Anja Nygren

Local Knowledge in the Environment–Development Discourse From dichotomies to situated knowledges

This article takes a critical look at the various approaches representing local knowledge as a scapegoat for underdevelopment or as a panacea for sustainability, these two representations characterizing the conventional environ-ment–development discourse. The static oppositions of local versus universal knowledge are challenged by establishing more diversified models to analyse the relationships of heterogeneous knowledges. The study emphasizes the complex articulation of knowledge repertoires by drawing on an ethnographic case study among migrant peasants in southeastern Nicaragua. Knowledge production is seen as a process of social negotiation involving multiple actors and complex power relations. The article underlines the issue of situated knowledges as one of the major challenges in developing anthropology as an approach that subjects fixed dichotomies between subject and object, fact and value, and the rational and the practical, to critical reconstruction.

Development Discourses and Peasant-Forest Relations: Natural Resource Utilization as Social Process

This article analyses the changing role of forests and the practices of peasants toward them in a Costa Rican rural community, drawing on an analytical perspective of political ecology, combined with cultural interpretations. The study underlines the complex articulation of local processes and global forces in tropical forest struggles. Deforestation is seen as a process of development and power involving multiple social actors, from politicians and development experts to a heterogeneous group of local peasants. The local people are not passive victims of global challenges, but are instead directly involved in the changes concerning their production systems and livelihood strategies. In the light of historical changes in natural resource utilization, the article underlines the multiplicity of the causes of tropical deforestation, and the intricate links between global discourses on environment and development and local forest relations.

Contested Lands and Incompatible Images: The Political Ecology of Struggles Over Resources in Nicaragua's Indio-Maíz Reserve

This article analyzes the contested struggles over protection and production in the Nicaraguan biological reserve of Indio-Maíz as a local example of broader conflicts over wilderness preservation and local livelihoods in the developing world. The main focus is on conflicting views of different stakeholders concerning the access to and control over natural resources. Special attention is given to the local inhabitants’ struggles for everyday survival and social justice on the fringe of the restricted-use reserve. The study emphasizes that in densely populated rural areas, such as Central America, inclusionary conservation represents the politically most feasible and socially most just form of conservation possible.

Political Ecology Revisited: Integration of Politics and Ecology Does Matter

This essay aims to strengthen our comprehension of the dynamic articulation between political and ecological processes within the contexts of human–environmental interactions. Utilizing the theoretical approach of political ecology, this study emphasizes the importance of recognizing the active role that nature plays in shaping human–environment relations and the need to see environmental change as the result of social action and ecological dynamics. In order to do justice to the constantly shifting relationships between nature and society, political-ecological analyses require an integrated understanding of the interconnections between political struggles over environmental resources, cultural meanings attached to the environment, and the ecological dynamics of environmental change.

Environment as Discourse: Searching for Sustainable Development in Costa Rica

This study analyses the social and political discourses related to environment and sustainable development in Costa Rica. The central interest is on those development institutions and ideologies that promote social interventions in the name of sustainable development, and on those social processes and economic relations on which the discursive formation of environment and sustainability is articulated. Four different kinds of ideologies of environmental sustainability are analysed: Environmentalism for Nature, Environmentalism for Profit, Environmentalism for the People, and Alternative Environmentalism. The study highlights the complexity of political discourses that construct the relationship between nature and society, and the multiplicity of the means by which the control over natural resources, within the internally differentiated development apparatus, is defined.

Environmental narratives on protection and production: nature-based conflicts in Río San Juan, Nicaragua.

This article focuses on local processes and global forces in the struggle over the fate of forests and over the contested claims of protection and production in a protected area buffer zone of Rio San Juan Nicaragua. The struggle over control of local natural resources is seen as a multifaceted process of development and power involving diverse social actors from agrarian politicians and development agents to a heterogeneous group of local settlers absentee cattle raisers timber dealers transnational corporations and nongovernmental organizations. The initial interest is in the local resource-related discourses and actions; the analysis then broadens to include the larger political-economic processes and environment-development discourses that affect the local systems of production and systems of signification. The article underlines environmental resource conflicts as one of the major challenges in subjecting structures of social power to critical analysis. (authors)

Ecological, socio-cultural, economic and political factors influencing the contribution of non-timber forest products to local livelihoods: Case studies from honduras and the Philippines

Discussion of the role of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) in efforts to reconcile the objectives of forest conservation and rural development has often been hampered by limited understanding of the complexity of the factors that affect the contribution of NTFPs to local livelihoods. By drawing upon two case studies where NTFPs play an important role - the municipality of Lepaterique in Honduras and Palawan Island in the Philippines - this study emphasizes that an ideal extractive system should be based on a mix of products to enable sustainable harvesting throughout the year. The study also demonstrates that considerable attention needs to be paid to the socio-cultural heterogeneity of resource users, and to the value chain structure, access and control over resources and political transparency that affect the opportunities for local people to benefit from NTFP extraction.

Violent Conflicts and Threatened Lives : Nicaraguan Experiences of Wartime Displacement and Postwar Distress*

This article utilises an ethnographic case study from Nicaragua to analyse peoples everyday experiences of wartime violence and postwar privation. A great deal of literature dealing with political instability in war-torn countries has ap- proached this issue by examining the societal manifestations of violence, while relatively less attention has been paid to peoples everyday experiences of conflict and pain. This study focuses on the several waves of violence, displacement, and distress Nicaraguan people have suffered in recent years, beginning with their trau- matic experiences of the civil war in the 1980s to the current postwar era charac- terised by political instability and socio-economic insecurity.

‘Life here is just scraping by’: livelihood strategies and social networks among peasant households in Honduras

This paper analyses the diverse ways in which peasant households struggle to earn their living and cope with distress amid the processes of globalisation, the decreasing role of agriculture, and market-based models of rural development, by drawing on research conducted among peasant households in northern Honduras. Special attention is paid to the socio-political processes that shape the opportunities and constraints of local households in diversifying their livelihoods and to social networks, cultural norms, political power relations, and institutional mechanisms that mediate peoples access to different livelihood options. The results of our study show that although peasant households engage in an array of livelihood practices, their sources of income are sporadic and their strategies of living are vulnerable. An overemphasis on the capacity of the poor to reshape their lives and reformulate their livelihood strategies easily underestimates the ways in which the inequitable socio-economic structures and political power relations constrain the livelihood options of the poor.

From Resistance to Resilience: Media Discourses on Urban Flood Governance in Mexico

Abstract This article examines the continuities and changes in newspaper coverage of urban flood governance in Tabasco, southeastern Mexico, where highly destructive floods have made flood risks a socially sensitive and politically contested public issue. The analysis draws upon post-Foucauldian critical discourse analysis, paying special attention to different actors’ discursive strategies to further their agendas amid the shifting forms of environmental governance. We argue that in recent years, discourses that promote integrated flood governance, based on cultural adaptation and social resilience instead of technological control, have become prominent in the media presentation of flood governance. These discourses endorse neoliberal views of flood governance as an issue of public–private co-governance and civil self-responsibility while being reluctant to consider flood risk from the perspective of the uneven distribution of vulnerabilities or as an issue of human rights.