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Abstract In this article I explore potential synergies between degrowth and environmental justice movements, with a focus on their shared goal of inclusivity. I turn to the case of the contentious San Cristóbal-Palenque highway project in Mexico's southernmost state, Chiapas, and highlight the ability of such intersections to speak to the concerns of protesters of the initiative. Since the mid-1990s, critics of market-based development in Chiapas have provided a sustained critique of the Mexican government's growth-oriented development agenda and related conditions of poverty and inequality in the state. These critics mobilized in 2009 and 2014 to protest the construction of a mega-highway designed to enhance agribusiness and tourism in the region. This opposition finds many points of overlap with perspectives of degrowth proponents in its critique of growthbased development, and yet is rooted in a unique socio-political and historical context. Given the situated nature of this opposition, I argue that a synergistic approach that takes into account the thinking of degrowth proponents and environmental justice advocates is needed, to address the concerns of highway protesters in Chiapas whose critiques of a growth society emerged from its negative effects to which they are disproportionately exposed. Key Words: Degrowth, environmental justice, contestation, Mexico

This article examines the gender equality component of Prospera, a conditional cash transfer program in Mexico that provides cash contingent on three nodes of civic engagement: health, nutrition, and education. This article draws on ethnographic research in La Gloria, a settlement of indigenous Mayan refugees from Guatemala in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The article identifies the Prospera program's neoliberal features, the impact its gender equality measures have in the lives of women, their families, and in the political structure of the community of La Gloria. The findings reveal how Prospera reinforces gender and racial hierarchy, and fosters community divisions that undercut efforts to promote community autonomy, which raises questions about the ability of conditional cash transfers to promote development and gender equality in indigenous communities in Mexico.

In this article, I analyze how daily conservation discourse and practices create and recreate local identities through the reconfiguration of social relationships brought about by conservation encounters. The mobilization of identity has been a main strategy of the inhabitants of the Lacandon Community Zone and the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve for maintaining their access to natural resources and benefitting from conservation. In the Lacandon Rainforest, conservation comes at great cost to the local population but, at the same time, offers an opportunity to access monetary and political resources. Because of this tension, the peasants build complex and fractured identities, in an iterative process, assuming different images as they struggle to reconcile their personal desires with the external plan to preserve the forest. Identity in the Lacandon Rainforest, as in other regions impacted by this practice, is a tool in the political struggle.Keywords: identity, power, biodiversity, conservation, protected areas, Mexico

In this article, I analyze how daily conservation discourse and practices create and recreate local identities through the reconfiguration of social relationships brought about by conservation encounters. The mobilization of identity has been a main strategy of the inhabitants of the Lacandon Community Zone and the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve for maintaining their access to natural resources and benefitting from conservation. In the Lacandon Rainforest, conservation comes at great cost to the local population but, at the same time, offers an opportunity to access monetary and political resources. Because of this tension, the peasants build complex and fractured identities, in an iterative process, assuming different images as they struggle to reconcile their personal desires with the external plan to preserve the forest. Identity in the Lacandon Rainforest, as in other regions impacted by this practice, is a tool in the political struggle.Keywords: identity, power, biodiversity, conservation, protected areas, Mexico

AbstractGlobalization has increased the mobility of labor, product of lower fertility rates and working age populations in developed nations that creates a demand for migrant workers to sustain national economic growth. According to the United Nations Population Fund in 2010, three percent of the world's population lived outside their country of origin. Migration is an important force in development and it also has become an important factor in social change processes. Perceived as a force that can contribute to development, migration has become a focus of state-level policy-making planning policies creating a growing interest in the political and economic consequences of migration for both receiving and sending communities.This paper offers an overview of the different factors that are leading to migration out of Oaxaca and Chiapas, and the consequences to local indigenous societies. The paper also presents viable existing alternatives to rural development that have been developed by local small-scale farmers that can help reduce the massive exodus of people and consequently destruction of communities.

Intro -- TABLE OF CONTENT -- TABLE OF FIGURES -- TABLE OF TABLES -- LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS -- SUMMARY -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- PROLOGUE -- 1 INTRODUCTION -- 2 TOPIC AND RESEARCH QUESTION -- 2.1 PHENOMENA AND PROCESSES OF INTEREST -- 2.2 STATE OF THE ART - FLOOD RELATED RESEARCH -- 2.3 CHALLENGES IN DISASTER RISK MANAGEMENT IN MEXICO -- 2.4 RESEARCH QUESTION -- 3 INTRODUCING THE CASE STUDY REGION - SELECTED SOCIO-SPATIAL DYNAMICS IN A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW -- 3.1 STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF THE USUMACINTA RIVER IN MAYAN TIMES -- 3.2 ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION AND ECOLOGICAL EFFECTS IN COLONIAL TIMES AND AFTER -- 3.3 POPULATION DYNAMICS, FIGHT FOR LAND AND MAJOR POLITICAL DYNAMICS IN THE 20TH CENTURY -- 3.4 RECENT PROCESSES OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND DYNAMICS OF RESISTANCE -- 4 SOCIAL PRACTICES, RISK AND SPACE - THEORETICAL BASIS -- 4.1 PARADIGMATIC AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL BASIS -- 4.2 SOCIAL PRACTICE THEORY -- 4.3 THEORETICAL ACCOUNTS OF RISK -- 4.4 THEORETICAL ACCOUNTS OF SPACE -- 4.5 INTEGRATION OF PRACTICES, RISK AND SPACE INTO THE RISKSCAPES CONCEPT -- 5 METHODOLOGY -- 5.1 POSITIONALITY, ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND QUESTIONS OF OWNERSHIP -- 5.2 GROUNDED THEORY AND LINK TO TWO "ALTERNATIVE EPISTEMOLOGIES" -- 5.3 A COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH APPROACH -- 5.4 ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH AND SOCIAL GEOGRAPHICAL METHODOLOGY -- 5.5 DESIGN OF THE EMPIRICAL RESEARCH PROCESS AND METHODS OF DATA GENERATION -- 5.6 AUDIO-VISUAL METHODS -- 5.7 INTEGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF ADDITIONAL METHODS -- 5.8 METHODS APPLIED IN ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION -- 6 SOCIAL PRACTICES OF LIVING WITH FLOODS PERFORMED BY VILLAGE INHABITANTS -- 6.1 LOCALLY IDENTIFIED TOPICS AND CONCEPTS -- 6.2 IDENTIFICATION OF KEY SOCIAL PRACTICES -- 6.3 FLOOD, FLOOD RISK OR LIVING WITH FLOODS -- 6.4 LIVELIHOOD, THE "GOOD LIFE" AND DEVELOPMENT -- 6.5 CREATING AND PERFORMING COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES.