Search Results Heading

MBRLSearchResults

mbrl.module.common.modules.added.book.to.shelf
Title added to your shelf!
View what I already have on My Shelf.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Oops! Something went wrong.
While trying to add the title to your shelf something went wrong :( Kindly try again later!
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
Oops! Something went wrong.
Oops! Something went wrong.
While trying to remove the title from your shelf something went wrong :( Kindly try again later!
    Done
    Filters
    Reset
  • Discipline
      Discipline
      Clear All
      Discipline
  • Is Peer Reviewed
      Is Peer Reviewed
      Clear All
      Is Peer Reviewed
  • Reading Level
      Reading Level
      Clear All
      Reading Level
  • Content Type
      Content Type
      Clear All
      Content Type
  • Year
      Year
      Clear All
      From:
      -
      To:
  • More Filters
      More Filters
      Clear All
      More Filters
      Item Type
    • Is Full-Text Available
    • Subject
    • Country Of Publication
    • Publisher
    • Source
    • Target Audience
    • Donor
    • Language
    • Place of Publication
    • Contributors
    • Location
165 result(s) for "Forsyth, Tim"
Sort by:
Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change
International efforts to reduce and sequester carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not yet slowing the rate of global warming. Indeed, the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) anticipates rapid changes in climate even if greenhouse gas emissions are reduced quickly, and recent findings suggest that these projections are underestimated. The impacts of climate change will be severe, particularly for the most vulnerable developing countries that have the least capacity to cope. As a result, the need to support adaptation in developing countries is growing in urgency. Adaptation describes adjustments in natural or human systems in response to the impacts of climate change. Until recently, adaptation was a controversial topic in climate change policy debates, with many arguing that too much attention to adaptation - considered locally focused, inexpensive, and beneficial only in the short term - could detract from more expensive mitigation efforts for the global good. In his 1992 book, Earth in the balance, Al Gore says, \"Believing that we can adapt to just about anything is ultimately a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time.\" However, the tide is turning. Given slow progress on mitigation coupled with evidence of greater and more rapid impacts of climate change than those previously expected by the IPCC, adaptation is firmly on the international policy agenda as a crucial supplement to mitigation. Signaling this change, Gore stated in a recent interview with The Economist, \"I used to think adaptation subtracted from our efforts on prevention. But I've changed my mind... Poor countries are vulnerable and need our help.\" One growing proposal calls for a community-based approach to adaptation. Community-based adaptation operates at the local level in communities that are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. It identifies, assists, and implements community-based development activities that strengthen the capacity of local people to adapt to living in a riskier and less predictable climate. Moreover, community-based adaptation generates adaptation strategies through participatory processes, involving local stakeholders and development and disaster risk-reduction practitioners. It builds on existing cultural norms and addresses local development concerns that make people vulnerable to the impacts of climate change in the first place. Three international conferences on community-based adaptation have been organized by international organizations and think tanks since 2005, with policymakers, researchers, and development organizations among the attendees. Community-based adaptation projects are now in operation in vulnerable communities in developing and some developed countries.
Forest guardians, forest destroyers
In this far-reaching examination of environmental problems and politics in northern Thailand, Tim Forsyth and Andrew Walker analyze deforestation, water supply, soil erosion, use of agrochemicals, and biodiversity in order to challenge popularly held notions of environmental crisis. They argue that such crises have been used to support political objectives of state expansion and control in the uplands. They have also been used to justify the alternative directions advocated by an array of NGOs. In official and alternative discourses of economic development, the peoples living in Thailand's hill country are typically cast as either guardians or destroyers of forest resources, often depending on their ethnicity. Political and historical factors have created a simplistic, misleading, and often scientifically inaccurate environmental narrative: Hmong farmers, for example, are thought to exhibit environmentally destructive practices, whereas the Karen are seen as linked to and protective of their ancestral home. Forsyth and Walker reveal a much more complex relationship of hill farmers to the land, to other ethnic groups, and to the state. They conclude that current explanations fail to address the real causes of environmental problems and unnecessarily restrict the livelihoods of local people. The authors' critical assessment of simplistic environmental narratives, as well as their suggestions for finding solutions, will be valuable in international policy discussions about environmental issues in rapidly developing countries. Moreover, their redefinition of northern Thailand's environmental problems, and their analysis of how political influences have reinforced inappropriate policies, demonstrate new ways of analyzing how environmental science and knowledge are important arenas for political control. This book makes valuable contributions to Thai studies and more generally to the fields of environmental science, ecology, geography, anthropology, and political science, as well as to policy making and resource management in the developing world.
Beyond Narratives: Civic Epistemologies and the Coproduction of Environmental Knowledge and Popular Environmentalism in Thailand
Popular environmentalism can have limited democratic outcomes if it reproduces structures of social order. This article seeks to advance understandings of environmental democratization by examining the analytical framework of civic epistemologies as a complement to the current use of environmental narratives in political ecology and science and technology studies. Civic epistemologies are the preexisting dimensions of political order that the state and other actors seek to maintain as unchallengeable. They add to current analysis because they show the structures around which narratives form, as well as how knowledge and political agencies of different actors are coproduced in reductive ways. The article applies this analysis to popular environmentalism in Thailand and especially concerning community forests and logging from 1968 to present. Using a combination of interviews and content analysis of historic newspaper reporting, the article shows how diverse actors-including state, elite conservationists, and peasant activists-have organized political activism and ecological claims about forests according to unchallenged norms of appropriate community culture and behavior. These actions have kept narratives about forests and society in place and worked against alternative and arguably more empowering visions of communities and forests in recent years. The article argues that revealing civic epistemologies can contribute to a deeper form of environmental democratization than engaging in environmental politics based on existing narratives or analyzing the limitations of narratives alone. Key Words: authoritarianism, environmentalism, political ecology, science and technology studies, Thailand.
Critical Political Ecology
Critical Political Ecology brings political debate to the science of ecology. As political controversies multiply over the science underlying environmental debates, there is an increasing need to understand the relationship between environmental science and politics. In this timely and wide-ranging volume, Tim Forsyth uses an innovative approach to apply political analysis to ecology, and demonstrates how more politicised approaches to science can be used in environmental decision-making.Critical Political Ecology examines:*how social and political factors frame environmental science, and how science in turn shapes politics*how new thinking in philosophy and sociology of science can provide fresh insights into the biophysical causes and impacts of environmental problems*how policy and decision-makers can acknowledge the political influences on science and achieve more effective public participation and governance.
Who gets to imagine transformative change? Participation and representation in biodiversity assessments
According to IPBES’s Global Assessment Report, “[G]oals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors” (IPBES 2019). According to one of the assessors, the MA identified ‘local’ actors and concerns in a highly reductive way in order to provide convenient counterpoints to the MA’s overriding framework arising from a global systems perspective. [...]local’ examples and stakeholders were selected in order to illustrate the assertions of the global systems framework adopted, rather than being used to reframe the framework or to rethink the objectives, benefits or means of managing biodiversity and ecosystem services (Filer 2009). [...]opportunities for co-production and participation can arise in more diverse and distributed ways.
Hidden Alliances: Rethinking Environmentality and the Politics of Knowledge in Thailand′s Campaign for Community Forestry
This paper provides a counterpoint to recent discussions of ′eco-governmentality′ or ′environmentality,′ which analyse how states use knowledge to regulate citizens and make problems governable. Adopting the concept of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this paper argues that well-known approaches to environmentality fail to acknowledge how both state and citizens can both actively participate in reifying authoritative expertise about environmental problems; and that this expertise can be based on shared visions of social order, which also exclude alternative perspectives about environmental management. The paper illustrates this debate with the history of legislation and social movements about community forestry in Thailand, where different state agencies and non-governmental organisations have disagreed about policies, but also demonstrated hidden alliances that reify and legitimise statements about the hydraulic functions of forests that exclude long-standing scientific research or alternative options for watershed management. The paper argues that political debates about community forestry should therefore pay more attention to how political opponents agree-and the social groups and policy options that are excluded from these agreements-rather than only analyse how one party might have power over another.
Forests, development and the globalisation of justice
Norms of justice are often invoked to justify the globalisation of forest policies but are rarely critically analysed. This paper reviews elements of justice in the values, knowledge, access and property rights relating to forests, especially in developing countries. Rather than defining justice in general terms of distribution of benefits and recognition of stakeholders, we argue that these processes are mutually defining, and can foreclose what is distributed, and to whom. Much recent forest policy, for example, emphasises forest carbon stocks and the benefits to indigenous peoples; but these terms de-emphasise livelihood outcomes for forests, and non-indigenous smallholders. Accordingly, we argue that current operationalisations of justice in forest policy based on John Rawls' principles of fair allocation to known actors need to be replaced by Amartya Sen's more deliberative and inclusive vision of justice that focuses instead on how different users experience different benefits, and seek to achieve multiple objectives together.
Hidden Alliances
This paper provides a counterpoint to recent discussions of ‘eco-governmentality’ or ‘environmentality,’ which analyse how states use knowledge to regulate citizens and make problems governable. Adopting the concept of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this paper argues that well-known approaches to environmentality fail to acknowledge how both state and citizens can both actively participate in reifying authoritative expertise about environmental problems; and that this expertise can be based on shared visions of social order, which also exclude alternative perspectives about environmental management. The paper illustrates this debate with the history of legislation and social movements about community forestry in Thailand, where different state agencies and non-governmental organisations have disagreed about policies, but also demonstrated hidden alliances that reify and legitimise statements about the hydraulic functions of forests that exclude long-standing scientific research or alternative options for watershed management. The paper argues that political debates about community forestry should therefore pay more attention to how political opponents agree—and the social groups and policy options that are excluded from these agreements—rather than only analyse how one party might have power over another.