Search

Through a study of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) environmental assessment (EA) of the Dakota Access Pipeline's crossing of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, this paper explores regulatory agencies' "interpretive implementation." We find that, in implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice, USACE "scope-shifted"—facultatively expanding and contracting the scopes of its spatial, scientific and cost–benefit impact analyses—to expedite industrial expansion, contravening the policies' original intents. In doing so, USACE's EA created various energy injustices by excluding local tribes (especially the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes) and their concerns, e.g. treaty rights, local histories, climate change and especially potential oil spills with impacts on human health and subsistence resources. We analyze this scope-shifting through the lens of Karl Polayni's double movement between socioenvironmental protections and capitalist development. We elaborate this framework further via a triple-helix model that analyses ideologies, power relations and policies (here further complicated by both "law" and "interpretation" threads), as three intertwined strands that pull with or against each other, jointly progressing toward greater rights for vulnerable communities, "retrograding" toward earlier, oppressive conditions or simply stagnating. Ultimately, we argue that understanding scope-shifting and other forms of interpretive implementation as threads within the triple-helix policy strand, in dynamic tension or synchrony with other threads and strands, can help explicate agency decision-making processes. We hope that this conceptualization can elucidate the capacity of seemingly mundane bureaucratic practices for exacerbating, or potentially alleviating, energy injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates divestment movements' attempts to influence investment decisions. I use the example of #DefundDAPL, which targeted private-sector funding of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), an oil conduit crossing the Missouri River a half-mile from the Standing Rock Reservation. I analyze activists' engagements with banks as a manifestation of Karl Polanyi's second movement, that is, resistance to environmental destruction and human rights violations that accompany "commodification" (the subordination of social relations to the economy). I identify divestment as a "withdrawing" type of decommodification that restrains free-market dominance by defunding environmentally and socially destructive projects. Next, I explore how investment practices can be analyzed as a "triple-helix" comprised of three intertwined strands—ideologies, power dynamics, and private-sector policies—that pull one another toward commodification and/or decommodification as they coproduce each other in dynamic tension, creating a constantly evolving investment environment. Applying this framework to #DefundDAPL, I examine how activists' success in mobilizing societal ideologies to paint DAPL as an unethical investment was informed by banks' concerns about project profitability as well as by place-based conditions and relationships between banks and pipeline companies. Further, I find that private-sector policy changes in response to the DAPL controversy were prompted by evolving societal ideologies yet constrained by interbank power relations. In conclusion, I argue that a triple-helix lens helps unpack the black box of decommodification by revealing complex interactions among ideologies, power relations, and policy-making and demonstrates limits to private-sector initiatives' ability to impose adequate restrictions on environmentally and socially harmful investment practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the power relations that unfold when Indigenous-led struggles invoke settler-colonial law toward protection from industry's impacts. Building on Critical Race Theory, I posit a 'triple-helical' relationship between law, power, and ideology, which coproduce one another, mediated by nudges from individual agents. I argue that the triple-helix of Indigenous rights to protection from industry's impacts has stagnated, due to industrial capitalism's pushback through social regularization processes as well as its capture of formal and informal regulators and of discourses and ideologies. I conclude with a research agenda for applying the triple-helix framework to Indigenous-led engagements with industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networks play an important role in the Indigenous rights movement's strategies and in Indigenous groups' engagements with industry actors, the State, and NGOs. We seek to extend the concept of Governance Generating Networks (GGN) to incorporate Indigenous grassroots movements, and evaluate multiscale interactions and processes of network-generated governance across scales. We compare the NoDAPL movement led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the U.S. with grassroots Indigenous-environmentalist networks of water defenders in the Komi Republic, Russia. These GGNs emerged to protest oil pipelines within two contrasting sociopolitical systems, yet demonstrate substantial similarities in respect to local grievances and global engagement. We find that the resonance of these movements across scales was substantial. These reactions exhibited dissonance between scales, when national and regional actors responded in diverging ways. The two Indigenous-led movements were also able to amplify their agendas and transfer strategic alliances to other places and issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of resistance to multinational mining in New Caledonia expands actor-network theory's concept of translation by exploring ways that power dynamics affect alliances and the translations that both support and challenge them. Examining relationships among an indigenous protest group, environmentalist grassroots organizations, a human rights lawyer, the mining company, and the provincial government, I argue that power often requires alliances, mediated by compatible translations. However, if alliances are to succeed, at least temporarily, these translations must be made compatible through a process of translation alignment. Ironically, this alignment inevitably alters at least one of the translations, diminishing the power of the actor-network that articulated it to achieve its original goals. This paper's findings also enhance radical geographical understandings of capitalism's infrastructure, as uneven development increasingly relies upon-yet finds it increasingly difficult to achieve-the alignment of local communities' translations with those of the agents of industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women’s experiences of violence often remain invisible or discounted in asylum law and practice. Gender is absent as an overt ground for protection under the Refugee Convention and readings of the Convention have commonly excluded it. Although Australia’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) has acknowledged women’s special protection needs with instruments such as the Guidelines on Gender Issues for Decision Makers (DIAC 1996, 2010), the article investigates whether these are translating into practice. It examines ways in which women’s claims for asylum because of gender-based persecution (GBP) may be impeded in Australia. Drawing on feedback from major stakeholder groups, including asylum advocates, asylum seeking women, and DIAC, we suggest that at the time of our fieldwork (2005/2006) appropriate consideration of claims of GBP was generally still not evident within DIAC. We identify barriers to both the emergence and consideration of claims and suggest ways DIAC might improve gender sensitivity in the processing of asylum claims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors respond to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) of Australia's comment on their critique of its processing of women eligible to claim asylum on grounds of gender-based persecution (GBP). They highlight discussions on refugee studies about the merits of various research methods, including the role played by different forms of qualitative research. Some issues that DIAC have not addressed in its procedures are cited, including separate interview of women applicants from their spouse.