Zach Anderson
University of Toronto, Department of Geography and Planning, Graduate Student
- Political Ecology, Political Economy, Human Geography, Cultural Politics, Environmental Anthropology, Cultural Geography, and 29 moreIndonesia, Development Studies, Uneven Development, Anthropology, Border Studies, Governmentality, Anthropology of the State, Anthropology of Development, Anthropology of Borders, Borderlands Studies, Borders and Frontiers, Decentralisation processes and development issues, Biofuels, Agrarian Change, REDD+, REDD+ or Reducing Emissions form Deforestation and (Forest) Degradation, Land Grabbing, Palm Oil Plantation, Indonesian Papua, Human Security, Governance and State Capacity, Poverty Reduction Strategies, Land tenure, Forest Tenure, Community forest, Community Enterprise, Agrarian reform, Food Security, and Environmental Sustainabilityedit
- PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto.edit
- Ken MacDonaldedit
This contribution addresses the growing global trend to promote ‘natural capital accounting’ (NCA) in support of environmental conservation. NCA seeks to harness the economic value of conserved nature to incentivize local resource users... more
This contribution addresses the growing global trend to promote ‘natural capital accounting’ (NCA) in support of environmental conservation. NCA seeks to harness the economic value of conserved nature to incentivize local resource users to forgo the opportunity costs of extractive activities. We suggest that this represents a form of neoliberal biopower/biopolitics seeking to defend life by demonstrating its ‘profitability’ and hence right to exist. While little finance actually reaches communities through this strategy, substantial funding still flows into the idea of ‘natural capital’ as the basis of improving rural livelihoods. Drawing on two cases in Southeast Asia, we show that NCA initiatives may compel some local people to value ecosystem services in financial terms, yet in most cases this perspective remains partial and fragmented in communities where such initiatives produce a range of unintended outcomes. When the envisioned environmental markets fail to develop and benefits remain largely intangible, NCA fails to meet the growing material aspirations of farmers while also offering little if any bulwark against their using forests more intensively and/or enrolling in lucrative extractive enterprise. We thus conclude that NCA in practice may become the antithesis of conservation by actually encouraging the resource extraction it intends to combat.
Research Interests:
New forms of environmental governance, such as the green economy, premise reconfigu-rations of social relations and rearticulations of scale, which raise myriad questions for field researchers, not least of all, what actually constitutes... more
New forms of environmental governance, such as the green economy, premise reconfigu-rations of social relations and rearticulations of scale, which raise myriad questions for field researchers, not least of all, what actually constitutes 'the field', and where it is to be found. These questions – practical, methodological, political, and personal – are integral to research itself and can tell us much about the dynamic forms that social organization and emerging governance structures take in practice. This contribution discusses the methodological challenges associated with 'doing fieldwork' in the amorphous networks of an emerging environmental governance assemblage – the green economy. Drawing on my fieldwork in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, I argue that by interrogating the positional-ity of different actors in relation to this assemblage, while remaining critically reflexive about one's own role in this production, field researchers can capture something of the rich embodied practices through which knowledge is produced and exchanged. Moreover , this relational focus on networks of knowledge, actors, and policy can help us to explore the processes of translation and negotiation that underlie the implementation of new forms of environmental governance.
Research Interests:
Indonesia aims to reduce its CO 2 emissions by 29% while maintaining a 7% annual GDP growth rate, thus making " green economy " a reality. Based on a review of literature and secondary data and interviews with key informants, this article... more
Indonesia aims to reduce its CO 2 emissions by 29% while maintaining a 7% annual GDP growth rate, thus making " green economy " a reality. Based on a review of literature and secondary data and interviews with key informants, this article examines the gap between these national ambitions and the reality on the ground, with particular attention to the challenges of multi-scalar environmental governance. It first introduces the green economy concept and discusses the main green growth policies and initiatives at the national level. The article then examines green growth ambitions at the provincial level in East Kalimantan province. Our findings suggest that existing plans to further expand oil palm plantations are at odds with provincial efforts to reduce emissions. This highlights a key paradox we identify at the heart of the green economy concept as it is developing in Indonesia: between a development trajectory based on resource extraction and agro-industrial development, and 'green' aspirations linked to environmental protection and greenhouse gas emissions reductions. We conclude that the main challenges to address these contradictions are related to the lack of coordination between different governance scales and a political economy that is not conducive to reforms in the land-based sector. There is a need to align investment, planning, and green growth policies, based on a strong political commitment and an awareness of social and environmental trade-offs. On a more general level the article shows that the green economy concept refers to a form of environmental governance in which authorities and interests may overlap and come into conflict at different scales. Hence, differing priorities may lead the material expression of the green economy to diverge significantly from policy as it is initially laid out.