Paper short abstract

This paper explores the Irish state’s use of conservation to project itself as ‘green’ while simultaneously presenting resistant farmers as uneducated and problematic. It calls for increased attention to the manipulation of green discourse within policy and state self-representations.

Paper long abstract

The rhetoric of green production and development is increasingly common in Irish publicity campaigns over the last decades. This idea builds off of a play on the island’s lush green aesthetics, grass-fed cattle industry, and conservation initiatives that support both tourism and EU-mandated species protections. This paper will explore the emergent identities of marginal upland farmers whose farmland has become part of the Natura 2000 network, thus reshaping the meaning of land ownership and farm futures. In doing so, I explore the intersection of plantation forests, low-intensity upland farming, and the Irish state’s use of forestry and conservation to project itself as ‘green’ while simultaneously presenting resistant farmers as uneducated, marginal, and problematic. Based on ethnographic research in north County Cork, this paper calls for increased attention to the manipulation of conservation and green discourse within policy and state self-representations. Attention to the intersection of state-led ‘green’ discourse and the ways in which locals are enmeshed, ignored, or presented within it is a necessary step in recognizing the local lives and identities that emerge within such discursively curated landscapes.

Paper short abstract

The Indian development state derived authority by deeming its farmers as backward. How does it reorient itself to promote organic agriculture, which valorizes the farmers' traditional environmental knowledge? Can states overcome fears of ceding their agency to farmers in this new inclusive paradigm?

Paper long abstract

Development states of the global south built their political legitimacy by claiming to be saviors of their "backward" citizens. How do they retain this legitimacy, now that the world increasingly sees such citizens as environmental stewards, guardians of local knowledge and principled opponents of neoliberal homogenization?

I explore the manifestation of this impasse in the promotion of organic agriculture in the Indian Himalayas by a government seeking political fame as an environmentalist pioneer. During the “green revolution”, third world states discursively positioned themselves as reeducating their socially, technologically backward farmers, who then ostensibly adopted modern, income and food security-boosting cultivation practices. Organic agriculture, as an alternative to this western, modernist engagement with nature, privileges the identity of pioneering farmers, seen as preserving local natural heritage against homogenizing, monoculture-imposing states. This transformation creates a conundrum for the Indian regional state of Sikkim. In 2016, to bolster its green-developmentalist credentials, the state barred its farmers from undertaking any non-organic cultivation. If – to draw maximum political mileage out of this conservation-and-development project – the regional government adopts a discourse of a pioneering state and its obedient farmers, it risks appearing autocratic and undemocratic. However, the alternative discourse of pioneering farmers and a supportive state underplays the state’s agentiveness, diminishing the political credit it gains from the bold initiative. Through discourse analysis and interviews with Sikkim’s officials and citizens, I analyze the mediation of this impasse – as indicative of a larger implicit tension over claims of leadership and innovation in green developmentalism.

Paper short abstract

The establishment of biodiversity corridors in the Yucatan in 2000 was a state strategy to conduct conservation in a broad not "developed" areas. After twenty years, this policy fed the reappropriation of landscape for current disputes over territory to confront extractivism frontiers.

Paper long abstract

Since the late 1990's, state conservation policies began to be framed for all Mexican landscapes. This policy affected rural communities in many ways, but in the Yucatan peninsula this policy was instrumented by a territorial framework known as biodiversity corridors. Biodiversity corridors as epistemological hypothesis were oriented to attend natural protected areas and their nearby areas known as "Influence zones" where subsidies were disperse for more than 20 years. This paper examines the many facets of the territorial policies instrumented in the Yucatan which for many years were held as an example of state instrumented neoliberal conservation, but recently as being appropriated as policies an as interests are held as means of social identities in the regions. Conservation became the locus of contested action against tourism development and agribusiness, the main extractivist industries operating in the area.