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"Norman, Emma S"
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Uncovering Discursive Framings of the Bangladesh Shipbreaking Industry
Shipbreaking in the Chittagong region of Bangladesh supplies metal to meet the needs of the nation’s construction sector. The shipbreaking industry has received international attention for environmental contamination and workers’ insecurity. However, these issues have been framed without considering the actors that produce them and their associated motives. This paper illuminates the conflicting discourses regarding the industry between two divergent groups of actors. On the one hand, national and international NGOs collaborate to enforce a discourse focused on negative localized impacts. On the other hand, yard owners, yard workers, and local community members forge a counter discourse, focused on positive localized impacts and raising doubts about the origin of the environmental pollutants and occupational standards setting. National and international actors have so far missed the conflicting perspective of workers, yard owners, locals and NGOs. We contend that these divergent discourses involve scalar politics, with one discursive frame focused on localized impacts in order to leverage global resources, while the other situates local communities in the global world system; this confounding of scale leads to ineffective policy formulation. This shipbreaking case study provides a valuable lesson on the importance of listening to and including stakeholders at multiple scales when seeking policies to address localized impacts of a globalized industry.
Journal Article
Who's counting? Spatial politics, ecocolonisation and the politics of calculation in Boundary Bay
Answering the simple question, 'who's counting', reveals much about the spatial and cultural politics of ecosystem management. In this paper, I unite the concept of 'ecocolonisation' with the body of work on the politics of calculation. I argue that political technologies – including calculative techniques such as the enumeration of contamination levels – are a form of ecocolonisation that have considerable political effects on Indigenous communities. I explore the ways that historically connected Indigenous communities are divergently impacted by shellfish regulations and water pollution through an investigation of Boundary Bay, which straddles the Canada–US border on the Pacific coast. In closing, I suggest the on-going need to decolonise our understanding of calculative techniques for ecosystem management, and offer a more nuanced interpretation of space that accounts for both traditional boundaries and connected ecosystems.
Journal Article
Water Security Assessment: Integrating Governance and Freshwater Indicators
A new approach is developed for assessing water security status: the Water Security Status Indicators (WSSI) assessment method. The WSSI has four innovative aspects which address important gaps in the literature. First, it was developed in cooperation with end-users, whose participation enabled the design of a user-friendly assessment method. Second, this method is designed to be implemented at the local scale (small scale watershed or sub-watershed). Third, the WSSI is multivariate: it integrates variables pertaining to water quality and water quantity as they relate to aquatic ecosystems and human health. Fourth, the method provides concrete outputs for incorporation into water decision-making processes. In this paper, we document the WSSI assessment method and its application in a community in British Columbia (Canada), including the incorporation of community input into the development and application of the WSSI, and the integration of WSSI results into community water governance.
Journal Article
Toward a Global Water Ethic: Learning from Indigenous Communities
This review essay examines three important new contributions to the water governance literature, which provide important overviews of the changing water governance structures over time, and advance the call for a new water ethic. Furthering this work, I suggest that the need for a water ethic is globally important, but it is particularly urgent for indigenous communities. Settler expansion, fixed political boundaries, and subsequent colonial framings of land and water ownership have affected indigenous communities throughout the world and have led to severe environmental and social justice disparities. Although the books under consideration provide examples of indigenous rights associated with water protection, the theme is largely underdeveloped. Thus, I suggest that insights from indigenous communities’ more holistic and long-term relationship with water could help define and move forward the adoption of a new global water ethic. These insights are gleaned from work with indigenous communities throughout North America, particularly those in the Salish Sea and the Great Lakes regions. A new water ethic could incorporate three precepts: (1) treat water as sacred; (2) consider rights and responsibilities together; and (3) practice hydrophilia (love and know your waterways).
Journal Article
Introduction to the Themed Section: Water governance and the politics of scale
This introductory article of the themed section introduces a series of papers that engage with water governance and the politics of scale. The paper situates the ongoing 'politics of scale' debates, and links them to discussions germane to water governance. We call for closer attention to the inter-relationships between power and social networks in studies of water governance, with particular reference to both institutional dynamics and scalar constructions. Framed in this way, we suggest that the engagement at the intersection of politics of scale and water governance moves the concept of scale beyond the 'fixity' of territory. The paper reflects on the ways in which the recognition of scale as socially constructed and contingent on political struggle might inform analyses of water governance and advance our understanding of hydrosocial networks.
Journal Article
Transgressing Scales: Water Governance Across the Canada-U.S. Borderland
This article examines the rescaling of transboundary water governance along the Canada-U.S. border. We draw on recent research in geography on rescaling and borderlands to query two assumptions prevalent in the water governance literature: that a shift in scale downward to the subnational or \"local\" scale implies greater empowerment for local actors, and that rescaling implies that higher orders of government become less important in water management. The case study presents an analysis of qualitative and quantitative data drawn from a comprehensive database of transboundary water governance instruments compiled by the authors, interviews with water managers on both sides of the border, and participant observation in transboundary water governance activities. Our analysis indicates that although a significant increase in local water governance activities has occurred since the 1980s, this has not resulted in a significant increase in decision-making power at the local scale, nor has it been accompanied by a \"hollowing out\" of the nation-state. This suggests the need to question some of the assumptions widespread in the water management literature, such as the putative primacy of the local scale, and highlights the utility of bringing current geographical debates over scale and borderlands to bear on questions of environmental governance.
Journal Article
Cultural politics and transboundary resource governance in the Salish sea
This paper explores the cultural politics of water governance through the analysis of a new governing body created by indigenous leaders in the Pacific Northwest of North America: The Coast Salish Aboriginal Council. This paper investigates how the administrative structures and physical boundaries of water governance are both socially constructed and politically mobilised. The key moments explored in this article are closely linked to the power dynamics constituted through postcolonial constructions of space. Inclusion of cultural politics of scale will, arguably, provide a more nuanced approach to the study of transboundary environmental governance. This has important implications for the study of natural resource management for indigenous communities, whose traditional homelands are often bifurcated by contemporary border constructions.
Journal Article
Local impacts, global sources: The governance of boundary-crossing chemicals
Over the last half century, a multijurisdictional, multiscale system of governance has emerged to address concerns associated with toxic chemicals that have the capacity to bioaccumulate in organisms and biomagnify in food chains, leading to fish consumption advisories. Components of this system of governance include international conventions (such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Minamata Convention on Mercury), laws enacted by nation states and their subjurisdictions, and efforts to adaptively manage regional ecosystems (such as the U.S.–Canadian Great Lakes). Given that many of these compounds – including mercury, industrial chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, and pesticides such as toxaphene – circulate throughout the globe through cycles of deposition and reemission, regional efforts to eliminate the need for fish consumption advisories cannot be successful without efforts to reduce emissions everywhere in the world. This paper argues that the scientific community, by monitoring the concentrations of these compounds in the atmosphere and by modeling their fate and transport, play an important role in connecting the various jurisdictional scales of governance. In addition, the monitoring networks that this community of scientists has established can be visualized as a technology of governance essential in an era in which societies have the capacity to produce and release such chemicals on an industrial scale.
Journal Article
Who's counting? Spatial politics, ecocolonisation and the politics of calculation in B oundary B ay
Answering the simple question, ‘who's counting’, reveals much about the spatial and cultural politics of ecosystem management. In this paper, I unite the concept of ‘ecocolonisation’ with the body of work on the politics of calculation. I argue that political technologies – including calculative techniques such as the enumeration of contamination levels – are a form of ecocolonisation that have considerable political effects on Indigenous communities. I explore the ways that historically connected I ndigenous communities are divergently impacted by shellfish regulations and water pollution through an investigation of Boundary Bay, which straddles the C anada– US border on the P acific coast. In closing, I suggest the on‐going need to decolonise our understanding of calculative techniques for ecosystem management, and offer a more nuanced interpretation of space that accounts for both traditional boundaries and connected ecosystems.
Journal Article