Fred Saunders

Are Alternative Food Systems Socially Sustainable? A Case Study from Finland

This paper explores the importance of alternative food systems in delivering social sustainability to local communities. The perceptions of local and organic food systems actors regarding equity (or fairness) between the actors and viability of the local communities are examined to analyze social sustainability in Juva, Finland. The findings lend conditional support to the positive relationship between localized food systems and actors within these systems feeling empowered and influential, while also supporting other research emphasizing the limitations of farmer influence on vertical distributional channels, irrespective of production methods (i.e., organic or conventional).

It's Like Herding Monkeys into a Conservation Enclosure: The Formation and Establishment of the Jozani-Chwaka Bay National Park, Zanzibar

Its Like Herding Monkeys into a Conservation Enclosure : The Formation and Establishment of the Jozani-Chwaka Bay National Park, Zanzibar

Seeing and Doing Conservation Differently: A Discussion of Landscape Aesthetics, Wilderness, and Biodiversity Conservation

This article argues that conservation agendas need to be informed by a landscape aesthetics that embraces the cultural and material richness of people’s relationship to place to better inform conservation agendas. Historical and contemporary views of landscape aesthetics and their relationship to nature conservation and notions of wilderness need to be included to complement a scientific expert assessment of conservation needs and approaches. Recent examples of conservation projects in Zanzibar are used to reveal how representations and symbols in nature are deeply embedded in biodiversity conservation aspirations and practices promoted by conservation experts. The article posits that an embodied and pluralistic approach to landscape aesthetics can more profoundly contextualize the specificity of interaction between people and between people and their environments and lead to more viable conservation and development outcomes. This would provide a contingent perspective that would to help elucidate nuanced understandings of social relations and place, thereby better serving both conservation and development agendas.

Planetary boundaries: at the threshold… again: sustainable development ideas and politics

Abstract The implications of the planetary boundaries (PBs) proposal involves scientific, moral and political dimensions. The core of the PBs idea is that humankind is transgressing global environmental tipping points resulting in changed conditions that threaten to unravel human progress. The growing status of the proposal potentially makes it a highly influential organising concept that seems to contain within it aspirations to dramatically reconstitute the relationship between society and the environment—thereby transforming the politics of sustainable development. This paper situates PBs in contemporary green thinking. Key planning events and related documents supporting the Post-2015 Development Agenda process are then examined to identify strategies and reactions to the PB proposal. The findings show that divisions reminiscent of older North/South environment and development tensions related to the role of experts, democracy and the Right to Development threaten to prevent PBs from being mainstreamed in key UN environment and development programmes and fora.

Power Relations and Cassava : Conservation and Development in Cameroon

Linking conservation and development activities requires local institutional change that can deliver global conservation as well as local socioeconomic benefits. Participatory approaches are considered a key element to this end, although recent research demonstrates that they may reinforce existing inequitable governance systems. This article examines microinstitutional formations and development interventions in the Mount Cameroon National Park. The study found that blending new governance approaches with traditional institutions at Mount Cameroon National Park led to diminished participation of the project and a failure to listen to and deliver meaningful development opportunities to Bavenga villagers. The article concludes that while local participation and governance institutions constitute laudable additions to Integrated Conservation and Development Projects, the implications of reproducing traditional authority structures must be carefully considered, and locally grounded development opportunities need to be better embedded into these projects.

Power and resistance in Cameroon – strategies, intentionality, intersectionality, and shifting spaces and identities

This paper examines how forest communities in Cameroon engage in social transformation when faced with social injustices and uneven power relations in their interactions with local state authorities and transnational corporations. It focuses on the different strategies that marginalized resource-dependent communities employ in resisting existing forms of domination manifested in public–private-community forest governance relations. We show how power operates in closed governance spaces to work against equitable, democratic and effective policy-making. We take as a point of departure that resistance or social change cannot be understood in isolation from power. Moreover, we engage with the intentionality debate and make the case that some forms of resistance are goal oriented in character. We reveal how disenfranchised communities, using powerful traditional ritual as a form of public protest, can effectively open up closed spaces and obtain effective participation in processes denied them. Our findings have significance for resistance and power debates relating to intentionality, intersectionality and outcomes.

Knowledge for environmental governance: probing science–policy theory in the cases of eutrophication and fisheries in the Baltic Sea

ABSTRACT How science and policy interact has been a major research focus in the International Relations (IR) tradition, using the epistemic community (EC) concept, as well as in the alternative perspective of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Should science be autonomous and as apolitical as possible in order to ‘speak truth to power’, as suggested by EC or should the inevitable entanglement of science and politics be accepted and embraced so as to make advice more conducive to negotiating the explicit travails of political decision-making as suggested by STS? With this point of departure, we compare similarities and differences between science–policy interactions in the issue areas of eutrophication and fisheries management of the Baltic Sea. To examine how knowledge is mobilised, the concepts of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘coherence’ are developed, drawing on both EC and STS thinking. We then reflect on the explanatory value of these approaches in both cases and discuss how a separation of science and policy-making in the pursuit of achieving scientific consensus leads to ineffectual policies. Drawing on STS thinking, we urge for a re-conceptualisation of coherence in order to accommodate a more reflexive practice of science–policy interactions.