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Deltas have provided fertile farmland, productive fishing, and access to trade routes for millennia. Today, more than five hundred million people live on deltas and coastal urban areas. Yet deltas are also incredibly vulnerable to the pressures of climate change.

Hydrodiplomacy in South Asia is in a nascent stage, primarily focusing on data exchange and limited state-to-state interactions, leaving aside an array of organic approaches to understand the facets of water diplomacy and governance. This perspective piece is based on a series of webinars to identify ways to bridge these gaps in hydrodiplomacy in South Asia, highlighting the merit of multi-track diplomacy for embracing the plurality of interests and decision-making. The piece concludes that it is pertinent to build capacities for improving science-media communication, acknowledging and strategizing power asymmetry, and implementing international water law to guide water diplomacy.

Potential to identify and cultivate forms of post-capitalism in tourism development has yet to be explored in depth in current research. Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries, and hence a powerful global political and socio-economic force. Yet numerous problems associated with conventional tourism development have been documented over the years, problems now greatly exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Calls for sustainable tourism development have long sought to address such issues and set the industry on a better course. Yet such calls tend to still promote continued growth as the basis of the tourism industry’s development, while mounting demands for “degrowth” suggest that growth is itself the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed in discussion of sustainability in tourism and elsewhere. This critique asserts that incessant growth is intrinsic to capitalist development, and hence to tourism’s role as one of the main forms of global capitalist expansion. Touristic degrowth would therefore necessitate postcapitalist practices aiming to socialise the tourism industry. While a substantial body of research has explored how tourism functions as an expression of a capitalist political economy, thus far no research has systematically explored what post-capitalist tourism might look like or how to achieve it. Applying Erik Olin Wright’s 2019 innovative typology for conceptualizing different forms of post-capitalism as components of an overarching strategy for “eroding capitalism” to a series of illustrative allows for exploration of their potential to contribute to an analogous strategy to similarly “erode tourism” as a quintessential capitalist industry.

Recent decades have shown the increased popularity of market-based instruments (MBIs) for conservation despite mixed social and ecological outcomes. This paper explores the extent to which two crucial MBIs, namely, ecotourism and sport hunting, are compatible with 'convivial conservation', a novel, integrated approach that explores conservation beyond capitalism. We developed an analytical framework of five key features for transformative change that can potentially contribute to conviviality: access and property rights, benefit-sharing, value operationalisation, institutional arrangements, and decision-making processes. We analysed the use of ecotourism and sport hunting in southern and eastern Africa in relation to the five features. Based on 'radical incremental transformation', we applied these features to analyse if, and if so how, incremental changes to these MBIs can be supportive in transitioning conservation towards (further) conviviality. With insights from our extensive research experiences in eastern and southern Africa, we highlight that the institutional design and contextual factors determining power relations are often more important than the choice of instrument in influencing its social and ecological outcomes. In conclusion, we propose a shift in the dialogue on conservation beyond its infatuation with commodification by integrating convivial elements into the design of conservation policies.

The gendered impact of fear from persistent insecurities informs women’s navigation within and through conflict- and conservation-shaped landscapes. This article introduces a feminist emotional geography approach into discussions concerning the relationship between conservation and conflict studies to explore how navigation of fear enables women’s self-determination and agency in generating survival strategies with(in) such ‘violent environments’. Based on visual ethnographic methods employed around Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the photo diaries and narratives of two women illustrate their attempts to make sense of their fears in order to develop emotional and behavioral coping responses in the form of bartering and performativity. Going beyond a dominant focus on ‘everyday resistance’ against oppressive conservation practices and other armed actors in conflict, I argue that this fear-induced coping allows to account for the compliances and collaborations unfolding with landscape and actors, that afford the women a sense of integrity, agency and ownership of their body and mind.

Science and technology studies and urban political ecology have made important contributions to the understanding of water provision in the Global South. In this article we develop insights from these fields with the aim to understand the blurring boundaries of urban water regimes and their power relations mediated by actors, institutions and technology. Furthermore, we explore how urban water regimes can form a critical interface which is a form of institutional–actor space where formal and informal water regimes encounter each other through conflict and cooperation.

Sea-level rise and resulting salinity inundation are making many coastal areas increasingly unfavorable for rice production. This paper examines intensive and extensive adaptations to rice production in salinity-prone areas of the Mekong River Delta (MKD) of Vietnam using a two-year panel dataset of 788 rice-growing households. In terms of intensive adaptations, we estimate a fixed-effect regression model and find that salinity tolerant rice varieties (STVs) increase rice yields on fields that are not protected by salinity barriers, but overall economic benefits from STVs are limited by lower market prices compared to other varieties. In terms of extensive adaptations, farmers stop growing rice on 15% of survey fields. Probit and IV-probit model results reveal that falling rice profitability plays a significant role in these observed exits from rice production, while salinity barrier infrastructure, large rice field holdings, and community commitment to rice farming are associated with continued rice production. Development initiatives that support household adaptation to sea-level rise need to blend currently polarized policy options of investment in large rice sector infrastructure projects that lock farmers into intensive rice cultivation and of support farmer efforts to find alternative land uses in response to evolving market and environmental conditions.

Research in environmentality has provided an analysis of environmentally friendly subject formation through the influence of conservation governance. Within this research, examination of subject formation from the local community perspective is also gaining attention. However, a gender perspective in environmentality research remains marginal. This study thus contributes to environmentality research by drawing on intersectional feminist political ecology to examine women's engagement with ecotourism in the context of India's Corbett Tiger Reserve. Ecotourism as a form of market-based conservation has been commonly framed as an expression of neoliberal environmentality. Neoliberal environmentality is reflected in market-centred incentives used to promote conservation and support for local people via employment in conservation-based work - a supposedly ‘win-win’ dynamic. Through ethnographic research, I provide insights into different forms of women's engagement with tourism. The analysis reveals that this engagement does not necessarily produce the environmentally friendly subject that environmentality analysis predicts. Rather, women's engagement is shaped by intersecting dynamics of caste and class and motivated by factors including but not limited to monetary benefits. This study thus questions the dominant approach to investigating neoliberal environmentality in particular, that tends to emphasise the influence of monetary incentives in producing environmentally friendly subjects.

Critical research concerning ecotourism has revealed the activity’s socio-economic impacts, including low-wage employment-based dependencies for many rural communities. While these dynamics are important, a crucial aspect of the ecotourism industry that falls outside this conventional sort of dependency is land use dynamics, specifically land use change, sales and entrepreneurship. We examine these dynamics in Corbett Tiger Reserve, India, where promotion of (eco)tourism since the 1990s has influenced significant changes in local land use. These changes were initially facilitated by outsiders buying land and setting up hotels and resorts in villages adjoining the Reserve. Empirical research reveals that while this initial boom of outsiders buying land has waned, land owning villagers are now setting up tourism enterprises on their own land, thereby diversifying land use from agriculture to tourism. Critical agrarian research has shown that material and symbolic factors influence farmers’ decision-making regarding land use change. An agrarian studies perspective thus facilitates a nuanced understanding of tourism-related land use diversification and change. By bringing agrarian and ecotourism studies approaches together here, we contribute to both by emphasising the importance of (eco)tourism in agrarian change and of attention to land use change in ecotourism studies to understand how rural people negotiate and navigate (eco)tourism in relation to land use. We also contribute to tourism geographies more broadly by highlighting how land use decision-making shapes local spaces in the course of ecotourism development. We draw attention to the broader processes of and impacts of ecotourism that shift generational rural land use influenced by changing values of land outside a protected area. Rendering land touristifiable deepens villagers’ dependence on the market and alienates them from their land. Ecotourism commodifies nature, and we show that this commodification extends to rural land outside of ecotourism zones per se.

There are renewed global efforts to make wildlife conservation the foundation for broad-based economic development. This article looks at these tendencies in the ‘Kruger to Canyons’ (K2C) biosphere region in South Africa, encompassing the Kruger National Park and adjacent settlement areas and reserves. Various forms of the wildlife economy have a long history in this region. However, it is increasingly posited as a preternatural means for creating jobs. We chronicle the growth of the wildlife economy from its apartheid heyday to the present, showing its fundamental dependence on the ecological and political fragmentation of space. More generally, these biopolitical divisions are part of a broad contestation of wildlife value, organised around changing regimes of protected area enclosure and the spacing of human and non-human life. Despite recent claims by the South African conservation industry that it is demolishing fences and increasing habitat connectivity, political territorialisation and ecological fragmentation continue to be important means of securing profit and reducing perceived risk. While the contradictions of this dynamic have now become acute through the emergence of the rhino-poaching crisis, the growth of that violent industry, we conclude, should not be seen as the negative inversion of a legal wildlife economy. Instead, both the legal and the illegal wildlife economies are manifestations of the same underlying problems: ill-conceived attempts at agrarian reform; the persistent influence of an older veterinary wildlife assemblage; the continued role of the rural poor as an enabling but unacknowledged buffer between development and wildlife.

This article introduces ‘eco-war tourism’, a growing niche in which tourists venture into war zones to seek adventure and ‘save’ nature from its violent surroundings. In Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, such tourists can experience the ‘threat of mortality’ while visiting mountain gorillas, contribute to the survival of the park and supposedly participate in regional peacebuilding. This article considers how the amalgamated commodification of war and gorillas leads to the bunkerization of tourism, the reconfiguration of space into ‘safe’ and ‘dangerous’ areas and the militarization of conservation. It links critical security studies and political ecology to theorize how eco-war tourism intensifies green militarization and how militarized conservation itself becomes a spectacularized tourist attraction. Eco-war tourism is informed by, and productive of, various affective geographies, entrenched in colonial durabilities that produce Eurocentric ideas about how and by whom nature should be protected. I call for critical security studies to examine how diverse security interventions – e.g. military, tourism, humanitarianism and conservation – are entangled in and reconfigure inherently political nature–society relations and underscore the futility of approaching ‘society’ and ‘the environment’ as separate fields of security.

Betel users are easy to identify. When chewed, betel colours its consumers’ saliva, teeth and lips in a distinct bright red. Since proper use of betel requires spitting of excess saliva, the practice also tends to stain the spaces surrounding its consumers. Because of these distinct aesthetic markers, betel has become a site of contestation in urban Solomon Islands. The practice is publicly discussed as a failure to realise the country’s tourist potential as an ‘island paradise’ and, consequently, as a threat to the country’s socioeconomic stability and development. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic field research in Solomon Islands, we critically engage with these debates about betel aesthetics as a pathway to socioeconomic stability and development. We demonstrate how betel aesthetics are centrally embedded in everyday processes of ‘cultural humiliation’ that are central to Solomon Islanders’ encounters with the global political economy. Simultaneously, many Solomon Islanders reject foreign betel narratives. Instead, they emphasise the everyday significance of betel for socioeconomic stability according to Solomon Islanders’ interests, needs and values. By comparing aesthetic and socioeconomic visions about betel, we uncover deep-seated inequalities and possibilities for everyday resistance in development encounters.

Current scholarship in the field of critical surf studies interrogates issues of gender, race and coloniality in global surfing tourism and culture. This literature focuses primarily on cultural discourse and tourism practice, yet has recently begun to examine researcher positionality in ethnographic and reflexive surf tourism research. As a novel empirical contribution to existing decolonial trends in surf tourism and intersectional surfeminist research, this article explores dynamics of gender, race and researcher positionality in conducting community-based participatory action research (PAR) in surfing tourism, through a year-long ethnographic project in Playa Hermosa de Cobano, Costa Rica. This contribution draws on discussions in feminist geography interrogating gendered and racialized dynamics in ethnographic and participatory research. Reflexive lessons from the field highlight the complexities associated with employing decolonial and poststructuralist feminist methods in critical surf tourism studies, particularly for white/white-assumed female-presenting researchers from the Global North working in Global South field contexts. These complexities include considerations of multiple researcher subjectivities related to postcolonial intersectional power dynamics in research team composition and throughout the PAR process.

This special issue explores theoretical and methodological issues related to activist and engaged scholarship. Combining scholarship and activism involves the (collaborative) production of knowledge that contributes not only to understanding the issues research participants face, but also to the social change they envision (Kirsch 2018; Hale 2006; Rasch and Van Drunen 2017; Rasch and Köhne 2016). Often, this entails a process of double contention. Activist scholars might be involved in social struggles against inequality and exclusion beyond the production of knowledge, engaging in solidarity work, supporting court cases, and co-strategizing for actions (see for example Bringa 2016; Grasseni 2014; Hale 2006). At the same time, they are often involved in processes of contention related to the metrics-oriented neoliberal university, as well as to its underlying positivist, eurocentrist, and colonialist structures (see for example Datta 2018; Mountz et al 2015).

News coverage of noteworthy environmental events is often fleeting, moving from one spectacle to another and rarely retaining global attention. But in August 2019, news of Amazon rainforest fires spread seemingly as quickly as the fires themselves, with sustained global coverage and funding pouring into environmental organizations. Yet Amazon fires regularly occur and fires were simultaneously burning in other important Brazilian biomes, with some causing worse damage. What was it about the 2019 Amazon fires that elicited such a strong and persistent global response? In this paper, we draw on distinctions between slow/immediate (Nixon, 2011) and structural/direct violence (Galtung, 1969) to answer this question. We argue that the Amazon's reputation as a global treasure and its association with climate change and biodiversity through ‘giantness’ (Slater, 2002) meant that the fires’ local spectacular violence became felt as an instant global threat, shifting perceptions of violence from slow to immediate. Moreover, as the identified instigator of the violence, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro became a sort of ‘bridge’ between structural and direct dimensions of violence, thus making the violence personal. These three dynamics combined to enhance visibility of the Amazon's destruction and its connection to planetary stability, thereby inspiring the 2019 fires’ extraordinary reactions. Through this analysis, the paper contributes to psychological literature on perceptions of ecological crises and to discussions in political ecology/geography concerning violent environments by demonstrating how and why both the slow and structural violence of the global climate and biodiversity crises can be rendered more visible via localized effects.

We critically reflect on a conservation project in the Ecuadorian Amazon that was designed to promote biodiversity conservation among lowland indigenous communities involved in eco-tourism initiatives by teaching them how to knit a particular set of local animals. We use interpretive qualitative research and draw on social practice theory to examine the ways that participants’ engagement with new knitting in participatory knitting workshops changed the understanding of environmental conservation and social entrepreneurship within an eco-tourism context. Eventually, the intervention pushed participants to adopt new and difficult-to-sustain conservation and entrepreneurial practices. The introduction of these new practices and a focus on a specific list of local species turned animals into commodities and created unsustainable connections with new materials and a disconnect between local and traditional know-how.

The discussion on the relation between human mobility and climate change has moved beyond linear and exceptional terms. Building on these debates, this article, and the Special Issue on Climate Mobilities: Migration, im/mobilities and mobilities regimes in a changing climate that it introduces, conceptualises this relation in terms of climate mobilities. Through the concept of climate mobilities, we highlight the multiplicity of mobility in the context of a changing climate, including the interrelations between human mobilities and immobilities and their interplay with other mobile flows, such as the mobilities of ideas, information, or climate risk. We furthermore delve into the politics of climate mobilities, defining climate mobility regimes, and implications for mobility justice among those whose mobility is impacted by these regimes. We argue for research to pay more attention to acts of resistance against dominant climate mobility regimes, including voluntary immobilities and re-emplacements that challenge mass migration frames or imposed relocation policies. The articles in this issue empirically examine these dimensions, reflecting on the plurality of climate mobilities and its politics, each analysing how these evolve in a situated cultural or political context.

Convivial conservation has been put forward as a radical alternative to transform prevailing mainstream approaches that aim to address global concerns of biodiversity loss and extinction. This special issue includes contributions from diverse disciplinary and geographical perspectives which critically examine convivial conservation's potential in theory and practice and explore both possibilities and challenges for the approach's transformative ambitions. This introduction focuses on three issues which the contributions highlight as critical for facilitating transformation of mainstream conservation. First, the different ways in which key dimensions of justice — epistemic, distributive, and participatory and multi-species justice — intersect with the convivial conservation proposal, and how potential injustices might be mitigated. Second, how convivial conservation approaches the potential to facilitate human and non-human coexistence. Third, how transformative methodologies and innovative conceptual lenses can be used to further develop convivial conservation. The diverse contributions show that convivial conservation has clear potential to be transformative. However, to realise this potential, convivial conservation must avoid previous proposals' pitfalls, such as trying to 'reinvent the wheel' and being too narrowly focused. Instead, convivial conservation must continue to evolve in response to engagement with a plurality of perspectives, experiences, ideas and methodologies from around the world.

Rights of Nature (RoN) approaches as a tool to protect ecosystems and nature is gaining growing attention in academic and societal debates. Despite this new momentum, theoretical work is increasingly pointing out major problems and uncertainties related to such approaches. Inspired by this critical work, the paper considers RoN as a type of intervention that competes with those of other actors for the control of, and decision-making power over, natural resources. To understand the implications of such interventions, it is necessary to investigatehow they shape, and are shaped by, local context. To that end, we look at Rights of Rivers (RoR) cases in New Zealand, Colombia and India. Investigating these well-researched cases, we aim to tease out the material and discursive contestations that emerge from the establishment and implementation of RoR interventions. We then propose an analytical approach that has emerged from our fieldwork and which can be useful in identifying the conflicts and contestations underpinning RoR.

Against the background of neoliberal conservation and green grabbing, this paper investigates an ecotourism initiative through the notion of ‘multiple environmentalities’ (neoliberal, disciplinary, sovereign and truth), which concerns the governance of people for environmental causes. We apply this to the inhabitants of Batu Katak, Sumatra, Indonesia, where the Green Life Project has been established next to Gunung Leuser National Park as a Private Protected Area. An important governance strategy for Green Life is the establishment of volunteer ecotourism to generate funds and to include the local community. We argue that ecotourism can play a crucial role in legitimising the activities and increasing the power of nature conservation organisations, which, in the case of Green Life, is visible in the growth of coercive means to secure protected areas. If ecotourism is the kernel of neoliberal environmentality at Green Life, the core issue is the prevalence of truth environmentality, in which nature is often valued higher than people. This valuation led to the strengthening of disciplinary and sovereign environmentality. Arguably, ecotourism at Green Life will not establish the intended sustainable relations with the community, and this paper functions as an important lesson for practitioners to scrutinise the consequences of their governance strategies.

Managing transboundary river basins proves a challenge for China when encountering disagreements with its neighbors that experience different political and social conditions. This paper analyzes what happens when China characterizes water as a security issue, examining China’s fluid securitization practices, where changes can be identified indicating that the Chinese government values the various water security concerns differently. Two cases are adopted for comparison. In the case of China sharing the Mekong River, the Chinese government has shown a willingness to incorporate more issues found both inside and outside of the water sector. In contrast, in the case of the sharing of the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, China’s security agenda has been limited to the consideration of water availability and has led to military security concerns. The findings indicate that China’s water security agenda is not only driven by a concern for water management over specific rivers, but also judgments that incorporate strategic military consideration with regard to countries that they are involved with. The case of China thus suggests that water security is a complex domain that demonstrates competing values and concerns in (de)politicizing water. Therefore, water-related security issues cannot be understood solely from an environmental policy perspective.

We proudly relaunch the International Journal of Water Governance. Free to read, free to publish in and peer reviewed as ever, it is now also open to practitioner contributions and commentaries. We (non-exhaustively) lay out some of our key water governance concerns and interests in the interrelationships between nature, society and technology that produce water governance, such as emerging ideas and imaginaries, ‘institutional spaghetti’, representation,recognition and (re)distribution as well as sociotechnical systems. We invite a range of potential approaches but would encourage power-sensitivity in the analysis. Your contributions are most welcome, whether insightful overviews or groundbreaking ideas, no matter how contrarian, as long as they are well argued and based in fact!

This article explores a case of human–wildlife cohabitation in the Rodopi mountains of Bulgaria, wherein people and brown bears ( Ursus arctos) have adapted to living together in relative harmony. While this is due to a variety of factors, chief among these is the way both people and bears appear to pursue knowledge of one another and act on this knowledge so as to actively minimize potential for conflict. We draw on this case to contribute to growing discussion concerning how nonhumans should be understood and included within conservation policymaking. While conservation has conventionally been understood as something humans do on behalf of other species, a growing body of “more-than-human” research challenges this perspective as “anthropocentric” in arguing that nonhumans should be considered “co-constitutive actors” of the spaces they occupy. Based on this understanding, some go so far as to assert that a “multispecies ethics” demands that nonhumans be actively included in decision-making concerning such spaces’ governance. While our study indeed demonstrates that both humans and bears seem to mold their behavior in relation to their sensing of the other’s behavior, it also demonstrates that knowledge of bears’ behavior is ultimately always interpreted by humans in conservation management. Moreover, different groups of stakeholders hold different knowledge of bears that influence their attitudes and behavior towards the animals. The study thus raises important questions concerning how to incorporate bears (and other nonhumans) within conservation decision-making, and whose knowledge should be privileged in the process.

Reports predict frighteningly serious escalations of the controversy between Afghanistan and its neighbours over transboundary waters. However, a postulated future is not empirical evidence. This paper focuses on Afghanistan’s relations with Iran. It aims to examine the evolution of the hydropolitical relations between Afghanistan and Iran over the Helmand River Basin and to identify where and how changes in the relationship occurred over the past century. The Transboundary Waters Interaction NexuS (TWINS) model is used to map the evolution of hydropolitical relations between the two riparian states. The paper also explores the dynamics of the political relations between the states in order to understand the potential for greater cooperation. While there is a complete disconnect between the two sides in terms of water management, the paper’s historical analysis shows that the frightening claims are not backed by facts on the ground and that they misrepresent the hydropolitical relations as they exist within the broader geopolitical context. The paper concludes that for both Afghanistan and Iran over the period of Western intervention and civil war, the water controversy has constantly been overshadowed by other priority concerns such as security, economy, and the quest for the stabilisation of Afghanistan. Enhanced water cooperation therefore depends on a change in the nature of geopolitical relations between the two countries and on the creation of a collective identity by Afghanistan and Iran over the Helmand River Basin.

De discussie over kernenergie suggereert dat we niet weten wat de beste oplossing is voor de klimaatcrisis en dus alle mogelijkheden moeten verkennen. Dat is niet waar.

Contains fulltext : 287534.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Abstract: Drawing on longitudinal research engagement with villages and government projects in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, we argue the case for a strong revamp of government policies on rural development. Thereby we suggest that the legitimacy of ascribing to policy a notion of “post-apartheid” is largely redundant as current development policies in rural South Africa have not changed sufficiently. Notably the underlying rationale behind government interventions and associated governance mechanisms remains highly technocratic. This represents a strong continuity in the role of the state and its quest to restructure and modernise the rural economy. We question the efficacy of such a technocratic approach when it seems so disconnected from the socio-economically fluid and spatially heterogeneous spaces created by rural populations who, in the process of defining and pursuing their livelihood goals in relation to particular identities, and ideals around notions of modernity, produce livelihood constructions and identities that are seldom confined to the village or the agricultural sector alone. 17 januari 2023

We respond to two rejoinders to our review article “Science for Success,” which proposed fuller contextualization of epistemological approach, researcher position and interests in conservation research. This way readers—including reviewers and journal editors—can better understand and interpret findings. We suggest this contextualization is particularly important when conservation and development professionals undertake research about programs they are involved in, as this can potentially create a conflict of interest. Both rejoinders follow an extended process of complaint about our article that included academic and legal threats, and ad hominem attacks, with little engagement with the points made about researcher positionality. We consider this to be a form of “discursive violence” deployed to silence unfavorable perspectives, confirming our argument that positionality in conservation (research) begs self-reflection and transparent disclosure.

In this introductory paper we discuss the emergence of the ‘event’ as a critical point of interrogation of contemporary understandings of disaster. While the practicalities of DRR are underpinned by an applied vision of disaster studies largely built around hazards scholarship, developments within a number of theoretical perspectives increasingly doubt the ability of this objectivist and ‘experiential’ approach to reduce risk in the longer term. Here, we categorise these various challenges as revealed through the SI's cases and theoretical interventions, and in selected wider scholarship, and assess what they mean for disaster interpretation, prediction and politicisation. We frame the eight articles making up the SI within an overarching view of the event based around social interpretations of space, place, time, and nature. (Re)assessing calamitous events, we argue, is prescient in a contemporary global predicament focussed on present and future ‘climatic threats’.

Recent decades have shown the increased popularity of market-based instruments (MBIs) for conservation despite mixed social and ecological outcomes. This paper explores the extent to which two crucial MBIs, namely, ecotourism and sport hunting, are compatible with 'convivial conservation', a novel, integrated approach that explores conservation beyond capitalism. We developed an analytical framework of five key features for transformative change that can potentially contribute to conviviality: access and property rights, benefit-sharing, value operationalisation, institutional arrangements, and decision-making processes. We analysed the use of ecotourism and sport hunting in southern and eastern Africa in relation to the five features. Based on 'radical incremental transformation', we applied these features to analyse if, and if so how, incremental changes to these MBIs can be supportive in transitioning conservation towards (further) conviviality. With insights from our extensive research experiences in eastern and southern Africa, we highlight that the institutional design and contextual factors determining power relations are often more important than the choice of instrument in influencing its social and ecological outcomes. In conclusion, we propose a shift in the dialogue on conservation beyond its infatuation with commodification by integrating convivial elements into the design of conservation policies.

Cresco is a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project in Varaita Valley, a mountain area in the South-Western part of Piedmont (Italy). The project started in 2021, in the midst of the Corona pandemic and it was born from the collaboration between Lorenzo and Pietro. Neither of them had much farming experience before. Initially, Lorenzo worked as a web designer in Turin to only later change to work as a chef and then as a farmer in 2017. Pietro, in the meantime, was studying Environmental...

This article analyses the media reporting on conflicts and cooperation in the Brahmaputra River basin. We used 2437 newspaper articles published between 2010 and 2020 from the four riparians (China, India, Bhutan and Bangladesh) to explain the science–media interlinkages and what print media reports on conflicts and cooperation. We have found that most articles focus on conflicts, especially relating to hydropower development, data and information asymmetry, and disaster governance. There is limited media reporting on the avenues of cooperation such as informal water diplomacy, collaborative research opportunities, and the community and the culture that brings the riparians together.

In southern Africa, the indigenous Bushmen (San) have for long been positioned as an inferior group. First, in pre-colonial paternalist relationships that included slavery and several types of serfdom. Next, they had an inferior position under colonial paternalism (‘baasskap’) originating at white settler farms and last, they experience inferiority again in relation to the contemporary, mostly black, elites, including state officials. This paper addresses this historical pattern: through ethnographic results and examples from the literature it relates this process to contemporary post-colonial paternalist relations of various groups of Bushmen, particularly in tourism and development programmes. I argue that, despite dominant discourses about bottom-up approaches by the tourism industry, NGOs and the state, tourism and development also provide for a continuation of paternalist relations, in which articulations of inferiority come from ‘above’ and ‘below’, thereby often perpetuating Bushmen’s inferiority. Moreover, I suggest that this perpetuation is not confined to tourism and development only; an important discourse that underscores inferiority to a degree is the hegemonic global articulation of ‘indigeneity’, which subtly emphasises indigenous peoples’ inferiority.

Drawing on an analysis of the implementation of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in the Somali periphery, we consider how the programme is promoted as an ‘innovative’ social protection programme that links food security with development projects. Underpinning its ‘innovative’ role is a community-based approach, focusing upon the institutions, values and capacities of a community. Taking the case of the nomadic pastoralists in Ethiopia’s Somali region, we consider the role of clans as the ‘dominant’ grassroot socio-political organizations. Our analysis, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork shows how in the implementation of PSNP the mobilization and (re)deployment of clanship values and rules create legible and governable Somali pastoral subjects. This is in line with the Ethiopian state’s conception of ‘improvement’ and ‘modern’ way of life based on sedentary-based development and governance. We illustrate how clan leaders unwittingly (re)organize their clan (leadership) values and capacities to support this project. We argue that clan-based implementation of PSNP has become an ‘effective’ mechanism of extending state power and governing nomadic pastoralists, leading to changes in relations of authority and in forms of (inter)subjectivity between pastoralists, their clan (leaders) and the state. Towards this end, we put forward the concept of ‘government through clanship’ to reflect the assemblage of these practices, processes and changes which would offer critical analytical insights into social policies claimed to be community-based.

Private engagement has always been central to biodiversity conservation. Recently, the role of private enterprises in (eco)tourism have increased, and private lands play a pivotal role in expanding protected areas within societies throughout the world. This paper contributes to discussions of private engagement in conservation and its relation to tourism (recreation generally), with novel insight on how the conservation-tourism nexus on private land is approached in different geographical contexts. We present a systematic literature review that results in five thematic clusters characterized by different conservation approaches to tourism in Global North and South. Research concerning Global South tends to emphasize (eco)tourism as a main inducement for conservation, while research concerning Global North emphasizes expansion of private protected areas where access for tourist-recreational use has to be compensated. We propose a future research agenda to exploring environmentally and socially just approaches to conservation and recreation in both Global North and South.

Failing Forward documents the global rise of neoliberal conservation as a response to biodiversity loss, and unpacks how this approach has managed to "fail forward" over time despite its ineffectiveness. At its core, neoliberal conservation promotes market-based instruments intended to reconcile environmental preservation and economic development by harnessing preservation itself as the source of both conservation finance and capital accumulation more generally. Robert Fletcher describes how this project has developed over the past several decades along with the expanding network of organizations and actors that have come together around its promotion. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, he explores why this strategy continues to captivate states, nongovernmental organizations, international financial institutions, and the private sector alike despite its significant deficiencies. Ultimately, Fletcher contends that neoliberal conservation should be understood as a failed attempt to render global capitalism sustainable in the face of its intensifying social and ecological contradictions. Consequently, he concludes, the only viable alternative capable of simultaneously achieving both environmental sustainability and social equity is a concerted program of "degrowth" grounded in postcapitalist principles.

Since the 1990s a body of soft international law and public policy has developed around property restitution after conflict. The Pinheiro Principles and the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) both proffer remedies for property losses experienced due to violent conflict and forced displacement. These international guidelines for remediating harm caused by property loss or damage in conflict at best only partially address losses in customary tenure systems. This article has two goals: first, to delineate where the international guidelines are out of step with the nature of customary tenure; and second, to identify trajectories of change for customary land tenure systems after violent conflict. These two issues are fundamentally linked. The characteristics of post-conflict environments– contested authority structures, displaced and returning populations, and contentious land relations – make customary land vulnerable to expropriation and elevate the threat of asset loss for customary rights holders. This challenges the assumption that people can always return to rural agricultural livelihoods when displaced from customary land; that is only true if those customary land systems function the way they did before the violence. This article draws on a socio-legal analysis of secondary sources and qualitative data gathered by the authors through focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews in rural communities in Burundi, Liberia, and Uganda over the past decade. Because customary land tenure systems are prevalent over much of the territory currently affected by violent conflict in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, the absence of specific restitution policies for customary tenure systems is a significant gap in international public policy.

De discussie over kernenergie suggereert dat we niet weten wat de beste oplossing is voor de klimaatcrisis en dus alle mogelijkheden moeten verkennen. Dat is niet waar.

This paper is written in recognition of the contributions that Maarten Bavinck has made to the field of maritime studies and for the inspiration that he has been for many. It is hard to separate Maarten’s academic and institution-building contributions from his personal qualities, particularly his interest in human relationships. Maarten’s aptitude for building bridges between people, ideas, and institutions has allowed him to connect people in larger knowledge generation and action projects and forge new conceptual bridges. In addition to reflecting shortly on Maarten's key role in establishing the Centre for Maritime Research (MARE) as a institutional anchor in maritime studies, this paper reviews on some of his important and original contributions to four academic domains: legal pluralism, interactive governance, the study of fisheries conflicts, and the environment-development interface. Common threads across these domains include his long-term commitment to meticulous fieldwork in South Asia that grounds his work so firmly, his focus on achieving a more socially just use of marine and coastal resources, and his pragmatic approach that has led to original connections across distinct conceptual and institutional fields.

Ecotourism has become an increasingly important market-based practice in nature conservation. Several scholars and non-governmental organizations have discussed this as a commodification of nature in the context of capitalist expansion, but only a few have examined how value is produced in this process. Focusing on ecotourism in Tangkahan, in the Sumatra Island of Indonesia, this paper looks at how value is produced in human-elephant encounters. It builds on the concepts of lively commodities and encounter value to show how the incorporation of captive elephants in ecotourism generates value from two layers of interactions between humans and nonhumans. First, captive elephants are trained by mahouts for the encounters with tourists; then, the production of value takes place through tourists’ encounters with the elephants in ecotourism activities (elephant bathing, elephant grazing, and trekking alongside the elephants). We argue that the expansion of the commodification of nature in some cases requires an understanding of the way this encounter value produces a ‘captive nature’: lively beings that are enclosed, managed, and employed to sell experiences.

The word livestock itself suggests the reduction of animals as living things to animals as economic goods. Disaggregating the term into its component parts—live and stock—also suggest the difficulty of rendering things that are alive into things that are stocked, especially on large or predicable scales. The be alive is biological; living things breathe, eat, defecate, move, sleep, grow, reproduce, connect with others, get sick, die. To be stock, on the other hand, is economic; stocks are things held and exchanged. In capitalist relations specifically, livestock (and livestock parts) are owned, quantified, rationalized, commodified, specialized, simplified, contracted, accumulated, speculated upon, traded, sold. Ongoing attempts to make living things into stocks, or commodities, are rife with contradictions and impossibilities. Fundamentally, biological bodies are barriers to accumulation. The unruliness of living stocks—including their biological needs, the time they take to grow and mature, their propensities toward genetic diversity, and their vulnerabilities in environments where diversity is strictly denied—make them particularly difficult to standardize and simplify for the market. Just as Karl Polanyi (1944) unveiled the fiction of land, labor, and money as commodities, animals must join this list.

Over the past 600 years, commodity frontiers – processes and sites of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy – have absorbed ever more land, ever more labour and ever more natural assets. In this paper, we claim that studying the global history of capitalism through the lens of commodity frontiers and using commodity regimes as an analytical framework is crucial to understanding the origins and nature of capitalism, and thus the modern world. We argue that commodity frontiers identify capitalism as a process rooted in a profound restructuring of the countryside and nature. They connect processes of extraction and exchange with degradation, adaptation and resistance in rural peripheries. To account for the enormous variety of actors and places involved in this history is a critical challenge in the social sciences, and one to which global history can contribute crucial insights.

This article critically reflects on contemporary discussions of human–nonhuman relations and their consequences for ecological politics. Recent critiques push back against popular ‘nonhuman turn’ appeals to ‘decentre’ humans and downplay distinctions between humans and nonhumans. The article seeks to both extend and nuance these critiques by emphasising how uneven developments from colonial to digital platform capitalism have intensified historical processes of alienation between humans and the rest of nature. This focus contextualises the nonhuman turn as a response to increasingly alienated forms of entanglement, which may hamper rather than enable challenging contemporary forms of domination. To address this, two conceptual shifts are proposed. First, a shift away from ‘decentring the human’ to a dialectics between more-than-human and ‘less-than-human’. This move emphasises how forms of capitalist domination continue to diminish (certain) humans and nonhumans and how challenging this requires pivoting between de- and recentring humans where needed. Second, a shift from ‘more-than-human’ to ‘more-than-life’, to emphasise how through extremely uneven histories of capitalist development the intensification of alienation has led to growing tensions between ontological relationality and epistemological and practical distinctions.

Despite decades of critique concerning violent conservation practices, ‘green’ violence and militarization for the protection of biodiversity are on the rise. This paper engages with the question of how and why these violent and militaristic dynamics unfold in relation to Transboundary Protected Areas in particular, which, paradoxically, are widely promoted as an instrument of peacebuilding. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork within the intended transboundary Virunga Conservation Area between the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, I introduce a novel analysis of the instrumental role of fear into the conservation debate. Inspired by frameworks from emotional geographies and critical geopolitics, I examine fear discourses that are perceived, reproduced and enacted in everyday realities of individuals living within this violent geography. My analysis focuses on the narratives of park rangers who are trained and deployed as parastatal conservation actors by their respective governments. Rangers’ perceptions reflect a discursively constructed ‘geography of fear’ informing their understanding and implementation of violent and militaristic measures as ‘necessity’ for the protection of national and park borders. Their fear narratives further point to governmental interests in political sovereignty and territorial integrity undermining transboundary collaboration efforts. Ultimately, I argue that the analyses of fear can advance conservation studies by generating a deeper understanding of the persistence of ‘green’ violence and militarization. On that account, I advocate to include the voices of those who feel and perform these problematic practices in their everyday lives to create alternative, non-violent pathways in the future.