Peter Leigh Taylor

Claim No Easy Victories: Evaluating the Pesticide Industry's Global Safe Use Campaign

Abstract The pesticide industry’s Global Safe Use campaign has reportedly produced a dramatic decline in pesticide-related health and environmental problems in Guatemala. This paper challenges this claim, reanalyzing existing data and further evaluating claims of the campaign’s efficacy. The paper argues that the campaign’s strategy inadequately links knowledge with structural constraints on behavior. It also suffers from the industry’s contradictory definitions of the pesticide problem both as public perception and as a serious health and environmental threat. The paper suggests an approach common to the field of Industrial Hygiene be applied to reducing pesticide hazards. The paper concludes by locating the Safe Use campaign within larger struggles to re-regulate globalizing economic spaces.

Introduction from the New Editors-in-Chief (2015–2017)

With this issue, David A. Sonnenfeld and Peter Leigh Taylor have assumed the role of Editors-in-Chief of Society & Natural Resources. We want to express our profound thanks to our predecessors, Jil...

Water Crises and Institutions: Inventing and Reinventing Governance in an Era of Uncertainty

Ensuring sufficient availability of water for human and environmental needs is one of today’s most pressing global challenges. The demand for water—for human consumption, sanitation, power, industr...

Liberalism, Illiberalism, and the Environment

Environmental social science faces daunting theoretical and empirical challenges today, as the modern political ideas of liberalism that shaped its historical development encounter the growing influence of illiberal ideas and politics. “Liberalism”, in this sense, refers to the philosophical stance in which the rights and perspectives of individuals and minorities of various types and persuasions are protected or at least tolerated, and given due personal, political, and institutional space by states and civil society majorities (Zakaria 1997: 26). Along with mainstream environmentalism and environmental policy, contemporary social theory of the environment emerged during the 20th century in close engagement with, and frequently in critique of, classical Western liberal values that include the rights of individuals, citizenship, pluralism, representative democracy, etc. Many nation states around the world are predicated at least nominally on the rule of law and the establishment of responsive/representative institutions, including those related to natural resources and the environment. Global institutions, including environmental institutions, are founded to a large degree on liberalism as well, including the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Rio Declaration, the recently endorsed global Sustainable Development Goals, and others. Western liberal democracies hardly are universal today, however. Illiberalism seems increasingly prevalent, including within historically liberal states. Illiberalism appears in institutional arrangements ranging from centralized states to illiberal democracies, theocracies, monarchies, and nonstate diverse “rights” movements promoting millenarian societal transformation. In much of the world, liberal states and institutions coexist with, and are at times overshadowed by, illiberal counterparts, rivals, and critics. Yet at the same time, strained by a seemingly endless series of actual and perceived social and environmental crises, all states face increased calls for environmental intervention, often even over the rights of individuals, communities, and dependent territories. This special issue seeks to advance social scientific understanding of society– environment relations in illiberal political and institutional contexts through evidenceinformed analysis of a series of cases around the world. Its central question is: What are the implications of today’s wide variety of sociopolitical forms and ideologies for a social science of the environment that seeks to study the full range of nature–society interactions and to support the attainment of a more sustainable future across the globe? Before delving into the six research-based articles at the core of this collection, it may be useful to define key terms and articulate the outlines of an overarching analytical framework.

DEVELOPMENT , KNO W LEDGE, PA RTNERSHIP , AND CHANGE In Search of Collaborative Approaches to Environmental Governance

Minería, movimientos sociales y respuestas campesinas: Una ecología política de transformaciones territoriales. Edited by Anthony Bebbington. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales, 2007. Pp. 349.

In the Market But Not of It: Fair Trade Coffee and Forest Stewardship Council Certification as Market-Based Social Change

22.00 paper. Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests: Rural Encounters with Gender, Ecotourism, and International Aid in the Dominican Republic. By Light Carruyo. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2007. Pp. viii + 128.

Fair trade coffee: building producer capacity via global networks

45.00 cloth. Development with Identity: Community, Culture, and Sustainability in the Andes. Edited by Robert Rhoades. Wallingford, U.K.: CABI Publishing, 2006. Pp. v + 325.

The future of Fair Trade coffee: dilemmas facing Latin America's small-scale producers

115.00 cloth. Partnerships in Sustainable Forest Resource Management: Learning from Latin America. Edited by Mirjam A. F. Ros-Tonen, Heleen Van Den Hoombergh, and Annelies Zoomers. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Pp. xv + 329.

Keeping trade fair: governance challenges in the fair trade coffee initiative

66.00 paper.