Suchergebnisse

Research on entanglements of power inquires into the multiple positions from which power of domination and resistance are exercised across time-spaces. This paper discusses the dominating efforts of colonizers (Europeans, Yucatecans, Mexicans and US-Americans) to territorialize the Mexican Caribbean in order to anchor it to global patterns of accumulation. The hegemonic power to grid, survey and discipline a region that for a long time was conceived as "empty space" becomes entangled with the resistance power exerted by indigenous Maya and local ecosystems. These entanglements of power have converged in contemporary Akumal to produce a geometry of spatial segregation in which Mestizo and Maya workers are segregated by government and businesses from spaces designated for tourist use. My findings show that spatial inequality has been constructed along a pattern of increasing globalization, local reconfigurations of local power positions, and the trans-nationalization of space. In Akumal this pattern could only be imposed by reinterpreting space, through tourism, from the logic of a resource to be exploited, to the logic of a good to be preserved and enjoyed in-situ. Local resistances to this hegemonic pattern have managed to delay and sometimes bend some of its spatial outcomes. The latest of these bends led to the creation of Akumal Pueblo. An analysis of the detailed genealogy of this bending reveals that a great source of resistance power to alter hegemonic spatial outcomes resides in human agents whose identities were formed autonomously, that is, squarely outside the region's entanglements of power, but who have chosen to re-signify them in order to fully embed themselves within these entanglements.

Politics is crucial to understand collective and individual responses to global environmental change, and climate change in particular. However, power dynamics are difficult to formalize, quantify or grasp empirically. This, and perhaps the influence of natural sciences and the IPCC, encourages power neutral representations of climate change, which is portrayed as a problem external to the evolution of socio-political systems. Attempts to formalize climate politics have focused on governance regimes; including norms, rules, regulations, political will, and decision-making procedures. This focus on governance entails a realist approach, which only accounts for those incremental changes in power that can be objectively justified in terms of solving specific problems. This allows studying power without challenging the status quo of power relations, and without compromising science's neutrality credentials. Yet, it ignores a long idealist/humanist tradition (e.g., Aristotle, Spinoza, parts of Hegel, Marx, Gramsci), which would highlight the potential of climate politics to liberate humanity from elite-based constraints. Thus, instead of perfecting (or proofing) current socio-politics, idealist positionings would seek to transform the socio-political causes of climate change. This also involves problematizing the relationship between science and the powerful. However, as illustrated by the Copenhagen's fiasco, liberal democracies may lack the capacity to effectively address global environmental change challenges. Hence, it is crucial to inquiry about the foundations and dynamics of power from a global environmental change perspective.

Adaptation is a main response to climate change that involves adaptive, but also developmental and transformative, socio-ecological change. From this perspective the politics of climate adaptation cannot be understood without considering their intersection, in particular contexts, with politics of development and transformation. These three types of politics differ in the pattern of socio-ecological change that each one promotes. We discuss the operations of power associated with each pattern of change, including the forms of authority and subjectivities that each one entails. Developmental authority achieves consent (or consensus) on a trajectory of improvement, and promotes subjectivities based on individuals' positions and their progress along that trajectory. Adaptation authority sets clear-cut boundaries between the adapting systems and their changing environments, and promotes subjectivities of belonging (or not) to the system's identity. Transformational authority seeks to transgress established authority, be it developmental or adaptive, and promotes emancipatory subjectivities. We analyze life-story narratives of local tourism entrepreneurs and workers in Akumal, a coastal enclave in Mexico doubly exposed to hurricanes and tourism globalization. This analysis shows how the operations of power in this enclave are variously linked to discourses and practices of development, adaptation, and transformation. The case of Akumal illustrates the complex interplay between risk and inequality in coastal communities exposed to growing climatic variability. Our analysis of deliberate transformations takes adaptation to climate change, and its transformative and emancipatory potential, into development. Understanding how authority and subjectivities evolve in particular locales, and the types of politics of change that they entail, is key for simultaneously reducing inequalities and risk.

Are established economic, social and political practices capable of dealing with the combined crises of climate change and the global economic system? Will falling back on the wisdoms that contributed to the crisis help us to find ways forward or simply reconfigure risk in another guise? This volume argues that the combination of global environmental change and global economic restructuring require a re-thinking of the priorities, processes and underlying values that shape contemporary development aspirations and policy. This volume brings together leading scholars to address these questions f

Are established economic, social and political practices capable of dealing with the combined crises of climate change and the global economic system? Will falling back on the wisdoms that contributed to the crisis help us to find ways forward or simply reconfigure risk in another guise? This volume argues that the combination of global environmental change and global economic restructuring require a re-thinking of the priorities, processes and underlying values that shape contemporary development aspirations and policy. This volume brings together leading scholars to address these questions from several disciplinary perspectives: environmental sociology, human geography, international development, systems thinking, political sciences, philosophy, economics and policy/management science. The book is divided into four sections that examine contemporary development discourses and practices. It bridges geographical and disciplinary divides and includes chapters on innovative governance that confront unsustainable economic and environmental relations in both developing and developed contexts. It emphasises the ways in which dominant development paths have necessarily forced a separation of individuals from nature, but also from society and even from 'self'. These three levels of alienation each form a thread that runs through the book. There are different levels and opportunities for a transition towards resilience, raising questions surrounding identity, governance and ecological management. This places resilience at the heart of the contemporary crisis of capitalism, and speaks to the relationship between the increasingly global forms of economic development and the difficulties in framing solutions to the environmental problems that carbon-based development brings in its wake. Existing social science can help in not only identifying the challenges but also potential pathways for making change locally and in wider political, economic and cultural systems, but it must do so by identifying transitions out of carbon dependency and the kind of political challenges they imply for reflexive individuals and alternative community approaches to human security and wellbeing.? Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism contains contributions from leading scholars to produce a rich and cohesive set of arguments, from a range of theoretical and empirical viewpoints. It analyses the problem of resilience under existing circumstances, but also goes beyond this to seek ways in which resilience can provide a better pathway and template for a more sustainable future. This volume will be of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Human Geography, Environmental Policy, and Politics.

The challenge presented by climate change is, by its nature, global. The populations of the Mexican Caribbean, the focus of this book, are faced by everyday decisions not unlike those in the urban North. The difference is that for the people of the Mexican Caribbean evidence of the effects of climate change, including hurricanes, is very familiar to them. This important study documents the choices and risks of people who are powerless to change the economic development model which is itself forcing climate change. The book examines the Mexican Caribbean coast and explores the wider issues of m

Experts, government officials, and industry leaders concerned about the sustainability of shrimp aquaculture believe they know what farmers need to know and should be doing. They have framed sustainability as a technical problem that, at the farm level, is to be solved by better shrimp and management of ponds and businesses. Codes of conduct, standards, and regulations are expected to bring deviant practices into line. Shrimp farmers are often cornered in a challenging game of knowledge in which their livelihoods are at stake. In the commodity chain there are multiple relations with both suppliers and buyers, not all of which are trustworthy. The social networks shrimp farmers belong to are crucial for sifting out misinformation and multiplying insights from personal experience in learning by doing. Successful farmers become part of a learning culture through seminars, workshops, and clubs in which knowledge and practices are continually re-evaluated. The combination of vertical and horizontal relationships creates a set of alternative arenas that together are critical to bridging knowledge and action gaps for shrimp farmers. Government and industry initiatives for improving links between knowledge and practice for sustainability have largely succeeded when incentives are aligned: shrimp grow better in healthy environments, and using fewer resources means higher profits.