Resource Management and Geography - Research Publications

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    Socially just publishing: Implications for geographers and their journals
    Batterbury, S (Geographical Society of Finland, 2017-12-15)
    There have been a range of protests against the high journal subscription costs, and author processing charges (APCs) levied for publishing in the more prestigious and commercially run journals that are favoured by geographers. But open protests across the sector like the ‘Academic Spring’ of 2012, and challenges to commercial copyright agreements, have been fragmented and less than successful. I renew the argument for ‘socially just’ publishing in geography. For geographers this is not limited to choosing alternative publication venues. It also involves a considerable effort by senior faculty members that are assessing hiring and promotion cases, to read and assess scholarship independently of its place of publication, and to reward the efforts of colleagues that offer their work as a public good. Criteria other than the citation index and prestige of a journal need to be foregrounded. Geographers can also be publishers, and I offer my experience editing the free online Journal of Political Ecology.
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    Fluid geographies: Marine territorialisation and the scaling up of local aquatic epistemologies on the Pacific coast of Colombia
    Satizabal, P ; Batterbury, SPJ (WILEY, 2018-03)
    The Pacific region of Colombia, like many sparsely populated places in developing countries, has been imagined as empty in social terms, and yet full in terms of natural resources and biodiversity. These imaginaries have enabled the creation of frontiers of land and sea control, where the state as well as private and illegal actors have historically dispossessed Afro‐descendant and indigenous peoples. This paper contributes to the understanding of territorialisation in the oceans, where political and legal framings of the sea as an open‐access public good have neglected the existence of marine social processes. It shows how Afro‐descendant communities and non‐state actors are required to use the language of resources, rather than socio‐cultural attachment, to negotiate state marine territorialisation processes. Drawing on a case study on the Pacific coast of Colombia, we demonstrate that Afro‐descendant communities hold local aquatic epistemologies, in which knowledge and the production of space are entangled in fluid and volumetric spatio‐temporal dynamics. However, despite the social importance of aquatic environments, they were excluded from Afro‐descendants' collective territorial rights in the 1990s. Driven by their local aquatic epistemologies, coastal communities are reclaiming authority over the seascape through the creation of a marine protected area. We argue that they have transformed relations of authority at sea to ensure local access and control, using state institutional instruments to subvert and challenge the legal framing of the sea as an open access public good. As such, this marine protected area represents a place of resistance that ironically subjects coastal communities to disciplinary technologies of conservation.
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    Australia: reclaiming the public university?
    BATTERBURY, S ; Byrne, JA (Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 2017)
    In a provocative article published in 'Minerva' in 2015, Halffman and Radder discuss the Kafkaesque worlds that academics in the Netherlands now find themselves in, as an underfunded university sector predates upon itself and its workforce (2015, p. 165-166). Their Academic Manifesto observes that Dutch tertiary institutions have become obsessively focused on ‘accountability’ and pursue neoliberal-style imperatives [forced upon them] of ‘efficiency and excellence’. They paint a portrait of academics under siege, untrusted, and constantly micro-managed. The pursuit of so-called efficiency has involved accountability systems that are themselves wasteful, driving seemingly endless institutional restructuring. Moreover, institutions have become obsessed with star-performers in research, driven by competitive targets that undergird global rankings. Metrics – publication outputs, journal quality, citations, impact and grant revenue – produce a culture of competition and sometimes, mercenary behaviours, on the part of academics and managers. While there may be beacons of light, they are heavily shielded in the article, which makes for depressing reading. Their provocation prompts two questions, to which we will try to respond through our own experiences and review of Australia's adoption of,and resistance to, higher education reform: 1.How does Australia compare? 2.What can Australian universities and their staff do?
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    Land Grabbing and the Axis of Political Conflicts: Insights from Southwest Cameroon
    Ndi, F ; BATTERBURY, S (German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), 2017)
    Large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) by foreign interests is a major driver of agrarian change in the productive regions of Africa. Rural communities across Southwest Cameroon are experiencing a range of political conflicts resulting from LSLA, in which commercial interests are threatening local land-use practices and access to land. This paper shows that the struggle to maintain or redefine livelihoods generates tension between inward competition for and outward contestation of claims to land. In Nguti Subdivision, the scene of protests against a particular agribusiness company, there is continued debate over ideas about, interests in, and perceptions of land and tenure. The authors show how top-down land acquisition marginalises land users, leading to conflicts within communities and with the companies involved, and conclude that for an agro-project to succeed and avoid major conflicts, dominance by elite interests must give way to a more inclusive process.
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    Who are the radical academics today?
    BATTERBURY, S (The Winnower, 2016-02-02)
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    Journal of Political Ecology
    BATTERBURY, S (Fundació ENT, 2016-02-01)
    Desde su nacimiento en 1994, la revista Journal of Political Ecology ha realizado publicaciones en inglés y, ocasionalmente, en español y francés. Sus creadores, los antropólogos Jim Greenberg y Tad Park, fundaron la revista a principios de los años 1990, justo después de que las conexiones a internet comenzaran a aparecer en las universidades americanas. Ellos creían que la ecología política debía fusionar la economía política y manifestaban su “insistencia en la necesidad de unir la distribución del poder con las actividades productivas” con “el análisis ecológico, ya que éste posee una perspectiva más amplia de las relaciones bioambientales” (Greenberg y Park, 1994: 1). Los fundadores también apoyaron la idea de que “la ecología política […] no debe basarse en premisas abstractas o dogmas, sino en las actividades productivas de individuos reales” (ibid.). La obra marxista del antropólogo Eric Wolf tuvo una gran influencia en este enfoque (Wolf, 1982).
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    Land access and livelihoods in post-conflict Timor-Leste: no magic bullets
    Batterbury, S ; Palmer, L ; Reuter, T ; do Amaral de Carvalho, D ; Kehi, B ; Cullen, A (Igitur, Utrecht Publishing and Archiving Services, 2015)
    In Timor-Leste, customary institutions contribute to sustainable and equitable rural development and the establishment of improved access to and management of land, water and other natural resources. Drawing on multi-sited empirical research, we argue that the recognition and valorization of custom and common property management is a prerequisite for sustainable and equitable land tenure reform in Timor-Leste. In a four-community study of the relationship between land access and the practice of rural livelihoods in eastern and western districts of Timor-Leste, where customary management systems are dominant, we found different types of traditional dispute resolution, with deep roots in traditional forms of land management and with varying levels of conflict. The article shows how customary land tenure systems have already managed to create viable moral economies. Interviewees expressed a desire for the government to formalize its recognition and support for customary systems and to provide them with basic livelihood support and services. This was more important than instituting private landholding or state appropriation of community lands, which is perceived to be the focus of national draft land laws and an internationally supported project. We suggest ways in which diverse customary institutions can co-exist and work with state institutions to build collective political legitimacy in the rural hinterlands, within the context of upgrading the quality of rural life, promoting social and ecological harmony, and conflict management.
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    Contested sites, land claims and economic development in Poum, New Caledonia
    Kowasch, M ; BATTERBURY, S ; Neumann, M (Taylor & Francis, 2015)
    Property relations are often ambiguous in postcolonial settings. Property is only considered as such if socially legitimate institutions sanction it. In indigenous communities, access to natural resources is frequently subject to conflict and negotiation in a ‘social arena’. Settler arrivals and new economic possibilities challenge these norms and extend the arena. The article analyses conflicts and negotiations in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia in the light of its unique settler history and economic activity, focussing on the little-studied remote northern district of Poum on the Caledonian main island Grande Terre. In this region, the descendants of British fishermen intermarried with the majority Kanak clans. We illustrate the interaction between customary conflicts, European settlement, struggles for independence and a desire for economic development. Customary claims are in tension with the attractions of economic growth and service delivery, which has been slow in coming to Poum for reasons largely outside the control of local people.
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    “We Live From Mother Nature”: Neoliberal Globalization, Commodification, the “War on Drugs,” and Biodiversity in Colombia Since the 1990s
    Chaves-Agudelo, JM ; BATTERBURY, S ; Beilin, Ruth, (SAGE Publications, 2015-08-05)
    This article explores how macroeconomic and environmental policies instituted since the 1990s have altered meanings, imaginaries, and the human relationship to nature in Colombia. The Colombian nation-state is pluri-ethnic, multilingual, and megabiodiverse. In this context, indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians, and some peasant communities survive hybridization of their cultures. They have developed their own ways of seeing, understanding, and empowering the world over centuries of European rule. However, threats to relatively discrete cultural meanings have increased since major changes in the 1990s, when Colombia experienced the emergence of new and modern interpretations of nature, such as “biodiversity,” and a deepening of globalized neoliberal economic and political management. These policies involve a modern logic of being in the world, the establishment of particular regulatory functions for economies, societies, and the environment, and their spread has been facilitated by webs of political and economic power. We trace their local effects with reference to three indigenous groups.
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