Chad Boda

Political ecology of inter-basin water transfers in Turkish water governance

We explore the emergence of two contemporary mega water projects in Turkey that are designed to meet the demands of the countrys major urban centers. Moreover, we analyze how policy makers in the water sector frame problems and solutions. We argue that these projects represent a tendency to depoliticize water management and steer away from controversial issues of water allocation by emphasizing large-scale, centralized, technical, and supply-oriented solutions. In doing so, urgent concerns are ignored regarding unsustainable water use, impacts on rural livelihoods, and institutional shortcomings in the water sector. These aspirations build heavily on prevailing discourses of modernity, development, and economic growth, and how urban centers are perceived as drivers of this growth. In the light of these tendencies, social and environmental implications are downplayed, even though the projects will change or already have changed the dynamics within urban-rural life and agricultural water resources practices. We develop an understanding of how such projects are presented as the only solution to problems of water scarcity in Turkey.

The politics of landscape creation in the history of development along Florida's Atlantic coast

Abstract The politics of landscape production involve questions about the power to define what landscape means, who or what belongs to landscape and who or what belongs in landscape. Asserting the right to participate in landscape production and thus to help steer landscape along desirable development pathways remains a core component of landscape politics and grows in importance as many societies experience widespread citizen withdrawal from engagement in political processes. In this article, I review the history of landscape production in Florida, USA, to reveal the interrelated consequences of adjustments in political economy, administration, land use and spatial representations for future landscape development. In particular, my analysis of the strategic contestation of undesirable development in the production of the local landscape in a small coastal community highlights the increasing need to engage strategically in the politics of landscape production in the pursuit of socially and environmentally desirable landscapes the world over.

Applying frame analysis and reframing for integrated conservation and development: example from Mumbai

ABSTRACT The way we frame a given problem structures the content that is brought into focus and thus the kinds of practical steps seen as necessary to alleviate it. This article interrogates two competing partial framings implicated in ongoing controversy over mangrove destruction in Vikhroli East, Mumbai, which have precluded integrated conservation and development. The article analyses the content of each particular framing, identifies their respective “blind spots”, and evaluates the validity of various frame components. It concludes with an exemplary alternative reframing arguably more conducive to social justice and sustainability in Vikhroli East and beyond.

The entrepreneurial Sunshine State : Neoliberalism, growth management and environmental conservation in Florida

ABSTRACT The severity of anthropogenic environmental change demands swift and effective conservation action in order to maintain the Earth’s essential life support systems. In particular, long-standing best practice in conservation sciences suggests that integrated action both within and between levels of social organization is necessary to ensure coordinated efforts capable of dealing with the cross-boundary nature of environmental challenges. The increasingly hegemonic influence of neoliberal policy reform, broadly aimed at promoting competition and individual autonomy in governance arrangements, however, has been cast by environmental and social critics as running counter to those efforts aimed at conserving the collective environment for the public good. Focusing on the case of multistage restructuring of Florida’s famed Growth Management Act (GMA), I articulate how the compounding effects of neoliberalization reform efforts have led to the complete transformation of the GMA’s potential to facilitate adequate large-scale environmental management, precluding the possibility of achieving needed conservation results. From this, I conclude with reflections on the major challenges facing advocates of conservation in the coming decades, in particular the need to resist the dismantling of existing and promote the establishment of new mechanisms capable of facilitating coordinated and collaborative conservation in line with scientific best practice.