Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role religious and spiritual beliefs play in the politics of the environment in Eastern Uganda. The findings unsettle the historical development dualism that separates material and spiritual realities, showing instead how they intrinsically include one another.

Paper long abstract:

Much of the literature on environment and development focuses on beliefs and knowledge about the issue in question (e.g. beliefs and knowledge about climate change, about forests, about wildlife). What is given less attention are different worldview beliefs that are not ostensibly about the environment but nonetheless inform and legitimise the social relations, practices, interpretations, and norms that mediate human-environment relations. In this paper, I focus in particular on the role that religion (including so-called ‘African traditional religion’) plays in the ways that land, wetlands, and water are managed and accessed in two villages in Eastern Uganda. The paper is based on research that employed participant diaries and stories to elicit learning about people’s different worldview beliefs and their relationship to environmental injustices. The findings unsettle the historical development dualism that separates material and spiritual realities, based on the now patently false supposition that modernising development projects will lead to secular societies. In the case of land, wetlands, and water, dominant development models ignore religious beliefs and neutralise often highly political situations through techno-managerial narratives of evolutionary land rights, natural environments, and community management. This paper discusses how the tensions and conflicts that imbue human-environment relations manifest and are mediated in part through a religious or spiritual idiom. In doing so, it moves beyond the narrow, instrumentalising approach that mainstream development, and much development studies literature, has taken over the past decade to incorporate religion into development.

Paper short abstract:

In Mindanao, contrasting ecological values and understandings of development form the core of a conflict in which the state labels Lumad Indigenous peoples as terrorists, 'justifying' their forced removals from their land, the bombing of their schools and extra-judicial killing of their leadership.

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces the history of capitalist, individualistic, anthropocentric understandings of development in the Philippines from Spanish colonisation to American imperialism. It argues that the structures introduced enabled the present colonial matrix of power and its prioritisation of profit and power over people and planet. Focusing specifically on the mining industry and Lumad Indigenous communities in Mindanao, drawing on interviews with affected persons, it outlines the current situation of environmental injustice in which the military forcibly remove Lumad from their ancestral land to enable mineral exploration.

After highlighting Lumad resistance to this oppression it argues that capitalist understandings of development and progress are the hidden motivation behind the government labelling Lumad as terrorists. They then use this label in an attempt to justify the bombing of Lumad schools and the extra-judicial killing of their leaders. Contrasting understandings of development and different ecological values are at the core of this conflict and the oppression of Lumad communities. For the government and its agencies, the environment is a resource to be exploited for profit, a stance supported by international institutions such as the World Bank. For Lumad, land is life, and the environment it is part of their spiritual system, which they must protect and respect.

In addition to the very real danger that being labelled as terrorists poses to Lumad life it also serves to silence and discredit their anti-capitalist, environmental, communal visions that have much to contribute to understandings of development, particularly given our intensifying global ecological crisis.

Paper short abstract:

How do Indigenous social movements make justice-based claims to climate finance? This paper analyses a case from Mesoamerica to highlight how the decolonial and deeply transformative claims of Indigenous groups unsettle mainstream sustainable development approaches, while remaining beholden to them.

Paper long abstract:

(Interested in panel option - this is a published paper)

For the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, the idea of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) has opened a window for advancing member groups’ claims to territory and community well-being, despite concerns that REDD+ could proceed as development-as-usual in practice. However, the claims under- pinning the engagement of this Indigenous and forest peoples’ network in international climate finance processes reflect conceptualizations of climate justice that diverge from those that have dominated policy and popular discussions. This article assesses the multi- scalar efforts of the Mesoamerican Alliance to promote claims to climate finance around different concepts of justice. Using empirical justice analysis to assess the subjects, dimensions, and criteria explicit and implicit in Mesoamerican Indigenous and forest groups’ claims, and drawing on decolonial and Indigenous perspectives on environmental justice, the article presents evidence as to the possibilities and challenges of translating REDD+ into just outcomes in historically marginalized territories. Using participant observation, unstructured interviews, and document and social media review, it specifically assesses the Alliance-proposed Mesoamerican Territorial Fund, which aims to directly capture climate finance, bypassing problematic relations with national governments and traditional donors. The article finds that although Indigenous peoples and local communities have made significant advances in terms of representation, recognition, participation, and concrete funding, the constraints of “becoming fundable” may hinder more transformative and reparative pathways to just climate outcomes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores refugee/host community environmental knowledges, values and practices in Uganda, in order to better understand the political-economic dynamics and interrelationship between livelihood practices/sustainability and environmental degradation in protracted refugee contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Uganda has the largest refugee population in Africa, and the third largest in the world. In need of access to scarce natural resources such as water, food and forest products, refugee populations have - alongside host communities - contributed to environmental degradation in Uganda. The country has lost more than one million hectares of forest in the last ten years, threatening biodiversity, livelihoods, and straining refugee-host relations. Yet the interrelationship between forced migrants’ use of natural resources, environmental degradation and livelihood sustainability in rural contexts is not well understood. This paper addresses this gap by combining household surveys, in-depth interviews and participatory mapping to explore situated refugee/host environmental knowledges, values and practices in two different refugee settlements in Uganda. Incorporating a sustainable livelihoods framing with a political ecology perspective, the paper ‘unsettles’ dominant narratives of refugees as environmental threats, exploring how (contested) knowledges and values shape society-nature interactions amongst those living in and around refugee settlements. Given Uganda’s increasingly neoliberal approach to refugee development and self-reliance, the paper also considers the differential impacts on livelihoods and access to natural resources amongst individuals, highlighting broader political-economic structural processes which undermine livelihood efforts, affect household decision-making processes, and drive environmental change and injustice. These insights will help guide the design of humanitarian and development policy in protracted refugee situations, facilitating the development of sustainable livelihoods and working towards more equitable and ecologically healthy environmental futures for refugees and host communities alike.