Ungovernable? The vital natures of swidden assemblages in an upland frontier

Dressler, Wolfram; Smith, Will; Montefrio, Marvin Joseph F.

doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.12.007

Cited by 23 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 27 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The NGO disapproved because of the perceived environmental costs and because the organisation was conditioning farmers to police and abandon swidden. Emerging as a hyper eco‐precariat, these Pala’wan families were labouring to protect old growth landscapes by simultaneously criminalising and undermining their main source of subsistence, swidden agriculture, on customary lands (Dressler et al ).…”

Section: Labouring In the Shadows: From Proficians And The Hyper‐precmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rather, for the most part in rural green economy setting, it first needs locals to “participate” mainly by “stepping aside” so conservation or development agencies can take over the more technical resource management and governance roles while also providing traditional extraction some “green cover”. In establishing itself, however, a programme and projects also need casual precarious labour to fill in for tasks like planting and patrolling (Dressler et al ; West ). It is in our minds a similar modern‐day service economy, without the need for long‐term labour.…”

Section: Articulating the Eco‐precariat As A Future Research Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

NotJustParticipation: The Rise of the Eco‐Precariat in the Green Economy

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite recent attention to "frontier" green economies and the governance of emerging ecosystem services, the specific division of labour in these economies has been little studied. As many such initiatives are in the global South, labour's marginality potentially contributes to the existing precariousness of those who are more often identified as "participants". This article examines the roles and vulnerabilities of these actors: the carbon counters, species identifiers, GIS mappers, tree planters and others operating in the shadows. We draw on current understandings of labour and precarity to examine the geographical contours of an apparent and emerging "eco-precariat": a socio-economically diverse group of labourers that address the volatile demands of an ever-expanding environmental service-based economy. We illustrate our analysis drawing on examples from a Blue Carbon project in Kenya, ecosystem services project in the Philippines, and REDD+ scheme in Cambodia. We use these examples to theorise the nature of labour in these frontier economies and put forward a framework for analysing the eco-precariat. We highlight the need to understand the precarity and marginalisation potentially created by this green division of labour in the provision of new ecosystem products and services. This framework contributes to ongoing analyses of labour as a central part of the green economy discourse and to larger discussions in the geographies of labour literature around the future of work in the global South and beyond.

show abstract

Section: Labouring In the Shadows: From Proficians And The Hyper‐precmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Articulating the Eco‐precariat As A Future Research Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

NotJustParticipation: The Rise of the Eco‐Precariat in the Green Economy

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…While abandoning 30 year cycles is economically feasible (and far more so than abandoning 5 year cycles) it may prove culturally unacceptable. Even in societies where shifting cultivation is no longer the sole economic or nutritional mainstay, it is maintained to continue ancestral and cultural rituals (Ellen and Berstein 1994, Dressler et al 2018.…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Where such contractions occur, carbon losses are also assured (Borah et al 2018), as the standing secondary forest growth in the eldest fallow plots is replaced with degraded scrubland characteristic of short cycles, limiting both biomass and biodiversity recovery (Blankespoor 1991, Itioka et al 2014. Such changes, both current and predicted, highlight this ancient practice will likely be replaced before the centuries end (Heinimann et al 2017, Dressler et al 2018. This also comes at the cost of forested area, carbon stocks, cultural practices, and food security for marginalised poor communities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economically viable forest restoration in shifting cultivation landscapes

Morton

Borah

Edwards

2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Shifting cultivation is a predominant land use across the tropics, feeding hundreds of millions of marginalised people, causing significant deforestation, and encompassing a combined area of land ten-fold greater than that used for oil palm and rubber. A key question is whether carbon-based payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes can cost-effectively bring novel restoration and carbon-sensitive management practices to shifting agriculture. Using economic models that uniquely consider the substantial area of fallow land needed to support a single cultivated plot, we calculated the break-even carbon prices required for PES to match the opportunity cost of intervention in shifting agriculture. We do so in the North-east Indian biodiversity hotspot, where 35.4% of land is managed under shifting agriculture. We found net revenues of US$829.53-2581.95 per 30 ha when fallow area is included, which are an order of magnitude lower than previous estimates. Abandoning shifting agriculture entirely is highly feasible with break-even prices as low as US$1.33 t −1 CO 2 , but may conflict with food security. The oldest fallow plots could be fully restored for US$0.89 t −1 CO 2 and the expansion of shifting agriculture into primary forest halted for US$0.51 t −1 CO 2 , whereas abandoning short-fallow systems would cost US$12.60 t −1 CO 2 . A precautionary reanalysis accounting for extreme economic uncertainty and leakage costs suggests that all interventions, excluding abandoning short-fallow systems, remain economically viable with prices less than US$4.00 t −1 CO 2 . Even with poorly formed voluntary carbon markets, shifting agriculture represents a critical opportunity for low-cost forest restoration whilst diversifying income streams of marginalised communities across a vast area.

show abstract

“…Though indigenous livelihoods in the area are now highly diverse, as a result of both sustained conservation efforts and new economic opportunities in lowland areas, swidden agriculture remains a vital dimension of household subsistence and, to a large extent, part of Pala'wan social and cultural worlds (Dressler et al . in press). Swidden agriculture, and the cultivation of rice in particular, features prominently in mythology and everyday ritual practice and spirituality, and is bound up with the enactment of certain aspects of kinship and social relations.…”

Section: The Social Construction Of Climate and Pala'wan Narratives Omentioning

confidence: 99%

Weather from incest: The politics of indigenous climate change knowledge on Palawan Island, the Philippines

Smith

2018

Australian J of Anthropology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Indigenous peoples' understandings of climate change are often interpreted through an instrumental prism that privileges the ecologically adaptive nature of belief and practice. This paper explores the limits of this perspective by considering the environmental narratives of self-blame among households in the uplands of Palawan Island, the Philippines. In the south of the island, indigenous Pala'wan widely suggest that cyclical El Niño Southern Oscillation driven variation in rainfall and related food insecurity is the product of a linear change in climatic patterns occurring over the past several decades. This perceived climate change is explained in reference to the popularity of incestuous relationships and a decline in ritualised executions. Through an ethnographic focus on the politics of climate knowledge, I argue that Pala'wan narratives of self-blame speak as much to ongoing struggles between indigenous people and the Philippine state over control of the forested uplands as it does to the grounded and empirical qualities of indigenous environmental knowledge.

show abstract

Ungovernable? The vital natures of swidden assemblages in an upland frontier

Cited by 23 publications

References 27 publications

NotJustParticipation: The Rise of the Eco‐Precariat in the Green Economy

NotJustParticipation: The Rise of the Eco‐Precariat in the Green Economy

Economically viable forest restoration in shifting cultivation landscapes

Weather from incest: The politics of indigenous climate change knowledge on Palawan Island, the Philippines

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About