Journal Article

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10535/5

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Are East African Pastoralists Truly Conservationists?
(1999) Ruttan, Lore M.; Borgerhoff Mulder, M.
"Controversy exists among anthropologists,conservation biolo-gists,and development workers as to whether the concept of the 'ecologically noble savage' is a myth. Central to this debate are the problem of how to identify conservationist behavior and the issue of whether sound management of common property is likely to evolve. While social scientists have documented in-stances of restraint in the use of resources, those who adopt an evolutionary perspective are challenged to identify the selective mechanisms whereby such altruistic conservation acts might be maintained in a population. Here a game theoretical approach is used to analyze the case of pastoralist grazing reserves. We demonstrate that under some conditions conservation can be the result of narrow self-interest and there is no collective-action problem. However, the range of these conditions is much broader for wealthy individuals, and thus the wealthy may also find it advantageous to coerce others into conserving. In conclusion, we propose an extension of the definition of conservation that is of greater generality for use in non foraging populations and incorporates the essential political element of how conflicts over resource use are resolved."
Building Negotiated Agreement: The Emergence of Community Based Tourism in Floreana (Galapagos Islands)
(2013) Ballesteros, Esteban; Brondizio, Eduardo
"Community Based Tourism (CBT) is a polysemic term referring to local involvement in the planning, development, and management of tourism. While there is no direct correspondence between CBT and positive economic and conservation outcomes, CBT is a frame widely used to reconcile tourism development with social-environmental goals. Building upon the case of the island community of Floreana, within the Galápagos National Park (GNP) in Ecuador (where tourism activities have introduced major environmental problems), this paper analyzes the emergence of CBT as part of multi-level processes of institutional crafting. Efforts to develop a new model of tourism management in Galápagos, strongly shaped by a particular community, offer a quasi-experimental case of rule-crafting aimed at developing a participatory, multi-level governance system. Our approach integrates ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis with the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to identify key elements associated with the process of implementing CBT. We discuss three points of broader relevance: the inter-dependence of regional and local levels, the importance of considering worldviews and the intended outcomes envisioned by different actors, and the importance of coherence in rule-crafting (across levels and types of rules) defining control and regulation of CBT development and of tourism operations."
Determining the Determined State: A Sizing of Size From Aside/the Amassing of Mass by a Mass
(2013) Kirsh, Marvin
"A philosophical exploration is presented that considers entities such as atoms, electrons, protons, reasoned (in existing physics theories) by induction, to be other than universal building blocks, but artifacts of a sociological struggle that in elemental description is identical with that of all processes of matter and energy. In a universal context both men and materials, when stressed, struggle to accomplish/maintain the free state. The space occupied by cognition, inferred to be the result of the inequality of spaces, is an integral component of both processes and process interpretation; arbitration space, ubiquitous throughout nature, occurred to a vast number of vastnesses, a manifestation of the existence of time dependent mass/number/amount, is argued to be located to the same judging criteria with which principles are determined for sociological purposes: the processes of mind are determined (excuse the pun) to occur as a free state that is reflectively equal to what is construed by the intellect as universe. Scientifically determined states are not free states."
Evolution at the Surface of Euclid: Elements of A Long Infinity in Motion Along Space
(2011) Kirsh, Marvin
"It is modernly debated whether application of the free will has potential to cause harm to nature. Power possessed to the discourse, sensory/perceptual, physical influences on life experience by the slow moving machinery of change is a viral element in the problems of civilization; failed resolution of historical paradox involving mind and matter is a recurring source of problems. Reference is taken from the writing of Euclid in which a oneness of nature as an indivisible point of thought is made prerequisite in criteria of interpretation to demonstrate that contemporary scientific methodologies alternately ensue from the point of empirically centered induction. A qualification for the conceptualization is proposed that involves a physically describable form bound to energy in addition to contemporary notions of energy bound to form and a visually based mathematical-physical form is elaborated and discussed with respect to biological and natural processes."
Political and Event Ecology: Critiques and Opportunities for Collaboration
(2013) Penna-Firme, Rodrigo
"The field of political ecology has striven to balance a focus on symbolic and materialist aspects of human-environment relations. Event ecology has emerged not only as a major materialistic approach for the study of human-environmental relations, but also as an important set of critiques of political ecology's supposed lack of ecology and over-reliance on a priori assumptions about the linkages between local environmental changes and macropolitical economic phenomena. This article discusses the origins and progress of event ecology, while demonstrating its strengths and limitations vis-à-vis the development of political ecology research. Based on participant observation and interviews conducted among local residents of a small village (a quilombola community) in a state park in São Paulo, Brazil, I propose a collaborative event ecology that combines the rationale of event ecology with critical perspectives inspired by political ecology's focus on power relations, conservation and justice. Unlike the strict application of event ecology, I contend that scrutinizing events other than researcher-oriented ones may help us better understand why some places achieve conservation while others do not. The article concludes that assessing conservation effectiveness and change through environmental outcomes alone risks being seen as socially unjust in the eyes of locals while posing a real threat to local livelihoods and community-based development expectations."
The Risks of Commodifying Poverty: Rural Communities, Quilombola Identity, and Nature Conservation in Brazil
(2007) Penna-Firme, Rodrigo; Brondízio, Eduardo
"Multicultural policies focusing on land devolution represent an effort on the part o the state and sectors of the civil society aiming at empowering 'traditional communities' (e.g., quilombolas) by recognizing rights based on territorial ancestry and ethnicity. Concurrently, environmental policies have limited the use of many of these areas through the creation of protected reserves. In this essay we discuss the contradictions created by the intersection of these policies and the implications of land devolution within protected areas based on constructed criteria of ethnicity. We discuss the limitations and implications of these strategies to achieve, concomitantly, environmental conservation and improvements in the well-being of marginalized rural populations."
Shifting Policies, Access, and the Tragedy of Enclosures in Ecuadorian Mangrove Fisheries: Towards a Political Ecology of the Commons
(2012) Beitl, Christine
"After decades of mangrove deforestation for the development of shrimp farming, the Ecuadorian state began to officially recognize the ancestral rights of traditional users of coastal mangrove resources in the late 1990s. This article traces the trajectory of coastal policy change and the transformation of mangrove tenure regimes from an implicit preference for shrimp aquaculture to a focus on conservation and sustainable development with greater community participation through the establishment of community-managed mangrove areas called custodias. I argue that while the custodias have empowered local communities in their struggle to defend their livelihoods and environment against the marginalizing forces of global shrimp aquaculture, the implementation of common property arrangements for mangrove fishery management has changed the nature of property rights, the distribution of resources, and social relations among collectors of mangrove cockles (Anadara tuberculosa and A. similis). I suggest a need to develop a political ecology of the commons, an analytical approach applied here to examine the fundamental shift in the nature of the struggle over mangrove resources, from artisanal fishers versus shrimp farmers to a struggle between compañeros: members of associations versus independent cockle collectors. Such a shift in the struggle over resources threatens to undermine the sustainability of the fishery. I conclude that shifting access may be an important underlying factor contributing to a tragedy of enclosures in Ecuador’s mangrove cockle fishery."
When Social Sustainability Becomes Politics: Perspectives from Greenlandic Fisheries Governance
(2014) Delaney, Alyne; Jacobsen, Rikke Becker
"This article approaches the topic of social sustainability as a discourse which holds potential for affecting fishery policy and investigates the extent to which this potential has actually materialised. The article identifies an Arctic social sustainability discourse and asks how it interacted with Greenlandic fisheries governance in the period from 2010 to 2012 when a major individual transferable quota (ITQ) reform was introduced into one of the largest coastal fisheries in Greenland: the coastal Greenland halibut fishery. The analysis is based on an impact assessment study of the ITQ reform, a self-reflexive discourse analysis of the social scientific production of truths relating to 'Arctic social sustainability' and participant observation of the policy-making process. The article concludes that in the planning of the ITQ reform, the 'truths' provided by the social sustainability discourse were deemed less relevant than the ones provided by competing discourses on biological and economic sustainability. The article suggests the possibility that the social sustainability discourse was dismissed because it was equated to a previously dominant political stance in Greenlandic fishery policy which the ITQ reform was meant to replace."

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