Political ecology and resilience: competing interdisciplinarities?

Both “political ecology” and “resilience” (or socio-ecological systems) are research approaches that explicitly claim to be inter- or even post-disciplinary. Both of these “interdisciplines” are currently dominant in academic study of society-environment interactions, engaging sizeable communities of students and scholars drawn from a range of traditional disciplines. Both approaches seeks to facilitate the kinds of boundary crossings that are crucial at the interface of nature and society, leading to new insights and knowledge, and to solving problems that are not contained within the boundaries. Yet there are inevitably pressures to “discipline” the new “interdisciplines”. In the case of political ecology and resilience, each has separate intellectual traditions, with some fundamental differences in purpose, in epistemology, in explanatory tools, and in ideology – illustrating that there are multiple ways of being interdisciplinary. This chapter explores these differences and reflects on the meaning of interdisciplinarity

Living with Alien invasives

Un certain nombre d’arbres australiens - en particulier acacias et eucalyptus - ont été cultivés dans de vastes zones de l’Afrique du Sud pour l’industrie forestière. Au cours des dernières années, ces plantations ont été beaucoup discutées en raison de leur impact supposé sur les ressources en eau et sur la biodiversité autochtone. Dans l’ère post-apartheid, les politiques gouvernementales de lutte contre la pauvreté ont de manière paradoxale poussé les Noirs pauvres des zones rurales à se livrer à la fois à l’arrachage de ces arbres exotiques envahissants avides d’eau, tout en encourageant les gens à les planter dans de petites plantations dans le cadre de programmes d’émancipation économique de ces mêmes Noirs. Cet article étudie comment une telle situation paradoxale s’est mise en place, et quels sont ses impacts sur les paysages ruraux comme sur les moyens de subsistance campagnards en utilisant le cas de l’acacia noir (Acacia mearnsii De Wild.), dans le highveld de l’Est de la province de Mpumalanga. Il retrace l’évolution de discours stratégiques entrant en concurrence les uns avec les autres (environnementaux, industriels forestiers, économiques paysans) et présente une étude de cas de leurs impacts sur les paysages locaux et sur les moyens de subsistance des populations locales.A number of Australian trees – particularly acacias (’wattles’ or ’mimosas’) and eucalypts – have been cultivated over large areas of South Africa for the forest industry. They have become quite controversial in recent years for their alleged impacts on water resources and native biodiversity. In post-Apartheid South Africa, government poverty alleviation policies paradoxically engage poor rural blacks to both rip out these water-hungry ‘alien invasive’ trees while also encouraging people to plant them in small-scale plantations as part of black economic empowerment. This paper investigates how such a paradoxical situation arises and its impacts on specific rural landscapes and livelihoods, using the case of the black wattle (Acacia mearnsii) in the eastern highveld of Mpumalanga province. It traces the development of competing policy discourses (environmental, forest industry, rural livelihoods) and presents a case study of their impacts on local landscapes and livelihoods

Indigenous Peoples and Forest Management: Comparative Analysis of Institutional Approaches in Australia and India

This article examines recent institutional approaches that address questions of access to forest resources and issues of redistributive justice for indigenous peoples in Australia and India. For over two decades, both countries have seen the emergence of claims to forest access and ownership made by indigenous communities that have been historically disadvantaged and marginalized from the benefits of mainstream social and economic development. The analysis focuses on regional forest agreements (RFA) in Australia and joint forest management (JFM) experiments in India through a comparative analytical framework defined by three concepts access, control, and substantive democracy to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of institutional processes that aim to engage in sustainable management of forest resources.Haripriya Rangan, Marcus B. Lan

Environmental History of Botanical Exchanges in the Indian Ocean World

Much of the environmental history literature on plant transfers has centred on European agency and on the effects on both Old and New Worlds colonised and inhabited by European powers over the past five centuries. The emphasis on European agency obscures, or diverts attention from, prehistoric botanical exchanges, i.e., plants transferred by human agency from one region to another thousands of years ago. While these exchanges may not have constituted 'ecological imperialism' the plants transferred nevertheless had significant impacts on the landscapes and societies they entered and in which they became established. This paper focuses on food crop exchanges in the Indian Ocean World. It draws on recent interdisciplinary research in archaeobotany and palaeoclimatic studies to illustrate the plant transfers that took place between eastern Africa, southern Asia and mainland and Island Southeast Asia between 2500 BCE and 100 CE and to explore how these arrivals may have transformed host societies and environments

Plantas exóticas invasoras e instrumentos de gestão territorial. O caso paradigmático do género Acacia em Portugal

Analisa-se neste artigo a adequação de instrumentos de gestão territorial ao fenómeno da invasão por espécies do género Acacia em Portugal continental. Apresenta-se cartografia das manchas invasoras no período 1977-2010 e analisam-se instrumentos de gestão territorial setoriais e de natureza especial que abordam esta problemática, nomeadamente planos de gestão de regiões hidrográficas, planos regionais de ordenamento florestal e planos de ordenamento de áreas protegidas. Analisam-se igualmente casos concretos de controlo de Acacia spp. e respetivos resultados. Discute-se a necessidade de reformular alguns aspetos das políticas e dos instrumentos de gestão territorial que possam reorientar as práticas de controlo de plantas invasoras e a recuperação de áreas invadidas