How the Commons Was Changed: Politics, Ecology, and the History of Floodplain Institutions

A review of The Contested Floodplain: Institutional Change of the Commons in the Kafue Flats, Zambia. By Tobias Haller. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013

Qualitative Data Archiving in the Digital Age: Strategies for Data Preservation and Sharing

Given the combination of recent mandates from funding agencies for data management plans and data sharing, and the explosion of data in digital form over the past two decades, it is time for the qualitative social science community to embrace digital archiving as an inherent component of research methodology. Archiving digital data ensures, at the least, that an individual scholar’s data is preserved and accessible to the user many decades into his or her career. Digital archiving also has the potential to preserve for the broader scholarly community, the full range of social science knowledge far beyond an individual researcher’s lifespan, or field site. However, the qualitative social science community has shown resistance to the archiving and data sharing movement. In this article I discuss the key debates around data archiving and sharing for qualitative research community, with particular attention to ethnographic data, and outline basic steps qualitative researchers can take as they begin to implement plans for digital archiving in their own research methodology

COMPONENTES SOCIAIS DA MIGRAÇÃO: EXPERIÊNCIAS DA PROVÍNCIA SUL, ZÂMBIA

As suposições comuns atribuem causas econômicas e ambientais às decisões de migração. Este trabalho revela a importância das estruturas do poder local – ao nível da comunidade e da família – para entender a migração. São examinados os processos migratórios na Província Sul da Zâmbia por meio do uso de informações coletadas de dois projetos de pesquisa qualitativa. Até recentemente, quando a seca e as doenças bovinas começaram a devastar a área, a Província Sul era conhecida por suas condições ideais para agropecuária. Até os últimos anos de 1980, os agricultores da Província Sul começaram a migrar para áreas da fronteira norte, onde há terra e chuva em abundância. Contextos locais econômicos e ambientais eram os fatores decisórios na migração das populações; o controle sobre os recursos da zona rural e a habilidade de mobilizar as redes de apoio social nos vilarejos também demonstraram influenciar as decisões para deslocar-se. As informações apresentadas nesse trabalho são do Projeto de Pesquisa longitudinal Gwembe Tonga (GTRP) e de um estudo de dois anos sobre emprego e mercados de trabalho na Província Sul, liderados pelo Centro de Estudos sobre Desenvolvimento da University of Bath, Inglaterra

Beyond Remittance: Evading Uselessness and Seeking Personhood in Fouta Djallon, Guinea

Remittance networks built through transnational migration have transformed local economies as well as social lives in many parts of the world. In this article, I examine the relationship between transnational migration and local business practices for ethnic Fulɓe people from the Fouta Djallon highlands of Guinea. Although some Fouta Djallon residents have withstood poverty with the help of remittances from migrant relatives, many migrants fail to earn money abroad. But despite slim chances of success, migration remains a popular undertaking, especially for young men. Meanwhile, non-migrants engage in small business projects that yield little or no income. Analyzing informants’ critiques of “uselessness,” I argue that both near- impossible migration quests and seemingly irrational business practices are linked by a common desire to achieve social personhood under adverse structural conditions. Apparent striving for success mitigates failure to send or earn money, even while reproducing ideals of mobility and entrepreneurship in responsible personhood

Resource Warfare, Pacification and the Spectacle of ‘Green’ Development: Logics of Violence in Engineering Extraction in Southern Madagascar

Bringing political ecology's concern with the critical politics of nature and resource violence into dialogue with key debates in political geography, critical security studies and research on the geographies and phenomenology of violence and warfare, this paper explores strategies ‘from above’ in relation to the establishment and operation of the Rio Tinto QIT-Madagascar Minerals (QMM) ilmenite mine in southeast Madagascar. While QMM claims to be a responsible ‘green’ self-regulator and sustainable development actor, it has triggered serious social, environmental and legal conflicts since its inception, including allegations of a ‘double land grab’ to accommodate mining activities and compensatory biodiversity offsetting. We argue that ‘pacification’, theorised as a productive form of violence that works through the re-ordering of socio-nature, underwrites the forms of ‘security’, ‘stability’ and even ‘sustainability’ that facilitate multiple and overlapping strategies of value extraction in the territorial and extra-territorial spaces occupied by the QMM mine partnership. By situating these dynamics historically, we identify ways in which pacification draws upon sedimented and evolving logics of racialised violence to facilitate operations and silence opposition