Journal: Geoforum

Abbreviation

Geoforum

Publisher

Elsevier

Journal Volumes

ISSN

0016-7185

Description

Filters

2013 - 201912020 - 20244
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Publications 1 - 5 of 5
  • The challenge of commodity-centric governance in sacrifice frontiers: Evidence from the Brazilian Cerrado's soy sector
    Item type: Journal Article
    Levy, Samuel A.; Garik, Anna Victoria Nogueira; Garrett, Rachael (2024)
    Geoforum
    Conservation governance is increasingly globalized, particularly supply chain polices implemented by multinational corporations. However, the ways that local elite narratives and power networks influence the design and implementation of policies is poorly understood. We examine the role that local agribusiness narratives have on producers’ resistance to supply chain policies through the concept of the “sacrifice frontier”. We theorize sacrifice frontiers are regions where reinforcing perceptions that conversion of native vegetation has high economic potential and low conservation importance combine with rapid processes of wealth and power consolidation by agribusiness interests. We posit that these dimensions of a sacrifice frontier make rapid land use change and ongoing social and ecological harm especially probable as they reinforce constraints on sustainability governance. Here, we build on existing theories of environmental sacrifice through the case of the Cerrado biome, Brazil's most active deforestation frontier. We argue that in the Cerrado, and other sacrifice frontiers like it, interventions that seek to reduce native vegetation loss cannot rely on supply-chain led policies, but instead need to foster more territorial multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder discussions to alter the narrative of sociocultural and biodiversity sacrifice locally. We suggest this can be achieved by paying attention to local needs in a manner that is inclusive to all land users present within a targeted landscape.
  • Resourcing the future
    Item type: Journal Article
    Prior, Tim; Daly, Jane; Mason, Leah; et al. (2013)
    Geoforum
  • In danger of co-option: Examining how austerity and central control shape community woodlands in Scotland
    Item type: Journal Article
    Sharma, Kavita; Hollingdale, Jon; Walters, Gretchen; et al. (2023)
    Geoforum
    Community ownership and management of land has gained prominence in environmental policy discussions, especially within land restoration debates. Within Scotland, community land ownership is promoted as a means to give communities greater say over land use decisions, receive a greater share of the benefits from land, and help deliver a just transition to the government of Scotland's net-zero targets. These goals are supported by legal mechanisms that enable appropriately constituted community bodies to buy or lease erstwhile private and public assets to deliver a wide range of social, environmental, and economic objectives. Drawing on interviews and secondary data, we inductively explore the transfer of public forests to communities in Scotland, examining the context of these transfers, the challenges in acquiring and managing forests, and broader implications of asset transfers for community empowerment. We find that community woodland groups operate in a political context shaped by public sector austerity, increasingly stepping in to provide services that local governments have withdrawn from. Our distinct contribution is to demonstrate the ways in which formalization and standardization can have a centralizing effect on place-based initiatives. Both these trends, we argue, can lead to uneven outcomes for community groups. As communities increasingly become part of global environmental agendas, we argue for a critical political geography of'community empowerment’, one that pays attention to the relationship between political processes and uneven outcomes.
  • Inhabiting more-than-human ecologies of Extended urbanization: Unruly leopards amidst urban-wild enmeshment in the Northern Aravalli region
    Item type: Journal Article
    Bathla, Nitin (2024)
    Geoforum
    As urbanization attains an increasingly planetary reach, transforming agrarian landscapes and commons beyond the city-countryside divide, ‘rewilding’ is gaining increasing popularity as a protective countermovement. This countermovement, comprising of a patchwork of actors, including state-led agencies, philanthropic and citizen-led groups, as well as environmental lawyers, seeks to counter unregulated urbanization and mitigate its impacts by restoring biodiversity and ecological processes in areas designated as “wilderness” or “pristine nature.” However, these legally and culturally constructed boundaries between urban and wilderness frequently diminish and collapse as species like leopards, wolves, and cougars transgress and repurpose these spaces. This paper investigates the enmeshment of urban and wilderness through human-animal interactions, examining how the more-than-human ecology of extended urbanization is produced and inhabited. It explores the different strategies and modalities of rewilding that generate a mosaic of “wilderness” spaces, such as biodiversity parks, urban forests, safari reserves, abandoned quarries, waterfronts, and green corridors, amidst the extended urbanization of nature. The paper also examines the governance of these spaces, focusing on how legal and property boundaries are upheld and how these efforts are captured for further capital accumulation. While grounded in empirical research from the Northern Aravalli Region in India, this paper provides comparative insights into the global challenges of urban-wild enmeshment and the complexities of planning for coexistence in the era of planetary urbanization.
  • 'Staying' as climate change adaptation strategy: A proposed research agenda
    Item type: Other Journal Item
    Pemberton, Simon; Furlong, Basundhara T.; Scanlan, Oliver; et al. (2021)
    Geoforum
    This paper brings work on mobility and ‘staying’ together with theoretical ideas of resilience to consider responses to climate change. To date, the majority of work that has explored the impacts of climate change on human populations has taken a migration-centred perspective, with an emphasis on mobility as a key response in crises, including extreme climatic events and civil conflict. However, evidence suggests that people may alternatively – and pro-actively – adopt a different approach involving “staying” as a climate change adaptation strategy. This is important as recent evolutionary approaches to resilience have highlighted how resilience is an on-going process of adaptation which emphasises the temporal, fluid and open-ended aspects of individuals’ experiences and practices in shaping everyday lives. In turn, this means that individuals’ experiences and practices can lead to different strategies of staying (as well as moving) in the face of climate change. Consequently, the paper highlights four key areas where more research is required in order to explore the links between climate change, ‘staying’ and resilience. These include the importance of historical context in disentangling and contextualising the “multicausal” nature of individuals’ mobility decisions; translocal networks in shaping mobility or immobility; the influence of equity, diversity and gendered social expectations on staying; and the importance of governance responses in facilitating resilience, adaptation and subsequent decisions by individuals to stay or move.
Publications 1 - 5 of 5