Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Chakad Ojani
(Stockholm University)
Julia Perczel (University of Cambridge)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Knut G Nustad
(University of Oslo)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Arguments about informality and formalisation as a moral imperative are frequently invoked in the context of environmental compliance and conservation. How do these create insecurities and precarity associated with livelihoods, land use, and employment patterns?
Long Abstract:
Arguments about informality and formalisation as a moral imperative are now being invoked widely in a variety of settings—including the enforcement of various forms of environmental compliance and conservation. The formal-informal duality since its inception has been used to analyse labour relations, economic rationale, taxation, and land regulations. While some argue for the complete abandonment of informality as an analytical tool, its continuing use and proliferation across the world calls for renewed ethnographic attention. As discourses on (in)formality fold into the context of conservation and environmental responsibility, claims to righteousness, afforded by that idiom, might potentially be propelling forms of exclusion and dispossession that are not immediately obvious. Imperatives of formalisation in the service of the environment may create insecurities and precarity associated with livelihoods, land use, and employment patterns.
We invite contributions that explore how discourses on formality and informality are encountered ethnographically in the context of environmental sustainability and conservation. How do efforts to enforce certain forms of action become enmeshed with the idiom of (in)formality? What new patterns and relations of formality and formalisation are brought about when streamlining social action and centring one particular ethic within the language of (in)formality? Unmoored from the academic context, what aesthetics, signs and signifiers of informality and formality become meaningful in the context of conservation and environmental sustainability? How do legal frameworks, institutions and organisations tasked with saving the planet afford new opportunities for diverse actors to assume formality?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In Lima, concerns about ecosystem endangerment afford opportunities to enact new forms of formality that attempt to marginalise informal squatters. At the same time, conservation offers inventive ways for squatters to pragmatically draw from those techniques of formality to attain their own goals.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among fog oasis conservationists in Lima, in this paper I show how emergent ethics of conservation became enmeshed with discourses on (in)formality. I demonstrate this by framing concerns about the endangerment of species endemic to Lima against the background of deep-seated understandings of informal urbanisation as a threat to the city itself. As a continuation of more long-standing attempts by the city’s affluent populations to hold informal forms of livelihood at bay, discourses on species endangerment lent conservationists and peripheral residents a powerful tool to marginalise informal squatters and perceived land trafficking activities. However, these ecosystem threats proved difficult to pin down and stabilise, in particular because squatters were understood to strategically emulate conservation practices as a means to avoid denunciation. At the same time, conservation occasionally required adopting informal methods, which rendered conservationists themselves reportable to authorities. I frame these shifts as displacements of the grounds for conservationists and informal squatters to maintain any fixed positions vis-à-vis one another, thereby displacing (in)formality onto their respective others. Against this background, I argue that concerns about species and ecosystem endangerment afford opportunities to enact new forms of formality that attempt to marginalise ‘the informal’. At the same time, fog oasis conservation offers inventive ways for squatters to pragmatically draw from those techniques of formality to attain their own goals.
Paper short abstract:
(Il)licit selective logging contributes to degradation of the Peruvian Amazon; in part because of failures to ensure long-term sustainability of timber species. Enforcing formal logging favors market interests, fails to address violent illegal extraction and excludes informal local populations.
Paper long abstract:
The San Martín region in the Andean Amazon has had the greatest forest loss in Peru. The government and popular narratives attribute most deforestation to the expanding agricultural frontier, however, informal selective logging additionally contributes to forest degradation. Some valuable timber species are now difficult to find. Illegally obtained wood is estimated to make up as much as 60% of all Peruvian timber (a new government methodology places the figure at 37%). Illicit extraction often co-occurs with narco-trafficking, occasionally leading to violent encounters with opposing local populations. Peruvian government agencies - with international support - aim to enforce regulations to formalize and thus legalize logging practices in the country. Unfortunately, most rural landholders do not have formal title to their land and thus they do not qualify to extract timber legally. Many local carpenters rely on informal supplies of timber, despite the associated risks. Furthermore, even with efforts to formalize extraction, few legal concession holders comply with regeneration and reforestation obligations, leading to further degradation. Drawing on ethnographic research and on interviews with forestry officials, rural residents, sawmill owners, and carpenters, this presentation offers a nuanced analysis of the complexities of informal timber in the Peruvian Amazon. How can formalization efforts encourage environmental sustainability without excluding often impoverished local populations? The focus on formalizing extracted timber favors foreign market interests. It does not address the underlying informality of the industry, the sometimes-violent extraction itself, nor the degradation both licit and illicit logging leave behind.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will discuss the tensions that emerge between those who look to avoid further deforestation in a region where much damage has been caused by the expansion of the Hass avocado monocrops, and those who see in this industry the possibility to secure their livelihoods.
Paper long abstract:
The Mexican state of Michoacán produces the largest volume of Hass avocado for the export market, mostly in the Purhépecha Plateau region, once characterized by its vast pine and oak forests. This industry transformed a marginal and impoverished region into an agro-industrial enclave integrated into an international economy through the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since 1994. However, it also triggered deforestation.
Whilst some orchards were planted on agricultural land plots, most have substituted pine and oak forests, particularly after 1997, when the exports agreement began. In 2017 accusations about the illegal land use change appeared in the regional press. At the same time, the state government launched an initiative called the Environmental Security Roundtable, to monitor environmental damage such as illegal logging for land use change.
This paper will discuss the tensions that emerge between those who look to avoid further deforestation (including government initiatives) in a region where much damage has been caused by the expansion of the Hass avocado monocrops, and those who see in this industry the possibility to secure their livelihoods. Even if the narrative of conservation is accepted by people in the Hass avocado-growing region, especially by leftwing militants, it struggles to get further consent among others who have access to land and see in this industry the possibility to secure their livelihoods by exporting a much-valued produce in the United States and Canada.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at how non-residential domestic migrant laborers navigate differentiated access to modern energy services following rural electrification efforts in peri-urban Beijing, exploring ways environmentality is negotiated between both formal and informal energy infrastructures.
Paper long abstract:
Beijing's rapid industrial growth in the past few decades has elevated a host of environmental issues to national concern, most notably urban air pollution. Clean air policies have been at the forefront of the city's environmental efforts, successfully integrating surrounding townships into centralized, state-owned energy grids through coal bans (Pachauri 2019), retrofitting households with energy-efficient cooking and heating technologies (Zhang 2012), and subsidized electricity pricing for residential households.
This paper looks at energy access and usage in what I cautiously describe as the "frontier" of Beijing's urban-rural divide where urban villages (chengzhongcun) offer affordable housing options for the city's floating population of domestic migrant laborers seeking work in the nation's capital. Due to their lack of household registration (hukou) in Beijing, migrant workers occupy marginal public and domestic spaces as differentiated citizens (Holston 2008) with little rights and are excluded from receiving subsidized electricity pricing. Ethnographic accounts reveal migrant residents thereby access and use energy differently from other residents, participating in informal arrangements outside of the government's stronghold on centralized energy services that more so reflect the precarious nature of their differentiated citizenship. This paper theorizes ways in which these formal and informal assemblages of household energy access in Beijing's urban-rural margins interact to simultaneously reproduce and resist environmental means of state and subject-making in post-reform China.