Bram Büscher

We have an exciting call for paper for the 2016 AAG in San Francisco:

Political Ecologies of Environmental Control, Conflict, and Crisis
 
Maano Ramutsindela, University of Cape Town: maano.ramutsindela@uct.ac.za
Bram Büscher, Wageningen University: bram.buscher@wur.nl
Libby Lunstrum, York University: lunstrum@yorku.ca

Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, 29 March – 2 April 2016, San Francisco

Twenty-First century political ecologies of environmental control, conflict, and crisis are rapidly changing. As environmental crises seem to deepen, we are witnessing a growing range of responses and a multitude of actors, including state conservation agencies, donor and development agencies, and border protection offices; mining and tourism companies and security firms; university researchers across disciplines, and national and international conservation NGOs. Such crises—arguably both real and perceived—along with the actors working to address them are yielding new patterns of environmental control and conflict, with profound impacts for land rights, livelihood opportunities, human rights, and nature-society relations more broadly. From the intersections of environmental conservation and natural resource extraction to commercial poaching and climate change adaptation and mitigation and beyond, this panel foregrounds the question of power in these dynamics. It examines in particular the impacts of these new modalities and relations of power on people, non-human nature, and their intersections.

Concretely, we are interested in understanding how these varied actors use, abuse, and rework power in order to establish modes of environmental control (materially, discursively, aesthetically, etc.) under situations of ‘crisis’ and conflict. The panel seeks to engage the following questions:
–       How can we understand changing dynamics of environmental control, conflict, and crisis?
–       What are the impacts of new dynamics of environmental control, conflict, and crisis for human and non-human nature? In particular, how do they relate to new patterns of green violence?
–       How is the notion of ‘crisis’ deployed in the context of different environmental challenges and what implications does this have for environmental control and conflict?
–       How do new forms of environmental control relate to new forms of surveillance?
–       How can we understand changing relationships and networks in the ‘control’ and management of environmental crises? For example, how are new partnerships forged? What promises and tensions rest within them?
–       How do different actors defend, maintain, or extend their interests, ideas, and stakes in instances of environmental crisis or conflict?
–       What are the roles of state, private sector, NGO, elites, etc., in these dynamics of environmental crisis or conflict?
–       How are scholars and the university complicit in or resistant to the consolidation of new patterns of environmental control? With what impact?
–       What types of resistance do we see against this consolidation of power over environmental resources, processes, and relations?
–       More broadly, how can we understand different forms of power in relation to these dynamics, and how do these challenge current conceptualisations of power?

We invite paper proposals on these and related topics. Please send your abstract to maano.ramutsindela@uct.ac.za before 22 October.