Suchergebnisse

Water-related disasters have become more unpredictable amidst human-induced climatic and hydroecological changes, with profound effects on people inhabiting fragile river basins. In this article, I analyse drastic waterscape transformations and people's differentiated exposure to water-related vulnerabilities in the Grijalva River lower basin, southeastern Mexico, focusing on how state authority is reinforced through waterscape alterations and how altered waterscapes shape state-making and scalar politics. Examining interlinkages between 1) state-making and governance; 2) resource-making and politics of scale; and 3) hazard-making and the dynamics of socionature, the article contributes to scholarly and development practice discussions on environmental vulnerability. I argue that the goals of consolidating state power and promoting development through massive waterscape changes and resource extractions have provoked hazards that are difficult to control, resulting in differentiated distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. Drawing on archival research, documentary analysis, thematic interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, the study illustrates the overlapping and cumulative effects of state-making, politics of scale, and the dynamics of socionature on socially differentiated vulnerability. Although the forms of governance shift over time, statecraft as a mode of consolidating state authority and controlling lower basin environments and residents persists. The government prevents social mobilisation through political persuasion and pressure, and disciplines residents to adapt to altered waterscapes, while allowing few changes in prevalent power structures. Simultaneously, the study demonstrates that water cannot be controlled by political rules and requisites, while local residents reinterpret dominant ways of governing through claim-making, negotiation, everyday resistance, and situational improvisation, albeit within unequal power relations. The study enhances understanding of water-related vulnerabilities resulting from recurrent, yet temporally remoulded agendas of state-making combined with socially differentiating politics of scaling and the dynamics of socionature, which altogether reformulate human-nonhuman interactions and make local smallholders and pen-urban poor increasingly vulnerable to floods. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ; Peer reviewed

AbstractCities around the world are developing new ways of governing risks and vulnerabilities. In the new flood-governance measures, technological risk-prevention is linked to programmes of social resilience and cultural adaptation. By focusing on the catastrophic floods in the city of Villahermosa, Mexico, this article argues that new flood-governance strategies rely on complicated forms of neoliberal governance, in which flood governance is turned into a matter of adaptation and self-responsibilisation, while scant attention is paid to the socio-spatial distribution of vulnerabilities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in three socially differentiated neighbourhoods of Villahermosa, this article demonstrates how flood-governance strategies and the residents' responses to them vary across the city and how the production of flood risk is connected to the uneven production of urban space. The institutional acts of governing aim to render certain population groups governable, whilst being unable to eradicate dispersed contestation efforts.

This essay analyzes the complexity and contradiction of resource-tenure regimes on tropical forest frontiers by drawing on a case study carried out in the department of Río San Juan, southeastern Nicaragua. The main attention is given to competing claims over productive resources and to contradictory relationships between the diverse modalities of resource control. The resource struggles emerging in Río San Juan are analyzed in the context of larger political-economic and socio-legal processes to understand the wider relations of politics and power that affect local resource access. The main goal is to reveal how control over resources is defined and contested in the everyday reality of legal pluralism where multiple legal orders intersect in people's lives, and where the conflicts over whose law applies, and who gets what resources and why, have increasing significance.