Richard A. Schroeder

Shady practice: Gender and the political ecology of resource stabilization in Gambian garden/orchards

AbstractAn increasing ecological awareness and greater efforts on a global scale to reverse processes of environmental degradation give rise to new forms of social and economic conflict—a “politics of resource stabilization”—which political ecology theorists have yet to fully explore. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) argue that the long-term payback period of capital-intensive and natural reclamation processes may potentially lead resource “managers” to adopt coercive labor mobilization tactics or seek out opportunities to capture inequitable subsidies in achieving stabilization goals. Both of these tendencies express themselves quite clearly in a lucrative horticultural production district on the North Bank of the River Gambia in West Africa.Two decades of drought, since the early 1970s, have prompted hundreds of womens groups in The Gambia to intensify fruit and vegetable production in low-lying communal garden projects. In an attempt at promoting environmental stabilization through tree planting, develop...

Dilemmas of Counter-Mapping Community Resources in Tanzania

Recent work has celebrated the political potential of ‘counter-mapping’, that is, mapping against dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals. This article briefly reviews the counter-mapping literature, and compares four counter-mapping projects from Maasai areas in Tanzania to explore some potential pitfalls in such efforts. The cases, which involve community-based initiatives led by a church-based NGO, ecotourism companies, the Tanzanian National Parks Authority, and grassroots pastoralist rights advocacy groups, illustrate the broad range of activities grouped under the heading of counter-mapping. They also present a series of political dilemmas that are typical of many counter-mapping efforts: conflicts inherent in conservation efforts involving territorialization, privatization, integration and indigenization; problems associated with the theory and practice of ‘community-level’ political engagement; the need to combine mapping efforts with broader legal and political strategies; and critical questions involving the agency of ‘external’ actors such as conservation and development donors, the state and private business interests.

Geographies of environmental intervention in Africa

This article analyses geographical assumptions underlying the latest in a long history of environmental interventions in Africa, including: 1) the distinct political problems of managing natural resources under the divergent ecological conditions of dearth and diversity; 2) the attempt by planners to resolve spatial conflicts arising in connection with land-use zoning strategies (protected areas, buffer zones, wildlife corridors); 3) the changed political ecological relationships resulting from the commodification of natural resources; and 4) the politics of scale embedded in environmental planning efforts.

“Re‐claiming” Land in The Gambia: Gendered Property Rights and Environmental Intervention

By definition, land reclamation programs render marginally productive land resources more valuable to a broader set of users. The question of who gets access to rejuvenated lands is often highly political, however. Environmental managers “reclaim” land resources by rehabilitating them, but they simultaneously reanimate struggles over property rights in the process, allowing specific groups of resource users to literally and figuratively “re-claim” the land. Relying on data gathered during fourteen months of field work between 1989 and 1995, this paper analyzes the openings created by environmental policy reforms introduced over the past two decades along The Gambia River Basin, and the tactics and strategies rural Gambians have developed to manipulate these policies for personal gain. Specifically, I demonstrate how women market gardeners pressed “secondary” usufruct rights to great advantage to ease the economic impact of persistent drought conditions for the better part of a decade, only to have male li...

Third World Environmental Justice

This special issue relates the key analytical constructs of environmental justice scholarship – distributive justice, procedural justice and environmental racism – to a series of Third World case studies. It calls attention to the need to theorize both distributive burdens and benefits; treat the relative salience of race as a category of differentiation as an empirical question; and examine new avenues of procedural justice that have opened up to transnational environmental justice activists. The basic position advanced in the collection is that the core issues at the heart of environmental justice struggles are universal. In this sense, the case studies presented here should be read not as though they were part of exceptional Third World circumstances, but instead as part of broader patterns of distributive, procedural and racial injustice with global significance.

Environmental Justice and the Market: The Politics of Sharing Wildlife Revenues in Tanzania

In northern Tanzania in the late 1980s and 1990s, rural communities displaced by the creation of wildlife protection areas advanced a number of grievances centered on equitable access to resources and compensation for wildlife-induced property loss and injuries, only to find their concerns largely ignored by policymakers. Instead, the countrys elite cadre of wildlife managers has formed a consensus around the idea that community concerns can best be addressed “through the market” by redistributing wildlife-sector revenues. This article explores three different initiatives whose proponents enjoy different levels of tenure security vis-à-vis wildlife resources. A comparison of these programs demonstrates that they stress quite different and sometimes competing and contradictory rationales for pursuing revenue-sharing strategies, with varying degrees of emphasis on the environmental justice claims of Tanzanias rural citizens.

Producing nature and poverty in Africa

Development donors have supported thousands of environmental initiatives in Africa over the past quarter century. The contributors to this provocative new collection of essays assess these projects ...

Hotspot discourse in Africa: making space for bioprospecting in Madagascar

Abstract The biodiversity hotspot strategy initially pinpointed ten tropical forest regions for conservation protection. It has since mushroomed to include 34 global regions spanning six continents and accounting for nearly 16 percent of the earths surface area. In this paper, we analyze the coincidence of biodiversity protection efforts and the extraction of biological specimens for drug development within African hotspot regions. We also discuss the work that the hotspot concept does to order and enframe specific locations for the dual purposes of resource conservation and extraction in Madagascar. We maintain that hotspot science has done a great deal to facilitate the bioprospecting industrys access to genetic resources in some of the most well endowed ecological settings in the world. Ultimately, this begs the question of what sort of relationship exists between hotspot conservators and actors whose involvement with hotspot ecologies is geared explicitly toward the extraction of plant and other biological materials for commercial gain.

Moving Targets: The ‘Canned’ Hunting of Captive-Bred Lions in South Africa

Abstract: So-called canned hunts take place within fenced private game ranches and typically target animals bred in captivity solely for that purpose. Thousands of semidomesticated lions form the focal point of South Africa’s canned-hunting industry. Notions of animal welfare, “fair chase,” and conservation have been deployed to varying degrees to sway public opinion surrounding canned hunts in South Africa and abroad. While state regulatory efforts have largely failed to date, the Campaign Against Canned Hunting (CACH) has successfully promoted stricter controls on the importation of lion trophies in Australia, Europe, and the United States, in part by highlighting the recent death of Cecil, a charismatic lion shot by an American bowhunter in Zimbabwe. Résumé: Les chasses dites en « boîte » ou chasse au trophée ont lieu dans des fermes d’élevage de chasses privées clôturées, elles visent généralement les animaux sauvages élevés en captivité dans l’unique but de mourir chassé. Des milliers de lions semi domestiqués constituent le point focal de l’industrie de la chasse en « boîte » de l’Afrique du Sud. Pour influencer l’opinion publique sur les chasses en « boîte » en Afrique du Sud et à l’étranger, les notions de bien-être des animaux, de chasse équitable et de conservation ont été déployées de façons diverses. Alors que les efforts de réglementation de l’État ont largement échoué jusqu’à présent, la campagne contre la chasse en « boîte » (CACH) a favorisé avec succès des contrôles plus stricts sur l’importation de trophées de lions en Australie, en Europe et aux États-Unis, en soulignant en particulier la mort récente de Cecil, le lion charismatique tué par un chasseur américain de chasse à l’arc au Zimbabwe.