From: Susanne Seymour [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 14 August 2002 14:48
To: Stephen Essex
Subject: Session at AAG Annual Conference: Community, Collaboration
andthe Environment


Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, 5-9
March 2003, New Orleans

Community, Collaboration and the Environment: assessing the new spaces
and scales of environmental decision-making

(Sponsored by the Rural Geography Specialty Group, the Cultural and
Political Ecology Specialty Group, the Political Geography Specialty
Group (all of the AAG) and the Rural Geography Research Group of the
Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers).

The past decade has witnessed increasing institutional interest (at
both international and state levels) in community involvement in the
management of a range of environments, from public forests and wildlife
reserves, to watersheds and coastal reefs. A number of interconnected
impulses inform this interest, notably neo-liberal economic and
governmental reforms, the legitimating principles of Agenda 21, calls
for greater local participation in new forms of governance, and the
search for more efficient and effective resource management strategies.
Significantly, this institutional interest has paralleled, and more
often followed after, grass-roots initiatives that have long advocated
community-based environmental management as a strategy to achieve
diverse politico-environmental goals.

The convergence of this wide array of interests may explain in part the
rapid and steady rise of community-based collaboration (CBCs) as a new
potentially hegemonic strategy for environmental decision-making.
However, rather than readily resolving environmental conflicts via
policy initiatives that simultaneously ensure ecological sustainability,
the proliferation and implementation of CBCs continues to raise a number
of persistent problematic issues (albeit in new spatial configurations)
related to the use, control and management of the environment.  In this
session, we plan to examine a number of these issues, including:

· Emerging forms of institutional governance & the role of spatial
scale dynamics.
· The politics of community & the potential of participatory
democracy.
· The role of neo-liberalism in driving or shaping CBCs.
· Representations of the nature/environment in CBC processes.

A goal of this session is to critically examine these issues in a
format that encourages the scholarly exchange of ideas about CBCs
occurring in different national, regional and socio-cultural contexts.
Those interested please email an abstract of no more than 250 words to
either Susanne Seymour ([log in to unmask]) or Randy
Wilson ([log in to unmask]) by 30 August, 2002.

Susanne Seymour Randall K. Wilson
School of Geography Department of Environmental Studies
University of Nottingham Gettysburg College
Tel: +44 (0)115 9515453 Tel: 717-337-6034