I am an Honorary Research Fellow in Mining and Society at the School of Geography, University of Melbourne. Prior to joining the School, I completed a PhD at the University of Westminster in the UK. My research interests focus on the interplay between indigenous epistemologies, human and environmental development ethics in natural resources governance. My current project explores the imaginaries of energy transition in the lithium mining industries in the North of Argentina. I am also one of the founders and current members of the Editorial Board of Alternautas, an academic journal that features Latin American critical thinking on development issues (http://www.alternautas.net). Beyond my academic work, I work as a Research and Programme Manager at Transparency International Australia. I lead on a global mining program working on promoting mining accountability in over twenty countries. Address: Melbourne, Australia
There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal " Great Transformation " of Polanyian scale is... more There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal " Great Transformation " of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries. This article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of (un)sustainable development – Human Development, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir – and outlines pathways for their realization. Human Development presents relative transfor-mative strengths in political terms, while Degrowth holds keys to unlocking unsustainable material-structural entrenchments of contemporary socioeconomic arrangements, and Buen Vivir offers a space of cultural alterity and critique of the Euro-Atlantic cultural constellation. The weaknesses or blind spots ('Achilles heels') of each discourse can be compensated through the strengths of the other ones, creating a dialogical virtuous circle that would open pathways towards a global new " Great Transformation ". As one of the main existing platforms for pluralist and strong-sustainability discussions, Ecological Economics is in a privileged position to deliberately foster such strategic discursive dialogue. A pathway towards such dialogue is illuminated through a model identifying and articulating key discursive docking points.
Angesichts des drohenden Staatsbankrotts Griechenlands richtet sich die mediale Aufmerksamkeit wi... more Angesichts des drohenden Staatsbankrotts Griechenlands richtet sich die mediale Aufmerksamkeit wieder verstärkt auf die argentinische Schuldenkrise, die um den Jahreswechsel 2001/02 in einer Periode massiver politischer Konflikte kulminierte.
Die Mitte-Links-Regierung, die in Argentinien aus den krisenbedingten Unruhen hervorging, versuchte der Überschuldung und den damit verbundenen sozialen Härten für die Bevölkerung durch eine Stärkung staatlicher Handlungs-
fähigkeit gegenüber internationalen GläubigerInnen und InvestorInnen entgegenzutreten: Sie wertete den bis dahin an den Dollar gekoppelten Peso ab, erklärte die Zahlungsunfähigkeit des Landes und regulierte im Rahmen einer wirtschaftlichen Notstandsgesetzgebung die Preise der privatisierten Versorgungsbetriebe. Der vorliegende Artikel analysiert die gegen Argentinien initiierten Verfahren als rechtliche Verhandlung eines grundlegenden Konfliktes zwischen demokratischer Selbstbestimmung bzw. regulativer Absicherung sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Grundbedürfnisse einerseits und der Besitz- und Gewinnansprüche internationaler WirtschaftsakteurInnen andererseits.
Alternautas, an academic peer-reviewed blog, is calling for contributions for a special issue on ... more Alternautas, an academic peer-reviewed blog, is calling for contributions for a special issue on ‘‘The Making of Caribbean Not-so-Natural Disasters’.
On Wednesday 20 September the lives of Puerto Ricans on the archipelago and abroad changed forever. Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico as a category four storm (sustained winds of 155mph), leaving the Island in a state of emergency. Essential services such as power, potable water and communication services collapsed (Duany, 2017). The first response from the Puerto Rico and United States federal government was insufficient and slow (Sosa Pascual & Mazzei, 2017). Flooding did not discriminate between marginalised and affluent neighbourhoods. However, like the damage caused by Katrina in New Orleans (Werner 2017; Brand 2018), the island’s natural disaster uncovered the soaring levels of inequality, unequal status and commodification of disaster-related recovery for Puerto Rican residents. To varying degrees, this ‘Not-So-Natural Disaster’ (Lloréns et al. 2018; Seda-Irizarry and Martínez-Otero 2017) has also affected ravished Caribbean neighbours like Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and Dominica - with their own variable ‘sovereign’ political arrangements and spatial and socio-economic frontiers of unequal development.
The government of Puerto Rico recently stated that “the devastation caused by Hurricanes Irma and Maria creates an opportunity to redesign” the role of the government and the market (AAFAF, 2018:11). The Caribbean government is following Prince’s (1920) centenary idea of portraying a disaster as a chance of permanent social change. Jones (2009: 318) argues that major disasters “have rarely sparked significant social changes, other than to solidify the power base of elites and further immiserate the poor”. This reproduction of inequality can be seen in the wake of hurricane Maria, through the attack on an already weakened and financially beleaguered public infrastructure, including its public energy and education system-- a tactic Naomi Klein has critically framed as disaster capitalism and ‘the shock doctrine’ (2007) in cases like post-Katrina New Orleans and post-tsunami Sri Lanka. Referred to also as a ‘doctrine of trauma’ (Bonilla 2015), a unique exploitation of distress appears to underway in the island; where long-standing crises-- political, economic and environmental-- are being used to justify further acts of negligence and austerity. Given that the future Puerto Rico envisioned in the revised fiscal plan proposes further austerity measures, privatisations, stagnation, liberalisation and flexibilization of the labour market (AAFAF, 2018), we must ask ourselves, what type of significant social change would these post-disaster policies bring to residents?
Beyond Puerto Rico, what kind of alternative Caribbean futures are being imagined and enacted in the wake of the 2017 hurricane season, and how are these entangled with a sense of greater infrastructural, relief or racial justice-- both local and regional? This special issue seeks to address the disaster conditions, responses and consequences not only in Puerto Rico but also in impacted neighbouring islands like Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Haïti, Turks & Caicos, Virgin Islands, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, St Kitts & Nevis, St. Martin and the Dominican Republic, among others.
Articles can address (but not be limited to) any of the following issues:
· Historical and comparative dimensions of ‘hurricane’ responses and aftermaths · Intersecting productions of ‘crisis’, ‘natural’ and ‘disasters.’ · Neo-colonial power structures: La Junta vs elected government of Puerto Rico · Community vs state efforts in the emergency response and reconstruction · Dismantling public infrastructure: deliberate neglect, collapse and exploitation · International aid, developmentalist models and military interventions · Divergences and solidarities in pan-Caribbean recovery struggles · The uses and abuses of ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability.’ · Logics, practices and politics of disaster capitalism · Economic and socio-spatial dynamics of foreign capital incursions · Colonial instigations of racialised and gendered differences · Art-as activism · Deepening of poverty and intensification of inequalities · Media representations of disaster and crisis (including political leadership) · Discourses, practices and aesthetics of political ‘post-disaster’ leadership · Designing reconstruction: legal, social and material reconfigurations of land, property and homes
The call is open to contributions from different disciplinary approaches, from sociology, anthropology, and political geography to architecture, law, history, economics or political science. They are expected to be of a length between 1,500 and 3,500 words and should include two (or more) pictures of your choice, eligible for unlimited reproduction. Please send your contributions before 2 May 2018 to Gibran Cruz-Martinez at gcruz (at) ichem.cl, Melissa Fernández at M.FernandezA (at) lancaster.ac.uk, Janialy Ortiz at janialy (at) gmail.com, and Patria Román-Velazquez at P.Roman-Velazquez (at) lboro.ac.uk
Timeline
Deadline to submit papers: 2 May 2018 Peer review process: 2 May - 2 June 2018 Author revisions: 2 June - 30 June 2018 Publication: Second semester 2018
Alternautas, an academic peer-reviewed blog, is calling for contributions for a special issue on ... more Alternautas, an academic peer-reviewed blog, is calling for contributions for a special issue on 'Agribusiness, (Neo) Extractivism and Food Sovereignty: Latin America at a crossroads'.
In Latin America’s history, the agricultural sector has played a pivotal role. From the colonial global division of labour that assigned many Latin American colonies the role of agricultural producers, entrenching some of the most unequal patterns of land distribution in the world (Florescano 1997, Bulmer-Thomas 2003) to the current expansion of the Soybean republic in the Southern Cone of the region (Turzi 2011) and the constitutional or legal enshrinement of food sovereignty in Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009) (see McKay and Nehring 2014; Altieri and Toledo 2011), the role of the agricultural sector in the definition of the region’s developmental path - in collaboration or rejection of either the neoliberal industry or the postneoliberal state, respectively - cannot be underestimated.
In the past few decades, the tensions between large scale agricultural producers and international agribusiness holdings and those of the local communities, peasant and rural organisations have increased considerably, framed in what Svampa (2013) has termed the “eco-territorial turn” of social and peasant (including indigenous) struggles. More than ever, the agricultural fields of Latin America have become conceptual and direct battlefields, where ideological, economic, political and cultural interests clash (Wallerstein 1990). The expansion of the agroindustrial frontier fuelled by technological advances of genetically modified crops and large scale use of pesticides and fertilizers has accompanied the increasing focus on extractivism that has dominated the region’s recent economic and political path, further increasing the tensions around environmental issues and land use (Gudynas 2013, North and Grinspun 2016, Svampa and Viale 2014, Svampa 2015). It is the intricacy of these issues, across both topographic, semantic and political scales, which calls for pan-regional discussions aiming at unearthing the inherent and related mechanisms of such transformations. This special issue seeks therefore to explore the tensions, changes and conflicts arising from the expansion of agribusiness as the dominant model of accumulation and food production in the region.
Suggested (but not exclusive) axes of reflection that we expect to be discussed in the issue include:
- Modalities of practices and discourses of states on agricultural commodities and the export-oriented development model, - Effects of the agribusiness technological package in terms of environmental, social and health related impacts and organization of local resistances, - Conflicts arising from the advancement of the agribusiness frontier and the struggle for access to land, - Tensions between food security and food sovereignty as either national projects (Clark 2016) or cosmopolitan social movement platforms beyond the state (Arce et al. 2015).
The call is open to contributions from different disciplinary approaches, from sociology, anthropology, political geography, law, history, economics or political science. Contributions are expected to be of a length between 1,500 and 3,500 words and should include two pictures of your choice, eligible for unlimited reproduction.
Please send your contributions before April 21st, 2017 to Ana Estefania Carballo at ana.carballo (at) unimelb.edu.au, Johannes Waldmueller at johannes.waldmuller (at) graduateinstitute.ch or María Eugenia Giraudo at M.E.Giraudo (at) warwick.ac.uk.
Contributions that built up the 2014 blog series of Alternautas. This first issue serves as a lo... more Contributions that built up the 2014 blog series of Alternautas. This first issue serves as a logbook of the first year of our journey, recording in a journal the discussions and issues explored in our blog during 2014.
Seeds of Maya Development: The “Fiestas y Ferias de
Semillas” Movement in Yucatan - Genner Llanes... more Seeds of Maya Development: The “Fiestas y Ferias de Semillas” Movement in Yucatan - Genner Llanes Ortíz ‘Underdeveloped Economists’: The Study of Economic Development in Latin America in the 1950s – Stella Krepp "Vivir Bien": A Discourse and Its Risks for Public Policies. The Case of Child Labor and Exploitation in Indigenous Communities of Bolivia – Ruben Dario Chambi The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics. Intercultural Relations, Conflicts, Appropriations, Articulations and Transformations – Daniel Mato From the Political-Economic Drought to Collective and Sustainable Water Management - Gustavo García López Taking Matters into Their Own Hands: The MST and the Workers’ Party in Brazil – Bruce Gilbert Strategic Ethnicity, Nation, and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education – Martina Tonet Book Review: Climate change and colonialism in the Green Economy – Sebastian Kratzer
There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal "Great Transformation" of Polanyian scale is n... more There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal "Great Transformation" of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries. This article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of (un)sustainable development-Human Development, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir-and outlines pathways for their realization. Human Development presents relative transfor-mative strengths in political terms, while Degrowth holds keys to unlocking unsustainable material-structural entrenchments of contemporary socioeconomic arrangements, and Buen Vivir offers a space of cultural alterity and critique of the Euro-Atlantic cultural constellation. The weaknesses or blind spots ('Achilles heels') of each discourse can be compensated through the strengths of the other ones, creating a dialogical virtuous circle that would open pathways towards a global new "Great Transformation". As one of the main existing platforms for pluralist and strong-sustainability discussions, Ecological Economics is in a privileged position to deliberately foster such strategic discursive dialogue. A pathway towards such dialogue is illuminated through a model identifying and articulating key discursive docking points.
There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal " Great Transformation " of Polanyian scale is... more There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal " Great Transformation " of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries. This article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of (un)sustainable development – Human Development, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir – and outlines pathways for their realization. Human Development presents relative transfor-mative strengths in political terms, while Degrowth holds keys to unlocking unsustainable material-structural entrenchments of contemporary socioeconomic arrangements, and Buen Vivir offers a space of cultural alterity and critique of the Euro-Atlantic cultural constellation. The weaknesses or blind spots ('Achilles heels') of each discourse can be compensated through the strengths of the other ones, creating a dialogical virtuous circle that would open pathways towards a global new " Great Transformation ". As one of the main existing platforms for pluralist and strong-sustainability discussions, Ecological Economics is in a privileged position to deliberately foster such strategic discursive dialogue. A pathway towards such dialogue is illuminated through a model identifying and articulating key discursive docking points.
Angesichts des drohenden Staatsbankrotts Griechenlands richtet sich die mediale Aufmerksamkeit wi... more Angesichts des drohenden Staatsbankrotts Griechenlands richtet sich die mediale Aufmerksamkeit wieder verstärkt auf die argentinische Schuldenkrise, die um den Jahreswechsel 2001/02 in einer Periode massiver politischer Konflikte kulminierte.
Die Mitte-Links-Regierung, die in Argentinien aus den krisenbedingten Unruhen hervorging, versuchte der Überschuldung und den damit verbundenen sozialen Härten für die Bevölkerung durch eine Stärkung staatlicher Handlungs-
fähigkeit gegenüber internationalen GläubigerInnen und InvestorInnen entgegenzutreten: Sie wertete den bis dahin an den Dollar gekoppelten Peso ab, erklärte die Zahlungsunfähigkeit des Landes und regulierte im Rahmen einer wirtschaftlichen Notstandsgesetzgebung die Preise der privatisierten Versorgungsbetriebe. Der vorliegende Artikel analysiert die gegen Argentinien initiierten Verfahren als rechtliche Verhandlung eines grundlegenden Konfliktes zwischen demokratischer Selbstbestimmung bzw. regulativer Absicherung sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Grundbedürfnisse einerseits und der Besitz- und Gewinnansprüche internationaler WirtschaftsakteurInnen andererseits.
Alternautas, an academic peer-reviewed blog, is calling for contributions for a special issue on ... more Alternautas, an academic peer-reviewed blog, is calling for contributions for a special issue on ‘‘The Making of Caribbean Not-so-Natural Disasters’.
On Wednesday 20 September the lives of Puerto Ricans on the archipelago and abroad changed forever. Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico as a category four storm (sustained winds of 155mph), leaving the Island in a state of emergency. Essential services such as power, potable water and communication services collapsed (Duany, 2017). The first response from the Puerto Rico and United States federal government was insufficient and slow (Sosa Pascual & Mazzei, 2017). Flooding did not discriminate between marginalised and affluent neighbourhoods. However, like the damage caused by Katrina in New Orleans (Werner 2017; Brand 2018), the island’s natural disaster uncovered the soaring levels of inequality, unequal status and commodification of disaster-related recovery for Puerto Rican residents. To varying degrees, this ‘Not-So-Natural Disaster’ (Lloréns et al. 2018; Seda-Irizarry and Martínez-Otero 2017) has also affected ravished Caribbean neighbours like Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and Dominica - with their own variable ‘sovereign’ political arrangements and spatial and socio-economic frontiers of unequal development.
The government of Puerto Rico recently stated that “the devastation caused by Hurricanes Irma and Maria creates an opportunity to redesign” the role of the government and the market (AAFAF, 2018:11). The Caribbean government is following Prince’s (1920) centenary idea of portraying a disaster as a chance of permanent social change. Jones (2009: 318) argues that major disasters “have rarely sparked significant social changes, other than to solidify the power base of elites and further immiserate the poor”. This reproduction of inequality can be seen in the wake of hurricane Maria, through the attack on an already weakened and financially beleaguered public infrastructure, including its public energy and education system-- a tactic Naomi Klein has critically framed as disaster capitalism and ‘the shock doctrine’ (2007) in cases like post-Katrina New Orleans and post-tsunami Sri Lanka. Referred to also as a ‘doctrine of trauma’ (Bonilla 2015), a unique exploitation of distress appears to underway in the island; where long-standing crises-- political, economic and environmental-- are being used to justify further acts of negligence and austerity. Given that the future Puerto Rico envisioned in the revised fiscal plan proposes further austerity measures, privatisations, stagnation, liberalisation and flexibilization of the labour market (AAFAF, 2018), we must ask ourselves, what type of significant social change would these post-disaster policies bring to residents?
Beyond Puerto Rico, what kind of alternative Caribbean futures are being imagined and enacted in the wake of the 2017 hurricane season, and how are these entangled with a sense of greater infrastructural, relief or racial justice-- both local and regional? This special issue seeks to address the disaster conditions, responses and consequences not only in Puerto Rico but also in impacted neighbouring islands like Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Haïti, Turks & Caicos, Virgin Islands, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, St Kitts & Nevis, St. Martin and the Dominican Republic, among others.
Articles can address (but not be limited to) any of the following issues:
· Historical and comparative dimensions of ‘hurricane’ responses and aftermaths · Intersecting productions of ‘crisis’, ‘natural’ and ‘disasters.’ · Neo-colonial power structures: La Junta vs elected government of Puerto Rico · Community vs state efforts in the emergency response and reconstruction · Dismantling public infrastructure: deliberate neglect, collapse and exploitation · International aid, developmentalist models and military interventions · Divergences and solidarities in pan-Caribbean recovery struggles · The uses and abuses of ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability.’ · Logics, practices and politics of disaster capitalism · Economic and socio-spatial dynamics of foreign capital incursions · Colonial instigations of racialised and gendered differences · Art-as activism · Deepening of poverty and intensification of inequalities · Media representations of disaster and crisis (including political leadership) · Discourses, practices and aesthetics of political ‘post-disaster’ leadership · Designing reconstruction: legal, social and material reconfigurations of land, property and homes
The call is open to contributions from different disciplinary approaches, from sociology, anthropology, and political geography to architecture, law, history, economics or political science. They are expected to be of a length between 1,500 and 3,500 words and should include two (or more) pictures of your choice, eligible for unlimited reproduction. Please send your contributions before 2 May 2018 to Gibran Cruz-Martinez at gcruz (at) ichem.cl, Melissa Fernández at M.FernandezA (at) lancaster.ac.uk, Janialy Ortiz at janialy (at) gmail.com, and Patria Román-Velazquez at P.Roman-Velazquez (at) lboro.ac.uk
Timeline
Deadline to submit papers: 2 May 2018 Peer review process: 2 May - 2 June 2018 Author revisions: 2 June - 30 June 2018 Publication: Second semester 2018
Alternautas, an academic peer-reviewed blog, is calling for contributions for a special issue on ... more Alternautas, an academic peer-reviewed blog, is calling for contributions for a special issue on 'Agribusiness, (Neo) Extractivism and Food Sovereignty: Latin America at a crossroads'.
In Latin America’s history, the agricultural sector has played a pivotal role. From the colonial global division of labour that assigned many Latin American colonies the role of agricultural producers, entrenching some of the most unequal patterns of land distribution in the world (Florescano 1997, Bulmer-Thomas 2003) to the current expansion of the Soybean republic in the Southern Cone of the region (Turzi 2011) and the constitutional or legal enshrinement of food sovereignty in Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009) (see McKay and Nehring 2014; Altieri and Toledo 2011), the role of the agricultural sector in the definition of the region’s developmental path - in collaboration or rejection of either the neoliberal industry or the postneoliberal state, respectively - cannot be underestimated.
In the past few decades, the tensions between large scale agricultural producers and international agribusiness holdings and those of the local communities, peasant and rural organisations have increased considerably, framed in what Svampa (2013) has termed the “eco-territorial turn” of social and peasant (including indigenous) struggles. More than ever, the agricultural fields of Latin America have become conceptual and direct battlefields, where ideological, economic, political and cultural interests clash (Wallerstein 1990). The expansion of the agroindustrial frontier fuelled by technological advances of genetically modified crops and large scale use of pesticides and fertilizers has accompanied the increasing focus on extractivism that has dominated the region’s recent economic and political path, further increasing the tensions around environmental issues and land use (Gudynas 2013, North and Grinspun 2016, Svampa and Viale 2014, Svampa 2015). It is the intricacy of these issues, across both topographic, semantic and political scales, which calls for pan-regional discussions aiming at unearthing the inherent and related mechanisms of such transformations. This special issue seeks therefore to explore the tensions, changes and conflicts arising from the expansion of agribusiness as the dominant model of accumulation and food production in the region.
Suggested (but not exclusive) axes of reflection that we expect to be discussed in the issue include:
- Modalities of practices and discourses of states on agricultural commodities and the export-oriented development model, - Effects of the agribusiness technological package in terms of environmental, social and health related impacts and organization of local resistances, - Conflicts arising from the advancement of the agribusiness frontier and the struggle for access to land, - Tensions between food security and food sovereignty as either national projects (Clark 2016) or cosmopolitan social movement platforms beyond the state (Arce et al. 2015).
The call is open to contributions from different disciplinary approaches, from sociology, anthropology, political geography, law, history, economics or political science. Contributions are expected to be of a length between 1,500 and 3,500 words and should include two pictures of your choice, eligible for unlimited reproduction.
Please send your contributions before April 21st, 2017 to Ana Estefania Carballo at ana.carballo (at) unimelb.edu.au, Johannes Waldmueller at johannes.waldmuller (at) graduateinstitute.ch or María Eugenia Giraudo at M.E.Giraudo (at) warwick.ac.uk.
Contributions that built up the 2014 blog series of Alternautas. This first issue serves as a lo... more Contributions that built up the 2014 blog series of Alternautas. This first issue serves as a logbook of the first year of our journey, recording in a journal the discussions and issues explored in our blog during 2014.
Seeds of Maya Development: The “Fiestas y Ferias de
Semillas” Movement in Yucatan - Genner Llanes... more Seeds of Maya Development: The “Fiestas y Ferias de Semillas” Movement in Yucatan - Genner Llanes Ortíz ‘Underdeveloped Economists’: The Study of Economic Development in Latin America in the 1950s – Stella Krepp "Vivir Bien": A Discourse and Its Risks for Public Policies. The Case of Child Labor and Exploitation in Indigenous Communities of Bolivia – Ruben Dario Chambi The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics. Intercultural Relations, Conflicts, Appropriations, Articulations and Transformations – Daniel Mato From the Political-Economic Drought to Collective and Sustainable Water Management - Gustavo García López Taking Matters into Their Own Hands: The MST and the Workers’ Party in Brazil – Bruce Gilbert Strategic Ethnicity, Nation, and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education – Martina Tonet Book Review: Climate change and colonialism in the Green Economy – Sebastian Kratzer
There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal "Great Transformation" of Polanyian scale is n... more There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal "Great Transformation" of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries. This article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of (un)sustainable development-Human Development, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir-and outlines pathways for their realization. Human Development presents relative transfor-mative strengths in political terms, while Degrowth holds keys to unlocking unsustainable material-structural entrenchments of contemporary socioeconomic arrangements, and Buen Vivir offers a space of cultural alterity and critique of the Euro-Atlantic cultural constellation. The weaknesses or blind spots ('Achilles heels') of each discourse can be compensated through the strengths of the other ones, creating a dialogical virtuous circle that would open pathways towards a global new "Great Transformation". As one of the main existing platforms for pluralist and strong-sustainability discussions, Ecological Economics is in a privileged position to deliberately foster such strategic discursive dialogue. A pathway towards such dialogue is illuminated through a model identifying and articulating key discursive docking points.
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Die Mitte-Links-Regierung, die in Argentinien aus den krisenbedingten Unruhen hervorging, versuchte der Überschuldung und den damit verbundenen sozialen Härten für die Bevölkerung durch eine Stärkung staatlicher Handlungs-
fähigkeit gegenüber internationalen GläubigerInnen und InvestorInnen entgegenzutreten: Sie wertete den bis dahin an den Dollar gekoppelten Peso ab, erklärte die Zahlungsunfähigkeit des Landes und regulierte im Rahmen einer wirtschaftlichen Notstandsgesetzgebung die Preise der privatisierten Versorgungsbetriebe. Der vorliegende Artikel analysiert die gegen Argentinien initiierten Verfahren als rechtliche Verhandlung eines grundlegenden Konfliktes zwischen demokratischer Selbstbestimmung bzw. regulativer Absicherung sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Grundbedürfnisse einerseits und der Besitz- und Gewinnansprüche internationaler WirtschaftsakteurInnen andererseits.
On Wednesday 20 September the lives of Puerto Ricans on the archipelago and abroad changed forever. Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico as a category four storm (sustained winds of 155mph), leaving the Island in a state of emergency. Essential services such as power, potable water and communication services collapsed (Duany, 2017). The first response from the Puerto Rico and United States federal government was insufficient and slow (Sosa Pascual & Mazzei, 2017). Flooding did not discriminate between marginalised and affluent neighbourhoods. However, like the damage caused by Katrina in New Orleans (Werner 2017; Brand 2018), the island’s natural disaster uncovered the soaring levels of inequality, unequal status and commodification of disaster-related recovery for Puerto Rican residents. To varying degrees, this ‘Not-So-Natural Disaster’ (Lloréns et al. 2018; Seda-Irizarry and Martínez-Otero 2017) has also affected ravished Caribbean neighbours like Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and Dominica - with their own variable ‘sovereign’ political arrangements and spatial and socio-economic frontiers of unequal development.
The government of Puerto Rico recently stated that “the devastation caused by Hurricanes Irma and Maria creates an opportunity to redesign” the role of the government and the market (AAFAF, 2018:11). The Caribbean government is following Prince’s (1920) centenary idea of portraying a disaster as a chance of permanent social change. Jones (2009: 318) argues that major disasters “have rarely sparked significant social changes, other than to solidify the power base of elites and further immiserate the poor”. This reproduction of inequality can be seen in the wake of hurricane Maria, through the attack on an already weakened and financially beleaguered public infrastructure, including its public energy and education system-- a tactic Naomi Klein has critically framed as disaster capitalism and ‘the shock doctrine’ (2007) in cases like post-Katrina New Orleans and post-tsunami Sri Lanka. Referred to also as a ‘doctrine of trauma’ (Bonilla 2015), a unique exploitation of distress appears to underway in the island; where long-standing crises-- political, economic and environmental-- are being used to justify further acts of negligence and austerity. Given that the future Puerto Rico envisioned in the revised fiscal plan proposes further austerity measures, privatisations, stagnation, liberalisation and flexibilization of the labour market (AAFAF, 2018), we must ask ourselves, what type of significant social change would these post-disaster policies bring to residents?
Beyond Puerto Rico, what kind of alternative Caribbean futures are being imagined and enacted in the wake of the 2017 hurricane season, and how are these entangled with a sense of greater infrastructural, relief or racial justice-- both local and regional? This special issue seeks to address the disaster conditions, responses and consequences not only in Puerto Rico but also in impacted neighbouring islands like Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Haïti, Turks & Caicos, Virgin Islands, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, St Kitts & Nevis, St. Martin and the Dominican Republic, among others.
Articles can address (but not be limited to) any of the following issues:
· Historical and comparative dimensions of ‘hurricane’ responses and aftermaths
· Intersecting productions of ‘crisis’, ‘natural’ and ‘disasters.’
· Neo-colonial power structures: La Junta vs elected government of Puerto Rico
· Community vs state efforts in the emergency response and reconstruction
· Dismantling public infrastructure: deliberate neglect, collapse and exploitation
· International aid, developmentalist models and military interventions
· Divergences and solidarities in pan-Caribbean recovery struggles
· The uses and abuses of ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability.’
· Logics, practices and politics of disaster capitalism
· Economic and socio-spatial dynamics of foreign capital incursions
· Colonial instigations of racialised and gendered differences
· Art-as activism
· Deepening of poverty and intensification of inequalities
· Media representations of disaster and crisis (including political leadership)
· Discourses, practices and aesthetics of political ‘post-disaster’ leadership
· Designing reconstruction: legal, social and material reconfigurations of land, property and homes
The call is open to contributions from different disciplinary approaches, from sociology, anthropology, and political geography to architecture, law, history, economics or political science. They are expected to be of a length between 1,500 and 3,500 words and should include two (or more) pictures of your choice, eligible for unlimited reproduction. Please send your contributions before 2 May 2018 to Gibran Cruz-Martinez at gcruz (at) ichem.cl, Melissa Fernández at M.FernandezA (at) lancaster.ac.uk, Janialy Ortiz at janialy (at) gmail.com, and Patria Román-Velazquez at P.Roman-Velazquez (at) lboro.ac.uk
Timeline
Deadline to submit papers: 2 May 2018
Peer review process: 2 May - 2 June 2018
Author revisions: 2 June - 30 June 2018
Publication: Second semester 2018
In Latin America’s history, the agricultural sector has played a pivotal role. From the colonial global division of labour that assigned many Latin American colonies the role of agricultural producers, entrenching some of the most unequal patterns of land distribution in the world (Florescano 1997, Bulmer-Thomas 2003) to the current expansion of the Soybean republic in the Southern Cone of the region (Turzi 2011) and the constitutional or legal enshrinement of food sovereignty in Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009) (see McKay and Nehring 2014; Altieri and Toledo 2011), the role of the agricultural sector in the definition of the region’s developmental path - in collaboration or rejection of either the neoliberal industry or the postneoliberal state, respectively - cannot be underestimated.
In the past few decades, the tensions between large scale agricultural producers and international agribusiness holdings and those of the local communities, peasant and rural organisations have increased considerably, framed in what Svampa (2013) has termed the “eco-territorial turn” of social and peasant (including indigenous) struggles. More than ever, the agricultural fields of Latin America have become conceptual and direct battlefields, where ideological, economic, political and cultural interests clash (Wallerstein 1990). The expansion of the agroindustrial frontier fuelled by technological advances of genetically modified crops and large scale use of pesticides and fertilizers has accompanied the increasing focus on extractivism that has dominated the region’s recent economic and political path, further increasing the tensions around environmental issues and land use (Gudynas 2013, North and Grinspun 2016, Svampa and Viale 2014, Svampa 2015). It is the intricacy of these issues, across both topographic, semantic and political scales, which calls for pan-regional discussions aiming at unearthing the inherent and related mechanisms of such transformations. This special issue seeks therefore to explore the tensions, changes and conflicts arising from the expansion of agribusiness as the dominant model of accumulation and food production in the region.
Suggested (but not exclusive) axes of reflection that we expect to be discussed in the issue include:
- Modalities of practices and discourses of states on agricultural commodities and the export-oriented development model,
- Effects of the agribusiness technological package in terms of environmental, social and health related impacts and organization of local resistances,
- Conflicts arising from the advancement of the agribusiness frontier and the struggle for access to land,
- Tensions between food security and food sovereignty as either national projects (Clark 2016) or cosmopolitan social movement platforms beyond the state (Arce et al. 2015).
The call is open to contributions from different disciplinary approaches, from sociology, anthropology, political geography, law, history, economics or political science. Contributions are expected to be of a length between 1,500 and 3,500 words and should include two pictures of your choice, eligible for unlimited reproduction.
Please send your contributions before April 21st, 2017 to Ana Estefania Carballo at ana.carballo (at) unimelb.edu.au, Johannes Waldmueller at johannes.waldmuller (at) graduateinstitute.ch or María Eugenia Giraudo at M.E.Giraudo (at) warwick.ac.uk.
Semillas” Movement in Yucatan - Genner Llanes Ortíz
‘Underdeveloped Economists’: The Study of Economic
Development in Latin America in the 1950s – Stella Krepp
"Vivir Bien": A Discourse and Its Risks for Public Policies. The
Case of Child Labor and Exploitation in Indigenous
Communities of Bolivia – Ruben Dario Chambi
The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics.
Intercultural Relations, Conflicts, Appropriations,
Articulations and Transformations – Daniel Mato
From the Political-Economic Drought to Collective and
Sustainable Water Management - Gustavo García López
Taking Matters into Their Own Hands: The MST and the
Workers’ Party in Brazil – Bruce Gilbert
Strategic Ethnicity, Nation, and (Neo)colonialism in Latin
America – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the
Establishment of Intercultural Education – Martina Tonet
Book Review: Climate change and colonialism in the Green
Economy – Sebastian Kratzer
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800917303798
PDF: https://sci-hub.cc/http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0921800917303798
Die Mitte-Links-Regierung, die in Argentinien aus den krisenbedingten Unruhen hervorging, versuchte der Überschuldung und den damit verbundenen sozialen Härten für die Bevölkerung durch eine Stärkung staatlicher Handlungs-
fähigkeit gegenüber internationalen GläubigerInnen und InvestorInnen entgegenzutreten: Sie wertete den bis dahin an den Dollar gekoppelten Peso ab, erklärte die Zahlungsunfähigkeit des Landes und regulierte im Rahmen einer wirtschaftlichen Notstandsgesetzgebung die Preise der privatisierten Versorgungsbetriebe. Der vorliegende Artikel analysiert die gegen Argentinien initiierten Verfahren als rechtliche Verhandlung eines grundlegenden Konfliktes zwischen demokratischer Selbstbestimmung bzw. regulativer Absicherung sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Grundbedürfnisse einerseits und der Besitz- und Gewinnansprüche internationaler WirtschaftsakteurInnen andererseits.
On Wednesday 20 September the lives of Puerto Ricans on the archipelago and abroad changed forever. Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico as a category four storm (sustained winds of 155mph), leaving the Island in a state of emergency. Essential services such as power, potable water and communication services collapsed (Duany, 2017). The first response from the Puerto Rico and United States federal government was insufficient and slow (Sosa Pascual & Mazzei, 2017). Flooding did not discriminate between marginalised and affluent neighbourhoods. However, like the damage caused by Katrina in New Orleans (Werner 2017; Brand 2018), the island’s natural disaster uncovered the soaring levels of inequality, unequal status and commodification of disaster-related recovery for Puerto Rican residents. To varying degrees, this ‘Not-So-Natural Disaster’ (Lloréns et al. 2018; Seda-Irizarry and Martínez-Otero 2017) has also affected ravished Caribbean neighbours like Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and Dominica - with their own variable ‘sovereign’ political arrangements and spatial and socio-economic frontiers of unequal development.
The government of Puerto Rico recently stated that “the devastation caused by Hurricanes Irma and Maria creates an opportunity to redesign” the role of the government and the market (AAFAF, 2018:11). The Caribbean government is following Prince’s (1920) centenary idea of portraying a disaster as a chance of permanent social change. Jones (2009: 318) argues that major disasters “have rarely sparked significant social changes, other than to solidify the power base of elites and further immiserate the poor”. This reproduction of inequality can be seen in the wake of hurricane Maria, through the attack on an already weakened and financially beleaguered public infrastructure, including its public energy and education system-- a tactic Naomi Klein has critically framed as disaster capitalism and ‘the shock doctrine’ (2007) in cases like post-Katrina New Orleans and post-tsunami Sri Lanka. Referred to also as a ‘doctrine of trauma’ (Bonilla 2015), a unique exploitation of distress appears to underway in the island; where long-standing crises-- political, economic and environmental-- are being used to justify further acts of negligence and austerity. Given that the future Puerto Rico envisioned in the revised fiscal plan proposes further austerity measures, privatisations, stagnation, liberalisation and flexibilization of the labour market (AAFAF, 2018), we must ask ourselves, what type of significant social change would these post-disaster policies bring to residents?
Beyond Puerto Rico, what kind of alternative Caribbean futures are being imagined and enacted in the wake of the 2017 hurricane season, and how are these entangled with a sense of greater infrastructural, relief or racial justice-- both local and regional? This special issue seeks to address the disaster conditions, responses and consequences not only in Puerto Rico but also in impacted neighbouring islands like Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Haïti, Turks & Caicos, Virgin Islands, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, St Kitts & Nevis, St. Martin and the Dominican Republic, among others.
Articles can address (but not be limited to) any of the following issues:
· Historical and comparative dimensions of ‘hurricane’ responses and aftermaths
· Intersecting productions of ‘crisis’, ‘natural’ and ‘disasters.’
· Neo-colonial power structures: La Junta vs elected government of Puerto Rico
· Community vs state efforts in the emergency response and reconstruction
· Dismantling public infrastructure: deliberate neglect, collapse and exploitation
· International aid, developmentalist models and military interventions
· Divergences and solidarities in pan-Caribbean recovery struggles
· The uses and abuses of ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability.’
· Logics, practices and politics of disaster capitalism
· Economic and socio-spatial dynamics of foreign capital incursions
· Colonial instigations of racialised and gendered differences
· Art-as activism
· Deepening of poverty and intensification of inequalities
· Media representations of disaster and crisis (including political leadership)
· Discourses, practices and aesthetics of political ‘post-disaster’ leadership
· Designing reconstruction: legal, social and material reconfigurations of land, property and homes
The call is open to contributions from different disciplinary approaches, from sociology, anthropology, and political geography to architecture, law, history, economics or political science. They are expected to be of a length between 1,500 and 3,500 words and should include two (or more) pictures of your choice, eligible for unlimited reproduction. Please send your contributions before 2 May 2018 to Gibran Cruz-Martinez at gcruz (at) ichem.cl, Melissa Fernández at M.FernandezA (at) lancaster.ac.uk, Janialy Ortiz at janialy (at) gmail.com, and Patria Román-Velazquez at P.Roman-Velazquez (at) lboro.ac.uk
Timeline
Deadline to submit papers: 2 May 2018
Peer review process: 2 May - 2 June 2018
Author revisions: 2 June - 30 June 2018
Publication: Second semester 2018
In Latin America’s history, the agricultural sector has played a pivotal role. From the colonial global division of labour that assigned many Latin American colonies the role of agricultural producers, entrenching some of the most unequal patterns of land distribution in the world (Florescano 1997, Bulmer-Thomas 2003) to the current expansion of the Soybean republic in the Southern Cone of the region (Turzi 2011) and the constitutional or legal enshrinement of food sovereignty in Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009) (see McKay and Nehring 2014; Altieri and Toledo 2011), the role of the agricultural sector in the definition of the region’s developmental path - in collaboration or rejection of either the neoliberal industry or the postneoliberal state, respectively - cannot be underestimated.
In the past few decades, the tensions between large scale agricultural producers and international agribusiness holdings and those of the local communities, peasant and rural organisations have increased considerably, framed in what Svampa (2013) has termed the “eco-territorial turn” of social and peasant (including indigenous) struggles. More than ever, the agricultural fields of Latin America have become conceptual and direct battlefields, where ideological, economic, political and cultural interests clash (Wallerstein 1990). The expansion of the agroindustrial frontier fuelled by technological advances of genetically modified crops and large scale use of pesticides and fertilizers has accompanied the increasing focus on extractivism that has dominated the region’s recent economic and political path, further increasing the tensions around environmental issues and land use (Gudynas 2013, North and Grinspun 2016, Svampa and Viale 2014, Svampa 2015). It is the intricacy of these issues, across both topographic, semantic and political scales, which calls for pan-regional discussions aiming at unearthing the inherent and related mechanisms of such transformations. This special issue seeks therefore to explore the tensions, changes and conflicts arising from the expansion of agribusiness as the dominant model of accumulation and food production in the region.
Suggested (but not exclusive) axes of reflection that we expect to be discussed in the issue include:
- Modalities of practices and discourses of states on agricultural commodities and the export-oriented development model,
- Effects of the agribusiness technological package in terms of environmental, social and health related impacts and organization of local resistances,
- Conflicts arising from the advancement of the agribusiness frontier and the struggle for access to land,
- Tensions between food security and food sovereignty as either national projects (Clark 2016) or cosmopolitan social movement platforms beyond the state (Arce et al. 2015).
The call is open to contributions from different disciplinary approaches, from sociology, anthropology, political geography, law, history, economics or political science. Contributions are expected to be of a length between 1,500 and 3,500 words and should include two pictures of your choice, eligible for unlimited reproduction.
Please send your contributions before April 21st, 2017 to Ana Estefania Carballo at ana.carballo (at) unimelb.edu.au, Johannes Waldmueller at johannes.waldmuller (at) graduateinstitute.ch or María Eugenia Giraudo at M.E.Giraudo (at) warwick.ac.uk.
Semillas” Movement in Yucatan - Genner Llanes Ortíz
‘Underdeveloped Economists’: The Study of Economic
Development in Latin America in the 1950s – Stella Krepp
"Vivir Bien": A Discourse and Its Risks for Public Policies. The
Case of Child Labor and Exploitation in Indigenous
Communities of Bolivia – Ruben Dario Chambi
The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics.
Intercultural Relations, Conflicts, Appropriations,
Articulations and Transformations – Daniel Mato
From the Political-Economic Drought to Collective and
Sustainable Water Management - Gustavo García López
Taking Matters into Their Own Hands: The MST and the
Workers’ Party in Brazil – Bruce Gilbert
Strategic Ethnicity, Nation, and (Neo)colonialism in Latin
America – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the
Establishment of Intercultural Education – Martina Tonet
Book Review: Climate change and colonialism in the Green
Economy – Sebastian Kratzer