David Manuel-Navarrete

From Resilience to Transformation: the Adaptive Cycle in Two Mexican Urban Centers

Climate change is but one expression of the internal contradictions of capitalism that include also economic inequality and political alienation. Seen in this way analysis of human responses to climate change must engage with social relations of power. We explore the potential for resilience theory to meet this challenge by applying a framework that integrates the adaptive cycle heuristic and structuration theory to place power at the heart of the analysis and question the transformational qualities of social systems facing climate change. This theoretical frame is applied to Mahahual and Playa del Carmen, two rapidly expanding towns on Mexicos Caribbean coast. The resilience lens is successful in highlighting internal contradictions that maintain social relations of rigidity above flexibility in the existing governance regimes and development pathway. This generates a set of reinforcing institutions and actions that support the status quo while simultaneously undermining long-term flexibility, equitable and sustainable development. One outcome is the placing of limits on scope for adaptation and mitigation to climate change which are externalized from everyday life and development planning alike.

Knowledge and innovation relationships in the shrimp industry in Thailand and Mexico

Experts, government officials, and industry leaders concerned about the sustainability of shrimp aquaculture believe they know what farmers need to know and should be doing. They have framed sustainability as a technical problem that, at the farm level, is to be solved by better shrimp and management of ponds and businesses. Codes of conduct, standards, and regulations are expected to bring deviant practices into line. Shrimp farmers are often cornered in a challenging game of knowledge in which their livelihoods are at stake. In the commodity chain there are multiple relations with both suppliers and buyers, not all of which are trustworthy. The social networks shrimp farmers belong to are crucial for sifting out misinformation and multiplying insights from personal experience in learning by doing. Successful farmers become part of a learning culture through seminars, workshops, and clubs in which knowledge and practices are continually re-evaluated. The combination of vertical and horizontal relationships creates a set of alternative arenas that together are critical to bridging knowledge and action gaps for shrimp farmers. Government and industry initiatives for improving links between knowledge and practice for sustainability have largely succeeded when incentives are aligned: shrimp grow better in healthy environments, and using fewer resources means higher profits.

Opinion: Urban resilience efforts must consider social and political forces

Environmental disasters, ranging from catastrophic floods to extreme temperatures, have caused more than 30,000 deaths per year and more than US

Feeding the world sustainably: knowledge governance and sustainable agriculture in the Argentine Pampas

250–300 billion a year in economic losses, globally, between 1995 and 2015 (1). Improved infrastructure and planning for extreme events is essential in urban areas, where an increasingly greater fraction of the world’s inhabitants reside. In response, international governmental and private initiatives have placed the goal of resilience at the center stage of urban planning. [For example, The 100 Resilient Cities Initiative (www.100resilientcities.org/); the Global Covenant of Mayors (https://www.compactofmayors.org/globalcovenantofmayors/); and the recent UN Habitat III (https://habitat3.org/the-new-urban-agenda)]. In addition, scientific and policy communities alike now recognize the need for “safe-to-fail” infrastructural design, and the potential role of green and blue infrastructure in mediating hydrological and climatic risks in cities (2). Fig. 1. Improving urban resilience could help cities better cope with natural disasters, such as neighborhood flood events in Mexico City pictured here. Data source: Unidad Tormenta, Sistema de Aguas de la Ciudad de Mexico. Nevertheless, the social and political norms, values, rules, and relationships that undergird and structure the myriad decisions made by public and private actors—what we call “socio-political infrastructure”—are likely to be as influential in urban vulnerability dynamics as “hard” infrastructure and environmental management. Urban planning for enhanced resilience and sustainability is ultimately a complex social and political process. Socio-political infrastructure creates patterns of behavior and action that shape the built environment. Developing more sustainable pathways of urban development hinges on making this socio-political infrastructure transparent and legible in the tools and approaches available for risk management. We argue that sustainability science is in the position to create the tools, methods, and strategies to identify, represent, and communicate the significance of these social and political processes to decision makers at all levels. In doing so, we can help … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: Hallie.Eakin{at}asu.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Boundary-work and sustainability in tourism enclaves.

This article discusses the role of knowledge governance arrangements in the mainstreaming of sustainable practices, in particular, in the creation, sharing and use of integrated and contextualized knowledge. That is, knowledge which accounts for the social, economic, institutional, and ecological dimensions of potentially sustainable practices, and which considers the need to adapt generic practices to the sustainability requirements of specific places. An actor-centered approach is proposed for the study of the historical evolution of knowledge governance arrangements in order to understand their role in the adoption of sustainable practices. The approach is applied to explain the rapid adoption of no-till agriculture in the Argentine Pampas. A radical knowledge governance transformation occurring in this region during the 1990s led to increasing knowledge exchange and pushing sustainability practices to the top of key actors’ agendas. This embracing of no-till agriculture illustrates the crucial role played by farmers’ associations as boundary organizations: linking farmers with actors specialized in the generation of scientific knowledge and technology. This case reveals that sustainability transitions can be fostered through knowledge governance arenas characterized by: (a) promoting public–private collaboration through boundary organizations, (b) assigning private actors a leading role in the adoption of sustainability practices at the production unit scale, (c) fostering the public sector competence in regional and socio-ecological research, and (d) addressing the heterogeneous needs of knowledge users. However, the case also shows that the success of no-till agriculture in the Pampas is pushing the agriculturization of surrounding areas where this practice is largely unsustainable. This finding suggests that present knowledge governance arrangements fail to contextualize practices that are potentially sustainable.

Adaptive pathways and coupled infrastructure: seven centuries of adaptation to water risk and the production of vulnerability in Mexico City

Tourists, workers, and business owners from diverse cultural backgrounds and social positions meet at tourism enclaves. Yet, the spatial layout of most enclaves encourages segregation instead of celebrating and benefiting from this diversity. This paper examines the genesis of enclave tourism boundaries. It proposes boundary-work as a sustainability practice to work out segregating propensities, and transform exclusionary boundaries or make them more permeable. Life story interviews in a Mexican Caribbean enclave revealed segregations appalling consequences for workers, implicit costs for business owners, and the personal involvement of tourism actors in historical struggles over boundaries. This analysis constitutes a first step to untangle exclusionary propensities and render tourism boundaries more workable from a sustainability governance perspective. The paper explains the need for sustainable tourism research that identifies opportunities to: (1) address traumatic experiences born of discriminatory practices, (2) turn adversarial emotions between workers and business owners into productive collaborations across boundaries, and (3) challenge power asymmetries by providing tourism actors with knowledge about the physical, symbolic, and imaginary dimensions of boundaries. It concludes that the influence of any individual agent is profoundly limited; the transformation of long-standing boundaries demands a deliberate reformulation of sustainable tourism as a multi-dimensional decolonizing force.

Gerotranscendence and Life Satisfaction: Examining Age Differences at the Maha Kumbha Mela

Infrastructure development is central to the processes that abate and produce vulnerabilities in cities. Urban actors, especially those with power and authority, perceive and interpret vulnerability and decide when and how to adapt. When city managers use infrastructure to reduce urban risk in the complex, interconnected city system, new fragilities are introduced because of inherent system feedbacks. We trace the interactions between system dynamics and decision-making processes over 700 years of Mexico City’s adaptations to water risks, focusing on the decision cycles of public infrastructure providers (in this case, government authorities). We bring together two lenses in examining this history: robustness-vulnerability trade-offs to explain the evolution of systemic risk dynamics mediated by feedback control, and adaptation pathways to focus on the evolution of decision cycles that motivate significant infrastructure investments. Drawing from historical accounts, archeological evidence, and original research on water, engineering, and cultural history, we examine adaptation pathways of humans settlement, water supply, and flood risk. Mexico City’s history reveals insights that expand the theory of coupled infrastructure and lessons salient to contemporary urban risk management: (1) adapting by spatially externalizing risks can backfire: as cities expand, such risks become endogenous; (2) over time, adaptation pathways initiated to address specific risks may begin to intersect, creating complex trade-offs in risk management; and (3) city authorities are agents of risk production: even in the face of new exogenous risks (climate change), acknowledging and managing risks produced endogenously may prove more adaptive. History demonstrates that the very best solutions today may present critical challenges for tomorrow, and that collectively people have far more agency in and influence over the complex systems we live in than is often acknowledged.

Spaces of Consumerism and the Consumption of Space: Tourism and Social Exclusion in the “Mayan Riviera”

This study applies scholarship on gerotranscendence and life satisfaction to an under-investigated context, mass pilgrimage sites. It focuses on the Maha Kumbha Mela 2013 Hindu pilgrimage, which took place in Allahabad, India. Drawing on a sample of 200 participants, this study examines the relationship between age, gerotranscendence, and life satisfaction. Using cross-sectional data, the findings show a positive correlation between age and gerotranscendence. Significant age differences in gerotranscendence scores, especially on the cosmic and solitude dimensions, are apparent. However, the relationship between gerotranscendence and life satisfaction was not statistically significant. Implications for the construct of gerotranscendence within Hinduism are discussed.

Tourism and Sustainability

This chapter discusses the commoditization and enclosure of space by the tourist industry. It is argued that commoditization takes place through the production of spaces destined to promote consumerism while at the same time strategies of enclosure are developed to intensify the private consumption of space. Spaces of consumerism are expansions from rational self-contained shopping spaces, such as malls and markets, toward urban space, and, through tourism, also to far-flung nonurban space. In contrast, consumption of space refers to the private appropriation and use of space, and the emptying, physically and symbolically, of public/collective uses and local meanings1. The chapter examines the development of the Mexican Caribbean south of Cancun, a coastline that has come to be known as the “Mayan Riviera.” On the one hand, it describes how tourist-based economies create spaces of consumerism such as all-inclusive resorts or tourist promenades in order to attract capital and monetary flows. At the same time, it considers the consequences of this process: the ways in which specific patterns of access and exclusion are promoted in order to intensify the private consumption of space. For instance, the ways in which certain ethnic groups and their social practices are segregated from places, such as “public” beaches, which are appropriated for exclusive tourist use.

Tourism and transitions toward sustainability: developing tourists’ pro-sustainability agency

This chapter outlines specific sustainability challenges in tourism destinations and the sector’s opportunities to contribute to global sustainability. The highly inequitable distribution of benefits among local actors, the energy-intensive character of most tourism activities, and the lack of systematic data on environmental and social impacts are identified as key challenges. Responses based on promoting “best practices” are useful and widely implemented by tourism corporations. Building on experiences from pioneering destinations, a case is made for sustainability solutions that go beyond the best practices approach and redefine tourism as a social activity that can actively promote broader sustainability transitions. This involves engaging local actors in the definition of “desirable or acceptable” tourism development objectives, as well as the identification of strategies that turn tourism into a social process that supports the emergence of new governance structures while questioning entrenched relations of power.