intersection of bureaucracies and the role of market-based instruments in environmental governance
  • Audits and measurement in conservation practice

References

Barnett, Michael, and Martha Finnemore. 2004. Rules for the World – International Organizations in Global Politics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Bear, Laura, and Nayanika Mathur. 2015. Introduction: Remaking the Public Good: A New Anthropology of Bureaucracy. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33(1).

Brockington, Dan. 2007. “Forests, Community Conservation, and Local Government Performance: The Village Forest Reserves of Tanzania.” Society & Natural Resources 20 (9): 835–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920701460366.

Feldman, Ilana. 2008. Governing Gaza – Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-1967. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine – “Development”, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Goldman, Michael. 2001. “Constructing an Environmental State: Eco-Governmentality and Other Transnational Practices of a ‘Green’ World Bank.” Social Problems 48 (4): 499–523.

Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Hetherington, Kregg. 2011.Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hughes, David McDermott. 2005. “Third Nature: Making Space and Time in the Great Limpopo Conservation Area.” Cultural Anthropology 20 (2): 157–84.

Hull, Matthew S. 2012. Government of Paper – The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

Li, Tania Murray. 2016. “Governing Rural Indonesia: Convergence on the Project System.” Critical Policy Studies 10 (1): 79–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2015.1098553.

Neumann, Roderick P. 2001. Africa’s ‘Last Wilderness’: Reordering Space for Political and Economic Control in Colonial Tanzania. Africa 71(04): 641–665.

Neumann, Roderick P. 1998. Imposing Wilderness: Struggles Over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Gerth and Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

West, Harry G., and Todd Sanders. 2003. Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

West, Paige. 2006. Conservation Is Our Government Now – The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

CfP POLLEN 20: Political ecology of professional practice: plurality and possibilities in environmental governance

Amber Huff

The Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN 20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organisers

Sam Staddon (University of Edinburgh, UK) and Floriane Clement (INRA, France). Paper titles and abstracts of 250 words should be sent to sam.staddon@ed.ac.uk and floriane.clement@inra.fr by 28 October 2019 by November 18.

Session description

Professional environment and development practice has been critiqued by political ecologists and development scholars for its techno-managerialism, its professionalisation, its colonial continuities with the past, its ‘rendering technical’ of complex realities, and ultimately for being apolitical (Nightingale 2005, Lund 2015, Kothari 2005, Li 2007). It is said to fail to engage meaningfully with environmental justice and social equity concerns, or with the politics of knowledge and authority of intervention. Digging into these professional practices however, some urge us to unpack the ‘social life’ of interventions (Mosse 2004) and environmental policies, and to question the role and agency of ‘intermediary actors’, including as ‘bricoleurs’ (Cleaver 2012, Funder & Marani 2015) or ‘street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 2010). Others draw attention to the multiple knowledges of development practitioners (Hayman et al. 2016, Eyben et al. 2015) and the importance and potential of reflective practice (Eyben 2014, Fechter 2012, 2013) in shifting professional practice to more effectively challenge hegemonic and oppressive systems.

Whilst political ecology has rightly explored and exposed the heterogeneity of ‘communities’ in community-based environmental governance, pointing to the diverse interests and dynamic power relations inherent within them, it has not extended this same attention to the importance of intersectional identities and multiple knowledges of the professional community working in this field. This session aims to unpack the community of environment and development professionals, to explore the diversity, plurality and possibilities of these actors and their actions. Kontinen (2016, p.29) observes that “NGOs are not only structures but also practices, communities, and sites of negotiation” (p.29), whilst Bee & Basnett (2017, p.797) suggest that “The key, then, is to identify possible points of reversal or switches, whereby potential openings for struggle and contestation occur”. This session seeks to explore such ‘negotiation’ or ‘points of reversal or switches’ where ‘struggle and contestation’ may occur, and which may open up the possibility of shifting environment and development practice into something more ‘transformatory’. It points also to the need and difficulty for researchers to engage in both critical and relational ways with environment and development actors (Bartels and Wittmayer, 2018).

We are welcoming theoretical and empirical contributions on the topic, from the Global South and Global North. Possible questions include:

  • How do different theories and bodies of knowledge help us to draw a more nuanced account of how environment and development programmes and policies get re-interpreted and re-negotiated and to identify pathways towards transformatory practices?
  • Which methodological approaches offer potential for understanding professionals’ everyday negotiations and struggles?
  • In particular, how does participatory action research support identifying ‘points of reversal or switches’ to challenge hegemonic and oppressive systems and moving beyond identification towards action?
  • To what extent and how might everyday, undercover and individual forms of resistance and negotiation by professionals lead to significant and transformatory change on the ground?
  • How do such forms of resistance and negotiation get acknowledged, accepted and institutionalised – and what are the risks and trade-offs of such institutionalisation?
  • How do individual professionals create space for reflexive and transformative practices within technocratic structures? In turn how do structures impede or support critical and reflexive agency through professional discourses, culture and institutions?