Chair: Pia Rinne, Development Studies, Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki (pia.rinne[at]helsinki.fi)
Coordinator: Elina Iso-Markku, Development Studies, Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki (elina.iso-markku[at]helsinki.fi)
Room: 401 (Thursday & Friday)
Environmental risk is generally defined as a function of environmental hazard, the elements at risk and the vulnerability of the population. Countries in the South are often in a disadvantageous position regarding all these elements. In recent years environmental hazards have become more prevalent and the general public has become more aware of the associated risks. Governments and private corporations are increasingly confronted with managing the expectations of a public more aware of environmental risks and demanding a more democratic management of these.
Environmental risk management concerns selecting appropriate responses to the political, social, cultural, economic and engineering implications of risks. Risk management is affected by various, often competing political and economic interests and the access to control and power, and is therefore closely linked to questions of environmental justice. People mostly subjected to environmental risks are often deprived of agency in risk management, and the institutions dealing with risk management often fail to take local knowledge sufficiently into account. There is often a lack of understanding of the interplay between scientific and lay environmental knowledge and of the different risk perceptions of actors at different levels. Environmental citizenship is an important aspect in the management of environmental risks, as notions and experiences of representation and inclusion can lessen the misunderstandings between government policies and citizen expectations.
This workgroup invites papers on various issues regarding environmental risks and environmental citizenship, such as:
- What is ‘environmental citizenship’?: What are the roles, rights and responsibilities of citizens, communities, ENGOs and business corporations in environmental governance and decision-making related to environmental risks? What obstacles are there to effective participation in environmental governance and how can these be overcome?
- Governance of environmental risk: How can public and private institutions promote new forms of governance in countering environmental risks and promoting environmental citizenship?
- Environmental justice: How could society promote the management of risks in a way that prevents one party to benefit at the expense of potential harm to another?
- Environmental education and citizenship: What are the roles of formal and informal education in mitigating environmental risks and promoting environmental citizenship?
PRESENTATIONS
(1) REDD+ benefit sharing mechanisms: Enhancing or reducing equity in environmental governance?
Sarobidy Rakotonarivo, Institute of International Forestry and Forest Products, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany (sarobidy.rakotonarivo[at]gmail.com) and Irmeli Mustalahti, Department of Political and Economic Studies – University of Helsinki, Finland (irmeli.mustalahti[at]helsinki.fi)
The concept of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) has become a key pillar of international cooperation on climate change. There are great expectations that it could address the 15-20% of global GHG emissions attributed to deforestation, forest degradation and provide at the same time economical, social and environmental co-benefits. While most countries acknowledge the importance of co-benefits, they are only just beginning the process of defining how the sharing of economical benefits in REDD+ may work. The Tanzanian Community Carbon Enterprise and UNREDD+ models offer two examples of benefit sharing mechanisms which remains to be analyzed. The various actors and groups involved in design these models have varying degrees of negotiation power and diverse interests regarding the objectives, design and implementation of REDD+. This raises questions of institutional choices and recognition: how REDD+ is designed and implemented, and how it influences equity in forms of recognition and accountability of various social groups among the non-governmental organizations, agrarian communities and in various levels of governance. This study is integrated part of an action research project called “The role of Participatory Forest Management in Mitigation of and Adaptation to Climate Change: Opportunities and Constrains” and is intended to be part of an ongoing local governance research program in Africa, the Responsive Forest Governance Initiative (RFGI).
(2) Media discourses on flood risk management in Tabasco, Mexico
Pia Rinne, Development Studies, Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki (pia.rinne[at]helsinki.fi)
Since 2007 the Mexican state of Tabasco has experienced annual floods. Environmental policies such as flood management are discursively constructed. Media plays a huge role in creating public opinion on environmental and policy issues, and citizen opinions can have power to influence policies. This paper analyses how flood management has been constructed in the media and how media constructions validate or challenge flood management policies. Media lays out its representations of reality both verbally and visually, and these representations influence public understandings and institutional policies.
The analysis is based on critical discourse analysis of newspaper texts from seven years. I analyse dominating and alternative discourses around flood management and what discursive shifts have occurred, how social actors are represented and how these and the journalists through their discursive strategies try to frame media discourses. I analyse what power struggles and political, ideological and economic motives there are behind the discourses and what relationships there are between wider societal changes and media texts. Analysing flood management coverage from two politically opposite newspapers provides possibilities to analyse the practices of flood management and public and citizen views on them from different perspectives.
(3) International organizations in environmental cooperation in the Western Balkans: What is the role of the local level?
Emma Hakala, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki (emma.hakala[at]Helsinki.fi)
The research deals with the involvement of international organizations in environmental security in the Western Balkans and the regional participation in local cooperation. After the wars in the 1990’s, a number of initiatives have been started, with support from international actors, to improve environmental quality and simultaneously to reinforce regional stability through cooperation. In my dissertation I will look at the realization of the objectives of these projects and trace their effects at the local level, thereby also considering the process of environmental securitization that has been taking place.
One important aspect of the environmental cooperation thematic is the level of regional and local participation in the process. Just as regional cooperation is untenable without indigenous regional initiative, sustainable environmental development requires ownership by the local communities. Has international involvement succeeded at developing regional engagement in environmental cooperation, or is it rather something imposed from the outside? In this paper, I aim to address this issue which ultimately comes down to questions of environmental democracy and citizenship.
(4) Fishing, petroleum industry and territorial rights in Southeastern Mexico
Liina-Maija Quist, Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki (liina-maija.quist[at]helsinki.fi)
This paper studies discourses and strategies of different actors involved in the making of offshore zones of exclusion reserved for the use of the petroleum industry. The objective is to analyze discursive and material resources that fishers, the government and the petroleum industry representatives deploy in negotiating territorial rights, and also to look at the consequences of these politics to the fishing industry, reflecting the present with the history of the relationship between fishers, government and the para-statal petroleum company Pemex in Tabasco, Mexico. The research material involves a three-month ethnographic fieldwork among different groups of fishers, interviews with government and petroleum industry representatives, participation in meetings and analysis of policy and juridical documents and newspaper articles. The study uses a Foucault-inspired method of Critical Discourse Analysis.
A relatively stable coexistence of fishing and petroleum extraction in Tabasco has for decades been enabled through unofficial compensatory deals between individual fishers and petroleum industry workers and at times, government repression. However, the displacement of coastal and offshore fishers, which begun with the establishment of the Zone of Exclusion in 2003 (in order to protect the petroleum industry from terrorist attacks), is predicted to escalate with recent discoveries of new petroleum reserves and planned construction of platforms in the vicinity of the coast of Tabasco. In order to appease the conflict of space and to search for alternatives for the fishers, the state government has established a negotiation table that is the first one to bring together representatives of all coastal fishers, Pemex and the Mexican government. However, while discourses among the three actor groups refer to the new form of negotiation as more equitable and transparent, it hasn’t yet been able to come up with long-term strategies. Moreover, the unregistered, “free” fishers (pescadores libres), who form the majority of the fishers, but who are not formally recognized by the government, are neglected in these negotiations.
The politics involved in the recent conflict of territorial rights reflects a history of corporatism and surveillance. Regardless of a shift in the discourses of especially Pemex and the government, political pressure exercised by fishers continues to be preserved by economic compensations canalized from Pemex. The material consequences of the displacement can be seen to reflect both social hierarchies and neo-liberal competition; the fishers in the position to secure their place in the industry are long-experienced political leaders who are best able to appropriate the new discourses of the government and Pemex.
(5) Environmental citizenship and justice-based responsibilities
Simo Kyllönen, Social and Moral Philosophy, University of Helsinki (simo.kyllonen[at]helsinki.fi)
Environmental citizenship is often characterized not by rights but by the self-imposed duties and responsibilities of the citizens. In this sense it contrasts traditional notions of liberal citizenship. But it departures also from the civic republican citizenship by broadening the space within which citizenship relations take place. In this it follows the critique of the cosmopolitan and feminist insights that a nation state and its public realm cannot be the only options for such political space.
The paper analyses, how the demands of environmental justice contribute to our understanding of citizenship and its political space. The environmental citizenship’s understanding replaces the membership-based notion of citizenship with a notion that is based on the material and causal bonds of unjust ecological space utilisation. How does this affect our understanding of the democratic and procedural legitimation of political authority?
Moreover, how will the concept of environmental citizenship alter our understanding of the just distribution of responsibilities to take action – both between the citizens and their authorities as well as between those who are collectively responsible for environmental harm and the victims of this harm?
(6) Globalization, Environment and Gender in SSA
Teija Reyes, Post-doctoral researcher, American University (teijareyes[at]hotmail.com)
Globalization and capitalism affect on everyone in the world. Maximizing profit, even immorally, many times undermine the maintenance of human life, not to mention of environment. Production has declined and rural poverty has increased. The gap between poor and rich has grown, and the environmental degradation has got worse. Many African countries are worse off now than before the globalization. Only the minority, who has access and control to the resources, benefit. Male family members have many times migrated to towns; still most rural resources are controlled by men. Women are overwhelmed with all responsibilities for meeting family’s basic needs. Women have important role for maintaining culture, ethnobotanical knowledge and transferring them to other generations. Women are also more aware of nature’s degradation, and willing to improve it as they are more dependent on it for survival. The results show that rural livelihood improves if women are empowered and seen economically more visible. They need technological and legal advice, access to resources and decision-making, and help to organize. Governments are needed in progressing decentralization, agribusiness, agricultural extension and private sector development in rural areas. Sustainable profitable agroforestry that benefit rural farmers and involve women in it is a potential option.
(7) Interdependence of people and the nature as a global social work concern
Satu Ranta-Tyrkkö, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tampere (satu.ranta-tyrkko[at]uta.fi)
In my presentation I would like to discuss the importance of natural environment and related ecosystemic resources particularly for poor rural people in the Global South, but also elsewhere. My starting point is that as a direct source of food, water, work, and other basic needs, natural environment is still today vitally important for the lives of poor people throughout the world. Likewise, deterioration of the natural environment is commonly an ingredient in complex local and global problems resulting in poverty, violent conflicts, economic crisis, natural and man-made disasters, as well as both short-term displacements and long-distance and long-term migration. Among many other disciplines and professions, these are tasks that also social work deals with as a profession, discipline, and a movement in various local contexts. Therefore, while paying attention to natural environment has been fairly marginal in social work discussion, it has been increasingly noted particularly in the discussions concerned of social work in international/global perspective, eco-social social work, and social justice issues. While there is still a way to go, it is also likely that in dealing with environmental risks and adaptation to environmental change social work could have something to contribute through its knowhow of ‘the social, most of all its experience and commitment to work with poor and vulnerable communities.
(8) Environmental Risk Management in the Developing Nations: Experiences from Finnish Capacity Development Projects in the Field of Meteorology
Minna Kristiina Mayer, Development Studies, University of Helsinki (minna.mayer[at]helsinki.fi)
Ability to forecast weather and issue warnings relating to it, i.e. country’s meteorological capacity, has an essential role in battling concrete risks posed by climate change: increased extreme weather-related phenomena, e.g. floods, drought, cyclones, etc. Meteorological institutes’ role in environmental risk management is essential in two key areas: safety and food security. In order to develop meteorological capacity in the developing nations, Finland has practiced development cooperation in this field. Thematic semi-structured interviews (n=13) were conducted with meteorological experts having experience from these projects. Interview questions were divided into four themes adapted from capacity development theory: societal significance, concrete practices, management and networks. First two were identified as most problematic, since they depend on deeply rooted societal problems, which the
institutes have little power over, e.g. political stability and infrastructure. Although management needed also much improvement, it was seen mainly as possible to achieve. Networking skills were seen as both adequate and important. It was also found that challenges of meteorological organizations are not solved merely through financial means. In addition to continuing technical support, significantly more active efforts should be directed towards institutes’ communication abilities and scope, as well as general empowerment, to ensure citizens’ safety in the future.