25.
Environmental Protection: Socio-Cultural and Political-Economic Dimensions
Convenors:
James G. Carrier, Oxford
Brookes University and University of Indiana
Flip van Helden, Ministry
of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, The Hague
This panel is concerned
with projects that are intended to protect the natural environment, whether
through environmental conservation or through sustainable development, whether
in the West or elsewhere. These projects are the sites where environmental
relationships and understandings of different sorts intersect with each other,
and intersect with other socio-cultural and political-economic forces that
emerge from those directly affected by or involved with the projects and from
people and institutions at more distant national or even global sites. They
are, then, places where orientations and forces that had been distant from each
other are brought into proximity. The papers in this panel will consider
critically these environmental protection projects as sites of these
intersections, and hence as places where we can see how those relationships
with and understandings of the natural surroundings can conflict with, shape
and be shaped by those other forces. Papers can consider a range of issues,
such as the relationship between expert (Western) and indigenous knowledge; the
relationship between natural- or life-sciences orientations and social-science
orientations; the importance of the global network of environmental
organisations, agencies and bodies that fund or support such projects, which
have their own interests, orientations and understandings; the relationship
between environmental protection projects and tourism or ecotourism;
environmental protection as a form of governmentality, and the like.
Introduction: the Social
Fields of Environmental Protection
Flip van Helden, Ministry of
Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, The Hague
Environmental Protection
and Cultural Politics
Vassos Argyrou, University
of Hull
Too Globally Important for
You: How Scientists and Environmental NGOs have Colonised the Coral Triangle
Simon Foale, Australian
National University
The Sundarbans Aka
‘Beautiful Forests’: Whose World Heritage Site?’
Annu Jalais, London
School of Economics and Political Science
The Problem of Wild
Elephants in Jharkhand, India: Conflicting Notions of Environment
Alpa Shah, Goldsmiths
College, University of London
Environmental protection
versus Boom and Bust Economy: Socio-cultural and Political-economic Dimensions
of Indigenous Forest Exploration in Campeche, Mexico
Ute Schüren,
Free University of Berlin
Smoke and Mirrors: The
Changing Political Context of Fears of Pollution and Environmental Damage on
Lihir, New Ireland Province, Papua New guinea
Martha Macintyre, University
of Melbourne
Mirror, Mirror, on the
Wall, Who is the Greenest of Us all?
Colin Filer, Australian
National University