Suchergebnisse

Using fine-grained case studies and ethnography, rather than the national/crossnational studies typically used to assess market-assisted land reform, this article finds no grounds for the foundational claim that decentralized, market-assisted land reforms are inherently less politicized than state-led land reforms. Despite claims to the contrary, proponents of the new policy deploy one-dimensional understandings of politics and the political construction of markets that gloss the ways "community" and "Markets" are highly politicized sites where actors play out multiple territorial projects. (InWent/DÜI)

This case study of the organic farmers' cooperative Indigenas de la Sierra Madre de Motozintla (ISMAM) explores the construction of identity as a dialogic process in which external elements are appropriated to permit resistance and creative adaptation to global processes. Building on indigenous Mam respect for nature, ISMAM forges a corporate image that responds to symbolic demands of the alternative marketplace and a self‐image reaffirming traditional values in a modern context.

The entry of large numbers of women with children into the paid labor force was a major demographic shift throughout North America and Europe during the last half of the 20th century. Mexican women have gone through similar changes in employment, though less research has been done to document their experiences. As in North America and Europe, Mexican women and girls are doing more unpaid caregiving and housework than men and boys. The issue of central concern in this article is the impact that gender disparities in family carework have on women's educational and work opportunities and experiences in Chiapas, Mexico. This article shows that girls' and women's unequal share of the unpaid childcare and housework has a substantial impact on their school performance, job choice, wages, and job retention. In 99 in-depth, open-ended interviews with working mothers in Chiapas, Mexico, 18% said that unpaid caregiving in the home affected their own education negatively; while 9% said that unpaid caregiving had a negative impact on their daughters' education. Thirteen percent of women interviewed reported job loss due to caregiving, while 43% reported income loss. Altogether, unpaid caregiving negatively impacted the school or work lives of 52% of the working mothers we interviewed. Their experiences are detailed in this article and have broad relevance for policy debates around the role of social services, educational and work benefits in improving the lives of men and women in Mexico and other industrializing countries.

This essay is an effort to understand a social process in which the Maya indians of central Chiapas, Mexico, show their territorial, demographic, labor and politic advancement throw the discourse of their leaders. This is about an ethnic movement that integrate both dimensions of globalization process: the cultural homogenization and heterogenization of the world. The perspective adopted attempt to integrate the discourse analysis from a flexible and embracement viewpoint of the cultural production with the analysis of the regional indianization process like a complex interethnic system, in the meluccian sense of system. The principal objective is to explain with detail how the indigenous leaders use discourse –to persuade their followers and to the others– constructing a identity discourse based on meaningful past, organized in and for the politic present. ; Este ensayo busca comprender un proceso social en el que los indígenas Mayas del centro de Chiapas, México, muestran su avance territorial, demográfico, laboral y político por medio del discurso de sus líderes. Se trata de un movimiento étnico que integra las dos dimensiones del proceso de globalización: la homogeneización y la heterogeneización cultural mundial. La perspectiva adoptada integra el análisis del discurso desde un punto de vista flexible y comprensivo de la producción cultural con el análisis del proceso de indianización regional como un sistema interétnico complejo, en el sentido melucciano de sistema. El objetivo principal es explicar cómo los líderes indígenas utilizan el discurso –para persuadir a sus huestes y a los otros– construyendo uno de identidad basado en un pasado significativo ordenado en y para el presente político.

This dissertation explores contradictions of development within market-based carbon forestry projects that aim to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions associated with climate change. Through the mechanism of the carbon market, forestry-based offset projects are in theory intended to reduce carbon emissions in a cost-effective manner, while also generating development and livelihood co-benefits for communities that participate by growing carbon-sequestering trees. However, I have found that in the multiple dimensions of sustainable development - the economic, social, and ecological - carbon forestry has largely failed to generate sustainable development benefits. This finding largely corresponds with previous empirical studies exploring questions of development through the carbon market. This dissertation, however, takes a different approach, in an attempt to understand not only project impacts but how and why market-based efforts at sustainable development have attracted participants despite failing to meet stated social and environmental goals. Through an engagement with debates on sustainable development, neoliberalization of nature, and agrarian change in Mexico, I draw on a relational approach and political ecology analytical framework. This framework gives attention to the social relations of carbon forestry development in Chiapas, in historical and geographical perspective. And the approach allows for an analysis that goes beyond mere recognition of the failure of development through carbon markets; it also demonstrates the ways in which project contradictions are produced and integrated with earlier and ongoing processes of development and agrarian transformation. I argue that this historical perspective, combined with an understanding of the interconnected relations of power stretching from local rural communities through national and global arenas of policy making and governance, can help better guide political strategies aimed at more just and plausible alternatives for social and ecological change. Specifically, I examine the Scolel Té carbon forestry project in Chiapas, Mexico, a region with a long history of conflicts over land and resources. I explore the local history of these resource politics to elucidate the conditions that led to the emergence and adoption of the project in the land-conflicted rainforest region of the Lacandon Jungle. I show that, for farmers involved with Scolel Té, carbon forestry emerged as a strategy to maintain land security in the wake of neoliberal agrarian reform policies that in various ways threaten to displace small landholders. In the Mayan Chol community of Frontera Corozal, however, where I carried out ethnographic fieldwork, the project has largely failed to meet the needs of participating campesinos, and in some cases, it has exacerbated tensions within households and the community. Furthermore, based on a carbon analysis of project plots, the ecological benefits of the project as conducted in the Lacandon Jungle are also substantially lacking. While carbon producers participate in the project in part as a means to secure land tenure, carbon forestry has intersected with a national land privatization process that may make peasant access and control over land tenuous in the future. I argue that this articulation of carbon forestry and land privatization constitutes an instance of what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession, whereby capital continues to expand through carbon trading and other markets at the expense of poor farmers' access to land. Working through these issues substantively, this dissertation links carbon forestry not to the more recent phenomenon of the neoliberalization of nature, but to the ongoing movement of capital into agrarian spaces, demonstrating the continued salience of agrarian questions concerning the fate of the peasantry. In conclusion, I offer alternative, more effective, and more equitable strategies for development and climate change mitigation.

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