No abstract

Many Anthropocene scholars provide us with the key take home message that they are writing ‘after the end of the world’. Not because they are writing about apocalypse, but because they are engaging the Anthropocene after the profound crisis of faith in Western modernity which has swept across academia in recent decades. Here the dominant problematic of contemporary Anthropocene thinking has rapidly turned away from modernity’s human/nature divide to that of ‘relational entanglements’. Thus, Anthropocene scholarship is taking a particular interest in geographical forms and cultures which are held to bring this problematic to the fore for more intensive interrogation. In this article, we examine how the figure of the island as a liminal and transgressive space has facilitated Anthropocene thinking, working with and upon island forms and imaginations to develop alternatives to hegemonic, modern, ‘mainland’, or ‘one world’ thinking. Thus, whilst islands, under modern frameworks of reasoning, were reductively understood as isolated, backward, dependent, vulnerable, and in need of saving by others, the island is being productively re-thought in and for more recent Anthropocene thinking. We explain how islands have shifted from the margins in a number of international debates, becoming key sites for understanding relational entanglements, enabling alternative forms of thought and practice in the Anthropocene.

EnglishThe Local Government Bill and the White and Green Papers informing it claim to deliver an agenda of democratic renewal. The reforms promise to reconnect local councils with local communities through a process of political renewal, a new statutory duty of community-wide consultation and the encouragement of active citizenship. This article assesses whether the plans for increased popular engagement in consultation processes actually develop democratic accountability, and suggests that, although the current proposals may institutionalise new links between government and community groups and individuals, they will provide little local control over policy making. EspañolEl Proyecto de Ley del Gobierno Local y los documentos White y Green que los informa, pretende lanzar una agenda de renovación democrática. Las reformas prometen reconectar ayuntamientos locales con comunidades locales a través de un proceso de renovación política, un nuevo deber estatutario de amplia consulta comunitaria y la situación de una ciudadanía activa. Este artículo examina los planes para el aumento de la participación popular en los procesos de consulta, para ver si realmente desarrollan responsabilidad democrática. El artículo, también sugiere que aunque las actuales propuestas pueden institucionalizar nuevos vínculos entre el gobierno, los grupos comunitarios y los individuos, proporcionarán poco control sobre las decisiones políticas.

The concept of societal resilience has rapidly spread throughout the policy world, driven by the desire to use systems theories and process understandings to develop new security approaches for coping, bouncing-back, and adaptive improvement in the face of shocks and disturbances. However, this article argues that under the auspices of the Anthropocene, the assumptions and goals of societal resilience become problematic. This is because external interventions often ignore feedback effects, meaning that attempts to resolve problems through focusing upon enabling and capacity-building can be seen as counterproductive "fire-fighting" rather than tackling causation. Even more "alternative" or "community-based" approaches, relying upon interventions to enable so-called "natural" processes, either through an emphasis on local and traditional knowledge or new monitoring technologies, constitute problems for resilience advocacy: firstly, the problem of unrecognized exploitation; and secondly, the problem of continuing to sacrifice others to maintain unsustainable Western modes of consumption and production.

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the "ontological turn" in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and "world" in a performatively different way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology-of being differently: 'being in being' rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or "possessive" modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but rather as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Thus, rather than "provincializing" dominant western hegemonic practices, such discourses of indigeneity extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.