Suchergebnisse

This article presents a study of coastal erosion narratives by the Mexican government, scientists, and local fishers in coastal communities in the Gulf of Mexico. It shows how plans to enroll fishing communities into programs to adapt to or to slow coastal erosion are based on simplified environmental narratives that rely on global climate change as the main cause of coastal erosion. They discount local processes and local explanations, as well as scientific studies that outline complex multi-scalar explanations for coastal erosion. Government narratives frame global climate change, as manifested in increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes and other hydrometereological extreme events and sea level rise, as the main causes of changes in coastal environments, including coastal erosion They fail to acknowledge other causes including the environmental degradation caused by the influential oil industry. In contrast, fishers' more complex and locally-embedded narratives are shaped by their long-term struggles against the state-owned oil company, whom they hold primarily responsible for coastal erosion in their communities. Scientists similarly emphasize the importance of local and regional processes, with climate change understood primarily as having significant impacts in the future, but less so in the recent past. Differences in temporal and geographical scaling among these narratives highlight the importance of considering how the translation of climate change adaptation programming from the global to diverse local situations would ideally consider site-specific power relations as well as community-based perspectives.

The shadowplay of Southeast Asia has often been understood as a reflection of local cultural patterns, and it has therefore been the object of much scholarly interest. That interest has been directed especially at the Javanese play, although much has also been written about Balinese and Malaysian shadowplay performances. The shadowplay performance is not usually associated with Thailand, and the shadowplay there has not been subjected to the same degree of scrutiny as in Indonesia and Malaysia. Nevertheless, such a tradition is thriving among Tai-speaking Buddhist peoples in peninsular (Southern) Thailand, particularly in the provinces of Songkhla, Thammarat, and Phatthalung on the long-settled rice plain stretching from Songkhla near the Malay border to Nakhon Si Thammarat, where most puppeteers are found.

Abstract
The lens of ontological politics explains the persistence of conflicts between upland ethnic minorities such as Karen peoples and state forest conservation agencies in Thailand. As can be seen with Karen communities in areas managed as national parks, such as the Ngao River basin, the environmental management practices employed by state agencies and ethnic minority communities enact different ontologies of conservation. We argue that shifting the focus of conservation discourse from forests to inland fish could present opportunities for both recognition of and government support for community-based conservation. We demonstrate how state forest conservation agencies foreclose other ontologies, thus precluding community-based conservation. Such ontological dominance, however, is more contested in the case of state agencies with jurisdiction over inland waters. By examining river management and conservation in the Ngao River basin, we consider how these communities make visible the agency of fish and other aquatic life through their knowledges and practices. We argue that Ngao Karen communities have demonstrated that they can account for and conserve aquatic life in inland waters in ways that the Thai state has been unable to do, thus legitimising otherwise marginalised ontologies for 'resource' management and conservation throughout Thailand.

Abstract in Thai: rb.gy/j0ify