Chris Sneddon

'Sustainability' in ecological economics, ecology and livelihoods: a review

This article reviews the work of several sets of researchers prominent in current debates over how sustainability might be interpreted and achieved. The notion of ‘sustainable development’ has reached a conceptual dead-end. Geographers may offer more effective investigations and critiques of socioecological transformations by instead focusing on ‘sustainability’ and its application to multiple dimensions of human and nonhuman processes. Such a move within geography demands critical engagement with ongoing debates in ecological economics, the ecological sciences and social applications of sustainability. Geographers are well positioned to address crucial gaps in these fields of inquiry and to propel debates over sustainability in several fruitful directions.

Contested Waters: Conflict, Scale, and Sustainability in Aquatic Socioecological Systems

Adequate interpretations of the complex social processes that contribute to the transformation of aquatic ecosystems and subsequent conflicts over water demand an interdisciplinary perspective. In this special issue, we focus on the multiple causes of conflicts over water, sensitive to the complex interrelations between and within social and ecological phenomena that result in transformed and contested environments. The cases presented here--representing research carried out in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States--emphasize three interrelated themes: the need to account for multiple spatial and temporal scales in analyzing conflicts over water and water-related resources; the complex character of environmental (or ecological) conflict; and questions of sustainability. Ultimately, more incisive understandings of the multiple causes of conflicts over water and aquatic resources are contingent on the integration of multiple disciplinary perspectives. This understanding will in turn promote uses of water and water-related resources that sustain rather than degrade aquatic socioecological systems.

Water Conflicts and River Basins: The Contradictions of Comanagement and Scale in Northeast Thailand

Questions of geographic scale, social conflicts, and shifting socioecological contexts are central to the prospects for and obstacles to comanagement of river basins. While thinking of a river basin as an environmental resource amenable to comanagement may have certain conceptual and practical advantages, the political and socioeconomic obstacles to creating effective comanagement regimes are substantial. The thorniest dilemmas involve devising effective institutions for managing water resources in basins characterized by intractable ecological conflict and within a national (and international) political-economic context that demands ever more rapid resource exploitation. These hurdles are compounded by the manner in which different actors are embedded within and contribute to socioecological processes linked--both materially and discursively--to multiple geographical scales. The comanagement and scale quandaries presented in the case of the Nam Phong basin in Northeast Thailand are characteristic of many river basins, and may provide a useful example for similar efforts to construct viable management regimes at a basin scale.

Reconfiguring Scale and Power: The Khong-Chi-Mun Project in Northeast Thailand

This paper uses the case of the Khong-Chi-Mun (KCM) interbasin transfer project in northeast Thailand to explore questions of power and scale in the context of state intervention in river basins. The KCM project figures strongly in the Thai states long-term aim of transforming its water-poor northeast region through large-scale irrigation works and agroindustrial development. The project has also become a key element in interstate negotiations over coordinated development of the Lower Mekong Basin. The early stages of the project have met with resistance in the form of both national and local Thai social movements arguing against it on social justice and ecological grounds. Proponents of the project in the Thai government are employing different scalar narratives to justify and legitimate implementation of the scheme. Scale and power are intimately related within complex environmental conflicts, and tracing their linkages through an array of actors and across a variety of scales, the approach associated with actor-network methodologies, can reveal a great deal about how power and scale are co-created.

Struggles Over Dams as Struggles for Justice: The World Commission on Dams (WCD) and Anti-Dam Campaigns in Thailand and Mozambique

Publication of the World Commissions on Dams (WCD) final report in November 2000 prompted a series of divergent responses. The global anti-dam movement applauded the reports call for fastidious screening of large dam projects and increased levels of transparency and participation in dam-related decisions, while the dam industry argued the document was irrevocably biased against large dams. Several anti-dam campaigns in specific localities almost immediately employed the WCD recommendations as a means of arguing against contentious projects. This article examines two of these struggles, one in northeast Thailand and one in the lower Zambezi Valley of Mozambique, to shed light on the impacts of the transnational WCD process and the variegated ways it intersects with conflicts in specific locales.

Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen as Growth Poles: Regional Industrial Development in Thailand and its Implications for Urban Sustainability

This article examines the concept of urban sustainability within the context of two case studies from Thailand. The Thai state, under the auspices of its development planning agencies, identified the secondary cities of Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen as growth poles in the 1970s. As such, both cities were perceived as engines of regional development in their respective regions of North and Northeast Thailand. The authors critically examine how the strategies of decentralization of industrial growth and development of secondary urban centers, ostensibly to alleviate congestion and pollution in Bangkok, have been deployed in the context of urban primacy and uneven development in Thailand. They argue that these policies have helped induce some growth in the secondary cities in question but that in doing so, they have induced new problems of sustainability in the secondary cities and their surrounding rural areas without alleviating problems of sustainability in Bangkok.

Water, Geopolitics, and Economic Development in the Conceptualization of a Region

Two U.S.-based geographers outline three dimensions (geopolitical, economical, and biophysical) used to define the basin of the Mekong River as a region, which reveal multi-scalar water governance policies and discourses that lie at the core of current challenges and tensions within the basin. Drawing on their extensive knowledge and fieldwork, the authors demonstrate that processes integral to the framing of the Mekong as a region of economic integration and international cooperation (water resource development through construction of large dams) conflict sharply with the functioning of the Mekong as a region of highly connected biophysical processes. The approach utilized in the paper can be applied to the study of other transboundary river-basin regions in Eurasia and elsewhere facing similar contradictions among the geopolitical, economic, and biophysical dimensions used to define them. By focusing on a region as constructed simultaneously through multiple social and biophysical processes, the authors contribute to current debates within geography and related fields on the nature of regions.

The Social, Historical, and Institutional Contingencies of Dam Removal

Environmental managers in the United States and elsewhere are increasingly perceiving dam removal as a critical tool for river restoration and enhancing watershed resilience. In New England, over 125 dams have been dismantled for ecological and economic rationales. A surprising number of these removals, including many that are ongoing, have generated heated conflicts between restoration proponents and local communities who value their dammed landscapes. Using a comparative case study approach, we examine the environmental conflict around efforts to remove six dams in New England. Each of these removal efforts followed quite different paths and resultant outcomes: successful removal, stalled removal, and failure despite seemingly favorable institutional conditions. Lengthy conflicts often transpired in instances where removals occurred, but these were successfully arbitrated by paying attention to local historical–geographical conditions conducive to removal and by brokering effective compromises between dam owners and the various local actors and stakeholders involved in the removal process. Yet our results across all cases suggest that these are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for restoration through dam removal since a similar set of conditions typified cases where removals are continuously stalled or completely halted. Scholars examining the intersection between ecological restoration and environmental politics should remain vigilant in seeking patterns and generalities across cases of environmental conflict in order to promote important biophysical goals, but must also remain open to the ways in which those goals are thwarted and shaped by conflicts that are deeply contingent on historical–geographical conditions and broader institutional networks of power and influence.

Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space by Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben, and Henk Schulte Nordholt, eds

gue that phenomena do not have properties in and of themselves but only by virtue of their relationships with other phenomena. Castree argues that these relations are internal not external, because the notion of relations suggests phenomena are constituted prior to the relationship into which they enter. In setting the stage for this discussion, the author acknowledges that many of the geographers whose work he refers to in this section would take issue with the framework of analysis used in his book, particularly in the context of the subject-object dualism that emanates from his framework. He also cautions and argues that ‘‘technoscience’’ has not made the society-nature dualism obsolete as one analyzes ‘‘post-natural’’ geographers. In one particular example of relational thinking, Castree summarizes ‘‘non-representational theory’’ through the work of Nigel Thrift, who ultimately reasons the world not as a pre-existing collection of human and nonhuman entities but as a set of mutually constitutive encounters or performances. In another example (‘‘actor-network theory’’) Castree suggests that the world is characterized by a myriad of qualitatively different but intimately related phenomena, ‘‘assemblages of human and non-human things that are aligned in more or less ordered ways.’’ The ‘‘new ecology’’ represents yet another post-natural approach summarized by Castree. This new ecology, pioneered by biologist Daniel Botkin, ‘‘accents disequilibria, instability, and even chaotic fluctuations in biophysical environments’’ and suggests that ‘‘when people make large-scale changes to natural communities of plants, animals, and insects that they are not necessarily disrupting an evolutionary harmony.’’ Overall, if pursued thoroughly, human and physical geographers would no longer look at only the biophysical or the human but more at the intersectionFthat is, in the context of environmental geography. Thus the author argues that environmental geography could begin to occupy more disciplinary space in the future. In sum, Castree’s Nature provides an important view of the diversity of nature knowledge within geography, and thereby recognizes that there is no one ‘‘correct way’’ of understanding nature. And although nature is not left to geography alone for study, geographers are in many ways better equipped to undertake such studies in the never-ending struggle to characterize and influence the phenomena depicted in these knowledges. Human and physical geographers are likely to take exception to some of Castree’s conclusions, but his basic themes provide all geographers with an opportunity to reflect anew on how we approach an important core analysis of our disciplinesFthat is, how we understand natureFwhile at the same time challenging us to recognize different points of view in being able to describe and analyze what nature is. In the process, Castree’s work provides a context to better reflect on the nature of the breadth, yet importance, of our discipline. Whether scholar or student, this book is an important read for those interested in nature and breadth of our discipline extending across human and physical geography.