Tom Bassett et Paul Robbins, deux de nos partenaires, ont organisé des séances de présentation des papiers scientifiques à la Reunion Annuelle des l'Asociation des Geographes Américains (AAG), tenu à Washington du 14 au 18 Avril, 2010.
The resurgence and transformation of ecological concepts in interpreting land use change, biodiversity conservation, and global climate change research has invigorated discussion over their meaning and utility among political ecologists and natural scientists. The status of such concepts as resilience, coping capacity, vulnerability, adaptation, and multi-equilibrium ecosystems are widely debated in the literature. Although there are some exceptions, the integration of the ecological and social remains tentative and incomplete. Some natural scientists take a social-ecological systems approach that divides the social and ecological into sub-systems in which the politics of resource access, control, and management are absent. But at what point does the ecological become political? This question preoccupies political ecologists writing on water scarcity in northern Thailand, on biodiversity conservation in the Peruvian Andes, and on sustainable development discourses just about anywhere. This paper session will highlight efforts to integrate ecology and political ecology into conceptual frameworks and explanations of environmental change.
Author(s):
Moussa Kone* - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Thomas J. Bassett
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract:
The global climate change literature views African savannas as the "burn center" of the planet that produces dry season intense fires, large amounts of carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2 )into the atmosphere. This paper argues that models exaggerate the amount of greenhouse gas emissions because of misconceptions about burning practices and savanna vegetation. Based on fieldwork in northern Côte d'Ivoire, this paper suggests that greenhouse gas emissions are less than believed because the timing of savanna fires and the diversity of savanna plant communities are different than what is presumed. Research methods included gas analysis of fires in experimental plots, household surveys, and participant observation. We find that farmers and herders set fire to the savanna much earlier in the dry season than assumed in the literature. Gas and vegetation analyses conducted in the Korhogo region show less intense fires and much lower levels of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide during the early dry season as compared the late dry season. We conclude that the shift to early dry season fires and the diversity of savanna vegetation suggests that the contribution of savanna fires to global climate change appears to be less alarming than assumed in the literature.
Author(s):
Baptiste Hautdidier* - Cemagref, UR ADBX
Denis Gautier
- Cirad
Abstract:
As supports for a variety of uses, West African savanna landscapes have been for long the subject of negotiations and struggles. More intriguing is the consistent political use of the uncertainties over their ecological dynamics.
While current ecologists are still striving to deliver comprehensive models of grass-tree coexistence, colonial foresters considered human practices as key—and detrimental—drivers, inspiring a repressive handling of local forest uses (such as herding, shifting cultivation or woodcutting) that pervaded postcolonial forest administrations. The academic context has changed since, as radical redefinitions of carrying capacity or burning practices were sparked by works akin to political ecology. Accordingly, most West African countries have undergone processes of devolution / decentralization of natural resource management, endorsing less stringent conceptions of the sustainable use of savannas. The debate is not settled on the specific issue of woodcutting, as the social/ecological links between a rising urban demand for charcoal and the potential harvesting pressures on savanna landscapes have not yet been fully specified.
Our contribution will be based on a cross-analysis of forest surveys and ethnographies of woodcutters' practices in a village in the outskirts of Bamako, Mali. We will demonstrate: (i) That the determinants of spatial dynamics of harvesting are driven both by ecological and access constraints; (ii) How "para-ecological" notions of 'degradation' and 'quality' are instrumentalized (in our case by foresters, customary authorities and woodcutters involved in the setting up of a village-based management scheme), promoting opportunistic behaviors of harvesters, potentially followed by a relegation in marginal lands.
Author(s):
Xavier Arnauld de Sartre* - CNRS (France)
Monica Castro
- INRA/CIRAD (France)
Bernard Hubert* - Inra
Johan Oswald - Université de Rennes 2 (France)
Sylvain Dolédec - Université de Lyon 1 (France)
Iran Veiga - Universidade Federal do Para (Brazil)
Valery Gond - CIRAD (France)
Fernando Michelotti - Universidade Federal do Para (Brazil)
Patrick Lavelle - IRD (France)
Abstract:
Since late 90s, the valuation of ecosystem services (ES) has become a fundamental principle for fulfilling poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation. As a result, scientific studies as well as management projects applying ES have proliferated, scarcely proposing a proper integration of ecological and social issues. Here, we question the universality of the ES concept and its capacity to fulfill ecological and socio-economical demands.
First, we consider ES concept origin among scientific arenas and the international institutionalization process from bibliometric and content analysis of scientific papers and policy reports. We further investigate its effectiveness for assuring a harmonious development of society as well as the maintenance of natural systems. We will address its relevance as a concept born in scientific spheres, then institutionalized in political arenas and implemented at the ground level in a diversity of situations around the world.
Second, to explore the importance of scale and social issues for the management of ES by family farmers, we confront theoretical findings and a study case concerning a recently colonized area of Brazilian Amazon. We use landscape structure as a mean for measuring ES variation. We demonstrate that ES variations are well explained by the high diversity of agricultural logics among family farmers, which is directly related to their cultural backgrounds, Moreover, institutional and environmental contexts strongly influence family logics and resulting agricultural practices.
We conclude by suggesting future steps required to improve ES valuation and payment for family farmers by taking into account geographical and social aspects.
Paul Robbins a organisé deux séance autour du projet "Socio-Ecological Theories and Empirical research" (SETER), du CIRAD et financé par Agropolis Foundation. Plusieurs political ecologist de notre réseau ont participé à ces séance:
Author(s):
Paul Robbins
- University of Arizona
Jean-Michel Vassal - CIRAD (Center for International Co-operation in Agronomic Research for Development)
Tor Benjaminsen
- Norwegian University of Life Sciences
Michel Lecoq - CIRAD (Center for International Co-operation in Agronomic Research for Development)
Claude Peloquin - University of Arizona
Nancy Peluso
- University of California - Berkeley
Abstract:
The African Desert Locust (Schistocerca gregaria) has presented a long (indeed deeply historical) problem for producers throughout northern and western Africa. Gestating in isolated settings in the Saharafor extended periods, populations of the insect periodically increase in density, change behavior and morphology, and take to the air in swarms that consume crops and pasture over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, moving across dozens of countries, spanning the range of the Mediterranean to the Congo. This paper reviews analysis by an international multidisciplinary team of researchers to examine and explain the political and economic barriers to locust control in the region. The conclusions suggest that: (1) the bifurcated resolution and extent of the insect's ecology - from its isolated solitary condition to its continental scale gregarious condition - are mismatched to the institutional scalar capacities of the modern nation state; but that (2) governmental and international institutions have become adapted to the cycles of locust outbreaks, leveraging these to capture, control, and absorb development resources on a massive scale.
Author(s):
Denis Gautier
* - CIRAD, France
Tor A. Benjaminsen
- Norwegian University of Life Sciences
Marco A. Janssen - Arizona State University
Martine Antona - CIRAD, France
Abstract:
The creation of fuelwood markets in Mali was a key element in the country's Forest reform in the 1990s. These fuelwood markets were created through a World Bank project that was partly informed by mainstream common property theory and which included the establishment of lists of right-holders linked to designated areas for cutting. The project was based on the assumption that there is widespread deforestation caused by fuelwood exploitation, that it was caused by inefficient management including unclear rights, and that this process could be arrested by establishing clear rights over specific areas for tree cutting. The establishment of fuelwood markets, however, led to adverse effects such as informalisation of rights and "relaxation" of control, which may have led to increased deforestation.
We present how these policies are constructed and how the attempted formalization of social and physical boundaries has perverse outcomes. Since clearly defined boundaries is one of the proposed design principles of Ostrom we explore the reasons for these unintended effects. We also try to explain why the same principles of the Forest reform are still spreading today despite the demonstrated limits of the rural fuelwood market model. These limits are particularly demonstrated on the question of boundary making and on who has the power to manage land and trees.
Author(s):
Monica Castro
- INRA/CIRAD
Bernard Hubert - INRA
Abstract:
As International biodiversity discourse spreads, the old categories of First and Third world are blurring. Using political ecology, we compare the translation effect of international biodiversity discourse at the local level in France and Brazil, two countries representing the opposing views of First and Third World. First we address the question of why and how biodiversity discourse has been institutionalized and implemented differently at the domestic level in Brazil and France. We historically follow the implementation of the PNR of Luberon (South France), and the TR Portal d'Amazônia (Northern Mato-Grosso), by inventorying socio-ecological zoning, agricultural practices, access rights and use of natural resources (particularly land), institutional and individual actors and knowledge used to build national and local policies applied. Institutional and socio-economical conditions are fairly opposite between Brazil and France. In France promoters of biodiversity are mainly territorial authorities and in Brazil are local NGOs. Nevertheless, strategies used by stakeholders to fulfill their socio-economical demands and some outputs of implementing the biodiversity discourse are very similar. In both countries biodiversity discourse is used to: capture financial support for project aiming to develop alternative agricultures; empower small farmers to resists against market pressure; creates exclusion of those who cannot mobilize scientific argument effectively; institutionalize ecological zoning as a mean of controlling use and access to land. We suggest that, rather than opposing "First" and "Third", biodiversity conservation discourse has come to point out the cleavage between industrial agriculture and small farming.
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