Racing climate change in Guyana and Suriname

Research on the overlap between race and vulnerability to the physical and governance-related aspects of climate change is often globally scaled, based on extended temporalities, and colour-coded with non-white populations recognized as being at greater risk of experiencing the adverse effects of climate change. This article shows how de-centring whiteness from its position as automatic, oppositional counterpart to blackness can make space for greater recognition of the role played by the environment in processes of racialization. De-centring whiteness in this way would form a valuable step towards recognizing how race, constructed in part through shifting relations between people and the environment, overlaps with climate vulnerability within multiracial populations. Without discounting the value of global, colour-coded interpretations of race, I point out the limits of their applicability to understandings of how climate change is unfolding Guyana and Suriname, two multiracial Caribbean countries. I argue that in the postcolonial period, relations with the environment take historical constructions of race forward in ways that undergird the impacts of climate change. Even further, I show how the environment has always played a key, underacknowledged role in processes of racialization, complicating colour-coded interpretations of race, whether global or local.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The extractive embrace : shifting expectations of conservation and extraction in the Guiana Shield

This paper demonstrates what the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative would have to do to satisfy the expectations of its diverse, local stakeholders. It connects the unmet expectations of REDD+ with a deepening reliance on extractive activity in the Guiana Shield. In it, I argue that extractive activity, which has always been the most significant driver of deforestation in the ecoregion, is further overtaking REDD+’s capacity for meeting expectations and development aspirations due to the combined failure of REDD+ to deliver vast amounts of promised funding to alter unsustainable development paths and the subsequent announcements of major oil discoveries in the territorial waters of the Guiana Shield. These arguments are based on data collected in the early phases of REDD+ readiness through a multi-sited ethnography, analyzed through a combination of Foucauldian discourse analysis and governmentality. I use critical discourse analysis to represent REDD+’s regional interpretations and governmentality to tease out the expectations embedded in these discourses. This combination supports my identification of what REDD+ would have to accomplish to be deemed successful in Guyana and Suriname, the only two REDD+ participating countries entirely within the Guiana Shield. In turn, this identification improves understandings of the relationship between failed or failing conservation and development initiatives and the subsequent intensification of extractive activity.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

A political ecology of atmospheres : a voluminous case study of the Guiana Shield

This paper conceptualizes a political ecology of atmospheres. It offers to political ecology, a field that features a strong territorial bias, a study of how the effects of dramas taking place on and off the Earth’s land surface go on to affect other spaces and places through the air and atmospheres. This interdisciplinary contribution is valuable because, as convincingly demonstrated by scholars in cognate disciplines, a dominant focus on land as territory limits understandings of the politics of environmental change. This is because, increasingly, spaces and places that are neither fixed nor grounded, such as the deep sea or outer space, are being directly and indirectly shaped by capitalist expansion. Hence, I argue for greater consideration of atmospheres in political ecology, a field that examines the often contentious relationship between the principle economic system and the environment. I develop this argument through a voluminous case study of the Guiana Shield, a highly forested, 1.7-billion-year-old Precambrian geological formation in the north of South America. I use the Guiana Shield as a spatial point of reference to argue for direct attention to be paid to the ever-evolving interplay of current and historical factors in atmospheric spaces. Combining insights from decolonial scholarship, the environmental humanities, and the wider ‘volumetric’ turn, I use ‘weathering’ as a method for analyzing the slow, microscale geological, biological, and socio-political processes through which colonial atmospheres emerged and went on to later encompass their reference points.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Weathering Weather:Atmospheric Geographies of the Guiana Shield

This chapter argues that paying attention to the weather and its associated processes of geological, biological, and social weathering can destabilize knowledge traditions that insist on dichotomies. Looking to specific histories and current conditions in Guyana and Suriname, this chapter shows how notions of weathering can accommodate a wide range of referents, ranging from the weathering of rock to socio-political and historical afterlives of violent colonial displacements

"Ocean Optimism" and resilience : learning from women's responses to disruptions caused by COVID-19 to small-scale fisheries in the Gulf of Guinea

The University of St Andrews Restarting Research Funding Scheme (SARRF) is funded through the SFC grant reference SFC/AN/08/020. The University of St Andrews Institutional Open Access Fund (IOAF) is acknowledged for open access support.This study examines the response of women to disruptions caused by COVID-19 in small-scale fisheries (SSF) in the Gulf of Guinea (GOG). It interrogates the concept of resilience and its potential for mitigating women’s vulnerability in times of adversity. We define resilience as the ability to thrive amidst shocks, stresses, and unforeseen disruptions. Drawing on a focus group discussion, in-depth interviews with key informants from Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria, and a literature review, we highlight how COVID-19 disruptions on seafood demand, distribution, labour and production acutely affected women and heightened their pre-existing vulnerabilities. Women responded by deploying both negative and positive coping strategies. We argue that the concept of resilience often romanticises women navigating adversity as having ‘supernatural’ abilities to endure disruptions and takes attention away from the sources of their adversity and from the governments' concomitant failures to address them. Our analysis shows reasons for “ocean optimism” while also cautioning against simplistic resilience assessments when discussing the hidden dangers of select coping strategies, including the adoption of digital solutions and livelihood diversification, which are often constructed along highly gendered lines with unevenly distributed benefits.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Plotting the coloniality of conservation

Funding: NORFACE/Belmont Forum (ES/S007792/1).Contemporary and market-based conservation policies, constructed as rational, neutral and apolitical, are being pursued around the world in the aim of staving off multiple, unfolding and overlapping environmental crises. However, the substantial body of research that examines the dominance of neoliberal environmental policies has paid relatively little attention to how colonial legacies interact with these contemporary and market-based conservation policies enacted in the Global South. It is only recently that critical scholars have begun to demonstrate how colonial legacies interact with market-based conservation policies in ways that increase their risk of failure, deepen on-the-ground inequalities and cement global injustices. In this article, we take further this emerging body of work by showing how contemporary, market-based conservation initiatives extend the temporalities and geographies of colonialism, undergird long-standing hegemonies and perpetuate exploitative power relations in the governing of nature-society relations, particularly in the Global South. Reflecting on ethnographic insights from six different field sites across countries of the Global South, we argue that decolonization is an important and necessary step in confronting some of the major weaknesses of contemporary conservation and the wider socio-ecological crisis itself. We conclude by briefly outlining what decolonizing conservation might entail.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

How REDD+ governs:Multiple forest environmentalities in Guyana and Suriname

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation mechanism is a policy instrument intended to achieve environmental conservation and utilization simultaneously. Recently, researchers have adopted environmentality’, a theoretical approach that recognizes the different strategies for the ‘conduct of conduct’ embodied in environmental governance, to parse the diverse governing logics supporting Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation implementation. Thus far, use of this lens has focused predominantly on how Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation introduces new forms of environmentality, overlooking the pre-existing, context-specific approaches to governance on which the mechanism builds, and hence potentially overstating the novelty of its governance techniques. Challenging this dominant use of the environmentality lens, I further develop its critical potential by demonstrating how environmentality’s temporal dimensions illuminate the shifts, continuities and disruptions in how environmental governance evolves over time. I do this by demonstrating how Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation builds onpre-existing forest governance interventions in Guyana and neighbouring Suriname. I argue that while Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation remains a global expression of neoliberal environmentality, it builds on a pre-existing sovereign environmentality established throughout the overlapping histories of Guyana and Suriname, draws on but also subvertscontext-specific truth environmentality in the spiritual relations of forest dependent communities with the forests, and is made palatable for resistant communities through disciplinary environmentality. In this way, these four forms of environmentality help to explain how Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation implementation in the two countries assumes its current character, while demonstrating how environmental projects work towards shaping the subjects of their governance