Indigenous identity, natural resources, and contentious politics in Bolivia: a disaggregated conflict analysis; 2000-2011

How do natural resources and ethnic identity interact to incite or to mitigate social conflict? This article argues that high-value natural resources can act as an important catalyst for the politicization of ethnic, specifically indigenous identity, and contribute to social conflict as they limit the malleability of identity frames and raise the stakes of confrontations. We test this argument using unique subnational data from Bolivian provinces. Drawing on Bolivian newspaper reports, we code conflict events for all of the 112 provinces from 2000 to 2011. We join this conflict data with information on local ethnic composition from the census, the political representation of ethnic groups at the national level, as well as geo-spatial information on gas deposits. Using time-series cross-sectional count models, we show a significant conflict-promoting effect of the share of indigenous people in provinces with gas reserves, but not without

What is governance in global telecoupling?

The concept of telecoupling is increasingly used as a framework to understand globally distant interconnections and their sustainability implications. Although there is a growing research focus on issues of governance related to global telecoupling, there appears little consensus over the meaning of “governance” in this respect. Papers in the recent Ecology and Society special feature titled “Telecoupling: A New Frontier for Global Sustainability” reveal quite different understandings of the telecoupling-governance relationship. We want to suggest that greater clarity and a common understanding of how governance figures in telecoupled systems will aid constructive dialogue on how to govern telecoupling toward more sustainable pathways in the face of pressing global social and environmental issues. This response, though not aiming to define a single, definitive framework of governance as it pertains to telecoupling, seeks to identify three distinct perspectives applied to governance in the context of global telecoupling: (1) governance by states or other actors that induces or fosters telecoupling in the first place, often irrespective of its sustainability implications; (2) governance mainly by private companies that coordinates telecoupled flows; and (3) governance by states, nonstate actors, and hybrid or multistakeholder initiatives that aims to address the negative externalities of telecoupling. By distinguishing these perspectives, we aim to make underlying understandings of governance explicit, and to foster further constructive exchange on the topic

Contextualizing certification and auditing: Soy certification and access of local communities to land and water in Brazil

The massive expansion of soy production in Brazil has contributed to a loss of access for local communities to land and water, particularly in highly dynamic frontier regions in the Cerrado. Soy certification standards like the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) contain principles that are supposed to prevent such problems. In this paper, we examine the extent to which certification and auditing have served to protect local communities’ access to land and water in western Bahía state in the Cerrado's Matopiba region. We draw on findings from field research in Brazil and western Bahía, 72 semi-structured interviews with corporate, state and civil society actors, and a systematic analysis of audit reports from RTRS-certified farms in Bahía. We find that auditing practices are not effective in protecting the rights and access of local communities to land and water due to three inter-related sets of factors: 1) the business-dominated nature of the drafting and content of the RTRS standard, 2) the structural limitations and everyday practices of auditing, and 3) domestic and local contextual factors in Brazil and western Bahía. This study aims to contribute to a re-thinking and re-assessment of certification and auditing practices and suggests that new approaches are required to govern global commodity chains in a more environmentally just way. We advocate for a locally embedded and community-sensitive perspective in research on certification and auditing, to complement previous research in the fields of critical political economy and sustainability governance

Governing global telecoupling toward environmental sustainability

Telecoupling constitutes a particular class of globalized environmental issues that are neither local-cumulative, nor transboundary, nor concerning global commons, but that arise because of specific linkages between distal regions. Such telecoupled issues, e.g., associated with global commodity chains, waste flows, or migration patterns, have been receiving increasing attention from scholars of global land change science. Although governance research has mostly studied existing institutional responses to these issues, telecoupling opens up a problem-oriented perspective on issues of environmental sustainability that occur regionally, but that arise because of global linkages, and raises novel questions about how such issues are and could be governed in a global architecture. We draw insights from existing literature on globally interconnected phenomena to advance our understanding of governing telecoupling toward environmental sustainability. We first identify and discuss five particular challenges that telecoupling poses to global environmental governance: knowledge deficits, divergent interests, high transaction costs of cooperation, the weak legitimacy base of current governance arrangements, and policy incoherence and fragmentation. Second, we review conceptual literature that meaningfully address the governance of telecoupling, while utilizing differing terminologies, for example, through reference to "flows," "chains," or "multiscalar" issues. Building on this, we elaborate on how currently debated governance approaches respond to the identified challenges. We conclude with a brief note on where we believe the discussion on governance of telecoupling stands, and where we see directions for future research

Environmental governance in globally telecoupled systems: Mapping the terrain towards an integrated research agenda

Environmental governance is increasingly challenged by global flows, which connect distant places through trade, investment and movement of people. To date, research on this topic has been dispersed across multiple fields and diverse theoretical perspectives. We present the results of a systematic literature review of 120 journal articles on the environmental governance of global flows and their environmental impacts, employing the notion of telecoupling as a common analytical lens. Six themes emerged, which can guide a comparative and policy-relevant research agenda on governing global telecoupling: (1) advancement of problem-centered research (as opposed to studying existing governance arrangements), (2) displacement of environmental burdens from Global North to South from a telecoupling perspective, (3) environmental governance of telecoupling between Global South countries, (4) policy coherence in governing global flows, (5) cross-scalar interactions between private and public governance and (6) combinations of governance arrangements to effectively address environmental problems in telecoupled settings