Scholars rethink the translation of environmental concepts between East and West, particularly ideas of nature and culture; what conservation might mean; and how conservation policy is applied and transformed in the everyday landscapes of Southeast Asia.
Managing the commons—natural resources held in common by particular communities—is a complex challenge. How have Asian societies handled resources of this sort in the face of increasing marketization and quickly growing demand for resources? And how have resource management regimes changed over time, with state formation, modernization, development, and globalization? Community, Commons and Natural Resource Management in Asia brings clarity, detail, and historical understanding to these questions across a variety of Asian societies and ecological settings. Case studies drawn from Japan, Korea, Thailand, India, and Bhutan examine fisheries, forests, and other environmental resources held in common. There is a tendency to imagine that traditional communities had socially equitable and environmentally friendly systems for managing the commons, but natural resources in Asia were often under free-access regimes. Resource management developed in response to social and economic pressures, and the state has been at various times both a beneficial and a negative influence on the development of community-level systems of managing the commons. The chapters in this volume show that a simple modernist framework cannot adequately capture this process, and the institutional changes it involved.
Revolutionizing the lives and renewing the minds of believers and local churches from North America to Africa, the Kingdom Lifestyle Bible Studies help people grow in their relationships with the King and his kingdom. Each tested, insightful study is designed for group or individual use and equips believers to engage in a vibrant life with Christ and offer healing to a broken world.
The 1955 Bandung Conference was an Asia-Africa forum, organized by Indonesia, Burma, India, the then Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Pakistan. Representatives of 29 independent Asian and African countries met in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss matters ranging from national unity, cooperation, decolonization, peace, economic development and their role to play in international policy. The ten points’ declaration of the conference, the so-called ‘Spirit of Bandung’, included the principles of nationhood for the future of the newly independent nations and their interrelations. After the conference most ‘non-aligned’ Asian and African countries opted for philosophies of national unity to guarantee peace and stability. Much is required of a philosophy of national unity. It should connect and inspire citizens via shared ideals, provide a basis for equal citizenship, construct a national history and national identity, being the foundation for laws and institutions etc.. Nowadays, changed international relations have created a diversity of views on secular or religious philosophies of national unity. This development has only made the question of the role of religion in this post-secular era more pressing. In the context of the resurgence of religions, the Bandung conference marks the increasing relevance of the choice at the time for a secular or religious approach. In the African case of Tanzania, the Ujamaa philosophy was secular although Tanzania had a ‘civic religion’. In the Asian case of Indonesia, the philosophy of Pancasila was ‘religious pluralistic’ by recognizing six ‘official’ religions. In both this and other countries, the philosophies of national unity are now contested. Therefore, 68 years after the Bandung Conference, experts from Africa, Asia and Europe do critically answer the questions: - What philosophy, secular or religious, succeeds or succeeded in promoting peace and stability? - Are there comparable philosophies of national unity from other countries?
Environmental Anthropology studies historic and present human-environment interactions. This volume illustrates the ways in which today's environmental anthropologists are constructing new paradigms for understanding the multiplicity of players, pressures, and ecologies in every environment, and the value of cultural knowledge of landscapes. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary topics in environmental anthropology and thorough discussions on the current state and prospective future of the field in seven key sections. As the contributions to this Handbook demonstrate, the subfield of environmental anthropology is responding to cultural adaptations and responses to environmental changes in multiple and complex ways. As a discipline concerned primarily with human-environment interaction, environmental anthropologists recognize that we are now working within a pressure cooker of rapid environmental damage that is forcing behavioural and often cultural changes around the world. As we see in the breadth of topics presented in this volume, these environmental challenges have inspired renewed foci on traditional topics such as food procurement, ethnobiology, and spiritual ecology; and a broad new range of subjects, such as resilience, nonhuman rights, architectural anthropology, industrialism, and education. This volume enables scholars and students quick access to both established and trending environmental anthropological explorations into theory, methodology and practice.
Focusing on rural development and environmental management, this book brings together the detailed history of development in East Timor under two colonial regimes and under the contemporary conditions of national independence. It addresses two comparative areas of development: across the three political regimes and across four case studies of projects delivered by various national or international development agencies in independent East Timor. Employing an original classificatory framework for kinds of approaches to development – coercive orders, mandated orders, negotiated orders – the book covers the plantation-centred development of Portuguese Timor as a European colony and the integration-oriented development of ‘Timor Timur’ as Indonesia’s 27th province. It examines the neoliberal ‘democratic’ development of East Timor (or Timor-Leste) in the current context of state and nation-building, before drawing on case studies to investigate how development proceeds as a negotiation between authoritative state, non-state and international actors and local people who need to adapt development and conservation projects to suit their lived realities. By using the history of East Timor to explore how particular modes of operationalising development interventions are intimately intertwined with the broader political system, this book makes a valuable contribution to the fields of Development Studies, Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies.
This study treats ecotourism in National Protected Areas of Lao PDR as a “recreational frontier” which instrumentalizes the recreation of human natures in capitalism’s centers for that of nonhuman natures at capitalism’s (closing) frontiers. This world-ecological practice of ecorational instrumentality – i.e. of nature domination in the name of “Nature” – presents a remedy for capitalism’s crisis that is itself crisis-ridden, enacting a central tension of ecocapitalism: that between “conservation” and “development”. This epistemic-institutional tension is traced through the preconditions, modes and effects of ecotourism in Laos by gradually zooming from the most general scale of societal nature relations into the most detailed intricacies of ecotouristic practice. The combination of Bourdieu, Marx and Critical Theory enables a systematic analysis of the recreational frontier as enactment of various contradictions deriving from the “false-and-real” Nature/Society dualism.
This volume provides an overview of key themes in Indigenous Environmental Knowledge (IEK) and anchors them with brief but well-grounded empirical case studies of relevance for each of these themes, drawn from bioculturally diverse areas around the world. It provides an incisive, cutting-edge overview of the conceptual and philosophical issues, while providing constructive examples of how IEK studies have been implemented to beneficial effect in ecological restoration, stewardship, and governance schemes. Collectively, the chapters in the Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Environmental Knowledge cover Indigenous Knowledge not only in a wide range of cultures and livelihood contexts, but also in a wide range of environments, including drylands, savannah grassland, tropical forests, mountain landscapes, temperate and boreal forests, Pacific and Indian Ocean islands, and coastal environments. The chapters discuss the complexities and nuances of Indigenous cosmologies and ethno-metaphysics and the treatment and incorporation of IEK in local, national, and international environmental policies. Taken together, the chapters in this volume make a strong case for the potential of Indigenous Knowledge in addressing today’s local and global environmental challenges, especially when approached from a perspective of appreciative inquiry, using cross-cultural methods and ethical, collaborative approaches which limit bias and inappropriate extraction of IEK. The book is a guide for graduate and advanced undergraduate teaching, and a key reference for academics in development studies, environmental studies, geography, anthropology, and beyond, as well as anyone with an interest in Indigenous Environmental Knowledge. Chapters 10 and 23 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
The problem of escalating population displacement demands global attention and country co-ordination. This book investigates the particular issue of development-induced displacement, whereby land is seized or restricted by the state for the purposes of development projects. Those displaced by these schemes often risk losses to their homes, livelihoods, food security, and socio-cultural support; for which they are rarely fully compensated. Bringing together 22 specialist researchers and practitioners from across the globe, this book provides a much-needed independent analysis of country frameworks for development-induced displacement spanning Asia, Africa, Central and South America. As global competition for land increases, public and private sector lenders are lightening their social safeguards, shifting the oversight for protecting the displaced to national law and regulations. This raises a central question: Do countries have effective ways of addressing the risks and lost opportunities for their people who are displaced? While many countries remain impervious to the problem, the book also shines a light on the few who are pioneering new legislation and strategies, intended to address questions such as: should the social costs to those displaced help determine whether a project meets the public interest and merits financing? Does the modern state need powers of eminent domain? How can country laws, systems, institutions and negotiations be reformed to protect citizens better against disempowering public and private sector development displacement? This book will interest those working on forced and voluntary migration, property and expropriation law, human rights, environmental and social impact assessment, internal and refugee displacement from conflicts, environment change, disasters and development.