Alejandro García Lozano, Crisol Méndez-Medina, X. Basurto, María Tercero Tovar
{"title":"Problemáticas: Multi-scalar, affective and performative politics of collective action among fishing cooperatives in Mexico","authors":"Alejandro García Lozano, Crisol Méndez-Medina, X. Basurto, María Tercero Tovar","doi":"10.1177/23996544231194426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231194426","url":null,"abstract":"The world’s fisheries face complex and high-stakes governance problems that increasingly require mobilizing diverse collectives of governance actors. How fishers and fishing organizations understand and articulate governance problems has implications for how they engage with governance institutions and the kinds of collective action they enact. In Mexico, cooperatives are a major form of organization for small-scale fishers. Fishing cooperatives form regional organizations (federations), which in turn form national organizations (confederations). These are nested or multi-scalar organizations that represent fishers’ interests and negotiate with other governance actors. Drawing on longitudinal data from assemblies of a national organization (2016–2019) – which represents more than 30,000 fishers in Mexico organized in about 300 cooperatives – as well as regional meetings involving federations and cooperatives, this study examines how cooperativist fishers in Mexico articulate problems in the governance of fisheries and to what effect. More specifically, the paper builds on scholarship about the performativity of collective action to examine the strategic discursive and affective practices through which fishers engage with major governance problems and the implications for collective action. Through the politics of multi-level cooperative institutions, specific issues are prioritized as leaders of fishers’ organizations translate diverse local-regional concerns to advance the interests of the sector at the national level. Using examples of (1) conflicts surrounding environmental conservation in the Gulf of California and (2) legacies of privatization and the decline of cooperatives in shrimp fisheries, the analysis demonstrates how discourses and affects are incorporated into specific storylines and mobilized in political spaces. Cooperativist fishers become contingently aligned along these storylines, which shapes the translation of local-regional concerns into national priorities, giving rise to a multi-scalar performative politics of collective action.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89880727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"E-waste is toxic, but for whom? The body politics of knowing toxic flows in Delhi","authors":"Julia Perczel","doi":"10.1177/23996544231188653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231188653","url":null,"abstract":"Bodily knowledge and lived experience of toxic exposures in e-waste markets are central to policies and legal frameworks that are being rolled out globally enforcing the “polluter pays” principle. Yet, the sensory experience of toxicity is far from the straightforward, narratable knowledge, which it is often made out to be. This article builds on twelve months of research into the process of establishing formal e-waste recycling channels in New Delhi, India. Environmental practitioners and e-waste workers, each in a different relation to power and toxicity, presented contradictory understandings and challenged the continuity between sensing bodies posed by environmental advocacy narratives. Acknowledging the difficulty to pin down lived experience, I compare the certainty with which employees of a producer responsibility organisation present toxicity for the purpose of spreading awareness to the ambivalence with which informal e-waste recyclers relate to the toxicity in their own environment. The paper highlights the process of turning bodily experience into knowledge and proposes that knowing toxicity is the result of socially and economically inflected relations between bodies, chemicals, forms of knowledge, and the material dismantling process. Rather than accepting the immediacy of sensory experiences, or looking to find the authentic witness, I suggest a triangulation of bodies differently positioned in relation to the processes and places in question.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89632419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The heterogeneous politics of infrastructure: Claims of authority in Accra’s drainage","authors":"Afra Foli","doi":"10.1177/23996544231190082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231190082","url":null,"abstract":"In many parts of the world, the modernist ideal of centralised and networked infrastructure provided by the state remains just that – an ideal. Instead, the reality is a patchwork of infrastructural solutions engineered by both state and private actors. While critical studies have highlighted how states use infrastructure projects to legitimize their authority, how do infrastructure projects shape relations between the state and urban residents when the state is not the sole actor in building and maintaining infrastructure? Drawing on scholarship on the socio-material dynamics of infrastructure, this article examines infrastructure’s politics in Accra’s drainage system. Studying these material interventions shows that drainage is politicised with state actors, aspiring politicians, and urban residents advancing and evaluating performances of authority in relation to this infrastructure. This politicization of drainage infrastructure reproduces patterns of urban socio-economic inequality. As residents experience the consequences of each other’s actions, they recognize the need for a centralised approach to tackle drainage problems and express a desire for the state to assume responsibility. Although ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ more accurately captures the reality on the ground in rapidly growing cities such as Accra, this analysis of everyday infrastructural politics helps explain why expectations of centrally organized drainage infrastructure persist.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74738844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Geopolitics and genocide: The Gambia vs. Myanmar at the International Court of Justice","authors":"A. Jeffrey","doi":"10.1177/23996544231188822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231188822","url":null,"abstract":"At a time of increasing prominence of the workings and judgements of international courts, recent interdisciplinary work has illuminated the deeply uneven ways in which violence is labelled, understood, and acted upon. Attempting to place work in genocide studies in conversation with current geographical scholarship, this paper argues that there are intrinsic spatial qualities to deliberations over whether an act of violence constitutes genocide. Understanding these invocations of space helps explain how accountability for violence is spatially contained, often severing judgement from wider historical or geopolitical contexts. This argument is made through analysis of the build up to, and enactment of, the legal deliberations at the International Court of Justice brought by The Gambia against Myanmar in relation to the expulsion of the Rohingya from Rakhine State, Myanmar. Such investigative work reveals the intrinsically geographical nature of both designations of genocidal acts and the intimate processes of legal deliberation itself.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81932412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ideology, environment, and open space in conflict arenas: The discrepancies and harmonizing strategies of West Bank Israeli settlers","authors":"Tamar Arieli, Gad Schaffer","doi":"10.1177/23996544231184047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231184047","url":null,"abstract":"The natural environments of conflict arenas often embody invisible contexts for political analysis. This study questions how environmental agendas are framed and acted upon by mid-level environmental professionals engaged in land-focused conflict. Ideological attachment to contested land together with engagement in the polemics of conflict, facilitate unique engagements with environmental agendas, particularly regarding open space preservation. This engagement prioritizes conflict-related goals and thus creates discrepancies between environmental knowledge, attitudes, and actions. Our study focuses on Israeli West Bank settlers who serve as mid-level environmental professionals and share professional dilemmas. Mid-level environmental professionals, rather than high-level policy and decision makers, are “street-level bureaucrats” and therefore a potentially novel and revealing source of environmental positions within the settler community. Through interviews focused on Israeli environment-related policies in the West Bank, we reveal disparities between environmental knowledge and the positions grounded in this group’s political identity and loyalties and identify the three particular harmonizing strategies employed in narrating the realities of their professional initiatives and agendas. We expose a distinct dual agenda, one which acknowledges environmental values and concerns, and yet only selectively recognizes and engages in goals of open space preservation when these challenge settlement infrastructure and expansion. These environmental discrepancies can be interpreted as the cynical political manipulation of environmental values, yet we propose that at a mid-level professional level, they can serve as self-rationalization in resolving dual loyalties to both political and environmental agendas. Personal realities and life experiences of environmental professionals affected by the conflict are identified as significant to the design and support of the resulting selective environmental agenda.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"132 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73464506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exploring transterranean activism as a research site beyond local protest sites","authors":"Tareq Sydiq","doi":"10.1177/23996544231188833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231188833","url":null,"abstract":"Increased interest in the spatial dimension of protests and activism has led to both the material spatial condition of protest activities and their spatial effect entering academic debate. With Social Movements being a dominant paradigm for activism which focuses on strategic localization and scalar tactics, an emphasis has been put on political activities in proximity to either centralized power or to actor communities and networks. On the fringes of Social Movements, however, smaller types of direct action have been emerging in places outside of conventional, landed spaces. Chinese and Japanese nationalists symbolically contesting national authority over islands in the Pacific, Environmentalists blockading oil platforms in the North Sea, refugee rights groups preventing air-based deportations and nationalists attempting to prevent human rights groups from saving drowning migrants have in common that the site of their activities are beyond the traditional power base of the state on solid ground and make use of specific sets of laws and regulations. This paper argues that transterranean spaces encompass an interplay of state and non-state actors heavily impacted by their location. As these spaces exist beyond the mainland, they share a lack of presence of both state and society. Both state agencies and activists have to adapt their strategies during successive contentions. I conceptualize this relationship as contentious configurations shaping these interactions: Vertical Activist-State, horizontal activist-activist and interconnected state-state contentious configurations. They serve as heuristic tool to analyze protest dynamics in transterranean spaces by highlighting both state power and actor’s engagement with it. With technological advancements and increased access to transterranean, such contentions are likely to increase.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76124530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Legitimacy and space in the use of technologies for environmental and social governance: The cases of human trafficking and COVID-19 contact tracing","authors":"T. Porter, H. Rani","doi":"10.1177/23996544231184053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231184053","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops the concept of legitimacy to analyze the capacity of technologies such as phone apps to mobilize collective commitments to shared environmental and social outcomes by constituting new governance spaces. This concept of governance spaces highlights the variable configurations of technologies and their interactions with humans, and helps avoid the tendency to see technologies as passive relays that transmit power originating elsewhere, or, in contrast, to overstate the almost magical autonomous capacities of technology. The concept of legitimacy is valuable for evaluating the degree to which technologies are effective and deserving of support. The article draws on Mark Suchman’s distinction between pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy, which correspond in turn to interests, ethical values, and facts. In contrast to more conventional state-centered conceptions of legitimacy, these aspects of legitimacy can be applied to governance spaces constituted by technologies. The article then examines and compares the cases of technologies for countering human trafficking and COVID-19 digital contact tracing apps. In both cases all three aspects of legitimacy are present, important, and interconnected. An examination of a recent report issued by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Tech Against Trafficking coalition on 305 anti-trafficking tools shows the role of ethics and facts in their legitimacy, but also the degree to which the tools are skewed towards interests other than those at risk of being trafficked. Acceptance and evaluations of digital contract tracing apps are similarly shaped by the interactions between interests, ethical values, and facts, including evidence about their effectiveness. The legitimacy of COVID-19 digital contact tracing apps involves a wider presence of a public interest in health while the risks associated with power inequalities are greater with anti-trafficking technologies, highlighting the importance of variability in the legitimacy of governance spaces constituted by technologies.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91135657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The long shadow of the repressive state: Militarized policing and the eviction crisis","authors":"Laura Flierl","doi":"10.1177/23996544231177819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231177819","url":null,"abstract":"This article is concerned with the often-overlooked role of repressive state agencies in the current eviction and gentrification crisis. Intervening into contemporary research, it provides a empirically based argument to re-include law enforcement into critical housing research for what the police essentially is: a political actor in the evictions crisis in its own right, central to reproducing racial capitalism in the realm of housing. Combining movement-produced data from anti-eviction struggles in Barcelona with US police record research in Oakland, the article shows how law enforcement’s policing and military upgrading determines the course of forced removals, much prior to a judge’s order. Examples of police activity illustrate how officers use the significant discretion afforded to them by the law to execute extralegal evictions of primarily poor women and racialized populations, seeking to secure above all that any ‘opting out’ of capitalist, patriarchal and racist power structures is repressed by state violence.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85097515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Governing the rural futures: Anxiety machine, anticipatory actions and rural affective politics","authors":"Chi-Mao Wang","doi":"10.1177/23996544231188828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231188828","url":null,"abstract":"Regional revitalisation ideas are widely regarded as cures for socio-economic problems in rural areas in developed countries. Instead of relying on exogenous resources, the concept seeks to revalorise rural communities through cultural resources and self-responsibility. Such an approach to rural development has gained rapid popularity across East Asian regions over the past decade. Rather than merely focusing on the movement of people and ideas, a growing body of literature on policy mobility directs more attention to the power relations of the movement. However, less attention has been paid to how rural futures are anticipated and acted upon and how policies that have implemented specific futures elsewhere are justified. To address these theoretical gaps, this paper draws on the work of future geographies and develops the idea of the anxiety machine. I suggest that the study of policy mobility must seriously consider how rural futures are imagined and governed, and what rural affective politics emerged from the enactment of particular futures. With reference to a case study of rural revitalisation policy learning in Taiwan and Japan, this paper suggests that an emphasis on the circulation of global anticipatory knowledge advances the understanding of the geographies of rural policy-making.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79499333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ignoring people: The micro-politics of misrecognition in participatory governance","authors":"N. Verloo","doi":"10.1177/23996544231182985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231182985","url":null,"abstract":"Local governments across the globe increasingly aim to engage citizens in participatory governance, encouraging them to take an active stance in community activities and policy or planning decisions. Despite the inclusive and emancipatory ambitions, these projects often reproduce inequality and exclude citizens leaving them marginalized and misrecognized. In this paper, I argue that inclusion and recognition do not take shape via political ambitions or promising institutional frameworks but via informal face-to-face interactions among citizens and state actors at the street level. By drawing on 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork in The Hague, the Netherlands, I critically unpack how the engagements among state actors and citizens misrecognized the latter as political subjects. Building on critical scholarship on the politics of recognition, I propose an agent-centered and practice-oriented approach that analyzes the micro-politics of misrecognition via (1) narrative analysis, (2) the detailed analysis of speech acts and emotional expressions, and (3) with a specific focus on analyzing the spatial practices that construe the geopolitical realm. As a result, I introduce the tactic of ‘ignoring people’ as a socio-spatial practice of politics. I found five socio-spatial tactics by which citizens were ignored during the very participatory process in which they were invited: disregarded elements of citizens’ stories, omitting their counter-narrative, neglecting citizens’ memories, showing disdain for their emotional expressions and being spatially absent from their protest. These insights require scholars interested in understanding the exclusive mechanisms of citizen participation, to turn to the micro-politics of interaction where the political is practiced and experienced.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"60 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84613872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}