Michiel Baud

Territorial pluralism: water users’ multi-scalar struggles against state ordering in Ecuador’s highlands

Abstract Ecuadorian state policies and institutional reforms have territorialized water since the 1960s. Peasant and indigenous communities have challenged this ordering locally since the 1990s by creating multi-scalar federations and networks. These enable marginalized water users to defend their water, autonomy and voice at broader scales. Analysis of these processes shows that water governance takes shape in contexts of territorial pluralism centred on the interplay of divergent interests in defining, constructing and representing hydrosocial territory. Here, state and nonstate hydro-social territories refer to interlinked scales that contest and recreate each other and through which actors advance their water control interests.

Environmental governance in Latin America

The multiple purposes of nature - livelihood for communities, revenues for states, commodities for companies, and biodiversity for conservationists - have turned environmental governance in Latin America into a highly contested arena. In such a recourse-rich region, unequal power relations, conflicting priorities, and trade-offs among multiple goals have led to a myriad of contrasting initiatives that are reshaping social relations and rural territories. This edited collection addresses these tensions by unpacking environmental governance as a complex process of formulating and contesting values, procedures and practices shaping the access, control and use of natural resources. Contributors from various fields address the challenges, limitations and possibilities for a more sustainable, equal and fair development. In this book, environmental governance is seen as an overarching concept defining the dynamic and multi-layered repertoire of society-nature interactions, where images of nature and discourses on the use of natural resources are mediated by contextual processes at multiple scales. Environmental governance in Latin America studies the nature and background of contemporary environmental governance in the region as well as the possibilities for more sustainability and socio-environmental justice. In eleven chapters by an international team of experts, important contemporary political changes in environmental governance are discussed, and new initiatives are analyzed.

Introduction: Environment and Society in Contemporary Latin America

Societal change in Latin America is intimately related to nature and natural resources. In this resource-rich region, nature–society relations provide both opportunities and challenges in achieving more fair, equitable and sustainable development. Nearly half of the world’s tropical forests are found in the region, next to several other natural biomes, which together carry a wealth of biodiversity. It holds one-third of the world’s freshwater reserves and one-quarter of the potential arable land. And despite five centuries of extractive activities to serve global markets, the region still holds large volumes of important mineral reserves, including oil, gas, iron, copper and gold (Bovarnick, Alpizar and Schnell, 2010). On the other hand, this “biodiversity superpower” has seen a fast rate of biodiversity loss, increasing ecosystem degradation and one-third of the world’s carbon emissions, mostly a result of the expansion of extractive activities and land-use change (UNEP, 2012). Together, these economic and ecological developments affect a large number of different social groups in all Latin American countries, primarily in rural areas but also in cities. Next to mobilizations and conflicts that attract national and international attention, there are numerous local socioenvironmental tensions that lead to longstanding economic problems and social injustice.

Patriarchy and changing family strategies: Class and gender in the Dominican Republic

This article explores the issue of ideologies of family formation and their influence on the concept of family strategies. It assesses the influence of patriarchal ideas using a historical case study of a rural village in the Dominican Republic as point of departure. The principal focus is the importance of patriarchal ideologies for class and gender relations. The article argues that the analysis of family strategies should take into account the context of class relations in the countryside and the influence of hegemonic ideologies on the gender relations within rural families. These factors led to specific strategies of rural families, but at the same time for diverging and often contradictory attitudes between individual family members.

Introduction: Structure or strategy? Essays on family, demography, and labor from the Dutch N.W. Posthumus Institute

The concept of ‘family strategies’ has yielded much valuable research when used in the classic ‘quantitative’ and ‘anthropological’ approaches to the history of family life. Its continued use as a research concept requires, however, that significantly more attention be paid to the relationships between families as social units and their individual members, to the great variety of families and households, and to the different motives that guided families in charging strategies. These questions are brought to the forefront when the history of the family is investigated cross-culturally and comparatively, as the articles of this Special Issue, written by researchers of the Dutch N. W. Posthumus Institute, seek to do.

Origins and Perspectives of Latin American Environmentalism

The debate on the socioenvironmental challenges faced by Latin America has a long history. This history is crucial to understanding Latin American perspectives on environmental governance and, above all, to understanding the specific characteristics which determine these perspectives. Traditional debates on environmental governance tend to see the Western debates on nature and environment as determining views and perspectives on a global scale. The suggestion is that Latin American environmental debates were directed by the changing views in the industrialized world. This chapter, however, suggests that Latin America has developed its own strands and perspectives on environmental issues which were emerging from its peculiar historical position. A focus on the specific, and to a large extent autonomous, knowledge development on nature and environment allow us to understand the determining roots of Latin American ideas on environmental governance.

Beyond the headlines: an editor's view on Latin American Studies in ERLACS

http://doi.org/10.18352/erlacs.10128

Sidney Mintz and Caribbean Studies

Review of:Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz. George Baca, A isha Khan & Stephan Palmie (eds.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. v + 232 pp. (Paper US

[Review of: M.I. Santiago (2006) The ecology of oil: Environment, labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938]

24.95)Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations. Sidney W. Mintz. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. xiv + 257 pp. (Cloth US

Intellectuals and Dictators in the Dominican Republic

27.95)[First paragraph]There can be no doubt about the importance of U.S. anthropologist Sidney Mintz in the development of Caribbean Studies. His work has influenced both the historiography and anthropology of Caribbean slavery and the emergence of Caribbean peasant societies. Now two books have been published that interrogate the significance of his work. The first is an anthology that tries to build on Mintz’s ideas - as I will argue below, in a circumspect and not fully convincing way. In the second Mintz describes and compares thesocieties of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, and looks back on his work that started in the 1940s.