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1.
Andrea Revell 《Geoforum》2007,38(1):114-126
Ecological Modernisation (EM) theorists argue that businesses in industrialised nations are ecologically restructuring in response to market signals, and that economic actors increasingly perceive a business case for sustainability. Whilst UK policymakers urge companies to undertake environmental measures voluntarily on the basis that it will be good for business, a qualitative study exploring the environmental practices of small and medium-sized construction firms found that the opinions of owner-managers had little resonance with this ‘win-win’ rhetoric. Respondents did not perceive the financial returns to be gained from eco-efficiency measures to be significant enough to warrant the short-term investment in time and resources required to pursue them. Moreover, the market was not signalling that product value could be raised or that customers could be won by embracing environmental best practice. The paper concludes by questioning the UK government’s faith in EMs ‘win-win’ ideology to encourage the greening of industry. 相似文献
2.
Though the concept of sustainable development originally included a clear social mandate, for two decades this human dimension has been neglected amidst abbreviated references to sustainability that have focused on bio-physical environmental issues, or been subsumed within a discourse that conflated ‘development’ and ‘economic growth’. The widespread failure of this approach to generate meaningful change has led to renewed interest in the concept of ‘social sustainability’ and aspects thereof. A review of the literature suggests, however, that it is a concept in chaos, and we argue that this severely compromises its importance and utility. The purpose of this paper is to examine this diverse literature so as to clarify what might be meant by the term social sustainability and highlight different ways in which it contributes to sustainable development more generally. We present a threefold schema comprising: (a) ‘development sustainability’ addressing basic needs, the creation of social capital, justice and so on; (b) ‘bridge sustainability’ concerning changes in behaviour so as to achieve bio-physical environmental goals and; (c) ‘maintenance sustainability’ referring to the preservation - or what can be sustained - of socio-cultural characteristics in the face of change, and the ways in which people actively embrace or resist those changes. We use this tripartite of social sustainabilities to explore ways in which contradictions and complements between them impede or promote sustainable development, and draw upon housing in urban areas as a means of explicating these ideas. 相似文献
3.
This paper examines the melding of two discourses in southeastern Zimbabwe: land reform and wildlife management. The former seeks to redistribute large, ‘under-utilized’ landholdings to smallholders whilst the latter needs extensive land holdings to be viable. These two discourses are rooted in very different models of development. The land reform exercise emphasizes direct redistribution, equity and land for crops; whilst the wildlife management discourse tends to stress maximizing foreign exchange earnings, encouraging public-private partnerships and trickle down. Yet there has been a recent flurry of interest in the development of ‘wildlife models’ for land reform which would combine the two. This paper investigates whether the competing discourses about land for smallholders and wildlife-based land reform are compatible or can be successfully reconciled. It traces the ways they have come together in Zimbabwe’s southeast lowveld and examines the ‘science’ and politics underlying their melding. Finally it explores the potential implications for rural people’s livelihoods of this development. It concludes that land reform and wildlife management can be reconciled, but probably not in a particularly equitable way: it is more likely to provide an opening for an equitable land reform agenda to be usurped by local and non-local elites with wildlife interests. 相似文献
4.
Noah Quastel 《Geoforum》2011,42(4):451-461
While geographers have increasingly focused on how global commodity and production networks create new ‘geographies of responsibility’ there has been little empirical work considering how responsibility is worked into management systems and social activism in such networks. Drawing on literature from global production networks, geographies of responsibility and other literatures, this paper explores the dynamic and contested ways in which concepts of responsibility can play a role in network regulation. Both foreign direct investment and commodity networks (here referred to as ‘global production and investment networks’) are subject to complex negotiations and compromises involving corporate social responsibility and sustainability initiatives as well as shareholder activist, human rights, labor, and environmental activism. This is illustrated by reference to conflicts in Canada over Alcan, Inc.’s investments from 1993 to 2007 in the Utkal Alumina Project in Orissa, India. The project involved significant socio-environmental conflict. In Canada, Alcan’s investment was met by civil society campaigns that tested the company’s commitments to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The case study suggests revising theories of geographies of responsibility. While foreign direct investment can create new relationships between distant others, these are fluid and contingent and not necessarily desirable. Rather than see networks as a source of responsibility we should work to ensure that the relationships that networks foster be structured to ensure our deeper values are respected. 相似文献
5.
Jessica Dempsey 《Geoforum》2011,42(2):211-221
Environmental politics, argues French philosopher Bruno Latour, have been a ‘disappointment’. Rather than trying to bring environmental concerns into a political world split into two - between Nature/Science and politics/society - Latour argues that environmental movements ought to focus on destroying this two-house collective, and develop ‘an understanding of ecological crises that no longer uses nature to account for the tasks to be accomplished’. In this paper I put my research on the politics and science of the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR), a large tract of temperate rainforest on the central and north coast of British Columbia, into direct conversation with Latour’s arguments about science, epistemology and environmental politics. The GBR was a site of intense political struggle focused predominantly on the scale and scope of industrial forestry, a struggle which ‘ended’ in 2006 with what some call a historic compromise between some high-profile environmental groups, First Nations, the Provincial government, and the forest industry. This paper focuses on two interlinked questions: do the environmental organizations at the centre of the struggle demonstrate the maladies identified by Latour; are they too preoccupied with representing Nature through Science? And second, do these maladies help us explain or understand the politics over the GBR? Were the politics of the GBR limited by environmentalist invocations of a singular Nature through Science, what Latour calls ‘Naturpolitik’? The encounter between theory and practice leads to a more cautious and critical assessment of the environmental politics in the GBR, but also tempers Latour’s arguments. Environmentalists in the GBR do exhibit Latour’s maladies, but in tracing the Politics of Nature there, it seems that Naturpolitik is not as powerful as Latour argues. 相似文献
6.
Henrik Gutzon Larsen 《Geoforum》2008,39(6):2000-2008
The Baltic Sea environment has since the early 1970s passed through several phases of spatial objectification in which the ostensibly well-defined semi-enclosed sea has been framed and reframed as a geographical object for intergovernmental environmental politics. Based on a historical analysis of this development, this article suggests that environmental politics critically depend on the delineation of relatively bounded spaces that identify and situate particular environmental concerns as spatial objects for politics. These spaces are not simply determined by ‘nature’ or some environmental-scientific logic, but should rather be seen as temporal outcomes of scale framing processes, processes that are accentuated by contemporary conceptions of the environment (or nature) in terms of multi-scalar ecosystems. This has implications for how an environmental concern is perceived and politically addressed. 相似文献
7.
Louise Crabtree 《Geoforum》2006,37(4):519-535
This paper responds to challenges made by Castree [Castree, N., 2004. Environmental issues: signals in the noise? Progress in Human Geography 28 (1), 79-90] and Sneddon [Sneddon, C., 2000. ‘Sustainability’ in ecological economics, ecology and livelihoods: a review. Progress in Human Geography 24 (4), 521-549] for human geography to clarify its contribution to environmental debates and engage with recent formulations of sustainability as informed by the ‘new ecology’. This approach focuses on resilience, functional diversity, flexibility and complexity, here used to examine housing sustainability within an industrialised sub/urban context in terms of design philosophy, ownership, management bases, community engagement and funding mechanisms. This framework highlights areas of concern for enhancing the functional diversity of housing systems, echoing recent assertions that challenges for sustainability arise more from trust and power sharing issues, than from physical design and maintenance issues. It is argued that it is precisely human geography’s place-by-place consideration of power, embeddedness, scale and politics that can lend new ecology the social relevance it requires. 相似文献
8.
A. Wendy Russell 《Geoforum》2008,39(1):213-222
In this paper, I argue that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have inherent potential to contribute to socially and environmentally sustainable agriculture by virtue of their ‘biological embeddedness’. Their actual ‘performance’ and how this contributes to sustainability depends on the ‘mutual shaping’ of technology and context. While much attention has been given to the design context of GMOs, this paper considers the influence of the application context and of users. A case study investigating the use of insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant GM cotton in the cotton-growing region of New South Wales in Australia is presented. The study was based on focus groups with farmers and other stakeholders in a cotton-growing community. It demonstrated a range of direct and indirect effects of GM cotton use, both positive and negative for sustainability, and the ways in which these effects were influenced by the local social context. The influences of the biotechnology industry context, in limiting the contributions that gene technologies can make to sustainability, were also considered, and remedies suggested. I argue that the polarity of the GM debate is hindering progress on these issues, and that a more balanced approach to our analysis of GMOs is necessary in order to fully understand, and to influence, their role in the future of rural spaces. 相似文献
9.
Navigating the terrains of transnational education: Children of Chinese ‘study mothers’ in Singapore
This paper demonstrates the value of child-centred migration studies which highlight children’s role in shaping the migration journeys of their families, as well as their own projected journeyings. It examines the case of children from China who move to Singapore, an aspiring global education hub, expressly for the purpose of an overseas education that will facilitate longer-term migration and life goals. Focus is given specifically to the children of ‘study mothers’ or peidu mama (literally: ‘mothers accompanying their children who are studying’). Through interviews with the teenagers and the conceptual optic of ‘social navigation’, our paper demonstrates that children are resilient and creative beings able to navigate the twists and turns of their immediate trajectories, as well as develop their own goals and projected destinations for their futures. The paper calls for a refinement in the way we understand children’s mobilities. First, in arguing that their spatial journeying across the terrains of transnational education cannot be decoupled from their process of social becoming and emotional development from passive followers to active negotiators, we wish to disrupt hegemonic discourses and dominant representations of children in migration as simply ‘migrant’s children’ and restore them to the status of ‘migrant children’. Second, adopting the concept of social navigation as an analytical lens allows us to highlight the fluid ways that young people think about their futures and the different pathways by which they can get there. This leads us to conceive of social and cultural capital accumulation through transnational education as a process with many more degrees of provisionality than what is often presented in the literature as a ‘strategic project’ with a fixed and abstract goal. 相似文献
10.
Reiner Buergin 《Geoforum》2003,34(3):375-393
Focusing on the case of the World Heritage Site and Wildlife Sanctuary Thung Yai Naresuan, the paper sketches the interdependences of international and national forest and conservation policies in Thailand since the middle of the 19th century. In the context of Thailand’s globalization and modernization, these policies resulted in a coercing conservationism which focuses increasingly on the so-called ‘hill tribe’ ethnic minority groups. The shifting cultural and political framings of the area that became a national wildlife sanctuary and a ‘global heritage’ reflect external economic, political, and ideological interests. The people of the Karen ethnic minority group who live in the sanctuary are conceived of as a disruptive factor and never have had a chance to participate in these framings. After the designation of the area as a World Heritage Site, the remaining villages face increasing pressure from the Royal Forest Department which is trying to remove them with the help of the Military. Drawing on the different vested interests and the relativity of cultural conceptualizations, the paper questions the external framing, pointing to three major problems that are raised with regard to Thung Yai, but are symptomatic of modern conservationism at large: inconsistencies between normative claims and political practice; distortions of scale between conceptions designed at different levels of social space from the local to the global, and; the problem to reconcile conflicting cultural patterns and conceptualizations. The paper argues for a reframing of the conflict to conceive the Karen in Thung Yai as an integral part of the ‘global heritage’. 相似文献
11.
Elaine Stratford 《Geoforum》2006,37(2):273-286
Baldacchino [Baldacchino, G., 2002. Jurisdictional self-reliance for small island territories: considering the partition of Cyprus, The Round Table, 365, 349-360] has argued that the ‘troika’ of smallness, insularity and peripherality may incline island peoples (rather more than mainlanders?) to question the effects of economic globalization and be especially disposed to innovative approaches to development. He views jurisdictional capacity as integral to that task. Much of the literature on such issues relates to island nations, but this work focuses on Australia’s smallest and only island state of Tasmania, and thus on a sub-national jurisdiction. In what follows I explore the effects of an attempt to enrol Tasmanians in the creation and stabilization of a ‘2020 vision’ meant to be global in its reach, to focus on the particular strengths of the island state, and be innovative in advancing sustainable development. Known as Tasmania Together, the 20-year strategic vision outlines diverse economic, social and environmental goals assembled over two years via widespread consultations with the island’s communities of place and interest. For a time Tasmania Together generated significant debate about what it means to be an island people, and whether and to what extent Tasmanians’ future will be secured through economic globalization or localized endeavours premised on sustainability principles. Important to Tasmanians as well as to island studies, these rhetorics of social and spatial engagement also have salience beyond the borders of the island state, highlighting larger questions about the technologies of governmentality, agency and the performance of identity. 相似文献
12.
Situated justice in environmental decision-making: Lessons from river management in Southeastern Australia 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Mick Hillman 《Geoforum》2006,37(5):695-707
The practical application of environmental justice in natural resource management depends upon moving beyond generic principles to situated understanding. This understanding in turn requires knowledge of both historical and geographical contexts, including how decision-making frameworks develop and the nature of the biophysical environment itself. This paper examines these requirements based on case material from the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. In the Hunter Valley, the colonial history of river management was one of the creation, and subsequent inclusion and exclusion, of particular ‘stakes’ from the decision-making process, resulting in a narrowly defined ‘community of justice’ that became institutionalised at the catchment scale. However, even within this restricted community, distributive injustices occurred due to a failure of policy to engage with environmental variability at both spatial and temporal scales. This combination of procedural injustice and environmental variability also resulted in ecological injustice - that is a disconnected or even antagonistic human-nature relationship that restricted the opportunity to redress the severe degradation of riverine ecosystems that had occurred since European settlement. In the light of these examples, broader challenges in the application of environmental justice to river management are explored in terms of ecological complexity and contested perceptions of environmental health. Based on this material, a historically and geographically situated, ecologically informed vision of environmental justice is proposed as an essential part of sustainable river management. 相似文献
13.
Drawing on a political economy of food quality, this paper investigates the main sources of uncertainty over the environmental sustainability of Vietnamese pangasius catfish in European markets and how retailers subsequently respond to these uncertainties. Based on media survey and interviews with supermarket retailers across Europe between 2008 and 2010, the analysis focuses on the claims and counterclaims over the sustainability of pangasius aquaculture, how retailers have dealt with the uncertainty these claims have engendered about the fish, and what effect this uncertainty has had on the potential of marketing ‘sustainable pangasius’ in European supermarkets. The paper concludes that successful claims around new food qualities like sustainability by retailers are dependent on the ability of regulatory networks to overcome any perceived illegitimacy of imported products in the face of continuing uncertainty and the wider politics of market protectionism. 相似文献
14.
Stephen Morse 《Geoforum》2005,36(5):625-640
Pressing global environmental problems highlight the need to develop tools to measure progress towards “sustainability.” However, some argue that any such attempt inevitably reflects the views of those creating such tools and only produce highly contested notions of “reality.” To explore this tension, we critically assesses the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), a well-publicized product of the World Economic Forum that is designed to measure ‘sustainability’ by ranking nations on league tables based on extensive databases of environmental indicators. By recreating this index, and then using statistical tools (principal components analysis) to test relations between various components of the index, we challenge ways in which countries are ranked in the ESI. Based on this analysis, we suggest (1) that the approach taken to aggregate, interpret and present the ESI creates a misleading impression that Western countries are more sustainable than the developing world; (2) that unaccounted methodological biases allowed the authors of the ESI to over-generalize the relative ‘sustainability’ of different countries; and, (3) that this has resulted in simplistic conclusions on the relation between economic growth and environmental sustainability. This criticism should not be interpreted as a call for the abandonment of efforts to create standardized comparable data. Instead, this paper proposes that indicator selection and data collection should draw on a range of voices, including local stakeholders as well as international experts. We also propose that aggregating data into final league ranking tables is too prone to error and creates the illusion of absolute and categorical interpretations. 相似文献
15.
In this paper, we explore how ‘peak oil’ anxieties are woven into the spaces and practices of the state in Norway and the consequences of this for environmental justice and the public sphere more widely. We focus in particular on an ongoing struggle over access to hydrocarbon deposits in the Norwegian Arctic, the so-called ‘Battle of the North’. We use this dispute to highlight three wider theoretical points regarding (i) the continuing relevance of the state in the governing of nature-society relations, (ii) the increasingly fragmented and fluid nature of state space, and (iii) the significance of ‘security’ as a term around which social, economic and environmental tensions pivot. The paper concludes by reflecting on current efforts to prevent new oil activities in the north of Norway. 相似文献
16.
Transfrontier conservation has taken Southern Africa by storm, where the modus operandi remains simple and intuitive: by dissolving boundaries, local benefits grow as conservation and development spread regionally. However, in the case of South Africa’s section of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, political and economic change redirects benefits to support ‘modern’ economies at the expense of rural livelihoods through community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). Neo-liberal agendas promoted by government and the transfrontier park derail efforts at decentralizing CBNRM initiatives beyond markets and state control. This paper argues that ‘hybrid neoliberal’ CBNRM has arisen in private and public sector delivery of devolved conservation and poverty relief projects as ‘tertiary production’ for regional development. As a result, ‘CBNRM’ projects related to and independent of transfrontier conservation support private sector interests rather than the resource base of rural livelihoods. Concluding sections assert that CBNRM can counter this neoliberal trend by supporting the land-based economy of local users living near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. 相似文献
17.
Security and the future: Anticipating the event of terror 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Ben Anderson 《Geoforum》2010,41(2):227-235
This paper explores the relation between processes of security and futurity in the context of efforts to govern the complexity and contingency of events of terror. It argues that processes of securing function by generating a dangerous or promissory supplement to the present that thereafter propels the extension of forms of security. The paper develops this argument through an example of how an event of terror was anticipated: a RAND exercise into the aftermath of a ‘ground burst’ nuclear explosion in Long Beach, California on March 14th 2005. It argues that exercises (in)secure through three quasi-causal operations, each of which render events of terror actionable and result in specific relations between the present and future. First, ‘hypothetically possible’ generic events are named. The future takes place as a threatening horizon. Second, the defined phases of an event’s happening are staged (an advent, its multiplication into a crisis in the context of a milieu, and a response/recovery phase). The here and now is suspended between an ‘as if’ future and the present. Third, the consequences of the event are played. The future is both an intensified ‘practical’ presence embodied by exercise participants and an outside that exceeds attempts to definitively know it. The conclusion summarises the implications of the paper for work on futurity, security and the event. 相似文献
18.
Choon-Piew Pow 《Geoforum》2011,42(3):382-393
Notwithstanding the burgeoning scholarship on enclave urbanism, urban gating has often been pigeonholed as an intra-urban development that is somewhat ‘epiphenomenal’ to wider global processes. Overlooked in the literature is how gated communities as globally-oriented spaces are intertwined with the transnational lifeworlds of its elite inhabitants. As key sites where transnational super-rich elites organize their consumption and reproduce their purportedly global lifestyle, gated communities are now emerging as a new ‘meta-geographical form’ that circulates in and around rapidly globalizing cities. Drawing on the case study of Sentosa Cove, an exclusive waterfront gated community in Singapore catering to ‘high net-worth’ residents, this paper critically examines how elite localities and transnationalism are being socially and spatially reproduced in the city-state. To this end, the paper makes a distinct contribution by bringing to bear critical transnationalism perspectives in the understanding of urban gating and the privileged geographies of the global super-rich. 相似文献
19.
Gavin Hilson 《Geoforum》2008,39(1):386-400
This paper critically examines the challenges with, and impacts of, adopting the models in place for fair trade agriculture in the artisanal gold mining sector. Over the past two years, an NGO-led ‘fair trade gold’ movement has surfaced, its crystallization fuelled by a burgeoning body of evidence that points to impoverished artisanal miners in developing countries receiving low payments for their gold, as well as working in hazardous and unsanitary conditions. Proponents of fair trade gold contest that increased interaction between artisanal miners and Western jewellers could facilitate the former receiving fairer prices for gold, accessing support services, and ultimately, improving their quality of life. In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, however, the gold being mined on an artisanal scale does not supply Western retailers as perhaps believed; it is rather an important source of foreign exchange, which host governments employ buyers to collect for their coffers. It is maintained here that if the underlying purpose of fair trade is to improve the livelihoods and well-being of subsistence producers in developing countries, then the models that have proved so successful in alleviating the hardships of agro-producers of ‘tropical’ commodities such as coffee, tea, bananas and cocoa, should be adapted to artisanal gold mining in sub-Saharan Africa. Campaigns promoting ‘fair trade gold’ in the region should view host governments, and not Western retailers, as the ‘end consumer’, and focus on improving governance at the grassroots, organizing informal operators into working cooperatives, and addressing complications with purchasing arrangements - all of which would go a long way toward improving the livelihoods of subsistence artisanal miners. A case study of Noyem, Ghana, the location of a sprawling illegal gold mining community, is presented, which magnifies these challenges further and provides perspective on how they can be overcome. 相似文献
20.
The work of environmental governance networks: Traceability, credibility and certification by the Forest Stewardship Council 总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2
Sally Eden 《Geoforum》2009,40(3):383-394