Paper short abstract:

To what extent food sovereignty movements make environmental justice possible? When marginalised community compete over scarce resources, simultaneously negotiate with the neo-liberal economy, what are the manifestations?

Paper long abstract:

The paper will focus on the local food practices, traditional knowledge system and the moral economy of the Kondh tribes of Odisha. Kondhs are a primitive tribal community with a unique system of agroecology and practice various forms of mixed cropping. Their socio-religious life ad rituals revolve around their patterns of agriculture and food system. They consider the ecosystem and nature as sacred. However, multiple factors of 'development' and their negotiation with modern power structures are gradually unsettling their socio-economic life. The commercialisation of crops, rampant usage of pesticides and Bt. cotton has brought new dimensions into their economy and shifted the identities of 'indigeneity'.

The Kondhs values regarding ecosystem are rapidly changing and the paper tries to capture aspects of this through manifestations of community (caste, gender, class) relationship.

The various local agencies found in diverse levels of the politico-economic hierarchy have created ways of exploitation. Yet, the Kondh practices of mixed cropping, morality, revere of nature and celebration of seeds and festivals strongly points at ways of resistance than merely following an animistic religion. The paper focuses on two villages in particular that are located in interesting geographical regions. Their proximity to the market and the caste and class of the populace offered new insights into forms of resisting the dominant development paradigm and negotiating with them in various forms. It explores the changing nature of community life in Kondh society and the way in which their traditional knowledge system might offer hope to regain control over their production system.

Paper short abstract:

In Brazil’s Bocaina coastal region, traditional musical and agri-food cultures have been given a new significance under the motto ‘socioenvironmental justice’ for a communal sense of territorial belonging and thus long-standing claims to the land.

Paper long abstract:

In Brazil’s Bocaina coastal region, the Fórum de Comunidades Tradicionais (FCT) has brought together three traditional communities: indigenous guaraní, quilombolas (descendants of escaped slaves) and caiçaras (descendants of Portuguese settlers). They have faced threats from the dominant development-as-modernisation, which has been colonising their everyday lives in many ways, e.g. by degrading their natural-resource base, expanding real-estate interests, shifting their production-consumption patterns and fragmenting their territory. To counter such threats, the FCT demands justiça socioambiental (socio-environmental justice); this perspective has helped to unite the three communities, coordinate joint activities and build a support network.

As an initial aim, the FCT sought to establish the communities’ role in nature conservation, while contesting the dominant portrayal of an ‘untouched Nature’. The communities later extended biodiverse agroecological agroforestry to commercialise new food products, complementing a community-based tourism (TBC). Their ethno-social diversity sustains local agri-biodiversity, as a basis to valorise agricultural traditions in old and new forms. In all those ways, ‘To conserve is to resist’, as in the FCT motto.

All three communities continue their musical traditions, closely rooted in dance. Such music help to renew collective bonds called mutirão (working together or mutual aid), central to their traditional agri-food practices. An ethnically-differentiated education programme has helped to link and renew their traditional cultures. These have been re-signified for an agroecological inter-group identity, a communal sense of territorial belonging and thus long-standing claims to the land. Together these activities build a territorialized development, aiming to transform the mode of production towards greater socio-economic equity.

Paper short abstract:

Waste facilities are often located away from affluent neighborhoods. This is because waste is too uncivilized to be a neighbor of the civilized communities. However, How best can human communities 'civilize the burden of waste' through promotion of environmental justice?

Paper long abstract:

A growing body of evidence reveals that environmental problems of human civilization are not borne equitably by various population segments of society. More often than not, people with low income tend to bear greater environmental and health risks of civilization than affluent people. For example, in most cities, low-income settlements play host to most waste dumping sites while affluent communities enjoy some of the best waste management, health, water and sanitation facilities even though affluent people (by virtue of their consumption habits) generate more waste. Using empirical data from waste sites in Kenya, this paper argues that a number of factors predispose low-income communities to environmental injustice and unless these are addressed, their environmental visions of the future seem to speak to fate rather than voice and action. A dominant environmental thinking is emerging that seems to legitimize environmental deprivation even where opportunities that favour the weak are available. Can the waste burden be 'civilized' through environmental justice actions?

Paper short abstract:

The coal industry has been the backbone of Chinese economic development. But, it has also destroyed the Chinese environment. As Beijing aims to move away from coal use, how do state actors, capital, and civil society react in places where coal is king?

Paper long abstract:

China is the king of coal. Over half of the world’s coal was mined and burned in China from 2014 through 2016. But, since 2016, China has actively sought to dethrone king coal. Xi Jinping’s first Five-Year Plan made sweeping changes to China’s economic, social, and environmental policies. Chinese leadership has cemented the environment as a “prominent part of the central government agenda and discourse” (Ran 2017), which include the recentralizing attempts under Xi which has made local-level actors more responsive to environmental policies. Considering the substantial limitation on subnational actors’ discretion, we would expect there to be significant changes in environmental policy implementation. Local officials in Shanxi and Henan—two of the largest coal producing provinces in the country and world—implemented Xi’s policies and did so enthusiastically from 2016 until 2018. However, since then coal production and consumption has steadily increased. What does this sudden and enthusiastic implementation of environmental policies tell us about Chinese state processes and the role of the central state’s designs, incentives, pressures, and interests in meso-level implementation? Why are there different levels of pro-environmental policies implementation in provinces that rely on extractive industry for political and economic power? I conducted 93 interviews with key informants and officials and 53 with coal miners in Shanxi, Henan, and Beijing over 11 months and supplemented my interviews with participant observation. I propose a new way of studying the Chinese state in the Xi Jinping era called interstitial débrouillardise to theorize the mechanisms authoritarian environmental governance