Suchergebnisse

A 'blether' is a colloquial Scottish term signifying 'a lengthy chat between friends', and this paper draws its inspiration from the conservationist who suggested that 'having a blether' and 'getting people on board' is what conservation is all about. Contributing to scholarship on conservation conflict and on convivial conservation, this paper explores the 'who', 'where' and 'when' of 'having a blether', seeking to understand what might cultivate and contribute to cooperative relations between conservationists and other land-managers. It draws on feminist political ecology and anthropologies of conservation to provide a framework with which to unpack the personal, spatial and temporal dimensions of conservation relationships, and applies this to a case study in the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland. Considering the 'who' in conservation relations, led to looking beyond professional affiliations to highlight the importance of intersectional identities and interests, as expressed through personal connections and emotions. Considering the 'where' of cooperation for conservation, so-called 'informal' and 'everyday spaces' were found to be highly significant as shared sites in which productive relationships can be built. Considering the 'when' of conservation relations revealed their emergent nature, and of the building of understanding and appreciation through shared pasts and experiences. This paper promotes the need to open up and move beyond stereotyped stakeholder groups, to consider what promotes not only commonalities but also appreciation of differences. It also draws attention to the political and structural forces that mediate conservation relations and shutdown opportunities for greater cooperation and inclusivity. Ultimately, this paper highlights the need for dialogue and for listening to diverse others with care and attention, seeing the ideal and practice of 'having a blether' and 'getting people on board' as a way to promote cooperative – or convivial – conservation.

The future of inclusive forestry in Nepal depends on forestry professionals who can recognise patriarchal roots of gender injustice as they operate in the ideologies and apparatus of forest governance, and who can resist those injustices through their work. This paper uses the notion of knowledge practices to explore the recognition of injustice amongst Nepal's community forestry professionals, and the relationship between recognition and resistance, highlighting the inherently political nature of all knowledge practices. By drawing on over fifty interviews and ethnographic insights, this paper goes beyond the typically black-boxed and essentialised 'forestry professional' and unsettles the false dichotomy between 'the professional' and 'the personal'. Nepal's community forestry professionals represent a plurality of knowledges, emerging from unique positionalities and personal experiences; however, the demand for quantifiable, short-term project outputs (attributed to funders and donors) shuts down their opportunities to meaningfully practice their knowledges. This paper articulates how, in order to resist injustices within both forest user communities and forestry institutions, professionals are demanding a greater focus on learning—from the lived realities of forest users, from each other as practitioners, from qualitative engagements with complexity and processes of change, from so-called mistakes, and ultimately from greater reflexivity. Through such learning and reflection comes the opportunity to recognise and resist injustices and create socially just community forestry. This paper urges scholars to go beyond black-boxing those in the forestry sector, and instead to offer solidarity and support in promoting knowledge practices that recognise and resist injustices and thus help build socially just forest futures.

The involvement of technical experts in environmental management and their perspectives on environmental justice issues can influence how justice notions become integrated into sub-national policies and programs. In other words, the justice-related norms perceived by technical experts have a huge impact on the delivery of justice for society and local environmental practices. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as the world's most widespread environmental policy tool, provides an opportunity for exploring the incorporation of justice in everyday environmental practices. Specifically, how justice concerns related to global sustainability goals might be promoted or shutdown at the sub-national level through the actions of the technical experts involved i.e., those referred to here as 'intermediary actors.' This article reports on research which used semi-structured interviews to investigate the justice-related norms prioritized and promoted by intermediary actors, namely consultants, academics, and governmental officers, in the technical review process of EIA in Indonesia. It also examined the facilitating or constraining factors for negotiating and mobilizing those norms in the project debates of EIA at the sub-national level. We find that the intermediaries engaged with prioritized issues of justice unevenly, as they prioritized distributive and procedural justice over recognitional concerns. Our findings also uncovered crucial structural factors that have preserved existing unequal power relationships in a decentralized environmental governance system. Traditional and authoritative customs underlying environmental policies and practices therefore have significantly influenced the prioritization of justice-related norms. These social and cultural contexts have also restricted an upward mobilization of justice concerns from the sub-national to national and international governance levels. This study argues that the intermediaries need various institutional, physical, and social resources to advance global sustainability and justice agendas at the sub-national level via existing national environmental management tools.

International audience ; Forest regeneration is a major land-use change in European uplands, and whether or not this is a desirable change for biodiversity is disputed. While this debate seems to be largely situated in the field of natural sciences, this paper aims to also examine its social dimensions. To do so, we adopt a comparative discourse analysis with four cases of protected areas in France, Spain, and Scotland. We draw on a conceptual framework highlighting both the ecological and social factors underpinning the construction of environmental discourses. It notably emphasises the role of interests, ideas and institutions, and the power dynamics underpinning discourse-coalitions. We show how diverging discourses emerged, gained ground, coalesced and competed differently in different contexts, explaining the adoption of seemingly opposite discourses by protected area authorities. These findings reaffirm the need to conceive environmental governance as an on-going deliberative process in order to achieve environmental justice.

Whilst political ecology scholarship has contributed much to articulating social injustices associated with Nepal's community forestry, here we took a different approach, by attempting an 'affirmative political ecology.' We drew on feminist and activist scholarship to inspire collective action that engaged directly with challenges of social justice and those charged with delivering it through their work. Guided by theories and practices of 'transformative learning' and a range of associated reflective practices, our participatory action research involved 4 facilitators and (up to) 25 participants who work across Nepal's forest bureaucracy (and for some, the wider community-based natural resource management sector). Together physically, remotely and through our writing, we reflect upon the operation of power in our professional – and personal – lives, exploring how that may enable a more informed and meaningful engagement with social justice within the workplace, and beyond. This article presents the process of our collective reflection and learning, and shares some of its initial outcomes based on the experiences of the 15 co-authors. Whilst 'simply' having the time and space to come together was hugely important, it was the form and feel of that space that was particularly significant, as we focused on co-creating a safe space which was non-judgmental and based on mutual respect, enabling comfortable and open discussion of often unspoken and uncomfortable issues. Ultimately, this article argues that collective practices of reflection and transformative learning can create shared learning, understanding, empathy and solidarity, and thus that it offers hope in the face of on-going social injustices. It therefore urges political ecologists to work towards such caring and affirmative collective engagements with practitioners as one way in which to affect change.