Suchergebnisse

This essay analyses comparative approaches to forestry management in Mexico. In a primary case study, corruption in a community-owned logging business legitimates timber smuggling, and this situation contrasts with several forestry communities having internally-legitimate social institutions able to control such problems. A discussion assesses the institutional choice model for understanding change in the commons and contrasts it with an approach that views individual choices and actions as embedded in communities and cultures. The commons exists in a value-laden social context. (DSE/DÜI)

In most countries in Latin America, rural areas remain as populated as, or more populated than, in 1950. People continue to live in rural areas despite the declining economic viability of agriculture and the availability of work elsewhere. Through an application of the production of nature argument, enriched by explicit attention to the production of culture and the agency of nature, I attempt to resolve that apparent paradox. In a case study illustrating the argument, agriculture has declined in importance over several decades, while craft production and temporary, cyclical emigration has increased. Remaining agricultural activities and craft production utilize natural stocks and processes through the application of family labour, with minimal recourse to a money economy. Cyclical emigration and remittances from relatives also support the economic maintenance of rural lives. Together, these activities permit the social reproduction of households that send members to find work elsewhere. At the scale of North America, therefore, Mexican nature subsidizes the cheap reproduction of labourers working in cities and commercial agriculture in both Mexico and the United States. At the scale of the village, nature enables people to cobble together livelihoods that support households and villages. But more fundamentally, people produce culture through everyday activities of production and consumption; and so nature provides the necessary context for the productive activities that define and give meaning to what households and village communities are, and what it means to be an individual member.

Out-migration might decrease the pressure of population on the environment, but what happens to the communities that manage the local environment when they are weakened by the absence of their members? In an era where community-based natural resource management has emerged as a key hope for sustainable development, this is a crucial question. Building on over a decade of empirical work conducted in Oaxaca, Mexico, Communities Surviving Migration identifies how out-migration can impact rural communities in strongholds of biocultural diversity. It reflects on the possibilities of community self-governance and survival in the likely future of limited additional migration and steady - but low - rural populations, and what different scenarios imply for environmental governance and biodiversity conservation. In this way, the book adds a critical cultural component to the understanding of migration-environment linkages, specifically with respect to environmental change in migrant-sending regions. Responding to the call for more detailed analyses and reporting on migration and environmental change, especially in contexts where rural communities, livelihoods and biodiversity are interconnected, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental migration, development studies, population geography, and Latin American studies.