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Environment and Planning E : Nature and Space
Number of Followers: 5  
 
  Hybrid Journal Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
ISSN (Print) 2514-8486 - ISSN (Online) 2514-8494
Published by Sage Publications Homepage  [1176 journals]
  • Making a market in environmental credits I: Streams of value

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      Authors: Morgan Robertson, Rebecca Lave, Martin Doyle
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This pair of papers examines and describes the state action necessary to make markets function as environmental policy instruments and as strategies of governance. They do this through a detailed look at the mechanics of environmental credit compliance markets in the US states of Oregon, Ohio, and North Carolina in which stream credits are privately created and sold to developers who have impacted protected stream systems. In this paper, we examine the tools, techniques, and people involved in the creation of a value-bearing stream credit out of a physical stream or river site. These observations reveal important principles of how science functions within governance, as well as where gaps and resistances appear that create unforeseen outcomes in market-led policy. We examine the construction and use of instruments that define natural processes as objects with value; these techniques and tools include databases and spreadsheets, algorithms, and field scoring tools that have been scavenged from a wide range of scientific and governance practices and are not themselves inherently capitalist or developed for capitalist purposes. In three different state settings, the move from measure to value is made in different ways that depend on the local institutional and social context. However, they all act to render a network of interacting ecological forces as a field of discrete ecosystem objects amenable to governance with markets.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-03-15T08:12:47Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151810
       
  • Making a market in environmental credits II: Watershed moments

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      Authors: Morgan Robertson, Rebecca Lave, Martin Doyle
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This pair of papers examines and describes the state action necessary to make markets function as environmental policy instruments and as strategies of governance. We do this through a detailed look at the mechanics of environmental credit compliance markets in the US states of Oregon, Ohio, and North Carolina in which stream credits are privately created and sold to developers who have impacted protected stream systems. In this paper, we observe that the governance of streams as water resources requires the state to create a scalar hierarchy that fixes certain characteristics of streams at certain scales of state action. These fixes attempt to resolve, bracket, or ignore the temporal and spatial variability of streams that can confound governance; however, these variabilities are essential to the scientific study of streams. At each of the four distinct scales, four different operations crucial to market function were observed; at each scale, elements of natural variability were fixed or confined to be expressed only within the given scale. These observations reveal principles of how scale functions within environmental governance, as well as failures where gaps and resistances appear that create unforeseen outcomes in market-led policy. In three different state settings, the establishment of a fixed scale of governance is made in different ways that depend on the local institutional and social context. However, they all act to render an unruly set of temporal and spatial flows as instead occurring within certain fixed scalar boundaries, and thus amenable to governance with markets.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-03-15T08:11:48Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151807
       
  • The emotional life of rupture at Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam

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      Authors: Sango Mahanty, Sopheak Chann, Soksophea Suong
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article aims to extend and deepen our understanding of how emotions figure in experiences of major nature-society disruptions or “rupture.” Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam is an example of rupture, which refers to dramatic, adverse, and disruptive episodes that ripple across scale. Against a historical backdrop of land enclosures and dispossession, the dam sparked significant community and civil society resistance. This emotionally charged campaign emphasized that the dam and associated resettlement would erase the impacted communities’ deep customary relationships to the area. Although some community members ultimately refused the resettlement package and moved to customary lands near their flooded village, the majority accepted resettlement. We explore the emotional dimensions of these communities’ experiences, finding that rupture is an inherently emotional process, within layered historical processes of change and violence. The intense emotions that such processes evoke can spark action within the “open moment” (Lund, 2016) that episodes of rupture create; yet the outcomes are highly unpredictable within the asymmetrical political and economic settings that underpin nature-society rupture.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-03-14T07:22:45Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231162087
       
  • Actually existing intersectionality: The place-based and embodied politics
           of animal and human rights activism

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      Authors: Esther Alloun, Nicole Cook
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Critiques of intersectionality as an additive and simplistic model of understanding identity politics has led to calls for renewed concepts that better grasp the complexity and potential of shared struggle. In this article, we contend that the experiences of activists attempting to practice an intersectional human and animal rights politics are a crucial yet overlooked resource in the development of such conceptual imaginaries and ethical practice. Drawing on an historical case study conducted with activists involved in the 1990s anarchist collective ‘One Struggle’ in Israel/Palestine, we argue that an ethic of shared human and animal rights struggle cannot be separated from place-based and embodied politics. We show that activists cultivating intersectional politics in practice must negotiate affective forces of discomfort, alienation and exhaustion that wear down and constrain the potential for intersectional coalitions and joint struggles. These affects are generated through state disincentives, violence the cultural politics of nationalism and incommensurable differences. In this context, intersectional politics are a precarious achievement, dependent on the capacities of activists to continue to compromise and negotiate affectively charged encounters in everyday settings. To better capture the precarious, contingent and provisional nature of animal and human rights activism, we therefore propose the concept of ‘actually existing intersectionality’, illustrating how intersectionality is retheorised via emplaced, embodied activist practices. In so doing we make visible the work through which intersectional politics coheres through negotiation by actors in particular places and times.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-03-13T06:43:31Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231159626
       
  • Unruly spaces, unsettling transformations: Nature connection, neoforaging,
           and unmediated encounters with others in Israel/Palestine

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      Authors: Ariel Appel
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article explores the potential of unruly wild spaces and foraging practices to enable unmediated encounters and unsettling transformations, through the ethnography of neoforaging praxis and its emphasis on seeking direct “connection.” In pursuit of connection with nature through foraging practices, neoforagers regularly encounter both non-human and human others at the unruly edges and seams of cultivated space. Neoforagers associate the unruliness and immediacy of such encounters with “true connection” and pursue practices that are considered both “connective” and “transformative,” capable of subverting hegemonic narratives and consumerist dependencies. Through the case of Israeli neoforagers in the troubled context of Israel/Palestine, I revisit power and categorical relations in the nation-state from neoforagers’ connection-oriented perspective, making salient ongoing processes in which micro-scale encounters are continuously disrupted by the mediating affects of macro-politics, social categories, cultural schemes and such, making salient that in the nation-state unruly situations and unmediated encounters are all too scarce.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-03-08T06:59:19Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231160082
       
  • “People are no longer quiet”: Ordinary environmental
           citizenship in Lago Agrio, Ecuador

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      Authors: Claudia Díaz-Combs
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      For years, residents in northeastern Ecuador's Amazonian city of Lago Agrio demanded the expansion of water and sanitation services to peri-urban neighborhoods. Community members regularly filed claims, made demands at town hall meetings, spoke directly to policymakers during neighborhood tours, and assembled an extensive quantitative and qualitative database on the everyday challenges of precarious access to water and sanitation. Their demands were clear: municipal and national governments must use state revenue to improve water and sanitation networks. Engaging an ordinary citizenship framework, this article forwards an interpretation of these actions as ordinary environmental citizenship. Residents dictate how they envisage the role of the Ecuadorian state through citizenship practices that respond to their community's environmental conditions. This article posits that the embodiment of socio-environmental citizenship represented in Lago Agrio is reproduced through relationships cultivated in every day, routine, ordinary experiences textured by a shared sense of insecure access to water and sanitation. Lago Agrians contest exclusion and demand the state use broad financial redistribution to improve and expand public water and sanitation infrastructure.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-03-06T06:57:32Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231160642
       
  • Making development legible to capital: The promise and limits of
           ‘innovative’ debt financing for the Sustainable Development Goals in
           Indonesia

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      Authors: Abbie Yunita, Frank Biermann, Rakhyun E Kim, Marjanneke J Vijge
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Aligning private finance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promises to close the multi-trillion-dollar SDG ‘financing gap’ while unlocking trillions more in market opportunities. This article explores the processes mobilised for this alignment in Indonesia, an emerging country exemplified as a site where such opportunities are profuse. We do so through assessing modalities of planning, prototyping and building project pipelines designed to facilitate market development for green and SDG bonds. As these types of bonds are supposedly used only to finance socially and environmentally beneficial projects, they are placed at the forefront of innovations to align financial returns with sustainable development outcomes. To make sense of what these forms of innovative finance do, we weave scholarship on the financialisation of development and on (shifting) governance practices surrounding the development project, together with empirical material gathered from SDG finance events, document analysis and semi-structured interviews. We argue that the processes shaping market development for green and SDG bonds functionally iterate upon and extend an open-ended project of making development legible to capital: to see and act on the SDGs as an investable proposition. This legibility rests upon and engenders standard(ising) techniques to define what counts as ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ in ways that (in)visibilise impacts, promising – albeit speculatively – the realisation of social, environmental and financial goals. Here, the SDGs provide the institutional locus to enliven this promise, erasing the unevenness of finance-oriented development and legitimising capitalist modes of ‘seeing’ and ‘doing’ development around this promissory imaginary.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-03-06T06:56:59Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231159301
       
  • Embodied geographies of environmental justice: Toward the sovereign right
           to wholly inhabit oneself

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      Authors: Miriam Gay-Antaki
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      I introduce insights from Latin America and across disciplines to advance our understanding of environmental injustices as written on women's bodies. This paper will entice environmental justice scholarship into conversation with geography to stress how embodied geographies of environmental justice are necessary to understand the geographical, gendered, sexualized, and racialized arrangement of environmental injustices. Expanding Environmental Justice to incorporate the body through Segato's understanding of cuerpo-territorio, a concept that blends geography, territory, and the body, we blur the lines between public and private—emphasizing the role of the state and global capitalism in the subjugation of women and people of color. By asking who reproduces, what is reproduced, and where, in environmental justice work, we underscore that environmental matters are reproductive, and the disproportionate embodied consequences of environmental injustices on sexualized, gendered, and racialized bodies. This violence against feminized bodies is explained as the unintended consequences of global capital accumulation, but decolonial, queer, Black, and feminist geographical insights show how these are central for capital accumulation. Attending to the body as an important geopolitical site allows us to articulate mundane, everyday instances of environmental justice and reproductive justice as geopolitically important. I propose that Embodied Geographies of Environmental Justice that center the concept of cuerpo-territorio underscore that the physical territory of both environmental justice and reproductive justice struggles is in racialized and feminized bodies. By bringing in feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial understandings of production and reproduction, I provide a framework that allows for a global and nuanced understanding of gendered geographies of violence, environmental, and reproductive justice. A reading of a Moraga poem toward the end of the paper, demands that we attend to women of color theorizing their own experiences in radical and innovative terms that resist and transform oppressive relations offering possibilities for renewal, regeneration, and healing.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-03-03T09:45:26Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151802
       
  • Smart energopower: Energy, work and waste within a UK smart grid trial

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      Authors: James Angel
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In The Birth of Energy (2019), Cara New Daggett offers an incisive critique of the dominant thermodynamic concept of energy. ‘Energy’, Daggett shows, is inextricably tied to an exploitative productivist politics that extols the virtues of work and the sins of waste. In this paper, I seek to develop new conversations between Daggett's account in The Birth of Energy and an important empirical development within the energy industry that Daggett herself does not consider: the smart grid. The paper draws upon a mixed-methods research project, investigating a UK smart grid trial called ‘OpenDSR’ devised and implemented by Manchester-based co-operative Carbon Co-op, with funding from the UK government. I draw on my research within OpenDSR to make two interconnected arguments. Firstly, I argue that the smart grid sees an intensification of the energy-as-work logic that Daggett opposes, taking pre-existing preoccupations with calculation and measurement within the energy system to new extremes in pursuit of the maximisation of efficiency and the minimisation of waste. I then proceed to think through the political implications of this argument, contending that while the smart grid reproduces the dominant energy logic that Daggett critiques, it might still have a part to play within an emancipatory environmental politics. In making this claim, a second argument emerges, constituting a sympathetic critique of Daggett's account more broadly. Daggett offers an incisive and important contribution that does much to develop debates within the energy social sciences and humanities. However, I suggest that her account risks obscuring some important political differences between variegated forms of work and waste: while she makes a persuasive case for an anti-work conceptualisation of energy that portends liberation from waged labour, her analysis of the kinds of ‘efficiency’ that pertain to the energy system seems less compelling.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-03-02T06:05:14Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231159628
       
  • Elements of power: Material-political entanglements in Australia's fossil
           fuel hegemony

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      Authors: Olivia Hamilton, Daniel Nyberg, Vanessa Bowden
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Anthropocentric climate change presents an existential threat through impacts such as rising sea levels, effects on agricultural crops and extreme weather events. However, governments, businesses and communities struggle to wean off fossil fuel dependency. In this article, we argue that this is due to the grip of fossil fuel hegemony. To explain this grip, we draw on the theoretical perspectives of new materialism to examine how fossil fuels and politics interact in upholding Australia's fossil fuel regime. Our analysis, based on 70 qualitative interviews conducted with politicians and political advisors, fossil fuel executives and experts and environmental activists, shows three processes – establishment, entrenchment and encroachment – through which political-material entanglements lock in a fossil fuel-based future. These processes are both discursive, with politicians and industry downplaying, if not outright denying, the climate emergency and material, with investment in new mines and infrastructure even while the negative ecological impacts of fossil fuel use gather pace.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-02-28T05:54:43Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231159305
       
  • The eco-munitionary subject: Conservation with and of firearms

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      Authors: John P. Casellas Connors, Elizabeth A. Carlino, Christopher M. Rea
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 was a transformative piece of legislation for wildlife management and conservation in the United States, incentivizing the creation of state wildlife agencies and establishing funding mechanisms for these agencies. The legislation directs an excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment to a fund to support wildlife restoration projects by state wildlife agencies. In 2021 alone, this generated more than $1 billion in project funds. Although commonly framed as a user pays model of conservation whereby hunters fund wildlife management, most of the excise taxes collected on firearms and ammunition are now associated with non-hunting uses. Despite this disconnect, many firearms industry groups continue to support and promote their relationship to Pittman-Robertson. Here, we examine the role of Pittman-Robertson in shaping the relationship between firearms and conservation and seek to understand how this relationship is reproduced. We examine this shifting relationship through an analysis of amendments to Pittman-Robertson since its creation and a discourse analysis of contemporary materials from web sites of firearms, hunting, shooting, and conservation organizations. Drawing on the concept of environmentality and diverse ecologies, we argue that Pittman-Robertson has contributed to the production of, and been re-shaped by, a distinct environmental actor: the eco-munitionary subject.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-02-23T06:35:44Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231157272
       
  • ‘They’re part of what we are’: Interspecies belonging, animal life
           and farming practice on the Isle of Skye

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      Authors: Tom Fry
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article develops the concept of interspecies belonging: a process of co-habitation between humans and non-humans achieved through material, affective and situated practises. This dynamic is generative of an intimate, personal sense of belonging and a socio-spatial politics of belonging. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork amongst hill farmers and the animals they live alongside on the Isle of Skye, North-West Scotland. It considers how farming work is an embodied and sensorial immersion in more-than-human worlds, undergirded by affective intensities that produce a feeling of being right with the world, but also of the farming self as producer of commodity goods. Within the fraught political ecologies of a post-productivist uplands, and the growing influence of nature conservation in farming life, they animate a political belonging aimed at protecting access to natural resources. I demonstrate how the imbrication of animal behaviours, mobilities and bodies within this dynamic of belonging shapes how they are understood as legitimate or illegitimate presences within upland landscapes. Through this, I consider how the recently reintroduced sea eagle is engaged with by farmers as an exemplar of exogenous institutional intervention that marginalises an already precarious way of life.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-02-23T06:35:15Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151809
       
  • Decolonising spaces of knowledge production: Mpala research centre in
           Laikipia County, Kenya

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      Authors: Mark Griffiths, Fridah Mueni, Kate Baker, Surshti Patel
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In this article we discuss Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia County, Kenya as a distinctly colonial space. Drawing on historical materials, fieldwork observations and in-depth interviews, we build an account of British colonial expropriation of land, European and American modes of enclosure, and the development of a prominent site of knowledge production in the fields of ecology, conservation and evolutionary biology. Mpala is product and productive of colonial relations, ones where land use serves mainly Western interests in ways that sustain and entrench categories of coloniser/colonised. We support this claim by identifying three ways in which colonial legacies endure at Mpala in terms of (i) ontology, or the particular ways in which land is made landscape; (ii) race and the organisation of space and labour and (iii) silence (and silencing) as a mechanism that sustains colonial power relations. We further argue that turning to such a nameable site of contemporary academic extraction enables a shift from postcolonial critique to decolonial praxis. By naming Mpala in specific terms, the possibility of politics opens out from critical analysis towards a project of undoing the epistemological and material legacies of colonialism.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-02-14T07:44:58Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231156728
       
  • The power of lament: Reckoning with loss in an urban forest

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      Authors: Catherine Phillips, Jennifer Atchison, Elizabeth Straughan
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper explores the lamenting for a street tree to better understand reactions to ecological loss. It responds to calls for social studies research into how ecological loss is felt and expressed, particularly when that loss and its emotional impact is unrecognised. Drawing on a unique dataset of emails to trees in Melbourne, we consider the most emailed tree, a tree felled despite collective action. Lamenting for this tree is explored as an individual and collective process that includes but extends beyond grief. A lament, we argue, involves shaping and expressing an account of loss that holds others to account. Understood as an embodied and emplaced process, we develop the case for the concept of lament through detailing the feeling, narrating, sharing and placing of loss. We argue that examining lament in this way reveals new insights into lived experiences and expressions related to facing the damage and destruction of nonhuman life and landscapes.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-02-10T06:26:18Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231153329
       
  • Entangled, unraveled, and reconfigured: Human–animal relations among
           ethnic minority farmers and water buffalo in the northern uplands of
           Vietnam

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      Authors: Peter Garber, Sarah Turner
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In the rural rice fields of upland northern Vietnam, Hmong and Yao ethnic minority farmers have been relationally “entangled” with a number of domesticated animal species to secure semi-subsistence livelihoods. Among these different inter-species entanglements, the relationships between farmers and water buffalo are the most profound. However, in recent years, the broader, contextual factors that shape the entanglements between farmers and water buffalo have been changing rapidly, provoked primarily by increasing extreme weather events, government-supported market integration, and rising land constraints. As these environmental, political, and socioeconomic factors have intensified, the complexity and persistence of long-standing entanglements between farmers and water buffalo appear to be diminishing. We offer a new conceptual perspective to the entanglement literature in this regard, suggesting that “unraveling” might best represent these processes. Nonetheless, we present the idea of “resistant” entanglements to indicate how many farmers have halted unraveling processes, while we posit a future of “reconfigured” entanglements, increasingly based on market forces. Drawing from in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with ethnic minority farmers, we analyze the changing characteristics of these farmer–buffalo entanglements, as well as a range of related socioeconomic and cultural consequences.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-02-02T06:21:43Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151808
       
  • A car showroom for the fish: The visual story of the first-ever artificial
           reef in Italy and the beginning of contemporary environmental discourse
           (Varazze, December 1970)

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      Authors: Giovanni Modaffari
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In October 1970, the city of Genoa was devastated by a major flood. A few weeks later, hundreds of wrecked cars removed from the city's streets were sunk off the coast of Varazze, in the first-ever Italian project to create an artificial reef. This initiative, which was inspired by similar experiences tried out in the United States and other countries, had been aimed at increasing the fish population and protecting the seabed but was carried out without any thorough preliminary scientific study, and produced other effects not in the initial intentions of the project. Nonetheless, this story should be read as one point in the broadest trajectory in the evolution of environmental discourse. This contribution, based on hitherto unpublished visual documentation, is therefore an investigation into the very specific meaning of the environment in Italy at the beginning of the 70s. The first part of the article provides a reconstruction of the operational details involved in creating the new underwater seascape of Varazze while in the second part, the earlier examples of similar initiatives are described, as well as the reactions of the scientific community. In conclusion, we reflect on the legacy of the initiative, both at the environmental level and as a basic step in the relationship between visual media and contemporary environmental discourse.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-02-02T06:20:29Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151806
       
  • Conservation violence: Paradoxes of “making live” and “letting
           die” in anti-poaching practices

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      Authors: Marlotte de Jong, Bilal Butt
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Wildlife poaching has been and continues to be of significant concern to environmental sustainability. While descriptions of poaching often include vivid details about the animal victims and the heroics of those fighting to conserve biodiversity, ambiguity still surrounds ‘the poacher.’ Clarifying the identity of a poacher is necessary to expose a societal tendency to enforce stereotypes on others that perpetuate violence and inequality. Without knowing the identity of a poacher, it becomes easy for society to impose unsubstantiated beliefs upon them that legitimize unjust and violent policies. This research examines how (1) the media and (2) conservation actors construct the identity and context of the poacher to understand how and why violent protected area policies like shoot-to-kill have become accepted conservation strategies. Through a systematic analysis of news articles and primary interviews with conservation actors, we demonstrate how poachers are anonymized, dehumanized, and placed in a space of exception to become legitimate and justifiable targets of violence. We conclude by examining a central paradox that emerges from the state's biopolitical use of violent anti-poaching policies: how does a form of authority that is fundamentally justified in its claims to protect life condone the use of deadly force on its own subjects'
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-02-01T06:11:06Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231151805
       
  • CORRIGENDUM

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      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.

      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-01-27T04:51:58Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486231153303
       
  • Conjuring carbon: Resource materialities in Timor-Leste

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      Authors: Lisa Palmer, Sue Jackson
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In this paper, we trace the social and material effects of a carbon verification encounter in Timor-Leste. Foregrounding the relational historicity of these resource materialities, we inquire into the disorientating but potentially generative place-based effects of carbon offsetting. We unpack carbon's elusive and unruly materiality through our participation in a verification event connected to a reforestation and carbon-offsetting program that encourages individuals and organisations from Australia to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing carbon credits from subsistence farmers in Timor-Leste. We interpret this making, or conjuring, of carbon through interactions between technical experts, program managers, staff, and participants over a 4-day audit of the program and, with the benefit of subsequent interviews with farmers, examine how the opacity of the carbon credit's materiality and its measurement leads to community scepticism and demands for greater methodological clarity and oversight. At the same time, we take issue with critics of market-based conservation programs who assert that carbon offsetting leads inevitably to severe adverse impacts for local communities. Activating a generative understanding of the economic logics of ‘commodity indigenisation’ through attention to the ‘cultural biographies’ or life cycle of things, we evidence fluid movements: complex socio-natural relations and moral economies that humanise nature to reveal and potentially reconfigure the otherwise alienating effects of carbon commodities and their socio-natural technical complex.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-01-06T05:48:41Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221148907
       
  • Divergent environmentalisms, conflicting counter-hegemonies: Lessons from
           the rights of nature movement

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      Authors: Stefan Rzedzian
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Within current literature on social movements, the existence and interrelations of multiple counter-hegemonies remains heavily undertheorised. Indeed, while the existence of such phenomena is acknowledged, in as much as scholars recognise that hegemony and counter-hegemony exist in plurality and in variegated forms, attention to the interactions between simultaneously existing counter-hegemonies is underexplored. In this article I draw attention to the ways in which multiple counter-hegemonies exist within a single social movement, and how those counter-hegemonies come into conflict with one another. Specifically, I show how one counter-hegemonic struggle comes to reproduce the hegemony against which the other is fighting. I situate this discussion within a case study of the rights of nature movement, operating in variegated forms within Ecuador and the United Nations’ Harmony with Nature Dialogues.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-01-06T05:47:05Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221148646
       
  • State, scarcity, and survival: A minor history of people and place in the
           Lower Bari Doab, Punjab

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      Authors: Abdul Aijaz
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The progressive materialization of the modern state and capitalist agrarian production in the interfluvial uplands of Punjab was enabled by colonial ideologies of control over nature as progress. The colonial project of the transformation of the people and place in Punjab was built upon the imperial aesthetics of waste that imagined the local landscape as hideous and pastoral communities as “semi-barbarous.” These imaginaries justified the colonial project of technological control over nature through installation of hydraulic infrastructure and the political control of native communities as investments in cultivation and culture. These statist narratives of progress are built upon an elision of the voices of subaltern communities and their interactions with the modern state. Based on my ethnographic and archival works on pastoral Baloch tribes of the Lower Bari Doab region of Punjab, I argue that a different history emerges if traced from the perspective of the communities located on the margins of this hydrosocial assemblage. This is a minor history that does not privilege state as the protagonist of progress rather traces the stories of survival in the face of eco-scarcity. As the current environmental crisis accentuates the inherent instabilities of the hydrosocial assemblage in the canal colonies, it also reveals limitation of the narratives of control over nature as progress. In a world threatened by the anthropogenic climate crisis, the possibilities of a better future might emerge in curating the stories of survival against the histories of control.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2023-01-03T07:45:37Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221147172
       
  • Theft: Grave robbery, territorial conquest, and irrigation

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      Authors: Carrie Mott
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper explores the process of settler colonialism in Washington State's Yakima Valley in the early twentieth century as an example of a regional power bloc that sought to maximize white access to natural resources while dispossessing Native Americans of their lands and access to water. Through a multiscalar approach, I consider how colonization and white supremacy were normalized through infrastructural projects crucial to agricultural development and economic prosperity in the US West A discussion of a 1906 Native American grave robbery operates as an anchor for a larger analysis of how irrigation infrastructure and other reclamation projects served the colonizing aims of the US federal government. In the US West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) were both federal agencies that played critical roles in an era where public lands were being converted to private property and allotted Native American reservation land was significantly diminished after being sold to non-Natives. The grave robbery itself and ensuing trial serve as indications of everyday life in the Yakima Valley in 1906, revealing the interconnections between infrastructural advancements, white supremacist settler colonialism, and grave robbery.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-12-23T07:24:29Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221145410
       
  • Critically assembling water quality ethics beyond thresholds, hierarchies
           and best practices

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      Authors: Elizabeth MacAfee
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The emerging field of water ethics analyses and explores the moral implications of particular human–water relations and practices. This article focuses on ethical aspects of planning, management and governance of water quality, in what I refer to as water quality ethics. In particular, I draw attention to the potential for incorporating the ethical perspectives of philosophers Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari into water quality planning, management and governance, opening for exchange between these normative fields of policy and practice with speculative philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics emphasises the rejection of externally imposed binaries and categories onto a deeply heterogenous and dynamic world. Therefore, I identify three potentially problematic moments in how water quality is defined and responded to according to these criteria. I provide examples of how abstract and universalising principles can obscure the complexity of individual situations and thus hinder the visibility of alternative solutions. In so doing, I note the possibility for the empirically oriented arena of water justice scholarship to be complemented by a philosophical approach that emphasises the situated, fluid and lively materiality of water and water quality.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-12-22T05:44:53Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221146686
       
  • Explaining societal change through bricolage: Transformations in regimes
           of water governance

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      Authors: Pierre-Louis Mayaux, Muna Dajani, Frances Cleaver, Mohamed Naouri, Marcel Kuper, Tarik Hartani
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper is motivated by the pressing need to understand how water use and irrigated agriculture can be transformed in the interests of both social and environmental sustainability. How can such change come about' In particular, given the generally mixed results of simplified, state-initiated projects of social engineering, what is the potential for transformations in societal regimes of governance to be anchored in the everyday practices of farmers' In this paper, we address these enduring questions in novel ways. We argue that the concept of bricolage, commonly applied to analysing community management of resources, can be developed and deployed to explain broad societal processes of change. To illustrate this, we draw on case studies of irrigated agriculture in Saharan areas of Algeria and in the occupied Golan Heights in Syria. Our case analysis offers insights into how processes of institutional, technological and ideational bricolage entwine, how the state becomes implicated in them and how multiple instances of bricolage accumulate over time to produce meaningful systemic change. In concluding, however, we reflect on the greater propensity of contemporary bricolage to rebalance power relations than to open the way to more ecological farming practices.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-12-22T05:44:23Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221143666
       
  • Everyday politics of care and exclusion: Conceptualising agency in rural
           south India

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      Authors: Saurabh Arora, Ajit Menon, M Vijayabaskar, Divya Sharma, V. Gajendran
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Confronting social exclusion is considered critical for grappling with poverty, livelihoods, inequality and participation in rural India. Studies highlight how exclusion is produced through hierarchical relations of caste, gender, class, religion, disability and ethnicity, while documenting people's agency to confront exclusions. However, the making of such agency through people's relations with ecologies and technologies is currently neglected. To address this neglect, we focus on different sociomaterial ways of relating – care and exclusion – which constitute people's agency. We argue that giving close attention to multiple ways of relating that coexist and interweave with each other, may be crucial for supporting grassroots transformations for justice and sustainability. To illustrate this ways-of-relating approach to agency, we rely on oral history narratives with three elderly people from rural Tamil Nadu, while building on insights from feminist scholars as well as science and technology studies. Central to the people's histories narrated in this article are uncertainties that yield non-linearities and loose ends. They foreground plural and flexible dimensions of each of our core concepts, from care and exclusion to intersections and relational agency. This open-ended plurality of dimensions, we conclude, may be crucial for concepts to find relevance in widely different settings.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-12-20T06:38:41Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221135989
       
  • The eternal return: Imagining security futures at the Doomsday Vault

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      Authors: Cameron Harrington
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article examines how imaginaries of security in the Anthropocene function at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), otherwise known as the ‘Doomsday Vault’. Recent explorations by scholars of security have suggested that different ways of seeing, understanding, acting in, and imagining the world are necessary to adequately respond to complex crises in the Anthropocene. The dissolution of the nature/culture divide and the existential risk from planetary threats are said to require new and creative formations of security. Buried in the Norwegian high Arctic, the heavily fortified SGSV was built in 2008 as a planetary-scale, ‘deep-time organisation’ that would forever secure a wide variety of plant seeds and their genetic makeup against regional or global upheavals. The article argues that his seed ‘ark’ materialises three Anthropocene security imaginaries: apocalypse, hope and escape. The prevalence and use of these imaginaries reveal the stability of long-held security logics and challenge the widely-held belief in the innately transformative properties of the Anthropocene concept for security. Instead, the SGSV demonstrates the difficulty in overcoming a collective mindfulness that fixes security to eternal forms even in the midst of unprecedented threats, interventions and technology.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-12-16T07:56:49Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221145365
       
  • Chennai flyways: birds, biodiversity, and ecological decay

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      Authors: Matthew Gandy
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The city of Chennai in southern India lies directly under one of the most significant global flyways for migratory birds. Over the last forty years, however, this intricate regional topography of lakes and watercourses that supports millions of birds and other organisms has been drastically reduced. I develop the idea of “ecological decay” in relation to the Pallikaranai wetlands in southern Chennai to explore the multiple socio-ecological dynamics behind declining levels of biodiversity. I note how the colonial simplification of the landscape has been entrained within an accelerated impetus towards regional capitalist urbanization. Thus far, however, the question of biodiversity in Chennai has been largely framed through the analytical lens of European modernity. I consider in particular whether a modified urban political ecology framework might provide distinctive insights into the particularities of biodiversity decline in an Indian context.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-12-06T05:10:33Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221142491
       
  • Planning use values or values-based planning' “Rolling with”
           neoliberal flood risk governance in Vancouver, Canada

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      Authors: Greg Oulahen, Jacob Ventura
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Neoliberal flood risk governance has become the norm in Canada and much of the rest of the global North in the interest, hypothetically, of achieving so-called efficiencies and resilience and, practically, out of desperation for access to any more resources to face a growing burden. This paper traces the path toward a flood risk governance model in Vancouver together with the development history of the city to illustrate the coproduction of urban landscape, capital, and flood risk. It situates what is intended to be a progressive “values-based” local adaptation planning program within that context to question whether or not such a program can elevate the use value of land. The paper demonstrates that a flood risk governance model further entrenches neoliberal hegemony and exchange values, with implications for urban space and how city inhabitants interact with flood hazards that are beyond the reach of values-based planning.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-11-28T07:10:35Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221140878
       
  • Speaking with the river: Confluence and interdisciplinarity in rivers and
           river systems

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      Authors: Grayson Cooke, Rob Garbutt, Johanna Kijas, Alessandro Pelizzon, John Page, Adele Wessell, Frances Belle Parker, Amanda Reichelt-Brushett
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article is underpinned by the hypothesis that if Australia is to reassess and improve its relationship to and use of rivers and river systems, then more holistic ways of understanding rivers, and strategies for representing and communicating this understanding, must be developed and brought together. Held over two days in August 2019 at the Lismore campus of Southern Cross University, ‘Speaking With the River’ was an interdisciplinary symposium exploring the capacities of creative research practice to develop new understandings of rivers and river systems as simultaneously environmental, cultural, historical and economic phenomena. In this article, we bring together the voices and disciplinary insights from the symposium and the rivers of Northern New South Wales, and we reflect on the way that riverine language ran throughout our discussions and ideas, providing a connective model of confluences and conjunctions for the interdisciplinary enterprise we were engaged in. This article presents perspectives on rivers and river systems from law, history, art and science, exploring common ground and common purposes. Developing a legal framework for recognising the rights and ‘voices’ of rivers, that is informed by Indigenous knowledges, historical contexts, and scientific understanding, and that employs artistic innovation in representation and translation, is to us the ultimate goal of such an enquiry. While this paper does not undertake the formal steps of developing this framework, it provides the necessary background and instantiates its elements and working methods within the context of the Richmond River in Northern New South Wales.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-11-28T07:09:39Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221139138
       
  • Territories of hope: A human geography of agrarian politics in Brazil

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      Authors: Bernardo Mançano Fernandes
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST)) is widely recognized for its struggles for land and for producing healthy food. Since its birth, 40 years ago, the MST has continued to territorialize itself, producing its own existence. There are hundreds of thousands of families fighting for the peasant condition, which is much more than fighting for land. In this article, I argue that MST members are not simply fighting for land in isolated agrarian reform settlements. Rather, as the mística suggests, they are producing new understandings, practices, and imaginaries of the Brazilian national space. Through their mobilization, their labor on the land, and their solidarity as expressed in countless meetings, marches, and collective organizations, they are actively producing alternative territories that sit within but resist the hegemonic national territory. I incorporate theories from critical human geography to argue that territory is a category that unites land and governance. Territorial control is established by (depends on) the norms, rules, and rights in any given place and time. Within the context of the modern nation-state, the MST can be understood as producing new territories, ones that are aspirational and emerging—I call these “territories of hope” to signal the material and symbolic labor of collective desire. These territories are constituted through relations within MST settlements and between MST members and the state, agribusiness corporations, and the broader public across various spatial and temporal dimensions and scales.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-11-24T06:13:16Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221135303
       
  • ‘Our humanism cannot be captured in the bylaws’: How moral ecological
           rationalities and care shape a smallholder irrigation scheme in Zimbabwe

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      Authors: Tavengwa Chitata, Jeltsje Kemerink-Seyoum, Frances Cleaver
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In this article, we bring concepts of institutional bricolage, moral ecological rationalities and care into engagement, to explain the everyday management of an irrigation scheme in Zimbabwe. In doing this we: (a) emphasise the constant processes of bricolage through which irrigators adapt to changing circumstances and dynamically enact irrigation management; (b) illustrate some of the key features of the contemporary, hybridised moral-ecological rationalities that shape these processes of bricolage; (c) show how motivations to care (for people, the environment and infrastructure) as well as to control shape the bricolaged management arrangements. Through this approach, we aim to contribute to expanding ways of thinking about rationalities, including those that express the aspiration to live well together with human and non-human others, including water and infrastructure. The focus on moral-ecological rationalities is central to our contribution to critical water studies. This sheds light on actual practices of governing water and relationships between society-water/people and the environment. In so doing it helps us to understand the possibilities of caring for natural resources.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-11-16T05:55:12Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221137968
       
  • Environmental justice and the state

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      Authors: Jill Lindsey Harrison
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In this article, I address a set of recent publications that explicitly critique U.S. environmental justice (EJ) movements and scholars for looking to the state for protection from environmental harm. These publications have argued that U.S. EJ movements and scholars have become preoccupied with seeking justice through state institutions instead of through other routes of change, that they do so principally through overly cooperative practices that cede the terms of debate to the state, and that engaging with the state inherently perpetuates injustice. Their arguments make important, incisive contributions to EJ studies and raise sobering questions about EJ activists’ engagement with the state. In this article, I highlight some of these contributions, but I also critique their arguments on two grounds: First, drawing on various studies, I argue that these publications’ empirical characterizations of EJ activism understate the diversity of tactics EJ activists use. Second, I argue that they treat the state as a wholly and inevitably repressive instrument of capital, and that this leads them to make politically problematic recommendations that dismiss the ways in which states also serve other ends, can be made to do so more meaningfully, must be made to do so, and are being made to do so. Reductionist characterizations of the state too easily dismiss the prospects for change through the state—including reforms that are modest but nevertheless reduce harm as well as “nonreformist reforms” that more fundamentally support justice, all of which can be pursued through both collaborative and confrontational practices. I draw on recent theoretical and empirical research from political ecology, political geography, and Native American and Indigenous studies—scholarship that treats the state in a more relational fashion and which intersects with or exists largely outside of EJ studies—to theorize my arguments and provide illustrative examples.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-11-15T07:04:04Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221138736
       
  • Doing environmental justice: Prospects for sustainable
           engagement—From classroom to fieldwork

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      Authors: Bilal Butt
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In response to national attention on questions of how racial justice is still unrealized, different academic institutes have sought to increase diversity and justice in their curricula, institutional practices, and immersive experiences for their students. This has normally taken the form of diversity, equity, and inclusion principles. Yet there remain significant obstacles to how inequities and lack of attention to power differential across race, class, and gender continue to create imbalances that affect the ability to conduct just research. In this piece, I describe six critical points of engagement for sustainable engagement for just research. These concerns range from the field to the classroom and identify how existing structures can reinforce dominant narratives and understandings linked to colonial histories of extraction and the exploitation of knowledge. I offer tangible and credible alternatives for grounding knowledge generation in ways that are less restrictive than the coercive practices of the past.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-11-08T06:10:28Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221137246
       
  • The business of saving cheetahs: Cheetah ecology and the diverse politics
           at work in human wildlife conflict (HWC) interventions in Namibia

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      Authors: Suzanne Brandon
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper is concerned with the intersection of cheetah ecology, human wildlife conflict (HWC), settler colonialism, and private land ownership in Namibia. Cheetahs’ ecological adaptation(s) in Namibia point to the need for a fuller picture of the permutations of conservation and conservation NGOs in Africa. In the case of Namibia, cheetahs’ ecological adaptations to interspecies threats have shaped their territory to be primarily on private commercial farms where they cause HWC. While cheetahs cause HWC on commercial farms and farming communities in Namibia writ large, HWC itself is not the conflict discussed in this research. Rather, HWC is the catalyst for what this paper will analyze to be a conflict between two private sector industries—commercial farming and cheetah conservation. After thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Namibia, this case study suggested diverse politics are at work within the NGOs conservation intervention policies at global, national, and local scales. This research identified a theoretical and conceptual fissure which led to an anomaly in the field of political ecology. This paper will argue HWC is an organizing structure in the business of saving cheetahs. The NGOs studied in Namibia are a service-based industry. They invest in both tangible and intangible conservation services rather than market-based participatory approaches, ecosystem services, and/or economic development. This is illustrative of a shift from market-based conservation to a service-based approach and calls for widening the political ecology lens to account for other cases of NGOs’ on-the-ground conservation business practices in Africa.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-11-08T06:09:57Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221135008
       
  • Democracy in a deluge: Epistemic agency of marginalized voices in Oaxaca's
           storm governance

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      Authors: Anna Bridel
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Despite repeated calls for grassroots participation in climate policy making, the epistemic agency of marginalized voices remains little understood. While local knowledge is increasingly regarded as an antidote to top-down climate expertise, it is often not heard, or ends up reinforcing dominant framings of risk. The concept of civic epistemologies (CEs), often understood as the sociocultural norms by which societies authorize knowledge claims, can provide insights into the epistemic agency of marginalized actors in climate governance, but has rarely been applied to such concerns. At the same time, such questions affect how scholars conceptualize CEs, which have seldom been examined where civics are fragmented or marginalized. In this article, I argue that understanding CEs as “expectations of democracy” can indicate how they authorize climate expertise in such settings. I illustrate this argument by examining hurricane governance in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, where vulnerable fishers constitute a sociopolitically and economically excluded part of a fragmented civic that shapes the production of risk expertise. Here, fisher expectations that the government will behave corruptly, and government expectations that fishers prefer to remain socioeconomically separate from the state reify biophysical approaches to risk. This analysis contributes to understanding why many attempts to include marginalized voices in climate policy fail to achieve their anticipated outcomes, expanding understanding of how CEs mediate epistemic agency in contested political contexts. Furthermore, examining CEs as expectations of democracy can inform upon conditions under which political-epistemic orders change, revealing opportunities for intervention in climate risk governance.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-11-08T06:09:19Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221132219
       
  • Race, citizenship, and belonging in the pursuit of water and climate
           justice in California

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      Authors: Linda E Méndez-Barrientos, Amanda L Fencl, Cassandra L Workman, Sameer H Shah
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Systemic inequalities, which affect how water is distributed and used, underlie water insecurities in higher-income (global North) countries. We explore the interlinkages between municipal decision-making and infrastructure to understand how urban climate justice can be advanced through engaging with state-like forms of governance. Drawing on archival information, spatial analysis, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews in the underbounded Latinx community of East Porterville, California, we analyze how local actors actively work against municipal-scale processes of infrastructure exclusion and production, within and beyond the state, to facilitate water access and particular notions of citizenship. We argue urban climate justice demands both an understanding of infrastructural marginalization, and attention to the diversity of perspectives, approaches, and solutions preferred by communities.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-11-03T07:21:27Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221133282
       
  • Governing caterpillar fungus: Participatory conservation as state-making,
           territorialization, and dispossession in Dolpo, Nepal

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      Authors: Phurwa Gurung
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Protected areas account for nearly a quarter of the total area of Nepal and over eighty percent of its Himalayan region. National parks—which are governed by top-down policies enforced through militarized infrastructures—have become a crucial avenue and site for the Nepali state to expand its authority and territorialize its peripheral spaces. But such state-forming effects of the park are obscured by the stated goals of biodiversity conservation which are often implemented through participatory conservation policies that claim to promote local participation and development. Through a case study of Shey Phoksundo National Park and the contested governance of caterpillar fungus in Dolpo, Northwest Nepal, this paper examines the role of participatory conservation in state-making, territorialization, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the Himalayan borderlands. After a brief background on the relationship between Dolpopa and the Nepali state, I introduce state-making, territorialization, and dispossession as corollary processes that define the experiences of conservation for Dolpopa. I conceptualize state-making and territorialization as intertwined state efforts and strategies to systematize local spatial practices and reorder socio-natural relations in ways that justify state authority and establish state territory in Dolpopa spaces. I approach dispossession as an ongoing, relational process of domination and removal, particularly of Dolpopa's ability to access and govern their collective land including caterpillar fungus. In so doing, I neither reify the state as a monolith nor assume dispossession to be totalizing. Rather, I show how “the state” is constituted in moments by a range of actors, institutions, and processes; as well as how Dolpopa contest dispossession by asserting their claims to collective land both within and beyond state structures.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-11-01T07:02:22Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221132236
       
  • (Un)claiming rights, resources, and ocean spaces: Marine genetic resources
           and area-based management tools in high seas governance negotiations

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      Authors: Emily C Melvin, Leslie Acton, Lisa M Campbell
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      After years of informal efforts, the parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) are negotiating an international legally binding instrument to address governance gaps that have impeded attempts to conserve biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). Though these discussions were initiated in response to concerns about biodiversity, states have used them to advance competing claims regarding rights of access, ownership, and control of ocean spaces and resources. This paper examines how states have discussed ocean space in negotiations regarding area-based management tools (ABMTs) and marine genetic resources (MGRs) at the first three intergovernmental conferences regarding biodiversity in ABNJ. ABMTs, which have become widespread in governing ocean space for conservation, are premised on an ontological framing that ocean space can be divided by geographical boundaries into territories for management. MGRs, on the other hand, are newly recognized governance objects that cross existing spatial boundaries: between areas of national and international jurisdiction, between the seafloor and water column, and between the ocean and the laboratory. Through their mobility, MGRs reveal how territorial forms of governance over material resources intersect with other forms of exclusion, control, and rights-based institutions, suggesting the need to develop creative management regimes that go beyond territorial approaches.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-28T06:52:47Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221132832
       
  • The ‘brother layer problem’: Routine killing, biotechnology and the
           pursuit of ‘ethical sustainability’ in industrial poultry

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      Authors: Rebecca Leigh Rutt, Jostein Jakobsen
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The global poultry industry culls approximately seven billion day-old male layer chicks annually. Superfluous to both egg and meat, male ‘brother’ layers constitute a momentous problem, simultaneously economical and ethical, to the poultry industry. In this article, we scrutinize present and proposed alternatives to routine killing involving multiple biotechnological innovations, including novel methods for fetus sexing, genome editing technologies and re-sexing. We utilize a political ecological perspective that views attempts to solve the ‘brother layer problem’ as discursive and techno-scientific ‘fixes’ to problems of the capitalist poultry industry's own making and to rising demands for ethics and environmental-friendly animal agriculture. This context opens new avenues for profit-making by and for an expanding matrix of actors we view as an evolving ‘economy of repair’ that is built in part by public resources. Further, these fixes constitute an ostensible ‘ethical sustainability’ meant to signal both animal welfare and environmental improvements, which seem to work towards stabilizing agro-industry, thereby foreclosing alternatives to agro-industrial intensification.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-27T07:49:19Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221131195
       
  • Corrigendum to Making global oceans governance in/visible with Smart
           Earth: The case of Global Fishing Watch

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      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.

      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-20T07:04:21Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221130849
       
  • A necessary evil' Examining the complexities of care and
           commodification

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      Authors: Carley MacKay
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In this article, I draw on a case study of interviews with Ontario grass-fed beef farmers about cow welfare and theorize these using the analytics of animal geographies and biopolitics. I engage with the former's work on animal agency and subjectivity, and the latter's focus on animal commodification, showing how welfare practices impact cows’ subjectivities, agencies, bodies, and interrelations. I make clear that cows exercise agency in their relationships with farmers, despite and in response to the different forms of governance that shape cows’ welfare and relationships with farmers. Analyzing welfare practices as different forms of biopower, I show how cows’ liveliness impacts their commodity value and describe the contexts in which farmers build emotional and disciplinary connections to cows. Central to my argument is that cows’ subjective and agentic features complement and complicate their commodification. Fusing animal geographies and biopolitics, I extend my analysis of cow welfare into a discussion of the emotional, economic, and ethically complex relationships between farmers and cows. Lastly, I contribute to emerging debates in literature on the complexities of caring and killing in human-animal relations through my analyses of welfare as an avenue for exploring the function of care, commodification, and killing in farmer-cow relations. Attending to these complexities, I argue, disrupts fixed logic about the ethics of animal production, while prompting us to rethink the way we relate with animals we call food.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-20T06:04:21Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221132227
       
  • Professionalisation and the spectacle of nature: Understanding changes in
           the visual imaginaries of private protected area organisations in
           Australia

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      Authors: Florence LP Damiens, Aidan Davison, Benjamin Cooke
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Imaginaries of protected areas as state-based fortresses have been challenged by expansion of the global nature conservation estate on non-government lands, notably in contexts such as Australia where neoliberal reform has been strong. Little is known about the implications of this change for the meanings, purposes and practices of nature conservation. Images are central to public understandings of nature conservation. We thus investigate the visual communication of environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs) involved in private protected areas in Australia, with particular focus on Bush Heritage Australia (BHA). We employ a three-part design encompassing quantitative and qualitative methods to study the visual imaginaries underlying nature conservation in BHA's magazines and the web homepages of it and four other ENGOs over 2004–2020. We find that visual imaginaries changed across time, as ENGOs went through an organisational process of professionalisation comprising three dynamics: legitimising, marketising, and differentiating. An imaginary of dedicated Western volunteer groups protecting scenic wilderness was replaced by the spectacle of uplifting and intimate individual encounters with native nature. Amenable to working within rather than transforming dominant political-economic structures, the new imaginary empowers professional ENGOs and their partners as primary carers of nature. It advertises a mediated access to spectacular nature that promises positive emotions and redemption for environmental wrongs to financial supporters of ENGOs. These findings reveal the role of non-government actors under neoliberal conditions in the use of visual representations to shift the meanings, purposes and practices of nature conservation.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-18T08:28:40Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221129418
       
  • The socioenvironmental state and urban transitions: Eco-urbanism in China
           and the UK

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      Authors: Ying Xu, Federico Caprotti, Weishi Zhang, Mingmin Pan
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Eco-urbanism encapsulates a range of approaches to the management of urbanisation processes and environmental imperatives in contexts of rapid industrial and economic change. The paper focuses on two eco-urban initiatives in China and the UK over a temporal lens stretching from the mid-2000s to the early 2020s, in order to critically engage with the question of how eco-urban projects develop and often undergo radical changes over time, as well as being changed through significant ruptures, periods of stasis and fluidity in the actor-networks involved in project visions, financing and development. Our comparative approach identifies cross-cutting processes operative across two projects at different scales and in different techno-political contexts. The paper argues that longitudinal analysis is key to enabling a view of transitional trajectories as unfolding, and as a way of moving past oft-repeated assessments of specific projects according to a ‘failure/success’ binary. In order to do so, the paper considers eco-urban projects through a theoretical lens that views projects as unstable assemblages exhibiting change over time on the one hand, but that also recognises the dynamic resilience of geographical imaginations around eco-urban projects, that means that these projects endure (albeit often in different guises) over time.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-18T06:51:16Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221132835
       
  • Conducting more inclusive solar geoengineering research: A feminist
           science framework

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      Authors: Ben Kravitz, Tina Sikka
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Solar geoengineering, or deliberate climate modification, has been receiving increased attention in recent years. Given the far-reaching consequences of any potential solar geoengineering deployments, it is prudent to identify inherent biases, blind spots, and other potential issues at all stages of the research process. Here we articulate a feminist science-based framework to concretely describe how solar geoengineering researchers can be more inclusive of different perspectives and potentially contradictory conclusions, in the process illuminating potential implicit bias and enhancing the conclusions that can be gained from their studies. Importantly, this framework is an adoptable method of practice that can be refined, with the aim of conducting better research in solar geoengineering. As an illustration, we retrospectively apply this framework to a well-read solar geoengineering study (also led by the first author of this study), improving transparency by revealing its implicit values, conclusions made from its evidence base, and the methodologies that study pursues. We conclude with a set of recommendations for the geoengineering research community whereby more inclusive research can become a regular part of practice. Throughout this process, we illustrate how feminist science scholars can use this approach to study climate modeling.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-18T06:50:14Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221132831
       
  • The material politics of living in close proximity to our wastewaters: A
           case of decentralisation in the Netherlands

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      Authors: Rebeca Ibáñez Martín, Fenna Smits
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper investigates how decentralised wastewater treatment initiatives experiment with ways to live in close proximity to wastewater and their potentiality for a future with less polluting wastewater. In the Netherlands, there is a contested political debate about whether centralised or decentralised technologies are better. Rather than engaging in this deliberative political debate, we articulate a less visible and more material politics by tracing different ways of ordering wastewater treatment in practice. Drawing on fieldwork with inhabitants, scientists, and engineers who have brought wastewater treatment ‘close to home’, we examine the turn to decentralisation as a material object of enquiry which, in turn, shapes our engagement with pollutants, technologies, and a range of non-human actors. We ask: What kinds of living together in close proximity to our waste do such decentralised experiments allow for'
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-18T06:49:17Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221131191
       
  • “A little portion of our 40 acres”: A black agrarian imaginary
           in the city

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      Authors: Justine Lindemann
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In this article, I draw upon more than three years of research with black urban gardeners and farmers in Cleveland, Ohio to explore the contours of a specifically black agrarianism in the city, or what I am calling a black agrarian imaginary. I argue that this imaginary, enacted through an ongoing production of space that stakes a claim on the right to difference, emerges from and draws upon a diasporic and ancestral agrarianism (most proximally from the American South) to build a more self-determined urban food system while also contesting prevailing notions of what does and does not belong in the city and who gets to make those decisions. Black growers in Cleveland assert the right to difference—to produce the city as oeuvre—as a way to build and establish a more self-determined, just food system.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-14T05:50:45Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221129408
       
  • Imaginaries of planetary inhabitance: Polar futurism and the labors of
           climate science

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      Authors: Spencer Adams
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      An emergent polar futurism characterizes the contemporary built space of climate science in Antarctica, inaugurated in large part by the British Antarctic Survey's cutting-edge Halley VI research base. This article analyzes the spatial form, design, and use of Halley VI as well as the rhetoric surrounding it, seeing in Halley VI an expression of a particular “socio-technical imaginary” that implicitly gestures toward a tendential integration of climate science and global logistics. Alongside claims toward fostering a comfortable, communal life among its inhabitants, the imaginary embedded in Halley VI is one where climate research is subsumed within capital's broader aims to facilitate stable logistical movements and infrastructural durability amid chaotic, volatile conditions, a subsumption that bears in particular on the knowledge workers who inhabit the base. What a reading of the base's layout, interior, and lived-in uses exposes, the paper claims, is an implicit portending of a growing proletarianization of sensual experience and knowledge work among residents at the base, increasingly displaced as they are from the subjective core of the base's operations. This reading both extends and complicates recent calls in polar geographies to attend to speculative figurations of Antarctic futures, channeling Halley VI's polar futurism through structural determinants drawn out of literatures critically dealing with design, the history of systems sciences, and theorizations of ongoing restructurings of contemporary labor. The article suggests then that imaginaries of Anthropocenic futures such as those embedded in Halley VI's polar futurism might serve at once as speculative-projective tools and implicit sites for carrying out critiques of tensions and pernicious trends that underlie such Anthropocenic speculation.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-12T06:48:22Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221129124
       
  • Imaginaries on ice: Sociotechnical futures of data centre development in
           Norway and Iceland

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      Authors: Paul Upham, Benjamin K. Sovacool, Chukwuka G. Monyei
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In 2018, Norway promoted itself as a ‘Datacentre Nation’. In terms of low cost, renewably generated sources of electricity and low ambient temperatures, Nordic countries and the data centre sector are potentially mutual beneficiaries – yet, there are also negative impacts associated with the necessary electric power production. With this as a starting point, for Norway and Iceland, we explore how data centre proponents promulgate similar techno-environmental imaginaries, but achieve differing degrees of stabilisation. To this end, we use three sources of imaginaries relating to data centre development in Iceland and Norway: those implicit in promotional imagery originating within the countries concerned; those implicit in international newspapers, as indicative of external perceptions; and those implicit in focus groups with the Norwegian and Icelandic public. We show how data centre advocates deploy visual imagery to create a promotional techno-environmental imaginary that marries nature with the digital in a symbiotic form, and we observe that this is largely consistent with the more mundane international imaginary of Norwegian data centres. For Iceland, however, the external imaginary is dominated by associations of excess energy consumption by bitcoin mining. For the publics questioned, there are multiple imaginaries of data centres, with significant notes of moral and other forms of scepticism. Looking ahead, we suggest that for long-term stabilisation of positive data centre imaginaries, conducive to investment, the capacity of Iceland and Norway to equitably supply sufficient renewable power will need to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-03T08:31:49Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221126619
       
  • Radical reassemblages: The life history of a Nile Delta pumping collective

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      Authors: Edwin Rap, Chris de Bont, Francois Molle, Alex Bolding, Ahmed Ismail
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article investigates how people, technology, and water flows act together in using and transforming infrastructure to improve water access. Analytically, we propose to study collective action over time through the relationships between humans and non-humans as they collaborate to mediate water and other flows. Our case-study lies in Egypt. Over four decades, the Irrigation Improvement Project has introduced various sociotechnical and institutional measures to improve water management in the Nile Delta. By establishing collective pumping infrastructure and Water User Associations, water users were compelled to collaborate to reduce water extraction and over-irrigation. For heuristic purposes, we examine in detail the life history of one pumping collective facing increasing water scarcity. The article presents four life phases of the pumping collective and analyses what drives the assemblage and its transformations. Through time, we understand pumping collectives as heterogeneous and shifting assemblages of human and non-human agents that provide differentiated access to multiple resource flows. We describe the surprising stream of events that unfolds. The pumping collective radically dismantles the standard technological and organizational set-up and replaces it with a more flexible and disaggregated form of irrigation. By tracking this trajectory, the article demonstrates the remarkable agency of a pumping collective in renewing and reassembling itself. On this basis, we argue that the complex entanglement of material objects, human actors, water (and other resource flows) can explain this. Hence, it is important to look beyond the society-nature dichotomy to understand the transformational capacity of collectives.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-10-03T06:54:22Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221123701
       
  • Unequal geographies of urban mining: E-waste management in London, Sao
           Paulo and Accra

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      Authors: Kauê Lopes dos Santos
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      E-waste generation has been increasing on a global scale in the past decades, reaching the unprecedented figure of 53.6 million tons (Mt) in 2019 and raising concerns and debates around the risks, challenges and opportunities related to its management. Collecting and recycling this type of waste – activities that are encompassed in the term ‘urban mining’ – should happen under proper environmental and social conditions, to ensure that reverse logistic system and the circular economy become a reality over the globe. Through exploratory qualitative research, this article establishes a comparative analysis among the multiple actors – operating both formal and informally – responsible for e-waste management in London Larger Urban Zone (LLUZ), Sao Paulo Macrometropolis (SPMM) and Greater Accra Region (GAR). These case studies are the most dynamic functional urban areas (FUA) of their respective national territories and integrate the world system with different roles: the United Kingdom representing the core, Brazil the semi-periphery and Ghana the periphery. Findings uncover the broad spectrum of ways in which e-waste can be recycled and confirm the relevance of political economy for understanding the regulatory and technological aspects of its management in different geographic contexts. The article also suggests a reflection on the ‘urban economy recommodization’, a process that is adding new contents to the urban space.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-27T08:15:36Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221128154
       
  • Feminist digital natures

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      Authors: Ingrid L. Nelson, Roberta Hawkins, Leah Govia
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This commentary proposes a research agenda for the concept of feminist digital natures (FDN). To demonstrate how we see FDN connecting existing research efforts, we review both the well-established and much-needed work in three overlapping areas of scholarship where we see the potential for productive discussions, new questions, and empirical analysis: feminist digital geographies (FDG), digital natures (DN), and feminist political ecology (FPE). We offer specific and grounded examples of topics and questions that scholars might pursue through an FDN approach. We encourage sustained, collaborative, and critical attention to the uneven consequences and political terrain of understanding natures as increasingly digitally monitored, managed, manipulated, and represented. We can and should think with digital relations, and we might benefit from new creative conversations across our areas of inquiry and action.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-26T02:15:30Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221123136
       
  • All dried up: The materiality of drought in Ladismith, South Africa

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      Authors: Elisa Savelli, Maria Rusca, Hannah Cloke, Tyrel J Flügel, Abdulrazak Karriem, Giuliano Di Baldassarre
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper conceptualises droughts as socioecological phenomena coproduced by the recursive engagement of human and non-human transformations. Through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates political ecology, material geographies and hydroclimatology, this work simultaneously apprehends the role of politics and power in reshaping drought, along with the agency of biophysical processes – soil, vegetation, hydrology and microclimate – that co-produce droughts and their spatiotemporal patterning. The drought-stricken Ladismith in Western Cape, South Africa, is the instrumental case study and point of departure of our empirical analysis. To advance a materiality of drought that seriously accounts for the coevolution of biophysical and political transformations, we alter the spatiotemporal and empirical foci of drought analyses thereby retracing Ladismith’s socioecological history since colonial times. In turn, such extended framework exposes the agency of soil, vegetation, hydrology and microclimate and their metabolic exchanges with processes of colonisation, apartheid, capitalist and neoliberal transformations of South African economy. We argue that the narrow pursuit of profits and capital accumulation of the few has produced a fundamental disruption between nature and society which contributed to transform Ladismith’s drought into a socioecological crisis. Whilst advancing debates on materiality, we note two fundamental contributions to the study of drought. First, our approach makes hydrological accounts of droughts less politically naive and socially blind. Second, it develops a political ecology of droughts and socioecological crises more attuned to the materiality of drought. We contend that apprehending the materiality of drought and the active role of its non-human processes can further understandings of the workings of power and the production of socioecological injustices.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-22T02:12:36Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221126617
       
  • Indigenous companion planting in the great churn: Three sisters in
           Kalapuya ilihi

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      Authors: Brian Klopotek, Talon Claybrook, Joe Scott
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article addresses place, culture, community, and mobility in relation to Indigenous food sovereignty and TEK (traditional ecological knowledge). We start with a reflection on what it means to live in the Pacific Northwest of the United States for people from tribes that use Three Sisters agriculture. Two of the authors grew corn, beans, and squash using wintertime, indoor hydroponics and other methods in a performance art mode in Kalapuya ilihi (Western Oregon, USA). Growing these sacred companion plants out of soil, out of sun, out of season, and out of place served as a meditation on our own senses of dislocation and disjuncture as well as modes of connection as Southeastern Natives living in the Pacific Northwest. The politics and practice of growing and/or tending traditional Indigenous food plants in both traditional and non-traditional ways and places provided new language for understanding Indigenous cultural and social health in relation to Indigenous traditions, mobility, and relationality. The three authors (two from Southeastern tribes, one from a Northwestern tribe) provide a model for collaborative intercultural Indigenous ecological projects as a mode of learning, a mode of relational Indigenous mobility, a mode of community-building, and a mode of engaging in Indigenous food sovereignty. Working on community and educational projects together helped us understand companion planting as an analogy, an aesthetic, a method, and a mode for building relational futures.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-21T07:51:21Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221126618
       
  • Care and its discontents: Commodification, coercive cooperation, and
           resistance in Copenhagen Zoo

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      Authors: Eimear Mc Loughlin
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Through ethnographic attunement to the emotionally complex relationships between zookeepers and nonhuman animals, commodification in the political economy of Copenhagen Zoo produces a form of care characterized by coercive cooperation. Amidst the coercive constraints of captivity, keepers depict relationships as ranging from those of explicit coercion, where the animals are made to work, to those of cooperation, where the animals are perceived as working with. Within this context, zoo animals can be better understood as “cooperative commodities”, lively commodities that are perceived as cooperating in their commodification. The belief in cooperation also reframes potential moments of resistance as opportunities to respond and thereby lessen the emotional toll on zookeepers when maladaptive behaviors highlight the failings of their captive environment.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-21T07:48:00Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221125227
       
  • The multiple environmentalities of conservation mapping in
           Patagonia-Aysén

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      Authors: Juan Astaburuaga, Agnieszka Leszczynski, Michael E. Martin, JC Gaillard
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In this paper, we mobilise a multiple environmentalities framework that captures overlapping rationalities of governing nature to engage and identify the role of maps and mapping practices in Patagonia-Aysén, Chile, a peripheral region where government and institutional actors have embraced (eco)tourism as a conservation strategy in protected areas. Through interviews with key stakeholders situated in conservation and tourism institutions in both the public and private sector, we identify two dominant environmentalities at play in the relationship between protected area management and tourism development in Patagonia-Aysén: a neoliberal environmentality, which seeks to promote conservation through the commodification of nature as a tourism product, and an environmentality of truth predicated on a singular, pristine and beautiful nature as an object of conservation and advantage for tourism. Through an analysis of conservation maps and mapping rationalities specific to the Cerro Castillo protected area in Patagonia-Aysén, we trace how these multiple environmentalities are consolidated, rendered real and actionable through geovisualisations and cartographic practices. We argue that conservation maps and mapping emerge as an ‘encounter point’ wherein multiple environmentality strategies and rationalities converge, producing a form of governing the spaces of conservation – what we term a spatial environmentality – rooted in neoliberal and aesthetic logics. Spatial environmentality, we contend, constitutes a form of governing conservation spaces by inscribing and assigning (in)appropiate uses to nature that operationalises institutional interests in conditioning the active engagement of ‘environment subjects’ to control, administer, and take care of the spaces of conservation while in turn making environmental stewardship profitable.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-20T06:25:13Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221125228
       
  • Wastewater and wishful thinking: Treatment plants to “revive” the
           Santiago River in Mexico

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      Authors: Cindy McCulligh
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article grapples with issues of urban wastewater sanitation in one of Mexico's most polluted river basins, through an analysis of a river restoration project centered on the construction of municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Taking an ethnographic approach to the study of infrastructure, the main argument is that, beyond their possible contribution to reducing pollutant loads, in this context municipal WWTPs can best be understood through the concept of “duplication,” whereby the infrastructure works serve as a vehicle for the transfer of public resources to the private sector, through construction and operation contracts. At the same time, these plants also fulfill objectives related to their symbolic value, in this case as indicators of a commitment to resolving one of the state's main socio-environmental conflicts, while studiously avoiding its root causes, including industrial pollution sources. From an urban political ecology perspective, the paper also examines how investment in wastewater treatment infrastructure in the basin continues to reinforce social and environmental inequities, particularly for peri-urban communities along the Santiago River.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-19T04:53:56Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221125230
       
  • (Dis)Entangling livestock marketplaces: Cattle purchasing, fluid
           engineering and market displays

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      Authors: Gareth Enticott, Ruth Little
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Livestock markets are pathological sites in which contrasting biopolitical regimes compete to reconfigure agricultural practices and identities. Whilst the circulation of cattle is central to agricultural geographies, little is known about the practices of cattle trading or the role of livestock markets in cattle purchasing. Drawing on recent attempts to conceptualise the process of marketisation, this paper seeks to invigorate research into livestock markets. Specifically, the paper conceptualises cattle purchasing as a market encounter in which socio-technical arrangements, devices and bodily performances entangle cattle and farmers, enabling markets to work. Using data collected from interviews, focus groups and participant observation at livestock markets in England, the paper makes two contributions. Firstly, the paper shows how farmers’ cattle purchasing practices are organised by practices of ‘fluid engineering’ that seek to maintain the ‘farm system’. Secondly, the paper shows how at livestock markets, these strategies are mediated by front and backstage ‘market displays’ by farmers and auctioneers which produce market price through a series of performances that are carefully spatially and temporally ordered. Specifically, these displays perform specific rural and agricultural identities, such as the ‘genuine’ or ‘good’ farmer. In creating these spatial frames, frontstage displays diminish the relevance of backstage displays that rely on abstract calculations by distant others. The paper therefore reveals the intense entanglements and socio-technical work that is required to make cattle markets function and their wider relevance for the management of livestock diseases.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-16T04:30:30Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221120543
       
  • Expelled from the garden' Understanding the dynamics of green
           gentrification in Vancouver, British Columbia

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      Authors: Daniel L Sax, Lorien Nesbitt, Shannon Hagerman
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      There is substantial evidence detailing the ecological and social benefits provided through urban greening. However, research in the field of urban green equity has revealed that these benefits are not enjoyed equitably by all residents; existing disparities in the distribution, accessibility, and experience of urban greening disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities and residents. Furthermore, green gentrification scholarship has indicated that instances of urban greening intended to rectify inequities, can contribute to or elicit shifts in property values, encouraging speculative commercial and retail investment, disrupting existing socio-spatial relationships, and threatening the housing security of residents. Although there is consensus on this general characterization of green gentrification, many questions remain concerning the relationships between urban residents engaged in small-scale urban greening and the perpetuation of green gentrification outcomes. Contributing to this line of inquiry, we present a case study of an urban farm operating in Vancouver, Canada, facing displacement due to the redevelopment of its current site. Our results from the study illuminate the contradictory position in which urban residents practicing urban greening are sometimes placed—both implicated in and impacted by green gentrification processes. We present a review of our case study to highlight the power dynamics that farm members must navigate in the effort to preserve their access to land and continue their farming practice. Then, we discuss the farm's role as a consultant for the redevelopment process, exploring how its vision, mission, and identity have been co-opted by development agents and used as a branding tool to promote and support the public perception of the redevelopment. Our findings offer insight into novel relationships between urban agriculture, large-scale redevelopment, and green gentrification. What's more, they contribute to existing discourse concerning the limitations of development processes to account for the risks of green gentrification.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-09T11:11:33Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221123134
       
  • El Niño without ‘El Niño’' Path dependency and the definition
           problem in El Niño southern oscillation research

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      Authors: George Adamson
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The El Niño phenomenon – and its associated phenomena El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and La Niña – have become probably the most well-known forms of natural climatic variability. El Niño forecasts underpin regional Climate Outlook Forums in many parts of the world. The declaration of El Niño conditions can unlock development aid money and El Niño events commonly receive widespread media coverage. Yet ‘El Niño’ has not always meant what it does today. The name was originally applied to an annually-occurring ocean current that affected northern Peru and Ecuador, so called because it arrived at Christmas (the Christ Child). The transition in meaning to a complex global phenomenon was related as much to commercial and geopolitical priorities as to the oceanic and atmospheric observations that underpin theories of El Niño dynamics. In this paper, I argue that scientific conceptualisations of El Niño are an example of path dependency. Badging ocean-atmosphere variability as ‘El Niño’ is unnecessary either for the advancement of science or effective disaster risk reduction; in fact, current definitions are confusing and can create problems in preparing for El Niño-related hazards, as occurred with the 2017 ‘coastal’ El Niño in Peru. This paper outlines the historical processes that led to the current conceptualisations of El Niño and suggests an alternative way of understanding ocean-atmosphere dynamics in the Pacific and beyond. It then considers the implications of this path-dependency on El Niño’s ontological politics; that is, who gets to define El Niño, and to what end.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-07T07:12:41Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221120546
       
  • Gambling with our climate futures: On the temporal structure of negative
           emissions

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      Authors: J. Daniel Andersson
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper considers negative emissions—the deliberate removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere by human intervention—as a future-oriented imaginary of connected social and technological order. It does so in order to examine how expectations around the development and use of negative emission technologies are managed with the help of integrated assessment models (IAMs). By treating this family of models as a case study for drawing out historical associations between the terminology of risk saturating the discourse of net-zero emissions and the modern conception of the future as an unexplored territory to be profitably colonized, the paper argues that integrated assessment modeling, as a praxis of forecast, structure and organize our experience of the future through standards of risk management and utility maximization. It concludes that to consider risk as a means of navigating between possible futures is to engage with practices that are enacted in the name of a particular understanding of how one ought to act in the face of deep uncertainty. Aside from epistemic questions of how to treat various kinds of uncertainties inherent to IAMs, of pressing concern are thus also normative questions of how its representation of environmental hazards in terms of risk are distinctively writing the contours of our contemporary forms of responsibility toward nature, each other, as well as future generations.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-09-01T06:22:14Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221123415
       
  • Analysis of ocean ontologies in three frameworks: A study of law of the
           sea discourse

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      Authors: Vanessa Burns
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Legal frameworks have historically used a colonial territorialist approach to governing ocean space. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982) represents a theoretical departure from colonial territorialism. Instead, UNCLOS employs a functionalist logic approach that is based on principles of sovereignty and consent and uses administrative reasoning as a basis for decision-making. This paper investigates what ontological principles are employed in the development of UNCLOS and asks how these are reproduced in other frameworks. I consider whether ontologies can be extrapolated and studied as latent but agential positions in ocean law and governance frameworks and examine how they might be obstructive to the development of effective regional ocean governance. Lastly, I ask whether ontological principles can be reformed, and through what type of interventions this might be achieved. Results show that tenets of colonial territorialism persist in UNCLOS as terrestrialising practices that are reappropriated towards marine communities. Further, that there are fundamental ways in which ontological principles are obstructive to conservation goals in ocean governance frameworks. Lastly, while the structural reproduction of ontological principles between frameworks resists intervention, evidence suggests that interventionist legal mechanisms that displace anthropocentrisms may offer distinct opportunities for reform.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-08-22T07:16:45Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221110436
       
  • Freedom Rangers™ and landscapes that move people

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      Authors: Daniel Schniedewind
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Born out of long-term fieldwork in New York's Hudson Valley, this article begins and ends with reflections on a fraught attempt to conduct ethnographic research with captive chickens, paradoxically called Freedom Rangers™, living on small-scale, organic animal farms. With no available ecological and economic justifications for their confinement, I had to turn instead to animal agriculture's long-standing role in a regional landscape tradition that generates a White sense of place and personhood. Since the dawn of the colonial period, agriculture, especially animal agriculture, has constituted a powerful landscape-making assemblage in the Hudson Valley, one both deeply dependent on racial slavery and uniquely responsible for (never complete) Native displacement. Imported European farm animals and their associate organisms remade the region ecologically, enabling the proliferation of colonial settlement. Then as now, the remaking of the land is itself a site of politics and a means of realizing possible futures. Watching as Whiteness emerges along the human/nonhuman interface, I argue that meat is but one product yielded from these confined chicken bodies and that the unspectacular terror they experience on a daily basis radiates far beyond their enclosures. Addressing the persistence of settler colonialism, antiblackness, and White supremacy requires attention to a wider range of political scenes and actors than are often considered in studies of these formations. What are the banal practices and everyday affects that secure a social order' What are the possibilities for more-than-human ethnography given the violence that saturates this venerated landscape'
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-08-17T07:57:18Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221118525
       
  • Decolonizing conservation' Indigenous resurgence and buffalo
           restoration in the American West

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      Authors: Lindsey Schneider
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      There has been a recent surge of interest in “decolonizing” conservation and natural resource management fields. Most of this scholarship, however, speaks to colonialism on a global scale and does not address conservation within modern settler colonial states such as the United States and Canada. This project focuses on the reintroduction of buffalo (bison) in the American West as an example of how even conservation efforts that purport to include, value, and share Indigenous perspectives can ultimately uphold settler colonial relations of power. Using an Indigenous mixed-methodology approach, it interrogates the discursive construction of buffalo as “America's great conservation success story” and highlights the ways in which conservation has historically worked to support colonial projects of Indigenous erasure and dispossession. Some contemporary buffalo restoration projects seek to include Indigenous people as stakeholders and/or collaborators with unique cultural interests in buffalo, but these efforts do not always embody the material shift in power relations that Indigenous scholars have identified as a key component of decolonization. For Indigenous people, buffalo are more than a keystone species with cultural import; they are relatives whose well-being is deeply entwined with our own. For landscape-scale buffalo restoration projects to engage in decolonization, they must seek to not only repair the harm done to tribal nations through buffalo eradication but also work to support Indigenous resurgence by transforming structures of power.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-08-17T07:56:55Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221119158
       
  • Technical reform or radical justice' Environmental discourse in
           non-governmental organizations

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      Authors: Ellie Ritter, Gregory M Thaler
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Discourses integrate facts, frames, metaphors, and narratives to produce shared understandings of environmental problems, and these shared understandings structure environmental policy and outcomes. Recent scholarship uses new data and quantitative content analysis to identify Environmental Management, Climate Politics, Ecological Modernization, and Environmental Justice as the major discourses among global environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs). Such discourse classification can be intellectually and politically useful, but typologies elide variation. Understanding environmental discourse involves not only classifying major discourses, but also identifying nuances, tensions, and absences behind any typology. This study builds on recent quantitative research with a qualitative, small-N design. We selected two ENGOs identified as extreme representatives of each of the four major discourses, for a total of eight ENGOs, and we conducted qualitative content analysis of ENGO documents as the basis for critical discourse analysis (CDA), examining the principal ideas, frames, and narratives of each discourse and the relations between discourses. Our analysis identifies tensions in Climate Politics between climate justice and multi-stakeholder governance subdiscourses, and divergence in Environmental Management discourse between protection-based and market-based approaches. Linking discourse with organizational structure, we trace tensions in these categories to broader webs of power that transcend typological classifications. Qualitative case studies both deepen and challenge quantitative analyses, underlining the importance of multimethod research and enhancing our understanding of environmental discourse as a key sphere of environmental politics.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-08-16T05:01:07Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221119750
       
  • Regulation by impasse: Pesticide registration, capital and the state in
           Costa Rica

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      Authors: María Soledad Castro-Vargas, Marion Werner
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Costa Rica's prodigious use of pesticides, as well as the burgeoning plantation sector that these agrochemicals support, exacerbates the tensions between extraction and preservation at the heart of the country's development model. We explore these tensions through a study of the country's pesticide registry, the regulatory process to approve active ingredients and formulations for use. After nearly two decades of reform efforts, the registry is widely recognized to be non-functioning: most of the country's pesticides exist in administrative limbo and relatively few new compounds have been approved. Based on extensive interviews and in-depth policy analysis, we construct four phases of reform and use a strategic-relational approach to the state to analyze this process. We conceptualize the registry's gridlock as a form of governance that we term regulation by impasse, an arrangement reproduced through disputes within and between the cognizant ministries, juridical bodies and other regulating authorities, in relation to the shifting strategies and contexts of political economic and wider social forces. We argue that hegemony is tenuously maintained through the registry dispute itself, while revealing the deeply frayed condition of the Costa Rican development model.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-08-16T04:58:44Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221116742
       
  • Activism and non-activism: The politics of claiming environmental justice
           in Vietnam

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      Authors: Thai Nguyen-Van-Quoc, Ethemcan Turhan, Ronald Holzhacker
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper aims to explore how under authoritarian regimes, undergoing reform processes, divergent forms of environmental activism may emerge. Two severe cases of environmental degradation serve as our starting points: the marine disaster in the central coast of Vietnam in 2016 and the Mekong Delta's ongoing environmental degradation. While the former offers a case of rural grievances over mass fish death in Central Vietnam triggering protests on a national scale, the latter presents a continuum of environmental changes leading to serious impacts on deltaic livelihoods, albeit with no observable efforts of activism compared to the situation in other countries along the Mekong Delta. Drawing from in-depth interviews and participant observation with NGO workers in Vietnam who focus on environment and community development, we unravel the conditions, methods and rationalities behind their engagement (or lack thereof) with environmental activism in each case. We argue that the difference between the cases can be explained by tracing the process of politicising environmental grievances, taking into consideration culinary nationalism, anti-China nationalism and political opportunities under authoritarianism. Moving beyond current literature on activism under authoritarian regimes which relies mainly on institutional and/or social network approaches, our analysis helps further shed light on how contemporary environmental activism is mobilised in Vietnam from a geographically and politically grounded as well as culturally embedded position.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-08-10T06:25:10Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221115955
       
  • The epistemic tensions of nuclear waste siting in a nuclear landscape

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      Authors: Marissa Bell
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Canada's siting process for spent nuclear fuel, led by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), is frequently held within nuclear industry spheres as an exemplary siting process, designed to be inclusive, participatory, and “community-driven.” Drawing from ethnographic observations of the process as it unfolded in Southern Ontario, Canada, this paper focuses on the epistemic issues of how diverse knowledges are treated in the process, whose knowledge is valued, how such knowledges are understood, and whose knowledges are excluded. In particular, I make sense of how epistemic tensions in the process are produced by being situated within a nuclear landscape, informed by local nuclear-dominant socio-technical relations and epistemic regimes, which exceptionalize pro-nuclear Western scientific knowledges. This socio-technical constellation, I suggest, leads to careful but sometimes paradoxical negotiations of the expert/lay divide that subsequently reveals cracks in the policy foundation for inclusion of diverse forms of knowledge. While the NWMO policy framework discursively values diverse knowledges, critical lay community knowledges are often delegitimized and dismissed. Similarly, there are scalar issues in the ways Indigenous knowledges are homogenized and devalued through discursive separation. These epistemic tensions, between how knowledges should be treated in policy, and how knowledges are actually treated in practice, demonstrate clear issues of recognition justice, participatory fairness, and inclusion of diverse knowledges. The implications of this work shed light on understanding the complexities of landscape-based knowledge politics and how they might inform siting practices and technological decision-making more broadly.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-08-09T07:53:36Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221117947
       
  • Obliqueness as a feminist mode of analysing waterscapes: Learning to think
           with overflows

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      Authors: Irene Leonardelli, Jeltsje Kemerink-Seyoum, Margreet Zwarteveen
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In this paper, we propose obliqueness as a feminist mode to analyse waterscapes, intersecting feminist political ecology with post-human feminist scholarship. Obliqueness means cultivating attentiveness to those things and events that at first sight appear inconsequential because they do not fit with official plans or predominant (power) structures. Through a methodological focus on the continuous making-of such structures – on acts of tinkering with institutions, ideas and technologies – obliqueness notices not just how structures are reproduced, but also helps draw attention to inconsistencies, divergences and transgressions – what we call overflows. Hence, our oblique analysis of a waterscape of a village in Maharashtra, India revealed overflows to two kinds of structuring: one stemming from the infrastructural lay-out of an irrigation system, and one stemming from intersecting hierarchical relations of caste and gender. These overflows point to possibilities for being and relating beyond those that can be contained in already identified social or planned material structures. In this way, an oblique analysis expands the theoretical and political space to co-enact more equitable human-water relations in Maharashtra, and elsewhere.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-08-08T06:56:55Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221117725
       
  • Is ecology anti-urban' Urban ideas and imaginaries across one hundred
           years of ecological publications

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      Authors: Silvia Flaminio, Joëlle Salomon Cavin, Marco Moretti
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper investigates urban imaginaries conveyed in publications in ecology over the past century. We examine some urban ecologists’ view that urban areas have been disregarded by ecology due to negative views on cities and urbanisation. Inspired by previous work on imaginaries in social and cultural geography and political ecology, and by textual data analysis methods, we adopted a methodological framework that applies both quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of a corpus of 960 articles (published 1922–2018) drawn from 10 long-standing international journals in ecology. Our hypothesis is that ecology has embraced an anti-urban imaginary that is manifested in urban invisibility as well as the recurrent expression of negative ideas about cities (constituting an ‘anti-urban bias’). Our results partially confirm this hypothesis. We show that until the 1970s only a few papers were published on cities. We identify nine main themes relating to cities around which ideas about cities have been constructed (threats, pests, refuges, fragmentation, gradients, pollution, homogenisation, planetary urbanisation, and planning) and show how these ideas have been mobilised in the articles since the 1920s. We discuss the way in which these evolving ideas reflect a move from an essentially anti-urban imaginary to a more complex and ambivalent one. This shift coincides with the rise of the idea of planetary urbanisation in ecological publications, increasing recommendations regarding urban planning, and more generally, growing conceptual debates on the ecological impact of cities.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-08-03T04:15:05Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221115949
       
  • What limits Muslim communities’ access to nature' Barriers and
           opportunities in the United Kingdom

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      Authors: Rachael C Edwards, Brendon MH Larson, Daniel Burdsey
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Recreation in protected areas can greatly contribute to health and wellbeing, but there exist significant demographic disparities in protected area use across Europe and North America. Minority ethnic groups, in particular, are often underrepresented in protected areas due to a variety of cultural, economic, and discriminatory barriers. Muslims are one of the fastest growing minority ethnic communities in Western countries but have received little study in the context of protected areas. More research is therefore needed to understand protected area exclusion as experienced by Muslim communities. Through 14 in-depth interviews with Muslim community leaders in the United Kingdom, we explored the socio-cultural barriers and opportunities that contribute to the accessibility of protected areas for Muslims. As the majority of our participants were women, this study addresses the underrepresentation of diverse female voices in research on Muslims and leisure and foregrounds Muslim women as agents in their recreational lives. We found that a wide variety of factors can inhibit access, cumulatively resulting in several layers of exclusion. Primary barriers included a lack of inclusive imagery, insufficient facilities for social gathering, prior instances of discrimination, the perceived whiteness of protected areas, and unfamiliarity with these spaces. Several barriers related to the wilderness ideology that is embedded across many aspects of protected area marketing, design, and management as it does not embrace collectivist aspects of Muslim cultures. The level of “naturalness” associated with protected areas, however, did not emerge as a barrier. We also identified many opportunities, including the stewardship role of humans depicted within Islam. Lastly, we discuss the management implications for protected areas that emerge from our results. This research demonstrates that to foster a sense of belonging for Muslim communities, protected area managers must consider many socio-cultural dimensions of accessibility, holistically engage with Muslim communities, and embrace diverse worldviews relating to the human–nature relationship.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-08-01T07:40:46Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221116737
       
  • Towards a feminist political ecology of health: Mystery kidney disease and
           the co-production of social, environmental, and bodily difference

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      Authors: Nari Senanayake
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article argues for a more rigorous engagement with intersectionality within political ecologies of health. Building on the work of feminist scholars who explore the co-production of social and ecological differences, I examine how health improvement schemes that target practices of natural resource use concentrate value (economic and ecological) and health dividends in particular bodies at the expense of others. As part of this intervention, I draw on long-term and ongoing ethnographic research in north-central Sri Lanka. This region is an endemic zone for a mysterious and deadly form of kidney disease (CKDu) as well as the site of frenzied health improvement intervention. Specifically, and in response to scientific studies that link kidney disease to agrochemical use and drinking water, an increasingly diverse range of actors, from different branches of the state apparatus to private industries and civil society organizations, have invested heavily in reconfiguring the region’s water supply infrastructure and agrarian landscapes. Through an analysis of resident testimonies, I demonstrate that the burden of subsidizing these new “healthful” practices of water provision and agricultural production is unevenly experienced, as are residents’ abilities to adopt and maintain them over time and space. More crucially, I illustrate how schemes designed to heal turn on the production of differentiated harms, including new gendered labor burdens for poor women, and intensified agrochemical use for ecologically and economically resource-poor farmers. Developing these narratives toward a feminist political ecology of health, I demonstrate how social, ecological, and bodily differences intersect to constitute new patterns of health and harm in the dry zone. I conclude by reflecting on how this approach can explain the paradoxical effects of well-intentioned disease mitigation strategies.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-07-27T06:22:38Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221113963
       
  • Mobilizing ‘impermaculture’: Temporary urban agriculture and
           the sustainability fix

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      Authors: Eugene McCann, Nathan McClintock, Christiana Miewald
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper addresses the alliance between some urban agriculturalists, developers, and the local state in promoting a certain type of ‘green urbanism’ through what we call ‘impermaculture’. Impermaculture is a model of urban agriculture whereby some urban farmers approach their impermanence – the possibility of their operations being replaced by higher value developments – less as a threat to be avoided, as traditionally understood in the literature, and more as an intended modus operandi to which they are committed. We discuss how they use lightweight and portable growing containers, planter beds, greenhouses, and livestock pens to operate within and enhance contemporary regimes of development in global North cities. We identify a spatio-temporal impermanence that stands in contrast to classic understandings of sustainability fixes as either a form of greenwashing or as spatial fixes involving the sinking of capital into construction of a ‘greener’ built environment. In what follows, we develop a conceptual framework that will facilitate these contributions and provide a language for discussing cases of impermaculture in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia. We discuss how urban agriculture is mobilized as part of the sustainability fix in the two cities. We first demonstrate how impermaculture emerges as a means of stabilizing the fix which is always prone to coming apart, or fracturing. We then draw on two examples – goat husbandry in Portland and temporary gardens in Vancouver – to demonstrate how urban agriculturalists are embracing and leveraging impermanence. This ‘impermaculture by design’ not only marks a new form of urban agriculture in the neoliberal city but shores up and temporally rescales the sustainability fix while providing urban agriculture initiatives stability.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-07-26T06:34:32Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221115950
       
  • Inflammatory agriculture: Political ecologies of health and fertilizers in
           India

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      Authors: Carly E Nichols
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Across India, many farmers contend that synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers do more than impact soils, but also lead to tasteless food crops and weakened bodies more susceptible to aches, pains, and diseases. Although these complaints, long-documented across South Asia, have been theorized as embodied critiques of development or as reflecting hybrid epistemologies, there has been strikingly little focus on the potential biophysical currents that may underpin these perceptions of fertilizer harm. This paper works to fill this gap, analyzing qualitative data collected from farmers in two remote eastern Indian districts using an “integrated” political ecology of health (PEH) framework that utilizes two main approaches to examine bodily materiality and health. In particular, the framework looks at the multi-scalar political economies, cultural forms of meaning-making, as well as the visceral, affective ways that respondents come to see synthetic fertilizers as the cause of barren lands, tasteless foods, and weakened bodies. The article then deploys a critical reading of bioscientific literature to interpret respondent narratives and zoom in onto potential bio-social mechanisms that may help illuminate claims of fertilizer harm in new ways. In particular, I present evidence around how phytochemicals—literally chemicals produced by plants—may shift due to chemical fertilizer use in ways that may matter for hunger and health. Yet, not losing sight of the affective ways crops are grown, consumed, and discussed, I also highlight research examining how beliefs and perceptions measurably modify physiological responses to food in positive or adverse ways through the still ill-understood placebo/nocebo effect. The goal of such analysis is not to present a tidy conclusion to questions of fertilizer–health connections but demonstrate how a PEH that remains attentive to power, discourse, and materiality can bring disparate streams of thought together to forge pathways for transdisciplinary research and practice.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-07-25T11:38:28Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221113557
       
  • Lively water infrastructure: Constructed wetlands in more-than-human
           waterscapes

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      Authors: Elliot Hurst, Rowan Ellis, Anu Babu Karippal
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Water infrastructures are often living infrastructures, whose operation relies on processes involving other-than-human living beings. This article considers the materiality of waterscapes by attending to this liveliness. We argue that critical water research can benefit from situating social relations and water transformations within more-than-human worlds. Our conceptual framework brings hydrosocial scholarship into conversation with more-than-human geography. This opens avenues for interdisciplinary water research that weaves together ecology and qualitative social research. The analytical potential of such a framework is explored through an empirical account grounded in two constructed wetland projects in rural India. These infrastructural assemblages engage humans, other living beings and objects in webs of material-semiotic processes. We present three stories of intra-action that focus on particular plants, microbes and animals within these waterscapes. Our analysis highlights the crucial importance of other-than-human living beings in the production of waterscape knowledge and suggests a need to go beyond the problematisation of ‘uneven’ waterscapes. Approaching waterscapes as more-than-human collectives prompts us to consider the power relations that underpin waterscape knowledge and the politics of multispecies justice. A focus on more-than-human infrastructures opens up the possibility of interdisciplinary water research that is better attuned to the hybrid nature of social and ecological processes, as well as the politics embedded therein.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-07-21T03:14:03Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221113712
       
  • Multispecies storytelling in botanical worlds: The creative agencies of
           plants in contested ecologies

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      Authors: Cheryl McEwan
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper argues for engaging in multispecies storytelling with plants to better conceptualise the ethics and contested ecologies associated with biodiversity loss. It focuses specifically on proteas, the iconic species of South Africa's threatened fynbos biome, to explore the possibilities of an ethical dialogue between human and more-than-human diversities, and to consider what might be gained from understanding plants as both agentic in contested ecologies and as storytelling figures worthy of attention. The paper draws on John Ryan’s conceptualization of phytography as a way of engaging in multispecies storytelling with plants. It teases out interwoven botanic and human histories, and the ways in which iconic proteas have written themselves into the narratives of their human interlocutors in the context of European settler colonialism, conservation, floral nativism and post-apartheid nation-building. The case for phytography is developed through an examination of the corporeal rhetoric of proteas in two examples. The first concerns the Mace Pagoda, a protea that resists narratives of extinction by writing back its percipience, agency, and resilience into human stories of anthropogenic habitat loss. The second focuses on botanical traces that result from absence, specifically the non-appearance in recent years of proteas in the Cederberg area of the Western Cape. The paper suggests that absence is a form of corporeal rhetoric through which plants write themselves into narratives of rapid climate change and multispecies loss. The final section of the paper explores questions of ethics that emerge from engaging with plants as storytellers, reflects on the kinds of human-plant relationships that are possible in the context of environmental catastrophe, and examines the possibilities that phytography provides for more-than-human engagements with plant life.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-07-20T03:55:19Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221110755
       
  • Emotional subjectivities and the trajectory of a Peruvian mining conflict

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      Authors: Ursula Balderson
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The trajectory of socio-environmental conflicts remains difficult to predict. In the case study explored in this article, attention to the emergence of emotional subjectivities helps us better understand the timing of the conflict and the style of contestation at the site. The data are drawn from interviews and observations of the ‘dialogue table’ meetings that took place between representatives from the BarrickGold run Pierina mine in Ancash, a highland area in Peru, and the nearby village of Mataquita to try and resolve a conflict over access to water. The paper identifies three ways that the emotional climate at the site influenced the conflict trajectory. Firstly, it was heightened fear for future water availability and increased feelings of hope that the mining company could be held to account for the hydrosphere disruption that triggered the conflict. Secondly, the Mataquitans tried to elicit feelings of compassion in mining company representatives whilst the company acted to repress them, fearing that they could endanger profit-making at the site. Finally, the inconsistent behaviour of the mining company and their ad hoc Corporate Social Responsibility allocations produced a moral-emotional critique of mine behaviour and a climate of distrust within and between villages. The emotions produced by interactions between actors reduced the likelihood of a more coordinated response to the problems at the site, conveniently serving the agenda of the mine.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-07-19T06:26:02Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221113308
       
  • Making global oceans governance in/visible with Smart Earth: The case of
           Global Fishing Watch

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      Authors: Lauren Drakopulos, Jennifer J. Silver, Eric Nost, Noella Gray, Roberta Hawkins
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The number and variety of technologies used for environmental surveillance is expanding rapidly, making constant data collection and near ‘real time’ analyses possible. ‘Smart Earth’ describes networked infrastructures comprised of devices and equipment and signals to the human dimensions inherent to developing, deploying and putting technology and large datasets to use. In this paper, we situate Smart Earth in terms of technological products and human practices and consider the relationship between Smart Earth and global environmental governance. Specifically, we review emerging literature and present a case study of an organization founded by environmental non-profit, SkyTruth, tech industry behemoth, Google and marine conservation NGO, Oceana. Called ‘Global Fishing Watch’ (GFW), this organization builds geospatial datasets, hosts an online mapping platform where anyone with internet access can surveil various types of ocean-going vessels and shares data and map products with scientists and practitioners. Two critical points emerge through the case. First, we show that GFW expands its surveillance capacity by pursuing ‘data sharing’ partnerships with sovereign states, many in the Global South. Second, the maps and datasets produced by GFW link vessels to a ‘flag state’ while the firms, subsidiaries and financiers that may own and/or operate these vessels remain obscure – and hence so too does the political economy of oceans fisheries. GFW maps and datasets offer new approaches to tracking fishing and are advancing fisheries science. At the same time, they rely on and are only legible through hegemonic geopolitical and political–economic orders deeply implicated in industrial (over)fishing. The norms and domains of global environmental governance are expanding, but Smart Earth ‘solutions’ risk leaving the structural drivers of environmental change unaddressed.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-07-14T08:08:01Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221111786
       
  • Multi-species, ecological and climate change temporalities: Opening a
           dialogue with phenology

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      Authors: Michelle Bastian, Rowan Bayliss Hawitt
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Many scholars have argued that climate change is, in part, a problem of time, with ecological, political and social systems thought to be out of sync or mistimed. Discussions of time and environment are often interdisciplinary, necessitating a wide-ranging use of methods and approaches. However, to date there has been practically no direct engagement with the scientific field of phenology, the study of life-cycle timing across species, including plants, animals and insects. In this article, we outline how phenology can offer novel inroads to thinking through temporal relations across species and environments. We suggest that greater engagement with this field will enable scholars working across the humanities and social sciences to incorporate detailed studies of environmental timings which shed light on individual species, as well as wide-ranging species interactions. Following an overview of phenological research from both western scientific and indigenous knowledge perspectives, we report on a scoping exercise looking at where phenology has appeared in environmental humanities literature to date. We then offer an illustration that puts phenological perspectives into conversation with plant studies in order to indicate some of the useful affordances phenological perspectives offer, namely those of comprehending time as co-constructed across species and as flexible and responsive to environmental changes. We conclude by offering a number of further potential connections and suggestions for future research, including calling for more exploration of how environmental humanities approaches might produce critical contributions to phenology in their turn.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-07-11T11:28:47Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221111784
       
  • Against settler sustainability: California’s groundwater as a
           vertical frontier

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      Authors: Vivian Underhill, Sheeva Sabati, Linnea Beckett
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider groundwater overdraft as a vertical frontier. Thinking with water as an analytic, we study the nexus of relationships that inscribe settler water infrastructures as normative, demonstrating their role as frontier processes within a settler colonial present. Our analysis shows the necessity of dismantling settler modes of sustainability and centering and supporting Indigenous sovereignty.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-07-08T06:13:09Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221110434
       
  • The greening of human rights in Iran: Lake Orumiyeh, human rights, and
           environmental justice

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      Authors: A. Marie Ranjbar
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In the mid-2000s, a social movement emerged in northwestern Iran to demand increased environmental protections for Lake Orumiyeh. Once among the largest saltwater lakes in the world, Lake Orumiyeh has undergone rapid desiccation, losing nearly 90 per cent of its surface area over the past two decades. Conceptually, the aim of this article is to examine how protesters in Orumiyeh used environmental justice, both as a concept and political strategy, to make human rights claims against the Iranian state. I posit that environmental justice functions as a coded language in this political context, where it is challenging to speak openly about human rights. Drawing from environmental justice and critical human rights literature in geography, combined with an empirical and visual analysis of protests to save Lake Orumiyeh, I analyze how protesters strategically ‘greened’ the language of human rights to protect themselves from state violence. I compare two protests organized in 2010 and 2011 to demonstrate how the site of the lake was used to signify broader grievances against the state. Through a comparison of the affective tone and state response to the protests, I explicate both the importance and the limits of ‘greening’ human rights as a protest strategy. Taken together, these case studies illustrate how limiting activism to binary frameworks of the environmental or political renders invisible the multidimensional claims of protesters. My study demonstrates the importance of widening our analytical gaze to incorporate protests that register rights claims outside of the normative framework of human rights, thereby accounting for political contexts where alternative rights narratives are both strategic and necessary.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-07-08T05:41:46Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221108176
       
  • Connecting across difference in environmental governance: Beyond rights,
           recognition, and participation

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      Authors: Rachel N Arney, Maya B Henderson, Haley R DeLoach, Gabrielle Lichtenstein, Laura A German
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper explores the significance of current paradigms for connecting across difference in environmental governance, with a focus on dominant practices and the erasures that occur in the process. It focuses on three core concepts and corresponding practices: rights (adhering to both persons and property, procedural, and substantive); recognition (of harms done, of those harmed, or of those deserving of special recognition); and participation (in which information, decision authority, and/or benefits are shared with affected populations). The paper begins with a literature review on the history and purported benefits of each of these concepts, the environmental arenas where they occur, and the critiques that are leveraged against them. To envision what it might look like to connect across difference differently, we situate these critiques in the literature on coloniality and use this to develop a conceptual framework for evaluating efforts to connect across difference in environmental governance. We then illustrate the application of this framework in the environmental arenas of biodiversity conservation and extractivism to crystalize through lived experiences what it means to operate inside of these paradigms and to move beyond them. The paper highlights how current paradigms for connecting across difference are deeply situated in (settler) colonial logics of hierarchies of value, state sovereignty, and Indigenous erasure. We conclude with a vision of how environmental governance can move beyond its current colonial hegemony by centering decolonial and abolition ecologies scholarship that decenters settler ontologies in favor of more radical alternatives for relating with the so-called “natural” world.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-30T06:18:24Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221108892
       
  • The new green apartheid' Race, capital and logics of enclosure in
           South Africa’s wildlife economy

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      Authors: Stasja Koot, Bram Büscher, Lerato Thakholi
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In this paper, we explore relations between race, capital and wildlife conservation in the town of Hoedspruit and its surroundings, which has developed into one of the main centres of the lucrative and rapidly growing ‘wildlife economy’ in South Africa. Behind its image as a shining ‘green’ example of wildlife-based development is a highly unequal and racialised state of affairs that is deeply unsustainable. At the core of these dynamics are private wildlife reserves, high-end nature-based tourism and gated ‘wildlife estates’, which have further consolidated land into private, mostly white, ownership. In addition to contestations about the building of a shopping mall and land claims, Hoedspruit’s wildlife economy is dependent upon black labourers who commute daily from former homeland areas. Municipal efforts to mediate this situation by building affordable housing, have been thwarted by several wealthy inhabitants and property developers. We build on Mbembe’s ‘logic of enclosure’ to argue that the wildlife economy and its ‘green’ image perpetuate and reinvent older forms of colonial and apartheid geographies of segregation, in effect creating a form of ‘new green apartheid’. While physical-geographical enclosures are at the centre of the wildlife economy, we show that they are reinforced by class and racial enclosures and ideological enclosures, the latter consisting of both the belief in the market as a natural solution for social and environmental causes and apartheid as an historical era that has now ended. We conclude that Hoedspruit serves as an important example of the regressive and unsustainable forms of development that the wildlife economy in South Africa can create.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-29T05:17:26Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221110438
       
  • Bankrolling biodiversity: The politics of philanthropic conservation
           finance in Chile

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      Authors: Clare M. Beer
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The role of philanthropic capital in biodiversity conservation is rapidly changing. Philanthropists increasingly seek to bankroll solutions to the biodiversity crisis, scaling up the size of their ambitions and gifts to help close what scientists and policymakers call the “biodiversity financing gap.” This paper interrogates the rising prominence of philanthropic capital in conservation governance, focusing on a class of actors I call “philanthro-environmentalists.” Unlike big, international NGOs and philanthrocapitalists, philanthro-environmentalists do not engage market-based, for-profit approaches to finance conservation. Rather, they engage a “dollars for policy” approach that leverages the power of their philanthropy to improve public conservation outcomes. Taking Chile as a case, I trace how a transnational network of philanthro-environmentalists is using a novel mechanism known as Project Finance for Permanence to exact substantial political and fiscal commitments from the state in exchange for substantive philanthropic support for a mega conservation initiative in Chilean Patagonia. I argue that Project Finance for Permanence targets policymaking as the primary site of philanthropic intervention, affording philanthro-environmentalists greater control over state conservation governance. Yet, I also argue that this case raises serious questions about the limits and implications of leveraging philanthropic capital to solve public environmental problems. Bridging literatures on conservation governance and conservation finance, the paper contributes new conceptual insights into the evolving dynamics of philanthropy-state relations in an age of biodiversity crisis.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-29T05:06:49Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221108171
       
  • Resonant relations: eco-lalia, political ec(h)ology and autistic ways of
           worlding

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      Authors: Audra Mitchell
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Echolalia – the repetition of words and phrases gleaned from one's environment – is often treated as a key behavioural marker of autism. Along with other perceived ‘stereotypies’, it is dismissed by Western biomedical and political discourses as disruptive, ‘meaningless repetition’ and targeted for individual and collective elimination in the context of a global ‘war on autism’. However, as this article shows, echoing is also a crucial element of Autistic ways of worlding. That is, it can be integral to forming and maintaining co-constitutive relations and ethical intimacy with other beings through distinctively resonant political-ec(h)ological relations. At the same time, echoing is a political act that can disrupt interwoven neurotypical (NT), colonial, racial and capitalist rhythms of sociality, communication and space. This insight challenges negative stereotypes about the perceived ‘lack’ or ‘impairment’ of Autistic people in the areas of relationality, intentionality and meaning-making. At the same time, it opens up a wider discussion of how Autistic ways of worlding can contribute to the creation of alternative eco-political futures. To flesh out these arguments, I draw on auto-ethnographic research based on my experience as an Autistic and Dyspraxic global political ecologist. In particular, I share elements of my experimental practice of ‘eco-lalia' – a reclamation of echoing as a form of echo-political praxis, expressed here in the form of poetry. In so doing, I argue that ec(h)olalia and other Autistic ways of worlding can contribute to nurturing robust more-than-human relations, confronting violence and creating solidarities across communities marginalized by dominant global norms of ‘humanity’.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-27T06:49:09Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221108177
       
  • Corrosive flows, faulty materialities: Building the brine collector in the
           Llobregat River Basin, Catalonia

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      Authors: Santiago Gorostiza, Hug March, Marta Conde, David Sauri
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The history of hydraulic infrastructures is plagued with failures often with catastrophic consequences. Although the agency of water in disasters has been widely documented less well known are the substances in water such as salt that may cause infrastructural collapse and harm humans, flora and fauna. In the Llobregat River Basin (Barcelona), a 120-km long pipe transports salt-saturated wastewaters produced in the potash mines of central Catalonia to the Mediterranean Sea. Conceived as a technological fix to reduce river water salinization, the brine collector started operating in 1989 and succeeded to cut by half the concentration of salts in river waters. However, as the extraction of potash salts increased the brine collector soon reached its full capacity and became prone to leaks and ruptures that poured salt-saturated flows into the rivers and adjacent lands. Moreover, the reduction in salinity achieved was not enough to prevent the need of salt-removing technology for the drinking water plants supplying Barcelona. The brine collector understood as a sociotechnical system assembling material, discursive, organizational, and institutional components proved the fragility of rules and regulations addressed to manage salt pollution in the basin. More fundamentally, the assemblage constituted by the collector showed how the interplay between private (the mining company) and public (the regional water agency) organizations has resulted in the successful shifting of impacts created by salt from the private to the public sphere in economic, health, and environmental terms.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-16T05:52:12Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221105875
       
  • Restoration as world-making and repair: A pragmatist agenda

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      Authors: Mark Usher
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The UN’s Decade of Ecosystem Restoration commenced in June 2021, with the expectation that ecological restoration will be vastly scaled-up internationally. Millions of hectares of the earth’s surface is projected to be restored, from forests and peatland to rivers, reefs and grasslands. This will transform restoration from a predominantly localized, community-driven field to a highly capitalized, professional activity. As the renowned biologist E. O. Wilson proposed, the twenty-first century certainly does look likely to be characterized by restoration. And yet, thus far, the still emerging field of ecological restoration has been dominated by the natural sciences, in both theory and practice, neglecting broader questions of how to live in and with restored landscapes. This paper contends that if restoration is to be significantly expanded over the next decade, the social sciences and humanities must be involved to ensure its purpose is given adequate scrutiny, by engaging wider publics of interest in scheme planning, design and implementation. This is crucial given the dominance of natural capital accounting in restoration, which privileges economic reasoning over alternative, more radical forms. Pragmatism, which has a substantive philosophical interest in the relationship between humans and their environment, can offer a distinctive orientation to inquiry conducive to collaboration between the natural and social disciplines. Focusing on waterway restoration in the United Kingdom, and drawing on social and natural science literature, this paper outlines a pragmatist research agenda that recognizes multiplicity in nature, advocates experimentation in human-environment relations, and foregrounds community in democratic renewal. The paper considers not only ways that pragmatism can inform restoration but how restoration can advance a pragmatist agenda for invigorating public life. This encourages scholars to think with not only against restoration, attending to composition as well as critique, as part of a political urban ecology.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-14T06:03:14Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221107221
       
  • Living with cows, sheep and endemic disease in the North of England:
           Embodied care, biosocial collectivities and killability

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      Authors: Lewis Holloway, Niamh Mahon, Beth Clark, Amy Proctor
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper engages with debates surrounding practices of care in complex situations where human and non-human lives are entangled. Focusing on the embodied practices of care involving farmers, their advisers and cows and sheep in the North of England, the paper explores how biosocial collectivities fabricate care around endemic health conditions in specific farming situations. Based on in-depth research with farmers and advisers, the paper examines how Bovine Viral Diarrhoea (BVD) and lameness are made ‘visible’ and become cared about, what practices are mobilised in response to an evident need to care, and how some animals are, paradoxically, made ‘killable’ in the practising of care for populations of cows and sheep. The paper discusses how the perspectives of farmers and advisers are aligned in developing practices of care for animals, although there are some tensions and differences between these groups. Advisers focus on making endemic diseases important to farmers, so that they become enrolled into taking prescribed action. However, the sets of competing priorities farmers have to address, in complex on-farm situations, along with some resistance to taking prescribed action, produces other perspectives on and practices of care. The paper concludes by emphasising the problematics of practising care in farming, showing how care for endemic disease coexists with harm to some animals and the reproduction of modes of farming which make it more likely that endemic conditions persist.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-08T05:55:12Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221105878
       
  • Water for whom' Desalination and the cooptation of the environmental
           justice frame in Southern California

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      Authors: Brian F O’Neill
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The environmental justice frame is a key feature of successful grassroots mobilization against the uneven distribution of environmental problems. However, what happens when this discursive framework is questioned, that is, when features of its established definition are made to serve, rather than contest, industry' The article examines this dynamic through an ethnography of a high-volume desalination (potable ocean water) proposal. Findings indicate community groups and non-governmental organizations make normative environmental justice arguments about the high costs of desalination, community disruption, and industrial burden. By contrast, organized labor and public sector actors align with the private sector to promote desalination, using a competing series of arguments about local independence, regional responsibility, and employment. Disentangling these discourses, the author argues that claims in favor of desalination are a part of what this paper calls a cooptation of the environmental justice frame that ultimately facilitates community division in favor of a class bias for a luxury commodity. Interpreting this socio-ecological problem through a political economic lens, this research contributes to discussions about industrial infrastructure conceived within public–private partnership frameworks, calling scholars, activists, and decision-makers to attend to how environmental (in)justice politics can take on surprising meanings amid the expansion of financial capitalism.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-06T04:57:02Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221102377
       
  • From fish to fishworker traceability in Thai fisheries reform

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      Authors: Alin Kadfak, Marie Widengård
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper explores the question of what traceability systems mean for the labour situation of fishworkers; for whom and in what respects is traceability effective, and what impact do these systems have' The limited social criteria in fishery governance is a core reason for recurrent problems of extreme abuse of fishworkers around the world, including trafficking, forced labour and so called modern slavery. New traceability systems, thus, now include social criteria to advance sustainable fisheries globally. Drawing from a Thai fisheries reform case study, we analyse how the new labour traceability system emerges and is perceived by migrant fishworkers. We base our analysis on interviews, documents and two periods of fieldwork in Thailand. We argue that labour traceability is a double-edged sword. While fishworkers have seen major improvement in limiting extreme abuse, labour traceability has a downsides of state surveillance and costs passed onto workers. Moreover, traceability does not solve underlying problems regarding the complex formalization of migrant workers, working conditions on fishing boats, freedom to change employer or the everyday vulnerability of being a migrant worker. Thus, while labour traceability has promising policy relevance for the integration of labour rights into fisheries governance, it requires contextual underpinning in migrant circumstances.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-03T07:57:14Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221104992
       
  • Mainstreaming ecosystem services: The hard work of realigning biodiversity
           conservation

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      Authors: Daniel Chiu Suarez
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      For over two decades, proponents of “ecosystem services” approaches have endeavored to transform the field of biodiversity conservation. In this article, I examine the work of the Natural Capital Project to show how the “mainstreaming” of ecosystem services has required not just hard work but specific forms of work performed by specific types of actors with specific sets of capabilities working through characteristic sorts of organizational contexts. I draw on key theorizations from organization studies to interpret the politics of ecosystem services and conceptualize the conditions (fragmented fields), practices (bricolage), actors (institutional entrepreneurs), and power relations (hegemonic) which have together comprised this work and underpinned ongoing efforts to realign the organizational forms and functions of mainstream conservation. I emphasize how tracing these micro-social foundations—the embedded agencies of those using ecosystem services to contextually negotiate real-world conservation interventions—is crucial to understanding the dynamics of broader and increasingly pronounced macro-institutional shifts in conservation.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-02T05:12:47Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221105153
       
  • Fall from grace or back down to earth' Conservation and political
           conflict in Africa’s “miracle” state

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      Authors: Annette A LaRocco, Emmanuel Mogende
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Since the publication of the influential text, An African Miracle, much scholarship has focused on Botswana's supposed “exceptionality” anchored in the country's economic growth and sustained democracy. Botswana's success story has proved enduring and versatile, being deployed in numerous contexts including in relation to Botswana’s status as a conservation “safe haven” in southern Africa. Many green plaudits are associated with the tenure of former president Ian Khama (2008–2018), who broke with longstanding tradition and actively campaigned against his own vice president and successor, President Mokgweetsi Masisi. Their acrimonious relationship is multifaceted but in this article, we refer to disputes over wildlife conservation policy wherein Masisi rolled back his predecessor's signature conservation policies, focusing specifically on the reversal of the hunting ban, the disarming of some anti-poaching officers, and changes in Botswana's stance in international environmental diplomacy regarding ivory and the CITES regime. We contend that Khama's conservation decisions—underpinned by lack of consultation and green violence—made Botswana a “green miracle” to outside observers while contravening the central principles of local democratic practice such as therisanyo (consultation) cherished in the country. We argue that Masisi's reversal of Khama-era positions that were unpopular with conservation-adjacent communities represents not a “fall from grace,” but rather the bringing back down to earth of policies that had alienated the local population, thus indicating the potential to pursue inclusive governance that domestically Botswana acclaims.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-02T05:12:36Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221101553
       
  • Dirty work in the clean city: An embodied Urban Political Ecology of women
           informal recyclers’ work in the ‘clean city’

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      Authors: Josie Wittmer
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper investigates the ways that ‘cleaning up’ Indian cities impacts those who rely on accessing waste on city streets for their livelihoods. I focus on low-income Dalit women recyclers in Ahmedabad, India as they navigate material and discursive shifts in urban waste management emanating from the national Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and 2016 Solid Waste Management Rules, and the municipal privatization and mechanization of solid waste management practice. The study is informed by 10 months of ethnographic research and a series of interviews and group discussions with women recyclers between 2016 and 2018. Using a feminist embodied Urban Political Ecology approach, I suggest the imagining and production of the ‘clean and green’ world-class city is affecting Dalit women recyclers’ work in two ways. First, I argue that emerging cleanliness governance mechanisms and solid waste management practices are re-spatializing and masculinizing waste labour in the city. I show how spatial, discursive and temporal shifts in solid waste management are producing new challenges for Dalit women recyclers in accessing waste, intensifying their physical and financial burdens and requiring more precarious adaptations to generate daily incomes. Second, I explore women recyclers’ own clean city aspirations, expressing a desire to experience the ‘clean and green’ city and a simultaneous sense of betrayal as their livelihoods, communities and bodies are excluded from its imagining and material production. I suggest that an embodied intersectional analysis of waste labour reveals how the imagining and production of clean and sustainable ‘modern’ cities can cause damage to socially marginalized and gendered bodies as they are displaced from work and denied the substantive experience of urban citizenship in the ‘world-class’ city. Attention to embodiment thus deepens an understanding of the complexities and contradictions invoked in urban environmental governance and infrastructural transformations, informing the imagining and production of more equitable and reparative urban futures.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-18T04:29:32Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221102374
       
  • Water with larvae: Hydrological fertility, inequality, and mosquito
           urbanism

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      Authors: Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Aedes aegypti, the primary vector for dengue, chikungunya and zika, breeds mainly in stored/stagnant water and thrives in contexts of rapid urbanization in tropical countries. Some have warned that climate change, in conjunction with urbanization, could drive the proliferation of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. In Colombia dengue has been endemic since the 1990s and the country had the highest number of cases of zika virus in the world after Brazil. Studies have found that domestic stored water contributes to high percentages of the total Ae. aegypti pupal population in Colombian urban sectors. In particular, neighborhoods where water service provision is intermittent are vulnerable to mosquito-borne diseases as water is stored inside households. This article draws on archival work, interviews, and entomological literature to reflect on the ways in which rapid urbanization in the context of armed conflict, infrastructural inequality, the absence of formal jobs, and specific water laws and regulations produce water and Aedes aegypti in the city. It offers an initial attempt to theorize water with larvae by focusing on two interrelated processes. First, the historical and geographic processes that underlie the production of stored water, which despite being treated can become a place of fertility where mosquitoes can flourish. Secondly, the processes by which water, mosquitoes, pathogens, and human bodies become interrelated. This entails thinking about some homes in Barranquilla as socioecological assemblages that are dynamically produced, socially and materially.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-18T04:29:12Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221099801
       
  • Working with the end of water: Infrastructure, labour, and everyday
           futures of socio-environmental collapse in Mexico city

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      Authors: Alejandro De Coss-Corzo
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper analyses how everyday futures of socio-environmental collapse are constituted by the situated interactions of people and infrastructure in Mexico City. I posit that everyday futures emerge at the intersection of infrastructures as accretions of socio-environmental projects, processes, and promises, and the situated practices that specific groups and individuals deploy when engaging with them. Here, I develop this argument by analysing the labour practices through which repair and maintenance workers and engineers at SACMEX, Mexico City's public water utility, engage with infrastructures that are tensed on the edge of breakdown. To do so, I introduce the notion of ‘modes of everyday futurity’, which holds together the infrastructural conditions that enable the emergence of everyday futures, and the labour practices that enact them differentially. I show how Mexico City's hydraulic infrastructures are shaped by austerity, the demands to supply and dispose of water to deal with the historical problems of excess and scarcity, and by the specific geological and hydrological conditions of the city. I then look at how workers and engineers engage differently with these infrastructures and show how these interactions produce two distinct modes of everyday futurity: management and displacement. The former enacts a future where catastrophe has already happened but not yet fully unfolded and can only be tactically contained in uneven ways. The latter enacts one where catastrophe might be still displaced spatiotemporally through the construction of new hydraulic infrastructures which promise to reiterate urban modernity not as a dream of equal progress but one of unequal survival. Interrogating the making of everyday futures in Mexico City through these modes, I contribute to literature on futurity, temporality, labour, and infrastructure across the social sciences by theorising the role that infrastructures, and the forms of labour that sustain them, have in making plural, non-linear futures.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-12T12:35:28Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221100391
       
  • Jatikaran: Caste, Rats, and the control of space at the Karni Mata Mandir

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      Authors: Kyle J. Trembley
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper explores how multispecies relationships with a range of nonhuman actors shape and are shaped by the politics of caste and religion in the multi-caste-species spaces of the Karni Mata Mandir, a popular pilgrimage and tourist site in Deshnoke, Rajasthan that has become sensationally renowned as India's “rat temple.” However, to members of the dominant-caste Charan community, who administer and work in the Karni Mata Temple, the twenty thousand inhabitants of the temple are entirely different from rats—they are kaba, the reincarnated descendants of Charans from the lineage of Karni Mata and they are considered and cared for as kin by members of the Charan community. Charans differentiate kaba from rats through a variety of discursive and material means such as the surveillance and control of the temple's boundaries, discourses of health and hygiene, concepts of transmigration, and practices of consumption and touch. These ways of differentiating rats and kaba intersect with those mobilized by Charans in practices of caste and the exclusion of local Dalit communities from the inner temple, particularly Valmikis, who comprise the second largest population of workers employed by the temple. Drawing upon ethnographic research and insights from multispecies studies, Dalit studies, and critical race studies, this article examines interdependent, relational processes of jatikaran, or processes through which human and nonhuman bodies become reified along caste, species, and other classificatory lines at the Karni Mata Mandir.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-04-18T09:20:41Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221094132
       
  • Tiger atmospheres and co-belonging in mangrove worlds

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      Authors: Michele Lobo, Ashraful Alam, Sumana Bandyopadhyay
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article adopts a place-based approach to explore tiger atmospheres in the Sundarbans, a transboundary environmental commons and major climatic hotspot in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta of India and Bangladesh. We argue that affective intensities of greed (lobh), fear (bhaya), respect (srodhya), trust (biswas) and empathy (karuna) sensed by the tiger subject contribute to novel theoretical as well as empirical insights into co-belonging and intersectional multispecies justice. We explore these animal atmospheres through multi-sited ethnographic research that include embodied observations, photographs, 31 in-depth interviews and focus groups with impoverished as well as racialised low-caste Hindus (Dalits/Scheduled Castes), Adivasis (Indigenous peoples) and Muslim forest-dwellers in India and Bangladesh. This attention to more-than-human geographies, animal atmospheres and subaltern stories situated in the Bengal delta unsettles macro-narratives of forest conservation and wildlife management that reduce animals to passive subjects or alternatively make them killable.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-02-28T12:22:24Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221079465
       
  • Fossilized conservation, or the unsustainability of saving nature in South
           Africa

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      Authors: Bram Büscher, Stasja Koot, Lerato Thakholi
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper argues that the conservation sector in South Africa is fossilized – unsustainable, outmoded and resistant to change – in two integrated ways. First, it is completely dependent on and steeped in fossil fuels and mineral extraction. The historical development of the South African economy's reliance on fossil and mineral resources provides the basis for this dependency but has since tentacularized into the very fabric of conservation and associated wildlife economies in the country. This unsustainable basis of the sector places a major stain on the ways in which South Africa's biodiversity is ‘saved’ for posterity. Second and relatedly, the social and labour relations that make up conservation in South Africa are fossilized in particularly racialized and gendered ways. This is socially unsustainable, as most of these relations are unjust and exploitative. Building on theories of fossil energy and labour relations that emphasise their everyday character, we argue that confronting the fossilized state of conservation in South Africa is necessary in and of itself, and a prerequisite for a broader societal transformation to sustainability. We conclude that the effective chances for this to happen are low, especially given the massive conservation attention on combatting rhino poaching in the last decade. This seems to have reinforced rather than alleviated the status quo.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-01-27T01:48:58Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486211062002
       
  • ‘Without white people, the animals will go!’: COVID-19 and the
           struggle for the future of South African conservation

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      Authors: Scott Burnett
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural crisis, the meaning of which was contested by a broad range of social actors in traditional and on social media. In 30 online news videos, racial hierarchies of land ownership and conservation labour geographies are reproduced and legitimated, as is a visual vocabulary of conservation as equivalent with guns, boots, and anti-poaching patrols. Here, hope is represented as residing in the increased privatization of public goods, and the extraction of value from these goods in the form of elite, luxury consumption. In a corpus of posts on Twitter corpus, on the other hand, significant counter-hegemonic resistance to established neoliberal conservation models is in evidence. In their replies to white celebrity conservationist Kevin Pietersen, critical South African Twitter users offer a contrasting vision of hope grounded in anti-racist equality, a rejection of any special human-animal relations enjoyed by Europeans, and an articulation of a future with land justice at its centre. The analysis supports the idea that in the “interregnum” between hegemonic social orders, pathways towards transformed futures may be glimpsed as “kernels of truth” in discursive struggles on social media.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-01-11T10:34:23Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486211069884
       
  • Towards the arboreal side-effects of marronage: Black geographies and
           ecologies of the Jamaican forest

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      Authors: Alex A Moulton
      First page: 3
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The English colonial plan of converting Jamaica into a settler colony was challenged by the Maroons who established communities in the interior of the island. Living in the forests at the edge of the expanding plantation system, Maroons were feared by aspiring white settlercolonists. The zone where the plantation and white settlements met the Maroon de-facto territory became a frontier zone, where race, belonging, and freedom were contested. The Maroons inspired Black revolt and dreams of freedom, but after signing treaties ending their war against the English in the mid-18th century, the Maroons became dreaded by non-Maroon Blacks in Jamaica. Fear of the Maroons had productive and protective effects on the physical environment; the conservation of much of Jamaica's interior was one of these effects. The paper uses colonial era admissions of this fear as openings for showing how Jamaican conservation was shaped by the Maroons as spatial actors. The paper proposes conceptualizing the afforesting outcomes of marronage as arboreal side-effects, geographical and ecological consequences that are denied in foremost accounts of colonial forest conservation. The paper illustrates the importance of considering Black spatial thought, race and the geographic imaginary (Black Geographies) alongside the connections between antiblackness, the exploitation of nature, and the imperatives of ecological justice (Black ecologies). Reading Maroon practices and histories through and as Black geographies, the paper argues for a subaltern environmental history of Jamaica that affirms Black spatial agency and epistemologies. Consequently, the paper helps clarify marronage as a material-ecological as well as social-political process that is always shaped by the morphology of power and the landscape.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-31T03:29:07Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221103757
       
  • Experimenting with fog: Environmental infrastructures, infrastructuring
           environments, and the infrastructure of infrastructure

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      Authors: Chakad Ojani
      First page: 24
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In coastal Peru, conservationists and scientists attend to fog as something that may be captured and transformed into water. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Limeñan conservationists who tapped into this atmospheric phenomenon as an alternative water source for use in fog oasis ecosystem reforestation. As I demonstrate, experimental engagements with fog had reconfigured conservationists’ and other experimenters’ understanding about the connections between the atmosphere, vegetation, and the underground, thereby bringing into view a hitherto imperceptible environmental infrastructure of groundwater production. The infrastructural potentials of the landscape were in turn foregrounded by the conservationists through comparisons with other geographies well-known for their capacity to produce water. Against this backdrop, the article argues for renewed attention to the infrastructural as a comparative effect resulting from simultaneous fore/backgrounding. Rather than mere grounds for second-order processes, infrastructural relations can be understood as situated between foreground and background. As environmental calamities complicate the infrastructure–environment nexus, it is no longer clear what infrastructures consist of, nor what they are capable of doing. In this context, an understanding of infrastructures as comparative effects is useful for describing and speculatively amplifying potentially more sustainable infrastructural alternatives.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-03T07:56:54Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221101458
       
  • From “trust” to “trustworthiness”: Retheorizing dynamics of trust,
           distrust, and water security in North America

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      Authors: Nicole J Wilson, Teresa Montoya, Yanna Lambrinidou, Leila M Harris, Benjamin J Pauli, Deborah McGregor, Robert J Patrick, Silvia Gonzalez, Gregory Pierce, Amber Wutich
      First page: 42
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Assumptions of trust in water systems are widespread in higher-income countries, often linked to expectations of “modern water.” The current literature on water and trust also tends to reinforce a technoscientific approach, emphasizing the importance of aligning water user perceptions with expert assessments. Although such approaches can be useful to document instances of distrust, they often fail to explain why patterns differ over time, and across contexts and populations. Addressing these shortcomings, we offer a relational approach focused on the trustworthiness of hydro-social systems to contextualize water-trust dynamics in relation to broader practices and contexts. In doing so, we investigate three high-profile water crises in North America where examples of distrust are prevalent: Flint, Michigan; Kashechewan First Nation; and the Navajo Nation. Through our theoretical and empirical examination, we offer insights on these dynamics and find that distrust may at times be a warranted and understandable response to experiences of water insecurity and injustice. We examine the interconnected experiences of marginality and inequity, ontological and epistemological injustice, unequal governance and politics, and histories of water insecurity and harm as potential contributors to untrustworthiness in hydro-social systems. We close with recommendations for future directions to better understand water-trust dynamics and address water insecurity.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-20T08:17:03Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221101459
       
  • Where land meets sea: Islands, erosion and the thing-power of hard coastal
           protection structures

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      Authors: Alex Arnall
      First page: 69
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In the last few decades, hard coastal protection structures, such as seawalls and groynes, have become increasingly commonplace around the world. Conventionally, the effects of such structures have been considered within a modernist framework that evaluates the degree of human control over the land–sea interface. However, this dominant viewpoint overlooks the central role that sea defences play in the ongoing production of coastal communities, particularly in small island states. This paper responds to these issues by revealing how coastal protection structures, as contingently performed material configurations, are devised and come into being and the social relations that these structures create and influence. Drawing on empirical research undertaken on a small island in the Maldives over a period of 6 years, the paper demonstrates not only the challenges that coastal communities face in attempting to exert control over the unruly sea but also the thing-power of the protection measures themselves that are made and unmade as part of this process. These findings suggest the need for sensitivity towards the social roles and effects of hard coastal protection structures when devising approaches and policies that might see the decommissioning of such structures in favour of softer, ‘nature-based’ responses to the vitality of the non-human world. As structures with their own unique material complexities, hard defence measures are deeply involved in the production of multinatural island futures.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-23T05:32:41Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221101461
       
  • Endless modernisation: Power and knowledge in the Green Morocco Plan

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      Authors: Andrea Mathez, Alex Loftus
      First page: 87
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      In 2008, in the aftermath of the World Food Crisis and in a context of an unfolding New Green Revolution for Africa, Morocco launched the Green Morocco Plan to ‘modernise’ its agricultural sector, thereby making the latter the main driver for economic growth and for the alleviation of rural poverty. Yet, the technicist-productivist rationale of the Green Morocco Plan, characteristic of New Green Revolution modernisation schemes, renders any positive socio-ecological outcome unlikely. Hence, recent studies of the Green Morocco Plan have focused on its impacts on food security, inequality and environment. However, how the Green Morocco Plan's rationale is (re)produced within a given set of socio-ecological, material relations has to date attracted relatively little attention. This study, therefore, explores the power-knowledge dynamics of the modernisation discourse within the Green Morocco Plan as a driver of socio-ecological change. Bringing together insights from political ecology, critical development and agri-food studies, we show how the entangled set of ideological, material, political and technical processes embodied within the Green Morocco Plan favours a reductionist view of agricultural development as increasing yields and profits. In so doing, such a view perpetuates efforts to ‘modernise’ smallholder/family farming.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-16T07:03:08Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221101541
       
  • Water footprints and sewage management challenges in second home tourism

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      Authors: Jan Kloster Staunstrup, Anne-Mette Hjalager, Rasmus Nedergård Steffansen, Michael Tophøj Sørensen
      First page: 113
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      While water consumption and water conservation have been issues in the discussion of sustainable tourism for many years, the residual part of the water cycle, the management of wastewater, lacks attention in tourism and planning research. This study addresses the wastewater challenges in Danish second home tourism. More than 200,000 second homes represent an important touristic resource both for owners and for short-term renters, and increasingly, the accommodation capacity is used over the whole year. Data from the building and housing register (BBR) show that only 54% of second homes are connected to public sewage and purification utilities. The remaining second homes rely on individual solutions such as septic tanks. A substantial regional variance can be partly explained by differences in the spatial layout and location of second homes, but mainly the dissimilar priorities in the responsible municipalities are the result of systemic factors following semi-privatized governance structures. The intensified use of second homes, rising ground water levels, more frequent climate incidences and EU and national quality obligations for the environmental standards of waterways and seas are and will in the future be challenges for the municipal wastewater management. A mobilization of second home owners and users to support updated wastewater infrastructures is hampered by the principles laid down in the governance structures.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-23T05:35:44Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221101554
       
  • Infrastructuring drip irrigation: The gendered assembly of farmers,
           laborers and state subsidy programs

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      Authors: Trevor Birkenholtz
      First page: 132
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper examines the relationship between the diffusion of drip irrigation technology, state subsidy programs to encourage its adoption by farmers, and gendered labor dynamics. Drip irrigation is promoted globally as a water conserving agricultural innovation that enhances water-use and productive efficiency by increasing yields with less water, while freeing up “saved” water for other uses. India leads the world in its rate of expansion and in total area. Relying on analyses of government drip irrigation policies and ethnographic field research conducted between 2015 and 2020 in the Indian state of Rajasthan, I find the successful diffusion of drip irrigation is dependent upon state subsidies, farmer adoption decisions and the availability of female labor. I engage conceptual work on water conservation technologies, and from feminist political ecology and infrastructure studies to argue: (1) the diffusion of drip irrigation is better understood as a gendered process of infrastructuring; which (2) is an ongoing process of the assembly of state subsidies, the aggregation of decentralized individual farmer adoption decisions, and the availability of on-demand, underpaid female labor; where (3) female laborers provide a “feminine labor subsidy” that produces productive efficiency gains and lends drip irrigation infrastructure its durability. Conceptualizing drip irrigation as a gendered process of infrastructuring, renders visible its emergent and gendered material politics. The conclusion discusses prospects for reassembling drip irrigation infrastructure in more materially just ways and its implications for the political ecology of water infrastructure.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-16T07:03:05Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221100386
       
  • Contested estuary ontologies: The conflict over the fairway adaptation of
           the Elbe River, Germany

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      Authors: Jonas Hein, Jannes Thomsen
      First page: 153
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The ongoing fairway adaptation of the Elbe Estuary is one of the most contested infrastructure projects in Germany in recent years. After a 17-year, highly contested planning process, delayed by a number of court proceedings, the dredging works started in 2019. The dredging aimed to establish a depth of at least 17.40 m below mean sea level, permitting the port to handle larger container vessels independent of the tide. Environmental NGOs, fishers and the riverine municipalities claim that the dredging will lead to habitat destruction, terminate the fishery in the estuary, and that it violates the European Water Framework Directive. The conflict illustrates that knowledge production, political economy and power are closely intertwined and provides evidence that some planning conflicts go even deeper than this. They are ultimately rooted in different ‘estuary ontologies’, in the different ways in which nature is enacted, and in different imaginations of possible futures for the Elbe estuary and its riverine population. Based on qualitative interviews with the actors who are involved in, observe or fight against the intervention, and on a content analysis of press articles and webpages, we unravel the complex relations between political economy, knowledge production and the different performances of reality which characterize the ongoing conflict over the fairway adaptation. We relate competing narratives, knowledge claims and ontologies to the actors promoting and challenging the fairway adaptation. Finally, we identify multiple estuary realities, which are enacted by specific practices performed by fishers, port authorities and environmental NGOs.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-18T04:28:59Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221098825
       
  • Disasters and indigenous peoples: A critical discourse analysis of the
           expert news media

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      Authors: A Mosurska, A Clark-Ginsberg, S Sallu, JD Ford
      First page: 178
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Attempts to shift the ways disasters have traditionally been managed away from authoritarian, top-down approaches toward more bottom-up and inclusive processes often involve incorporating viewpoints from marginalised and vulnerable groups. Recently as part of this process, there have been calls for greater inclusion of Indigenous peoples in disaster management. In theory, this also suggests a shift in power structures, towards recognising Indigenous peoples as experts in disaster management. However, in popular imagination and policy Indigenous peoples often appear to be caricatured and misrepresented, for instance through tropes of Indigenous peoples as custodians of the environment or especially vulnerable to environmental change. These framings matter because they can result in disaster management policies and practices that do not capture Indigenous peoples’ complex realities. However, these framings have not been analysed in the context of disasters. In this article, we aim to better understand these framings through a critical discourse analysis of how Indigenous peoples in disasters are represented in the expert news media. We identify five discourses, including a dominant one of disasters as natural phenomena to be addressed through humanitarianism and technocratic interventions. Such discourses render Indigenous peoples helpless, depoliticize disasters and are justified by framing governments and NGOs as caring for Indigenous peoples. However, we also identify competing discourses that focus on systems of oppression and self-determination in disaster management. These discourse recognise disasters as political and include discussion of the role of colonialism in disaster creation. As care emerged as a means through which intervention was justified, we conclude by asking questions of who is cared for/about in disasters and how that care is performed.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-16T07:37:17Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221096371
       
  • Preparing the grounds for emancipation. Explaining commoning as an
           emancipatory mechanism through dialectical social theory

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      Authors: Nathalie Bergame, Sara Borgström, Rebecka Milestad
      First page: 202
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      While there is evidence that commons have the potential to counteract socio-spatial injustices unleashed by neoliberal and capitalist forms of urbanisation, less is known about how commons lead to emancipatory change. Anchored in dialectical social theory, this article explains commoning as a mechanism through which people reproduce/transform their structural context and agency, arguing that the potential for emancipation through commoning lies in the commoners’ ability to induce processes of structural/agential transformation. Empirically grounded in interviews with urban community gardeners in the City of Stockholm, Sweden, we show that collective gardening conceptualised as practice of commoning contributes to structural change in that female volunteer labour collectivises the mandate over municipally managed public space, transforming socio-spatial relations. Yet, garden commoning proves to reproduce structural whiteness and middle-class agency in public space, fails to establish autonomy from waged-labour relations, and is unable to abolish the separation from the sources of reproduction and subsistence.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-04-15T05:47:46Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221092717
       
  • Mines, plantations, and militarisation: Environmental conflicts in
           Tinsukia, Assam

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      Authors: Sanjay Barbora, Sarat Phukan
      First page: 222
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Two large-scale environmental disasters in Assam's easternmost district Tinsukia, raised great passion and held much traction in local print, electronic and social media platforms in 2020. The National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) granted post-facto approval for opencast mining in Saleki Proposed Reserved Forest (PRF) under Dehing-Patkai Elephant Reserve in Assam. Later, the public sector company, Oil India Limited (OIL) reported a gas leak in Baghjan that resulted in a major blowout resulting in deaths and displacement in the area. In this article, we argue that these events constitute a tragic outcome of decades of appropriation of natural resources by the oil, tea and coal industry all of which depend on obsolete technologies of extraction. We focus on how this is happening in a place that has several disaffected, marginalised people who once relied on agriculture for their livelihoods. We argue that these two events are not aberrations in the global narrative of inter-governmental concerns for climate change. Instead, we believe that they are part of a global template of re-colonisation that continued long after the formal transfers of power that occurred in Africa and Asia in the 20th century.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-04-06T06:02:44Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221089820
       
  • The violence of involuntary resettlement and emerging resistance in
           Mozambique's Limpopo National Park: The role of physical and social
           infrastructure

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      Authors: Kei Otsuki
      First page: 240
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Nature conservation turns violent when it leads to enclosure, dispossession and militarisation, causing suffering among people living in the environment that is to be protected. Resettlement projects are meant to facilitate the process of repossession for dispossessed people as the proponents promise improved housing and physical infrastructure outside the protected area. While scholarly attention has been paid to the violence of dispossession, little is known about the ways in which the post-resettlement built environment turns violent for displaced people as well as people remaining in the protected area. Drawing on field research on water infrastructure in two resettlement villages in Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP), this paper analyses how the violence of resettlement is entrenched in the material, ecological and political framework that shapes the resettlement project. It pays particular attention to the process by which the resettled citizens struggle with the everyday sufferings in their new built environment in order to expose how physical infrastructure and the lack thereof led to new social infrastructure, which have enabled the remaining park residents’ resistance against resettlement. The emerging resistance indicates the urgent need to pay attention to the built environment expanding outside the conservation area in order to address the violence of resettlement as well as to pursue nature conservation itself.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-03-25T05:18:22Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221089161
       
  • Scientific expertise and volunteer power in the Cook County forest
           preserves

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      Authors: Natalie Bump Vena
      First page: 259
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Through a historical case study, this paper explores the political potential of volunteerism in urban natural resources management. As governments continue to rely on unpaid labor to perform essential services, volunteerism has proliferated in urban protected lands during the neoliberal era. It is therefore worthwhile to study the power that volunteers may wield at their service sites, alongside the scholarly attention already paid to the inefficacy and the inadequacy of volunteer labor. By drawing on science and technology studies literature, especially concerning the role of citizen science in activist movements, this article analyzes how volunteer stewards influenced natural resources policy in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. A local agency, the district is responsible for nearly 70,000 acres in the county that encompasses Chicago, IL. For most of the twentieth century, forestation constituted the district's official land management policy, as leaders sought to match its ecologically diverse holdings to the agency's name. In the late 1970s, volunteers won permission from the district to begin restoring prairies in the forest preserves. Working autonomously, volunteer stewards cultivated expert credibility in the science of ecological restoration. Over several decades, they drew on their scientific authority to convince forest preserve leaders to adopt ecological restoration as the district's primary land management policy, a process culminating in the early twenty-first century. The paper also explores the fragility of volunteer authority rooted in scientific expertise, by tracking how an anti-restoration movement and, later, forest preserve staff members successfully undercut volunteer expertise in ecological restoration.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-04-05T06:36:30Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221087103
       
  • Modernity, landscape conquest, and the mobility politics of stilt-walking
           in Landes region, France

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      Authors: Teo Wickland
      First page: 280
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Histories of stilt-walking in the Landes de Gascogne reveal intertwinements between mobility politics and landscape modernization. Reading these stories through a lens of “landscape conquest” centers the ongoing presence of coloniality in modernity, while highlighting the ways in which modernization produces homogeneity. This process of making every place more like anywhere else is more-than-physical. Universal landscape features, including universal mobility cultures, reproduce universal ways of thinking and relating. This depauperation enables the continual conquest of natural, cultural, epistemological, and phenomenological diversity. Conversely, landscape diversification, including the diversification of mobility cultures, could support abundant futures.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-03-29T07:38:40Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221087104
       
  • “Making do”: Religious segregation and everyday water
           struggles

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      Authors: Vrushti Mawani
      First page: 311
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      I illustrate through this paper how contemporary water (in)justice results from interactions between historical, socio-political, technical, and economic relations, and how such water (in)justice is emotionally experienced and embodied. Focusing on the case of Faizalpur, a low-income Muslim neighborhood in segregated Ahmedabad, I draw on lived experiences approaches to water justice and on an emotional political ecology framework to offer a multi-scalar analysis set across urban, community, and individual scales. I show how the settlement of low-income Muslim families in Faizalpur is inseparable from both the (il)legal status of this land and the religious segregation that have shaped this city. In turn, everyday experiences of water injustice in Faizalpur are premised in contestations relating to the site's land use zoning history. I illustrate how in this contested site carefully framed requests make municipal water infrastructure possible even though such infrastructure is technically disallowed here. The careful-ness of such requests lies in skirting issues pertaining to (il)legality, instead activating other discursive categories, such as ‘humanitarian’ need: categories that possess the moral power to outweigh legal and technical arguments. I suggest that everyday experiences of water (in)justice cannot be understood without attending to the discursive power of planning terms like ‘illegality’ and ‘land use zoning’. Emotionally experienced everyday water struggles in Faizalpur, in the form of anger, trust, fear, grief, etc., need to be understood then as emotional everyday experiences of religious segregation.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-06-07T05:20:06Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221086481
       
  • Bouncing back' Kangaroo-human resistance in contemporary Australia

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      Authors: Sophie Chao
      First page: 331
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This article explores how human and animal agencies shape the socio-ecological lifeworlds of kangaroos as cultural icons, native wildlife, problematic pests, and commercial meat in contemporary Australia. Kangaroos’ resistance to Western, colonial ways of knowing and ordering the world fundamentally challenged the classificatory logic and foundations of early natural science. Kangaroos’ biological and behavioral resistance to domestication and farming – the traditional loci of animal exploitation – speaks to their inherent wildness, at the same time as it reveals their complicated dependence on ecosystems adapted for introduced livestock. Meanwhile, kangaroos’ resistance to government-endorsed population control programs, and the contested logic of (over)abundance that justifies kangaroo culling, both challenges and legitimates human calculations of who and what “counts” as worth conserving or killing. In tandem, the sensorial and symbolic valences of kangaroo flesh, compounded with the growing voices of animal welfare movements, generate visceral and political resistance to kangaroo meat as an unpalatable foodstuff. The article further centers the polysemic valences of kangaroos as a form of resistance to symbolic unity and coherence. Existing as many things at once, kangaroos eschew classification and treatment as any one thing. Instead, their ontology multiplies across the many epistemologies vying to determine kangaroos’ actual being and future becoming. The article concludes by assessing the opportunities and challenges of centering resistance and its diverse epistemic, vitalist, symbolic, and carnal manifestations to understand animal lifeways and deathways amidst entrenched capitalist and colonial regimes, whose reproduction depends on the production of the non-human as “killable.”
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-03-15T08:40:52Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221084194
       
  • An intersectional approach to neoliberal environmentality: Women's
           engagement with ecotourism at Corbett Tiger Reserve, India

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      Authors: Revati Pandya
      First page: 355
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Research in environmentality has provided an analysis of environmentally friendly subject formation through the influence of conservation governance. Within this research, examination of subject formation from the local community perspective is also gaining attention. However, a gender perspective in environmentality research remains marginal. This study thus contributes to environmentality research by drawing on intersectional feminist political ecology to examine women's engagement with ecotourism in the context of India's Corbett Tiger Reserve. Ecotourism as a form of market-based conservation has been commonly framed as an expression of neoliberal environmentality. Neoliberal environmentality is reflected in market-centred incentives used to promote conservation and support for local people via employment in conservation-based work - a supposedly ‘win-win’ dynamic. Through ethnographic research, I provide insights into different forms of women's engagement with tourism. The analysis reveals that this engagement does not necessarily produce the environmentally friendly subject that environmentality analysis predicts. Rather, women's engagement is shaped by intersecting dynamics of caste and class and motivated by factors including but not limited to monetary benefits. This study thus questions the dominant approach to investigating neoliberal environmentality in particular, that tends to emphasise the influence of monetary incentives in producing environmentally friendly subjects.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-03-07T10:42:10Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221082469
       
  • Relational Displacement and the Colonial Legacies of Copper Mining in the
           Kalahari Copperbelt Region of Botswana

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      Authors: Justyn Huckleberry
      First page: 373
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Displacements are understood as having wide-ranging impacts on livelihoods and community access to resources. Using interviews and oral histories of farmers displaced by a copper mine in Botswana, the research described here demonstrates that displacement not only changes lived experiences of those who are displaced, but also has broad relational impacts by dispersing displaced people's family members and neighbors, disenfranchising farmers from their cattle and land, shifting the ways that human-wildlife conflict plays out, and creating a new and disruptive relationship between cattle farmers and the mining industry. Postcolonial and Indigenous scholars have long written about human-animal kinship and ongoing colonial and capitalist relations that weave (sometimes disparate) communities closer together or further apart. The work described here demonstrates that this knowledge allows for a clearer understanding of how displacement impacts the material and relational worlds of people and nonhumans displaced by the disruptive forces of resource development.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-02-23T01:50:06Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221081391
       
  • The socio-ecological contradictions of land degradation and coastal
           agriculture in south India

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      Authors: C.M. Pratheepa, Rengalakshmi Raj, Shreya Sinha
      First page: 391
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper examines the drivers and impacts of degradation of agricultural land in a village in a South Indian coastal delta. Drawing on insights from political economy and political ecology scholarship, it argues that there is a dialectical relation between land degradation and social inequalities, i.e. the biophysical degeneration of land is not only caused by human and environmental factors but it also generates social contradictions which further intensify both land degradation and social inequalities. The paper demonstrates, firstly, that coastal land degradation has been generated in the form of soil salinity through a confluence of the inherent environmental vulnerabilities of the region, forces of commoditization (especially those associated with shrimp aquaculture), existing social hierarchies and state policy. Secondly, it shows that social groups differentiated by caste, class and gender have experienced these changes differently. A small, relatively well-off section of the locally dominant caste landowners has benefitted from shifting from paddy to shrimp aquaculture, which is leading to a further increase in salinisation. Others have to bear the brunt of decreasing productivity of land for crop cultivation, leading them to abandon or reduce cultivation and increase dependence on non-agricultural sources of income, especially through male outmigration. Women's burden of work has increased while their capacity to earn wage-income has declined. Without any concerted state effort to either restore the land or to alleviate the widespread agrarian distress, land degradation has developed into a continuously evolving downward spiral, but one where there will still be some winners and many losers.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-03-07T10:42:06Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221079720
       
  • Urban oceans: Social differentiation in the city and the sea

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      Authors: Jesse Rodenbiker
      First page: 412
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper argues that the urban and the ocean are co-constituted through relations that are unevenly classed, gendered, and racialized. This argument is empirically anchored in high-value fish maw markets in Hong Kong, New York City, and the oceanic spaces and lives therein. The global inter-urban trade in Totoaba, an endangered fish endemic to the Gulf of California, serves as a primary example of piscine capital circulation, while supporting examples engage a much longer durée of urban ocean relations. Agrarian technologies appropriated through colonial trans-oceanic trade, for instance, are shown to be precursors of Euro-American industrial urbanization, while whale bodies were crucial to urban politics of difference and producing urban spaces in 19th century U.S. cities. Contemporary fisheries on the high seas exemplify how ocean spaces remain frontiers of unfree labor and natural resource extraction that contribute to capital accumulation in global cities. Through these examples, the article details how the ocean is urbanized, how the urban is constituted through the ocean, as well as some of the differentiated social formations and socio-natural effects of urban oceanic relationships. Urban oceanic processes of exploitation, extraction, circulation, and consumption predispose marginalized people and ocean wildlife to premature deaths. Urban oceanic relations could be otherwise constituted. Towards reconstituting these relations, the paper advances a hybrid analytical framework that ungrounds the urban from terrestrial conceptual moorings through engaging interdisciplinary ocean geographies.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-02-14T03:32:53Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221078690
       
  • AirPods and the earth: Digital technologies, planned obsolescence and the
           Capitalocene

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      Authors: Sy Taffel
      First page: 433
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Apple's AirPods have helped forge a multibillion-dollar market for true wireless hearable devices. The article employs media geology and political ecology to argue that AirPods exemplify the Capitalocene, a time where a planetary sociotechnical system based on ecologically unequal exchange benefits a privileged minority of humans while inflicting significant harms to humans and ecosystems that will persist across inhuman temporalities. These harms are inequitably distributed and are not typically experienced by those who can afford luxury items such as AirPods. While digital technologies are often mistaken for dematerialised objects that will enable infinite economic growth on a materially finite planet, examining the flows of energy, matter, labour and knowledge required for the production and maintenance of these devices comprehensively refutes these claims. AirPods are designed to function for just eighteen to thirty-six months of daily use before planned obsolescence renders AirPods as long-lived, toxic, electronic waste. Pending ‘right to repair’ legislation should prohibit the production of irreparable digital devices such as AirPods, as the right to repair an irreparable device is effectively meaningless.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-01-31T11:10:00Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221076136
       
  • Regulating pests—material politics and calculation in integrated
           pest management

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      Authors: Leon Wolff
      First page: 455
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      This paper attempts to shed some light on current biopolitics of food and environmental security by analyzing the strategy of Integrated pest management (IPM). IPM is an ecological form of pest management that emerged in the United States in the 1950s in response to the pesticide crisis and now informs numerous pesticide legislations around the world. The paper analyzes IPM as a governmental hinge that aims to reconcile the conflicting goals of food security and environmental security. To this end, the paper makes three intertwined arguments. First, through an examination of scientific texts from the field of economic entomology, the paper shows how biological and chemical pest control methods are produced as two conflicting materialities that must be mediated. In a second step, the text shows how economically defined thresholds and cost-benefit analyzes are used to level the difference between these two materialities and make them commensurable. Finally, it elaborates how IPM aims primarily at transforming farmers’ practices. The use of chemicals in agriculture is to be reduced by transforming farmers into calculating subjects. Overall, the article aims to show how IPM, as an important element of contemporary ecological governmentality, seeks to realize positive environmental effects in the quantitative medium of economics and science.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-02-07T10:04:44Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486221076138
       
  • The making of an uneven shore: How coastal management and housing policies
           shaped racial inequality in asbury park NJ

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      Authors: David C. Eisenhauer
      First page: 473
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Recent work in urban geography and political ecology has explored the roots of housing segregation in the United States within governmental polices and racial prejudice within the real estate sector. Additional research has demonstrated how coastal management practices has largely benefited wealthy, white communities. In this paper, I bring together insights from these two strands of research to demonstrate how both coastal management and governmental housing policies combined to shape racial inequalities within and around Asbury Park, New Jersey. By focusing on the period between 1945 and 1970, I show how local, state, and federal actors repeatedly prioritized improving and protecting the beachfront areas of the northern New Jersey shore while promising to eventually address the housing and economic needs of the predominately Black ‘West Side’ neighbourhood of Asbury Park. This paper demonstrates that not only did governmental spending on coastal management largely benefit white suburban homeowners but also came at the expense of promised spending within Black neighbourhoods. The case study has implications for other coastal regions in the United States in which housing segregation persists. As climate change and sea level rise unfold, the history of racial discrimination in coastal development raises important considerations for efforts to address emerging hazards and risks.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-01-11T03:14:47Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486211069868
       
  • Greenwashing in Palestine/Israel: Settler colonialism and environmental
           injustice in the age of climate catastrophe

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      Authors: Sara Salazar Hughes, Stepha Velednitsky, Amelia Arden Green
      First page: 495
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Israeli innovations in “green” technology are ostensibly aimed at sustainable resource management and climate change mitigation. But sustainable development and environmental (in)justice in Palestine/Israel need to be examined through interdisciplinary perspectives that account for the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts in which they occur. Taking into account the historical and geographic context of Israel's scientific development, we argue that Israel's green technologies are fundamentally structured by the Zionist project of appropriating Palestinian lands. Within settler colonial analysis, environmental injustice comprises part of a broader pattern of settler domination of Indigenous ecological relations, requiring attending not to ‘equity’ in relations with the state and environment but a reckoning with settler privilege and the return of land to Indigenous communities. We analyze the use of environmental infrastructures—specifically in the areas of waste management, renewable energy, and agricultural technologies (“agritech”)—as mechanisms for land appropriation and dispossession in Palestine/Israel. Our analysis of ‘greenwashing’ as a rhetorical strategy asserts that regardless of the ecological impact of individual technologies, in Israel's settler colonial context they further indigenous dispossession and elimination and are therefore incommensurable with long-term socio-ecological resilience. Through this analysis of Israeli greenwashing, we discuss Israeli sustainability initiatives and technological innovations not as ahistorical discourses, commodities, or technologies, but as elements of a historically situated settler colonial project.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-05-17T05:03:29Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486211069898
       
  • Politicizing disaster governance: Can a board game stimulate discussions
           around disasters as matters of concern'

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      Authors: Kewan Mertens, Bosco Bwambale, Gina Delima
      First page: 514
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      The disaster risk reduction (DRR) community tends to treat disasters and risks in a managerial and technocratic way, thereby disregarding the highly political nature of DRR. An alternative epistemology of disasters, as “matters of concern”, is proposed and tested. Mobilizing concepts from Chantal Mouffe and Bruno Latour, this paper illustrates how DRR can be transformed into a public issue. It is argued that education and policymaking on DRR would benefit from a recognition of the hybrid nature of disasters. A serious game is used to investigate proposed epistemology. The board game simulates political decision-making on the reduction of risks due to floods and landslides in South-West Uganda. It is hypothesized that the game can generate an ideal speech scenario that fosters discussions among players and possibly even creates a space of political confrontation. Discussions during ten gameplays have been recorded, transcribed and analyzed (1) to understand how the dominant epistemology facilitates an apolitical approach to disasters and (2) to understand the process of politicization and de-politicization brought about when playing the board game in order to derive recommendations for future tools to facilitate a political appreciation of disasters. Our results indicate that participants effectively experience affects, power relations and confrontations during the game, but that a call for consensus and technical solutions is used by the players to close the discussions and move on with concrete solutions. Insights from this paper contribute to understanding why DRR is frequently treated as a technical issue in local and international disaster governance. Epistemology and approaches proposed in this paper are expected to stimulate innovative experiments towards a more political approach to DRR education and policy.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-01-17T12:40:50Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486211069000
       
  • Contested Sovereignties: Indigenous disputes over plurinational resource
           governance

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      Authors: Isabella M. Radhuber, Sarah A. Radcliffe
      First page: 556
      Abstract: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ahead of Print.
      Indigenous organizations in the Andean countries of Ecuador and Bolivia originated novel proposals to pluralize sovereign arrangements through plurinational statehood. Reflecting diverse Indigenous groups’ relations with postcolonial states, these proposals created a unique basis for re-negotiating (sovereign) resource governance. Despite the constitutional endorsement of the plurinational state model however, the latest empirical evidence confirms growing state control over subsoil resources that excises Indigenous peoples from decision-making over resources. In this paper, we trace the emergence of novel agendas for sovereignty-multiplicity, showing how Indigenous agendas had anticipated the need to go beyond their rights over subsoil resources and autonomous territories. These agendas implied re-negotiating national sovereignty in light of the countries’ internal ethno-political and epistemic heterogeneity. Under nominally plurinational states however, resource governance outcomes perpetuate and normalise longstanding epistemic and power differentials between rights-bearing political subjects and Indigenous subjects. We highlight the colonial-modern bases of current sovereignty arrangements, identifying the presumptions and legal parameters that shape the dynamics between states, people and Indigenous people. Situating resource governance in relation to the concept of modernity/coloniality, we propose to (re)think sovereignty arrangements in the colonial present in light of internal heterogeneity.
      Citation: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
      PubDate: 2022-02-23T05:15:53Z
      DOI: 10.1177/25148486211068476
       
 
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