Geoforum最新文献

Geopolitical strategies and transnational governance can synergistically interact to meet strategic ambitions and environmental targets. International NGOs and their transnational operations are the heart of these entangled dynamics. This study reveals how geopolitical strategies influence international NGOs and their transnational activities. Drawing on empirical insights from a comparative study of international NGOs (Japanese and Chinese) in Cambodia, we developed two models to elucidate the nature of this relationship. The “tight coupling” model is exemplified by Japanese NGOs that are closely aligned with the Japanese state’s geopolitical focus on soft power in Southeast Asia. This alignment results in strong state support in terms of resources and networking capabilities, enabling the NGOs to conduct long-term environmental work and build relationships with Cambodian communities through deep engagement. The “loose coupling” model is exemplified by Chinese NGOs whose alignment with China’s dominant geopolitical strategy (the Belt and Road Initiative) is relatively weak. Consequently, these NGOs receive limited state support, which restrict their ability to engage with local communities and achieve a sustainable impact. This study breaks new ground by weaving together the fields of geopolitics and transnational environmental governance, offering new insights regarding how to incorporate geopolitical perspectives in examining the roles of non-state actors in global environmental politics.

Meat consumption is increasingly discussed as a key lever for reducing environmental and human health impacts within food systems. As in many high-income countries, meat consumption in Austria exceeds dietary and planetary-health recommendations. If, and how, to address overconsumption has become a site of political conflict. Calls for political measures toward sustainable dietary transitions make it important to consider the political economy of meat consumption and production in national contexts. It is thus important to understand the surrounding structures, institutions, and power relations. Using a theoretical approach grounded in food regime theory and critical state analysis, we shed light on important actors and power relations concerning meat production and consumption in Austria. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of interviews and documents, we identify three political projects competing for influence. A strong production driven project pushes to establish a regime of national consumption rather than addressing excessive production and consumption. A civil society driven project is gaining ground in challenging dominant forms of accumulation. In a third project, national producers and alternative production pathways are subject to an increasingly powerful corporate retail sector, which advances economic and increasingly ecologically oriented rationalization to increase profits. Strategies to challenge this corporate power have so far been sparse. Rather, the reproduction of consumer power and responsibility in the producing sector serves to strengthen this development as food retailers can effectively position themselves as custodians of the consumer. Active policies and willingness to accept the necessity for changing consumption are required to redistribute power.

Based on the contributions of critical Latin American geography, this paper proposes an alternative understanding of territories to explore the transformation of regional and local economies towards environmentally friendly and conscious modes of production while tackling uneven development. We argue that economic geography is well-suited to study these transformations due to its emphasis on understanding the spatial distribution and organization of economic activities. However, most of its theorisations are based on the Global North, leaving out discussions in the Global South. A decolonial approach to territories can help understand economic change towards sustainability and inclusiveness, considering alternative institutional and social arrangements that mediate socio-economic relations. The concept of ‘territories as practice’ emerges from critical Latin American geography and challenges monolithic and colonial conceptions of development and modernity. As proposed here, territories as practice allows explaining and planning for regional transformations in non-core regions, while paying attention to how global networks and extra-territorial factors influence economic change. We advocate for a practice-based spatial approach that acknowledges the practices shaping territories, helping us comprehend how localities and communities resist and adopt economic transformations. Territories as practice capture the multiplicity of visions, contradictions, and constructions defining a territory, leading to more inclusive and context-specific approaches to economic transformations.

Extractivism is notorious for causing environmental destruction, resulting in worsened living conditions for those residing near sites of, among other processes, mining, logging, and hydraulic fracturing. Yet, companies can operate in certain areas because they mobilize narratives, often supported by governments and local authorities, asserting that extraction will bring local economic benefits in the forms of employment, improved general living standards, and economic compensation. In this article, we examine this core argument, focusing on shale gas development that has taken place since the mid-2000s in central Appalachia. We ground our analysis in original material gathered between 2020 and 2022 through 55 interviews with land and mineral owners. Extractivism is a capitalistic complex that operates on a systemic level with similar structures independently of the context where it is taking place. In this article, we zoom in on its operations and consequences at a micro level. We show how the logic of critical infrastructures is enacted by energy companies through compensation and experienced by residents through impacts on livelihood. While this qualitative analysis does not quantify local economic gains or losses, there is a preponderance of evidence showing that land and mineral owners have received limited and discontinuous compensation often compounded with the loss of usable land or forest. We argue that the extraction of raw fossil materials not only contributes to environmental destruction and climate change but is fundamentally grounded in unequal power relations that heighten social vulnerability and potentially destroy livelihoods.

Movements and scholars have called for proactive just transition efforts that involve the protection of historically marginalized communities and workers. Urban conservation is increasingly central to shifts away from a carbon-based economy, but its racialized hierarchies have reproduced inequality. This article builds on just transition, political ecology, and environmental justice scholarship in its understanding of workers as key sources of needed and imaginative interventions. We used photovoice methods with participants of a green workforce development program in Austin, Texas to identify the equity implications of their urban conservation work. Participants called attention to an incomplete just transition effort and strategic possibilities in two domains: workplace structure and relationality. Acting upon these insights to create and maintain an environmentally just urban forest system requires urban governance structures that are more responsive to workers and communities.

As a stable, democratic petrostate, Janus-faced Norway balances fossil fuel incumbency (profitable oil and gas exports) with leadership in green transitions (domestic hydropower supply and transport electrification) and just transitions (major donor to global green initiatives). These roles imbue domestic politics with reverence for fossil fuels as enablers of generous welfare state support, alongside a push to show progress on low-carbon energy transitions. This political dynamic has embraced the global rise to prominence of Net Zero target-setting, highly reliant on speculative, yet-to-emerge carbon mitigation technologies. Such a hubristic response to this target has served to direct massive financing to innovation activities of fossil incumbents. Nowhere is this push felt keener than in Stavanger, the oil capital rebranded to Norway’s ‘energy capital’, and the site of the country’s largest industrial hub Forus and great performative spectacles such as the Offshore Northern Seas conferences and numerous other oil and gas events. Yet it is also here that critique is often focused, pointing out the folly of continued investment that assumes oil and gas persistence in tempered form over rapid renewable energy rollout. We investigate the forms this enactment of Net Zero takes at the urban scale in Stavanger through which the promise of carbon removal is used to uphold carbonscapes. Empirical material includes place-based observation, participatory ethnography at events, and media reports. We engage with conceptual scholarship on the positionality of researchers, role of actionable knowledge, and the specific function of the knowledge economy to enable Stavanger’s juggling act as the site of fossil success since 1969, and champion of carbon removal innovation and development as one of Europe’s 112 climate-neutral 2030 Mission Cities. We argue that unpacking urban spectacle offers evidence of the interwoven nature of domestic politics and performative carbon mitigation approaches, constituting an entry point to critique mitigation deterrence.

The city’s local markets are essential for daily shopping and nurture traditions, spatial practices, and heritage. This study investigates the everyday lived experiences of Palestinian women street vendors operating in the Al-Hisba marketplace, located in the center of Ramallah/Al-Bireh. It investigates the challenges they encountered in the evolving Al-Hisba, against the backdrop of male dominance and the impediments imposed by the Israeli occupation. Within this context, they struggle to survive and to cope with transformative shifts in marketing trends. These challenges offer glimpses of resilience and opportunities to adapt to emerging informalities, the essential practices of spatial making-do, and a growing network of “carescape.” Employing a qualitative approach and actor-network theory, this study draws on the narratives of women street vendors to unravel their tactics of resilience, the dynamics of their carescape network, and the adaptive practices they employ to sustain their presence in Al-Hisba. The findings illuminate the negotiated spatial opportunities of adaptation in the face of uncertainties within Al-Hisba marketplace. This study also contributes to the realm of cultural studies and human behavior, offering insights that inform urban epistemologies. It underscores the importance of local markets in anchoring cities to principles of spatial equity and sense of place.

One of the key challenges facing urban areas in the twenty-first century is how to promote inclusive developmental policies and address increasing social inequality. Using the community of Mercado Campesino de Arocagua in north-western Bolivia as a case study, this article shows how peri-urban spaces destabilise traditional ethnic and class divisions, exemplifying the growing complexities of the politics of social and racial exclusion in Latin America. The article argues that the endurance of relations of coloniality enables the exclusion of rural Indigenous groups from the political, social, and economic boundaries of the city. These boundaries, however, are increasingly permeable and unstable. In this context, the multi-scalar governance structures that have helped many Indigenous people in Bolivia to move to and prosper within urban spaces prevent the community of Mercado Campesino from legal recognition.

Despite pressure from international donors and the national government, neoliberal policies have not had a transformational impact on the way water is provided in Mumbai. Some modest reforms were introduced but these have not led to major change. Moreover, in 2022 the city introduced a policy of ‘Water for All’ to extend water access to slum areas. At first sight this system might seem to be a socially progressive approach to water management, which might be surprising given the right-wing orientation of Shiv Sena, the political party which has been in power since the 1990s. But this paper shows that policy has been shaped by an unlikely alignment of diverse interests. Campaigners have been resisting neoliberal policies and demanding fair water rights for slum dwellers for years. But these demands gained policy traction when they overlapped with the interests of the engineers who manage the complex water system, as well as the political regime. For decades, slum households have been scapegoated and water access was deemed illegal for millions of the city’s poorest residents. But the political climate has recently shifted such that it now suits the ruling party to expand water access, although restrictions remain. This paper shows how global paradigms intersect with embedded structures, politics and institutions to create contextually specific outcomes. Drawing on Brenner and Theodore (2002), we argue that the same context that generated Mumbai’s form of ‘actually existing’ neoliberalism has also created a distinctive, ‘actually existing’, interpretation of the human right to water.