Adaptation is a process of deliberate change in anticipation of or in reaction to external stimuli and stress. The dominant research tradition on adaptation to environmental change primarily takes an actor-centered view, focusing on the agency of social actors to respond to specific environmental stimuli and emphasizing the reduction of vulnerabilities. The resilience approach is systems orientated, takes a more dynamic view, and sees adaptive capacity as a core feature of resilient social-ecological systems. The two approaches converge in identifying necessary components of adaptation. We argue that resilience provides a useful framework to analyze adaptation processes and to identify appropriate policy responses. We distinguish between incremental adjustments and transformative action and demonstrate that the sources of resilience for taking adaptive action are common across scales. These are the inherent system characteristics that absorb perturbations without losing function, networks and social capit...

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Adaptation to Environmental Change: Contributions of a Resilience Framework

Community-based conservation (CBC) is based on the idea that if conservation and development could be simultaneously achieved, then the interests of both could be served. It has been controversial because community development objectives are not necessarily consistent with conservation objectives in a given case. I examined CBC from two angles. First, CBC can be seen in the context of paradigm shifts in ecology and applied ecology. I identified three conceptual shifts—toward a systems view, toward the inclusion of humans in the ecosystem, and toward participatory approaches to ecosystem management—that are interrelated and pertain to an understanding of ecosystems as complex adaptive systems in which humans are an integral part. Second, I investigated the feasibility of CBC, as informed by a number of emerging interdisciplinary fields that have been pursuing various aspects of coupled systems of humans and nature. These fields—common property, traditional ecological knowledge, environmental ethics, political ecology, and environmental history—provide insights for CBC. They may contribute to the development of an interdisciplinary conservation science with a more sophisticated understanding of social-ecological interactions. The lessons from these fields include the importance of cross-scale conservation, adaptive comanagement, the question of incentives and multiple stakeholders, the use of traditional ecological knowledge, and development of a cross-cultural conservation ethic.

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Rethinking Community‐Based Conservation

Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. The vigorous debate on ‘land grabbing’ already highlights instances where ‘green’ credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel – as where large tracts of land are acquired not just for ‘more efficient farming’ or ‘food security’, but also to ‘alleviate pressure on forests’. In other cases, however, environmental green agendas are the core drivers and goals of grabs – whether linked to biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, biofuels, ecosystem services, ecotourism or ‘offsets’ related to any and all of these. In some cases these involve the wholesale alienation of land, and in others the restructuring of rules and authority in the access, use and management of resources that may have profoundly alienating effects. Green grabbing builds on well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment – whether for parks, forest reserves or to halt assumed destructive local practices. Yet it involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances – as pension funds and venture capitalists, commodity traders and consultants, GIS service providers and business entrepreneurs, ecotourism companies and the military, green activists and anxious consumers among others find once-unlikely common interests. This collection draws new theorisation together with cases from African, Asian and Latin American settings, and links critical studies of nature with critical agrarian studies, to ask: To what extent and in what ways do ‘green grabs’ constitute new forms of appropriation of nature? How and when do circulations of green capital become manifest in actual appropriations on the ground – through what political and discursive dynamics? What are the implications for ecologies, landscapes and livelihoods? And who is gaining and who is losing – how are agrarian social relations, rights and authority being restructured, and in whose interests?

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Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?

This review examines the social, economic, and political effects of environmental conservation projects as they are manifested in protected areas. We pay special attention to people living in and displaced from protected areas, analyze the worldwide growth of protected areas over the past 20 years, and offer suggestions for future research trajectories in anthropology. We examine protected areas as a way of seeing, understanding, and producing nature (environment) and culture (society) and as a way of attempting to manage and control the relationship between the two. We focus on social, economic, scientific, and political changes in places where there are protected areas and in the urban centers that control these areas. We also examine violence, conflict, power relations, and governmentality as they are connected to the processes of protection. Finally, we examine discourse and its effects and argue that anthropology needs to move beyond the current examinations of language and power to attend to the ways in which protected areas produce space, place, and peoples.

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Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas

https://umanitoba.ca/institutes/natural_resources/canadaresearchchair/Carlsson&Berkes.paper.05.pdf

Co-management : concepts and methodological implications

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a loosely woven transnational movement, based particularly on advocacy by nongovernmental organizations working with local groups and communities, on the one hand, and national and transnational organizations, on the other, to build and extend new versions of environmental and social advocacy that link social justice and environmental management agendas. One of the most significant developments has been the promotion of community‐based natural resource management programs and policies. However, the success of disseminating this paradigm has raised new challenges, as concepts of community, territory, conservation, and indigenous are worked into politically varied plans and programs in disparate sites. We outline a series of themes, questions, and concerns that we believe should be addressed both in the work of scholars engaged in analyzing this emergent agenda, and in the efforts of advocates and donor institutions who are engaged in designing and implementing s...

Representing communities: Histories and politics of community‐based natural resource management

1 Introduction 2 Part 1: Mobilizations and Models 3 A. Institutional Mandates 4 Chapter 1: Dances Around the Fire: Conservation Organizations and Community-Based Natural Resource Management 5 Chapter 2: Participatory Democracy in Natural Resource Management: A "Columbus' Egg"? 6 Chapter 3: Building Models of Community-Based Natural Resource Management: A Personal Narrative 7 B. Defining Community in National and Transnational Contexts 8 Chapter 4: Congruent Objectives, Competing Interests and Strategic Compromise: Concept and Process in the Evolution of Zimbabwe's CAMPFIRE Programme 9 Chapter 5: Of Diffusion and Context: The Bubbling Up of Community-BasedResource Management in Mozambique 10 Chapter 6: Model, Panacea, or Exception?: Contextualizing CAMPFIRE and Related Programs in Africa 11 Chapter 7: What We Need is a Community Bambi: The Perils and Possibilities of Powerful Symbols 12 C. Empowerment or Coercion? 13 Chapter 8: Community, Forestry and Conditionality in the Gambia 14 Chapter 9: Can David and Goliath Have a Happy Marriage: The Machiguenga People and the Camisea Gas Project in the Peruvian Amazon 15 Chapter 10: Social Movements, Community-Based Natural Resource Management, and the Struggle for Democracy: Experiences from Indonesia 16 Part 2: Stealing the Master's Tools: Mapping and Law in Community-Based Natural Resource Management 17 A. Mapping against Power 18 Chapter 11: Maps, Power and the Defense of Territory: The Upper Mazaruni Land Claim in Guyana 19 Chapter 12: The Ye'kuana Mapping Project 20 Chapter 13: Maps as Power-Tools: Locating "Communities" in Space or Situating People and Ecologies in Place? 21 Chapter 14: Mapping as Tool for Community Organizing Against Power: A Moluccas Experience 22 B. Legal Strategies for the Disenfranchised 23 Chapter 15: Concepts and Strategies for Promoting Legal Recognition of Community-Based Property Rights: Insights from the Philippines and Other Nations 24 Chapter 16: Engaging Simplifications: Community-Based Natural Resource Management, Market Processes, and State Agendas in Upland Southeast Asia 25 Chapter 17: Advocacy as Translation: Notes on the Philippine Experience 26 INDEX 27 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Charles Zerner

Papers

Representing communities: Histories and politics of community‐based natural resource management

Communities and conservation : histories and politics of community-based natural resource management