Andrew S. Mathews

Scandals, audits, and fictions: Linking climate change to Mexican forests

Over the past 10 years, Mexican officials and scientists have promoted the project of protecting Mexican forests in order to mitigate climate change, forests acting to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This article compares existing policies around mass reforestation and markets for environmental services, and their relationships to a policy in construction – Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation. Mass reforestation policies collapsed in the face of politicized audits and stories about corruption; markets for environmental services continued with little criticism, stabilized in part by the charisma of Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation policies. I explain the collapse of mass reforestation policies as being due to failed knowledge performances by officials and scientists; such failures are assessed by more or less skeptical publics who expect specific ways of performing credible public knowledge. Areas of nonknowledge can be tamed as calculable uncertainty, or alternatively transformed into ontological indeterminacy, scandals, and stories of corruption. Areas of nonknowledge are not pathological: they may support, as well as undermine, climate science, the authority of institutions, or the credibility of carbon accounts.

The Global Mobilization of Environmental Concepts: Re-Thinking the Western/Non-Western Divide

It is increasingly evident that the process of globalization is a more complex and conflicted one than has been thought to be the case. Former iconographic images of “one world” have come to be suspect (Ingold, 1993; Sachs, 1992), and predictions of the coming “global village” have receded in the face of increasingly prominent divisions between developed and under-developed countries, North and South, Western and non-Western (Huntington, 1996).1 The first challenge of global governance, as the debate over global warming has demonstrated, is not to coordinate solutions to global environmental problems, but to agree on a definition of the problem in the first place (Dove, 1994). An apparent irony of the globalization process is that at the same time as it erases some barriers and boundaries it constructs and crosses others. The simultaneous construction and destruction of boundaries is evident in the new and unorthodox alliances and oppositions that global mechanisms like the World Trade Organization have fomented.

Ignorancia, conocimiento y poder : El corte de la madera, el tràfico ilegal y las políticas forestales en México

Academic and popular stereotypes of the state have assumed that official power and knowledge go hand in hand. In an institutional ethnography of the Mexican environment agency, Semarnap, the author show that ignorance and complicity may be as important as knowledge in asserting state power. Official ignorance of illegal firewood cutting and logging is deployed both within and outside state forestry institutions. Official knowledge and ignorance justify state power and are entrenched by the daily practices of bureaucrats. A closer attention to the production and translation of knowledge within state institutions leads to a more nuanced understanding of various forms of obscurity and ignorance which accompany official knowledge claims.