The authors provide an empirical study of the conservation strategy adopted in the northern Sierra Madre, the Philippines, and criticize the assumptions behind the main legalistic interventions.
Drawing on interviews with the managers of 56 internationally adjoining protected areas in 18 countries in the Americas, the study focuses on the link between land use change and environmental change, and on three adaptation strategies, namely diversification, pooling, and out-migration. It suggests that the impact of adaptation depends on the adaptation strategy chosen.
Ludger Brenner analyzes the potentials and limitations of multi-stakeholder platforms (known as advisory councils) in Mexico that are involved in protected area and resource management in the peripheral regions.
The authors explore the case of a Privately Protected Area (PPA) in Chilean Patagonia to learn its impact on local residents. Based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews, they find that the park has been detrimental to local livelihoods, has disrupted systems of production, and has elicited a negative emotional response.
Erin Ryan shares her work on negotiated federalism, exploring how good multiscalar governance is often the product of intergovernmental bargaining among decision makers at various levels of government.
In the United States, debate over the responsibilities of different levels of government are framed within our system of constitutional federalism, which divides sovereign power between the central federal administration and regional states. Dilemmas about devolution have been erupting in all regulatory contexts, but environmental governance remains uniquely prone to federalism discord because it inevitably confronts the core question with which federalism grapples—“who gets to decide?”— in contexts where state and federal claims to power are simultaneously at their strongest.
Through a quantitative questionnaire survey conducted in villages around the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in northern Congo, the authors assess local attitudes towards conservation and elephant conservation in particular.
Christine Hansen uses the concept of deep time to challenge the idea that never-before-witnessed events are unprecedented. Using the case of a massive firestorm in 2009 in southeast Australia, she calls into question the shallow temporal frames through which deep time environmental phenomena are understood in Australian settler culture and offers an insight into often unnoticed ways in which contemporary society struggles with the colonial legacy.
Sophie Chao delves into an unexplored dimension of the agribusiness nexus—the affective attachments of corporate actors to oil palm seeds. Drawing from fieldwork in an oil palm concession in Riau, Sumatra, she highlights the conflicting nature of caring for palm oil seeds.
The authors analyze the portrayal in popular conservation discourse of the flowering plant Rhododendron ponticum as an invasive species in the British countryside, especially Scotland. They explore how its invasiveness is materially produced via the cultural and socioeconomic as well as vegetal relations within which it is entangled.
