Geoforum最新文献

Women’s knowledge, roles, and responsibilities are increasingly recognised in natural resource management (NRM). A raft of affirmative action policies in the forestry sector has amplified the importance of women in the conservation, management, and use of natural resources. Yet, women are often excluded in NRM decision-making practices. This paper investigates the persistence of the exclusion of women in Nepal’s community forestry practices. We focus on the forces of exclusion of women in community forestry decision-making in the context of changes in politics, institutional hierarchies, markets, and knowledge domains. We draw on an innovative research method − Planning Studio, bringing together key ideas from critical action research from seven case study sites, five years of participant observation, 40 Key Informant Interviews (KII), 10 Focus Group Discussions (FDG) and six research workshops. Findings demonstrate that several forces of exclusion shape and sustain the persistence of women’s exclusion in Nepal’s community forestry practice. These forces include a) CFUG institutions in the new political landscape of Nepal, b) the emergent market for forest products and services, c) technical knowledge hegemony in policy, and d) cultural hegemony in which CFUG decisions are made. Women’s exclusion increases in the institutional hierarchy, from the CFUG decision-making to the state’s policymaking and adopting technocratic rules in forest management and market access. The pre-existing patriarchy shapes and excludes the aspiration of women’s agency in active engagement in community forestry. The exclusion continues and worsens if these forces are not recognised and addressed at various levels of decision-making.

Geographers and political ecologists have demonstrated settler-colonial states’ longstanding key roles in producing environmental injustice through colonialism, racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and other mechanisms. Such studies tend to conclude, implicitly or explicitly, that environmental justice (EJ) movements’ pursuits of more sustainable and just futures must therefore antagonistically confront the state or work beyond it entirely to create alternative futures that do not reinforce state hegemony and violence. However, other scholars in recent years have critiqued such characterizations of the state as unilaterally and fundamentally oppressive, arguing instead that states are terrains of struggle whose contradictory programs and practices reflect not only the interests of capital but also actions of movements. They demonstrate that movements pursuing more just and sustainable futures find purchase working both through and beyond the state. Here, we follow these scholars but depart from them in one respect – namely, they frame movements as pressuring the state only from outside of it. We argue that conceptualizing the state and movements as ontologically overlapping and permeable realms in which some actors move back and forth illuminates additional movement influence on state practice and additional factors that mediate their efforts. We make this case by following a group of U.S. EJ activists who pursue EJ movements’ goals by taking formal positions inside the government agencies they seek to change. We show that they accomplish meaningful change in these roles and that their work is mediated not only by industry power over state agencies, as other scholars have rightly identified, but also by elements of regulatory workplace culture, insider allies’ skills honed in external EJ advocacy, and solidarity among EJ advocates within and beyond the state. By more fully identifying such mediating factors and showing how they shape insider allies’ work, we hope to highlight new fronts of struggle as former EJ movement activists use their insider ally positions to wrest more control over the state from capital and for liberatory ends.

Culture and creativity are active but often overlooked processes in contemporary urbanisation. This paper contributes to scholarship on the cultural and creative industries, as well as urban placemaking on the margins, by adopting a placemaking approach in which artists are positioned at the centre of the analysis. The focus is on why artists choose to be located away from national cultural hubs, how this shapes their work, and how their work in turn shapes the city. Qualitative research was conducted in the northern Ghanaian city of Tamale with artists based in three creative and cultural industries: film, music and visual arts. The paper makes three important contributions to the literature: first, sense of place, attachment to place and feeling at home are shown to be key to artists’ decisions to be based in peripheral locations; second, the material and cultural attributes of place and associated access to resources influence the work artists produce when located far from cultural urban hubs; and third, artists are changing the perceived marginality of their home cities by shaping urban infrastructure and projecting new geographical imaginaries.

Geographical scholarship of the ‘digital turn’ has refuted the suggestion that digital technologies produce a utopian ‘cyberspace’ capable of transcending its material attachments. The image of a frictionless ‘digital world,’ it is argued, merely masks the uneven social and material relationships conditioning that world’s possibility. While this is essential criticism, I offer in this paper some reasons for hesitation in collapsing digital space into material practices too quickly. Abstractions may always be attached to their social and material conditions of possibility, but this does not mean that these things are the same. I develop this insight further in the context of the ‘volumetric turn,’ which has analogously criticized geographers for remaining fixated on surficial formalism while neglecting consideration of the dynamic, material capacities of volumetric space. While again heeding this equally important warning, I question the limits of dynamism as a volumetric analytic insofar as, much like digital technology, this notion can easily be fetishized. In turn, I suggest that these dynamic capacities can be more productively theorized in relation, rather than opposed, to formalistic abstraction, as both are constituent elements of volumetric space. I explore these theoretical considerations through a historical geography of early 20^th-century geophysical prospecting in American oilfields, where prospectors produced spatial knowledge that was simultaneously dynamic and formal, material and abstract. In turn, this case study serves to show how the relations between material practices and processes of abstraction can be a fruitful meeting point for theories of digital and volumetric space.

Pacific Island countries are experiencing and responding to significant and multiple climate change impacts. However, very few studies have examined how these climate change impacts affect what people value and how this then affects how people respond to these impacts. This study explores what people value and how climate change affects these values, and identifies values-based ways of addressing loss and damage. We draw on in-depth interviews with 27 people across three study sites in Fiji: Togoru settlement, Sese village, and Vunisavisavi village. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analysed using SPSS and NVivo. The most highly ranked values were spirituality and family, illustrating the foundation of the Fijian way of life, although the relative importance of values can change and trade-offs between values were emerging for different community groupings in the face of risk. The most common climatic stressors across the three study sites included sea-level rise, coastal erosion, tidal inundation, and salt-water intrusion. Adaptation measures largely proved inadequate, resulting in intolerable climate change impacts. Intolerable climatic risks were affecting people’s values of family, spirituality, a sense of place, and agency, followed closely by wellbeing, culture, connection to land and sea, future generations, and ways of being. Six locally identified responses to protect values and respond to loss and damage were identified, including: investing in resilient infrastructure to disaster-proof communities; restoring the socio-ecological system; promoting and protecting culture and knowledge; providing holistic wellbeing support; protecting sacred places; and enabling subsistence livelihoods to flourish.

This study explores the geopolitics of wildfires in the inter-Korean borderland, known as the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). It is widely recognized for restricting human access, which contributes to its perception as ‘untouched’ or ‘pristine’ and in need of protection within the inter-Korean political arena. This study challenges the conventional territorial- and political–ecological imagination of the DMZ through the lens of wildfires. Contrary to being perceived as apolitical or natural disasters, wildfires in the DMZ are geopolitical events that create new possibilities for geopolitical orders both within and beyond the two Koreas. To illustrate this, the study unveils the fragmented and materialized Cold War logics of territoriality, manifested through the actions of the United Nations Command, the U.S. military, and both Koreas in the DMZ. Additionally, it explores the geopolitical materialities of wildfire intermediaries, such as landmines and military surveillance devices. These elements reveal the production and ongoing reproduction of fragmented Cold War territoriality influencing the current geopolitical order. The study posits that wildfires, intertwined with complex geopolitics, simultaneously promote rebordering and hold the potential to deconstruct the established territorialities of the DMZ and inter-Korean politics.

Over the last two decades, the Moroccan state has had to deal with some deeply uncomfortable knowledge regarding mounting water scarcity. This presents governing actors with a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, this knowledge is politically disturbing as it could undermine prevailing hydro-agricultural policies, which are based on the promise of unlimited irrigation expansion. It could also corrode the dominant social alliance built around these policies. On the other hand, accurately quantifying water resources has long been essential for establishing the technocratic legitimacy of the state.

This paper investigates how the state manages uncomfortable numbers that it has either produced or endorsed: an issue rarely addressed by social studies of quantification, but increasingly consequential in the current ecological crisis. Drawing from a literature on the production of ignorance, we highlight contradictory processes of knowledge production and ignorance. We show that Moroccan state hydrologists have dealt with uncomfortable figures by keeping them fragmented in space and time. They have continued to produce innumerable measurements of water scarcity. However, they have done so in an increasingly scattered manner, both spatially and temporally, while studiously avoiding integrating these fragments into updated national estimates.

This uneasy compromise between “seeing” and “not seeing” like a State has so far helped reproduce the “modernizing” social alliance forged around large hydraulic projects. However, its durability is doubtful. Our case study thus raises a number of hypotheses about what the ecological crisis could do to state quantification in many places and in the near future.

This paper interrogates the intricacies of care, neoliberalism, and self-sufficiency within the U.S. refugee resettlement program and as shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic. For refugees, as well as for most Americans, the pandemic rendered (more) visible the injustices of neoliberal individualism and self-sufficiency. I examine how humanitarian care, via the resettlement program, is co-opted toward neoliberal goals of economic self-sufficiency, and how the pandemic shaped these humanitarian and economic responses and narratives. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, I demonstrate the ways in which care is infused with power and normalizing values; however, feminist ethics of care also provides a framework for envisioning a different world in which the goals of resettlement are not predicated upon neoliberal standards of self-sufficiency, but instead center collectivity, interconnection, safety, and belonging. Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork in a resettlement city in the U.S. West between 2021–2022, this article examines how resettlement services and care are provided in ways that often reinforce neoliberal expectations of good citizenship, and questions what this means for resettlement beyond self-sufficiency.

This paper considers how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) engages in world-making around risk that sets up a harmful basis for thinking about climate security. This inquiry offers a reading of a recent IPCC report chapter as a form of world-making and epistemic violence through its limited portrayal of risk. A core argument made in this paper is that the selective representation of risk sets up the potential for slow violence outcomes and practices can perpetuate unjust harm. It matters how the IPCC portrays risk, because the organization is in a unique position to influence how security practitioners understand connections between climate change and security. This paper draws on concepts of world-making, epistemic violence, and slow violence, and it builds on previous critiques of the IPCC’s selective representation of climate change. It suggests alternative opportunities for understanding human contributions to the current state of our planetary environment through an example of another well-known, world-making representation of the water cycle. Overhauling the way that the water cycle is presented as influenced by human activity offers insights to possibilities to create transformative, less harmful pathways for understanding and engaging with the changing climate.

Addressing the largely overlooked area of illegal action in geography, this study draws upon an institutional framework to examine how actors of legitimate institutions admit to their actions in the face of conflicting regulations. In recreational fishing, the practice of voluntary ‘catch and release’ (C&R) of fish collides with official regulations in most German federal states. Yet, despite the prohibition by law and the threat of criminal conviction, this is widely legitimized as a conservation practice. Grounded on extensive social media research and interpretive content analysis I qualitatively extract the underlying social practices that unite voluntary C&R anglers into a cohesive group. Building on these findings, I propose the strategy of institutional signaling as a means of encoding compliance with common expectations while avoiding explicit acknowledgment of unlawful behavior. In this way, the study sheds light on a relatively unexplored facet of our social fabric, where the realms of legitimacy and illegality intersect.