The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation mechanism is a policy instrument intended to achieve environmental conservation and utilization simultaneously. Recently, researchers have adopted ‘environmentality’, a theoretical approach that recognizes the different strategies for the ‘conduct of conduct’ embodied in environmental governance, to parse the diverse governing logics supporting Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation implementation. Thus far, use of this lens has focused predominantly on how Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation introduces new forms of environmentality, overlooking the pre-existing, context-specific approaches to governance on which the mechanism builds, and hence potentially overstating the novelty of its governance techniques. Challenging this dominant use of the environmentality lens, I further develop its critical potential by demonstrating how environmentality's temporal dimensions illuminate the shifts, continuities and disruptions in how environmental governance evolves over time. I do this by demonstrating how Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation builds on pre-existing forest governance interventions in Guyana and neighbouring Suriname. I argue that while Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation remains a global expression of neoliberal environmentality, it builds on a pre-existing sovereign environmentality established throughout the overlapping histories of Guyana and Suriname, draws on but also subverts context-specific truth environmentality in the spiritual relations of forest dependent communities with the forests, and is made palatable for resistant communities through disciplinary environmentality. In this way, these four forms of environmentality help to explain how Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation implementation in the two countries assumes its current character, while demonstrating how environmental projects work towards shaping the subjects of their governance.
Contemporary and market-based conservation policies, constructed as rational, neutral and apolitical, are being pursued around the world in the aim of staving off multiple, unfolding and overlapping environmental crises. However, the substantial body of research that examines the dominance of neoliberal environmental policies has paid relatively little attention to how colonial legacies interact with these contemporary and market-based conservation policies enacted in the Global South. It is only recently that critical scholars have begun to demonstrate how colonial legacies interact with market-based conservation policies in ways that increase their risk of failure, deepen on-the-ground inequalities and cement global injustices. In this article, we take further this emerging body of work by showing how contemporary,market-based conservation initiatives extend the temporalities and geographies of colonialism, undergird long-standing hegemonies and perpetuate exploitative power relations in the governing of nature-society relations, particularly in the Global South. Reflecting on ethnographic insights from six different field sites across countries of the Global South, we argue that decolonization is an important and necessary step in confronting some of the major weaknesses of contemporary conservation and the wider socio-ecological crisis itself. We conclude by briefly outlining what decolonizing conservation might entail.
This study examines the response of women to disruptions caused by COVID-19 in small-scale fisheries (SSF) in the Gulf of Guinea (GOG). It interrogates the concept of resilience and its potential for mitigating women’s vulnerability in times of adversity. We define resilience as the ability to thrive amidst shocks, stresses, and unforeseen disruptions. Drawing on a focus group discussion, in-depth interviews with key informants from Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria, and a literature review, we highlight how COVID-19 disruptions on seafood demand, distribution, labour and production acutely affected women and heightened their pre-existing vulnerabilities. Women responded by deploying both negative and positive coping strategies. We argue that the concept of resilience often romanticises women navigating adversity as having ‘supernatural’ abilities to endure disruptions and takes attention away from the sources of their adversity and from the governments’ concomitant failures to address them. Our analysis shows reasons for “ocean optimism” while also cautioning against simplistic resilience assessments when discussing the hidden dangers of select coping strategies, including the adoption of digital solutions and livelihood diversification, which are often constructed along highly gendered lines with unevenly distributed benefits.
Research on the overlap between race and vulnerability to the physical and governance-related aspects of climate change is often globally scaled, based on extended temporalities, and colour-coded with non-white populations recognized as being at greater risk of experiencing the adverse effects of climate change. This article shows how de-centring whiteness from its position as automatic, oppositional counterpart to blackness can make space for greater recognition of the role played by the environment in processes of racialization. De-centring whiteness in this way would form a valuable step towards recognizing how race, constructed in part through shifting relations between people and the environment, overlaps with climate vulnerability within multiracial populations. Without discounting the value of global, colour-coded interpretations of race, I point out the limits of their applicability to understandings of how climate change is unfolding Guyana and Suriname, two multiracial Caribbean countries. I argue that in the postcolonial period, relations with the environment take historical constructions of race forward in ways that undergird the impacts of climate change. Even further, I show how the environment has always played a key, underacknowledged role in processes of racialization, complicating colour-coded interpretations of race, whether global or local.
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