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"Dressler, Wolfram Heinz"
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Nature inc. : environmental conservation in the neoliberal age
\"\"Nature Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how 'neoliberal conservation' is reshaping human-nature relations\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Food justice or food sovereignty? Understanding the rise of urban food movements in the USA
As world food and fuel prices threaten expanding urban populations, there is greater need for the urban poor to have access and claims over how and where food is produced and distributed. This is especially the case in marginalized urban settings where high proportions of the population are food insecure. The global movement for food sovereignty has been one attempt to reclaim rights and participation in the food system and challenge corporate food regimes. However, given its origins from the peasant farmers' movement, La Via Campesina, food sovereignty is often considered a rural issue when increasingly its demands for fair food systems are urban in nature. Through interviews with scholars, urban food activists, non-governmental and grassroots organizations in Oakland and New Orleans in the United States of America, we examine the extent to which food sovereignty has become embedded as a concept, strategy and practice. We consider food sovereignty alongside other dominant US social movements such as food justice, and find that while many organizations do not use the language of food sovereignty explicitly, the motives behind urban food activism are similar across movements as local actors draw on elements of each in practice. Overall, however, because of the different histories, geographic contexts, and relations to state and capital, food justice and food sovereignty differ as strategies and approaches. We conclude that the US urban food sovereignty movement is limited by neoliberal structural contexts that dampen its approach and radical framework. Similarly, we see restrictions on urban food justice movements that are also operating within a broader framework of market neoliberalism. However, we find that food justice was reported as an approach more aligned with the socio-historical context in both cities, due to its origins in broader class and race struggles.
Journal Article
The impact of swidden decline on livelihoods and ecosystem services in Southeast Asia: A review of the evidence from 1990 to 2015
Global economic change and policy interventions are driving transitions from long-fallow swidden (LFS) systems to alternative land uses in Southeast Asia's uplands. This study presents a systematic review of how these transitions impact upon livelihoods and ecosystem services in the region. Over 17 000 studies published between 1950 and 2015 were narrowed, based on relevance and quality, to 93 studies for further analysis. Our analysis of land-use transitions from swidden to intensified cropping systems showed several outcomes: more households had increased overall income, but these benefits came at significant cost such as reductions of customary practice, socio-economic wellbeing, livelihood options, and staple yields. Examining the effects of transitions on soil properties revealed negative impacts on soil organic carbon, cation-exchange capacity, and aboveground carbon. Taken together, the proximate and underlying drivers of the transitions from LFS to alternative land uses, especially intensified perennial and annual cash cropping, led to significant declines in pre-existing livelihood security and the ecosystem services supporting this security. Our results suggest that policies imposing landuse transitions on upland farmers so as to improve livelihoods and environments have been misguided; in the context of varied land uses, swidden agriculture can support livelihoods and ecosystem services that will help buffer the impacts of climate change in Southeast Asia.
Journal Article
Fish, Trade and Food Security: Moving beyond 'Availability' Discourse in Marine Conservation
The goal of food security increasingly serves as an objective and justification for marine conservation in the global south. In the marine conservation literature this potential link is seldom based upon detailed analysis of the socioeconomic pathways between fish and food security, is often based on limited assumptions about increasing the availability of fish stocks, and downplays the role of trade. Yet, the relationship between fish and food security is multi-faceted and complex, with various local contextual factors that mediate between fish and food security. We use data from interviews and food security assessment methods to examine the relationship between fish and food security among fishing households in San Vicente, Palawan province, Philippines. We highlight the local role of income and trade, emphasising the sale offish to purchase food not easily accessible for fishers, particularly staples. In particular, we show that because rice is the primary staple of food security for these households, fish must be traded with the intent of buying rice. Trade is therefore central to household food security. We argue that the relationship between fish and food security must be considered in greater depth if marine conservation is to engage with food security as an objective.
Journal Article
Caves of Fortune? Gendered Labour Precarity and Securitisation Involving the ‘Wild’ Edible Birds’ Nest Trade in Kapuas Hulu, Indonesia
Harvesting edible birds’ nests (EBN) produced by swiftlets from caves and purpose-built dwellings has generated a new high-value, non-timber forest product-based livelihood for rural smallholders across Indonesia. Drawing on extended fieldwork, we explore the gendered labour and livelihood outcomes for households transitioning from EBN cave harvesting to domestication in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Following calls from feminist political ecology, we investigate the more visible ‘men’s work’ associated with EBN access and labour and highlight women’s pivotal, yet often overlooked, role in managing the associated household incomes and land-based livelihoods. We show how the increasing demand for ‘wild’ EBN drove significant changes in the ownership rights of caves in the region, securitisation and scarcity of the nests, and the rise in precarious labour conditions. The increasing demand for ‘wild’ EBN has intensified extraction and securitisation of caves and nests, and the precarity of work for Dayak men working as cave guards and harvesters. In response, many Dayak women—who receive and manage their husbands’ salaries—saved to scale up their household’s EBN production using purpose-built swiftlet farmhouses. Both spouses’ labour contributions were integral to securing a sustained source of income through the EBN trade, enabling income diversification and a more hopeful future for rural households.
Journal Article
The persistence of precarity: youth livelihood struggles and aspirations in the context of truncated agrarian change, South Sulawesi, Indonesia
Processes of rapid and truncated agrarian change—driven through expanding urbanisation, infrastructure development, extractive industries, and commodity crops—are shaping the livelihood opportunities and aspirations of Indonesia’s rural youth. This study describes the everyday experiences of youth as they navigate the changing character of agriculture, aquaculture, and fishing livelihoods across gender, class, and generation. Drawing on qualitative field research conducted in the Maros District of South Sulawesi, we examine young people’s experiences of agrarian change in a landscape of entangled rural, coastal and increasingly urbanised spaces. We find that young people aspire to secure, modern, and salary-based work, while continuing to seek and sustain intergenerational farming or aquaculture-based livelihoods. Youth take advantage of increased connectivity to diversify their incomes, yet their dependence on mobility also introduces new forms of gendered and class based precarity such as insecure working arrangements, disruption to education and violence (especially for young unskilled women and youth from financially insecure households). Our study highlights the persistent conditions of precarity that many young people encounter in both rural and urban settings, while challenging assumptions that youth are uninterested in rural futures.
Journal Article
On the Demise of Makkalice: Conservation Enclosure and the loss of a wealth-redistributing Harvest System in South Sulawesi, Indonesia
This article analyzes the effect of a conservation enclosure on a longstanding multi-functional harvest system found throughout rural upland villages in the Maros District of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. We examine how and why a type of redistributive harvest system, known as makkalice––the final stage of the candlenut harvest during which women and children collect the leftover produce––is in demise. Drawing on a mixed-method qualitative approach, we find that the conservation enclosure associated with the establishment of the Bantimurung-Bulusaraung National Park in 1994 prevented candlenut tree renewal, significantly reducing nut production, and limiting options for Bugis farmers and workers to participate in the redistributive harvest system. Formation of the national park limited villagers’ access to their longstanding candlenut groves, compelling farmers to adopt less secure commodity cropping options. We show how coercive conservation restrictions have created a land squeeze for rural cultivators, pushing them to intensify remaining land for more sedentary, seasonal, and market-oriented crops. Restricted access to candlenut groves, and its impact on makkalice, removed access to a ‘productive commons’ used by landless and land-poor households for generations, particularly affecting women and children. The demise of makkalice has curtailed what was once a celebrated socio-cultural practice and obstructed access to an important supplementary form of income for many households.
Journal Article
TheProspects for Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) in Vietnam: A Look at Three Payment Schemes
Global conservation discourses and practices increasingly rely on market-based solutions to fulfill the dual objective of forest conservation and economic development. Although varied, these interventions are premised on the assumption that natural resources are most effectively managed and preserved while benefiting livelihoods if the market-incentives of a liberalised economy are correctly in place. By examining three nationally supported payment for ecosystem service (PES) schemes in Vietnam we show how insecure land tenure, high transaction costs and high opportunity costs can undermine the long-term benefits of PES programmes for local households and, hence, potentially threaten their livelihood viability. In many cases, the income from PES programmes does not reach the poor because of political and economic constraints. Local elite capture of PES benefits through the monopolization of access to forestland and existing state forestry management are identified as key problems. We argue that as PES schemes create a market for ecosystem services, such markets must be understood not simply as bald economic exchanges between 'rational actors' but rather as exchanges embedded in particular socio-political and historical contexts to support the sustainable use of forest resources and local livelihoods in Vietnam.
Journal Article
Old thoughts in new ideas: Tagbanua forest use and state conservation measures at Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park, Palawan Island, Philippines
This study examines how Tagbanua responses to changes in conservation approaches have shaped forest access and use in relation to the political economy of a buffer zone village on Palawan Island, the Philippines. A recent shift from \"fences and fines\" to \"devolved\" conservation at Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park in Cabayugan has been lauded in government and non-governmental circles to support Tagbanua livelihoods while preserving the rain forest. Concurrently, however, the Tagbanua have adjusted to migrants dispossessing them of land, controlling the trade in forest products, and the means of agricultural production. Given that conservation and local resource access and use now intersect, this study asks whether \"community-based\" conservation can fulfill its own objectives while addressing older disparities in social relations of production and exchange. A history of national park and cadastral zoning has restricted Tagbanua access to forest resources while supporting settler migration onto public lands. The two-way process of park zoning and migrant control over trade and productive resources has become interrelated and shaped the evolution of conservation in Cabayugan from 1971-2001. Although older \"fences and fines\" criminalized traditional resource uses, such as swidden (kaingin), and supported state interests in expanding paddy rice cultivation (basakan ), newer community-based approaches have carried on this agenda. Going against its purported benefits, such conservation has supported the livelihoods of dominant households, both politically and economically. Over time, these households have used political economic opportunities to build on and influence how projects support their livelihoods, which has exacerbated socio-economic differences between both social groups. As a result, conservation practitioners have continued to tie into and support wealthier households' production, while fulfilling the state's agenda of curbing swidden. Confined to unequal trade and restrictions over swidden, Tagbanua livelihoods remain vulnerable and have difficulty sustaining paddy rice. With few options to reinvest, they fail to access those socio-political and economic networks that enable participation in projects that support more lucrative cultivation. Despite good intentions, current attempts by state practitioners and non-governmental organizations at livelihood development for conservation have proven to be more divisive than effective.
Dissertation