Michael Fabinyi

This paper examines how state and non-state actors govern through pursuing speculative conservation among resource-dependent people who must renegotiate altered livelihoods amidst extractivism in ruptured landscapes. As donor aid declines and changes form, bilaterals, state agencies, and civil society now pursue advocacy in overlapping spaces of intensifying extractivism and speculative gov-ernance in the ruptured frontiers of Southeast Asia. In these spaces, bilaterals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) struggle to work with upland farmers who negotiate the contrasting expectations of the abstract, speculative nature of conservation initiatives and the lucrative nature of extractive labour in the face of dramatic transformations of agrarian livelihoods and landscapes. Through a case study of the Philippine uplands, we demonstrate that as speculative conservation unfolds and manifests within and beyond these landscapes, it endeavours to revalue nature monetarily in ways that help reorganise labour and capital in an effort to overcome the exhaustion of capital wrought by rupture. We propose that during moments of rupture speculative conservation coproduces value from ruin by renewing and preserving capital flows.

Leadership is heralded as being critical to addressing the ‘crisis of governance’ facing the Earth’s natural systems. While political, economic and corporate discourses of leadership have been widely and critically interrogated, narratives of environmental leadership remain relatively neglected in the academic literature. The aims of this paper are twofold. Firstly, to highlight the centrality and importance of environmental science’s construction and mobilization of leadership discourse. Secondly, to offer a critical analysis of environmental sciences’ deployment of leadership theory and constructs. The authors build on a review of leadership research in environmental science that reveals how leadership is conceptualised and analysed in this field of study. It is argued that environmental leadership research reflects rather narrow framings of leadership. An analytical typology proposed by Grint is employed to demonstrate how any singular framing of environmental leadership as person, position, process, result or purpose is problematic and needs to be supplanted by a pluralistic view. The paper concludes by highlighting key areas for improvement in environmental leadership research, with emphasis on how a political ecology of environmental crisis narratives contributes to a more critical body of research on leadership in environmental science.

Recent studies in the literature on fisheries trade have contrasted the challenges and opportunities associated with domestic and internationally oriented fish trade. We examine forms of domestic and international fish trade in a municipality of the Philippines to show the empirical complexities of how fish trade unfolds on the ground. We draw on insights from the literature in livelihoods to highlight how the debate on fisheries trade can benefit from closer attention to the social and economic context of fisher livelihoods. We argue that from the perspective of small-scale producers who are focused on maintaining diversified livelihoods across a range of fisheries, the distinctions between domestic and international fish trade blur locally, and are sometimes of limited relevance when assessing livelihood options and outcomes. Instead, a more important distinction for households is social differentiation based on ownership of fishing assets. We suggest that household asset characteristics strongly influence how households can access a broad range of fisheries (both domestically and internationally traded) that often co-emerge in rural areas of the Philippines. We argue that a better understanding of household diversification and differentiation provides a view of fisheries trade that is more closely aligned with the perspectives and priorities of local fishers, than a focus on whether such trade is (or should be) domestically or internationally oriented.

The world’s remaining biodiversity-rich regions are often located in borderlands or physically remote areas which are frequently also inhabited by stateless peoples, who are then subjected to policies expressly designed to exclude or restrict local livelihood activities. This situation has been exacerbated by the tendency for international non-governmental organisations to join forces with the State to promote their conservation agenda. Whilst the political and environmental implications of this trend have been explored within the academic literature, the consequences for the survival of disempowered and marginalised stateless communities have received little attention. This article will focus upon stateless peoples enmeshed within a policy framework influenced by globalised environmental priorities and directed by international conservation NGOs in South-East Asia. It will explore how stateless peoples’ capacities are undermined by models of ‘participation’ used by these actors and underline the importance of recognising stateless peoples’ rights and responsibilities in marine natural resource management.