This paper explores the unintended local outcomes of the centrally designed land reform in postsocialist Romania, examining two strands of this story in order to understand how land reform was thwarted at a local level.
This film follows two young men fighting to preserve the Ecuadorean Amazon. One is a member of the indigenous Cofan tribe, sent to the US for a Western education as a child; the other is an American college student.
Disrupted Landscapes focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation’s forests, farmlands, and rivers.
This article discusses the need to broaden the debate about land rush by including a few key issues that have been neglected. Control over land is increasingly dictated by global actors and processes, leading to a patchwork of locally disembedded land holdings, not conducive for inclusive and sustainable development at the local level.
Goodchild’s article for the Special Commentary section analyzes Pope Francis’s Laudato si, focusing particularly on the concept of connectedness and the economic changes necessary for the Pope’s statements to become reality.
In this Special Section on the Green Economy in the South, Brett Sylvester Matulis considers Costa Rica’s national “payments for ecosystems services” (PES) programme. He explores World Bank / Costa Rica relations and market-oriented interventions to the financing of ecosystem service payments and explains that (despite inherent contradictions inhibiting market formation) neoliberal actors within the state can still implement mechanisms designed to approximate markets.
Virtual water is heralded as the solution to freshwater scarcity and overconsumption, but it oversimplifies global water flows.
Examining the case of the Bellbird Biological Corridor in Costa Rica, Karen Allen argues that conservation policy should reinforce multifaceted social values toward sustainable landscapes, rather than promote economic incentives that reduce environmental benefits to exchange value.
Focusing on Jasper National Park, Megan Youdelis argues that austerity politics create the conditions for a re-articulation of the politics of conservation governance as the interests of parks departments and private sector interests are brought into alignment.
Andrés León Araya reviews Jim Igoe’s The Nature of Spectacle: On Images, Money, and Conservation Capitalism.
