Contesting longstanding conceptualisations of urban green space

Ever since the Victorian era saw the creation of “parks for the people,” health and wellbeing benefits have been considered a primary benefit of urban parks and green spaces. Today, public health remains a policy priority, with illnesses and conditions such as diabetes, obesity and depression a mounting concern, notably in increasingly urbanised environments. Urban green space often is portrayed as a nature-based solution for addressing such health concerns. In this chapter, Meredith Whitten investigates how the health and wellbeing benefits these spaces provide are limited by a narrow perspective of urban green space. Whitten explores how our understandings of urban green space remain rooted in Victorian ideals and calls into question how fit for purpose they are in twenty-first-century cities. Calling on empirical evidence collected in three boroughs in London with changing and increasing demographic populations, she challenges the long-held cultural underpinnings that lead to urban green space being portrayed “as a panacea to urban problems, yet treating it as a ‘cosmetic afterthought’” (Whitten, M, Reconceptualising green space: planning for urban green space in the contemporary city. Doctoral thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, U.K. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/. Accessed 12 Jun 2019, 2019b, p 18)

FLEGT: Another ‘forestry fad’?

There has been recent debate around the role of ‘fads’ in global conservation measures, and the lessons they hold for achieving desired conservation and development outcomes. Fads are characterized by initially widespread enthusiasm and major mobilization of resources followed by abandonment in favor of the next fad. Debate centers less on whether such fads exist, but rather on whether they represent opportunities for incremental policy learning, or are symptomatic of the more systemic failure of a market-based conservation agenda and the reinforcement of existing power inequalities. The European Union (EU)’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan aims to prevent the trade of illegal timber among the EU and its trading partners especially in the ‘Global South’. Fifteen years since launching the Action Plan, we ask whether the processes and outcomes of FLEGT, and specifically the Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs), resonate with the dynamics observed in other processes dubbed ‘fads’ within conservation and development arenas, and if so, what we can learn from this. Drawing from interviews, grey literature, and scholarship, we examine FLEGT VPAs as following three key stages of a fad: (1) there is initial enthusiasm by a wide range of actors for FLEGT as something ‘new’ or ground-breaking, (2) discrepancies and disagreements emerge about its end goals, i.e. whether it's core purpose is to distinguish legal from illegal wood in the EU marketplace, or to achieve deeper governance reforms; while the means for achieving those goals borrow heavily from previous market-based initiatives (3) actors and champions become fatigued, yet at the same time frame elements of their own involvement as a ‘success’. Identifying these fad-like characteristics calls into question the ‘newness’ of FLEGT, by uncovering its many similarities to other market-based measures such as certification that exacerbate inequalities. Hence, branding FLEGT a success without challenging its role in the unequal concentration of power and resources, is likely to further entrench these inequalities in subsequent conservation fads, while a focus on incremental learning misses the larger failures and injustices of market-based approaches and can reinforce their re-emergence

“A level playing field”? – What an environmental justice lens can tell us about who gets leveled in the forest law enforcement, governance and trade action plan

The European Union introduced Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan, with Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA) and the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) as the key components. The VPA and EUTR have been conceived as complementary tools to establish a “level playing field.” This paper analyses how a level playing field has been conceptualized, approached, and experienced in practice. It focuses on the adoption and implementation of EUTR and VPA in Europe, Indonesia, and Ghana. Our research highlights inequities in the practice of “leveling” and outcomes from a presumed level field. Stakeholder engagement excluded some factions of the private sector, notably SME operators, favoring select NGOs in general. New systems also favor larger operators who possess more capacity to deal with legality requirements. This leads small operators to perceive of a so-called level playing field as one in which they are disadvantaged, indicating multiple injustices against already vulnerable groups