The ‘solution’ is now the ‘problem:’ wind energy, colonisation and the ‘genocide-ecocide nexus’ in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca

Dunlap, Alexander

doi:10.1080/13642987.2017.1397633

Cited by 98 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The wind farms are 'sold' as a means to produce renewable energy (SDG7.2) as part of 'green economy' initiatives that would reduce GHG emissions (13.a) and provide jobs (SDG1, SDG8), yet they exacerbated existing problems and inequalities (SDG1, SDG2, SDG10) (CEJ-intersectionality, IDEJ). In this case, indigenous people and subsistence farmers and fishers have borne the costs (DJ, CEJ-intersectionality, IDEJ) of wind farm projects arising from State supported private companies controlling large tracts of land (and sea) (CEJ-embeddedness) and excluding them from their ways of life and 'spiritual sustenance' some communities gain from the sea (RJ, CEJ-indispensability) (Dunlap 2018). FPIC and consultation processes were delayed and embedded within state-corporate power dynamics (PJ, CEJ-embeddedness).…”

Section: Case Study: Applying the Ej Framework To The Climate And Enementioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental justice and the SDGs: from synergies to gaps and contradictions

et al. 2020

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Through their synergies, trade-offs, and contradictions, the sustainable development goals (SDGs) have the potential to lead to environmental justices and injustices. Yet, environmental justice (EJ), and social justice more broadly, are not currently embedded within the language and spirit of the SDGs. We part from the premise that "many 'environmental' problems are, by their very nature, problems of justice" (Lele, Wiley Interdiscip Rev Water 4:e1224, 2017). We review progress in EJ frameworks in recent years, arguing for the need to move beyond a focus on the four principles of mainstream EJ (distribution, procedure, recognition, and capabilities) towards a more intersectional decolonial approach to environmental justice that recognises the indispensability of both humans and non-humans. EJ frameworks, and the SDGs should recognise power dynamics, complex interactions among injustices, and listens to the different 'senses of justice' and desires of theorists, activists, and other stakeholder from the Global South. We analyze how EJ frameworks are, or fail to be, incorporated in the SDGs with a focus on the food-water-health nexus (SDG2, 3, 6); climate-energy (SDG7, 13), conservation (SDG14, 15); and poverty and inequality (SDG1, 10). We call attention to the 'elephant in the room'-the failure to go beyond GDP but instead include economic growth as a goal (SDG8). We argue that sustainable degrowth and intersectional decolonial environmental justices would create better conditions for the transformative changes needed to reach the broader aim of the SDGs: to leave no one behind.

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Section: Case Study: Applying the Ej Framework To The Climate And Enementioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental justice and the SDGs: from synergies to gaps and contradictions

et al. 2020

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“…Effective social control arises further when such disciplining becomes voluntary, intrinsic and self-led (Dunlap, 2018c;Foucault, 1995Foucault, [1977), such that values, lifestyles and ideologies associated with the 'dream of development' (Escobar, 2012(Escobar, [1995: xlv) are internalized (see Berman, 1983;Rahnema, 1997). The consumptive desires which condition and manufacture particular subjectivities thereby appear to emerge from within the self -naturalized as intrinsic rather than externally driven.…”

Section: Rags To Riches: Manufacturing Desires With New Commodity Ficmentioning

confidence: 99%

A faultline in neoliberal environmental governance scholarship? Or, why accumulation-by-alienation matters

Dunlap

Sullivan

2019

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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This article identifies an emerging faultline in critical geography and political ecology scholarship by reviewing recent debates on three neoliberal environmental governance initiatives: Payments for Ecosystem Services, the United Nations programme for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and carbon-biodiversity offsetting. These three approaches, we argue, are characterized by varying degrees of contextual and procedural – or superficial – difference, meanwhile exhibiting significant structural similarities that invite critique, perhaps even rejection. Specifically, we identify three largely neglected ‘social engineering’ outcomes as more foundational to Payments for Ecosystem Services, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and carbon-biodiversity offsetting than often acknowledged, suggesting that neoliberal environmental governance approaches warrant greater critical attention for their contributions to advancing processes of colonization, state territorialization and security policy. Examining the structural accumulation strategies accompanying neoliberal environmental governance approaches, we offer the term ‘accumulation-by-alienation’ to highlight both the objective appropriations accompanying Payments for Ecosystem Services, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and offsetting and the relational deficiencies accompanying the various commodifying instrumentalizations at the heart of these initiatives. We concur with David Harvey’s recent work proposing that understanding the iterative and consequential connections between objective/material and subjective/psychological dimensions of alienation offers ‘one vital key to unlock the door of a progressive politics for the future’. We conclude (with others) by urging critical geography and political ecology scholars to cultivate research directions that affirm more radical alternatives, rather than reinforcing a narrowing focus on how to improve Payments for Ecosystem Services, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and offsetting in practice.

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“…Temporal periodization, however, with "colonial territorialization," discursively separates continuous processes of land control and degradation organized by states and their economies (Rasmussen and Lund, 2018: 394). "Colonization," as a term, implicitly politicizes and takes a position against the colonial model or the state (Dunlap, 2018c(Dunlap, , 2019a. The state is a highly developed (computational) evolution of the colonial model (Dunlap and Jakobsen, 2020;Gelderloos, 2017).…”

Section: Infrastructural Colonization: "Large Imposed and Useless" mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The state is a highly developed (computational) evolution of the colonial model (Dunlap and Jakobsen, 2020;Gelderloos, 2017). Understanding the state this way can relate to Indigenous struggles for selfdetermination and autonomy; their rejection of state legitimacy; its modes of political organization and corresponding methods of extractivism (Churchill, 2003;Dunlap, 2018c), which extends to dissident non-Indigenous people. Individual self-identification with state-building, nationalist mythology, governmental sociocultural engineering, and resource extraction become central issues (Dunlap, 2018c(Dunlap, , 2019cDunlap and Jakobsen, 2020).…”

Section: Infrastructural Colonization: "Large Imposed and Useless" mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bureaucratic land grabbing for infrastructural colonization: renewable energy, L’Amassada, and resistance in southern France

Dunlap

2020

Human Geography

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Governments and corporations exclaim that “energy transition” to “renewable energy” is going to mitigate ecological catastrophe. French President Emmanuel Macron makes such declarations, but what is the reality of energy infrastructure development? Examining the development of a distributional energy transformer substation in the village of Saint-Victor-et-Melvieu, this article argues that “green” infrastructures are creating conflict and ecological degradation and are the material expression of climate catastrophe. Since 1999, the Aveyron region of southern France has become a desirable area of the so-called renewable energy development, triggering a proliferation of energy infrastructure, including a new transformer substation in St. Victor. Corresponding with this spread of “green” infrastructure has been a 10-year resistance campaign against the transformer. In December 2014, the campaign extended to building a protest site, and ZAD, in the place of the transformer called L’Amassada. Drawing on critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and human geography literatures, the article discusses the arrival process of the transformer, corrupt political behavior, misinformation, and the process of bureaucratic land grabbing. This also documents repression against L’Amassada and their relationship with the Gilets Jaunes “societies in movement.” Finally, the notion of infrastructural colonization is elaborated, demonstrating its relevance to understanding the onslaught of climate and ecological crisis.

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The ‘solution’ is now the ‘problem:’ wind energy, colonisation and the ‘genocide-ecocide nexus’ in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca

Abstract: To cite this article: Alexander Dunlap (2018) The 'solution' is now the 'problem:' wind energy, colonisation and the 'genocide-ecocide nexus' in the

Cited by 98 publications

References 25 publications

Environmental justice and the SDGs: from synergies to gaps and contradictions

Environmental justice and the SDGs: from synergies to gaps and contradictions

A faultline in neoliberal environmental governance scholarship? Or, why accumulation-by-alienation matters

Bureaucratic land grabbing for infrastructural colonization: renewable energy, L’Amassada, and resistance in southern France

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