The concept of resilience in ecology has been expanded into a framework to analyse human-environment dynamics. The extension of resilience notions to society has important limits, particularly its conceptualization of social change. The paper argues that this stems from the lack of attention to normative and epistemological issues underlying the notion of ‘social resilience’. We suggest that critically examining the role of knowledge at the intersections between social and environmental dynamics helps to address normative questions and to capture how power and competing value systems are not external to, but rather integral to the development and functioning of SES.
Abstract. Forest is in trouble. The most recent (2015) FAO Forest
Resources Assessment shows an encouraging trend towards a decrease in
deforestation rates, but it also points out that since 1990 total forest
loss corresponds to an area the size of South Africa. Efforts to curtail
deforestation require reliable assessments, yet current definitions for what
a forest exactly is differ significantly across countries, institutions and
epistemic communities. Those differences have implications for forest
management efforts: they entail different understandings about where exactly
a forest starts and ends, and therefore also engender misunderstandings
about where a forest should start and end, and about how forests should be
managed. This special issue brings together different perspectives from
practitioners and academic disciplines – including linguistics, geographic
information science and human geography – around the problem of
understanding and characterizing forest. By bringing together different
disciplinary viewpoints, we hope to contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary
efforts to analyse forest change. In this introduction, we propose that
interrogating the relationship between forest definitions, boundaries and
ways of valuing forests constitutes a productive way to critically
conceptualize the trouble that forest is in.
Community Resource Management Areas (CREMAs) in Ghana combine conservation and development objectives and were introduced in the year 2000. In some cases, they have connected collectors of shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) nuts with certified organic world markets, which can be understood as a ‘market-based’ approach to conservation. This paper examines how the benefits of this approach are distributed and argues that shea land formalization is crucial to this process. It makes this argument by drawing on interviews within two communities bordering Mole National Park. One community accepted to engage with, and benefitted from this approach, while the other did not. The paper analyzes narratives from different actors involved regarding why and how the market-based approach was accepted or rejected. It shows that, contrary to the neoliberal principles that underlie market-based conservation, a utility maximization rationale did not predominantly influence the (non-)engagement with this conservation approach. Instead, it was the history of land relations between communities and the state that influenced the decisions of the communities. We highlight the role of traditional authorities and NGOs brokering this process and unpack who in the communities profited and who was left out from benefits from this market-based conservation initiative.
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