Natural resources at the centre of conflicting visions?
Exploring the quantitative/qualitative frontier for a consensual
management of the environment
Call for Contributions : Royal Geographical Society with IBG Annual
Conference London, 28th-30th August 2013
Sponsor : Participatory Geographies Research Group
Session convenors:
Andrea Berardi (Open University, UK), Jay Mistry (Royal Holloway,
University of London, UK), Elisa Bignante (University of Torino, Italy),
Céline Tschirhart (Royal Holloway, University of London), and Géraud De
Ville (Open University, UK).
Sustainable natural resource management has become of crucial
importance in the face of new challenges such as climate change and
accelerated environmental degradation in a world of 7 billion people. In
response, current international neoliberal policy formulation and
implementation is focused around the management of comodified ‘ecosystem
services’ such as carbon storage and biodiversity conservation. REDD+
and other payments for ecosystem services schemes require governments to
establish mechanisms for monitoring these ecosystem services or natural
goods. In the pursuit of assigning some form of ‘value’ to the
environment and its services, together with the predominantly top-down
vision governing the process of monitoring, the generally accepted
approach has been to focus on highly quantitative forms of measurement
and monitoring. Yet, in many countries where state and civic society
resources, both financial and human are low, it is the local communities
who are being asked to act as the stewards of ecosystems and actually do
the 'management' and 'monitoring' on the ground. But to what extent do
local communities living in these ecosystems have quantitative
worldviews and means of communication? Studies, particularly on
indigenous peoples, indicate the oral, relational, emotional, and
visual, as important elements of how communities relate to their
environment.
In this session, we draw on Hanson’s (1997) suggestion that geographers
should use methods that “maximise the chance that we will see things we
were not expecting to see, that leave us open to surprise, that do not
foreclose the unexpected, …to…avoid… simply affirm[ing] what we already
believe“ (p.125). In the context of the management of natural resources,
we invite papers to explore the following questions:
• To what extent and in what aspect do local communities have a more
qualitative worldview of their environment?
• How is it possible to integrate these qualitative perspectives and
dimensions into national and international policies that shape and
determine natural resource management for the benefit of local
communities?
• What methodological tools, including participatory methods,
technologies, can we adopt to promote and support a qualitative approach
to natural resource management? And with what limits?
• How do we analyse and communicate qualitative information?
• What is the ‘unexpected’ that might be revealed?
Please email questions about the session, or send abstracts (approx 250
words) to Andrea Berardi ([log in to unmask]), Jay Mistry
([log in to unmask]) or Elisa Bignante ([log in to unmask]) by
Tuesday 5th February 2013.
Reference:
Hanson S 1997 As the world turns: new horizons in feminist geographic
methodologies in Jones III, JP, Nast H and Roberts SM eds Thresholds in
feminist geography Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD 119-128.
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