Fred P Saunders

There are ever growing demands on farmers to consider the wider environmental implications of production, not least in the Baltic Sea Region where concerns about agricultural related eutrophication are significant. In Sweden, farmers are being nudged through voluntary agri-environmental measures, enticed by the market and compelled to transition from a productvist agriculture to a multifunctional agriculture. Drawing on the 'good farmer' concept, inspired by Bourdieu, this paper studies Swedish conventional and organic farmers’ views and reflections on the changing relationship between farming practices and the environment. The paper finds that despite 25 years of agri-environmental policy in Sweden, some conventional farmers are still mired in a narrow productivist mindset. That said, the study concludes that we should be wary of conceiving the 'good farmer' too strictly in productivist terms given that the ‘rules of the agricultural game’ in Sweden are leading to a more divergent farmer habitus. Farmers are looking for opportunities within the multifunctional agriculture field that increasingly demands and expects all farmers to embed social and environmental goals into production considerations.

The implications of the planetary boundaries (PBs) proposal involves scien- tific, moral and political dimensions. The core of the PBs idea is that humankind is transgressing global environmental tipping points resulting in changed conditions that threaten to unravel human progress. The growing status of the proposal potentially makes it a highly influential organising concept that seems to contain within it aspirations to dra- matically reconstitute the relationship between society and the environment—thereby transforming the politics of sustainable development. This paper situates PBs in contem- porary green thinking. Key planning events and related documents supporting the Post- 2015 Development Agenda process are then examined to identify strategies and reactions to the PB proposal. The findings show that divisions reminiscent of older North/South environment and development tensions related to the role of experts, democracy and the Right to Development threaten to prevent PBs from being mainstreamed in key UN environment and development programmes and fora.

ABSTRACT Commons projects, such as community-based natural resource management, have widespread appeal, which has enabled them to shrug off a mixed performance in practice. This paper discusses how the theoretical assumptions of common pool resource (CPR) theory may have inadvertently contributed to the unfulfilled expectations of commons projects. The paper argues that the individual ‘rational resource user’, encapsulated in the CPR design principles, struggles to provide clear direction for meaningful consideration of local norms, values and interests in commons projects. The focus of CPR theory on efficiency and functionality results in a tendency in commons projects to overlook how local conditions are forged through relations at multiple scales. Commonly politically complex and changing relations are reduced to institutional design problems based on deriving the incentives and disincentives of ‘rational resource users. The corollary is that CPR theory oversimplifies the project context that it is seeking to change because it offers little or no direction to deal with the social embeddedness of resource use or implications of different stratifications.

"Common pool resource theory has become the dominant theoretical and practical strategy to study and design natural resource management institutions. This essay contrasts the common pool resource theory (CPR) with that of actor-network theory (ANT) by employing the rhetorical device of a conversational piece between two researchers. Examining their respective approaches to understanding highlights the ontological and epistemological differences between the two approaches, and how they could be used to investigate community based nature resource management. For illustrative purposes we draw on our empirical work on community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in Kisakasaka, Zanzibar. Some common misconceptualizations and misunderstandings of actor-network theory are clarified by examining some often taken for granted common pool resource assumptions about rationality, objectivity, framing, scale and what constitutes common sense when undertaking social science research. T...

This article argues that conservation agendas need to be informed by a landscape aesthetics that embraces the cultural and material richness of people’s relationship to place to better inform conservation agendas. Historical and contemporary views of landscape aesthetics and their relationship to nature conservation and notions of wilderness need to be included to complement a scientific expert assessment of conservation needs and approaches. Recent examples of conservation projects in Zanzibar are used to reveal how representations and symbols in nature are deeply embedded in biodiversity conservation aspirations and practices promoted by conservation experts. The article posits that an embodied and pluralistic approach to landscape aesthetics can more profoundly contextualize the specificity of interaction between people and between people and their environments and lead to more viable conservation and development outcomes. This would provide a contingent perspective that would to help elucidate nuanced understandings of social relations and place, thereby better serving both conservation and development agendas.