Globalization, Conservation, and Green Development

Globalization, conservation, and green development

Geography 6402

Spring 2007

Instructor: Emily Yeh

Guggenheim 103A, x2-5438

Meeting: Mondays 12-2:50pm

Guggenheim 201E

Office hours: Tuesday, Thursday 2:00-3:30 pm

and by appointment

course description:

This seminar explores questions about the increasingly globalized practices and politics of conservation and development from the perspective of political ecology, an interdisciplinary field with contributions from geography, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines. Political ecology emerged out of Marxian political economy and cultural ecology, as a reaction to over-simplified, neo-Malthusian analyses of environmental problems. Today, the field is both increasingly popular, and also sprawling and complex, with topics traveling under the name of political ecology ranging from struggles over property rights to the social construction of nature to vulnerability to famine, to discursive analyses of scientific narratives. We will start the semester with a general overview of political ecology but the course by no means tries to comprehensively cover the field.

Instead, the seminar will investigate a smaller set of themes in depth, through the reading of recent monographs, articles, and book chapters. These overlapping themes include: community-based/participatory conservation and development, environmental NGOs and movements, environmental identities, nature and nation, the politics of conservation science, and neoliberal governance of nature. The following, then, are some of the kinds of questions we will be asking. How should we understand different scalar trends in conservation - toward community-based natural resource management and decentralization on the one hand, and ecoregions and transboundary management on the other? How and why do people become environmentalists, ie. what are the processes of translation and subject formation through which differently placed people come to identify with the environment? How do ideas of nature or environmental protection get mobilized in the service of religion and nationalism, or vice versa?How should we analyze different kinds of environmental actors - environmental NGOs, transnational development institutions, elite domestic scientists, etc. - in relation to national and transnational histories and processes? What do participatory development and ideas of community mean for changing forms of governmentality? What are the implications of neoliberalization for the management of nature?

The class will be run as a reading-intensive, advanced seminar in which students are responsible for careful reading of the assigned pieces; weekly commentary; and brief presentations. Most of each class period will be devoted to discussion.

This class can be taken to fulfill a DART core requirement

Course texts

Required

Roderick Neumann. 2005 Making Political Ecology. Hodder Arnold.

Christine Walley. 2004. Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an east African Marine

Park. Princeton University Press.

Celia Lowe. 2006. Wild Profusion: Biodiversity conservation in an Indonesian archipelago.

Princeton University press.

Paige West. 2006. Conservation is our government now: The Politics of Ecology in

Papua New Guinea. Duke University Press.

Raymond Bryant, 2005. Nongovernmental organizations in Environmental Struggles: Politics

and the making of moral capital in the Philippines. Yale University Press.

Cori Hayden. 2003. When nature goes public: the making and unmaking of bioprospecting in

Mexico. Princeton University Press.

Michael Goldman. 2005 Imperial Nature: The world bank and struggles for social justice in

the age of globalization. Yale University Press.

Karl Zimmerer, ed. 2006 Globalization and new geographies of conservation. University

of Chicago Press.

Katrina Schwartz. 2006. Nature and national identity after Communism: Globalizing the

Ethnoscape. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Recommended

Brosius, Peter, Anna Tsing, and Charles Zerner. 2005. Communities and Conservation: Histories and politics of community-based natural resource management. Boulder: AltaMira.

The other required course readings (in addition to the required textbooks, which are available at the CU bookstore) will be available on e-reserve and/or CU Learn.

Course requirements

(1) Seminar participation:

To make this seminar work, everyone must complete assigned readings prior to class meetings, and actively participate in the discussion. (25% of grade)

(2) Critical reading commentaries

Written commentaries in the form of a roughly 1-page critical reflections on at least 8of the weekly readings are due. These should be analytical rather than descriptive, critically engaging the week’s reading rather than simply summarizing them. They are assigned both as an opportunity for you to carefully reflect upon the readings before we meet as a group, and as a way of generating class discussion.

These commentaries will be due on CU Learn on Sundays at 4pm (time subject to discussion on first day of class). You should read all contributions before coming to class on Monday. (25% of grade)

(3) Class presentations:

Every student will be responsible for one(maybe two, depending on enrollment) 10 minute class presentation of weekly readings at the beginning of class. Rather than provide an exhaustive summary, the presentations should be concise, covering key theoretical and conceptual issues in the readings of the week. They should clarify key arguments and pose provocative statements and questions that open up, rather than close down, discussion. In addition, the person responsible for the class presentation will help guide the discussion and help summarize or synthesize the discussion at the end. (10% of grade)

(4) Seminar paper:

A final seminar paper is due at the end of the semester. A half page paper description of the proposed paper topic is due during Week 8 (March 12). The paper, in the range of 15 pages, may take one of several forms: (a) a paper or thesis chapter that links your research with course themes; (b) a grant application or dissertation proposal that has been substantially shaped by engagements with course readings and themes; or (c) a paper that critically engages with a cluster of course themes or readings.

It is fine to turn in a grant proposal, prospectus or a part of your thesis/dissertation. The only requirement is that it must engage critically and substantively with at least a subset of the readings, themes, and discussions from this class.

(40% of grade)

Feedback on seminar paper

The first draft of your paper will be due April 23. On April 23 everyone will distribute a copy of their papers to the rest of the class. Then on April 30 (and depending on class size, one additional meeting outside of regularly scheduled class time) we will devote about ½ hour to each student’s paper. In addition to participating actively in the discussion of every other class member’s paper, you will also provide a written commentary (roughly one page) for your pre-assigned paper partner.

All comments should be done by April 30. You will then have one full week to revise.

Final papers are due Monday May 7 at noon

Schedule

Week 1IntroductionsJanuary 22

No reading

Week 2 What is political ecology? – Definitions and genealogiesJanuary 29

1. Neumann, Roderick 2005 Making Political Ecology. Hodder Arnold.

2. Robbins, Paul, 2004 Political Ecology: A critical introduction. Blackwell. Ch. 1, pp 3-16.

3. Paulson, Susan, Lisa Gezon, and Michael Watts. 2005 "Politics, Ecologies, Genealogies"

Political ecology across spaces, scales, and social groups .

Rutgers University Press, pp 17-40.

4.Political Economy: Marx. Capital Volume 1, Chapters 26 and 27, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation and the Expropriation of the Agricultural population, pp. 873-895.