Drawing on interviews with 25 Australian environmental leaders, the authors ask how international instruments with cosmopolitan ambitions influence the discourse and practice of national and subnational environmentalists attempting to find common ground with Indigenous groups.
Synthesizing ethnographic case studies from mainland Southeast Asia, the authors critically review the implementation of REDD+, a UN project to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. They argue that REDD+ maps onto local power structures and political economies in its implementation, rendering it blunt as a tool for change.
Beth A. Bee studies the implementation of decentralized forms of environmental governance in Jalisco, Mexico, and the political and economic forces resulting in the marginalization of the municipalities affected by this project.
Elizabeth Callaway analyzes scientific literature on climate change, specifically from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to consider how scientific representations structure, articulate, and inform our experience of time.
In his article for the special “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities Section,” Mike Hulme goes beyond traditional, institutional definitions to view climate as an idea which mediates between the human experience of ephemeral weather and the cultural ways of living which are animated by this experience.
In this special issue on Disempowering Democracies, Swati Sidhu, Ganesh Raghunathan, Divya Mudappa, and TR Shankar Raman discuss human-leopard coexistence in the Anamalai Hills, India. They suggest a combination of measures to mitigate negative interactions and support continued human-leopard coexistence.
In this special issue on Disempowering Democracies, Emmanuel Sulle and Holti Banka explore the impacts of taxes imposed on tourism activities occurring on communal lands and the emerging politics of resource and revenue sharing among Wildlife Management Area (WMA) member villages in Tanzania.
In this special issue on Disempowering Democracies, Gretchen M. Walters and Melis Ece analyze the project development negotiations in a World Bank-led REDD+ capacity building regional project, involving six Central African countries between 2008 and 2011. It explores how the project created a “negotiation table” constituted of national and regional institutions recognized by the donors and governments, and how this political space, influenced by global, regional and national political agendas, led to “instances” of recognition and misrecognition among negotiating parties.
In this special issue on Disempowering Democracies, Melis Ece argues that Senegal’s 1996 regionalization reforms narrowed down local democracy via neoliberal processes.
In this special issue on Disempowering Democracies, Robert Mbeche argues that even though REDD+ claims to be democratic and participatory, the Uganda program allows the input of only a few selected stakeholders – mainly the government actors and a limited number of NGOs.
