Upcoming event: The Social Dimensions of Resilience

The Environmental Change and Security Program will host The Social Dimensions of Resilience at the Wilson Center on:

Monday, March 18, 2013
12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
5th Floor Conference Room

Featuring: Roger-Mark De Souza
Vice President of Research and Director of the Climate Program, Population Action International

Elizabeth Malone
Senior Research Scientist, Joint Global Change Research Institute

Betty Hearn Morrow
Professor Emeritus, Florida International University
Moderator: Laurie Mazur
Author, ECSP Consultant

RSVP Here

From the Haitian earthquake to Superstorm Sandy, recent years have presented many “teachable moments” about the need for greater resilience in the face of disaster. To date, much of the conversation on resilience has focused on making infrastructure more robust—by, for example, building seawalls to protect against storm surges. But resilience has social dimensions that are at least as important. Social factors largely determine the extent to which people and communities respond to and recover from changes in the environment, whether gradual (such as climate change) or more abrupt (such as hurricanes). This panel will explore the social dimensions of resilience, including the role of equity–especially gender equity–and inclusive governance. Panelists will present research and initiatives that link reproductive health to climate adaptation, and showcase current projects in Malawi, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and the Caribbean that take a holistic approach to cultivating resilience.

Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. (“Federal Triangle” stop on Blue/Orange Line). A map to the Center is available at WilsonCenter.org/directions. Note: Photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.

Anthro in the news 2/18/13

• Gas company targets a protected park in the Peruvian Amazon

An article in The Guardian reported on how an energy company is eyeing the gas reserves of a Peruvian Amazon park where biodiversity exceeds any other place on earth and which is home to indigenous people who have little contact with the outside world.

Pluspetrol's Pagoreni-B gas well, part of the Camisea project in the Amazon jungle near Cuzco, Peru. Photograph: Cris Bouroncle/AFP — Pluspetrol's Pagoreni-B gas well near Cuzco, Peru. Photograph: Cris Bouroncle/AFP

The report is based on a leaked document. The revelation about Manu national park follows rumors and reports in Peru that the government is to create a gas concession bordering or including parts of the park, but which have not been publicly confirmed.

The Guardian quotes anthropologist Daniel Rodriguez, who has worked with indigenous federation Fenamad: “This is the first time we’ve seen evidence for plans to expand hydrocarbon activities into Manu.” Manu is home to 10 percent of the world’s bird species, 5 percent of all mammals, and 15 percent of all butterflies. Unesco has declared the park a World Heritage Site and biosphere reserve.

• Becoming a mother without a husband in Vietnam

The New York Times reported on northern Vietnamese war widows becoming mothers without husbands in order to avoid living without a child and dying a lonely death.

The article focuses on women in one village who “upended centuries-old gender rules and may have helped open the door for a nation to redefine parenthood.” Having endured the war, they developed a new strength and were determined not to die alone. They asked men, whom they did not interact with afterward, to help them conceive a child. The practice was known as “xin con,” or “asking for a child,” and it meant breaking with tradition, facing discrimination and enduring the hardships of raising a child alone.

“It was unusual, and quite remarkable,” said Harriet Phinney, an assistant professor of anthropology at Seattle University who is writing a book on the practice of xin con in Vietnam. Purposely conceiving a child out of wedlock, she said, “was unheard-of.” It was a product of the mothers’ bravery and a postwar society that acknowledged the unique situation of women across Vietnam, including thousands of widows who were raising children alone.
Continue reading “Anthro in the news 2/18/13” →

A different kind of cooking show

For those of you (including me) who enjoy watching TV cooking contests, we know that the worst that can happen is that an aspiring winner is perspiring, or the presentation was chaotic, or the judges made nasty comments about the taste of one of the dishes.

For millions of women who cook family meals, especially in developing countries, the challenges are quite different. There is no panel of judges and no “time’s up” called out to arrest the work of the contestants in their well-equipped stainless-steely kitchen.

Instead, there is a “killer in the kitchen” which calls time’s up for mothers and children who spend a lot of time inhaling cook stove fumes.

On November 3, Rob Bailis, assistant professor of environmental social science in the department of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, gave a CIGA seminar entitled, “Arresting the Killer in the Kitchen: The Promises and Pitfalls of Commercializing Improved Cookstoves.”

Bailis took the audience on a rich and insightful tour of how improved cook stoves could have a major positive impact on women, children, and the environment. His talk drew on knowledge about the effects of various types of fuel for daily cooking on the cooks and the wider environment.

His slides included maps of types of household fuel in various regions of the world. He brought together data from the fields of environmental studies, public health, and local surveys.

He discussed the “energy ladder hypothesis” which says that as people get wealthier, they use cleaner fuels. As I was listening, I was thinking: okay, this doesn’t sound good for the earth, given the way the economy is going.

Another point to share is this: Bailis said that Western development experts have been pushing improved cook stoves for three decades but there is very little evidence about their effectiveness in terms of reducing health risks for cooks/children and reducing deforestation and other environmental problems.

China is the country to watch on improved cook stoves. Of the 200 million improved cook stoves in the world, 80 percent are in China. Let’s hear about the “best practices” there and how they might be replicated elsewhere.

Thirty years is a long time, especially without much to say in terms of what works. Time to switch channels and get back to the cooking throw-down.

Maybe we need a TV show about what works in development?

Update from Professor Rob Bailis:
In fact, there is evidence that some improved stoves certainly improve quality and, based on that, we can justifiably hypothesize that if families adopt such stoves and use them regularly, then their air quality will improve and their health risk will be reduced. More importantly, there is evidence of this – just last week (about a week after my presentation) a paper was published in the Lancet by Kirk Smith and his team. This reports the results of the first randomized control trial based on improved cookstove adoption. They found that the stoves they promoted reduced the incidence of severe forms of respiratory infection by around 30%. So the evidence exists. What is lacking is program-specific follow-up to understand whether a given intervention is resulting in effective and long-term stove adoption. But, like I hinted at in my talk, the carbon markets are having an interesting influence on project monitoring by creating elaborate protocols to make sure stoves are actually used.

What lurks at the margin for indigenous peoples

Guest post by Morgan Keay

This post is an analytical literature review, with bibliography, of recent sources that use anthropological methods to explore threats to indigenous peoples, the implications of the threats/factors, and the responses of indigenous groups. It was originally prepared for a graduate seminar at George Washington University on “Culture, Risk and Security” in spring 2009.

A broad range of factors — including those alleged to threaten land, identity, rights, reputation — and a broad geographic scope — ranging from Siberia to Papua New Guinea — are featured in this essay. This breadth illustrates the diversity of threats faced by indigenous peoples and how indigenous people perceive and respond to these threats in widely divergent contexts. Trends and themes will be discussed with regard to who assesses or identifies threat, the nature of the threat, and the subsequent threat-response strategy of indigenous communities.

Who Assesses Threat?
With regard to factors that affect indigenous peoples, what is perceived as threatening by one party may be benign to another. Non indigenous actors such as indigenous rights activists, NGOs, or anthropologists may be quick to raise alarms over the very same factor indigenous peoples actively seek out (Donahoe 2008, Errington and Gewertz 1996). Anthropologists, for example, may assess the practice of neo-shamanism by Anglo Americans and Europeans as a form of cultural appropriation and thus a threat to the cultural integrity of shamanist indigenous groups (Wallis 1999), while an indigenous shaman may assess the phenomenon as neutral or even beneficial for the visibility of their traditions. Vice versa, unconcerned outsiders or those with a different stake in an issue may not recognize the risks associated with a given factor, while indigenous peoples see it as a clear threat (Collaredo-Mansfield 2002). Even among indigenous peoples, a single factor may be assessed differently, as is the case with ethnic policy and identity-based land/resource legislation in Siberia (Donahoe 2008), or the arrival of an extractive industry in indigenous territory in Brazilian Amazonia (Turner 1995), which are perceived as threats by some indigenous groups and individuals and as opportunity by others.

The factors explored in this essay may be understood by evaluating them in terms of themes about who assesses them as threatening, and the level of ambiguity or consolidation of that assessment. A factor that is perceived as a threat uniformly by all members of an indigenous group, and by a variety of distinct outside agents might be classified as a “clear threat,” whereas a factor that is ambiguously assessed among indigenous groups and individuals or among outside entities may be a “potential threat” or “threat-opportunity.” Environmental degradation, for example, might fall under the former, while at the same time, mining activities may fall under the latter (Turner 1995). The term “projected threat” may be appropriate for factors assessed as being threatening by an outsider but benign or even attractive to an indigenous group. This is the case with commercialization of ritual associated with “modernity” for the Chambri in Papua New Guinea (Errington and Gewertz 1996).

Continue reading “What lurks at the margin for indigenous peoples” →

What lies beneath

Possibly trillions of dollars worth of mineral deposits lie untouched beneath the surface in Afghanistan. A recent New York Times report generated a flurry of discussion about whether this subterranean wealth would help Afghanistan and its people or prove to be a “resource curse” that instead brings more violence.

One thing is certain, if the minerals are to be mined, there will have to be substantial infrastructure development (asphalted roads) and security for the mining companies. I can just see Halliburton written all over this, and taxpayer dollars supporting the US military to protect business interests.

A less gloomy and much more informed view than mine comes from long-term expert on Afghanistan, Thomas Barfield, professor of cultural anthropology at Boston University.

From ecological disaster to constitutional crisis

Guest post by Terence Turner

“Debating Belo Monte Hydroelectric Complex on the Xingu River,” creative commons licensed content by Flickr user International Rivers. March 14, 2007.

UPDATED: Once again, the indigenous peoples of the Xingú valley in the Brazilian Amazon are planning to make the long journey to the town of Altamira*, where the Trans-Amazonica highway crosses the Xingú. Their ultimate destination will be the island of Pimental a short distance downriver from the town, where the Brazilian government plans to build a huge hydroelectric dam they call Belo Monte after the nearest Brazilian village. The Indians’ bold plan, is to prevent the construction of the dam by building a new village directly on top of the proposed dam site and maintaining their occupation until the government abandons its plans for the dam. The planning for the encampment is being led by the Kayapo, the largest and most politically organized of the indigenous nations of the region, but other indigenous groups are also participating.

The Indians, in a bold attempt to prevent the construction of the project, are building a new village directly on top of the proposed dam site, They have vowed to maintain their occupation until the government abandons its plans for the dam. The construction of the encampment is being led by the Kayapo, the largest and most politically organized of the indigenous nations of the region, but other indigenous groups are also participating.

The Kayapo, however, are not waiting for the discussion of the plan for the encampment among the 23 indigenous groups of the Xingú Valley to reach consensus. They have already seized the ferry that carries Brazil Route 80, an important link in the Trans-Amazonica highway system, across the Xingú River at the Kayapo village of Piaraçú. The ferry and the river crossing are now under guard by armed Kayapo warriors, who have announced that they will continue their blockade until the government negotiates with them about their plans for the Belo Monte dam.

This will not be the first indigenous encampment organized by the Kayapo in their effort to stop the building of dams on the Xingú. In 1989, when the government first set out to implement its plan for a giant hydroelectric complex on the Xingú, with financial support from the World Bank, the Kayapo led a great rally of 40 indigenous nations at Altamira against the scheme, setting up an encampment of several hundred Indians at a Catholic retreat center just outside the town. The five-day rally was extensively covered by national and international media, and succeeded in persuading the World Bank to withdraw its planned loan for the construction of the dams.

* See the video, “The Kayapo: Out of the Forest” in the Disappearing World Series, Terence Turner, anthropological consultant, 52 minutes. This video covers the 1989 Altamira meeting and campaign against the Xingu dams. Available from the Royal Anthropological Institute(RAI)
here.

After the 1989 Altamira meeting, the Xingú dam scheme remained dormant, but not dead, for two decades. Two years ago it was revived as the centerpiece of the Lula government’s Project for Accelerated Development. As a Brazilian activist remarked at the time, “These big dams are like vampires: you pound a stake through their hearts but they rise again from the grave and you have to do it all over again.”

Continue reading “From ecological disaster to constitutional crisis” →

Mountains of a different kind

Tracy Kidder‘s widely read documentary book about Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti is called Mountains beyond Mountains. The title comes from a Haitian proverb which is translated into English as: “Beyond the mountains, more mountains.” In other words, every challenge is followed by another.

Have you by any chance read Rose George‘s book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters? If not, I highly recommend it. It will take you where no book (that I know of) has gone before. It’s about human excrement.

In following the excrement, George will guide you through the sewers of London to open defecation in rural India to the biogas revolution in villages of China: all places and situations that are quite “normal.”

Perhaps, in an updated edition, she will add a chapter on the “big necessity” in crisis situations. What happens, for example, when over a million people are displaced from their residences and are forced to survive in “tent camps?”

One things that happens is mountains beyond mountains of excrement. An article in the New York Times points to the sanitation situation and its implications for disease. Not to mention everyday misery and degradation.

The article, however, provides a ray of hope. Viva Rio, a Brazilian nongovernmental group, has launched an operation in one slum area of Port-au-Prince that turns human excrement into biogas that can be used for cooking and electricity.

This project should be replicated throughout the camps, throughout the island: turn the mountains beyond mountains of excrement into something people can use. Thank you, Viva Rio.

Image: Creative commons licensed Flickr content by BBC World Service. Feb. 9, 2010. From Haiti. “There aren’t many latrines, so this is pretty much the only way to dispose of all types of waste – dig a big hole and stick it in the ground.”

Follow the aid

Despite an abundance of aid materials and the good intentions of relief agencies, relief efforts in Thailand following the December 2004 earthquake/tsunami were afflicted by skewed distribution.

Jin Sato, associate professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, analyzes the factors that skewed relief good distribution in an article in Development in Practice. He discusses how the political and economic turmoil caused by relief efforts themselves constitute an additional risk for victims.

Sato also notes that while the social ramifications of relief efforts are substantial, yet they are often overlooked for three reasons:

most “disaster management” experts are engineers
social analysis requires time
relief organizations are poorly coordinated which prevents the generation of lessons for the future

His recommendations for more effective responses, based on lessons from the 2004-2005 tsunami relief efforts, are:

the selection of goods and distribution mechanisms are of paramount importance
aid efforts should not only supply goods but should focus on strengthening institutional resources that allow recipient communities to more effectively absorb the goods and distribute them fairly
relief agencies should co-ordinate with each other after the emergency stage to develop ways to reduce pre-existing inequalities or dominance

After reading his article, I decided to contact Professor Sato to learn more about him and his involvement in disaster response work. Here is my email interview with him:

Q: What is your background in terms of academic training?

A: My B.A. from the University of Tokyo was in anthropology, and I have a master’s degree in both international relations and public policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard University. My Ph.D. was in international studies (interdisciplinary) at the University of Tokyo, and my dissertation topic was on natural resource governance and politics in Thailand. I did a post-doc at the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University under Jim Scott in 1998-1999.

Since my student years, I have been interested in natural resource governance and foreign aid. The article is a spin off from my interest in the latter.

Q: When you worked as a policy advisor to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of Thailand, what were your major responsibilities?

A: I was there to advise on the formulation (and prioritization) of the Environmental Policy 5-year plan, particularly about citizen participation and the role of international assistance (especially that of the Japanese government).

Q: Where were you when the tsunami hit, and what role if any did you play in responding to the tragedy?

A: As you might remember, the Tsunami hit on Dec. 25. I was taking a vacation in Samui Island in Thailand. Since my duty was to advise on environmental policy, I was not sure what to do, but I contacted the JICA office to offer assistance since I could speak the language. They put me on the first assistance survey team to develop livelihood assistance strategy from Japan. But Japanese assistance was too slow, and I don’t think we had any impact at all.

Q: Can you comment on the current situation in Haiti, in terms of how your findings about Thailand might relate to that context?

A: Since I have not been to the field, it is hard to comment. But judging from the news, there was more order and discipline in Thailand where people could wait in lines to receive aid goods. The tsunami hit only the coastal zone and other parts remain intact (unlike the earthquake). This is a huge difference in terms of the availability of assistance and speed of recovery. I suspect that there will be some structural concentration in either damage or assistance due to pre-existing resource inequity.

Image courtesy of Jin Sato.

Go with the flow

Guest post by Laura Wilson

By focusing attention on a single but critical resource, Jessica Barnes sheds light on the complexities of social, economic, and political change in rural Egypt. The resource is water.

Barnes is currently completing her doctorate in Columbia University’s new multidisciplinary Ph.D. program in Sustainable Development. She combines training and perspectives in cultural anthropology, geography, and environmental science to understand the multifaceted world of water in a context where rainfall is extremely scarce and farmers depend on the flow of one river and its tributaries. Her mantra is: follow the water.

In a presentation at the Elliott School of International Affairs on January 27, Barnes described the findings from her research in Egypt on land reclamation from the desert for farming (she focused on the areas around Fayoum). The Egyptian government promotes land reclamation in order to help the country achieve food self-sufficiency and to create agricultural jobs for college graduates who cannot be absorbed by the civil service.

Barnes finds that the new farmers are successful in the “greening” of desert land, and much desert land is now producing food. But such expansion of farming requires water. Reclamation projects are located further from the Nile and its tributaries than the plots of longstanding farmers. Gaining access to irrigation water is difficult, so many new farmers resort to illegal means to obtain water for their farms. Barnes showed a photograph of one farmer’s illegal pipeline.

Long-term farmers said that their lands are no longer productive because the water they normally depend on is being diverted to the reclamation areas. Barnes links this pattern to what David Harvey refers to as “accumulation by dispossession.” The new farmers reclaim land from the desert and earn profits, but they simultaneously deprive long-term farmers of their livelihood. The long-term farmers are forced to abandon their nonproductive land.

Barnes’ ethnographic focus on water, augmented by her use of GIS mapping and long-term multi-level fieldwork, is an excellent example of how a resource-centered approach can yield rich insights of value to international development and environmental policy and programs.

Laura Wilson is a candidate for an M.A. degree in International Development Studies at George Washington University with a focus on gender, human rights, and development. She received a B.S. degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 2007. She is currently the program assistant for the International Development Studies program.

Image: “Egyptian stuff BW” from flickr user Richard Messenger, licensed with Creative Commons.

Accountability lost

by Barbara Miller

A category of local conflict in Peru is called conflictos mineros, mining conflicts. The existence of this specific term reflects the frequency of such conflicts in Peru following neoliberal economic reforms in the early 1990s. Fabiana Li, now a Newton International Fellow based at the University of Manchester, conducted research for her doctoral dissertation in anthropology at the University of California at Davis on mining accountability and conflicts in Cajamarca, Peru. In an article in PoLAR, she shows how the EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) documents and its approval process skew the outcome in favor of the mining companies.

Public mechanisms of evaluation and record-keeping are supposed to hold corporations accountable to local people. Li describes and analyzes the proceedings of a public workshop and a public hearing about the expansion of the country’s largest gold mine. The EIA is intended to serve as an instrument through which risks are made visible to the public. The risks that are shared with the public, however, are those that engineers can manage with mitigation plans. Furthermore, the EIA entrusts companies to carry out background studies on the landscape and the “social component,” to establish the “baseline” characteristics of the site, and to conduct monitoring as the project progresses.

Such company-sponsored studies, not surprisingly, provide a carefully constructed partial picture, erasing or framing out problematic issues. In spite of its claims to public accountability and transparency, the EIA works in non-transparent ways to serve the interests of the mining companies and the neo-liberal state.

Popular participation is emphasized as part of the process. Company representatives listen to the people who appear at the meetings. They take notes for hours on end. A critique of such participation is that it is in fact disempowering because it provides the appearance of public approval. As Li notes, contesting the approval of an EIA is difficult, and only one mining project has ever been halted at the EIA stage.

Nonetheless, many people in Cajamarca and elsewhere in Peru are pursuing creative forms of activism including seeking other scientific opinions to produce “counter-information.” The playing field in terms of scientific expertise, however, is extremely uneven. EIAs, including baseline studies and environmental monitoring, “increasingly rely on the language and tools of large-scale, capital-intensive science.” The need for scientific counter-arguments places a heavy financial burden on NGOs and campesino groups.

The EIA documents and so-called “popular participation” transform “participants” into unwitting or unwilling collaborators who had their chance to speak up during the EIA process. The companies are protecting their interests, using legalized, scientific, and performative means. But even such encircling power doesn’t mean there will never be another Bougainville.

Photo, “Yanacocha Gold Mine”, from Flickr, Creative Commons.