Globalization, conservation, and green development
Geography 6402
Spring 2007
Instructor:
Emily Yeh
Guggenheim 103A, x2-5438
emily.yeh@colorado.edu
Meeting:
Mondays 12-2:50pm
Guggenheim 201E
Office hours: Tuesday, Thursday 2:00-3:30 pm
and by appointment
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This seminar explores questions about the increasingly globalized practices and politics
of conservation and development from the perspective of political ecology, an interdisciplinary
field with contributions from geography, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines.
Political ecology emerged out of Marxian political economy and cultural ecology, as a reaction
to over-simplified, neo-Malthusian analyses of environmental problems. Today, the field is both
increasingly popular, and also sprawling and complex, with topics traveling under the name of
political ecology ranging from struggles over property rights to the social construction of nature
to vulnerability to famine, to discursive analyses of scientific narratives. We will start the
semester with a general overview of political ecology but the course by no means tries to
comprehensively cover the field.
Instead, the seminar will investigate a smaller set of themes in depth, through the reading
of recent monographs, articles, and book chapters. These overlapping themes include:
community-based/participatory conservation and development, environmental NGOs and
movements, environmental identities, nature and nation, the politics of conservation science, and
neoliberal governance of nature. The following, then, are some of the kinds of questions we will
be asking. How should we understand different scalar trends in conservation - toward
community-based natural resource management and decentralization on the one hand, and
ecoregions and transboundary management on the other? How and why do people become
environmentalists, ie. what are the processes of translation and subject formation through which
differently placed people come to identify with the environment? How do ideas of nature or
environmental protection get mobilized in the service of religion and nationalism, or vice versa?
How should we analyze different kinds of environmental actors - environmental NGOs,
transnational development institutions, elite domestic scientists, etc. - in relation to national and
transnational histories and processes? What do participatory development and ideas of
community mean for changing forms of governmentality? What are the implications of
neoliberalization for the management of nature?
The class will be run as a reading-intensive, advanced seminar in which students are
responsible for careful reading of the assigned pieces; weekly commentary; and brief
presentations. Most of each class period will be devoted to discussion.
This class can be taken to fulfill a DART core requirement
COURSE TEXTS
1
Required
Roderick Neumann. 2005 Making Political Ecology. Hodder Arnold.
Christine Walley. 2004. Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an east African Marine
Park. Princeton University Press.
Celia Lowe. 2006. Wild Profusion: Biodiversity conservation in an Indonesian archipelago.
Princeton University press.
Paige West. 2006. Conservation is our government now: The Politics of Ecology in
Papua New Guinea. Duke University Press.
Raymond Bryant, 2005. Nongovernmental organizations in Environmental Struggles: Politics
and the making of moral capital in the Philippines. Yale University Press.
Cori Hayden. 2003. When nature goes public: the making and unmaking of bioprospecting in
Mexico. Princeton University Press.
Michael Goldman. 2005 Imperial Nature: The world bank and struggles for social justice in
the age of globalization. Yale University Press.
Karl Zimmerer, ed. 2006 Globalization and new geographies of conservation. University
of Chicago Press.
Katrina Schwartz. 2006. Nature and national identity after Communism: Globalizing the
Ethnoscape. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Recommended
Brosius, Peter, Anna Tsing, and Charles Zerner. 2005. Communities and Conservation: Histories
and politics of community-based natural resource management. Boulder: AltaMira.
The other required course readings (in addition to the required textbooks, which are
available at the CU bookstore) will be available on e-reserve and/or CU Learn.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
(1) Seminar participation:
To make this seminar work, everyone must complete assigned readings prior to class
meetings, and actively participate in the discussion. (25% of grade)
(2) Critical reading commentaries
Written commentaries in the form of a roughly 1-page critical reflections on at least 8 of
the weekly readings are due. These should be analytical rather than descriptive, critically
engaging the week’s reading rather than simply summarizing them. They are assigned both as an
opportunity for you to carefully reflect upon the readings before we meet as a group, and as a
way of generating class discussion.
These commentaries will be due on CU Learn on Sundays at 4pm (time subject to
discussion on first day of class). You should read all contributions before coming to class on
Monday. (25% of grade)
(3) Class presentations:
Every student will be responsible for one (maybe two, depending on enrollment) 10
minute class presentation of weekly readings at the beginning of class. Rather than provide an
exhaustive summary, the presentations should be concise, covering key theoretical and
conceptual issues in the readings of the week. They should clarify key arguments and pose
provocative statements and questions that open up, rather than close down, discussion. In
2
addition, the person responsible for the class presentation will help guide the discussion and help
summarize or synthesize the discussion at the end. (10% of grade)
(4) Seminar paper:
A final seminar paper is due at the end of the semester. A half page paper description of
the proposed paper topic is due during Week 8 (March 12). The paper, in the range of 15 pages,
may take one of several forms: (a) a paper or thesis chapter that links your research with course
themes; (b) a grant application or dissertation proposal that has been substantially shaped by
engagements with course readings and themes; or (c) a paper that critically engages with a
cluster of course themes or readings.
It is fine to turn in a grant proposal, prospectus or a part of your thesis/dissertation. The
only requirement is that it must engage critically and substantively with at least a subset of the
readings, themes, and discussions from this class.
(40% of grade)
Feedback on seminar paper
The first draft of your paper will be due April 23. On April 23 everyone will distribute
a copy of their papers to the rest of the class. Then on April 30 (and depending on class size, one
additional meeting outside of regularly scheduled class time) we will devote about ½ hour to
each student’s paper. In addition to participating actively in the discussion of every other class
member’s paper, you will also provide a written commentary (roughly one page) for your preassigned paper partner.
All comments should be done by April 30. You will then have one full week to revise.
Final papers are due Monday May 7 at noon
SCHEDULE
Week 1
Introductions
No reading
January 22
Week 2
What is political ecology? – Definitions and genealogies
January 29
1. Neumann, Roderick 2005 Making Political Ecology. Hodder Arnold.
2. Robbins, Paul, 2004 Political Ecology: A critical introduction. Blackwell. Ch. 1, pp 3-16.
3. Paulson, Susan, Lisa Gezon, and Michael Watts. 2005 "Politics, Ecologies, Genealogies"
Political ecology across spaces, scales, and social groups .
Rutgers University Press, pp 17-40.
4.Political Economy: Marx. Capital Volume 1, Chapters 26 and 27, The Secret of Primitive
Accumulation and the Expropriation of the Agricultural population, pp. 873-895.
Related Readings
Introductions and edited volumes on political ecology
Biersack, Aletta, ed. 2006. Reimagining Political Ecology. Duke University Press.
Forsyth, Timothy. 2003. Critical political ecology: the politics of environmental science. London: Routledge.
Heynen, Nik, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw eds. 2006. In the nature of cities: urban political ecology
and the politics of urban metabolism Routledge.
3
Paulson, Susan, and Lisa Gezon, 2004 eds. Political ecology across spaces, scales, and social groups. Rutgers
University Press.
Peet, Richard and Michael Watts. 1996. Liberation Ecologies: Environment, development, social movements.
Routledge. (First Edition)
______ 2004. Liberation Ecologies: Environment, development, social movements. Routledge (Second
Edition – not the same as first edition)
Robbins, Paul. 2004. Political Ecology: A critical introduction. Blackwell Publishing.
Zimmerer, Karl and T. J. Bassett, eds. 2003. Political ecology: an integrative approach to geography and
environment-development studies. New York: Guilford Press.
Definitions and Early works in political ecology
Blaikie, Piers. 1985. Political Economy of Soil erosion in developing countries. New York: John Wiley &
ons.
_______ 1999. “A review of political ecology: issues, epistemology, and analytical narratives.”
Zeitschrift fur Wirtschaftsgoegraphie. 131-147.
Blaikie, Piers and Harold Brookfield 1987. Land Degradation and Society. London: Methuen.
Bryant, Raymond L. 1992. “Political ecology: An emerging research agenda in Third-World studies.” Political
geography 11(1):12-36.
_______ 1999. “A political ecology for developing countries?: Progress and paradox in the evolution of a
research field.” Zeitschrift fur Wirtschaftsgeographie. 148-157
________. 2001. “Political Ecology: A critical agenda for change?” in Castree and Braun, ed., Social Nature
: theory, practice and politics. 151-169.
Bryant, Raymond and Sinead Bailey. 1997. Third world political ecology. New York: Routledge.
Neumann, R.P. 1992 “Political ecology of wildlife conservation in the Mt. Meru area of northeast Tanzania.”
Land Degradation and Rehabilitation Vol. 3 85-98.
Schmink, M. and H. Wood. 1987. "The 'Political Ecology' of Amazonia" in Lands at Risk in the Third World
Local-level Perspectives. (eds) Peter D. Little and M.M. Horowitz. Boulder: Westview:38-57.
Vayda, Andrew and Bradley B. Walters. 1999. “Against Political ecology.” Human Ecology
27(1): 167-179.
Cultural ecology
Carney, Judith. 2001. Black rice: the African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard
UP
Conklin, Harold C. 1969 “An ethnoecological approach to shifting agriculture.” in Andrew P
Vayda, ed. Environment and Cultural Behavior. Natural History Press.
Durham, William. 1976. “The adaptive significance of cultural behavior.” Human Ecology 4(2):89-121
Ellen, Roy. 1982. Environment, subsistence and system: the ecology of small-scale social formations.
NewYork: Cambridge University Press.
Nietschmann, Bernard. 1973. Between land and water: the subsistence ecology of the Miskito Indians,
Eastern Nicaragua. New York: Seminar Press.
Nietschmann, Bernard. 1979. “Ecological change, inflation and migration in the Far Western Caribbean.”
Geographical Review. 69/1. 1979.
Padoch, Christine. "The woodlands of Tae: traditional forest management in Kalimantan." in Forest resources
and Wood-based biomass energy as rural development assets.
Posey, Darrell. 1985. "Indigenous management of tropical forest ecosystems: the case of the Kayapo
Indians of the Brazilian Amazon." Agroforestry systems. 3:139-158
Rambo, Terry and Percy Sajise. 1984. An introduction to human ecology research in South Asia. Laguna,
Phillipines.
Rappaport, Roy. Ecology, meaning and religion. Chapter 2 North Atlantic Books
________ 1984 [ 1968]. Pigs for the Ancestors: ritual in the ecology of a new guinea people. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Steward, Julian. 1977 Evolution and Ecology: essays on social transformation. University of Illinois Press.
Vayda, Andrew. 1983. "Progressive Contextualization: Methods for Research in Human Ecology."
4
Human Ecology 11(3):265-281
Wilden, Anthony. 1972. System and Structure. London, Routledge. pp. 202-230/
Political economy of natural resources, agrarian studies
Bernstein H. and P. Woodhouse.2001. “Telling Environmental change like it is.” Journal of Agrarian Change.
Barham, Bradford, Stephen Bunker and Denis O’Hearn. 1994 “Raw Materials industries in resource-rich
regions.” States, firms and raw materials: the world economy and the ecology of aluminum. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Friedman, Jonathan. 1974. “Marxism, structuralism and vulgar materialism” Man. 9(3):444-469.
Hecht, Susanna. 1985. “Environment, Development, and Politics: Capital Accumulation
and the Livestock Sector in Eastern Amazonia.” World Development 13(6):663- 684.
Thompson, EP. 1975. Whigs and Hunters: the origins of the Black Act.
Watts, Michael. 1987. “Drought, environment, and food security: some reflections on peasants, pastoralists
and commoditization in dryland West Africa.” in Michael H.Glantz, ed., drought and hunger in
Africa: denying famine a future. Cambridge UP, pp. 171-211.
Wilmsen, Edwin. 1989, Land filled with flies: a political economy of the Kalahari U Chicago Press.
Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Property and access
Berry, Sara. 1997. "Tomatoes, land and hearsay: property and history in Asante in the time of structural
adjustment." World Development 25(8): 1225-1241.
Buck, Susan J. “No Tragedy on the commons” Environmental Ethics. Spring 1985:49-61.
Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the ecology of New England. New
York: Hill and Wang.
Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science. 163: 1243-1248.
Feeny, D., F. Berkses. B.J. McCay & J. Acheson. 1988. “The Tragedy of the commons: 22 years later”
Fortmann, Louise. 1995. “Talking claims: discursive strategies in contesting property.” World Development.
23(6):1053-1063.
Macpherson, C.B. (ed) 1978. Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions. Buffalo, NY: University of
Toronto Press
McCay, Bonnie J. and James M. Acheson. 1987. The Question of the Commons: The Culture and
Ecology of Communal Resources. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.
McKean, Margaret A. 2000. “Common Property: What is it, what is it good for, and what makes it work?” In
Clark C. Gibson, Margaret A. McKean and Elinor Ostrom, eds., People and Forests: Communities,
Institutions and Governance. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 27-56.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1991. Governing the Commons: the evolution of institutions for collective Action. Cambridge
UP
Peluso, Nancy. Peluso, N.L. 1996. "Fruit trees and family trees in an Anthropogenic rainforest: Property rights,
ethics of access, and environmental change in Indonesia." Comparative Studies in Society and History
38 (3):510-548.
Ribot, Jesse C. "Theorizing Access: Forest Profits along Senegal's Charcoal Commodity Chain,"
Development and Change Vol 29 (1998): 307-341.
Ribot, Jesse and Nancy Lee Peluso. 2003. “ A Theory of access.” Rural sociology pp. 153-181.
Schroder, Richard 1997. “ Reclaiming’ land in the Gambia: Gendered property rights and environmental
intervention.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87(3):487-508.
Week 3 Conservation, Community and its discontents
February 5
1. Tsing, Anna, Peter Brosius and Charles Zerner. 2005. Communities and Conservation:
Histories and Politics of Community-based natural resource management. Alta Mira
Press. Chapters.:
5






Introduction, pp1-36.
Chapter 1 “Dances around the Fire: Conservation organizations and community-based
natural resource management. Janis Alcorn, pp. 37-68
Chapter 2, “Participatory democracy in natural resource management." BorriniFeyerabend with Christopher Tarnowsky, pp. 69-90;
Chapter 4, "Congruent objectives, competing interests, and strategic compromise."
Marshall Murphree, pp 105-148
Chapter 6, “Model, panacea, or exception? Contextualizing CAMPFIRE and related
programs in Africa”, Neumann, pp. 177-194;
Chapter 8 “Community, forestry and conditionality in the Gambia” ,Schroeder, pp. 207230.
The neoliberal question
2. McCarthy, James. 2005. "Devolution in the woods: Community-based forestry as hybrid
neoliberalism." Environment and Planning A 37 (6): 995-1014.
3. Li, Tania. “Neo-liberal strategies of government through community: the social development
program of the World Bank in Indonesia.”http://www.iilj.org/documents/2006-2-GALLi-final-web.pdf (on CU Learn )
Related readings
Agrawal, Arun. 2001. “State formation in community spaces?: Decentralization of control over forests in
the Kumaon Himalaya, India.” Journal of Asian Studies. 60(1):9-41.
Agrawal, Arun and C. Gibson. 1999. “Enchantment and disenchantment: the role of community in natural
resource conservation.” World Development, 27:629-649
Agrawal, Arun and Clark Gibson. 2001. Communities and the Environment: Ethnicity, gender and the
state in Community-based conservation. Rutgers University Press.
Agrawal, Arun and Jesse Ribot. 1999. “Accountability in decentralization: a framework with South Asian
and West African cases.” Journal of Development Areas. 33:473-502.
Belsky, Jill M. “Misrepresenting communities: the politics of community-based rural ecotourism in Gales
Point Manatee, Belize.” Rural Sociology 64:641-666.
Brechin, Steven R. ed 2003. Contested nature: promoting international biodiversity conservation with social
justice in the twenty-first century. Albany: SUNY Press.
____, et al. 2002. “Beyond the square wheel: toward a more comprehensive understanding of biodiversity
conservation as social and political process.” Society and natural resources. 15:41-64.
Brosius, Peter, Anna Tsing and Charles Zerner 1998. “Representing communities: histories and politics of
community-based resource management.” Society and Natural Resources 11(20:157-168.
Li, Tania M. 1996. “Images of Community: discourse and strategy in property relations.” Development and
Change. 27(3):501-27.
McCarthy, J. 2006. Neoliberalism and the politics of alternatives: community forestry in British Columbia and
the United States. Annals of the Association of American Geographers
Neumann, Roderick. 2004. “Nature-state-territory: toward a critical theorization of conservation
enclosures” in Peet and Watts. ed., Liberation ecologies, pp. 195-217.
Nightingale, Andrea J. 2005. ‘The experts taught us all we know”: Professionalization and knowledge in
Nepalese Community Forestry. Antipode.
Oates, John. 1999. Myth and reality in the rain forest: How conservation strategies are
failing in West Africa. UC Press. pp. xi-xx; pp. 43-58; 229-254
Orlove, Ben. and Brush, S. 1996 “Anthropology and the conservation of biodiversity”. Annual Review of
Anthropology 25:329-352
Peluso, Nancy L. 1993. “Coercing conservation? The politics of state resource control.” Global Environmental
Change p. 199-217
6
Sundar, Nandini. 2001. “Beyond the bounds? Violence at the margins of new legal geographies.” in Peluso
and Watts, Violent Environments. pp. 328-353.
Walker, Peter A. and Patrick T. Hurley. Collaboration derailed: the politics of 'community-based' resource
management in Nevada County. Society & Natural Resources.
Wilshusen, Peter, et al. 2002. “Reinventing a square wheel: critique of a resurgent ‘protection
paradigm’ in international biodiversity conservation.” Society and natural resources.15:17-40.
Zerner, Charles. 2000. Peoples, plants and justice: the politics of nature conservation. Columbia UP.
Week 4
Globalization, conservation, and the politics of scale
February 12
1. Zimmerer, Karl, ed. 2006. Globalization & New Geographies of Conservation,
 "Introduction", Zimmerer, Karl, pp. 1-44
 "Conclusion", Zimmerer, Karl, pp. 315-346.
 Chapter 7. Turner, Matthew. ”Shifting scales, lines and lives: The politics of conservation
science and development in the Sahel,” 166-185.
 Chapter 8 Snedden, Chris. “Conservation initiatives and ‘transnationalization’ in the
Mekong River Basin.” 191-211. .
 Chapter 9, Sierra, Rodrigo. “A transnational perspective on national protected areas and
ecoregions in the tropical Andean countries” pp. 212-228.
 Chapter 10, Kenneth Young and Lily Rodriguez. "Development of Peru 's Protected-area
system: historical continuity of conservation goals" pp229-254.
 Chapter 12. Leslie Gray, "Decentralization, land policy and the politics of scale in
Burkino Faso." pp 277-296.
2. Brosius, J. P. and Russell, D. 2003. "Conservation from above: an anthropological
perspective on transboundary protected areas and ecoregional planning." Journal of
Sustainable Forestry 17 (1/2): 35-58.
3 McCarthy, James. 2005. “Scale, sovereignty and strategy in environmental governance”
Antipode. 37(4):731-753.
Related readings
Basnet, Khadga. 2003. "Transboundary biodiversity conservation initiative: an example from Nepal." Journal
of Sustainable Forestry 17(1-2).
Brosius, Peter. “Seeing communities: technologies of visualization in conservation.” in Reconsidering
Community: the unintended consequences of an intellectual Romance. School of American Research
Press.
______What counts as local knowledge in global environmental assessments and conventions?” In Bridging
Scales and epistemologies: linking local knowledge and global science in multi-scale assessments. ed
by Walter Reid, Doris Capistrano and Tom Wilbanks, Island Press.
Chester, Charles C. 2003. "Responding to the idea of transboundary conservation: an overview of public
reaction to the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) Conservation Initiative" Journal of Sustainable Forestry
17(1/2).
Fall, Juliet. 2003. "Planning protected areas across boundaries: new paradigms and old ghosts." Journal of
Sustainable Forestry. 17(1/2).
Hanks, John. 2003. "Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in Southern Africa: Their role in conserving
biodiveristy, socioeconomic development and promoting a culture of peace." Journal of Sustainable
Forestry 17(1/2).
McDermott, Hughes. 2003. "Village republics and venture capitalists: strange bedfellows in Zimbabwe
-Mozambique Transborder conservation." Journal of Sustainable Forestry 17(1/2).
_______. 2005. "Third nature: making space and time in the Great Limpopo conservation area." Cultural
Anthropology 20(2): 157-84.
7
West, Paige, James Igoe and Dan Brockington. 2006. "Parks and Peoples: The Social impact of Protected
Areas." Annual Review of Anthropology 35:251-277
Week 5
Participatory conservation and development in practice
February 19
Walley, Christine. 2004. Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an east African Marine
Park. Princeton University Press.
Related readings - critical development studies
Crush, Jonathan, ed. The Power of Development. Routledge.
Escobar, Arturo, 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and unmaking of the Third World.
Princeton University Press.
Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization and Bureaucratic
Power in Lesotho. University of Minnesota Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge University Press.
Siviramakrishnan, K and Arun Agrawal, eds. 2003. Regional modernities: the cultural politics of
development in India. Oxford University Press.
Yappa, Lakshman. 1996. "Improved seeds and constructed scarcity." In R. Peet and M. Watts,eds.,
Liberation ecologies: environment, development, and social movements. Routledge.
Ecotourism
Belsky, Jill. 2000. "The Meaning of the Manatee: Community-based ecotourism discourse and practice
in Gales Point, Belize." in Charles Zerner, ed., Plants, People and Justice.
______. 1999. "Misrepresentating communities: the politics of community-based rural ecotourism in
Gales Point Manatee, Belize." Rural Sociology 64(4): 641-666.
Che, Deborah. 2006. "Developing ecotourism in First World, resource-dependent areas." Geoforum 37(2):
212-226
Hughes, D.M. 2001b. “Rezoned for business: how eco-tourism unlocked black farmland in eastern
Zimbabwe.” Journal of Agrarian Change 1(4): 575-99.
Lindberg, Kreg, Jeremy Enriquez, and Keith Sproule. 1996."Ecotourism Questioned: Case
Studies from Belize." Annals of Tourism Research 23(3):543-562.
West, Paige, et al. 2004. "Ecotourism and authenticity." Current Anthropology 45:483-498.
Young, Emily. 2003 "Balancing conservation with development in marine-dependent communities:
is Ecotourism an empty promise?" in Zimmerer, K and T Bassett, eds. Political
ecology: an integrative approach to geography and environment-development studies,
pp29-49
Week 6
Conservation-as-development and transnational translation
February 26
West, Paige. 2006. Conservation is our government now: The Politics of Ecology in
Papua New Guinea. Duke University Press.
Related readings: ICDP
Herrold-Menzies, Melinda. 2006. " Integrating Conservation and Development: What We Can
Learn from Caohai, China" Journal for Environment and Development.
______forthcoming. "From Adversary to Partner: the Evolving Role of Caohai Nature Reserve in the Lives of
Reserve Residents"
van Schaik, C., & Rijksen, H. D. (2002). Integrated conservation and development projects: Problems and
potential. In J. Terborgh, C. van Schaik, L. Davenport, and M. Rao (Eds.) Making parks work:
Strategies for preserving tropical nature (pp. 15-29). Covelo, CA: Island Press.
Week 7
Environmental NGOs
March 5
8
Raymond Bryant, 2005. Nongovernmental organizations in Environmental Struggles: Politics
and the making of moral capital in the Philippines. Yale University Press.
Related readings
Bebbington, Anthony. 2005. "Donor-NGO relations and representations of livelihoods in NGO aid chains"
World Development 33(6).
_____2004 'NGOs and uneven development: geographies of development intervention' Progress in Human
Geography 28(6): 725-745
Bryant, Raymond. 2002. "NGOs and governmentality: ‘consuming’ biodiversity and indigenous people in the
Philippines". Political Studies 50: 268-292.
_________2002. "False prophets? Mutant NGOs and Philippine environmentalism." Society and Natural
Resources 15: 629-639.
________. 2001. "Explaining state-environmental NGO relations in the Philippines and Indonesia". Singapore
Journal of Tropical Geography 22: 15-37.
Dove, Michael. 2006. "Indigenous people and environmental politics." Annual Review of Anthropology
35: 191-208.
Fischer, William. 1997. "Doing good? The politics and antipolitics of NGO practices." Annual Review
of Anthropology. 26:439-64.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 2000. "Spatializing states: towards an ethnography of neoliberal
governmentality." American ethnologist 29(4): 981-1002.
Hardt, Michael and Toni Negri. 2000. Empire. Harvard University Press.
Kellow, A. 2000. "Norms, interests and environmental NGOs: The limits of cosmopolitanism." Environmental
Politics 9(3):1-22.
Mason, Michael. 2004. "Representing transnational environmental interests: new opportunities for
non-governmental organization access within the World Trade Organization?" Environmental Politics
13(3):566-589.
Mawdsley, E Porter, G. and Townsend, J. (2005) 'Trust, accountability and face-to-face interaction in NorthSouth NGO relations', Development in Practice, 15 (1), pp. 77-82
Mindry D. 'Nongovernmental Organizations, "Grassroots," and the Politics of Virtue' Signs 2001;
26: 1187-211
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2000. "For and against NGOs: The Politics of the lived world." New Left Review
2:63-84.
Newell, Peter. 2000. "Environmental NGO, TNC, and the question of governance." in The International
Political economy of the environment, eds. V. D'Assetto and Dimitris Stevis, pp85-107.
Riles, Annelise. 2001. The Network Inside Out. University of Michigan.
Townsend, J., Porter, G. and Mawdsley, E. (2004) 'Creating Spaces of Resistance: Development NGOs and
their Clients in Ghana, India and Mexico', Antipode, 36 (5), pp. 871-99
West, Paige. 2004 “Environmental NGOs and the nature of ethnographic inquiry” in Anthropology and
Consultancy P.J. Stewart and A. Strathern (eds.), 2004, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Yaworsky, William. 2005. "At the whim of the state: neoliberalism and nongovernmental organizations
in Guerrero, Mexico." Mexican Studies 21(2):403-427.
Week 8
Environmentalism:
Movements, translations, articulation, and representation
March 12
* Paper topic proposal due *
1.Tsing, Anna. 1997. "Transitions as translations." In Joan Scott, Cora Kaplan and Debra Keates,
ed. Transitions, Environments - Translations. Routledge pp 253-272.
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2. Tsing, Anna. 2005. "This earth, this island Borneo" and "Movements" pp. 155-170; 213-238
in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press.
3. Li, Tania. 2000. “Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia: Resource politics and the
tribal slot." Comparative Studies in Society and History. 42(1) :149-179.
4. Dove, Michael. 1999. "Writing for versus about, the ethnographic other: Issues of
engagement and reflexivity in working with a tribal NGO in Indonesia." Identities 6(2/3)
5. Brosius, Peter. 1999. "Analyses and Interventions: anthropological engagements with
environmentalism." Current Anthropology 40(3):277-309.
6. Arun Agrawal. 2005. "Environmentality: Community, intimate government and the
making of environmental subjects in Kumaon, India." Current Anthropology 46(2):161181.
Recommended
Brosius, Peter. 1999. "Locations and representations: writing in the political present in Sarawak, East
Malaysia." Identities. 6(2/3).
Gatmaytan, Augusto B. "Advocacy as translation: notes on the Philippine Experience"
in Communities and Conservation, Histories and Politics of Community-based natural resource
management, pp 459-477.
Mawdsley, Emma. 2004. "India 's Middle Classes and the Environment." Development and Change
35(1):79-103.
Tsing, Anna. 1999. "Becoming a tribal elder and other green development fantasies." in Tania Li, ed.
Tansforming the Indonesian uplands: marginality, power, and production. Harwood.
Related readings
Baviskar, Amita. “Tribal politics and discourses of Indian environmentalism” pp. 289-318
in Greenough and Tsing, Nature in the Global South.
Bending, Tim.2006 Penan histories: Contentious narratives in Upriver Sarawak. KITLV Press.
Brosius, Peter. 1999. "On the practice of transnational cultural critique." Identities. 6(2/3)-179-200.
________ “Voices from the Borneo rain forest: writing the history of an environmental
campaign.” in Greenough and Tsing, Nature in the Global South. pp. 319-346.
Edelman, Marc. 2001. "Social movement: changing paradigms and forms of politics." Annual Review
of Anthropology. 30: 285-317.
Keck, Margaret and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond borders.Chapter 4, Environmental Advocacy
Networks. Cornell University Press.
Mawdley, Emma. 1998. After Chipko: From Environment to region in Uttaranchal. Journal of Peasant
Studies. 25(4);36-54.
Perrault, Tom. “Developing identities: indigenous mobilization, rural livelihoods, and resource access in
Ecuadorian Amazonia.” Ecumene, 8(4): 381-413.
Rangan, Haripriya. 2004. “From Chipko to Uttaranchal: the environment of protest and development in the
Indian Himalaya.” in Peet and Watts, Liberation Ecologies, pp. 381-393.
______2000. Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History. New York: Verso.
Sturgeon, Noel. 1999. "Ecofeminist appropriations and transnational environmentalisms." Identities.
6(2/3):255-280.
Tsing, Anna. 2005. "Introduction," "Nature Loving," and "The Forest of Collaborations"
in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection.
Week 9
Environmentalism, religion, and national identity
March 19
1. Darlington, Susan M. 1998. “The ordination of a tree: The Buddhist ecology movement in
Thailand.” Ethnology 37(1):1-15.
10
2. Delcore, Henry D. 2004. “Symbolic Politics or Generification? The Ambivalent
Implications of Tree Ordinations in the Thai Environmental Movement.” Journal of
Political Ecology 11(1):1-30. http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/
3. Mawdsley, E (2006) 'Hindu Nationalism, Postcolonialism and Environmental Discourses in
India', Geoforum, 37 (3), pp.380-90.
4. Schwartz, Katrina. 2006. Nature and National identity after Communism. University of
Pittsburgh Press. Introduction, Chapters 2, 5-7 and conclusion; pp. 1-26; 54-77; 115-198.
Related
Arnold, Philip and Ann Grodzins Gold eds. 2001. Sacred landscapes and cultural politics: planting a tree.
Ashgate.
Daedelus. 2001. Special issue: religion and ecology: can the climate change? Journal of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. 130(4)
Darlington, Susan. “Practical spirituality and community forests: monks, ritual and radical
conservatism in Thailand.” in Greenough and Tsing, Nature in the Global South. pp. 347-366.
_____2003. “The Spirit(s) of Conservation in Buddhist Thailand.” In Helaine Selin, ed. Nature Across
Cultures. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Pp. 129-145.
Dwivedi, OP, Tiwari BN. 1999. Environmental protection in the Hindu religion. in James GA (ed)
Ethical perspectives on environmental issues in India.
Gold, Ann Grodzins. 1995. "Magical Landscapes and Moral Orders: New Readings in Religion and Ecology."
Religious Studies Review (21:2).
________1989 "Of Gods, Trees and Boundaries: Divine Conservation in Rajasthan" (with Bhoju Ram
Gujar). Asian Folklore Studies (48:2).
_______2000. 'If You Cut a Branch You Cut My Finger': Court, Forest, and Environmental Ethics in
Rajasthan." In Hinduism and ecology: the intersection of earth, sky, and water. Christopher Key
Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds. Harvard University Press.
_______2002. "Children and trees in north India." Worldviews: environment, culture, religion. 6(3): 276-299.
Harper, Krista. 2005. "Wild Capitalism" and "Ecocolonialism": A Tale of Two Rivers. American
Anthropologist. 107(2): 221-233.
Hou Wenhui, “Reflections on Chinese Traditional Views of Nature.” Environmental History v.2 n.4 (October
1997), pp.482-492.
Huber, Toni. 1991. "Traditional Environmental Protectionism in Tibet Reconsidered." The Tibet
Journal. pp. 63-77. New Delhi.
Huber, Toni and Poul Pedersen. "Meteorological Knowledge and Environmental Ideas in Traditional and
Modern Societies: The Case of Tibet," in Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute (NS)3: 577-598.
Lucas, Johnston. 2006. "The 'nature' of Buddhism: A survey of relevant literature and themes." Worldviews:
Environment, Culture, Religion. 10(1):69-99.
Mawdsley, E. 2005. The Abuse of Religion and Ecology: The Vishva Hindu Parishad and Tehri Dam',
Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion, 8 (2), pp. 1-24
Olsen, Jonathan. 1999. Nature and nationalism: Right-wing ecology and the politics of identity in
contemporary Germany. St. Martin 's Press.
Sharma, M. 2001. Nature and nationalism. Frontline 18(3)
Siviramakrishnan, K and Gunnel Cderlof. eds 2005.Ecological nationalisms: nation, livelihoods
and identities in South Asia. University of Washington Press.
Snyder, Samuel. 2006. "Chinese traditions and ecology: survey article." Worldviews: Environment, Culture,
Religion, 10(1)
Tomalin, Emma. 2002. "The limitations of religious environmentalism for India." Worldviews
Environment, Culture, Religion 6(1):12-30.
White, Lynn Jr., 1967. “Historical roots of our ecologic crisis,” Science v.155
Witt, Joseph, David Wiles. 2006. "Nature in Asian indigenous traditions: a survey article." Worldviews:
Environment, Culture and Religion 10(1).
11
*
Week 10
NO CLASS - SPRING BREAK
*
March 26
Institutional ethnography and transnational green development
April 2
Goldman, Michael. 2005. Imperial Nature: The World Bank and the struggles for
Social Justice in the age of Globalization. Yale University Press.
Related Readings
Bebbington et al. 2004. "Exploring social capital debates at the World Bank." Journal of Development
Studies. 40(5)
Bobrow-Strain, Aaron. 2004. "DisAccords" World Development 32(6).
Crewe, Emma. 1999. Whose Development? : An Ethnography of Aid. Zed Books.
Easterly, William. 2006. The White Man 's Burden: Why the West 's Efforts to aid the rest have
done so much ill and so little good. Penguin.
Fox, Jonathan. 2004. "Advocacy research and the world bank." in A. Haugerud and M. Edelman.
The Anthropology of Development and Globalization. Blackwell.
Hunter, David 2001."The World Bank: A Lighter Shade of Green?" in Olav Schram Stokke and Øystein B.
Thommessen (eds.), Yearbook of International Co-operation on Environment and Development
London: Earthscan Publications. 59–67.
Litzinger, Ralph. 2006. "Contested sovereignties and the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund." Political
and Legal Anthropology Review 29(1).
Mosse, David. 2005. Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Development and Practice. Pluto
Wade, Robert. 2002. "US hegemony and the World Bank." Review of International Political Economy.
9(2)
Week 11 Postcolonialism, biodiversity conservation and an analytics of reason
April 9
Lowe, Celia. 2006. Wild Profusion: Biodiversity conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago.
Princeton University Press.
Related Readings (Indigenous knowledge and its discontents)
Agrawal, Arun. 1995. “Dismantling the divide between indigenous and scientific knowledge.”
Development and Change 26: 413-439.
_________2002. “Indigenous knowledge and the politics of classification.” International Social Science
Journal. 54: 287-297.
Berkes, Fikret. 1999. Sacred Ecology: traditional ecological knowledge and resource management.
Taylor & Francis.
Brosius, Peter J. 1997. “Endangered forest, endangered people: environmentalist representations
of indigenous knowledge.” Human Ecology 25(1): 47-69.
Dove, Michael. “2002. “Hybrid histories and indigenous knowledge among Asian rubber
smallholders.” International Social Science Journal 54:349-359.
Ellen, Roy, Peter Barkes, and Alan Bicker, ed. 2000. Indigenous Environmental knowledge and its
transformations. Harwood Publishers. selections.
Fausto, Carlos. 2002. “The bones affair: indigenous knowledge practices in contact situations seen from an
Amazonian case” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological institute. 8(4):669-690.
Gupta, Akhil. 1998. Postcolonial development: agriculture and the making of Modern India. Duke UP
Gururani, S. 2002. “Construction of Third World women’s knowledge in the development discourse”
International Social Science Journal. 54/173:313-323
Harpold, Terry. 2002. “Masons, tricksters and cartographers: comparative studies in the sociology of scientific
12
and indigenous knowledge” Technology and Culture 43(2): 398-401.
Leach, Melissa and James Fairhead. 2002. “Manners of contestation: ‘citizen science’ and ‘indigenous
knowledge’ in West Africa and the Caribbean.” International Social Science Journal 54/173:299-311.
Li, Tania M. 2002. “Ethnic cleansing, recursive knowledge and the dilemmas of sedentarism.”
Nazarea, Virginia. 2006. "Local knowledge and memory in biodiversity conservation." Annual Review of
Anthropology 35:317-335.
Nelson, Richard K. 1983. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. U Chicago
Press.
Raffles, Hugh. 2002. “Intimate knowledge.” International Social Science Journal 54:325-335.
Roue, M. and D. Nakashima. 2002. “Knowledge and foresight: the predictive capacity of traditionalknowledge
applied to environmental assessment.” International Social Science Journal. 54/173:337-347.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999 Decolonizing methodologies : research and indigenous peoples Zed Books. NY.
*
NO CLASS - WEEK OF AAG MEETING
Week 12
Bioprospecting and neoliberal nature
April 16
April 23
Hayden, Cori. 2003. When Nature goes Public: The making and unmaking of Bioprospecting in
Mexico. Princeton University Press.
Related Readings
Brown, Michael. 2003 Who Owns Native Culture? Harvard University Press.
Brush, Steven. 1999. "Bioprospecting the Public Domain" 14 Cultural Anthropology 535 - 555
Coombe, Rosemary. 1998. "Intellectual Property, Human Rights, and Sovereignty: New Dilemmas in
International Law Posed by the Recognition of Indigenous Knowledge and the Conservation of
Biodiversity" 6 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 59 - 115.
Escobar, Arturo. 1998. Whose knowledge, whose nature? Biodiversity conservation and the political
ecology of social movements. Journal of Political Ecology.
Greene, L. Shane 2004. "Indigenous peoples incorporated: Culture as politics, culture as property in
contemporary bioprospection deals." Current Anthropology 44.
McAfee, Kathleen.“Selling Nature to Save it? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism,” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 17: 133 (1997).
Parry, Bronwyn. 2004. Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-information. Columbia
University Press.
Svarstad, Hanne.2005. "A global political ecology of bioprospecting." Paulson, Susan and L Gezon, eds.
Political ecology across spaces, scales and social groups.
Week 13
Peer commentaries on papers
April 30
* PAPERS DUE MONDAY MAY 7 BY NOON *
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