Suchergebnisse

Tai Lue and Lua people are struggling to maintain access to resources in a northern Thai national park. Contrasting outcomes for Tai Lue and Lua relations with the park can largely be explained by political, economic and discursive structures and the interests, attitudes and actions they promote. In particular, the racialisation of resource use constrains the ability of minority upland groups like the Lua to secure recognition and legitimacy for their resource use practices.

Since the early 1990s, tree ordinations have become an important practice for some Thai environmental activists who seek greater legitimacy for local management and use of natural resources. This paper, explores the political and cultural effects of tree ordinations by applying the concepts of "cultural objectification" and "cultural generification. It argues that recent uses of tree ordinations depend on a process of cultural objectification, facilitating the generification of the ritual and its various components as an example of the larger category of "local wisdom." Significant forms of power difference are implicated in the process. Middle class NGO activists largely controlled the practice and representation of the ritual and its symbols, and tended to objectify and simplify the values and practices of rural people. The tree ordinations of 1996-1997, dedicated to King Rama IX, had the further effect of symbolically bolstering the hierarchical structure of the Thai state and Thai society as a whole – a structure in which local leaders and middle class NGO activists exercise power as arbiters of "good" and "bad" culture among rural people. These are the ambiguous implications to which the title of this article refers: a process of objectification and generification and its place in the reproduction of a hierarchical political and cultural order, together with some decidedly positive outcomes of tree ordinations for the conservation and control of natural resources by rural people.Key words: Thailand, environmental activism, social hierarchy, power, cultural objectification.

*Background/Question/Methods:*

Ecological theory has begun to incorporate humans as part of coupled socio-ecological systems. Modern urban development provides an excellent laboratory to examine the interplay among socio-ecological relationships. Urban land and water management decisions result from dynamic interactions between institutional, individual and ecological factors. Landscaping and irrigation at any particular residence, for example, is a product of geography, hydrology, soil, and other local environmental conditions, the homeowners' cultural preferences, socioeconomic status, identity construction, neighborhood dynamics, as well as zoning laws, market conditions, city policies, and county/state/federal government regulations. Since land and water management are key determinants of habitat for other species, urban biodiversity is strongly driven by the outcome of interactions between these variables. This study addresses the significance of water as a key variable in the Fresno-Clovis Metropolitan Area (FCMA), shaping current patterns of landscape and water use, at a time when the city of Fresno is installing meters as a regulatory tool to conserve water. We combine data from a citizen science bird monitoring project, field surveys of trees, and mail surveys of residents to address interactions among key components of the urban socioecological system.

*Results/Conclusions:*

We present results of multivariate analyses of bird and tree surveys to show that neighborhood income and irrigation levels interact to influence species diversity of both taxa. Data from the Fresno Bird Count found that bird species richness and functional group diversity are both strongly correlated with residential irrigation and neighborhood income levels. Tree species diversity shows a similar pattern. We examine these results to test and develop several theoretical models explaining outdoor water use behaviors, with the aim of assessing the resilience of such behaviors with the introduction of water metering in Fresno, and the resilience of urban plant and bird communities to resulting changes in water use in the landscape. We argue that socioeconomic status results from a complex interplay of cultural, economic, structural, and social-psychological factors, influencing institutional policies regarding the governance of water resources, and in turn impacts biodiversity within the urban landscape through spatial and temporal variations in water usage. This study is part of a long-term research project that examines the impacts of human water usage and water use policies on biodiversity within an urban environment.

Contents; Introduction: The Way Forward; 1. Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge; 2. Untangling the Historical Origins of Epistemological Conflict; 3. Barriers to Integrating Indigenous Knowledge into Natural Resource Management; 4. Exploring Obstacles in Action: Case Studies of Indigenous Knowledge and Protected-Areas Management; 5. Joint Management and Co-Management as Strategies for Indigenous Involvement in Protected-Areas Management; 6. The Indigenous Stewardship Model; 7. Conclusion; References; Index; About the Authors.