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Cultural Ecology Newsletter (CEN #37 -- Spring 2001) Last Updated: Announcements Notes from Chair Netting Award Annals of the AAG manuscript call AAG business meeting Sustainability Science Calls: Conferences, meetings, publications Jobs/scholarships Plenty Meeting Reports Access to Resources: Land Tenure
and Governance in Members' News Oliver Coomes Book Reviews & Notes Federico on Boserup New Books Announcements The CESG Listserv (AAG-CESG-L)
is for general exchange of information, news, views, debate, questions and
answers by the members of the specialty group.All current CESG members have
been subscribed to the list. Go to
http://lists.psu.edu/archives/aag-cesg-l.html, select the link to join the
list, and follow the instructions. Thereafter, you can manage your
subscription and access the archives through the same interface. For all
queries, email jpm23@psu.edu . Only list members
(CESG members) can post messages. To do so, send your message to the list
address: Notes from the Chair - Spring 2001 We came, we spoke, we listened.
The 2001 national meetings have come, gone, and once again demonstrated our
group’s vitality. Our membership as of the end of We sponsored and co-sponsored some
thirty-eight sessions, six of them alone and thirty-two with other groups.
Clearly we continue to be an extremely active group that overlaps and
collaborates with other groups in paper sessions and panel discussions. A
breakdown of co-sponsorship provides some insight into which other groups we
collaborate with. (The total adds up to more than thirty-two because of the
number of sessions with more that two co-sponsors.) Latin America 8; Human
Dimensions 7; Africa 6; Cultural 6; Hazards 6; Asian 5; Indigenous Peoples 5;
Qualitative Research 4; Geomorphology 4; Contemporary Ag 3; Political 2; CLAG
1; Climate 1; Biogeography 1; Coastal and Marine 1; Economic 1; Remote
Sensing 1; Socialist 1; Urban 1; Water Resources 1. Such data hardly allow for
strong generalizations, but many of the co-sponsorships, especially toward
the top of the ranking, obviously represent long-standing associations. The
new Indigenous Peoples group clearly has much in common with the CESG. Also
worth remarking on is the lack of co-sponsorship with many other groups that
would seem to overlap with CESG in areas of interest: GIS, GPOW, Historical
Geography, and others. Maybe next year? Regarding some of the sessions
in particular, Andrés Guhl and The Awards Luncheon also
witnessed plenty of group activity. Congratulations to the following. Billie
Lee Turner II ( This year, with twenty-two
applications for the student awards, our student members once again
demonstrated their commitment to our dynamic research tradition. The 2001
Student Paper Award has gone to Paul Laris ( Last but far from least, I need
to thank Barbara Brower for her contributions over the last year and welcome
our new Western Region Councilor, Netting award - thanks Billie Lee Turner II, Higgins
Professor of Environment and Society at "I can't recall the
practice of Netting awardees addressing the CESG, and I hope I do not break
some appropriate convention by doing so. With this note I express my
appreciation for the honor given to me by the group. The long traditions of
geographical research on human-environment themes are served well by the
CESG, which has a large number of other highly qualified scholars who will,
no doubt, be honored in the near future. I was extremely lucky to have known Denevan on Barney Nietschmann,
2000 winner. Annals of the AAG We struggled to get a
human-environment or nature-society vision and editor for the Annals last
year. We now have a responsibility to insure a steady flow of manuscripts to
this section of the Annals. The past year this flow dropped off
significantly. It appears to have regenerated, but we need to make sure that
remains strong. Please submit the very best of your work that appeals to the
geographic community to the nature-society section of the Annals. Meeting notes for CESG business meeting Tom Whitmore recording 1. Opening comments from the new
Chair, a. New chair b. The CESG membership is
estimated by the AAG at about 238, but that this is a preliminary figure and
will likely grow since the AAG meeting was held so early this year. Problems
with new software and staff at the AAG offices have delayed a more accurate
count (also see below). As before the CESG ranks about 10th in memberships
among all AAG SGs. c. Sluyter noted that in the
2001 AAGs CESG sponsored of co-sponsored 38 sessions. d. From the AAG SG chairs
meetings, Sluyter noted a number of issues for the group to consider. i. Reg Gollege has a project to
create a number of on-line geographical case studies ? members wishing to
contribute should contact Reg directly. ii. Starting in 2002, the AAG
will go to an anniversary membership renewal system rather than the calendar
year system now in place. Sluyter noted that this will potentially impact our
accounting since we potentially won't have a firm count of members or of our
cash balance (on deposit with the AAG) with the new system. iii. The 'New' Annals is seeking
MS submissions. Currently the acceptance rate is about 30%. The new editors
are hoping for a faster turn around rate. 2. Treasurer's report by Tom
Whitmore. a. Tom noted that the AAG office
problems lead to no financial report being prepared by the AAG in advance of
the meeting as has been the case in the past. It is not clear what will be
done in future given the changing registration procedures being initiated in
2002. b. A provisional report (through
Feb. 2000) was created for the SG Chairs meeting but it was incomplete due to
the early date of the meeting and late registration by members. i. In that report, the CESG is
credited with 109 regular members and 50 student members through Feb. 2001
and 22 regular and 57 student members for 2000. It is not clear if the 2000
figures are for the entire year, however, and they probably only represent
members not accounted for in the end of 2000. ii. Given these membership
numbers, the AAG foresees depositing in our account (maintained by the AAG)
$110 for the unregistered yr 2000 members and $545 for the 2001 members for a
total of $655. c. The current balance of the
account (as of the meeting dates in late Feb) is unknown, but an e-mail dated
3. Report on the CE chapter in
the forthcoming new edition of Geography in a. CESG chapter co-author, b. A draft of the CE chapter has
been written and circulated to members of the committee. c. Gary Gaile was contacted and
noted that the SG has until mid-summer to give a complete version, but it is
not clear if the present version has been reviewed externally. d. Chapter authors, Bassett and
Zimmerer , hope that the resulting piece faithfully represents the diversity
of the SG and that no one feels slighted. Many thanks offered to the large
number of submissions of reprints or other material ? the resulting
bibliography will be huge. e. The status of the chapter
will be noted on the web site. 4. Newsletter report from a. Simon is still happy to be
the newsletter editor if the membership approves. b. Simon gets very little
feedback from the membership and would welcome suggestions, criticisms, and
praise. c. The spring 2001 issue of the
newsletter is not yet complete but will be posted soon [this is it]. d. Simon noted that while he
sent many books out for review, few reviews returned. He questioned the
utility of the book review section since so few were actually posted. i. e. Simon wondered if other,
substantive sections should be created to replace/augment the book reviews? i. f. Simon asked if the newsletter
should be continued as a web site or should it be available only on the
Listserv? i. Oliver Coomes noted that the
current web format was useful in that it was more permanent and even
searchable and that is an advantage to students and others. ii. 5. Issues regarding the CESG
Listserv a. i. One way to handle this would
be to make the Listserv an 'open' list and let people add themselves. ii. This raises, however,
problems of list etiquette that can be managed now by the managed list. iii. iv. But, an open list is
potentially open to spamming. Someone asked if the sysop of the list could
deal with the spamming and Andrew said that he'd ask. v. Andrew noted that in the
Chair's meeting the issue of AAG management of the SG's Listservs was raised
but Ron Abler declined to commit to that option at this time. vi. Ultimately Andrew felt that
it might be best to leave things as they are for the time being to see how
these changes impact us. 6. Awards by the CESG a. Student awards presented at
the Awards Luncheon i. Field Study: Jeff Bury and
Bill Mosley ii. Paper: Elizabeth Olsen and b. Currently there are more than
2 'field' and 10 'paper' entrants (the deadline is the end of i. This is far more than in past
years and someone wondered if the the Listserv was responsible for getting
the word out. c. The Netting award was
presented to Billie Lee Turner II who could not attend the business meeting.
Billie Lee's profound thanks were reported to the meeting by 7. New business a. Donald Friend of the Mountain
geography SG noted that 2002 is the UN 'year of the mountains' and as such
the SG would be seeking special issues in several journals to promote
mountain geography. He urged CESG members with interests in mountains to be
aware and to submit manuscripts. b. The issue of additional CESG
awards was widely discussed. i. (1) Melinda Meade noted
satisfaction with both. (2) Tom Whitmore noted that care
needed be taken with the process of nominating and voting for these and the
existing Netting award. (NB currently nomination and voting takes place among
the CESG Board comprised of the Chair, the Sec/tres, Student representative,
and the regional representatives) (3) Suzanne Michel noted that
other SGs have awarded groups such as NGOs or Indigenous rights groups with
plaques or the like. These were nominated by SG members who know of their
work and the winners were invited to the AAGs to receive their plaques. (4) (5) Oliver Coomes questioned the
utility of adding any more awards for senior scholars (as these would
presumably be). (a) Anthony Bebbington agreed
and suggested a new 'scholarship' award to be awarded for the best paper
annually regardless of rank or seniority. (6) c. It was suggested that we
inquire soon if there are available AAG funds to bring a distinguished
scholar to the meetings in d. The AAG wants SGs to be
thinking of how to celebrate the centennial of the AAG in e. f. Lastly, but certainly not
least, the SG elected a new Western representative to replace the resigning
current representative. Sustainability Science. CESG
member -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Calls; conferences, meetings,
publications Urban Political Ecology, Justice
and Scale in Advanced Capitalist Countries Organized by Erik Swyngedouw (School
of Geography, Oxford University) and Nik Heynen (Department of Geography,
Indiana University) for the 2002 AAG Meeting in Los Angeles. Urban
political-ecology has recently emerged as an important lens through which to
understand the urban environmental ramifications of contemporary global
capitalism. Despite encouraging recent developments, there still exists the
need to expand the approach, both through better theorization and informed
case-studies. Most of the recent political ecological research has favored -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jobs/scholarships (all dated, don’t apply) Job at Job at Job at Job at Syracuse The Department
of Geography at Syracuse University invites applicants for a Visiting
Post-Doctoral Instructor in Human Geography for academic year 2001-2002,
beginning August 27, 2001.We seek a Human Geographer to teach courses in
Global Environmental and Population Change, and also to teach a regional
course from among the following: USA, Former USSR, China, South Asia, or
Africa. The successful candidate will be responsible for four different
courses, two in each semester. A Ph.D. at time of appointment is preferred.
Deadline: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Meeting Reports Access to Resources: Land Tenure
and Governance in This workshop was the third in a
series of ESRC-funded meetings on 'Transformations in African Agriculture'
and was convened by Phil Woodhouse at IDPM, University of 1) Customary land rights ,
expressed as ' land to the tiller' , or ' land to the inheritor' - do not
protect the poorer or disadvantaged members of communities, and need to be
reformed. 2) The negotiability and
ambiguity of rights is a positive feature of customary systems, because it
means there is always some opportunity for the poor to gain resource and land
access often through informal mechanisms and derived rights such as sharecrop
ping and loans. 3) The negotiability and
ambiguity of rights is indeed a feature of African systems, but the defa ult
mode of privatization of land actually increases inequality across societies,
because powerful social actors gain access or resources at the expense of
poorer actors. ' Land to the buyer' becomes the default mode. Which of these perspectives was
best supported by the case studies? Woodhouse and his team studied an
irrigated swamp in Kimana, The authors of the book argue
that processes of socioeconomic differentiation are downplayed in populist
writing on African land use systems, and in 'sustainable livelihoods '
thinking which focuses on the strength of local initiative and local
knowledge. In the book, it is suggested that the ' Lie of the Land' style
arguments (identified in African Enclosures with the IDS Environment group)
about the power of global discourses to dominate African policymaking
rightfully identify power inequalities in determining the fate of African
landscapes, but fail to adequately explore the political economy of
socio-economic differentiation, particularly between members of local
communities. We need to better understand the implications of the 'default
mode' through the tools of political economy and local level investigations -
particularly market based access to land and water. Comments from Christopher
Clapham and the other workshop members reinforced this point, and moved the
discussion onwards to consider political and fiscal decentralization
programmes in Africa, which are trying to push decisonmaking 'downwards' to
local bodies and to communities themselves. Would the communities' studies in
African Enclosures be suitable targets for decentralized government
structures? The participants had their doubts. Decentralization programmes,
may - in theory - permit greater local governance of wetlands in dry lands.
Yet the case studies showed that de facto local governance was already in
place, and this was often exclusionary and conflictual. We cannot assume that
poverty reduction or equity will emerge from vesting power with local
communities and their leaders - this is a very naive assumption. Clapham
stressed that there is a strong reason lying behind decentralisation efforts
- the manifest failure of many African central states to govern effectively
and to respect human rights. But notions of good governance still take their
cue from an erroneous, and western inspired view of accountability and
politics basically that civil society is worthy of support. What constitutes
civil society, however, is rarely fully understood - in fact the range of
actors is diverse, and not always separate from the state of from business.
So there are ranges of "unintended consequences of well intentioned
actions" under the guise of decentralization. Three issues will not go
away, and will stymie efforts to vest control in local communities: 1)
Conflicts internal to communities over resources will be exacerbated or
repressed by decentralization. Local power structures are unequal, and
contain significant age and gender biases that will endure. 2) Conflict
between ' indigenous' and ' immigrant' or 'outsider' communities are
widespread. Dissent over land access can be particularly hard to handle in
these conditions. Decentralization can vest more power in 'indigenous'
leaders to exclude others. As David Hulme argues, political leaders ' play'
with ethnicity and social differentiation. 3) There is also a clash between
holders of rights to land often local people - and a range of 'providers' of
rights external to communities - particularly governments and NGOs. He argues
the state is always needed to counterbalance local political conflict over
land and to manage the activities of NGOs etc. External providers like NGOs
act as a magnet for local people, and can create competition. Clapham proposed that customary
authorities are a 'screen' behind which other things happen - exploitation,
as well as mediation and resolution of conflicts. We need to penetrate this
screen. However be wary - if, under devolved governance, 'rights' to land or
resources were rendered more transparent and clear cut, would the poor be
able to negotiate and retain informal or derived rights? Unlikely. Clapham
feels the only option facing us is to abandon western models of equity and good
governance, and to 'go with the flow' (view 3 of land reform above), even if
this means tacit acceptance of the 'default mode' as an actually existing
model for social and economic change. In discussion there was agreement,
following Henry Bernstein, that 'access to land is not enough' - the studies
revealed that access to labour, to materials, to health, and other social and
material goods is also paramount in addressing rural poverty. It was also
very clear, as he argued, that a natio nal level politics often lies behind
land tenure reform and decentralisation of governance - witness the racial
and economic disputes that have affected land reform in Camilla Toulmin of IIED
presented a paper on Identifying a research agenda for the reform of land
tenure that bravely proposed some avenues for future research and policy
reform, in the light of the realities of politicized land access and tenure
struggles. She also suggested that land access conditions have tightened over
time for rural people - for example in West Africa, elders will no longer
allocate land to young men in the community without question (creating exclusion),
and these youth sometimes rebel against working without pay on the family
farm for several years (leading to individualisation). In areas of strong
immigration, local villagers are trying to reclaim land already given to
immigrant farmers. In these conditions, domestic groups are fragmenting (one
part of Woodhouses default mode) with short-term calculation of economic
advantage often replacing reciprocity as a driving principle of household
decision-making. But people need to negotiate a complex path the ensure land
access, sometimes resorting to fictive documents issues by local leaders or
personages, that lack legal authority, to 'claim' land as theirs. There is
therefore a 'plurality of norms' for assuring land access. There is also
confusion in several countries about the mechanisms proposed under
decentralisation programmes. IIED efforts which hare sponsored by DFID and
other donors, and are some of the most important research and publications
programmes currently ongoing in A surprising turn to the
discussion, and one very important to land tenure policy, is over the new
geography of African citizenship. As Camilla noted In Ivory Coast, Ivoriens
are ranking their Ivorien identity - often invented - well above that of the
long term and short term Burkinabe migrants that provide the majority of
labour on the country's plantations, and fill many urban jobs. In a situation
of political turmoil, Burkinabes are being ejected or are leaving the country
voluntarily, amidst harassment and loss of livelihood (such harrasment has
been seen be fore, in In conclusion, the meeting
broadly supported Phil Woodhouse's/Henry Bernstein's thesis that the default
mode of changing land use in much of Africa is individualization and
commercialization of production, and agreed than this posed big problems for
policy that purports to be driven by equity considerations. While it could be
argued that people gain from commercialization and make more money or
increase their stability, similarly, other people nearly always lose. Current
works such as Sara Berry's Chiefs know their boundaries (2000) illustrate
this point very well. African Enclosures - a term not all the workshop
participants were happy with - describes sometimes a territorial, and
sometimes a social or ethnic exclusion from wetlands in dry lands. In
thinking through future avenues for research and policy formulation, we need
to (following David Hulme and Camilla Toulmin) - Develop long-term research and
monitoring programmes - On decentralisation: start
with decentralisation of services, before moving to more tricky issues like
land allocation later, if appropriate - Conduct political
ethnographies of power and institutions - Do not overestimate
bureaucratic and administrative capacities at the local level, or their
ability to set aside ethnic or historical claims. There were 20 people at this
stimulating and timely event. Members' (or those who should be..) News Oliver Coomes (McGill) with Brad
Barham and Yoshito Takasaki were among three finalists (of about 350
submissions) for the Global Development Network 2000 award for Outstanding
Research on Development, for their work on peasant economic diversity in Hires Becky Mansfield (PhD student, Kendra McSweeney (PhD student, Bill Moseley (PhD Student, Book Reviews All CESG members, and others,
are invited to submit reviews of books that would be of interest to our
Specialty Group. Publishers are invited to send books to the Editor, and
willing reviewers are sought. Review Essay by
Giovanni Federico Population, Agricultural Growth
and Institutions: The Real Long-Run View. Boserup, Ester. 1965. The
Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under
Population Pressure. Cross-Posted from EH.NET.
Copyright © 2001 by EH.NET. All rights reserved. Giovanni Federico, Department of
Modern History, University of Pisa is the author of An Economic History of the Silk Industry, 1830-1930 (Cambridge
University Press, 1997) and (with This may be an unusual review
for the series. In fact, Ester Boserup was not a professional economic
historian and this is not properly speaking a work of history. Boserup was
part of the staff at the United Nations and she wrote the book out of her
experience as a consultant in developing countries. The book does not discuss
in depth any specific historical event, and quotations of historical works
are rather rare. It nevertheless is one of the most widely quoted works in
economic history. Usually, it is labeled as "anti-Malthusian" and
encapsulated with a sentence such as "population growth causes agricultural
growth." This is undoubtedly an implication of her model and comes in h However, Boserup's book is much
more than a simple rejection of Malthus. It aims at explaining all the
characteristics of agriculture in any specific area and time according to the
resource endowment -- the land/labor ratio. The more dense population is, the
more intensive cultivation becomes. Agrarian economists in the 1950s focused
on the Western world, and thus they could appreciate only a relatively narrow
range of techniques. Looking at less developed countries, Boserup could list
five different agricultural systems, according to the length of fallow
between periods of cultivation (pp.15-16): 1) forest-fallow or slash and burn
(15-20 years of fallow), 2) bush-fallow (6-10 years); 3) short-fallow (1-2
years); 4) annual cropping (a few months); 5) multi-cropping (no fallow).
Even if the original evidence comes from the observation of primitive
societies in the 1940s, the leap from changes in space to changes in time is
short. Thus the rest of the book explores the consequences of intensification
-- i.e. of the move from one stage to another caused by population growth.
Each of them entails more labor per unit of (total) land, and thus the
intensification increases the productivity of land and reduces that of labor.
A household has to work more to keep the same level of income. The
intensification brings about an improvement in tools (from the digging stick,
to the hoe, to the plough) and in the long run also brings some investments
in land improvement (e.g. irrigation schemes). With pre-industrial
technology, land improvements had to be done manually by peasants. Thus, they
are typical of the last stages of the process, when there is enough
work-force and enough demand for food to justify them. Total factor
productivity may increase in the long run, but surely most of the increase in
total output is achieved with a massive growth of work effort by the
agricultural population. Finally, intensification also
shapes institutions, and this is the most innovative aspect of Boserup's
model. The forest-fallow system is inconsistent with household property of
any given plot of land. The land belongs to (or more precisely is exploited
by) the tribe as a whole. Property rights have to be created only when the
cultivation cycle is shorter, and the quality of each single piece of land
begins to matter. In the later stages of development some people could cease
to work, and be entitled to rights to a part of the product (a
"two-tier" society). However, Boserup is not nostalgic about
primitive societies. She makes it crystal clear that the "two-tier"
societies are better, even if in these latter some men did not work as hard
as others. Some years later, Boserup
extended her model from agriculture to the whole of society (Population and
Technological Change: A Study of Long-term Trends, Chicago, 1981). She added
the concept of economies of scale. Many technologies can be properly
exploited only if the population is dense enough. Population growth makes
urban civilization possible. The second book is highly interesting, and has
many insightful passages. Yet it fails to reach the simple elegance of The
Conditions of Agricultural Growth -- that quality which makes this book
really deserving of being added to this list of masterpieces. Of course, one could quibble
endlessly about the "details" of Boserup's model such the number
and the exact features of the "stages." The overall view provides a
short, but powerful, history of the world, from prehistory to the nineteenth
century arranged around one of the basic principles of economic theory --
that techniques (and much else) depend on resource endowments. As you would expect from a
seminal work, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth launched and refocused
many modern debates. Let me give two examples. When Boserup was writing, the
British agricultural revolution (i.e. the change in rotations with the
substitution of fodder crops for fallow) was considered an epochal change
with far-reaching implications for the entirety of world history. This view
is still diffused, if no longer dominant. In Boserup's model, the change is
only part of the long-run process of world-wide intensification, and Why this (relative) neglect in
spite of the so frequent quotations? One can put forward three causes, which
are not mutually exclusive. The first is academic specialization.
Intensification lasted for centuries, even for millennia, and few scholars
would feel at ease in discussing both pre-historical agriculture and
nineteenth century techniques. This fate is common to all interpretations of
long-term change (cf.Anderson, 1991). Second, the evidence on early-stage
societies is very scarce, and by its nature it is often unfamiliar to
historians. "Real" historical sources exist for Last, but not least, the model
has its own weaknesses. It is surely convincing as an account of long-term
growth. It is less convincing as an explanation of short-term trends, and in
this case the "short" term can last for decades. Boserup speaks as
if all the techniques were known since the beginning, so that the population
had only to choose the one best suited to its resource endowment and adjust
its institutions if necessary. On the contrary, new techniques had to be
learned, and sometimes discovered or re-discovered. In backward economies,
information travels very slowly or not at all, and thus a people may not know
that another one, maybe hundreds or thousands of miles away, has successful
managed to overcome a specific problem. And, even if it gets to know the
right technique, plant, or implement, the population still may need time and
effort to master it and to adapt it to its own environment. Thus a success in
the long run may conceal several short-term crises. Outright failure cannot
be ruled out entirely. Second, Boserup assumes that
population growth is exogenous, following a standard practice among
economists in pre-Beckerian time. Today, however, most consider population
growth to be endogenous, and largely affected by economic calculations.
People could reduce population increase by delaying marriages, controlling
births, migrating and the like. Slower population growth would, ceteris
paribus, reduce the drive to agricultural intensification. This is, of
course, an empirical issue. Finally, Boserup seems to
neglect the different nature of modern technology or, if you want, the new
role of capital. Her world is a two-factor world -- labor and land. As said,
capital does exist either as simple tools or as labor-intensive investment
projects -- but not as labor-saving machinery and above all land-saving
fertilizers. In her world, intensification is possible up to a point, but
sooner or later it has to reach a limit. It is unclear whether in real
history this limit had ever been reached, even if References Anderson, J. L. 1991. Explaining
Long-term Economic Change, Macmillan, Chao, K. 1986. Man and Land in
Chinese Economic History: An Economic Analysis. G. Clark. 1987.
"Productivity Growth without Technical Change in European Agriculture
before 1850", Journal of Economic History, Vol. 47. This page maintained by |
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