Suchergebnisse

Guyana, a small oft-forgotten country in South America, has seen its prospects shift markedly in recent years. Previously lauded as a world leader in environ-mental conservation and avoided deforestation initiatives, Guyana recently made international headlines when significant oil discoveries were made in its territorial waters. Using a model of convergence, stasis and reverberation, this article positions these developments historically and politically. In it, I argue that Guyana's shifting fortunes are reflective of broader regional and international shifts and contestations around post-colonial development and climate policy. The article shows how different forms of vulnerability coalesced over time to position Guyana as both vulnerable and as agential. The state's vulnerability lies in its susceptibility to natural disasters through climate change, imperialism in the wake of colonialism, and ethnic strife through race-based politics. Its agency, on the other hand, lies in its deployment of its natural resources and its geographic location to negotiate changing geo-political arrangements and efforts to address climate change. In developing this argument, the article views, and positions Guyana as a microcosm of several pressing and overlapping global crises – a metaphorical eye of the storm. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

Research on the overlap between race and vulnerability to the physical and governance-related aspects of climate change is often globally scaled, based on extended temporalities, and colour-coded with non-white populations recognized as being at greater risk of experiencing the adverse effects of climate change. This article shows how de-centring whiteness from its position as automatic, oppositional counterpart to blackness can make space for greater recognition of the role played by the environment in processes of racialization. De-centring whiteness in this way would form a valuable step towards recognizing how race, constructed in part through shifting relations between people and the environment, overlaps with climate vulnerability within multiracial populations. Without discounting the value of global, colour-coded interpretations of race, I point out the limits of their applicability to understandings of how climate change is unfolding Guyana and Suriname, two multiracial Caribbean countries. I argue that in the postcolonial period, relations with the environment take historical constructions of race forward in ways that undergird the impacts of climate change. Even further, I show how the environment has always played a key, underacknowledged role in processes of racialization, complicating colour-coded interpretations of race, whether global or local.

The University of St Andrews Restarting Research Funding Scheme (SARRF) is funded through the SFC grant reference SFC/AN/08/020. The University of St Andrews Institutional Open Access Fund (IOAF) is acknowledged for open access support. ; This study examines the response of women to disruptions caused by COVID-19 in small-scale fisheries (SSF) in the Gulf of Guinea (GOG). It interrogates the concept of resilience and its potential for mitigating women's vulnerability in times of adversity. We define resilience as the ability to thrive amidst shocks, stresses, and unforeseen disruptions. Drawing on a focus group discussion, in-depth interviews with key informants from Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria, and a literature review, we highlight how COVID-19 disruptions on seafood demand, distribution, labour and production acutely affected women and heightened their pre-existing vulnerabilities. Women responded by deploying both negative and positive coping strategies. We argue that the concept of resilience often romanticises women navigating adversity as having 'supernatural' abilities to endure disruptions and takes attention away from the sources of their adversity and from the governments' concomitant failures to address them. Our analysis shows reasons for "ocean optimism" while also cautioning against simplistic resilience assessments when discussing the hidden dangers of select coping strategies, including the adoption of digital solutions and livelihood diversification, which are often constructed along highly gendered lines with unevenly distributed benefits. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

Decolonizing biodiversity conservation science and practice involves a transition towards more locally rooted, plural, socially just, and convivial forms of conservation, moving away from mainstream conservation approaches, such as protected areas, sustainable resource management plans, or market-based instruments that are strongly rooted in Eurocentric ontologies and epistemologies. In this article, we introduce and review the contributions to the special issue "Decolonizing biodiversity conservation" and we identify six principles that can be thought of as starting points in efforts to decolonize conservation: recognition, reparation, epistemic disobedience, relationality, power subversion, and limits. We explain how these principles feature in the collection's contributions and how they can contribute to decolonizing conservation science, policy, and practice. We also acknowledge that there can be differences over meaning and emphasis regarding the principles among Indigenous and local peoples, scholars, and practitioners. Yet we think that their implementation can result in subtler and less universalizing conservation approaches.

Contemporary and market-based conservation policies, constructed as rational, neutral and apolitical, are being pursued around the world in the aim of staving off multiple, unfolding and overlapping environmental crises. However, the substantial body of research that examines the dominance of neoliberal environmental policies has paid relatively little attention to how colonial legacies interact with these contemporary and market-based conservation policies enacted in the Global South. It is only recently that critical scholars have begun to demonstrate how colonial legacies interact with market-based conservation policies in ways that increase their risk of failure, deepen on-the-ground inequalities and cement global injustices. In this article, we take further this emerging body of work by showing how contemporary,market-based conservation initiatives extend the temporalities and geographies of colonialism, undergird long-standing hegemonies and perpetuate exploitative power relations in the governing of nature-society relations, particularly in the Global South. Reflecting on ethnographic insights from six different field sites across countries of the Global South, we argue that decolonization is an important and necessary step in confronting some of the major weaknesses of contemporary conservation and the wider socio-ecological crisis itself. We conclude by briefly outlining what decolonizing conservation might entail.

Weathering is atmospheric, geological, temporal, transformative. It implies exposure to the elements and processes of wearing down, disintegration, or accrued patina. Weathering can also denote the ways in which subjects and objects resist and pass through storms and adversity. This volume contemplates weathering across many fields and disciplines; its contributions examine various surfaces, environments, scales, temporalities, and vulnerabilities. What does it mean to weather or withstand? Who or what is able to pass through safely? What is lost or gained in the process?