Dayabati Roy
(University of Helsinki)
Sirpa Tenhunen
(University of Jyväskylä)
Arne Harms
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
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Formats:
Panels
Sessions:
Thursday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Living with degrading environments: Narration, Social Justice and Conflicts in the Global South.
Panel P045 at conference EASA2020: New anthropological horizons in and beyond Europe.
This panel explores encounters with environmental degradation in the Global South. We invite papers, which examine how environmental discourses relate to ideas of social justice and conflicts as environmental policies are formulated and implemented.
Long Abstract:
While climate change and environmental degradation are debated globally in the media and public sphere, people in climate change affected regions in the Global South are bearing the burden of many of these changes. This panel seeks to explore how people in the Global South locally interpret climate change and take action. We are particularly interested in understanding how local understandings and discourses relate to and differ from the state discourses and how people contest the governmental and trans-local agendas reframing the issues of social and environmental justice. The panel seeks to explore various socio-political processes by which the issues of environmental and social justices are taking new shapes, recreating confrontation, conflict and social change as environmental policies are formulated and implemented. This panel invites paper proposals from scholars who are trying to understand the political consequences of implementation or non-implementation of environmental policies in the Global South. We welcome papers, which are based on ethnographic research, and seek to make a theoretical contribution.
Centering on the environment versus development debate that has grown in Bangladesh in recent years, the study will shed light on the conflict between the state and environmentalist organizations regarding coal powered plants, with specific reference to the plant being built near the Sunderbans.
Paper long abstract:
Bangladesh has been known as one of the countries in the Global South that are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The country is signatory to the Paris Agreement of 2015 as such, and national leaders have enthusiastically participated in COP25 to emphasize the need to take environmental justice and future climate migration from the region into consideration. However, when it comes to its energy policies, the state has shown little concern for the climate in the global dimension. Bangladesh is planning to launch 27 coal power plants in the current decade, much to the dismay of local and international environmentalist organizations which have consistently raised voice in this issue. The conflict had heated first in 2015 when the government had announced the establishment of a coal plant near the country's mangrove forest, the Sunderbans. Environmentalist and civic pressure groups had strongly opposed such a plan that violated the limit of distance of industrial endeavors from forests and a long environmentalist movement called 'Save Sunderbans' has been underway.
The present study will explore the environmental discourses underlying the Sunderbans movement and other environmentalist movements in Bangladesh that critique the state for giving preference to economic growth and critically examine the role and action of different local and international stakeholders, from local people to the UNESCO, under such circumstances. It will also take into account the political-ecological context of the burgeoning coal powered energy in Asia and explore its implications at the local, national and international scale.
The paper focuses on the issue of water and neoliberal policies. Specifically it addresses the conflict between communities and the privatization of communal property in rural areas of the Western Balkans. The ethnographic material focuses on Albania .
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on the issue of water and neoliberal policies. Specifically it addresses the conflict between communities and the privatization of communal property in rural areas of the Western Balkans. The ethnographic material focuses on Albania that leads the list of Balkan States with the privatization of more than 713 rivers and streams in order to built dams and hydropowers under the label of an environmentally friendly renewable energy. Progress, development, modernization and European integration are often used as keywords by state bureaucrats and politicians to describe and eventually legitimatize the privatization of water flow. Hydro powered energy production is sold to the public by the government as eco-friendly carbon-free energy production. However, most of these projects have faced community-based resistance. Dams are changing not only the natural landscape of the rural areas but also people's lives as long as access to water is reduced dramatically. Communities are often supported by environmental activists. It is in the intention of this presentation to explore the dynamicity of the conflict between communities, government policies and private firms over water rights in the implementation process of two hydropower projects in contemporary Albania. Among others, our discussion will draw the audience's attention to the ways how the materialization of neoliberal policies on the environment specifically and on the common good in more broader terms are quickly eroding the very foundations of the democratic order.
This ethnographic research looks at how constant flooding of the Paraguayan River is understood differently by residents of the slums of Asunción city and the state, resulting in social-ecological and political conflicts. It questions how top-down environment policies could be used against the poor.
Paper long abstract:
This ethnographic research looks at how constant flooding of the Paraguayan River is understood differently by residents of the slums of Asunción city and the state, resulting in social-ecological and political conflicts. New urban redevelopment projects deem that floodplains areas of the city are the "rightful" space of the river and that marginalized communities living there should move elsewhere. However, these areas, known as Bañados, were never empty floodplains. Indigenous, mestizos and rural migrant communities have lived there since colonial times, forming a historically rooted socio-ecology with the neighboring river. This research aims to understand the way(s) in which the recent urban redevelopment projects and top-down environmental policies in Asunción create a socio-ecological conflict between what is understood as the "rights" of the river as opposed to that of marginalized urban communities. In this way, it addresses the main question: how is the Paraguayan State evoking the social and political jurisprudence of the river as a way to delineate environmental claims and deny access to land, housing, and basic services to the urban poor? Findings combine ethnographic accounts drawn from different locations of Asunción city, state institutions, and historical archival research. In this way, the goal is to advance understandings about novel forms of governing people and the "environment" in an era marked both by climate anxiety and uncertainty as well as greater social and political inequalities.
This paper argues that people in Vanuatu, by engaging in discourses and implemented climate change policies, constantly create new realities. These include assumptions about the nature and effects of climate change as well as actions to be taken, which differ among various actors.
Paper long abstract:
In Vanuatu, climate change plays an important role in foreign as well as in national policy. Implementation of climate change policy includes most importantly climate change adaptation projects, planned and realised by international development organisations and NGOs in cooperation with governmental departments. Staff of these climate change adaptation projects, which focus for example on the introduction of new agricultural methods, figure prominently for the dissemination of information about climate change, besides various other actors, like media. Nevertheless, politicians, staff of governmental institutions, and inhabitants of villages have quite different assumptions about the nature and effects of climate change and consequently do not perceive proposed adaptation strategies in the same way.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the rural area of the island of Efate, I will show that villagers in Vanuatu constantly generate new 'climate change realities' by interacting with staff of organisations as well as with their environment(s). These realities created include not only assumptions about climate change, but also subsequent actions (or non-actions) to be taken when dealing with environmental changes. I argue that in this context villagers might challenge policies and with it concepts connected to climate change, like adaptation.
Thailand in 2595 BE (2052 CE) A sci-fi comic story that braids together ecologically driven grief and complicated grief is at the centre of this paper that engages with vulnerability and resilience on a wider geographical scale and with life in the Anthropocene from a material culture perspective.
Paper long abstract:
Thailand in 2595 BE (2052 CE) - It is Link's fifth death anniversary. Roong, who survived a disaster that turned the Malay peninsula into an ephemeral archipelago, urges her widowed father to resume a "normal life". While she recovered from the inflicted stress, he stays at home. He lost his job, colleagues, friends, neighbours, appetite, dreams, and hope. He only speaks with his daughter. Intrigued by a pal's experimental brain-machine interface designed to delete "bad memories", she agrees to test the device on her father. Will it work? Told by a group of Thai secondary school students envisioning a career in medicine and the natural sciences, this sci-fi comic story imaginatively and productively braids together ecologically driven grief and complicated grief with life in the Anthropocene. What their progressive narrative that problematises environmental policy and high-skill labour migration in the Global South may add to current scholarly and policy debates of vulnerability and disaster resilience on a wider geographical scale is explored and examined from a material culture perspective and situated within Southeast Asia's fast growing science-city population.
This paper will discuss the environmental activist scene of Bali, Indonesia, and the local struggle to contain the damage done by the tourism industry.
Paper long abstract:
Whose island is it, when most of those who dwell on it are there only temporarily? Bali has a population of 4.2 Million people. In 2017, the number of yearly tourists was 5.7 Million. Accordingly, tourism is an immense business sector to the Balinese. But it brings with it questions of inequality to the island: of water scarcity for some, and abundant pools for others. Of droughts, floods and pollution. Tourism thus emphasizes the issues which climate change is threatening Balinese island life with.
A number of environmental activists have started protesting against the tourism industry as well as the local government's blind eye to its faults and repercussions, especially since 2013. Interestingly, activist circles on Bali revolve around and are intermingled with the punk and art scene of the island. These "artivists" endorse environmental NGO work, and many transcend the different activist scenes.
This paper will thus explore how Balinese artivists seek both small and large stages to mobilize supporters and turn around local policies, to acknowledge the danger of climate change and tourism's contribution to its harsh effects.
Within the broader narrative of climate change that dominates stories from the Pacific, the paper explores the Fijian concept of tabu (taboo, prohibition) to map out the complex ways in which people imagine their future(s).
Paper long abstract:
With climate change as an ongoing reality the Fijian government is highlighting a new sustainable development regime to better fit with future challenges. Through this, they wish to inform the population of the physical reality of climate change, and equip people with knowledge to make the right choices for their future. However, the national climate change narrative does not include the lifeworlds of all Fijians. In some places climate change is not such a pressing matter in daily lives, and their choices for the future may seem to collide with the general advice from the government and the international community regarding climate change concerns. Through ethnography from a rural island in Fiji, the paper explores the local concept of tabu (taboo, prohibition) to map out the complex ways in which people imagine their future(s).
Traditionally, tabu has been used to ban fishing in a certain area for a limited period to secure maximum profit. Today such tabus are of a more permanent character, and together with newer forms of fishing bans they are meant to secure food resources for future generations. This modern idea of using the principle of tabu as a form of risk management differs from the local one. Fishing bans from the government is developed from a climate perspective and lacks convergence in the village. So, how do people experience the state's emphasis on resource management? Moreover, what are the various relationalities underlying the different tabu practices?
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