political ecology forcivil society

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework
Programme for research, technological development and demonstration (Marie
Curie Actions) under grant agreement no 289374 (ENTITLE)

Political Ecology for Civil Society
Project:
ENTITLE ‐ European Network of Political Ecology
http://www.politicalecology.eu/
https://entitleblog.org/
Project’s partners:
CDCA - Documentation Centre on Environmental Conflicts
www.cdca.it
ICTA - Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona
http://ictaweb.uab.cat/

Authors:
Diego Andreucci, María J. Beltrán, Rita Calvário, Creighton Connolly, Julie De Los Reyes,
Salvatore Paolo De Rosa, Irmak Ertör, Melissa Garcia-Lamarca, Marien González-Hidalgo. Amelie Huber, Panagiota Kotsila, Gustavo García López, Santiago Gorostiza, Felipe
Milanez, Giorgos Velegrakis, Irina Velicu, Jonah Wedekind
Editors:
María J. Beltrán, Panagiota Kotsila, Gustavo García López, Giorgos Velegrakis, Irina
VelicuCoordinators:
Salvatore Altiero, Giacomo Dalisa, Lucie Greyl, Christos Zografos

ISBN: 9788894071467

Table of Contents
Introduction

7

Chapter 1. Engaging environmental conflicts in political ecology
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Co-Producing political responses to ‘swiftlet farming’ in George
Town, Malaysia
1.3 Building alliances to influence decision making in the European Parliament and the European Commission
1.4 Ecologies of Conflict: between dispossession and resistance amidst
tree plantations in Southern Chile
1.5 Latent conflicts in mining activities: water appropriation in Cobre las
Cruces copper mine

19
21
24

Chapter 2. Conceptualising Disaster Capitalism in Political Ecology
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Who owns the world’s largest gold mining companies and why itmatters?
2.3 Violence and Capitalism: when money drains blood
2.4 Waste and money: on the driving forces of illegal waste disposal
2.5 Tales of dispossession in times of crisis: Lessons from Greece

49
51
54

Chapter 3. Struggles over the commons: Between enclosures andcommoning
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Extractivism, commons’ enclosure and dispossession in the Bolivian
highlands
3.3 A Short History of The Enclosures in Ethiopia: imperialist, socialist
and developmentalist land grabs
3.4 A political ecology of forest commons in Mexico

83

Chapter 4. Socio-ecological Transformations and Struggles forReal Democracy
4.1 Introduction
4.2 ‘Green’ Development and its Threats to Democracy - Hydropower
and Conflict in the Eastern Himalayas, India
4.3 From Mining to Becomings: Rosia Montana’s Movement for Democratic Justice
4.4 Deconstructing public health, enabling health empowerment. A casefrom the Mekong Delta, Vietnam
4.5 Reclaiming democracy through alternative economies activism: les-

30
37
44

59
67
75

84
94
102
111
121
122
127
136
142
149

sons from agrifood movements in the Basque Country and Greece
Chapter 5. Movements in motion. Sharing Experiences, Building
Socio-Ecological Struggles
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Memory, Historical Research and Activism. The case of Segle XXbuilding and the neighbours of Barceloneta (Barcelona)
5.3. Struggles over urban greenspace in San Juan, Puerto Rico: Reconnecting ecology and democracy
5.4 Linking fronts, building the alternative, enhancing autonomy: Lessons from 15 years of Campania’s social mobilizations
5.5 Energy struggles: organising from the bottom up to combat energy
poverty in Catalonia

157

Chapter 6. Conclusions
Conclusions

193
194

Bibliography

200

159
163
169
177
185

Introduction

Gustavo García López

Political ecology: The environment as a political issue
The study of human-environment interactions has a long history inmany different disciplines. Political Ecology (PE) is an emerging supradisciplinary approach to study human-environment interactions
with a critical lens. In general, it is focused on how power inequalities
relate to environmental changes, and to the distribution of the costs andbenefits resulting from such changes. A central feature of political ecology is the politicization of environmental problems. This means thatenvironmental problems are seen as problems of distribution and theexercise of political and economic power, marked by conflicts over alternative futures and by clashes between alternative values and imaginaries. Recognizing environmental problems as such, calls for attention
to political and economic context: aspects and problems of democracy,of economic systems, of ideology, etc. Therefore, there is a crucial distinction between what PE calls political explanations of environmental
problems and apolitical ones (also apolitical ecology).
Attempts to explain environmental degradation based on factors
like “poverty” or “population”, for example, are understood as apoliticalbecause they do not attend to the root causes of poverty or of population growth, nor do they consider the stark inequalities in resource
consumption between rich and poor populations. It is therefore crucial
for PE to re-historicize and re-contextualize problems in the socioecological sphere. This means looking at these problems as historical
processes and with in a particular set of political and economic conditions that include national and international policies, balance of forces
between different sectors in society, and conflicts. Some of the maintheses studied in political ecology include the relation between socioecological marginalization and degradation, the causes, characteristics
and outcomes of environmental conflicts; the relation between environmental conservation and government control over territories; andthe role of social movements in achieving more just and sustainablesocio-ecological conditions (Robbins, 2011).

Why and for whom is this manual?
The European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE - http://www.

!

politicalecology.eu/) is a project funded by the European Commission’sMarie Skłodowska-Curie Actions initiative, to train and engage 15 doctoral and 7 postdoctoral researchers in Political Ecology. ENTITLE iscoordinated by the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology(ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona sees the participation of 8 other Universities, 2 Non-governmental organisations and 1
Environmental consultancy.
ENTITLE has promoted inclusive and socially relevant research,inspired by an “organic intellectual” approach in academia.
The objective of the project was to develop an academic training
program on political ecology. In particular, the project sought to study
five key topics from a political ecology perspective: (1) democracy, (2)social movements, (3) commons, (4) environmental conflicts, and (5)disasters. Among other activities’, the ENTITLE project had planned
the development of a PE manual for Civil Society (CS), as one of its
main outcomes, coordinated by the project leader institution ICTA-UAB
and project partner CDCA – Documentation Centre on Environmental
Conflicts. It appeared important to involve us, the young ENTITLE researchers as authors of the manual, as a concrete means to apply andfurther share our research and collaboration experiences.
Political ecology often remains an academic venture of theorizing
and writing for a scholarly audience instead of practical engagementswith existing political-ecological conflicts that resonate outside of academia. Moreover, the ever increasing market of handbooks on political
ecology are not only geared to academics and students, but have outrageously inaccessible prices, leading some scholars to call for boycotts and for developing alternative platforms of open knowledge in thefield. Political ecologist Alex Loftus has captured the political ecologist
conundrum nicely:“Most of what goes by the name “political ecology” is written about
and practised in universities. The research produced is nearly always
published in academic journals and lengthy monographs. Only rarely
do these writings serve as activist interventions of any kind. And thelanguage spoken – laden with references to actants, anti- Malthusianisms, systems approaches and poststucturalism – is rarely the same asthat spoken by activists. How then might we reconcile the fact that mostof those who practise political ecology care deeply about intervening in
the world with the difficulties that most also seem to encounter in prac-!"

tising activism?” (Perreault et al., 2015).
That said, collaborations between researchers and activists havelong been promoted and developed in the field, either as short-termed
attempts or long-lived engagements. After more than 30 years of studies on and with civil society organizations across the world, the relationship between academia and social movements is becoming moredialogical and synergistic than simply observational. Along these lines,
this book seeks to contribute to a dialogue, share experiences, findings
and tools, and invite the cross-fertilization of ideas, concepts and vocabularies.
The manual follows political ecology’s vision that there are morejust and ecologically sustainable ways of organizing our society (i.e. ourpolitical and economic system), or as political ecologist Alex Loftus puts
it: “a sense that something is not quite right in the world”. Moreover,political ecologists depart from the observation that change is achieved
through grassroots organization (communing) and struggles. Finally,
political ecologists firmly believe in the power of narratives in changing
how certain problems are viewed. Therefore, our role as scholars is
one of supporting and collaborating with civil society in the discussion,
critical analysis and imagination of transformative changes. There areseveral intentions to this book. The first is to serve as a manual –that is,a reference book– providing a basic introduction to PE, communicatingsome important insights from this field and seeing how these could be
useful to the activities of civil society organisations, including non-governmental organisations (NGOs) of all kinds but also less formalized
collectives and movements, as well as independent activists and practitioners who work on issues related to human-environment interactions.
The second is to serve as a conversation starting point between
civil society organisations, activists and political ecology researchers
who engage political ecology from an “activist-scholar” or “engagedscholar” approach. As the anthropologist and political ecologist, Arturo
Escobar, recently noted, there is an urgent need to establish the conditions and spaces of conversation between intellectuals, artists, andsocial movement activists. Political ecology has partly emerged fromthe accumulated learning from social movements, and today, it is againsocial movements that seem to be leading the process of identifying
the structural causes of our social-ecological conditions, and imagining!!

alternative worlds to transform these conditions.
We believe that this publication will be a useful tool for civil society
organizations. While there are multiple books on political ecology, all ofthem are oriented towards an academic audience, either as introductory textbooks (Robbins, 2012) or as comprehensive or partial compilations of state-of-the-art theory and research in the field.
PE State of the Art and Theory Readings• Peet, R., Watts, M. (2004) Liberation ecologies: environment, development and social movements. Routledge• Peet, Robbins and Watts (2010) Global Political Ecology. Taylor & Francis, 2010
• Keil, Bell, Penz and Fawcett (1998) Political Ecology: Global and Local• Forsyth (2003) Critical Political Ecology• Escobar, Gardner and Brodgen (2004) Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, andSocial Groups• Biersack (2006) Reimagining Political Ecology• Zimmerer and Basset (2012) Political Ecology: An Integrative Approach to
Geography and Environment-Development Studies• Bryant (2015) The International Handbook of Political Ecology• Perreault, T., Bridge, G., McCarthy, J., (2015) The Routledge Handbook of Political
Ecology. Routledge.

This manual is the first to explicitly introduce political ecology to abroader non-academic audience. In designing the manual, we were inspired by the work of others who have approached the issue of activism
from a practical, educational and theoretical point of view to do similar
work for related topics, including bottom-up research projects and postnormal science.
Pertinent manuals for Civil Society• Alternativas al desarollo: La destrucción del planeta no es un destíno• Militant Research Handbook• Ecological Economics from the Ground Up

We, further, believe that PE offers added value to the work of civil society organisations, because it can support their efforts in explaining and drawing the connections between issues that might appear to
be localized but have wider common sources and implications. In thisprocess of identifying larger systems and processes while tracing theirimpacts on local populations, the claims of civil society organizations!"

become relevant for more people, beyond specific locality and for morethan one “issue”. Whereas this process reveals multiple levels of complexity, it also opens up opportunities for building connections between
and uniting struggles.
However, perhaps the most important apsect of this is manual is
its potential usefulness in to reinforcinge existing and developing newcollaborations between civil society and academia for the purpose oftransforming current unjust and unsustainable social-ecological arrangements. As Loftus puts it: “doing political ecology” requires “being attendant to activist practices”, it is a “symbiotic” relationship of mutual
learning and reinforcement where political ecology can inform activism
and activism can inform political ecology. Integrated projects bringing
together academics and activists, such as ENTITLE can lead to very
productive outcomes. For instance, recent research documenting theexperience of the EC – funded project EJOLT – Environmental Justice, Liability and Trade (ww.ejolt.org), shows how concepts from political ecology and related disciplines, such as ecological economy, havebeen used by activists and even national and international politicians inrecent years. It also shows, by the same token, how concepts developed through activism are being used in academia to develop and renew
fields of analysis, or are being applied in the political field (MartínezAlier et al., 2011).
This manual reflects on how different scholars have defined
this scholar-activist relation. How research can really achieve such a
symbiosis is an open question, which depends on the context and theparticular scholars and activists involved, but it surely requires longterm commitment to a cause, relations of trust and reciprocity and a balance between informed critical scholarship and activist engagements.
By presenting selected case studies from a wide variety of locations, times and contexts, in this manual, we seek to amplify the voicesof people who have been struggling for justice and democracy, inspiring
further action and more fruitful alliances between academia and civilsociety.

!"Structure of the book
This book is organized across five chapters recalling the 5 main
themes of the ENTITLE project, axes of research, theory and activism
with which ENTITLE fellows have engaged: environmental conflicts, disaster capitalism, social movements, commons, and democracy.
For each theme, we explain what is the contribution of a political
ecology approach, we define key concepts and illustrate theories, methods and tools through case studies so to provide readers with accessible and transferable knowledge.
(1) Environmental conflicts: This first Chapter answers the fundamental question of what is an environmental conflict, as well as areflection on the role of research in environmental conflicts. It seeks toexpand the definition of environmental conflicts and how they can beaddressed both in political ecology research and through civil society
activism.
We shows how non-governmental/ civil society organizations, social organised actors and communities develop resistance strategies
through socio-environmental conflicts and how they interact with otherstakeholders involved and to what end. In this sense, the conflicts theme is closely related to that of social movements. The chapter also
underlines the importance and pertinence of the knowledge of groups
mobilised in environmental conflicts in informing research and policy
making.
The environmental conflicts discussed here are of various naturelatent or of various intensities and result from industrial activities developed at different scales such as industrial tree plantations in Chile, industrial aquaculture in Europe, swiftlet (bird nest) farming in Malaysiancities and mining exploitation in Spain.
Contributions include insight into methods for researching environmental conflicts in particular in the urban arena and also methods
to increase the influence of civil society in the institutional and judicial
arenas.
(2) Disaster capitalism: This chapter deals with the concept ofdisaster capitalism, concept applied to various fields and most known
through Naomi Klein’s (2007) work and seeks to unbundle it. In particular, we wants to tackle two main questions: a) How capitalism “creates”
disasters and b) How capitalism uses disasters as openings for further!"

financialization and commodification of nature resources.
In this context we understand capitalism not as a mere economic process but rather as an socio-ecological one. There is not just adomination of economy over the “political” but rather a domination ofcapital accumulation over the imaginaries of different social relations
and socio-natural transformation. Subsequently societies have to unquestionably accept economic growth as the only possible mode ofaccessing nature and capitalism as the only reasonable form of organizing socio-natural relations.
The chapter offers different cases’ review to illustrate such perspective: new modes of financialization in the gold-extraction industry ;legal and illegal strategies of profit making in waste ill management in
Campania, Italy ; different forms of violent coercion against a various
local social groups and local effects in Brazil, produced by global capitalism, depoliticization and de-democratization in the process of accumulation by dispossession in Greece.
(3) Commons: The chapter approaches interrelated civic and ecological commons emphasising they have become a symbol for grassroots practices from different domains, seeking to collectively organise,sustain or innovate around common resource access and use etc., buthave also been contested by acts towards establishing property rights
for the purposes of free markets or states. The chapter explains theconcept of commons both as a type of resource or good, such asa forest, an urban garden, a fishery, water in an agricultural irrigation
system or in a city, an open-source digital software or a knowledge
database such as Wikipedia; and as the collective governance arrangements devised by groups of people (“commoners”) for managing,conserving, producing and reproducing these resources or goods. We
review “commoning” as the process of producing and sustaining overtime these collective governance arrangements as well as the common
resources.
Through this chapter we review the declination of the commons indifferent disciplines and deepen the approach offered by political ecology, looking particularly into processes of commons’ enclosures andthe role of social movement in putting the commons at the centre of
democracy.
The chapter offers three case studies: the case of the enclosure and dispossession of the commons in Bolivia as part of historical,!"

resource-based processes of capital accumulation; the unique caseof community forest governance in Mexico as a living example of thecommons and its challenges ; and a short history of how different typesof land grabbing of agricultural land under different political regimes(imperialism, socialism and neoliberalism) all had the same effect of
enclosing the commons in Ethiopia.
(4) Social movements: In this chapter we are interested in social
movements as struggles for justice and egalitarian socio-ecologicalfutures. We introduce different strategies, tools and practices that havehelped movements in advancing their goals in Italy, Spain and Puerto
Rico and could provide transferable knowledge useful in other contexts.
This chapter introduce us to various ways in which Political Ecology canbring new understandings on movements across the world: what seemto be local problems reverberate into global structural issues which
concern all of us. Movements play a fundamental role in the defenceof the environment, common resources and people’s livelihoods, andin preventing processes of dispossession. Most importantly, they makevisible the interconnections between political and ecological issues.
The section on historical narration shows how activists can re-articulate the struggle they are involved in, connecting the present withthe past in shaping desired futures. The Puerto Rico case shows theinterconnections between political ecology and suburban expansion
into green spaces and offers an example of movement development
for reclaiming not only the ecological but also the civic commons. The
section on Campania Biocide shows how movements tackle the connection between local manifestations of structural processes, turning
this framing into a political device for enlarging the scope of activism
in connection to other issues and movements. Similarly, the section
on energy poverty highlights how an alliance of social-ecological movements tackles the issue through struggle, education, legal and institutional mechanisms connecting the right to consume energy to theenergy commodity of itself, a commodity that produces social and environmental costs for people elsewhere on the planet.
(5) Democracy: Social-environmental issues are often dealt withby mainstream political power as issues of specific expertise, for which
public opinion does not matter or is not necessary. Political ecology
shows that “expert” answers can never be impartial and for this reason,
the needs, knowledge and concerns of affected communities shall gui-!"de policy-making. Recognizing the inherent tension for conflict in theuse and management of resources (both natural and social), political
ecology examines democratic processes that will allow different opinions to be heard, communicated and negotiated in society, throughnon-violent and just processes.
The Democracy chapter brings forth cases of political ecology research from the Basque Country, Greece, Transylvania, the Indian Himalayas and Southern Vietnam to show how core elements of democracy are often undermined and threatened, even when democracy
is proclaimed. The authors depart from identifying processes of depolitization. De-politization is a recurrent theme in many of the casesin this chapter (dam construction, gold-mining, health impacts of waterpollution) but also relevant to processes of commodification, dispossession and accumulation, as described in the chapter on ‘Commons’.
By using the “scientific” mantle and the unquestionable imperative ofcapitalist economic forces, the injustices that such interventions anddecisions produced are being justified.
Recognizing some of the pitfalls of representative democracy andidentity politics, examples of social movements from the gold-mining
resistance in Rosia Montana and from food cooperatives in Bezkaia
and Greece bring into light how, through discovering new practices andnew identities, solidarities can be formed towards a radical rethinking of
democratic participation.
Some reading tips
The manual has been developed on the basis of cases studies
in order to facilitated on one hand the understanding of PE concepts,
theories and tools and, on the other hand, to provide readers with tools
and examples that could support and inspire other mobilisations.
Through the table of contents, readers can access directly one
rather than another section or chapter, while in the text, words related
to important concepts and information are in bold.
Furthermore, each section presents a further readings recommendation box that provide readers with reading suggestions to go
more into depth of the issues and theories reviewed in the manual.

!"Chapter 1.
Engaging environmental
conflicts in political ecology

María J. Beltrán,Creighton Connolly,
Irmak Ertör,Marien González-Hidalgo
Editor: María J. Beltrán

1.1 Introduction
There are multiple views as to what constitutes an environmental
conflict from a political ecology perspective. Le Billon (2015) identifies a
number of scenarios: First, they can be a conflict over the environment,
taking the form of struggle over access to, or control of, environmental
resources (see 2.4 and 2.5 as examples of environmental conflicts overland and water appropriation). Environmental conflicts can also be a
conflict around the environment, whereby environmental problems become rapidly politicized due to unequal power relations and the uneven
distribution of burdens, benefits and risks (Robbins, 2004). In this way,environmental conflicts are closely related to environmental justice,which refers to the right of everyone to enjoy and benefit from a safeand healthy environment (Kosek, 2009). Environmental justice is in turnbound up with cultural politics, which considers the ways in which
ecological, economic and culturally conflicting discourses influence thestruggle for environmental justice via environmental conflicts (see contributions 2.2 and 2.3).
Environmental conflicts typically arise as a result of the unequal
distribution of environmental and social costs precipitated by intensive
resource extraction, appropriation of land and waste disposal issues(Martínez-Alier, 2002). Political ecological analysis of environmental
conflicts therefore seeks to understand both the causes and consequences of these transformations. Moreover, environmental conflicts
are not simply technical problems to be solved by ‘experts’ via top down
approaches. On the contrary, environmental conflicts are political andsocial problems usually addressed by local communities and/or civil society actors (CSOs), including non-governmental organisations, NGOs.
These groups also may have an important role in informing researchand policy surrounding environmental conflicts, given their knowledge
and expertise of the local environment. Therefore, environmental conflicts are highly related to - and often spark - social movements, andother forms of engaged activism (see chapter 6).
Environmental conflicts can also be defined as a specific form ofsocial conflict that is associated either with struggles to gain accessto natural resources or struggles resulting from the use of natural resources (Turner, 2004). Accordingly, Fontaine (2004) states that there
can be no environmental conflict without a social dimension. Social re-!"sponses that can take the form of public protests, or complaints in the
media are thus signal to the existence of an environmental conflict.
Instead, this chapter shows that environmental struggles take placethrough different social grassroots organizations, using a diversity ofknowledge and strategies that are not always manifest clearly in thesocial arena. When environmental impacts do not give rise to a concrete social response, it is important to analyse the reasons underlying
the absence of social protest. Considering environmental conflicts as if
their existence only depends upon the existence of a social response
ignores the strategies deployed by private companies or state authorities to avoid environmental conflicts. Therefore, the contribution of environmental conflict studies must be to analyse not only conflicts thathave already manifest, but also to identify latent conflicts and potential strategies to overcome them (see 2.5).
This chapter uses a case study approach to demonstrate howNGOs, social actors and communities can develop resistance strategies through environmental conflicts. The four conflicts reviewed here
focus on the impact of extractive and agricultural activities at different
scales such as industrial tree plantations and forest management inChile; aquaculture and fisheries management in Europe; edible birds
nest cultivation in Malaysian cities and mining exploitation in Spain.
Although these four case studies are all focused on a particular locality, we emphasize that environmental conflicts are not limited to local socio-environmental and political problems. As we illustrate, manyof the conflicts emerge through extra-local power relations (based on
global political-economic or environmental factors). Thus, resistances
often include networks of different actors and alliances across time andspace as well.
The contributions in this chapter also present methods for participatory research projects in the urban arena and tactics to increase
the influence of CSOs in the political arena. Specific research methods
discussed include narrative analysis, which is a useful tool for tracing
connections between the various actors involved in a given conflict,and the various hierarchies at play; as well as participant observationthat enables sustained engagements between researchers, CSOs andother key stakeholders, which can assist with lobbying and creating
impact. Tools for increasing the influence of NGOs in the political arena
include the publication of common position papers and the presenta-!!

tion of notice of appeal to different authorities. Another means by which
we suggest political action can be taken is through the issue of press
releases and reports signed by NGOs and CSOs, in order to enhance
the role of civil society in decision-making procedures, as will also be
discussed in the following cases.
Futher readings
Fontaine G., 2004. Enfoques Conceptuales y metodológicos para una sociología delos conflictos ambientales, in: Cardenas M., Rodriguez M. (Eds.), Guerra, Sociedad y
Medio Ambiente. Foro Nacional Ambiental, Bogotá.
Kosek, J., 2009. Environmental Justice, in: Gregory, D., Johnston, R. Pratt, G., Watts,
M. & Whatmore S. (Eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography, fifth ed. WileyBlackwell, Malden, MA.
Le Billon, P., 2015. Environmental conflicts, in: Perreault, T., Bridge, G., McCarthy, J.
(Eds.), Handbook of Political Ecology. Routledge, London.
Martinez-Alier, J., 2002. The environmentalism of the poor: a study of ecological conflicts and valuation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Cheltenham.
Robbins, P., 2004. Political Ecology. A critical introduction. Blackwell Publishing, Malden MA.
Turner, M., D., 2004. Political ecology and the moral dimensions of resource conflict:the case of farmer–herder conflicts in the Sahel. Political Geography. 23 (7), 863– 889!"

1.2 Co-Producing political responses to ‘swiftlet farming’ inGeorge Town, Malaysia
Creighton Connolly

The tensions and controversies surrounding edible bird’s nest harvesting in Malaysian cities (or ‘swiftlet farming’ - see ‘case study’ box) isa clear example demonstrating the importance of engaging a wide range of stakeholders in responding to environmental conflicts (see also,
Affolderbach, Clapp & Hayter, 2012). Within the on-going struggles
over swiftlet farming in Malaysia, there has been a fundamental clash
over the competing urban, economic and ecological imperatives at stake. This contribution draws on action research conducted in George
Town, Penang, Malaysia in early 2014 to reflect on research methods
that can be used to understand the variety of issues in environmental
conflicts. This contribution reflects on the ways in which this analysis
can then contribute to methods for addressing such conflicts at the regulatory level. Moreover, in recognising the social character of knowledge (Owens, 2011), this contribution
encourages the formation of stronger
linkages between academics, urban
policy makers, and civil society organisations in order to achieve thesegoals.
‘Co-production’ is the term increasingly used to describe these
new forms of encounters and engagements, and is increasingly shaping
research agendas, institutional pracFigure 1: Location of George Town tices, and forms of governance (Polk,
within Malaysia. (Source: FCO, 2015) 2015). This section will introduce three specific methodological tools thatmight be used by researchers and CSOs to work together on confronting socio-ecological conflicts. Specifically, this chapter explores narrative and discourse analysis, participatory action research (see!"

also, contribution 2.3), and conflict mapping in order to demonstrate
how action-oriented research can utilise ethnographic methods to bothanswer research questions and achieve activist goals.
Case study – Urban “Swiftlet Farming” - Malaysia‘Swiftlet farming’ is a colloquial term which refers to the cultivation of edible birds’
nests through preparation of specially designed buildings for swiftlets to roost andnest. Edible-nest swiftlets are a small species of bird, native to Southeast Asia, whichmake edible nests entirely of their saliva. Birds’ nests are a Chinese delicacy which
are believed to have a number of medicinal, therapeutic and pharmaceutical qualities,
and consequently command upwards of US$2,000 on the international market. Traditionally, nests were collected from caves by (mostly) indigenous peoples across Southeast Asia, where swiftlets would traditionally roost, but increasing price and demandfor birds nest since the 1990s has resulted in the proliferation of urban swiftlet farming.
Since many of the buildings used are converted shop houses in urban residential areas, the industry has generated considerable controversy over its impacts on heritagebuildings, property values, and the urban environment.
This case study focuses specifically on the case of George Town (Penang), which has
been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2008. Due to the international prestige
and economic importance attached to this status, swiftlet farming was declared illegal
in George Town in 2009, and the government has since (unsuccessfully) attempted
to clear all swiftlet farms from the heritage zone. However, many CSOs have criticized the lack of action by the state government in controlling this industry, which theyargue threatens both the (in)tangible heritage of the city and the health and safety ofresidents.
Moreover, there are conflicting business interests at stake, as swiftlet farming is perceived to affect the ability of other business owners to operate in a healthy environment.

Narrative and discourse analysis
Narrative analysis involves the collection and examination of documentary or oral sources of information, which can be used to thestudy of any kind of discourse, from printed word to in-person interviews (Wiles et al., 2005). These include emails, letters, reports andpresentations, individual and focus group interviews, as well as newspaper clippings, online articles and blogs. Such documents can help toidentify the key actors involved, allowing further consultation with themduring the research. Moreover, they make it possible to trace the websof connections between the various actors involved in the conflict, andthe various hierarchies at play. Official documents, such as government!"

reports, industry guidelines and press releases can also be instrumental in identifying the diverse issues at stake.
In examining the controversies over swiftlet farming in George
Town, newspaper articles were particularly useful in that they allowed
for the identification of key narratives circulating within Malaysia regarding swiftlet farms. In the 100 plus articles collected, dating back to theearly 2000s, there was a diversity of sides represented, including thatof swiftlet farmers themselves, the government’s perspectives, CSOs
like the Penang Heritage Trust and Sahabat Alam (Friends of the Earth,
Malaysia) and of course residents affected by swiftlet farms. By piecing
together the various stories in the articles, the key moments of conflict and contestation between these different groups began to emerge,
which allowed the construction of an overarching narrative of the key
tensions over time.
However, there are some limitations with using a pure narrative or
discourse analysis strategy for researching environmental conflicts. For
instance, most newspapers or otherdocument-based sources do not cover
the full range of voices or informationthat one may need in researching aparticular case. Therefore, it is important to be cognizant of such limitations
when using narrative studies, so thatthe missing information can be colFigure 2: Cover of Penang Econo- lected via alternative means, as will be
mic Monthly, illustrating the pu- discussed below.
blic discourse regarding swiftlet
farming in George Town. (Source:
Chua, 2010)‘Participant observation’: Co-producing knowledge and resistance between researchers and CSOs
A third method used in the course of this research centred on athree month internship period undertaken with the Penang Heritage
Trust (PHT) during February - May, 2014. This is a form of ‘participant!"

observation’ in which the researcher actively works with those whom(s)he is studying (Buscher, 2006). Collaborating in this way allowed forthe daily contact and knowledge exchange between the researcher andCSO members and the opportunity to coordinate joint action against
detrimental socio-environmental practices. Moreover, the interests of
the CSO members were able to guide data collection and research
outputs to a considerable extent.
One of the primary activities undertaken was lobbying government
officials and UNESCO representatives with regards to their position on
swiftlet farming in George Town. Since this type of work is an integral
part of most CSO work, it will not be greatly elaborated on here, however, key points from this case merit brief consideration. First, theresearcher being an ‘outsider’ in Penang, as both a foreign nationaland non-resident, allowed for a different type of interaction than the
PHT council members had achieved in the past. Second, the key toworking with the local authorities required pitching the research in a
way that would also be useful to them. For instance, some municipal officers admitted (mistakenly) to perceiving the researcher as an ‘expert’in managing swiftlet farms in urban areas, which facilitated knowledgetransfer between the CSO members and government officials so thatthey could improve enforcement practices.

Conflict mapping
A final component of this research involved surveying the heritage zone (1.6km2 area) for active ‘swiftlet houses’. In order to do this,previous records of active swiftlet houses in the inner city were consulted, which had been conducted in 2008 and 2011 by individuals fromthe PHT, University Sains Malaysia (USM), and the Penang municipal
council (MBPP - Majlis Bandaraya Pulau Pinang). All counts were conducted manually, and locations were recorded on a base map of thecity, as well as on a spread sheet to record details and observations
about each site. The revised count proved that despite the State Government’s announcement that they had been successful in clearing
all remaining active swiftlet houses from the World Heritage Site by theend of 2013, this was not necessary the case. In 2011 there were estimated to be around 174 active swiftlet houses within the heritage zone,!"

but as of May 2014, there are still at least 42.
The resulting map of active swiftlet farms (see fig. 3) was useful in several ways. First,
and most importantly, it
was used to put additional pressure on the state
government to fulfil theirpromise of removing all illegal swiftlet houses fromthe heritage zone by theend of 2013 (see ‘casestudy’ box, above). Updating the numbers and locations of swift houses also
added important data to
Figure 3: Locations of active swiftlet farms in Ge- the existing CSO recordsorge Town’s World Heritage Site as of May, 2014
regarding the numbers of(Source: Connolly)
swiftlet farms in the city,which allowed for the identification of patterns over time and clusteringof swiftlet farms in certain areas.

Conclusion
Though the details of this contribution have been focused on aparticular case, it has intended to shed some light on how researchers
and CSOs can work together in co-producing knowledge on and resistance to environmental conflicts. The methods and tools discussed inthis section have been used to understand the causes of environmental conflicts and how different stakeholders make both sense of andrepresent the issues at stake. This contribution has also demonstrated the importance of democratic participation in the resolution of environmental conflicts, as their causes and thus solutions necessarily
requires the cooperation of NGOs, industrial alliances, different levelsof government and other actors with competing interests (Affolderbach
et al, 2012).
The collaboration among research and CSOs members for this research involved not only sharing co-produced information with relevant!"authorities in a constructive manner to aid their enforcement work, butalso engaging with government officials to understand and overcome
the challenges that they faced in doing so. Although the conflict was not
fully resolved, the additional pressure put on the state government to
uphold their promises did result in an improvement of the situation. In
sum, this contribution has stressed the necessity of making deep connections between academics, CSOs and other stakeholders, in orderto tackle complex environmental conflicts such as the case presented
here.
Futher readings
Affolderbach, J., et. al., 2012. Environmental Bargaining and Boundary Organizations:Remapping British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest. Annals of the Association ofAmerican Geographers. 102 (6), 1391-1408.
Buscher, M., 2006. Vision in Motion, Environment and Planning A. 38 (2), 281-99.
Chua, R., 2010. City of Birds: No swift end to George Town’s swiftlet breeding controversy. Penang Economic Monthly. 9, 8–15.
Owens, C., E., 2011. Contesting sustainability in the Valley of the Grizzly Spirit: Models of Justice in Environmental Conflict and Assessment. Simon Fraser University,
Vancouver.
Polk, M. (ed.), 2015. Co-producing knowledge for Sustainable Cities. Routledge, NewYork.
Wiles, J., L., Rosenberg, M. W., Kearns, R. A., 2005. Narrative analysis as a strategy
for understanding interview talk in geographic research. Area. 37 (1), 89-99.

!"

1.3 Building alliances to influence decision making in the European Parliament and the European Commission
Irmak Ertör

NGO and CSO collaboration to influence the outcomes of environmental conflicts
This contribution focuses on how NGOs (Non-governmental Organisations) and other CSOs (Civil Society Organisations) may build
strong networks of communication and collaboration in order to respond to environmental conflicts and influence relevant political decisions. By reflecting on two public campaigns initiated by NGO andCSO networks, it aims to highlight the ways in which these networks
have engaged with actors on local, regional, national, European andglobal levels, and how they developed joint positions and arguments.
Additionally, it will present and analyse several tools, methods andactivities that have been used by the campaigns in order to increase
their political influence on the outcome of both environmental conflicts
and the decisions taken by national authorities, European Parliament
and/or European Commission. In this way, it will elaborate the lessons
learned from successes and challenges for future collaborations of
NGO and/or CSO networks.
The observation of –and the participation in– both campaigns
has been realised while working in a Barcelona-based environmental
consultancy and NGO (ENT Environment and Management/Fundaciὸ
ENT). Fundaciὸ ENT has been a partner entity of two NGO networks
called Ocean2012 and Seas at Risk. Both of them aimed to influence
conflicts –one over fisheries and the other over aquaculture– throughbuilding strong alliances among NGOs and different civil society actors
and through their participation in national and European level decisionmaking.

Fisheries and aquaculture conflicts
The two examples at hand represent the involvement of NGO and!"CSO networks taking position in two environmental conflict arenas.
The first conflict regards capture fisheries in European waters. The
European Union has had a Common Fisheries Policy since 1983 thatfailed to ensure the sustainable use of the stocks in European waters.
Europe’s fishing fleets became too large, increasingly unprofitable andreliant on public subsidies, which also harmed coastal communities andsmall-scale fishing (EC Green Paper, 2009). In order to change thistrend, a substantial reform was debated in the European Commission
and the European Parliament on the subsequent Common Fisheries
Policy that would come into force from 2014 onwards.
In this context, the Ocean2012 campaign pushed European legislators for the establishment of stringent regulations through the Common
Fisheries Policy (CFP) to prevent overfishing. The Ocean2012 coalition
was created in 2009 and included 193 member groups from 24 EU
member states and some international ones. It consisted of both large
and small environmental NGOs, cooperatives of small-scale fishermen,
scientists, development agencies, consumer and development organisations, dive centres or restaurants, as well as any social actors thatwere negatively affected by overfishing.
Through this network disparate actors discovered common interests, established a strong joint position and ultimately convinced
European parliamentarians to take steps towards ending overfishing.
They also agreed on a commitment to end overfishing by 2015, where
possible, and by 2020 at the latest, thereby setting a legally binding
target. New policies in the new CFP include reducing discards1 andby-catches2, restoring the fish stock in European waters, using transparent criteria (including social and environmental criteria) when allocating fishing quotas, rejecting a proposal for compulsory transferable

1
Discard is the portion of catch that is thrown overboard, but which may be ofimportant ecological or commercial value. Discard typically consists of “non-target”
species or undersized specimens (so that it does not get counted within the allowed
quota for captures).
2
By-catch refers to fish and/or other marine life that are incidentally caught while
capturing the targeted species. Most of the time bycatch is discarded at sea.

!"

fishing concessions3 and an appropriate allocation of funds (e.g. that
do not allow an increase in fishing intensity or fleet volume, but rather
support sustainable ways of fishing).
The second environmental conflict presented here is over thedevelopment of aquaculture in Europe. Due to increased demand for
seafood and stagnant global catches, in the last two decades aquaculture has grown remarkably throughout the world. However, the sector
has stagnated in the EU since 2000s (FAO, 2012; JRC, 2012). Throughthe Seas at Risk (SAR) network, NGOs from different countries withdifferent expertise on marine issues intended to establish a common
position about the development model of aquaculture in Europe and related legislations. While European authorities like the European Commission (EC) and the European Parliament (EP) encourage the growthof the aquaculture sector (EC 2012), many NGOs, fisher people, angler
societies, local people and tourism representatives, are concerned with
the negative social and ecological impacts of such development.
Most of them complain about an increased amount of sedimentationand pollution in the sea, the use of chemicals and antibiotics that easily
spread to wild species, the intrusion of invasive species through escapees and diffusion of illnesses.
Although the policy-making scene was dominated by European
and national public administration and aquaculture sector representatives, building a strong network enabled Seas at Risk to make NGOs’
voice heard. Members of the SAR network participated in all possible
national and European meetings and workshops on policy changes
and strategies for aquaculture. SAR participants shared their opinions,expertise and experience with each other, and used these communications to publish a joint position paper, “Priorities for environmentally
responsible aquaculture in the EU” (SAR, 2014). The proposals were3
“A Total Allowable Catch (TAC) is defined for each fishery and divided among
the individuals of the fleet according to “historical” fishing records, usually over the
past five years, during which the most informed fishers have been “racing for quota,”
catching as much as possible and targeting strategic species. With Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQ) or Transferable Fishing Concessions (TFC), individual accessrights to a common resource are transformed into a tradable commodity.” While thevery existence of ITQs and TFCs is already a controversial issue, many actors argued that making them compulsory would enable a total commodification of the sea.

!"presented in the European Commission workshops on the developmentof a guidance document about the implementation of European aquaculture in line with the WFD (Water Framework Directive) and MSFD
(Marine Strategy Framework Directive)4. Thanks to this joint effort, thenetwork’s position document has become a key reference in the guidance document of the EC and voiced NGOs’ common demands andalternative proposals for aquaculture development in Europe.

Comparison of two campaigns: strategies, involvement andmethods
Comparing the two cases, the Ocean2012 campaign included
many more local actors and associations ranging from diving centres
to fisher people’s cooperatives or to local CSOs than the SAR network.
Furthermore, through careful national and European coordination withmeetings and events where members periodically came together, they
managed to discuss and establish a common position.

Figure 4: Children’s paintings and involvement in the Paint a Fish.

Some of the tools and strategies used by this campaign were: (i)establishing direct NGO pressure at European Parliament, which inclu-

4
The WFD and the MSFD establish the standards in order to have good ecological and chemical conditions of aquatic ecosystems in Europe.

!!

ded analysing the positions of relevant parliamentarians from different
countries and trying to convince them through face-to-face conversations, and; (ii) organizing many public and participative activities including small-scale fisher people, CSOs and NGOs, families and children.
For instance, Ocean2012 members organized “Paint a Fish” activities
in many locations, which involved both protests and festivals with families and children. Social activities were organized to raise awarenessabout fisheries policy and to make more marginalized voices heard.
Images of people creating a fish figure, carrying posters of the campaign or fish drawings of children that were taken during these activities were spread through social media. Postcards with children’s fishdrawings were sent to the European parliamentarians in order to affecttheir opinion and votes about the Common Fisheries Policy reform.
These postcards had policy messages and were written from a child’s
perspective demanding the protection of seas and the survival of fish.
Related activities included forming a kind of human chain in the form ofa fish in front of the European Parliament.
The SAR network on
the other hand, is composedof actors working at European or national and regional
level rather than local level.
Its activities were much more
focused on shaping policymaking by using scientificinvestigations conducted byNGOs or independent research centres. They havebeen mostly relying on tools such as the publicationof common position papers,
press releases and reports
signed jointly by EuropeanNGOs, and participation in
discussions and workshops
organized by EC in order toenhance NGOs’ role in deciFigure 5: Paint a Fish postcards and activities
sion-making procedure.
in Brussels.

!"

Challenges and successes: benefits of alliances
In both cases, politicians and fisheries and aquaculture sector representatives attempted to undermine NGOs and CSOs by claimingthat they are NIMBY (Not-In-My-Back-Yard) initiatives. Both networks
and their campaigns helped to show how these conflicts are not affecting some specific people, but the society at large. The social actors
opposing overfishing or aquaculture’s harsh development were not only
focused on their locality, but rather having bigger arguments and demands regarding the use of European waters and natural resources.
Due to the large number of members involved, including NGOs, local
initiatives and national or international CSOs, both networks have become capable of influencing the outcome of the conflict by underlining
their demands and the importance of local-level participation and decision-making.
For both networks, a significant challenge remained as far as how
to reach an agreement on demands and positions related to fisheries
and aquaculture development, i.e. to what extent to oppose which partof these activities such as whether to insist that tradable fishing permits
should be completely abolished or whether first it has to be stopped
from being obligatory. A related challenge is to understand whether working as a large network and aiming to find common ground decreases
the potential of protests and NGO campaigns, or if coalition building
silences more radical arguments. The desire to reach consensus may
eliminate some of the demands or alternative proposals of participatinggroups, or some of the groups may want to leave the network.
However, the benefits of establishing a joint position, including thelegitimacy and strength it gave to the campaign and to the network
turning them into powerful social actors in policy-making, was crucial
for the success of campaigns. Both campaigns succeeded in agreeing
on common demands and positions with fast and collaborative organization and coordination, good communication among members, andrepeated meetings where they shared opinions about each step.
The successes of both networks had other common aspects, including good timing, and diversity of strategies. First, although campaigns tend to be mid- or long-term oriented, it is important to note thatthey became quite successful when they increased the number andintensity of their activities just before important European public!"decisions were made, including votes on the CFP or the publication ofguidelines on aquaculture, for example. Secondly, diverse strategies
ranging from the presentation of scientific data to direct conversations
with parliamentarians in the European Parliament, organising massive
public festivals and protests, awareness raising, increasing public attention to the environmentally conflictive arenas, and providing alternative solutions contributed to the success of both networks, and enabled
them to influence the outcome of the environmental conflicts.
Building alliances helps to situate environmental conflicts inthe bigger socio-political, economic and ecological context, andshows their connections with each other. In both cases explained above, it has become clear that not only the amount of fish caught by somesmall-scale fishermen in one village has been decreasing rather overfishing has caused an intense environmental deterioration and hadsocial consequences. A rise in the fish farms’ production in order tocompensate the loss in the fish stock has its link with overfishing andthe pursued more profitable development model as well. Therefore,
establishing strong NGO and CSO networks is an important step to underline that these environmental conflicts are not limited to locallyfocused claims of some interest groups, on the contrary that they
include environmental justice demands for many actors in varying
regions (Ertör and Ortega, 2015). This underscores the importance ofdeveloping a joint position and common demands in order to show
the relevance of environmental conflicts regarding environmental
politics and participatory policy-making and moving towards a morejust, participatory and sustainable society.

!"1.4 Ecologies of Conflict: between dispossession and resistance amidst tree plantations in Southern Chile
Marien González-Hidalgo

Tree plantations: old and new forms of dispossession
Tree plantations are monocultures of a single tree species, typically fast growing species such as eucalypts, poplars, acacias and pines, designed to supply external markets for wood, charcoal, logs andpulpwood. In recent decades, tree plantations have expanded in Latin
America, Africa and Asia to satisfy increasing demand for wood-based
products, especially for urban populations in the Global North. Chile
now has three million hectares of Monterey pine (Pinus radiata) and
Eucalyptus spp. plantations, concentrated in its central and southern
regions. In 2013, Chile’s US$5 billion in forestry exports were primarily
sent to China, USA and Japan. Tree plantations are an efficient formof forestry extractivism given their large scale, intensive exploitation,orientation towards exportation and low industrial processing needs(see 1.4, 2.3, 3.4).
As is the case with many of the world’s tree plantations, the state has beena significant
actor in the
expansion of
monoculture
forestry in Chile. Subsidies
and
cheap
credit were given to forestry companies
tofacilitate
Figure 6: Left: Map of situation of tree plantations in Chile infrastructure(source: author’s illustration using cartographic data of GADM creation (suchand CONAF. GRS WGS84, Datum WGS84). Elaborated by Marta assawmillsBorròs. Right: Photograph of tree plantations in Chile!"

and cellulose plants) and to grow the resource itself: between 1974
and 1994 the government paid 75% of pine and eucalyptus forestation costs, spending about USS50 million (Bull et al, 2009). As a consequence, forestry enterprises were able to accumulate vast tracts ofland, and in the process squeezed out other agricultural activities aswell as small landholders, peasants, agricultural-estate labourers andindigenous communities. Individual and communal landowners werealso subsidised to plant trees, in order to enlarge the industry’s supplyof raw materials. Alongside these financial interventions, state violence and the criminalisation of protest were also important tools for increasing the number of hectares under cultivation. The largest expansionof the timber industry occurred during Chile’s 1973-1990 bloody military
dictatorship, as was the case in Brazil and Indonesia, or in South Africa
under apartheid (Gerber, 2011). Dispossession of the commons (land,
water, forests) as well as long-lasting impacts on livelihoods (reduced
quality and quantity of water, pollution, forced migration and lack ofwork opportunities) have framed mobilisations of, mainly, peasant andindigenous populations. Worldwide, these conflicts are expressed bymeans of lawsuits and demonstrations, side-by-side with direct action
such as land recuperations, which can include material damages andblockades to the industrial forestry activity. Therefore, state-run special
security forces are used to protect corporate tree plantations, which inmany cases has militarised the conflict. In Chile, several indigenous
people have been jailed and tried under anti-terrorism laws or assassinated during the occupation of their ancestral lands.
Figure 7: Upper left - “Look how they wantto paint capitalism green!” Right: “There [inindigenous territory]... it has been green forquite a long time now”. The thought bubble
depicts how tree plantations, bribery andstate security force uniforms are all ‘green’(Source: OLCA).

As Figure 7 shows, states andprivate sector actors have used varied
strategies for legitimising extractivism.
For example, tree plantations in Chile
were and are justified as a way to con-!"

trol soil erosion and to prevent native forest degradation. However, tree
plantations have replaced native forests, pastures and agriculture lands, while failing to control erosion because the creation of large scale
plantations requires extensive clear-cutting (see figure 6, right). Recently, forestry enterprises have deployed the language of “environmental values” such as carbon capture5 and sustainable development6 toprove that their practices are socially and environmentally responsible.
Some local communities have denounced this “greening” of extractivism as a way in which corporations seek to be internationally legitimised
while maintaining land control through violent practices. The provisionof wage labour for marginalised communities is another argument thatstates and corporations use to legitimate forestry extractivism. However, labour opportunities are scarce in sawmills and cellulose plants,
while in rural areas forestry employment is rare, outsourced and temporary. The practices of forestry extractivism facilitate the accumulation and concentration of capital, land, and especially power- known asaccumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004; see also Chapter 4.
Commons). This concept explains how dispossession is made possibleby the appropriation of public and communal resources for the benefitof capital accumulation. In Chile this has happened through direct statesubsidises to land owners for planting and by the privatisation of thecellulose factories and paper mills established by the state between
1964 and 1973. As a result, indigenous peoples, the working class andthe environment have been subordinated to the imperatives of capitaland power which has been concentrated in the hands of a select few.

5
Carbon credits are financial instruments that can be internationally tradedby governments, industries or individuals. Under the assumption that planting trees reduces carbon emissions, some forestry corporations sell carbon credits related to energy generation upon forest biomass. Since 2007, Arauco Corporation has
counted for two million tons of CO2 emissions “reduced”. In the carbon market, every
ton of CO2 is around 7 Euros.
6
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an organisation that certifies the socially and environmentally responsible management of the world’s forests. Surprisingly, main forestry corporations in Chile are certified by the FSC.

!"

Ecologies of conflict
Resistance framed by the indigenous grassroots: Autonomous
Territorial Recuperation
Globally, indigenous people tend to be at the forefront in conflicts
over tree plantations, due to large-scale private landholdings that concentrate power, displace local residents, incur water shortages andskew local uses of natural resources (Gerber, 2011). The extractivist forestry model in Chile has been primarily contested by indigenous
Mapuche. The Mapuche see forestry enterprises as the third wave ofcolonisation of their territory, after the Spanish in the 16th century andthe Chileans in 1861.
In their historic struggle for the recuperation of ancestral territoryand sovereignty, (self-referred to as “in resistance”) Mapuche communities perform what they call “land recuperations” since the 1990s.
These land occupations of corporate forestry plots are effective exercises in retrieving territory by means outside formal proceedings andlegality as defined by the state or private forestry corporations. These
action have been accompanied by other strategies to regain control
of indigenous territory, including claims for the restitution of ancestral
lands filed under Convention 169 of the UN’s International Labour Organisation11, negotiating with state representatives and forestry enterprises to reach agreements where the state buys privately held land
then hands it over to the Mapuche, and road blockades and/or material
damages to corporate properties.
Figure 8: Beans now growwhere before grew Eucalyptus sp. in the areas slowly
recuperated by Mapuche
communities (Source: author).

In performing territorialrecuperations,
Mapuche express their
spiritual worldview ofconnection to the landby socialising throu-!"

gh customary and traditional forms of community-making, based on
kinship and friendship. When a plot is recovered, communities organise
themselves either collectively or by household and plant potatoes, wheat, beans and peas on a small scale, recuperate their extensive livestock practices, collect fruit from the remaining native forest and decide
to what extent they want to engage with tree plantations. The process isboth physically and emotionally exhausting, especially as they are often
exposed to violence and criminalisation. Sustaining recuperated lands
is not easy given the precarious environmental conditions in terms ofwater availability, soil fertility and biodiversity after conversion into tree
monocultures. Difficulties are also expressed in the inability of impoverished Mapuche communities to fully express their own worldviews
which depend on spiritual, emotional and livelihood relationships withnative forests. Yet, the active resistance of Mapuche communities incertain areas in Southern Chile is discouraging private corporations tocontinue or expand their extractivist activities.
Resistance framed through policy: reforming the Water Code totransform the forestry sector
The Agua que has de beber (water you have to drink) initiative
uses another strategy for contesting the impacts of forestry extractivism. Developed by the Association of Forest Engineers for Native Forests (AIFBN) and funded by the European Union delegation in Chile,the initiative seeks to join diverse social actors to influence and implement public policies that prioritise human uses of water over industrial
applications. Tree plantations (and specially Eucalyptus spp.) capture
rainwater retained in soils, causing a decrease in flow rates and runoff during summer periods. Long term impacts regarding quality andquantity of water have been documented in several countries after theestablishment of tree plantations (EJOLT, 2012).
The initiative is seeking to put to reform of the Water Code on theagenda of recently re-elected Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. The
current Water Code, signed during the Pinochet dictatorship in 1981,
created a system of water rights that can be traded with few restrictions. While other extractive industries such as mining or agriculture
profit from the accumulation of water rights, forestry extractivism instead seizes water through the physiological activity of trees. This meansthat the discussion on water rights could have no effect on what happens in areas where tree plantations are extensive. Therefore, in Sou-!"

thern Chile, the role of the “Agua que has de beber” initiative has been
to analyse and publicly criticise institutional solutions to mend seasonal
water scarcity such as providing water to rural communities by tanktrucks or building new infrastructure like wells and reservoirs. These
governmental proposals to solve water scarcity are disconnected fromspatial planning policies - neither the temporal nor long term solutions
consider the varied land ecologies. The dissemination of academic publications about the relationship between tree plantations and water
shortages that confirm local rural knowledge has been crucial to argue
against state and private discourses that seek to legitimate extractivist
forestry.

Lessons for the political ecologist mobilisation regarding tree
plantations
These examples of strategies to contest forestry extractivism inChile show the complexity of these conflicts, with an overlap of present
and historical political issues at different levels. In the face of this, expressions of both dispossession and resistance are varied. Tree plantation conflicts in Chile can provide some lessons or tools useful for
movements facing similar environmental, land or forestry conflicts inthe following fields:• Denouncing and disseminating the impacts of tree plantations:differentiating forests and tree plantations, see WRM and Friendsof the Earth statements; see also EJOLT’s video; denouncing the relationship between the expansion of tree plantations and physical andstructural violence.
• Reporting impacts of tree plantations to nature and livelihoods,
see periódico Resumen’s video “Planting Poverty, the forestry businessin Chile”.
• Empowering land sovereignty through peasant and indigenous
practices: fostering gatherings to discuss the impacts of the forestry industry, while connecting them to others forms of extractivism, see
OLCA’s work; coordinating action with workers of the tree-farming
industry and including their demands as part of the struggle against
tree plantations, see Fundación Sol’s report; revitalising and maintaining the expression of indigenous and peasant knowledge to the!"land, via their native languages, legends, arts, spirituality, etc. These
serve to strengthen local communities’ cohesion and enables creative,
emotional and embodied engagements for resistance.
Futher readings
Bull, G. Q., et. al., 2006. Industrial forest plantation subsidies: Impacts and implications. Forest Policy and Economics. 9(1), 13-31.
Overbeek, W., et. al., 2012. An over view of industrial tree plantations in the global
South. EJOLT Report No. 3.
Gerber, J., F., 2011. Conflicts over industrial tree plantations in the South: Who, how
and why? Global Environmental Change. 21, 165-176.
Gudynas E., 2013. Extracciones, extractivismos y extrahecciones. Un marco conceptual sobre la apropiación de recursos naturales. Observatorio del Desarrollo. 18.
Harvey D., 2004. The ‘new’ imperialism: accumulation by dispossession. Socialist Register. 40, 63-87.
On denouncing and disseminating the impacts of tree plantations
Plantations are not forests
The difference between a forest and tree plantations
Araucanía, Chile y la violencia del latifundio colonial – forestal
Planting Poverty, the forestry business in Chile
On empowering land sovereignty through peasant and indigenous
practices
Somos alternativa al extractivismo, Memoria Encuentro Aguante la vida 2013
Victims of the Chilean Miracle. Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet era. 19732002
Informe Industria Forestal, Cuadernos de Investigacion
Araucanía, Chile y la violencia del latifundio colonial – forestal!"

1.5 Latent conflicts in mining activities: water appropriationin Cobre las Cruces copper mine
María J. Beltrán

The empirical case of the use of water resources in the Cobre Las
Cruces mining project (CLC) demonstrates the importance of considering latent environmental conflicts as part of the study of environmental conflicts. Fontaine (2004) states that there can be no environmental
conflict without a social dimension. But what if environmental conflicts
are not socially manifested due to strategies deployed by private companies with the blessing of governmental institutions? This contribution
shows silenced conflicts created by mining activities and the factors
influencing the absence of social response among the population. Thissection aims to analyse and expand the concept of environmental conflicts by elucidating strategies that are deployed to avoid and silence
conflicts, understood as if its existence depends upon a big and highly
visible social response.
Case study – Cobre Las Cruces mining project - Spain
The CLC mining project is located in the easternmost area of the Iberian Pyrite Beltin the south of Spain, in the province of Seville (Andalusia), one of the most important
metallogenetic provinces in the world.
The mineable ore reserves are estimated at 16 million tons with a 6.2 percent copper
average grade. The deposit is a very profitable one since average grade copper deposits are considered very profitable when their grade is over 2.5 percent. Besides, thedeposit of this mine is quite special because it is located beneath an aquifer, making
the project extremely sensitive to water management.
The project is the largest operating open-pit copper operation in Europe. The mine has
been owned by First Quantum Minerals, a Canadian firm, since 2013.

!!

The Cobre las Cruces mining company and its strategies tosilence conflicts
Copper is an important global commodity but its extraction usually entails massive ecological consequences. Significant environmental
impacts arising from copper mining include excessive water use andwater pollution (REFS around the world). On the one hand, the operations involved in this activity require large volumes of water, and on
the other, in relation to the quality of water, large amounts of acid minedrainage (AMD) are generated.
Figure 9: Location of Cobre las Cruces mining
exploitation (Source: Andalusia Regional Government, 2009).

During the 20th century, global copper consumption reached 18,000 million
tons and this figure is expected to double
in the next 30 years (International Copper
Study Group, 2012). In Europe, most of
the copper consumed is extracted, melted and refined outside the continent. However there have been various extraction
sites in Europe historically. One of the largest deposits of copper in Europe is the Iberian Pyrite Belt in southern
Spain. In the past, copper mining in Andalusia has led to environmental
conflicts. For instance, the “battle of smoke” in Rio Tinto in 1888 orwhat was known as the “Aznalcollar disaster” in 1998, which resulted inlarge-scale water contamination.
The Cobre las Cruces mine is in a particularly precarious ecological zone. Much of the copper is situated directly below an aquifer that is
an important source of water for the region. Although the aquifer is notofficially overexploited, net extraction of water is prohibited by law. In
addition to mining, water from the aquifer is also required for agricultural irrigation during the summer, for industrial supply and for emergency
supply of the nearby city of Seville during periods of drought. In orderto gain access to the deposit without disrupting the aquifer, a complex
water management system was designed and implemented. Immediately after its start-up phase in 2008 this system failed and affected thequality and quantity of the aquifer’s water resources. Legal proceedings!"were started and are still pending to date. The company is accused of
the non-authorised withdrawal of 75.000 m3 of water from the aquiferand drilling 20 unauthorised boreholes. Further, the failure of thewater management system resulted in the discharge of arsenic andother AMD polluting substances (Guadalquivir Hydrographical Confederation [GHC], 2008).
In order to avoid further
damage, the regional administration closed theoperation and demanded
a new water management
system.
Figure 10: Open Pit CLC
project.
October
2007.
(Source: www.ecologistasenaccion.es)

In that specific phase of the environmental conflict, the impact overwater resources was followed by social collective response in the formof social protest. In order to restart the copper extraction, CLC presented a new water management plan to the Andalusia Regional Government in 2009. The previous water management system, following
the water concession presently in force, allowed the company to use
18,3 m3/hour of water from the aquifer. The main change introducedby the new plan was the modification of the volume of water stipulated
in the water concession by allowing the use of 157,83 m3/hour of what
they called “mine water”, some 876 percent higher than the amount originally authorised. This concept, introduced through a hydrogeologicalstudy that the mine company commissioned to a group of experts, claimthat the volume of water considered as “mine water” is water from thebottom of the pit that emerges “naturally” as the pit is dug deeper and it
does not actually come from the aquifer. In this way, the introduction ofthis scientific term legitimised the use of more underground water thanpreviously with no modification of the water concession. In this sense it
is worth to mention that the modification of a water concession in Spain
may take up to ten years. The Regional Administration accepted thisargument as valid and subsequently approved the plan, thus avoiding
any social response to this environmental damage.

!"Latent conflict and the factors influencing the absence of social response
The NGO Ecologistas en Acción has reported that the argument
put forward by the hydrogeological study to introduce the concept of“mine water” was a successful strategy to avoid any (negative) social
responses regarding possible environmental damages to the aquifer.
The conflict remained silenced because the users of the aquifer
water are not aware of that the political decision to approve the
new water model -apparently in order to repair environmental damage- has resulted in the authorization for substantially more withdrawalof underground water, bypassing the existing regulations.
Since the beginning of the project, Ecologistas en Acciòn have closely followed mining activities. The NGO successfully petitioned to be
named as an affected party in the ongoing lawsuit, thus gaining accessto court documents that have allowed for more in-depth monitoring.
In order to increase their influence in the proceedings, Ecologistas enAcciòn presented notices of appeal to the GHC (the basin authority incharge of the aquifer) to influence future decision making regarding
the aquifer in collaboration with scientists. In addition, the mining company’s irregularities have been explained in detail through press releases and reports available in the NGO´s website (see www.ecologistasenaccion.es).
Similar to the Aznalcollar disaster pollution episode, regional authorities and local communities both reacted to the environmental impacts after the damage was already done. Two factors have been identified influencing the absence of social response. First, the historicaldependence of the local population to the mining activity and second
the community’s belief that the authorities will supervise and punish
the mining company in case of further pollution events. Almost twenty
years later the local population´s perception of the mining activity has
not significantly changed. Faced with the evidence of the Aznalcollar
disaster, they recognize the potential impacts of the mining activities,
however, the two aforementioned factors firmly influence the perception that the authorities will supervise the mining activity and will avoid
possible damages.

!"

Lessons learned
Environmental conflicts occur as the result of the high environmental and social costs of the increasing capital driven resource
extraction and waste disposal. However, unevenly distributed environmental and social costs are silenced if more powerful actors legitimise resource appropriation. In this case, it was the intervention ofscientists legitimising the concept of “mine water” that has enabled themining company to access and control the common water resources.
Political ecologists can collaborate with NGOs to denounce the
top-down, technocratic version of science that silences environmental conflicts. This can be done collaborating in presenting notices of appeal to different authorities, writing collaborative reports anddisseminating the results in different arenas. Finally, this case showsthat an environmental conflict study must contribute by analysing not
only the conflicts already socially manifested, but by pointing out thesilenced conflicts and the strategies deployed to avoid social responses
to environmental conflicts.
Futher readings
Andalusian Regional Government, 2009. Minimización del volumen de vertido al Dominio Público Marítimo Terrestre (río Guadalquivir) en el proyecto minero Cobre las
Cruces.
Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation, 2008. CLC. Propuesta de suspensión de
30 de abril de 2008 de la Autorización de drenaje reinyección de 30 de octubre de
2003.
International Copper Study Group, 2012. World Copper Consumption.

!"

Chapter 2.
Conceptualising
Disaster Capitalism
in Political Ecology

Julie De Los Reyes
Felipe Milanez
Salvatore Paolo De Rosa
Giorgos Velegrakis
Editor: Giorgos Velegrakis

2.1 Introduction‘Disaster capitalism’ became part of public lexicon following Naomi
Klein’s widely successful book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism (2007). Klein deployed the term to capture how elites havetaken advantage of moments of shock-disasters, wars and crises-to
advance free market ideology and reforms. Cataclysmic events suchas the Iraq War, collapse of the Soviet Union, and Hurricane Katrina,
she argued, have been important opportunities for profiteering that enrich the elite class.
For movements across the globe, ‘disaster capitalism’ has been
a powerful rallying concept, providing a frame to connect local and disparate forms of encroachments that often dovetail calamities, warfare
and economic crises, to something bigger. That capitalism is to blame
brings much-needed attention back to the system-and that ultimately,
any meaningful action must be directed at countering it.
The contributions in this chapter extend this tradition, but alsoseek to refine it. Disasters, crises, both social and ‘natural’, we argue,
are themselves the result of capitalism’s insatiable quest for accumulation even as it harnesses these to fuel its expansion. We focus on
two inter-related processes: capitalism’s use of disasters as openings
for further financialization and commodification of natural resources,
and capitalism’s tendency to ‘create’ disasters. Drawing from examples
of its interface with forests, wastes and mining, we documents its expansion deeper into ‘nature’, spawning new forms of enclosures, newmodes for realising higher profits, and the new socio-environmental
crises and disasters that it generates.
Such disasters and crises create new kinds of tensions and struggles. We hope that such tensions will continue to lead to social movements that challenge and say “no” to the forms of disaster capitalism,
as described above. We also hope that these short articles on one
hand shed light on this process, on the other hand bring together anentire series of localised responses to the symptoms of disaster capitalism into a broader struggle that actually confronts the disparities andinequities that permit such system changes in the first place.
Furthermore, it is not by luck that the chapter includes case-studies both from the “Global North” and “Global South”. We believethat the task for radical social scientists as well as for the social mo-!"vements is, among others, to challenge this dichotomy and to search
for theories, policies and practices tore-establish the values and priorities
for social and spatial justice locallyand globally. As political ecologists
often argue: “There instead are many
souths in the north and vice versa”.
Figure 11: Disaster(Source: Daily Blog)

capitalism

speak.

We will illustrate how economic
disasters, such as the 2007 financial crisis, can open up opportunities
for profiteering. In the gold mining industry for instance, speculative
investments in the wake of the crises have fuelled the intensificationand expansion of gold mining activities into new territories, bringing
about heightened contestations on the ground. In this context, this contribution aims to provide inputs and definition of concepts, trends andmechanisms fundamental to understand the financial aspects of mining
as an essential part of (disaster) capitalism. Furthermore, questions forthe civil society groups and socio-environmental movements aroundthe globe are brought up: conflicts over extraction are never only local.
This crucially courts a rethink of extractive complex and the strengths
or shortcomings of existing forms of resistance to challenge the larger
configurations that take place beyond the borders of the nation-state.
This chapter, focusing on the interplays between capital’s accumulation and local/environmental violence, will also present local effects of global capitalism turned into different forms of violent coercion
against a great diversity of local social groups. Market pressure is not
the only element that produces local violence, but in many cases itis the main driver. There are world trade commodities like diamonds,
wood, timber and many others that are organized through violent process of extraction locally to be circulated in the global markets. NGOs
and social movements have succeeded in part in denouncing widely
the crimes associated with it, although the violence of these “extraction
processes” is still being played.
This chapter also documents the waste conflict in Campania, Italy!"

as an explanatory enactment of strategies of profit making that blur thedemarcation between legal and illegal economic practices that produce
disastrous consequences for local communities. These insights, in theform of facts-based accounts and interpretations, focus on hazardous
waste management issues, but they illustrate an underlying tendencyof contemporary business corporate behaviour and of market-oriented
governance. Where most of the mainstream accounts of illegal economies refer to this process as an anomaly in the smooth functioningof market economy, this contribution invites to look at their current fundamental role in maintaining and reproducing capitalist accumulation
cycles and power hierarchies.
Finally, the case of gold-extraction project in Halkidiki, Northern Greece since 2011 brings up further questions on capitalism’s
tendency to create disasters in order to ensure capital’s accumulation. The case of gold-extraction in Halkidiki is only one chapter in thebook of dispossessions in Greece during the crisis period. Land dispossession is not a simple outcome of Greece’s obligation to repay its debt.
In fact, land in Greece is a social asset that is being targeted by domestic and international speculative capital and through the intensificationof land privatization over vast areas of the country. The result of such a
strategy is myriad tensions, conflicts and movements that try to tackle
it. This strategy is here conceptualised as a constant process of depoliticization and de-democratization.
By foregrounding the profit objectives, the capitalist entities andthe neoliberal strategies that played a critical role in the making of disasters, these contributions move us away from seeing disasters as‘naturally-occurring’. They are the result of the reorganisations thattake place to organise socio-natures in particular ways. Capitalism is
an ‘irreducibly socio-ecological’ project (Moore, 2011). Disasters, in thissense, are a manifestation of its internal contradictions and its attempts
to overcome it.
Futher readings
Klein, N., 2008. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Penguin, UK.
Moore, J., 2011. Ecology, Capital and the Nature of our Times: Accumulation and Crisis in the capitalist world-ecology. American Sociological Association. 17 (1), 108-147.

!"

2.2 Who owns the world’s largest gold mining companies andwhy it matters?
Julie De Los Reyes

Beginning in early 2000, highly capitalised financial players, likehedge funds and pension funds (referred to as institutional investors),
have increasingly moved into investing in extractive industries. Interest in commodities as a particular ‘asset class’ saw institutional investments move towards oil, precious metals, and gas. This found its
way in speculative platforms like the notorious derivatives markets that
led to volatile movements in commodity prices.
In the case of gold, institutional investments were also channelled
to the stock markets at the start of the boom, with large investors turning to owning (through stock ownership) the companies that own the
resource. Holding gold mining stocks was perceived to be a convenientand profitable way of cashing-in from future price increases in gold.
Owning the miners, that hold big reserves of gold, was expected tobring a higher investment return than owning the physical bullion itself.
In the course of the commodity boom, the investor base within gold mining companies shifted. Barrick Gold, Newmont Mining, and Goldcorp,
exemplify some of the highest institutional investor ownership among
the world’s largest gold mining companies, with institutional investors
as majority shareholders.
In this context, this text aims to contribute to an understanding of
key developments in the past commodity boom, especially in the areaof mining finance, and to provide points of reflection for those who
struggle on the ground as the mining industry becomes more deeplyintertwined with financial markets. Financialization - used here to referto the recalibration of mining operations around financial goals-heralds
another form of disaster capitalism. Geared as it is at squeezing evergreater financial value from mineral extraction, it tends to amplify tensions that surround mining activities, leading to ‘disastrous’ consequences for economies, the environment, people and their livelihoods.

!"

Financialization in gold mining
Institutional investors are a particular class, known in the financial world for their ‘activist’ approach to their investments. By the sheer size of the capital that they manage, holding at the minimum $100
million, these investors are more inclined to take an active role in theway companies are run than individual investors. As they concentratelarge sums of investment in a company, they have strong bargaining
power (and indeed voting power) to lobby management on issues likeshareholder value creation. Shareholder value creation refers to thepush for the prioritisation of stock performance and dividend returns toshareholders as the guiding principle for the activities of the firm. Under this framework, institutional shareholders expect a greater share of
the profit of the company from dividend payments and an appreciatingstock price, achieved through a more disciplined allocation of capital
within the company.
The adoption of the ‘shareholder value’ framework is said to herald the ‘financialization’ of the corporation, with its activities being increasingly aligned to the financial interests of its institutional investors.
Company managers shift the focus of the company towards profitability
over market share, ensuring that sufficient cash flow is generated fromtheir activities to support dividend returns. For gold miners, this means that company operations, and indeed, the portfolio of mines andprojects under their belt are able to satisfy new thresholds on returns
to investment and are sensitive to the risk tolerance of their shareholders. As institutional shareholders often move in herds and cannot leave without driving share prices down, companies are disciplined to
pay greater attention to engaging them. Companies that deliver greater
shareholder value are rewarded by stock appreciation, improving theirchances to raise funds in open markets.
Some of the large financial players that were drawn to the gold
mining industry include high-profile hedge funds such as Blackrock andPaulson Co. which hold significant holdings in the world’s largest goldcompanies including Barrick Gold, Goldcorp, AngloGold Ashanti, Yamana, Harmony Gold and Kinross Gold. Paulson and Co.’s big entrance in the gold sector in 2009 started with a large purchase of a stake in
AngloGold Ashanti, making it the largest institutional shareholder at 7
per cent ownership, in addition to large positions in Kinross Gold and!!

Gold Fields. The top 8 gold-producing firms are now predominantly owned by institutional investors.

The changing face of extraction
As the push for ‘shareholder value creation’ intensified with the
decline in commodity prices, new metrics have been rolled out by theindustry in response to investor pressure for capital discipline. The
fixation on cost cutting, and the drive across firms to meet lower cost
metrics, signal their commitment to hand back cash to shareholders
throughout the commodity cycle and their firm’s continued attractiveness as an investment asset. In an environment of lower gold prices,
this required squeezing out cash flow from existing operations through reorganisation. The sale of non-core mines and the laying-off ofworkers have been the preferred response, executed in a way that is
not only responsive to decline in mineral prices but also sensitive towhat it could contribute to stock market valuation. Emblematic of thesemoves are those made by the industry’s largest: Barrick Gold, AngloGold Ashanti, and Kinross. As a strategy, the sale or closure of mining
projects also allowed companies to generate immediate cash from thesale. The proceeds from these have been re-allocated to developing‘core’ projects and handing money back to shareholders.
Figure 12: Spilling of 40.000
cubic meters of sulfuric acidinto the Sonora and Bacoachi rivers by the Cananea
gold and copper mine (Mexico). August 9, 2014 (Source:
http://olca.cl)

The shareholder value model moreover carries important implications
for the financing of mining
projects, as it assesses
jurisdictions along costand political risk criteria. The focus in South America, for example, is
not just a function of the geological attributes of the region but also by!"investor perception of its relative geopolitical stability. As one industry
executive explained, ‘securing mining finance for Latin America is easier as the political environment and permitting procedures are well understood by both North American companies and predominantly North
American institutional shareholders’. The position of established mining
states in the region, perceived to be mining-friendly, with sufficient state
support for the industry (particularly relevant for keeping down infrastructure and electricity costs, etc.) and for foreign investments become
solidified as areas of concentration of mineral investments.

Challenges for the movement
Such developments carry important ramifications for countries
that follow an extractivist model for development, and crucially, thosepushing for a shift away from this model. The ‘value’ generated fromextractive activities, for instance, must accommodate shareholder demands, amid already heightening and competing claims coming fromlabour unions, affected communities, and the state, in the form of increased wages, compensation, taxes, and royalties. At the same time,companies push for realising profits that can simultaneously allow themto finance future investments. The distribution of value thus becomes acontentious terrain that companies must negotiate. But as the industry
becomes even more tied to financial markets and its health gauged
on the basis of its investment potentiality and returns, the competition
across (and the survival of) firms increasingly rest on being able toslosh greater value back to financial markets. This becomes even more
apparent in light of the gold industry’s history of dividend payments,
which in the decades prior to 2000 have been negligible.
Herein lays a gap in the configuration of struggles against mining,as the primarily local effects of mining activity means that much of thecontestations around it are directed at the community or national level.
Environmental degradations, around which many protests are organised, mainly impact the local communities at close proximity to the mining site, and are thus treated as local, and at best national, concerns.
The state, seen as the main arbiter of relations between corporate entities and local communities, becomes the key rallying site for the resolution of struggles on the ground.

!"This presumed scale where struggles and conflicts are imbricatedneeds to be re-thought and re-scaled. As illustrated here, the institutions that prop up this extractive model, that move and shape extraction
in particular ways, are located in places far from where physical extraction takes place. Yet the interventions of these actors and their particular motives are critically transformative of livelihoods, environment andpeople.
That ‘conflicts over extraction are never only local’ (Bebbington and Scurrah, 2013: 194) rings true, as the capital deployed and thevalue it generates are entangled in processes of financial accumulationin core capitalist countries. This crucially courts a rethink of extractive
complex, and the strengths or shortcomings of existing forms of resistance to challenge the larger configurations that take place beyond
the borders of the nation-state. The building of alliances between civilsociety organisations and movements across regions (e.g. between
Latin America and North America) should be integral to this strategy tobolster local campaigns and help deal head on with the global dimension of mining, powered as it is by stock exchanges in Canada, London,
New York, and Australia.
Futher readings
Bebbington, A., Scurrah, B., 2013. Hydrocarbon Conflicts and Indigenous Peoples
in the Peruvian Amazon: Mobilisation and Negotiation Along the Río
Corrientes, in: Bebbington,
A. Bury, J., 2013, Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil and Gas in
Latin America. Austin, Texas: The University of Texas Press, pp. 173-196.

!"

2.3 Violence and Capitalism: when money drains blood
Felipe Milanez

Blood and money
What’s the colour of gold? Does gold has the same colour as diamond, or timber?
We may initially think that gold is yellow; diamond is transparent,
timber is brown. However, in fact they all can have the same colour,
which is also the same colour as soya, or just like the colour of asmartphone, or even the energy that is lightening your house: the red
colour of blood.
How do these entire different commodities can have the same “redblood” colour? They do through their mode of extraction, production,transport or even their waste disposal.
This statement may be too generic, and many other questions
appear from this short and general idea. Why a distant market does
influence a local system of violence? How commodities and resources
chains can have a direct impact in local violence, very often perpetrated
by local elites against traditional communities?
While in some parts of the world environmental concern has become an institutional political issue, such as in rich countries
in the global North, as well as a hegemonic
concern, in other parts of the world environmental leaders, who struggle for collective rights to environment, are the target of
local political violence.
Figure 13: Chico Mendes, Brazilian Environmental
activist. 1988 (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.
org)

Many of these popular environmentalists have already paid with
their own life the political coherence of their position in defending theenvironment - defending the environment as a life concern.
One can have already heard about the story of Chico Mendes, the!"rubber taper union leader in the Amazon that was killed by gunman in
1988; or Ken Saro Wiwa, the Ogoni leader who was hanged by Nigerian government in 1995, together with another eight activists from theMovement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP); or one may
have never heard the names of more 908 different people killed between 2002 and 2013 worldwide for similar reasons. This is the number
presented by international organization Global Witness, in its Deadly
Environment Report (2014), a study of violence against environmentalist for the first time produced in a global scale.
Some key concepts and empirical cases can help to understand or
to visualize the circuit of this deadly engine of capital accumulation
are presented. Knowing how violent social environmental conflicts areassociated with economic process can be a first step towards understanding processes of violence that can help to produce a more peaceful human condition.

World system and local violence
Industry and technology are a form of fetish. They hide their process, what they really do in the process of transformation: not really
improving the transformation, but rather displacing to different territories the burdens of industry. A fetish as something that people are fascinated and though away from seeing the truth behind it, as Karl Marxdefines the idea of commodity fetishism in Capital, in which the economic relationships between the money and commodities exchanged inmarket trade hides the social relationship embedded.
As the anthropologist Alf Hornborg (2006, 2015) argues, technology is, in this sense, a cultural category fetishizing social relations. The
author describes in his work the circulation of material in a world systemthat interconnects places of industrial production to sites of extraction of
raw material and the working class used during this process. In a very
simple way: the industrial revolution in England has been made possible thanks to the displacement of slaves from Africa into large territory in
the United States, where indigenous groups have been dispossessed.
Industrial production is a complex worldwide network, functioning
in a world system (Wallerstein 1974) that cannot be ignored when we
see a local extraction. But one would have a hard time finding everything!"that is used in the chain to produce one good, and its impact on thepoor in the South, while buying something at a supermarket in a nicecity in the global North.
Extractives systems, in the example provided by geographer
Stephen Bunker (1984), has contributed to technical and financial
advances in industrial nations, “while leaving the Amazon desperately
impoverished”, damaging the environment and many societies that lives there (Bunker 2005). It means that costs and benefits are unequallydistributed worldwide. In general, the local conditions of extraction shape international strategies to export.

Environmental Violence
Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts have described violence associated to socio-environmental conflicts, in a book collecting global works presented in a conference in Berkley at the first year of this century,in what they have named “violent environments”. Violence, in theirdefinition, is “a phenomenon rooted in local histories and social relations, also connected to transnational processes of material change,
political power relations, and historical conjuncture” (Peluso and Watts,
2001).
There are different explanations seeking to provide a framework
to comprehend how supply chains can produce violence in local sitesof extraction of raw material or in the industry. These conflicts follow
the sequence, as argues the economist Joan Martinez Alier (2002):
social metabolism is increasing in the world, in energy and materials;
there are ecological distribution conflicts, such as resource extraction,transport, waste disposal conflicts, at the “commodity frontiers”. The
increase of world metabolism needs raw material and energy. Even the
improvement of technology will need new types of raw material, andproduce new types of socio-environmental conflicts, such as tropicalforest rubber for tire, or just for fashion, like jaguar skin, diamond, gold,
etc.
Violence can be structural and direct, according to Galtung (1969),
or it can even be slow, as described by Rob Nixon (2011), without taking much attention by the media. To find the systemic violence, as
writes Slavoj Zizek (2008), “we need to perceive the contours of the!"background which generates such outbursts”, once objective violence
is “invisible”.
It is not easy to uncover the causes of systemic violence, and Zizek gives the example of a story published at Time magazine on the“deadliest war in the World”, and it came with a story about violencein Congo, offering a “detailed documentation on how around 4 million
people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the result of political violence over the last decade”. The author comments: “The Congo
today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradean ‘heart of darkness’”.
Here is a central point to our argument: by the time Joseph Conrad
wrote the classical novel “The Heart of Darkness”, was Congo just awild violent zone of savage tribes killing each other, or was the violencea product of colonialism and the expansion of capitalism through theextraction of rubber during king Leopold II rule in Belgium?
Jean Luc Vellu answers this question: Conrad have offered a romantic view to the West of the deep Africa, a place with phantoms,
fear and the evil, but he has left outside the main point to be exposed,
the brutal violence of colonialism associated rubber economy. It was
Edmund Morel who made public with the book correctly naming rubber
as “red”: Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishingon the Congo in the Year of Grace 1906.
Same as the violent rubber extraction in the Congo was the system in the Amazon, the biggest producer of rubber in the world bythat time. The “British Congo” in the Amazon denouncing extreme violence against indigenous people first appeared in the magazine Truth,in 1909, with a series of articles by the American engineer Walter Hardenburg entitled “The Devil’s Paradise: a British Owned Congo”.
The United Kingdom sent right after the diplomat Roger Casement, who has met Conrad in Congo, to investigate the crimes. The“Casement Putumayo Report”, presented to the House of Commonsand published in 1913, is what we can call today the very start of the“boomerang effect” in modern economy, and a work that have inspired many political and economic pressures by organisations worldwide
in defending human rights and the environment. Casement present in
136 pages report after seven weeks of travel in 1910 in the Amazon
along Putumayo river, details of “terror and tortures”, as explains Taussig, together with “Casement’s explanations of causes and his estimateof the toll in human life”: “For twelve years from 1900, the Putumayo!"

output of some 4,000 tons of rubber cost thousands of Indians theirlives. Deaths from torture, disease, and possibly flight had decreased
the population of the area by around 30, 00 during that time” (Taussig,
1987: 474). Terror and violence was associated with and organized by
Peruvian Rubber Company, owned by Julio Cesar Arana that was trading rubber with the UK.
Market pressure is not the only element that produces local violence, but it is the main driver. There are other world trade commodities, such as diamonds and timber, for example, that are organizedthrough violent process of extraction locally, and which have international demand. In some cases, like Hardenburg in the past, NGOs havesucceeded in denouncing widely the crimes associated with the extraction of these goods.

Conflict Diamonds
Global Witness was amongst the first organisations to bring theworld’s attention to the problem of conflict diamonds, also known as‘blood diamonds’. Global Witness’ ground-breaking report, A RoughTrade, released in 1998, exposed the role of diamonds in funding thecivil war in Angola. This thrust the secretive practices of the global diamond industry into the spotlight for the first time.
The organization describes
conflict diamonds as “diamonds
that are used tofuel violent conflict and humanrights abuses”.
They name theirworking as “breaking the links
between intersupFigure 14: Catoca Diamond Mine, Angola. Fourth largest mine nationalin the world and owned by a consortium of international mi- ply chains andning companies including Endiama, Alrosa, and Odebrecht. violent conflict”:(Source: http://www.rubel-menasche.com)!"

“Revenues from the extraction and trade of these natural resources
can give abusive armed groups the means to operate and can provide
off-budget funding to State security forces and corrupt officials.”
Lightweight, valuable and easy to mine and smuggle, rough diamonds have been responsible for fuelling some of the worst armed
conflict in Africa-from Sierra Leone and Liberia to Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
For over a decade the Canadian NGO called PAC has been at theforefront of a global campaign to stop violence in diamond producing
areas and create a responsibly managed diamond supply chain. Diamonds are often used to shore up threatened political elites, perpetuate
corruption and deprive state coffers of much needed revenues.
After the situation of violence was exposed, a protocol called Kimberly Process was signed under the United Nations.
Tropical Blood Wood
Bloodwood is a type of Amazon wood. It has the red colour andit’s used in furnishing, electric guitars, etc. But it is also an expressionof blood in the same sense of the blood diamond: timber extraction
in conflict zones that produce different forms of violence against theenvironment and local populations.
In 2014 Greenpeace has released an international campaign
against illegal timber extracted from the Amazon.
The report “The Amazon’s
Silent Crisis” shows thatthe Brazilian timber control system is flawed andallows illegal timber to belaundered with official documentation and sold: “Illegal and predatory timber
destroys remote areas offorest, drives deforestation and is linked to the
Figure 15: Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva, Brazilian
violence against traditioEnvironmental activist. (Source: http://whoaminal forest dependent comwhoareyou.blogspot.it)!"munities such as indigenous people”. It was named: license to launder.
The meaning is the different mechanism loggers found in Brazilian legal
system to turn illegal timber into legal to reach internal and international
markets. But it is not just an economic and market problem, or a juridical one: it has an intense use of violence in the system against the ones
who are living of the forest.
Some references was the story published in 2007 called Blood
Wood (“Madeiras de Sangue” by Felipe Milanez), in Rolling Stone magazine, where it was exposed that the violence and killings in Colniza,
the most violent place in the entire Amazon, was related to the extraction of timber to supply national and international markets. Official datareported that 165 per 100.000 people were killed every year.
The main target in the Amazon has always been the same, as
when Chico Mendes was killed in 1988: popular environmental activists. In a very simple way, José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva, a traditional
Brazil nut gathers, explained in a TEDTalk: “I denounce, and they think
I should not exist.” José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito
Santo were killed by two gunmen in 24 may 2011. José Cláudio advices
to the audience were: do not buy any goods from the forest illegally
produced.
Conclusions
The process of capital accumulation and the expansion of capitalare a violent process dispossessing people worldwide. The practices of primitive accumulation can serve as a transition from a structural
violence based on inequalities, to a direct and fatal violence. International political institutions can provide a regulatory framework towards amore peaceful condition of human existence and of capitalism. At least,less deadly.
Futher readings
Bunker, S. G., 1985. Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange,
and the Failure of the Modern State. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.
Conrad, J., 1902/1990. Heart of Darkness.
Hornborg, A., 2006. Footprints in the cotton fields: The Industrial Revolution as time–
space appropriation and environmental load displacement. Ecological Economics. 59!"

(1), 74–81.
Hornborg, A., 2015. The political economy of technofetishism: Agency, Amazonian
ontologies, and global magic. Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 5 (1), 35-57.
Martínez-Alier, J., 2002. The environmentalism of the poor: a study of ecological conflicts and valuation. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham.
Marx, K., 1992. Capital, volume 1: A critique of political economy. Penguin Classics,
London.
Morel, E., D., 1968. Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishing on
the Congo in the Year ofGrace 1906. Negro Universities Press, New York.
Nixon, R., 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.
Peluso, N., Watts, M., 2001. Violent Environments. Cornell University Press.
Peluso, N., Lund, C., 2011. New frontiers and land control: Introduction. The journal of
Peasant Studies. 38 (4), 667-681.
Taussig, M., 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man/ A Study in Terror andHealing. University Chicago Press.
Wallerstein, I., 1974. The Modern World-System. Academic Press, New York.
Wallerstein, I., 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge University Press &Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Cambridge & Paris.
Reports and articles
Global Witness, 1998, A Rough Trade. The role of companies and governments in the
Angolan conflict.
Global Witness, 2014. Deadly Environment. A rising death toll on our environmental
frontiers is escaping international attention
Greenpeace, 2014. The Amazon’s Silent Crisis
Milanez, F., 2007. Madeiras de Sangue. Edited June 21, 2008. Rolling Stone magazine.
Ribeiro da Silva, J., C., 2010. TEDTalk Amazonia
The Kimberly Process!!

2.4 Waste and money: on the driving forces of illegal waste
disposal
Salvatore Paolo De Rosa

Prologue
The Pellini Group is a family-run company managed by the three
Pellini brothers, active in the sector of waste management and disposal.
Headquarter is in the town of Acerra, an agricultural town near Napoli,in Campania region, Southern Italy. The company began its activities in
the 1980s: at that time, it was a small firm dealing with wastewater fromsewage system. Throughout the years, the Pellini increased the size
and the scope of their business. In the early 2000s, people in Acerra
remained quite puzzled after seeing the Pellini brothers crossing thetown in Ferrari, and the confusion became real shock when they started
flying around in their own private helicopter. After all, they were only
dealing with garbage. How could they become millionaires in such shorttime?
The answers were to be found in the police investigations uncovering in 2006 the role of Pellini Group in a network dedicated to the illegal
management and disposal of industrial waste. Even though engaging
in an illegal activity, this network involved several legal corporate entities: from respectable industries of national relevance (the waste producers), to shipping firms and treatment facilities (the transit segment),
to dumping sites (the final stage of the cycle, and the Pellinis’ task). The
involvement of corrupted police officers and government control bodies was fundamental to the traffic. They would close both eyes when
the hazardous waste was wildly dumped in sand quarries, agricultural
fields and water channels. Mafia-type organizations were also involved:
smoothing the process, establishing the connections, overseeing theoperations and receiving tributes. The clients who benefited from theirservices were legal industries from Northern Italy, in particular from Tuscany and Veneto regions, which cut the costs of expensive proceduresof correct waste disposal by handling the scraps from their production
processes to the Pellinis, thus adding up profits on their corporate balance sheet. Prosecutors estimated the quantity of industrial waste “tre-!"ated” by Pellinis in one million ton, generating a turnover of 27 million
euro.
When the trial against Pellini ended in December 2013, the fall of
their stinky economic empire was a bitter victory: only 4 years of jail toeach and the right to keep their assets. This was a slap on the face of
thousands people that for decades to come will suffer the outcomes ofthe poisons stuffed in the earth by Pellini.

Criminal Capitalism
The story of Pellinis’ rise and fall is not at all a folklorist account ofSouthern Europe’s underdevelopment. Rather, it exemplifies a recurrent praxis within contemporary global capitalism: the intertwining andthe mutual benefits of legal and illegal economies. In other words,
crime is becoming a customary tool for legal businesses to engage inlawless profiteering and to beat competitors (Hudson 2013). The mainfeatures of this practice are the search for maximization of profits andthe shifting of “negative externalities” onto less powerful actors andcommunities through the circumvention of laws and regulations (Martinez-Alier 1994).
In this contribution, the case of Campania is used as an explanatory enactment of strategies of profit making that blur the demarcation
between legal and illegal economic practices and that produce disastrous consequences for local communities. These insights will focus
on hazardous waste management issues, but they illustrate an underlying tendency of contemporary business corporate behaviour. With
this piece, there is an attempt to provide an analytical tool for activists,
NGOs and civil society: where most of the mainstream accounts of illegal economies refer to these processes as anomalies in the smoothfunctioning of market economy, the contribution invites to look at theirfundamental role in maintaining and reproducing capitalist accumulation cycles and power hierarchies.

!"

Toxic waste colonialism
The global production of hazardous waste from industries is increasing, both in developed and in developing countries. Recent research points to the fact that, since 1940,
the amount of industrial waste produced worldwide has increased from 10 million tons
to more than 400 million tons per year (Sende, 2010). Most of this waste is not treatedin proximity of the places where it is produced. The process of globalization and theliberalization of international trade policies precipitated a North to South trade in hazardous waste that often causes widespread contamination in the receiving countries.
Only a fraction of the international waste shipments comply with the legal procedures.
Indeed, much of this trade is illicit. Scholars and activists have labelled the transnational hazardous waste trade, in its legal and illegal forms, toxic waste colonialism.
Money is the key motivating factor for toxic waste colonialism. When compliance costs
in developed countries are coupled with an increased quantity of waste and local
opposition to disposal, they generally produce drastically increased disposal costsfor hazardous waste (Pratt, 2011). Therefore, the shipping of waste to countries thatlack strict regulations and enforcement schemes becomes a profitable economic solution. The international community began tackling the issue in 1989 with the Basel
Convention, which regulates transnational shipment and disposal of hazardous waste. However, still today, countries in the South continue to be the illegal recipients ofgrowing amounts of waste produced in the North: the rules are easily circumvented
and a highly lucrative black market of hazardous waste has emerged. When the illegal
waste shipment routes toward less developed nations are detected and dismantled bypolice investigations, industries in the developed world increasingly turn to intranational traffic and disposal routes.

Industry calls, Mafia responds
Italy can be seen as a case of a “Global South” dynamic in the“Global North”. In this country, the presence of organised crime andmafia-like groups mainly based in the Southern regions, together withthe presence of industrial districts that produce a large amount of toxic
waste, mainly based in the Northern regions, has nourished the rapid
development of an extensive domestic illegal market for the toxic waste.
The importance of the role played by mafia groups in waste trafficking in Italy is reflected in the neologism Ecomafia, a word that was
first coined by the Italian environmental organisation Legambiente in1994. According to the environmental NGO, annually at least 15–20%
of waste in Italy disappears between production and final storage or
disposal. This ‘ghost waste’ fuels a rich illegal economy: in 2013, earnings produced by the illegal management of hazardous and non-ha-!"zardous waste in Italy have been estimated at almost 3.1 billion Euros(Legambiente 2014).
Trafficking in toxic waste has developed in Italy since the second
half of the 1980s. Progressively fuelled by the growth in the waste production, and because of the high profits and low, almost non-existentrisks, this highly lucrative market has expanded rapidly. The region ofCampania in the South of Italy has been one of the main terminals of
the toxic waste trade. For at least thirty years, complex networks involving legal corporate entities, criminal organizations and government
officials cooperated in the dumping of thousands tons of hazardous
materials in unsuitable places throughout Campania, turning the environment into a toxic landscape.
When the case exploded in the media, thanks to the social mobilizations of civic associations from Campania, the narration that emerged in national and international accounts of the issue posited the camorra (the mafia-type organization historically rooted in this region) as
the main driver and accomplisher of the trade. This rhetoric’s aim wasto downplay the involvement of legal industries in the traffic, depicting
them as victims rather than drivers.
A closer look at the police investigations that in recent years uncovered the illicit traffic reveals a different story: the main actors seeking the services of camorra were distinct executives with no criminal
background but eager to pay half of the price, compared to the legal
market, for getting rid of the hazardous waste from their industries. Moreover, only the existence of political protection, of white-collar participation, and the involvement of entrepreneurs from transport sector
to landfill management, made this business possible. By crossing theirdeclarations with the facts uncovered by police investigations, we geta more nuanced picture of this traffic and a better assessment of theshared responsibility of the actors involved.

!"

Figure 16: A special unit of Italian fire-fighters analyse an illegal waste dump uncovered under cultivated fields in Caivano, near Naples, on September 2013. In
the photo on the right, it is possible to read the label of one of the barrels unearthed from the illegal dump: it says “Milano”, an industrial centre in Northern Italy.
Source: Corriere della Sera.

Garbage is gold
Italian prosecutors learned that domestic hazardous waste trafficking was something more than an occasional crime in 1992. During
the course of the first high profile investigation in the issue, codenamed
Adelphi, the former Neapolitan mafia boss Nunzio Perrella simply told
them “I don’t deal with drug anymore. Now I have another business. It
pays more and the risk is much less. It’s called garbage. For us, garbage is gold”. Going further into the investigations, prosecutors realizedthat illegal hazardous waste management was an expanding market
fuelled by the increasing demand of the corporate sector and relying on
the cooperation of State officials.
The Adelphi investigation opened the Pandora’s Box. On the basis of the evidence collected, prosecutors arrested the former environmental councillor of Naples Province, Raffaele Perrone Capano. His
contribution to the traffic was the issuing of landfill authorizations, forwhich he was receiving compensation based on the quantity of incoming waste. All the landfills authorized by Perrone Capano were usedthroughout two decades for disposing illegally hazardous waste from
Northern Italy. Among these, the Resit landfill, in the municipality ofGiugliano, represents probably the most dangerous dump of the ecocriminals’ legacy. According to a geological assessment commissioned!"

by the DDA (Anti-Mafia District Directorate) in 2013, the Resit is filledwith hazardous waste to such an extent that by 2064 the weight of thewaste will break through the subterranean layer of tuff penetrating theunderground aquifer, thus threatening all life forms in an area of at least
twenty square kilometres.
The owner of the Resit is a lawyer and entrepreneur recently charged of “environmental disaster” and currently in jail. His name is Cipriano Chianese, and he is considered by prosecutors the inventor of theillegal toxic waste trade toward Campania. During the 1980s, Chianesebuilt a wide network of friendships with powerful people in Campania
and elsewhere in Italy. According to the declaration of several informers, it was him to bridge the connection between the camorra’s clans
and members of the Freemasonry in touch with the most prominent
legal productive forces of the nation.
In 1989, around the same table, camorra’s bosses, owners of waste facilities and shipment companies, and the referents from the Italianindustrial sector, made a dirty deal: hazardous waste would travel toward Campania on the routes set up by the network of entrepreneurs
near to camorra and it would end up in their facilities or wildly dumped;in exchange for the support of the mafia organization, entrepreneurs
would pay a tax to them that would also fuel the corruption of public
officials; industries would have their waste “treated” at half of the priceand on papers everything would look “clean”. Finally, the falsification ofaccompanying certificates and the distribution of bribes would smooththe entire process. This deal allowed for the turning of Campania into
a waste-land, while camorra, criminal entrepreneurs, complicit professionals and corrupted officials all gained illegal profits. The social andecological costs of these operations have been shifted on the people
and the ecosystems that are still waiting for land remediation projects
which appear arduous and expensive.
What seems to differ from the traditional interpretation of mafia
groups as economic parasites in the actual logic of the illegal waste
trade, is the fact that camorra does not get profits through threats orviolence toward the entrepreneurs, as in more classical schemes ofracketeering. Rather, it appears that industries themselves seek thehelp of camorra, and the same goes for many other entrepreneurs andprofessionals, eager to offer their services for participating in the business. The police investigation codenamed Houdini has shown that the!"market cost to properly dispose certain kinds of toxic waste imposed
prices ranging from 21 cents to 62 cents per kilo, while the eco-criminal
network provided the same service at 9 or 10 cents per kilo. Ultimately,companies engaging in illegal disposal will do much better in terms of
economic performance. Yes, it is a polluted market, but it is still a market.
Once police investigations collected evidences, arrested criminals
and seized facilities, the ordeal passes to tribunals and magistrates. In
Italy, the crime of “illegal waste traffic” has been codified in law in 2001;
that of “environmental disaster” only in 2014. According to activists’groups and NGOs these laws still need improvements: by strengthening the sanctions for traffickers; by allowing the seizing of all assets
earned through the criminal activity; by implementing polluters pay
schemes. The legislation dealing with environmental crimes is of prominent importance in order to create the basis for effective repressive
strategies of the waste trade but to weaken further the corporate crime
behaviour, laws improvement should go together with the involvementof the productive sector into partnerships and procedures aimed to thetransparency, tracking and improved certification schemes for all phases of the production process.

Final thoughts
This contribution aimed to show the leading role in the illegal hazardous waste trade taken by legal corporate entities seeking to savemoney. The need of the productive sector for cheap disposal met withthe predatory economic behaviour of criminal organizations, more asa gentlemen’s agreement rather than as a case of extortion. The congeries of actors revolving around the business (transport companies,
chemical laboratories, state officials and so on) were all fundamental
to the traffic, trying to get a scrub of the rich toxic pie. Therefore, it ismisleading to talk about the environmental disaster of Campania onlyin terms of mafia crimes, giving the leading role to mere actors in what
is better understood as an organized corporate crime.
It is indeed more fruitful to focus not only on the characteristics ofthe offenders, but also, in particular, on the techniques used to perpetrate these sorts of crimes. Evidence from police investigations shows!"how these actors often demonstrate the same illegal know-how. At thesame time, mafia-type organizations are increasingly reinvesting
capitals from illegal activities into the legal market, often constituting
successful business entities and becoming undistinguishable fromtheir legal partners. Moreover, in times of economic crisis, mafias
have access to unregistered cash flows that become funds for the credit system and the financial markets. Investigation and trials point to an
ongoing incorporation of illegal economies into legal ones (Massari
and Monzini, 2006).
This is an invitation to look at what is hidden behind so-called organized crime: it may reveal nothing more than a criminal, underlying
tendency of (disaster) capitalism itself in its search for cutting costs inany conceivable way.
Futher readings
Hudson, R., 2014. Thinking through the Relationships between Legal and Illegal Activities and Economies: Spaces, Flows and Pathways. Journal of Economic Geography.
14(4), 775-795.
Martinez-Alier, J., 1994. Distributional conflicts and international environmental policy
on carbon dioxide emissions and agricultural biodiversity, in: Van den Bergh, J., C.,
Van der Straaten J., (Eds.), Towards sustainable development: concepts, methods,
and policy. Island Press, Covelo, pp. 234-264.
Massari, M., Monzini, P., 2004. Dirty Businesses in Italy: A Case-study of Illegal Trafficking in Hazardous Waste. Global Crime. 6(3/4), 285-304.
Pratt, L., 2011. Decreasing Dirty Dumping? A Reevaluation of Toxic Waste Colonialism
and the Global Management of Transboundary Hazardous Waste, William & Mary
Environmental Law & Policy Review. 35 (2), 581.
Sende, M., 2010. Toxic Terrorism: A Crisis in Global Waste Trading, Anamesa Journal,
8 (1), New York University.
Reports and conventions
The Basel Convention
Legambiente, 2014. Rapporto Ecomafia 2014. Edizioni ambiente, Milano.

!"2.5 Tales of dispossession in times of crisis: Lessons from
GreeceGiorgos Velegrakis“They don’t violate merely against our bodies. They violate against
our dignity, our beliefs, and our common struggle to save our land andenvironment, our attempts to build a different future.”
Rania V., activist of the anti-gold socio-environmental movement,
Halkidiki, Greece“Politics as public management, then, stands in contrast to thepolitical as the sphere of agonistic dispute and struggle over the environments we wish to inhabit and on how to produce them. There is atendency for the first to suture, and ultimately disavow or foreclose, theformer.”E. Swyngedouw, Depoliticization (“The Political”) in “Degrowth:
Vocabulary of a new era”
In Halkidiki, northern Greece from 2010 on, local communities
have been resisting the transformation of their land into an open castgold extraction mine for the Canadian company Eldorado Gold. Cassandra mines, in the area of Halkidiki operate since 6th century BC andfrom 1950 up to the present date, national and international consecutive companies continue the extraction of metals mainly in caves. Mining
activity was tolerated by local communities, as it created employment
locally. Yet the present case is different. In 2011, following a long storyof ambiguous government decisions and scandalous agreements the
Greek state agreed to long-term contracts for the exploitation of thedeposits for a ludicrously small sum-ceding 31.000 ha. The new extraction method is problematic too: Open-pit gold copper ore mine together
with flash melting that can lead to the implementation of cyanide. The
method creates irreversible and negative consequences on local environment. These consequences together with the social and economic
consequences have mobilised thousands of local communities’ residents to fight against the project.
The case of gold-extraction in Halkidiki is only one chapter in the!"“book of dispossessions” in Greece during the crisis period. The exploitation of land, natural elements and public infrastructure nowadays in
Greece comprise investment targets for local and international speculative capital at some unprecedented extent, intensity and geographicalspread. Land dispossession is not a simple outcome of Greece’s obligation to repay its debt. In fact, there is a significant change in governing socio-spatial relations within the current debt crisis. A new pattern
is currently being created and is radically different from the traditional
pattern that covered the long period between the end of the Greek civil
war in 1949 and the beginning of the public debt crisis in 2009. The newform is based on big foreign and domestic investments, land grabbing
through privatization schemes, and efforts to extract monopoly rent.
Are these processes part of what could be described as disaster
capitalism? We argue that the social and ecological catastrophe which
local and international elites imposed upon Greece is a systemic process to make sure the European neoliberal model could be sustained.
In this context disaster capitalism is translated into specific policies thatare “justified”, “legal” and almost “natural”, so that homo economicus in
the neoliberal era can go on with business as usual. In this sense weface capitalism’s tendency to “create” disasters: new forms of enclosures, new modes for realising higher profits that contribute to renewedsocio-environmental crises.
Is this strategy unchallenged? In Greece within the crisis period
intense socio-ecological movements (such as the anti-gold initiative in
Halkidiki) have showed up to tackle this rationality and not only fightfor but “produce radically new environments against the dominantones”. These movements and protests brought up a significant change against the neoliberal “There Is No Alternative – TINA” framework:
They are keeping democracy and “the political” alive. The new socialand socio-ecological movements under certain circumstances have athreefold importance: a) they put into practice democracy and democratic procedures at all levels, b) they challenge power relations
and alienation that capitalism produces and c) they fight for an “openfuture”: a desire for the world to be radically different. And as Loftus(2012) argues this desire is “a commonplace one: nearly always morea stifled anger than a revolutionary cry, the challenge, surely, is to understand the movement of this anger, to learn from it, to build on it, andtranscend it in both humble and democratic ways.”!"Socio-ecological relations at stake...
In Greece, since 2010 and the first bailout program between Greece and its creditors (European Commission, European Central Bankand International Monetary Fund), urban and rural space is being actively remade though a double devaluation of labour and nature. As aresult, land and environment dispossession is rapidly increasing. For
example, land and housing values have lost 20–35% of their commercial value since 2008 (Hadjimichalis, 2014a); at the same time, the devaluation of land is linked to policy changes proposed through austerity
packages that specifically imposed massive public land privatizations.
The majority of new laws implemented to drive this strategy, are a direct
product of the monetary fiscal policies implemented by the creditors to“stimulate development”. This has been achieved through:• the elimination of legal provisions for the protection of the environment,• the constant weakening of the already feeble environmental governance and spatial planning framework,• the rapid approval of large-scale private investments on land withirreversible consequences on local environments and• the undermining of the protection status of ecologically precious
natural areas.
In addition, a programme involving mass privatization of stateowned assets is being imposed. A big part of these assets consists ofreal estate. The process is managed by the Hellenic Republic Asset
Development Fund (HRADF – in Greek TAIPED). TAIPED was legally
established in 2011 under the so-called ‘medium-term fiscal strategy’.
This law allows project-led planning inside the boundaries of TAIPED
properties, distinct from plan-led planning system in the rest of the national space. In particular, the intensive land uses applied to TAIPED
properties are shaped to facilitate the implication of an investment plan.
Investors see this as the biggest advantage of the new legal framework.
In sharp contrast with previous development planning, which centred on
small-scale land owners and small building projects, the new projects
by international or domestic investors focus on larger land parcels, andthe fortification of segregated spaces as privileged enclaves emerging
in contrast to more humble urban and rural environments. As a result,the extraction of monopoly rent from new real estate investments!!

is becoming the dominant source of general rent in Greece.
The aims of spatial cohesion, environmental protection and socioeconomic justice, are rejected in the spirit of“new investments” to overcome the crisis.
Figure 17: Assets of Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (HRADF – in Greek TAIPED) including
public land, buildings and infrastructures for sale.
(Source: Hadjimichalis, 2014b)

The ongoing Greek tragedy shows that
aspects of the nowadays disaster capitalismis the intensification of neoliberal shock therapy and the promotion of the TINA ideology.
When it comes to space and socio-spatial
relations, a new paradigm shift for land and local, urban and regional
development is put in place to promote capital accumulation regardlessof the effects on local societies and environment. Therefore, we should
conceptualise (disaster) capitalism as a constant process of depoliticization (Swyngedouw, 2015) and de-democratization (Brown, 2013)
in order to unquestionably accept economic growth as the only possiblemode of accessing nature and capitalism as the only reasonable formof organizing socio-natural relations. There is not just a domination of
economy over the political but rather a domination of capital accumulation over the imaginaries of different social relations and socio-naturaltransformation. This context is both de-politicized since there is a tendency to make the ecological and social crisis manageable with thehelp of mere technical and organisational adaptations and de-democratized since there is a replacement of the subject who chooses its
ends and means with one who has only one end, namely to enhance
its value as human capital.

... And the struggles for alternatives
The TINA ideological and political framework has been challenged
by very intense social and environmental struggles all over Greece.
These struggles have their origins in different social strata, geographical scales, political views and perspectives. Nevertheless, they have!"

succeeded into giving voice to Greek citizens who “can and must decide their future and maintaining that despite declarations by European
Union officials, and their allies in Greece, “there is an alternative”. Suchinitiatives and social movements are:• the solidarity networks (including food initiatives, social clinics,
groceries and pharmacies) all over the country,• the water and sewerage anti-privatization movement in Thessaloniki,• the anti-gold extraction movement in Halkidiki,• the movement against house evictions in different neighbourhoods in Athens,• the initiative for a metropolitan park at the former Hellinikon International Airport of Athens,• the environmental movements against large scale windmill
projects on different Greek islands,• the environmental struggle against landfill projects in the greater
metropolitan area of Athens• the occupation of the VIOME factory (under workers’ control) in
Northern Greece
There are debates on whether those initiatives present a continuation or a change of the pre-2010 anti-austerity mobilizations or theanti-globalisation movement between 2000 and 2010. Nevertheless, it
is obvious that apart from a “traditional” progressive stance towards
development to overcome the present framework, alternative ideas arecoming to the fore regarding, democracy and alternatives. The social
mobilisations, movements and initiatives at the moment in Greece:
provide an immediate response to the needs of those mostly affected by the crisis, and therefore prioritize social needs as the essential starting point for thinking about any alternative• provide structures of social solidarity and spaces for new democratic procedures• challenge power relations• put the questions of justice, welfare state and human rights• experience self-management• relate directly to ecological concerns and socio-ecological transformation• challenge the current patterns of production and consumption!"

Figure 18: Pictures from different
mobilisations and protest during the
Greek crisis period: a) “SOS Halkidiki” anti-gold social movement, Northern Greece b) Social movement
against house evictions in Athens,c) “People’s assembly in Syntagma,
Square, Athens, d) The logo of “VIOME factory occupation”, near Thessaloniki, Northern Greece

Furthermore,these
counter-hegemonic experiences and practices re-politicise
and re-democratise the debate about development, justice, decision
making processes and power relations. Furthermore they question
economic growth as the only possible mode of accessing nature andcapitalism as the only reasonable form of organizing socio-natural relations.

Conclusions
The uneven spatiality of TINA produce a sharpened process of
uneven development where the concentration of wealth that sits at the
top 0.1% rather than an already hideous 1%, recognized elsewhere.
What is also clear (not only in the case of Greece) is that the current
policy repertoire to tackle this pattern of development is inadequate:
unemployment increases, the gutting of the welfare state, and the privatization of public land and infrastructure. We cannot overstate how,essentially, the EU project is dominated by political economic elites,
who are attempting to create and prioritize a new space of European
accumulation, namely Greece.
The result of such a strategy is myriad tensions. Let’s hope thatsuch tensions will continue to lead to political movements that challenge and say “no” to the forms of uneven development, as we describe
above. As Hadjimichalis and Hudson argue (2014) “The task then [forradical social scientists and social movements] is to search for theories
and policies beyond neoliberalism, to re-establish the values and priorities for social and spatial justice”. We would add, there is also a chal-!"lenge to bring together an entire series of localised responses to thesymptoms of uneven development into a broader political programmethat actually confronts the disparities and inequities that permit such
system changes in the first place.
Futher readings
Brow, W., 2013. Neoliberalism, De-Democratization, Sacrifice. La Clé des Langues,
ENS Lyon/DGESCO, Lyon.
Hadjimichalis, C., 2014. Debt crisis and land dispossession (in Greek). KΨΜ press,
Athens.
Hadjimichalis, C., 2014. Crisis and land dispossession in Greece as part of the global
land fever. City. 18 (4-5), 502–508.
Hadjimichalis, C., Hudson, R., 2014. Contemporary Crisis across Europe and the Crisis of Regional Development Theories. Regional Studies. 48 (1), 208–218.
Loftus, A., 2012. Everyday Environmentalism – creating an urban Political Ecology.
University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London.
Swyngedouw, E., 2015. Depoliticization (“the political”), in: Degrowth – A vocabularyof a new era, D’ Alisa G., Demaria F., Kallis G. (Eds.), Routledge, London & New York.

!"Chapter 3.
Struggles overthe commons: Between
enclosures and commoning

Gustavo García López
Diego Andreucci
Jonah Wedekind
Editor: Gustavo García López

3.1 Introduction
The concept of the “commons” is becoming more widely deployed in diverse setting, spanning academia and civil society, governments and international organisations. This chapter introduces
the commons from a political ecology perspective. Our aim is to show
how commons are central to grassroots, solidarity-based cooperationin struggles for alternatives to the hegemonic state-market organization of our society and our ecology; and to situate the commons in thecurrent political economy of capitalist ‘development’. We propose thata political ecology approach can help civil society organizations identify the processes through which commons are enclosed (with)in thecapitalist economy. Conversely, a political ecology approach can also
help to understand the manifold and ingenious actions to protect andreclaim commons, and to situate these actions within a wider project ofsocial, political-economic and ecological change.

What are the commons?
The term commons originated in England to refer to lands (“common lands”) which, regardless of who owned them7, were open to villagers for traditional access and use rights such as livestock grazing andcollection of firewood, before they were gradually privatized (“enclosed”) with the expansion of individual property rights beginning in the
16th century. Similar commons existed in other parts of Europe, and all
across the world. In fact before colonization indigenous groups mostly
managed lands and other resources as commons, and many continue
to do so today.
The meaning of “commons” has been extended in several ways
over time. Some authors define the commons as shared (or “commonpool”) goods or resources that are used by many individuals, suchas forests, fisheries, water, the air, and even knowledge. Others emphasize that the commons refer to not just resources, but two other
inseparable dimensions: the communities that have longstanding re-7!"

Most in fact were owned by the English Crown and large feudalist landowners

lations to these resources (the commoners), and the social practicesof cooperation (the act of “commoning”) and collectively defined andenforced rules (“institutions”) that allow these communities to manage the resources sustainably for collective benefit. As David Bollier
put it: Commons = Resources + Communities + Commoning. In
addition, commons operate in a particular territory, which as explainedby anthropologist Susana Sawyer, is not just “the physical and material
contours of a region” but actually “encompasses moral-cosmologicaland political–economic complexes that shape identity and social relations” (Sawyer, 2004, p.83).
Contemporary examples of commons include seed-sharing cooperatives; communities of open-source software and hardware programmers; alternative currency groups; indigenous and peasantcommunities collectively managing forest lands, fisheries, and other resources for subsistence livelihoods; urban vegetable gardens and community-supported agriculture projects; and cooperative housing. These
practices often embody cooperative and autonomous self-organizationof groups of individuals that seek to address common issues beyond
the bureaucratic solutions of the state or the market. These initiatives
usually operate at the local level, though oftentimes they also form partof regional, national or global networks.

The commons as “tragedy” versus commons as possibility
The hegemonic view since the 17th century has been that selfinterest prevents people from coming together to sustainably manage common resources. This view has been strongly influenced by the
economics model of “rational egoist” individuals, in which individuals
always act in pursuit of a calculated maximization of their own interests,
usually without consideration of others. Biologist Garret Hardin (1968),
following this view, argued there was a “tragedy of the commons”:
people using a “common resource” (e.g. fishery, grazing land) would
be compelled by their own interest to extract as much as possible inthe short-term until depleting a resource, because if they did not do so,!"other users would8.
The same narrative is present today, in discoursesthat fixate on theidea of “resourcewars” as an inescapable result of
increasing resource
scarcity. This is an
example of a classic
apolitical narrativeof ecological degradation, where the
Figure 19: Illustrations by James Yang. Source: http:// causes are natural
sharinglab.dk/theimportance-of-the-commons/or biological: in thiscase, a purported inherent egoist competitive ‘nature’ of human beings,
coupled with a population boom and the ‘wrong’ type of legal property
regime. This view provided support to a process of enclosures (seebelow) of many commons around the world that came in parallel tothe globalization of capitalism. According to this logic, the only way to
avoid increasing and worsening tragedies brought on by unregulated
access to resources is through strong state control or private (market)
ownership over resources and populations. Hardin, as most mainstream thinkers then and today, preferred private property, which was seenas the most ‘efficient’ use of resources as well as the most individual‘freedom’ to citizens– an idea that had become hegemonic since at least the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Code in the 18th century.
Important critical scholars throughout history have challenged
this view, from Marx to anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin. Citizens
themselves have also challenges this through acts of overt mobilizations
and resistance to enclosures as well as through every day practices ofcommoning. Commons, in fact, have never ceased to exist, despite theattempts to erase them from history. Over the past two decades, howe-

8
Hardin drew on the writings of British economist W.F. Lloyd, a central figure in
the intellectual justification of the enclosure of the commons in England in the 1800s.

!"

ver, scholarly and practical challenges have become more pronounced,
as accumulated history and current events show that around the world,
people do organize to collectively protect and sustainably manage theirterritories, commons, and lives. This renewed interest is related tomany social struggles across the world that have sought to reclaim thecommons. In academia and policy circles, it is usually associated to thework of the late political scientist Elinor Ostrom. She and other scholars
showed that more often than not, communities developed rules (“institutions”) that allowed them to control egoistic interests and sustainably
use collective resources. They also identified characteristics of diverse
institutional arrangements, which Ostrom called “design principles”, inlong-lasting sustainable commons governance. These principles include local autonomy to design, monitor and enforce institutions; a levelof equality between costs and benefits of participation; and integration(“nestedness”) of local commons into organizations at multiple levels,
e.g. regional or national. Finally, institutional scholars have underscored the central importance of deliberation, trust and reciprocity between
people in overcoming individual interests to cooperate.
The Ostrom school, however, still operates within a mainstream
paradigm of “rational choice”, whereindividuals’
main
objective for cooperation is maximizing
profit and institutions
emerge as a beneficial solution to allparticipants. A political ecology approach instead focuseson how power, ineFigure 20: Illustrations by James Yang. (Source: http:// quality, and capitalist
political economy
sharinglab.dk/the-importance-ofthe-commons/)in general, affects
the possibilities of creating and sustaining commons.

!"

The tragedy of enclosures
Along with other disciplines, a political ecology approach rejects
the “tragedy” discourse, as referred to in the introduction, while recognizing grassroots cooperation in the commons; however, political ecology
emphasizes different dimensions of commons.
First, political ecology provides an understanding of the political
economy in which commons are situated. It emphasizes that the overexploitation of commons is not, at its root, a consequence of people’s
inability to collectively self-manage, but of larger political-economic forces that often privatize lands, displace communities, foster inequalities
and elite dominance, and plunder resources. Commons have historically been subjected to enclosures by the state and private actors to facilitate capitalist ‘development’ (for instance, mega-dams, transportation,mining, timber and agricultural plantations), and for human-excluding
nature conservation (protected areas). Enclosures are forced – often
violent – separation of commoners from their means of production andsubsistence through: physical displacement, regulating away certain
traditional usage rights, or contamination which renders commons unfit
for subsistence activities. Such a separation has a double objective. It“frees up” land and assets for private appropriation and inclusion into
circuits of capital accumulation (“commodification”). It also forces
those people who can no longer access their means of subsistence tobecome ‘workers’ (sell their labour) in the capitalist economy in order tosurvive (“proletarianisation”).
The English agricultural commons were progressively enclosed
from the 16th century onward – first to pave way for the expansion of
more intensive, export-oriented agriculture (for sheep wool, for instance). By the 19th century the European commons had been reduced tosmall areas of mountainous lands. Karl Marx labelled this enclosure aspart of what he called “original” or “primitive accumulation”, linked tothe emergence of capitalism. Marx in Capital had already noted how
these processes at the origin of capitalism were not restricted to Europe, but closely related with colonialism, to “the discovery of gold andsilver in America”, the enslavement of local populations, and “the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins”.
The enclosure of the commons has continued to be central to theprocess of capital accumulation throughout the history of capitalism.

!!

Geographer David Harvey labelled this “accumulation by dispossession” (see 1.4). It reflects that commons in general, and naturein particular, have become a key “accumulation strategy” of contemporary capitalism, distinct from the “normal” capital accumulation (based on labour exploitation), and that this strategy has often (though
not always) been violent. A common case is the concession of mineraland oil deposits, forests, agricultural and other common resources toprivate companies for their large-scale, intensive exploitation, which
critics have called extractivism (see 1.4, 1.5, 3.2, 4.3). Enclosures arealso associated to privatisation of water services, patenting of genetic
materials, and carbon trade schemes, among others. Two of the mostimportant facets of this new wave of enclosures, particularly in the “global South”, are an intensification of extractivism and the associatedtheft, purchase or lease of land for large-scale agriculture and biofuels
but also for conservation (called land grabbing).
In the following
sections we provide further analysesof the processesof enclosures, extractivism and land
grabbing,
focusedon the historical andon-going dispossessions from mining
activities in indigenous territories BoFigure 21: Enclosure of commons. (Source: http:// livia; the history of
www.utne.com/environment/history-of-the-com- enclosures and commonszm0z13mjzbla.aspx)
moning in Mexican
forests; and on the trajectory of land grabbing of agricultural land in
Ethiopia. These three cases in this chapter show that different formsof enclosures can happen under different political regimes, even when
progressive political elites or states claim to access and use resources
collectively, for the greater common good. For instance, in Ethiopia,
enclosures happened under the royal (kingdom), socialist, and (the current) neoliberal regimes. In Mexico, forest enclosures have happened
both under a dictatorship and a supposedly revolutionary pro-peasant!"regime; while in Bolivia, enclosures for mining characterized both neoliberal and the current ‘pro-indigenous’ presidency of Evo Morales. Accumulation by dispossession is thus shown as a recurrent feature of thedevelopmentalist, growth-based capitalist system, even in supposedly
anti-capitalist regimes like that of Morales.
The cases also show that extractivist/land grabbing enclosures
primarily affect indigenous and peasant communities for two reasons.
Firstly, as extractive frontiers expand increasingly into marginal areas(e.g. the Amazon, the Andean mountains), the overlapping with territories titled to indigenous and peasant communities become higher.
Secondly, these communities often depend for their livelihood on natural resource-based subsistence activities such as small-scale agriculture, fishing or hunting and gathering –often managed communally. By
exploring dispossession across these axes, political ecology scholars
have emphasized that enclosure is a form of “environmental injustice” (see Chapter 1. and Chapter 4.)

Resistance and alternatives through “commoning”
A second contribution of political ecology to the topic of the commons is showing the central importance of social movements thatemerge to resist enclosures and defend and recover the commons (seeChapter 5.). Social resistance and open rebellions in Europe as wellas in the colonized territories of America in fact accompanied original
enclosures.
Figure 22: The Diggers rebellion in England, 1649. (Source: https://libcom.org/
history/shadow-glorious-though-strange-goodthings-come-ranters-libertariancommunism-english-ci)

Political ecologists often link
this to a defence of local identity,
autonomy and their territory andresources. Joan Martínez Alier indentifies these manoeuvres as partof an “environmentalism of the!"poor”. These struggles can be seen all around the world, for instancethose of the rubber tappers, landless rural workers, and indigenous
peoples of Brazil to protect and reclaim their Amazonian commons fromagribusiness, mega-dams and other destructive projects (see Chapter2.); and the communities of Campania in Italy struggling against toxic wasting of their territories by the mafia and the state (see Chapter5.). As new forms of enclosure have proliferated around the world,counter-movements have multiplied, leading to new forms of commoning.
The cases discussed in this chapter also highlight that histories of
enclosures have a parallel history of counter-movements for the commons. In Bolivia, social movements’ mobilisation for water following
its enclosure in Cochabamba and other regions were one of the key
events that brought Evo Morales to power. Ultimately, this led to thestate-sanctioned doctrine of rights for nature, as well as of indigenous
groups in the country’s new constitution. Yet as is discussed below, inboth of the national indigenous confederations, CIDOB (lowlands) and
CONAMAQ (highlands), part of the members were co-opted and wereused to forcibly replace the legitimate leadership (and create parallelorganizations by the same name). This was a violent process involving
expelling them from their offices, even beating them up, with police force backing them. They were also denied legal personhood, and therefore funding. In Mexico, redistributing land was an important goal of therevolution in the 1910s; the right of peasant and indigenous groups toforest and agricultural commons were recognized in the post-revolution
constitution. Following the revolution, social movements fostered many
communal forestry institutions and garnered state support for these
new modes of forest management. While many were also co-opted or
marginalized after the 1930s by the pro-peasant revolutionary regime,in recent decades there has been a renewal of resistance to dispossessions across the country.
In recognizing the centrality of social struggles to the protectionand expansion of the commons, we can see that commons are not justa set of organizational procedures and institutions to sustainably manage ‘resources’; nor are they the result of isolated local experimentsof solidarity. Rather, many political ecologists insist we should analysecommons also for their potential as grassroots social and economic
alternatives to the hegemonic political economy and the construction!"

of real democracy.

Figure 23: 2014 People’s Climate March in New York City. (Source: Light Brigading/flickr/cc http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/19/young-people-have-power-rally-others-createpositive-change)

Some call it a radical form of democracy, based on the principle ofself-governance or what Henri Lefebvre called autogestion: a processof self-organization that carries a deep political commitment, intense
debate and deliberation, and constant renewal, in which a group refuses the imposition of certain conditions of existence and rather seeks
to take control of them. Commons and democracy are therefore central
pillars of a transformation towards a post-capitalist society that emerge
from grassroots social struggles and practices.
In the next sections, we detail these cases of commons in Bolivia(3.2), Ethiopia (3.3), and Mexico (3.4).

!"

Futher readings
Bollier, D. (2014). The Commons as a Template for Transformation.
Caffentzis, G., 2010. The Future of ‘The Commons’: Neoliberalism’s ‘Plan B’ or theOriginal Disaccumulation of Capital? New Formations. 69, 23-41.
De Angelis, M., 2001. Marx and primitive accumulation: The continuous character ofcapital’s“enclosures”. The Commoner. 2, September.
De Angelis, M., 2013. Does capital need a commons fix? Ephemera: Theory and politics in organization. 13(3), 603-615.
Fairlie, S., 2009. A Short History of Enclosure in Britain. The Land, 7.
Hardin, G. (1968) The tragedy of the commons. Science. 162 (3859), 1243-1248.
Harvey, D., 2003. The new imperialism: Accumulation by dispossession. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hobbes, T., 1651/2009. Leviathan., Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Lefebvre, H., 2009. Theoretical Problems of Autogestion (1966), in : Lefebvre, H.,
State, Space, World. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 138-152.
Linebaugh, P., 2009. The Magna Carta manifesto: Commons and liberties for all. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Martínez-Alier, J., 2002. The environmentalism of the poor: a study of ecological conflicts and valuation. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham.
Polanyi, K., 1944. The Great transformation.
Sawyer, S., 2004. Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism inCivil society organizations and institutions working on the Commons
On the Commons (USA)Commons Strategies Group (USA, Germany)
Commons Transition Platform (USA)
Digital Library of the Commons (USA)Commons Law Project (USA)Commons Abundance Network
Commons Blog (Germany)
Heinrich Böll Foundation (Germany)!"3.2 Extractivism, commons’ enclosure and dispossession in
the Bolivian highlands
Diego Andreucci‘Extractivism’ is a critical term emerged in recent years in Latin
America, in the context of debates around the increased dependencyof the region on the export of natural resources. The political ecologist
Eduardo Gudynas defines it as a type of natural resource extraction
which a) is large scale and/or very intensive; b) is primarily export oriented; and c) entails little or no industrial processing (Gudynas, 2013). Extractivism is associated with considerable negative political, economic,
social and ecological outcomes. It is historically embedded in relationsof (ecological and economic) ‘unequal exchange’ at the global scale.
Writing in the early 1970s, the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano
famously described this primary export-based development model as aform of ‘pillage’ to which Latin America had been condemned by colonial and then industrial nations throughout its history (Galeano, 1971).
The expansion of extraction ‘frontiers’ is caused by declining
availability and quality of natural resources, as well as by the intensification of extraction enabled by technological developments (such as
open cast mining). Political ecologists have associated the expansionof resource frontiers with highly disruptive socio-ecological outcomes
and an increase in related conflicts (Özkaynak and Rodríguez-Labajos,
2012; Bebbington and Bury, 2013). This last aspect is most closely related to the issue of commons’ enclosure. In this section, we use thecase of mining in the Bolivian highlands to describe some of the ways
in which extractivist-led development results in communities’ dispossession.
Bolivia is a traditionally extractivist country. Since colonial times,
its integration in global capitalism has been historically dependent on
the export of a few commodities. The silver from Potosí’s cerro rico(‘rich mountain’), for instance, was fundamental to the expansion of the
Spanish empire from the 16th century onwards and to the successive
development of manufacture in Europe. It was also, however, responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands indigenous people forced
to work in the cerro’s mines. Successive ‘boom and bust’ cycles, typical!"

of primary exporting countries, have made a few people rich and left
the country largely poor, by transferring most of the extracted wealthabroad.
In the last decade, growth in global demand and high commodity
prices fuelled another mineral export boom for Bolivia. At the sametime, however, a wave of social struggles led by indigenous and peasant organisations created the conditions for a progressive shift in theway the country’s natural wealth is managed. These include popularmobilisations against the privatisation of water resources in the cityof Cochabamba in 2000 and struggles to include environmental andindigenous rights provisions in the 2005 Hydrocarbon Law. The electionof Evo Morales in December 2005, a leader of the coca-grower union
movement of indigenous Aymará descent, brought to the fore long-neglected questions of social, environmental and indigenous rights. The
government and the social movements’ coalition which supported itparticularly, the ‘Peasant-Indigenous Unity Pact’-proposed ambitious
plans for a more just resource exploitation, including democratic-communitarian participation, redistribution of revenues, respect of indigenous territorial self-determination and protection of the ‘rights of theMother Earth’.
Unfortunately, however, many of these principles and plans havenot been translated into concrete measures for their implementation.
The Morales governments’ dependence on extraction rents, as well
as a close alliance with the mining sector, has worked as a politicaldisincentive to improve socio-environmental management. Moreover,the progressive marginalisation of indigenous organisations has reduced communities’ ability to mobilise in defence of their territories. As
a result, the intensification of resource exploitation has resulted in theworsening of the conditions of many peasant-indigenous communities
in extraction areas. Among these, the basin of the Uru-Uru and Poopó
lakes in the highland region of Oruro has been affected particularly
badly, generating high levels of ecological degradation and community
dispossession.

!"

Mining and contamination in the Poopó lake basin
In the Andean highlands, where the climate is semi-arid, mining
is in competition with agricultural and subsistence activities for the useof land and water. The legislation in place gives mining title-holders fullright to exploit-free of charge-all resources found on their concession,
including unlimited use of water and the possibility to change the courseof water bodies. The systematic dispossession of water exasperates the water scarcity problems faced by rural communities (Perreault,2013). These legal principles were established under previous, neoliberal, governments, particularly in the Mining Code passed in 1997
by then Bolivian president (and mining magnate) Gonzalo Sánchez de
Lozada. The new Mining Law approved in May 2014 has not redressed
this imbalance in the distribution of water and land rights.
Figure 24: Poster for the presentation of a book on
extractivism in Latin America. (Source: Bolivian
Centre of Documentation and Information - CEDIB)

The growth of mining in the Andean Highlands has led severe contamination ofsoil and water with commensurate negativesocial impacts. The Poopó lake basin contains fragile ecosystems and internationallyprotected wetlands, where fishing and peasant communities of Uru, Aymara and Quechua indigenous nations once thrived. Today,
it is one of the country’s most contaminatedareas. Due to expanding mining operation with little or no environmental mitigation measures, the Poopó Lake receives enormous quantities
of toxic chemicals and heavy metals-including zinc, arsenic, lead andcadmium. With the fishing population disappearing, so are the ancestral Uru fishing cultures of the lake that now face the threat of rapid
extinction. The campesino (peasant) and originario (indigenous) communities around the lake’s shores are also heavily affected by mining.
Lack of clean water sources forces communities to either limits theiragricultural activity to the rainy season or to use contaminated waterfrom the rivers or lake. Crops are losing productivity as a result. Animals, a central part of the local economy, get sick and occasionally die!"

from drinking unsafe water. Humans are affected too, suffering from gastric, dermatological and neurological maladies brought on by constant
exposure to toxic dust and contaminated food and water. Eroding
socio-economic and health conditions are forcing a large part of the
population in working age to migrate either to mining centres nearby orto larger cities in Bolivia and abroad.
Despite many years of organised resistance, a sense of hopelessness is pervasive among many who live in this area. The state islargely complacent with the environmental devastation created by mining companies. Not only is the law permissive, the state lacks qualified personnel and resources to effectively control and monitor theactivities of corporations. The general sense is that-at all levels of government-the priority is not to alienate mining interests. This is partly
explained by the economic importance of mining in certain areas. In
Oruro, for instance, small-scale agriculture and animal husbandry are
the most important sources of livelihood for rural families. Yet, according to study funded by the European Union, they only account for
4% of the region’s economy, while mining contributes as much as 35%(Vargas, 2013).
The argument that local subsistence practices may be sacrificed
for the good of local and national, mining-driven development-a widespread argument in mining conflicts around the world-should be rejected(see Chapter 4.). Besides impacting the environmental and public health, mining’s contribution to development in Bolivia is questionable.
The net contribution of the mining
sector to state revenues at the national
level has been calculated to be around
11% of the total value of exports. For
the year 2011, outof $3.5 billion USD
in mineral exports,
only $420 million
USD benefited the
Figure 25: Urus protesting against mining in the Popo country.
Moreover,basin. Source: http://subversiones.org/archivos/25589!"

regions where mining production is highest-such as Oruro and Potosíalso have the highest levels of poverty (in the Poopó basin, poverty
levels reach 85% of the rural population). As Pablo Villegas, a mining
expert at the Bolivia Information and Documentation Centre in Cochabamba (CEDIB) remarked, “[mining] royalties which do not compensate
for the [socio-environmental] damage and are not sufficient to promote
development are an economic absurdity”.

Enclosure and dispossession
This brief description of the Bolivian case highlights various formsof dispossession related to extractivism (Bebbington 2012). First, there’s dispossession of monetary value. At the national and regional
level, as we have seen, the revenues from mining are hardly enoughto compensate for the negative socio-environmental impacts of mining
itself. Locally, communities are also dispossessed of monetary value;loss of crop and livestock productivity due to contamination, for instance, reduces the already thin income of campesino families.
Second, there’s separation of communities from their meansof subsistence, related to commons’ enclosure. Direct cutting off fromwater and land access are favoured in Bolivia by a legal framework,
which, as we have seen, has traditionally been overly generous towards mining operators. Indirect separation of communities from theirsources of livelihood is also widespread. Because of contamination, forinstance, essential resources such as fish or clean water and soil areslowly rendered unavailable or unusable for communities.
Third, immaterial forms of dispossession accompany or are aconsequence of the rest. As communities are forced to abandon theirtraditional economic practices, the cultural and value practices attached to them are also lost.
Fourth, there is a dispossession of individuals’ and communities’ rights. These include, for instance, the rights of indigenous peoples to territorial self-determination, recognised by international humanrights law. Besides adopting these principles, the Bolivian Constitutionof 2009 recognises for everyone the right to a healthy environment andto participate in the benefits of extraction. Yet, in mining areas, all ofthese principles are dismissed or violated systematically, generally with!"

impunity. All this leads to the last form of dispossession - the dispossession of everyday security and, ultimately, of communities’ future.

Externalising costs
The lack of environmental and social protections is a way formining companies to save money and thus ‘externalise’ the cost of theiroperations. In Bolivia, the weak legal framework for mining designed
during the 1990s aimed to create favourable terms for private (especially foreign) investors. According to Emilio Madrid, a researcher at theOruro-based Collective for the Coordination of Socio-Environmental
Actions (CASA), this legislation creates a system of environmental regulation largely based on companies’ ‘self-control’. This means thatenvironmental monitoring is left to the company itself; the state shouldverify the information contained in the company’s environmental reports, but does not have the resources- or perhaps, much willingnessto do it. To the unregulated activities of large mining corporations, onemust add the mushrooming small-scale, self-employed miners-known
in Bolivia, misleadingly, as mining ‘cooperatives’. These work without
environmental licenses (with state endorsement) and explicitly admit
to not complying to socio-environmental standards because it would
significantly narrow their profit margin.

Figure 26: Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera celebrating with the Federation of
Mining Cooperatives (FENCOMIN) leadership in the entity’s 45th anniversary, where he delcared“We are a government of the people, and so what?”. (Source: http://
www.vicepresidencia.gob.bo/Garcia-Linera-Somos-un-gobierno)!!

Last but not least, the greatest single polluter in the Poopó basin is
the state itself, whose re-nationalised operation, the Huanuni tin mine,
has admittedly no functioning tailings dams or any environmental safeguard at all. This case shows, then, the intimate connections between
extractivism and commons’ enclosure. Here we have briefly shownthat extractivism operates as a form of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. In many parts of the world, extractivism is one of the most aggressive forms of capitalist expansion. Such an expansion, however, hasn’t
gone unchallenged. There are an increasing number of ongoing conflicts and instances of struggles against accumulation by dispossession
and for environmental justice. Demands for a profound re-thinking ofdevelopment emanating from peasant and indigenous movements
must be integrated further with a global critique of the political economy
of capital and its increasingly untenable ‘growth imperative’.

!""Futher readings
Bebbington, A., 2012. Underground Political Ecologies: The Second Annual Lectureof the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American
Geographers. Geoforum. 43 (6), 1152-62.
Bebbington, A., Bury, J., 2013. Subterranean struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil,and Gas in Latin America. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Galeano, E., 1997. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of aContinent. Ed. Belfrage C. Monthly Review Press, New York.
Gudynas E., 2013. Extracciones, extractivismos y extrahecciones. Un marco conceptual sobre la apropiación de recursos naturales. Observatorio del Desarrollo. 18.
Özkaynak, B., Rodríguez-Labajos, B., 2012. Mining conflicts around the world: Common grounds from an Environmental Justice perspective. EJOLT report 14.
Perreault, T., 2013. Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining, Water and the Nature of
Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano. Antipode. 45 (5), 1050-69.
Vargas, I. (2013). Formulación del plan director de la cuenca del lago Poopó: Diagnóstico socioeconómico ambiental general. Oruro: Programa de gestión sostenible
de los recursos naturales de la cuenca del lago Poopó.
Villegas, P. 2013. Las Regalías y Los Precios Altos de los Minerales. PetroPress. 31,
23-31.
Civil society organizations and institutions working on mining conflicts
Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts
Centro de Documentación e Información de Bolivia (CEDIB)
Centro de Ecología y Pueblos Andinos (CEPA)
Observatorio de Industrias Extractivas y Derechos Colectivos (OIEDC)
Colectivo de Coordinación de Acciones Socio Ambientales (CASA)!"!

3.3 A Short History of The Enclosures in Ethiopia: imperialist,
socialist and developmentalist land grabs
Jonah Wedekind

The 2007/08 financial crisis which saw rising food and fuel prices
has been accompanied by a rush of investors for agricultural land in the
global South. This has been called ‘the global land grab’ or ‘the new enclosures’ of commons (Wily 2012). Mainstream economists argue thatland grabbing and its negative consequences occur where states are
too weak to enforce property rights that clearly define ownership anduse of land, so that land may be legally transferred to investors, economic benefits captured and social ills avoided (Deininger et al. 2011).
Yet such a view does not help us to understand the dynamics of land
grabbing in a country like Ethiopia, where the state has been a strong
agent in manipulating property rights and enclosing the commons to
grab control of land and peasants.
Political ecology not only assesses the property rights that are inplace in a certain context, but also analyses property relations – thesocial struggles that take place over access to and use of property
such as land – as well as how power relations change across time andspace (Ribot and Peluso 2003). By tracing the history of enclosuresin Ethiopia we learn how common property was first turned into state
property that now ironically enables the transfer of land to private investors. While enclosures served to build the state from above, they also
always unleashed struggles for the commons that challenged the statefrom below. In retelling Ethiopia’s history of changing property relations
we can uncover a remarkable continuity of enclosures and resistances under different political regimes, under imperialism (1870s–1974),
socialism (1974–1991) and developmentalism (1994–2000s). Whilespecific to Ethiopia, such analysis of property relations can be usefully
applied to other settings.

!"#

Feudalist Imperialism
Ethiopia’s imperial, feudalist regime was formed during the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the late 19th century. While European colonizers enclosed other African territories, Emperor Menelik II expanded his rule fromthe central highlands of Shewa north and southwards to establish a modern Ethiopian state (Donham and James 2002). Through integrationand conquest of rival chiefdoms and peasantries, the Ethiopian state
formed into an empire that was able to maintain independence fromcolonizers in the early 20th century. While Ethiopia did not experiencecolonial enclosures as elsewhere in Africa9 the external presence ofcolonial powers meant that there were limits to further territorial expansion of the imperial state. Instead, imperial elites looked within their
peripheries to transform the commons into state property and impose
feudal relations, which would allow them to tax peasants and fund theimperial state (Markakis 1974).
In the densely populated central and northern highlands, various
peasant communities historically practised a regionally diverse customary property system called rist. It gave community members theright to access and use land, according to family or community ties.
The expanding state soon declared the highlands as property of imperial landlords so that peasants eventually only had individual userights to the land they once had customary rights to. Although highlandpeasants were not physically evicted, they were legally dispossessedfrom their rights to land. While the rist officially remained in use it was
subjected to a feudal tax system called gult, through which landlords
taxed peasants for using the land (Crummey 2000). Because the state
was unable to fully abolish the rist and many peasants’ communities
were unable or unwilling to pay land taxes, some imperial elites became warlords and looked southward to exploit the lowlands for profit andpower (Donham 1986).
The southern lowlands were considered by imperial elites as “unused” or sparsely populated by “primitives” – even though they were
inhabited by indigenous peasant and pastoralist communities with customary property systems based on seasonal or shifting cultivation.

9

Apart from a brief but violent Italian occupation (1935-1940).

!"#

Through violent forms of land grabbing the warlords enclosed the southern lowlands, often physically dispossessing indigenous peoples, sometimes taking them as slave labourers (Donham and James 1986).
The warlords began imposing a feudal property system called gabbar, which forced peasants to pay taxes or work as labourers on theland they had once owned collectively; yet warlords rarely settled in
the lowlands, ruling in absence through local chiefs (Donham 1986).
In the mid-20th century, Emperor Haile Selassie legally enforced theenclosures of the southern lowlands by declaring ‘all property not heldor possessed in the name of any person as state domain under imperial law’ (Constitution 1955). Thus imperial administrators (often former
warlords) began privatizing many southern lands suitable for largescale farming. This way Ethiopia’s south was turned into a peripheryfor cheap resources and strengthened political power of imperial elites(Makki, 2012).

Centralised Socialism
Peasants and workers challenged the enclosures of the commons
under imperialism across Ethiopia. To avoid taxation various northernand central highland peasant communities retreated into subsistence
production (Rahmato, 2011), while others retreated into clandestine
production and trading networks to avoid taxation (Zewde, 2002).
Across southern Ethiopia, the dispossessed even turned to banditry
for survival (Fernyhough, 2010). From the 1940s – 70s many peasant
movements challenged the state. In the north, the Woyane movement
fought a long-lasting peasant war to challenge centralization of the imperial state and aim for autonomy and self-governance (Young 1996),
and cross the central highlands too various peasant uprisings took place (Tareke, 1996). Resistance to feudal property also emerged in thecities. Students and workers, many of who had rural backgrounds, declared solidarity with the peasantry with slogans like ‘land to the tiller’and demanded land reforms to end feudal property relations (Markakis1978). Finally, the social revolution of 1974 overthrew the feudal regime and a new political elite of progressive intellectuals and military leaders emerged. Together they formed a centralized socialist state, which
set out to abolish feudal property relations that proclaimed ‘all rural!"#lands … [as] collective property of the Ethiopian people’ and pledged‘any person ... willing to personally cultivate land shall be allotted ruralland’ (Land Act 1975). In theory, this gave all peasants equal rights toland – in practice the land reforms were experienced unevenly10 acrossthe north and south of Ethiopia (Makki 2012).
The northern peasantries had hoped for autonomy after the
revolution in order to re-establish customary property systems. Yet
precisely because peasants now had ‘equal’ rights to state land, theregionally and culturally uneven rist systems were not prioritised by thestate. The state planners created rural Peasant Associations and staffed these with bureaucratic administrators rather than peasant community elders in order to implement the land reforms as fast as possible.
Soon after the first wave of land reforms, the central state quickly ran
out of revenues – due to stagnant agricultural productivity – and ordered Peasant Associations to tax the peasantry again. The effect wasthat northern peasants soon found themselves having the same tax
obligations to the administrators of the socialist regime as theypreviously had to landlords of the previous regime (Rahmato, 1984).
In the south, land reforms initially provided relief, especially forlandless peasants who managed to regain access to farmland (ibid.).
Yet, by the 1980s the state made collectivized agriculture in the southa priority for development. Like the imperial elites, the socialist planners considered the low-density lowlands and their peasant or pastoralist communities “unproductive”.
Figure 27: EPRDF Propaganda for Agrarian Transformation. (Source: Jonah Wedekind, East Hararge, Ethiopia 2013)

The state converted private capitalist
farms into state farms and collectivized peasant farms into producer co-operatives(ibid.). The labour force required for agricultural collectivization was mobilized throughmassive resettlement projects, including the10
See the contribution of Garcia-Lopez (this chapter), where comparable radical
land reforms were carried out.

!"#

forced resettlement of poor highland peasants to southern producer co-operatives and the movement of landless peasants or pastoralists across the south into wage-labour camps near large state farms.
By 1990, a huge section of Ethiopia’s rural population had experienced
land grabbing, displacement and famine as a result of the radical land
reforms and resettlement projects (Pankhurst and Piguet, 2009).

Federalist Developmentalism
The agricultural policies of the socialist planners were unsuccessful and unpopular as agricultural output was low and famine a
constant risk. Particularly, the suppression of cultural diversity and ethnic identity like practising customary property systems lead to rural unrest. Various rural liberation movements formed across Ethiopia, mobilising their own ethnic communities and forming coalitions with otherethnic movements in other regions. This multi-ethnic coalition was led
by the northern Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which coordinated rural insurgencies against the socialist military. After years of
struggle, the movements took power in 1991, forming a coalition of ethnic parties, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front(EPRDF), in which the TPLF remains the most influential on the politics
of the federal state (Young 1997).
Figure 28: Enclosure of Land, Edible Oil Factory.
(Source: Jonah Wedekind, East Hararge, Ethiopia
2013)

The Ethiopian federalist state is decentralised through its division into different ethnic regions and a constitution according to which ‘the right to ownership ofrural and urban land is exclusively vested
in the state and the peoples of Ethiopia.
Land is a common property of the Nations,
Nationalities and Peoples of Ethiopia and shall not be subject to sale’(Constitution 1994). Ethiopia’s decentralized property system was thus
designed to respect the cultural diversity of the various customary property systems. The constitution also follows a developmentalist logic,!"#

according to which the state strongly regulates industrial developmentand (in theory) gradually privatized agriculture to avoid the massive
peasant dispossessions of the previous regimes (Lavers 2012). The
decentralized developmentalist state declared that its main task was totransform Ethiopia from a primarily agricultural economy to a modern
industrial country. The strategy to do so was first based on providing
peasants with technologies (credits, fertilisers, seeds) to boost theirproductivity in order to then shift agricultural surpluses into industrial
development (Rahmato, 2008). Yet over the years the peasantry failed to become as productive as the federal political elites hoped, andthe state soon revised its development strategy, preferring instead toattract foreign investors who could provide capital to boost agricultural productivity and industrial growth (Rahmato, 2011). Again, suchinvestments lead to centralisation of land control and uneven development across the north and south.
In the central andnorthern highlands, thestate now directs investments into peasantagriculture to commodify
their production activities. These investments
encourage subsistence
farmers to produce a surplus to sell on markets
for export. The effect of
direct investments into
Figure 29: Land Clearance and Land Conflict in peasant agriculture in thethe Lowlands. Source: Jonah Wedekind, East Ha- highlands leads to a slow
rarge, Ethiopia 2013
process of economic differentiation between peasants as they compete with each other, eventually causing poorer peasants to give up farming, often leaving theirfarmland (proletarianisation). The state still does not fully privatize
land, fearing that this will lead to massive dispossessions. However, bydirecting investments into peasant agriculture and thereby promoting
the commodification of their subsistence and production, the state
gradually contributes to the destruction of customary property systems
in the highlands (Lavers, 2012).

!"#

In the southern and western peripheries, the state identified investments zones where foreign and domestic investors may establish
large-scale farms for food and energy production. The land is leased
to investors and the state mobilises the required labour force for theinvestors. Like the two previous regimes before it, the political elitesof the developmental state claim that the lowlands are “underused” by“unproductive” peasants and pastoralists (Makki, 2012). To make way
for agricultural investments, the state resettles or claims to compensate
indigenous communities, and in some cases pastoralists are forced tosettle-down to make space or work as labourers for the new large-scale
investment farms (Abbink et al., 2014). In recent years, it has become
clear that the state is stretching to its final frontiers in order to grab lands for capital accumulation and state formation (Markakis 2011), thereby displacing the commoners and enclosing the commons in Ethiopia.

Lessons from Ethiopian History
Land grabbing has different faces in different global settings(GRAIN, 2014). The above historical political ecology of changing property relations, though specific to Ethiopia, provides analytical tools thatcan be applied to any context – in order to comprehend and counteract
the global enclosures of the commons. Individuals and organizations
involved in social struggles for land rights, might learn from such an
historical analysis the following. First, it is always vital to understandhistories of property relations - their changes and continuities - inorder to identify the coercive and consensual strategies through whichstate (and market) actors can manipulate property rights in order to legally enclose the commons and physically grab land. This is important,to comprehend and challenge processes of commons’ enclosuresand land grabs that are taking place globally. Second, progressive
states, even when promising to act in the interest of a marginalised
collective, must be held accountable by a strong civil society, in order
to serve commoners rather than political or economic elites. Currently
there are few CSOs inside Ethiopia that are able to push for common
land rights for culturally diverse commoners, despite a rich history of
movements, revolutions and progressive state agents (see 3.2) striving
for common access to and use of property such as land. It is therefo-!"#re fundamental to strengthen CSOs knowledge on the potentials andperils of past social struggles against the enclosures and for the commons.
Futher readings
Crummey, D., 2000. Land and society in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia: from thethirteenth to the twentieth century. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.
Deininger, K., et. al., 2011. Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? The World Bank: Washington, D.C.
Donham, L., D., 1986. Old Abyssinia and the new Ethiopian empire: themes in social
history, in: Donham L.D., James, W. The southern marches of imperial Ethiopia: essays in history and social anthropology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp.
3-49.
Donhan, L.D., James, W., 2002. Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia, James Currey, Oxford.
Fernyhough, T.D., 2010. Serfs, Slaves and Shifta: Modes of Production and Resistance in PreRevolutionary Ethiopia. Shama Books, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
GRAIN, Martinez-Alier, J., et. al., 2014. The many faces of land grabbing. Cases fromAfrica and Latin America. EJOLT Report No. 10.
Lavers, T., 2012. ‘Land grab’ as development strategy? The political economy of agricultural investments in Ethiopia. Journal of Peasant Studies. 39 (1), 105-132.
Makki, F., 2012. Power and property: commercialization, enclosure, and the transformation of agrarian relations in Ethiopia. Journal of Peasant Studies. 39 (1), 81-104.
Markakis, J., 1974. Ethiopia: Anatomy of a Traditional Polity. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Markakis, J., 1978. Class and Revolution in Ethiopia. Spokesman, Nottingham.
Markakis, J., 2011. Ethiopia: The Last Two Frontiers. James Currey, Oxford.

!"#

Futher readings
Pankhurst, A., Piguet, F., 2009. Moving People in Ethiopia: Development, Displacement and the State. James Currey, New York.
Rahmato, D., 1984. Agrarian Reform in Ethiopia. Red Sea Press, Trenton, NJ.
Rahmato, D., 2008. The peasant and the state: studies in agrarian change in Ethiopia
1950s-2000s. Custom books publishing, Addis Ababa.
Rahmato, D., 2011. Land to investors: large-scale land transfers in Ethiopia. Forum
For Social Studies, Addis Ababa.
Ribot, J., Peluso, N., L., 2003. A Theory of Access. Rural Sociology. 68 (2), 153-181.
Tareke, G., 1996. Ethiopia: Power and Protest, Peasant Revolts in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Wily, L.A., 2012. The Global Land Grab: The New Enclosures, in: Bollier, D., Helfrich,
S. (Eds.), The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State. Levellers
Press, Amherst, pp. 132-140.
Young, J., 1997. Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia: The Tigray People’s Liberation Front
1975-1991. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Zewde, B., 2002. Systems of Local Governance among the Gurage, in: Zewde, B.,
Pausewang, S. (Eds.), Ethiopia: The Challenge of Democracy from Below. Forum forSocial Studies, Addis Ababa, pp. 17-28.
Civil Society organizations and institutions working on land grabbing and/or in
Ethiopia
Farmland Grab
Oakland InstituteTransnational Institute (TNI)
Land Matrix
Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia
Anywaa Survival Organization
Melca Ethiopia
South Omo Research Center (SORC)
Forum for Social Studies, Ethiopia!!"

3.4 A political ecology of forest commons in Mexico
Gustavo García López

The experience of community forestry in Mexico, a global pioneer
in common property institutions over forests, highlights the possibilities
of commoning as alternative forms of social organization, economic
production and ecological protection. At the same time it underscores,
on one hand, the challenges of commons within an extractivist, developmentalist system that continually pushes for commons’ enclosures,and on the other, the necessity of social struggles to defend and rebuild
those commons. The case has interesting parallels with some of thecases discussed in other chapters, such as that of Chile’s extractivist regime of Eucalyptus plantations in indigenous Mapuche land (seeChapter 1.); the cases of struggles around waste contamination in theregion of Campania, around the recovery of urban spaces in Barcelona(see Chapter 5.) and the case of social economy initiatives in the Basque Country and Athens (see Chapter 4.).

Mexican forest commons as a model of sustainability
Approximately 52%
of Mexico’s entire territory
and 70% of its temperate
forests - the highest percentage in the world - areestimated to be under collective property regimes
known as ejidos (peasant communities) andcomunidades(indigenous communities) (Bray,2013). Approximately 14
Figure 30: The temperate pine forests of the Sierra million people live in more
Madre Occidental mountain range in the state ofthan 8.000 forest’s comDurango. (Source: Gustavo Garcia Lopez, Duranmunities and most of theirgo, 2010)!!!

livelihoods depend on forests resources. About 20% of these communities currently manage forests on their own for timber, while many others
do so for non-timber forest products, ecotourism, and conservation,
among others.
In collective properties, decisions are taken collectively throughthe general assembly, the primary decision-making body of the community, which in most communities holds monthly meetings. Every three years, the community elects a governing council (comisariado) that
officially represents the community, and an oversight council (consejo
de vigilancia) in charge of monitoring the governing council, forest management activities and overall rule compliance.
Communities
thatengage in forestry activities are legally required
to hire a certified forester(a sort of private ‘extension service’) to develop
a management plan tobe approved first by thegeneral assembly andthen by the government’s
environmental
ministry.
The forest management
plan, usually for a period
Figure 31: General assembly of forest association.
of 10 years, establishes a(Source: Gustavo Garcia Lopez, Durango, 2010)
maximum allowable volume of timber (or non-timber product) to be harvested every year, withthe goal of sustaining output in the long term. It also identifies the areas
to be conserved for other uses and ecological restoration activities tobe carried out, such as reforestation, soil conservation, and fire prevention. The economic benefits of timber harvesting and other economic
enterprises (e.g. ecotourism) are shared equally amongst the community members. In this sense, the operation resembles small cooperatives.
In many ways, Mexico’s community forestry has been a successful
experiment, leading some to call it a global model and for its replicationin other countries. Research has shown that communities that havedeveloped an active social and economic activity around forestry (e.g.

!!"timber extraction, ecotourism) have lower levels of deforestation thangovernment-run protected areas as well as other non-communally managed forests. Community forestry has also contributed in some regions to reduction of poverty and to the development of strong social
ties (Duran et al., 2011). Moreover, through social solidarity and livelihoods, forest commons have helped communities to adapt and respondin creative ways to the challenges posed by the political economy
they inhabit, often resisting pressures for enclosures. For instance, researchers in the state of Michoacan (Barsimantov and Navia-Antezana, 2012) analysed forest communities’ responses to the expansionof avocado crops (the ‘avocado boom’), grown for export to the USA,fostered by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Communities engaged with timber harvesting activities for the most part did
not cut their forests to plant avocado, while communities that had noforestry activities deforested almost everything. Meanwhile, in the stateof Guerrero, researchers found that a region where communities had
developed community forestry and strong monitoring and enforcement
around forests had avoided the problems of illegal timber harvestingand violence that marred a nearby region in the same state.

Beyond the local: Multi-level commons
The case of Mexico also shows the importance of connecting local commoning experiences with different levels of governancebeyond the local for sustaining the commons. These connections include inter-community organizations as well as collaborators from outside
the communities, such as researchers, civil society organizations, anddevelopment agencies. These entities can provide political and economic support that fosters less dependence on the state.
Inter-community organizations that coordinate between multiple
communities in a given region, help forest communities through political representation, channelling resources from government programs,
pooling member resources for developing collective timber enterprises,
and harmonising ecological protection activities. For instance, in Oaxaca, with the longstanding support of a local CSO (GAIA) and financing from the Global Environmental Fund and the United Nations Development Program, the Community System for Biodiversity (SICOBI)!!"brought together five forest communities from the southwest region in2001 to establish regional watershed-level initiatives to improve livelihoods and better conserve land, water an biodiversity. With this project,member communities have been supported in developing community
territorial plans and improving land management practices. Aside fromstrengthening community
forestry, SICOBI has also
helped establish pesticidefree agroforestry and shade-grown coffee initiatives
to diversity local production
while also conserving traditional maize as well as forestlands.
At the same time, national peasant forest organisations that provide a
Figure 32: Tree nursery of forest association in unified voice, such as Red
Durango. The association provides saplings at a Mocaf, as well as allied cilow cost for member communities’ reforestation
activities. (Source: Gustavo Garcia Lopez, Du- vil society organizations,such as the Mexican Civil
rango, 2010)
Council for Sustainable Forestry (CCMSS), have played a crucial supporting role in demanding
changes in federal policies and programs to guarantee support for, anddefend the rights of, forest communities.

A turbulent history: Between enclosures and resistances
The successful development of the commons in Mexico was nota conflict-free process. Forest commons emerged and evolved as adirect result of a revolutionary process and the social mobilizations,which peasants and indigenous groups have recurrently used to expand and defend these commons and pressure the state to support
them. The initiatives that can be observed today, including the Zapatista movement, are part of a much longer history of struggle.
During the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1884-1911), Mexican forests suffered the classic fate of enclosures for large-scale economic!!"

projects by powerful corporations. Díaz sought to promote substantial
investments by private foreign (mostly US) capital. For this purpose
he passed a law in 1883 which declared all “unproductive lands” (baldíos) as property of the state to be ‘developed’ by private investors forlarge-scale extractivist projects such as mining and timber – the same
strategy used in Europe during the original wave of commons’ enclosures. Many of the lands declared as unproductive were inhabited byindigenous groups and peasants.
The Mexican revolution (c. 1910-1920) –the first in the world in
the 20th century– led to the largest and longest-standing land reform
process of the century, embodied in the Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution. Over a period of 60 years, the state distributed millions of hectaresof land in collective property to groups of landless peasants and indigenous communities. The Mexican state’s recognition of common property regimes in the Constitution and a series of federal laws, as well as
programmatic support providing capacity building and resources for thedevelopment of community forestry activities, were crucial for today’s
success of community forestry.
However, this state support was not automatic, but another aspectof the revolutionary struggle. While the Revolution opened the door forthe collective land grants in the 1930s under the presidency of Lazaro
Cardenas, land reform quickly faced obstacles with changes towards
more conservative presidencies after Cardenas. The government’s
strategy for managing forests quickly became anti-commons: a combination of conservation areas where any kind of community use of
the forest was prohibited; and industrial-scale extractivist concessions
given first to private corporations and then to public ones. This system
proved a total failure in sustaining either forests or rural livelihoods.
Peasant struggles across the country led to the reigniting of significant land reform in the 1960s-70s; to a series of government programs to support community forestry; and to the end of the timber
concessions in 1986. Many community forestry enterprises and intercommunity forest organizations emerged in this period; they established the collective organizational basis of what today is considered amodel initiative.
Yet as in the rest of the world, the 1990s brought neoliberal reforms to agrarian and environmental laws and policies. Common
property was perceived as inefficient; privatization was promoted as the!!"only ‘solution’ to ‘modernize’ the agricultural sector. Land reform wasofficially ended and ejidos were allowed to privatize their land. Free trade agreements with Chile (MCFTA) and with US and Canada (NAFTA)
opened the door to the influx of cheaper forest products into Mexico.
Despite a large community forestry program developed by the Mexican government with financing from the World Bank and the Global
Environmental Fund11, in the balance, the political economy of the newneoliberal regime has proved a great challenge to the forest commons.
Deforestation continues at high levels in many regions12, andsocial, political and economic conditions for rural communities continue to deteriorate. Most forest communities still do not have organizedself-management of their forests; many are under rentismo, contracts
under which private corporations harvest timber with little economic benefit for locals. Land tenure conflicts and associated illegal logging
from timber mafias also persist; in places like Michoacan and Guerrero,community leaders have been killed for defending their forests, as
is happening in many places around the world (see Chapter 2.). Communities across the country have also started to de-collectivize forest
management activities, forming what are called work groups (one of theinstitutions promoted by the neoliberal reforms), and to divest their collective forestry enterprises, selling off their timber processing infrastructure (e.g. sawmills). This is in significant part due to increasing costs
of inputs and decreasing timber prices, strongly related to competition
from the industrial timber plantations of Mexico’s ‘free trade’ partners;
but also to government over-regulation of community forestry and lackof sufficient subsidies. A recent study by the CCMSS calculated thatcomplying with all relevant regulations can cost a community forestry
enterprise hundreds of thousands of dollars and take up to two years.

11
The program sought to promote stronger community forestry enterprises, anddid succeed in doing this, though it has been criticized for among other things, emphasizing too much the commercialization aspect of forestry rather than the socialorganizational component, and allocating too many resources to hiring of private foresters to provide technical assistance to communities. Moreover, the program, in its
own neoliberal World Bank framing, failed to foresee that only a very limited numberof communities can really compete in a (‘free trade’) forestry market dominated bylarge corporations and timber plantations.
12!!"

Between 2000 and 2012, almost 2 million hectares of forest were deforested.

Another study by this CSO showed that the vast majority of government
funding for forestry goes to timber plantations and reforestation activities, and not to community forestry.
In the last decade, the state’s response to these challenges has
increasingly been one of neoliberal conservationist policies: mostof the forest budget now goes to reforestation activities and payment
for environmental services (PES) programs; and to increasing timber
production through timber plantations and more intensive harvesting.
This failed response is coupled with new processes of enclosure by
the State and its corporate allies for large-scale extractivist activities(mainly mining and hydropower). Challenges to these new forms ofdispossession have often been violently repressed. These challenges
remind us that the commons require a structural change in order toflourish, and that meaningful state support comes through the pressureof social struggle.
In some regions, communities have faced this challenge throughorganized struggles to demand political and economic changes andcontinue to build grassroots alternatives. The best publicised is the Zapatista struggle, which emerged alongside NAFTA to challenge neoliberalism as the only possible form of governing. They sought to reclaim
and defend the commons of the indigenous nations of Mexico by kicking
out the government and political parties and recovering their traditional
decision-making systems, where electoral processes are substituted byappointed positions deliberated in community assemblies. In Oaxaca,
which has the largest indigenous population in Mexico, communities
have similarly fought for recovering these traditional systems, and today
indigenous communities autonomously govern more than 70% of thestate’s 570 municipalities13. These communities often portray a rather
different vision of ecology than the Western development model:
nature is seen as Mother rather than product, development as a circular
process between humans and ecology, rather than a linear process of‘growth’. Oaxaca’s indigenous autonomy has served to support the durability of community and inter-community forestry organizations that inturn have sustained their forests and livelihoods for decades. In these13
In contrast, in the entire country of Bolivia there are only 11 recognized autonomous indigenous municipalities.

!!"

struggles, we see that the recovery of the commons is also reclamationof community, territory and grassroots democracy.

Lessons from the Mexican forest commons
The history of the Mexican forest commons debunks the hegemonic “tragedy of the commons” narrative; on the contrary, it shows
marginalized communities are often at the forefront of protecting thesecommons. It also highlights that a broad redistribution over rights
to land and its resources is an essential basis for commons. The
Mexican revolution and subsequent peasant mobilizations that pushed
the state to act made an important contribution in this regard –creating
the institutional (legal, property) basis for commons initiatives. At thesame time, we saw that even a ‘revolutionary’ pro-peasant state canhave a tendency towards commons enclosures to facilitate capital accumulation; a process that has intensified under neoliberalism. Hence,
there is a need for continuing struggles that go beyond the local andconnect at regional and national levels to achieve structural changes.
The participation of civil society organizations in these struggles can bepivotal, but it requires long-term involvement, dedication, commitment
to mutual learning, and in-depth analysis of the structural constraints tocommoning and the ways to transform them.

!!"Futher readings
Barsimantov, J., J. Navia-Antezana, 2012. Forest Cover Change and Land Tenure
Change in Mexico’s Avocado Region: Is Community Forestry Related to Reduced
Deforestation for High Value Crops?. Applied Geography. 32, 844-853.
Bray, D. B., et. al., 2005. The Community Forests of Mexico: Managing for Sustainable
Landscapes. University of Texas Press, Austin
Bray, D., 2013. When the state supplies the commons: Origins, changes, and designof Mexico’s common property regime. Journal of Latin American Geography. 12(1),p. 33-55.
Durán, E., et. al., 2011. Multi-Scale Forest Governance, Deforestation, and Violence in
Two Regions of Guerrero, Mexico. World Development. 39, 611-619.
Garcia Lopez, G., A., 2013. Scaling up from the grassroots and the top down: theimpacts of multilevel governance on community forestry in Durango, Mexico. International Journal of the Commons. 7(2), 406-431.
Hart, J.M., 1999. Los norteamericanos en Durango, in: Cano Cooley, G., E., Cerutti,M., (Eds.), Porfiriato y Revolución en Durango. Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas,
Durango, Mexico, pp. 127-155.
Merino, L., Martínez, A., 2014. A vuelo de pájaro: Las condiciones de las comunidades
con bosques templados en México. Conaibo, Mexico City.
Navarro, S., F., Bessi, R., 2014. Across Latin America, a Struggle for Communal Landand Indigenous Autonomy. Truthout, July 20.
Civil society organizations working on foresty management issues
Consejo Civil Mexicano de Silvicultura Sostenible (CCMSS)Red Mexicana de Organizaciones Campesinas Forestales (Red MOCAF)
Grupo Autónomo para la Investigación Ambiental (GAIA)
Grupo de Estudios Ambientales (GEA)!!"Chapter 4.
Socio-ecological Transformations
and Struggles for Real Democracy

Rita Calvário
Amelie Huber
Panagiota Kotsila
Irina Velicu
Editor: Irina Velicu

4.1 Introduction
Obviously the multi-party democratic system that we have, no longer can adequately represent or capture the level of social discontent[…] the eternal marriage between democracy and capitalism is approaching a divorce.
Slavoj Zizek, contemporary philosopher (2011)
Ecological issues are politicized through local and regional conflict, and political questions and conflicts are increasingly cast in ecological terms.
Paul Robbins, Professor of political ecology (2011 p. 200)

Democracy & Political Ecology
A variety of issues, ranging from land use change, waste management, agricultural production and environmental pollution to publichealth, the extraction of natural resources and environmental policy ingeneral, are often presented solely as techno-managerial questions;that is, as questions that can only be answered through the specificexpertise of engineers (economists, geneticists, material or biomedical scientists etc.) and the regulatory power of central/high-level institutions (like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, national
governments or international agreements). The problem of presenting
environmental issues in this way is that science and governance institutions are mistakenly seen as independent entities. Political ecology canhighlight how environments, and conflicts over them, are in fact affected
and shaped by diverse interests and power relations in society.
Decision-making processes are closely related to the questionof which knowledge is to be considered valid and, thus, what kind of
science becomes the visible, credible and legitimate basis for legal
action and policy making. Political ecological research has aimed toshow that it is exactly because of power asymmetries, economic interests and political gains that certain scientific truths are rendered more
valid than others. Some people’s voices, forms of knowledge and waysof organizing livelihoods are being dismissed as irrelevant or invalid
during this process (see the work of anthropologist James Ferguson!""

on pasture management practices in the South African region of Lesotho, (Ferguson, 1990)). As a result, undesired environmental, economic
and other impacts are unequally distributed, both geographically andsocially.
Political ecologists speak about how natural resources are being
extracted, allocated and exploited in ways that are not only ecologically unsustainable, but also socially harmful and undemocratic. Suchprocesses are often de-politicized through discursive practices that
posit them in the realm of technical expertise instead of public debate(see sections 4.2 and 4.3). Development projects often avoid or obstruct true participation by proceeding behind a democratic façade.
In reality, these projects generally empower state bureaucracies andmarket institutions, rendering the realities and opinions of those whose
livelihood and well-being are really at stake, practically unheard (seealso sections 4.4 and 4.5).
Political ecology sheds light on these aspects and emphasizes that“expert” knowledge and policy decisions are never neutral, but always
political. Not only is the result of techno-politics (Mitchell, 2002) undertakes this to be “the kinds of social and political practice that produce simultaneously the powers of science and the powers of modern states”)
an unequal exposure of people to environmental harms, like pollution,
infrastructural damage, livelihood destruction, or disease, but also a
withdrawal of these issues from the political space. It further asks, who
sets the terms of negotiations around access to common goods, natural resources and desirable environments and how are decisions onthese issues made (see chapter 3.). Political ecology, thus, shows theimportance of re-politicizing, re-historicizing and re-contextualizing
environmental issues and the everyday problems that people face inlocal and global scales, at the same time striving to enable transformation within a socio-ecological “collective”.

But what is Democracy?
The democratic ideal is an old aspiration of the oppressed, arisingfrom confrontations with elitism. However, political power is no longer
reserved exclusively to a group of individuals defined by their social
status and has become a universal right of individuals regardless of!"#their conditions of existence. Democracy can be understood as a process and a political system in which the ‘rule of the people’ replacesthe ‘rule of an individual’ or the ‘rule of the elites’. The state is, thereby,
separated and independent from economic powers and social classes,
becoming a neutral entity to negotiate and balance different interests.
According to the Marxist critique, this separation is only relative. Abstract equality, through the attribution of individual rights, hides the inequalities produced by the capitalist order and, as a result, economic
elites end up exercising political power in determining who gets what
and under which conditions. The socialist alternative revolves aroundequal access to means of production – as opposed to the liberal ideaof equal rights.
The goal of democratic processes is often portrayed as a means to
avoid social conflict through negotiation or by achieving consensus. Although neither of the latter processes is per se apolitical, in a neoliberal
globalised world they risk of becoming so, when the adversarial natureof politics is denied or hidden under the cloak of techno-bureaucratic
expertise. In this sense, critical thinkers see political conflict as a necessary process that democracy should expect and be able to handle,
rather than avoid. The Belgian theorist Chantal Mouffe (2009), calls thischaracteristic of democratic conditions, agonism. Agonism could beseen as the beginning of democratic politics and has been thought ofdistinctively by many other scholars (dissensus for J. Rancière (2012),
conflicts for J. Martinez-Alier (2014) or discord for W. Connolly (2002,
1985), to name a few). Renowned political ecologist Erik Swyngendow
speaks of the political as essentially and structurally different than politics. According to him, the political is the only moment in which equality
can exist in a democratic configuration, where anyone can occupy the
space of power and for which agonism is a precondition. In sum, exposing the exclusions, the silencing, the subjugation and the manipulationthat often take place, even in contexts of consensual politics, is considered by many critical thinkers as a prerequisite for democracy. In thissense, struggles for ‘real democracy’ must involve political conflict for
re-distributing power and for ensuring the control of the economy frombelow.
Does democracy mean reclaiming the state or should we rethinkdemocracy beyond state representation? Many of the forms in which
democracy has been attempted seem to have failed on many fronts.

!"#

Nonetheless, the practices of resistance, solidarity and collective action
continue to challenge and re-invent the meaning of democracy, power,
control and participation, shifting the nature of dialogues and organisations. In response to disillusionment with formalized democratic institutions, people around the world are articulating political alternatives.
After a rebirth of leftist movements in Latin America (Bolivia, Venezuela,
Ecuador) and the Arab Spring, a new wave of street protests swept overan increasing number of places, from Athens to New York and from Tel
Aviv to Moscow. They had in common their disagreement with a democracy that is only defending the interests of the elites (the “1%”) on thisplanet. In face of neoliberal globalisation and increasingly authoritarianstates, these movements reclaim ‘real democracy’ as a demand still tobe met. At the same time, many social movements have managed totake power in their own hands and build alternatives despite or beyond
the reflexes and responses of the state (see also the chapter 5.).

Case Studies
Despite the different ways to approach, analyse and act towards
democracy, few would disagree that there is no specific ground, condition or circumstance for democracy to land on; democracy can only
become as we constantly come together. It is, therefore, a concept thatneeds ceaseless scrutinizing and which also requires both conflict andcooperation, both consensus and agonism (see also chapter 1.). By
necessity, the contributions in this chapter cannot be fully representative of all debates on democracy by political ecologists; indeed, they are
not the only contributions in this book that are relevant to such debates.
Nevertheless, they exemplify research on how democracy is criticised,
constrained, reinvented, or claimed in a variety of contexts. They aim
to reveal how questions about changes taking place in socio-ecologicalspheres are ultimately questions of democracy.
How capitalist development, in the form of large hydropowerdams, fosters fundamentally undemocratic environmental governance processes? Through de-politicization and the casting of dam
construction as clean development, controversies surrounding theselarge water infrastructure projects are side-lined and affected populations excluded from environmental decision-making. In response, citi-!"#

zen groups are pushed to reinvent their political identities and understanding of democracy, in an effort to protect their environments and to
make their voices heard.
How democracy and environmental justice are at stake in the
struggles and alternative practices of people who were faced withthe prospect of one of the largest opencast gold mines in Europe?
Through studying the success of the movement, the issue behind claimsof “democratic participation” and the limits of identity politics arise anddemocratic politics appears not only as a practice of contesting
power but also of performing alternative ways of being.
How does the field of public health experiences processes ofde-politicization? Development panaceas such as water supply andsanitation constructions cannot induce health benefits, unless the formulation and implementation of policy is in concert with the worldviews,
concerns and needs of those whose health is at stake. Communities
need to recognize and re-gain control over the factors that affecttheir health.
How solidarity economies help to challenge dominant politicaland economic powers that structure agrifood systems? Throughthe case of alternative agrifood movements, this chapter stresses theimportance of complementing such initiatives with more ‘classic’forms of protest-type practices in order to move from fragmented
to collective action. It also highlights the role of ideology and organisation in processes of re-politicisation and social mobilisation.
Futher readings
Connolly, W. E., 1985. Taylor, Foucault, and otherness. Political Theory. 13, 365-376.
Connolly, W. E., 2002. Identity, difference: democratic negotiations of political paradox.
U. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London
Martinez-Alier, J., 2014. The environmentalism of the poor. Geoforum. 54, 239-241.
Moufee, C., 2009. Agonistic politics and artistic practices, New Patrons: A Proposal for
Promoting Art in Civil Society.
Ranciere, J. 2012. Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century
France. Verso Books, London.

!"#

4.2 ‘Green’ Development and its Threats to Democracy Hydropower and Conflict in the Eastern Himalayas, India
Amelie Huber

Democracy in the Green Economy
Over the last decades climate change has set an imperative for
economies around the world to revise their development models, aiming at more sustainable and ‘carbon-neutral’ energy production. Thisis also opening up new spaces for capitalist development to exploit.
Often, new profitable technologies are promoted as green and ecologically sustainable, while accompanying environmentally destructive
processes, or socially and ethically prohibitive outcomes are obscured.
This process is commonly known as ‘greenwashing’, and large hydropower dams make for an excellent example of this form of depoliticization.
Hydropower has long been promoted as a clean energy technology by governments, donor agencies, private sector companies andeven big green groups across the globe. These promotions have persisted despite the negative impacts of hydropower dams on people andthe environment, exposed by civil society campaigns since the 1980s.
By the 1990s the World Bank, largest international hydro-financier, had
withdrawn most of its support for dam construction. Yet as climatechange policies have made celebrations of hydropower as an energy
model cleaner and greener than fossil fuels more relevant, the large
dam has made a comeback. What is being largely overlooked in theprocess – deliberately or not – is that social and environmental impacts
are still controversial, and that practices with which dam construction ispursued locally are rather dubious.
The biodiversity and landscapes in the footprint of large dams areoften home to indigenous and/or agricultural societies who claim rights
to these territories as their ecological, ancestral and spiritual commons.
Their way of valuing nature (i.e. as invaluable heritage) is radically incompatible with that of hydropower proponents (i.e. as a commodity).
Thus, as with many other ‘green’ technologies, in addition to depoliticizing ‘greenwashing’ discourses they are often accompanied by fun-!"#damentally undemocratic means of governance. This may include thedeployment of exceptional laws, or the repression of democratic andfundamental human rights through state actors and armed forces.

Political Economy of Hydropower Development in the Eastern Himalayas
In India, the revival of large dams has led to a sudden expansion of hydropower development activities inthe Eastern Himalayan border region, known
as India’s “water towers” and the nation’s last
untouched hydropower ‘frontier’.
Figure 33: Plans for multiple large run-of-the-riverhydropower projects in Sikkim will leave virtually no
stretch of the Teesta river flowing free (Source: Sanctuary Asia / Vagholikar and Das, 2010).

Between 2003 and 2010, the governmentsof the two states Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim signed over 160 agreements for hydropower projects, mostly with private companies. The capitalist relations
underpinning these hydro ventures are evident, as private developers
anticipate huge profits and ample opportunities for financial speculationin the stock market. Local political elites, in turn, are benefitting by wayof kickbacks.
The state earns 12% of the power or revenue generated for a period of 35 years, after which it becomes the owner of the project. The
communities whose land is acquired for dam construction are entitledto only 1% each from the state and the power developer. For downstream areas or other areas adversely affected by the project, whereland has not been acquired, there are no compensation or rehabilitation
provisions. In the long term, the agricultural and forestland purchasedis effectively transferred from private and community ownership to thestate. As such, hydropower development represents a form of enclosure of the commons (river, land, forest) for purposes of capital accumulation.

!"#

Contradictions of Hydropower Development and Challenges
to Democracy
The commodification of the Eastern Himalayan Rivers is legitimized as the only way in which these peripheral states can generate
revenue, become financially independent, and enhance local development. Since this is a less-developed mountain region with serious
infrastructure deficiencies (particularly for transport, electrification andhealth care provision), the discourse of development is used as justification for the construction of dams. Dam enthusiasts also claim that the
projects serve the national interest. Finally, by labelling the projects “runof-the-river”, a technology,
which is neither supposed
to affect the flow of theriver nor to cause significant submergence anddisplacement, promotersclaim that these dams are
low impact.
The reality differs quite a bit. Existing projects
are diverting almost theentire river flow throughunderground tunnels (upFigure 34: Damaged building above reservoir of
510 MW Teesta V project (Source: Amelie Huber) to 20km long), which are
dug by blasting. Communities on the land above the tunnels experience declining availabilityof water sources, a lowering of the groundwater table, and a degradation of arable and forestland through landslides and subsidence. Thisaffects agricultural production and residential buildings and can lead todisplacement even after project completion. It also creates anxieties
about potential future impacts, including from projects yet to be implemented. What will happen, for example, if a flash flood or an earthquake damages a dam upstream? Could it cause a domino effect? And
how will the arrival of hundreds or thousands of workers from otherparts of the country impact local cultures, politics and economies? The
choice for hydro-based development is a political choice that calls
for public debate and negotiation, involving all concerned actors, yet!"#the process to date has been anything but democratic.

Depoliticization through discourse and state-sanctioned illegality
In the process of publicizing and promoting projects, uncomfortable facts oftentimes remain untold, or understated. For example that
underground tunnelling impacts the land and water resources above; orthat a barrage is able to dam and store water, even though its technicaldesign is different from a dam. Instead of clarifying and accounting forinconveniences and technicalities with unpleasant consequences, government and company representatives often share one-sided project
information to appease affected communities with promises of employment, local infrastructure development and at times even free electricity. This is a form of depoliticization that undermines public debate
and democracy.
To the local populations it becomes evident only at the stage of
construction, or even only after project completion, that employment opportunities tend to recede with the completion of construction activities;
that promised health, education and communications facilities often do
not materialize, or do not meet locally specific needs; or that the promised electricity is not for free after all, and can only flow if transmission
lines are installed. The market town of Dikchu near the 510MW Teesta
V hydroelectric project in Sikkim faces almost daily, several hour-longpower cuts, seven years after project completion.
The 97MW Tashiding project in West Sikkim is one example where
public consultation and the eliciting of consent were largely sidestepped. The mandatory public hearing was so poorly advertised that manythought it never took place. Despite a stay order issued in 2012 because mandatory approval by the National Board of Wildlife had not beenobtained, construction works continued and millions of rupees were invested since.

!"#Suppressing democratic freedoms
Where communities stand up to contest hydropower development
and the procedural injustices it is fraught with, they face heavy-handed
responses by the state. One common way of suppressing dissenting
voices is by cutting off so-called ‘benefits’ to the concerned persons
and/or their families. In Sikkim, teachers in particular have been ‘punished’ through transfers to new assignments across the state, including
to remote locations. In the Dibang Valley of Arunachal Pradesh, civilsociety groups and dam-affected people successfully blocked the mandatory public hearing for the 3000MW Dibang Multipurpose Project forsix years. In response, the state government
mobilized paramilitary forces,
which resulted inviolent clashes.
In one incident
the police fired
at a group of
students during
a religious celeFigure 35: Members of the indigenous Idu Mishmi community bration.
blocking the road in protest against the Dibang dam project(Source: sandrp.wordpress.com)

This heightened fears and the activists eventually resigned, permitting the public hearing and confining their demands to improved
terms of compensation.

Reclaiming Democracy
Citizen groups who contest hydropower plans in the Eastern Himalayas undoubtedly face formidable obstacles: local civil society andaffected communities often lack the political self-determination andexperience to mobilize against the state or the private sector. Due tothe greater political and economic power of the latter, many people!"!

fear being targeted and economically marginalized. The Himalayan
geographic and cultural landscape also makes it difficult to mobilize
across natural and ethnic-cultural boundaries. Different ethnic groups
often compete against one another for the resources and opportunities
provided by the state, and are therefore reluctant to cooperate. Other
times they are simply too far apart. Nevertheless different anti-hydromovements have emerged and have challenged project proponents –in context-specific, strategic ways.

(Re-)claiming identity
In North Sikkim a group of indigenous Lepcha activists – theAffected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) – staged one of the earliest examplesof resistance against hydropower development. Several years of street
protests, protracted hunger strikes and persistent legal activism havebeen effected the scrapping of four out of seven proposed projects within
their ‘tribal reserve’ Dzongu. Two projects are still being challenged in
the courts. As a major mobilizing tool, ACT used and ‘re-invented’ their
distinctive identity – a ‘vanishing’, endangered tribe. This issue had
more traction with the government, because the ruling party had won
its votes by promoting an all-inclusive policy centred on enhancing thepolitical recognitionand protection of minority communities. It
was also a
way of redefining a sense of cultural
self-esteem
and politicalFigure 36: ACT activists during a protest against dams in Dzongu e m a n c i p a (Source: saveteesta.wordpress.com)
tion,
and
helped mobilize larger numbers of supporters from the Lepcha community, which had been split over the issue of hydropower.

!"#Mobilizing for inclusive governance
The indigenous Adi community in Arunachal Pradesh is staging
another on-going struggle for self-determination. The main contention here is that dam construction will submerge the wet-rice fields near
the bank of the Siang River, an important asset in the Adis’ subsistence economy, and a marker of culture, identity and political autonomy.
The Adis take collective decisions through traditional democratically organized community councils (one vote per household), and these arebinding for all community members. This allowed civil society activists
to mobilize a unified, resolute political stand against three large dam
projects planned on the Siang River, even if individual opinions may
differ, and a resolve not to allow any project activity before public consultations are held. Their adamant refusal to allow the mandatory public
hearings has so far discouraged project proponents to further pursue
project plans.

Politicizing new issues
The most powerful resistance to hydropower, in terms of numbers, is currently being staged by peasant and student organisationsin the state Assam. The Assam anti-dam movement took up the issueof lacking impact assessments and rehabilitation processes to accountfor downstream affected populations. The 2000MW Lower Subansiri
hydroelectric project, built on the Arunachal-Assam border, is expected
to have significant impacts on Assam’s peasant economy, as flow fluctuations and potential floods resulting from the dam stand to disrupt
agriculture, fisheries and transportation in the downstream areas.
The movement has also taken up the issue of dam safety. Commonly perceived as a techno-scientific matter to be assessed by experts and scientists, dam safety concerns are often brushed aside by
depoliticizing claims that today’s dams are technologically advanced,
unbreakable and indisputably safe. A team of local academics demonstrated that this was not the case. They assessed and questioned the
project’s site selection and technical design, in light of the high risk ofearthquakes, associated landslides, and possible disaster should anearthquake or flash flood hit the reservoir. The anti-dam activists quickly!""

picked up the issue and made it a central point of their campaign, forwhich they received backing from large sections of Assamese society.
The Lower Subansiri project has become such a politicized issue that
construction has been brought to a standstill for the past three years(helped by the movement’s blockade of the supply of construction materials), and has been unresolved even after multiple rounds of highlevel negotiations.

Lessons learned
This contribution outlines how democratic values and practices
are being threatened by top-down hydropower planning, disguised asa green, sustainable, and imperative development solution. The dam
conflicts presented here illustrate how civil society groups have reacted
to such assaults on democracy: by reclaiming their political identities;
by mobilizing traditional democratic institutions to create a more
powerful voice; and by broaching and politicizing contentious issues
that have previously been sidelined. Just as depoliticization can occur
through very different means, it is important to keep in mind that there
are myriad ways to counter it, depending on local experiences, politicalconfigurations, geographic characteristics etc.
To further enhance the democratisation of ‘green’ development it
is important to rethink grassroots actors as political actors, and public action for social and environmental justice as an exercise ofpolitical agency. The political should be understood here not in the
narrow sense of electoral politics, but as a way of starting or entering apublic debate; of reclaiming voice; and of laying open controversies andantagonisms; even if this implies civil disobedience.

!"#Futher readings
Ahlers, R., et. al, 2015. Framing hydropower as green energy: Assessing drivers, risks
and tensions in the Eastern Himalayas. Earth Systems Dynamics. 6, 195- 204.
Baruah, S., 2012. Whose river is it anyway? Political economy of hydropower in the
Eastern Eastern Himalayas. Economic and Political Weekly. 47(29), 41–52.
Imhof, A., Lanza, G. R., 2010. Greenwashing Hydropower. World Watch Magazine.
23(1).
Meyer, K., et. al., 2014. Green and Clean? Hydropower between Low-carbon andHigh Social and Environmental Impacts. Briefing Paper 10, Deutsches Institut für
Entwicklung.
Vagholikar, N., Das, P., J., 2010. Damming Northeast India. Kalpavriksh, Aaranyak,& Action
Aid India, Pune, Guwahati, New Delhi.
Civil Society organizations working on hydropower conflicts
Affected Citizens of Teesta
Carbon Market Watch
Forum for Policy Dialogue on Water Conflicts in India
International Rivers
Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group
Save Dzongu
South Asia Network of Dams, Rivers and People!"#

4.3 From Mining to Becomings: Rosia Montana’s Movementfor Democratic JusticeIrina Velicu

The context of Rosia Montana
Rosia Montana is a small village in Transylvania, Romania where,
for the last fourteen years, a Canadian corporation has been pushingfor the development of what would be the largest open cast cyanideuse gold mine in Europe. In the 1990s, Rosia Montana was declaredmono-industrial, not allowing for any other form of business than mining
to be developed by locals. Under this pressure, the majority of Rosieni
were discouraged and disillusioned, ultimately conceding their displacement by selling their lands and properties. People have been told thatthe ‘disease’ of communism handicapped them and as a result many
Rosieni were ashamed to exercise criticism against privatization. At thesame time, politicians and media representatives have overwhelmingly
supported the corporate takeover of the region. This tense context hascreated a situation of urgency in which the choice to develop a mine
became a life-related choice - or rather, a non-choice. About 100 families were stubborn enough to not give up their land and confront thecorporation; their movement mobilized thousands of supporters from allover Romania and the world. How have Rosieni imagined themselves
as something else than miners, in the face of these events? How havethey articulated their resistance to what seemed an inevitable development path?

Responding to Injustice: Organizing Resistance
In 2002, 300 families from Rosia Montana and the surrounding
villages created Alburnus Maior (AM), a mining resistance organization.
AM gradually gained the support of many activists and public figures
worldwide (Greenpeace, Mining Watch, the EU parliament and even
the World Bank). In more than a decade of struggle, a relation of trust
was slowly built (not without tensions and quarrels) between NGOs, ac-!"#tivists and the Rosieni opposing the mine, resulting to co-mobilizations
at local, national, international levels. This coalition also attracted the
support of various professionals, including architects, lawyers, economists, engineers and artists, who have voluntarily given specialized
support for the campaign. Empowered by this solidarity, Alburnus began the strategy of legally challenging the permits and authorizations
obtained by the corporation for the gold-mining project in January 2004.
By mid-2007, courts began to rule against the company. Further, thesecourt proceedings demonstrated the illegality of the permit process.
In addition to legal strategies, a diversity of protests and public events, publications
on websites, permanent
press releases, articles
and documentaries havegreatly strengthened theefforts of the movement.
The persistent work ofmore specific campaigns
such as the “No-Cyanide
Figure 37: Figure 1 Anti-mining protest for Rosia Romania” or the campaign to include Rosia in
Montana (Source: Irina Velicu)
the UNESCO patrimony
continued to bring attention to the detrimental impacts of the proposedmine at Rosia Montana. While none of these more specific campaigns
were successful, the efforts mobilized national and international opposition to the mine. The movement slowly grew from hundreds tohundreds of thousands of sympathizers, while also pushing for more
civic engagement.
Rosieni and their supporters appreciate the beauty and richnessof the land, mountains and rivers surrounding them. This, along withthe comfort, relative stability and predictability of controlling their livelihoods, make them feel ‘rich’ enough to refuse development as simply
mining. They started to think about other possibilities of maintaining thecommons together while questioning the long-term benefits of mining
extraction. Rosieni have created what French philosopher Jacques
Rancière has called a dissensus, or “a conflict over the common itself!"#

[...] not a quarrel over which solutions are best to apply to a situation,
but a dispute over the situation itself” (Rancière, 2004). Dissensual
politics disrupted habitual conditions of sensible experience, shedding
more light on the complications and contradictions of economic development as a goal:“How is it that the EU is telling me I am poor? I have 15 cows; I cantake care of my family...
When I wake up in the morning and I see the mountain, for me thatis mental health.
I don’t want any type of development... I don’t want just anyone tocome here to change the area. I tell people openly “you have togrow up, you cannot be dependent on gold or whoever comes . . .
dependent on others just as drug addicts”.
Transformed attitudes like these have been turned into actions
through the creation of the first green festival in Romania, HayFest.
Initially a music event that focused on entertainment, HayFest has become a cultural event that represents Rosia as a ‘big stage’ of organizations and thousands of citizens from all over the world showing theirsolidarity with the cause and socializing/debating issues of common
concern. By creating all these different (everyday) practices, Rosieni’s
movement gradually made other Romanians think differently about development and about global problems. Rosia Montana evolved froma local labour conflict into an emblematic socio-environmental
movement defending traditional ways of life, knowledge and the commons.
Becoming Something Else: Identity as a Denial and Events ofSubjectification
Resistance to mining might not have been successful if not for thecontinuing, long-term efforts of a handful of people who were producing different routines and habits in what became the everyday life of‘Saving Rosia Montana’. Rosieni gradually transformed their mind-set,learning to imagine themselves as something else than just miners or‘poor people’. Instead of feeling helpless, people began to find strengthand imagination to live differently their everyday life. They became‘entrepreneurs’ of their own destinies, diversifying their economic andsocial activities both individually and collectively; activists and citizens
concerned about their autonomy and independence, informing themselves about other similar cases from other continents, re-discovering their!"#home-community as a rich sustainable place with mountains, lakes, forests and hospitality for small scale tourism.
These becomings can be theorized as ‘events of subjectification’. In his book Proletarian Nights, Rancière (2012) refers to the workers during the Revolution of 1830, who read, wrote and discussed
journals, letters, newspapers or poetry after their day in the factory.
Rancière reinterpreted those writings as rebelling against the predetermination of their lives and identity under the category of ‘workers’ andthus a denial of other possibilities of life/identity.
Rosieni are now aware that politicians perceive them as a surplus
that could easily be ignored, removing them from the domain of thevisible. Therefore, their efforts of imagining something else and their
becomings are also processes of visibilization: disturbing the ‘natural’order of mining/working class paradigm and creating politics by articulating previously unheard voices. Opposing Rosieni have also become aware that their formal recognition as partners in dialogue is notnecessarily followed by a policy of redistribution or decision-making infavour of their alternatives. Therefore, during protests in 2013, whichwere the largest post-communist mobilization in Romania, supportersof Rosia Montana did not ask for their rights of participation just to berecognized. Instead, they more broadly questioned the system that allocates rights and liberties, rather than simply contesting a corrupt local
government and one development scheme.
Moreover, even if a certain level of participation may be secured,it does not protect Rosieni from being devalued by elites as some kindof social scum: the last thing the Rosieni need is to be recognised as“ignorant miners”, as instituted in the current social imaginary. This kindof demonization as the underdog is a form of injustice that cannot easily
be repaired through rights or laws: it pervades everyday life and practices. Therefore, Rosieni’s fundamental struggle is to push back against
being intrinsically tethered to some fixed identities, like “poor workers”,“ignorant miners”, “nostalgic communists”, or peasants who are waiting
for support and easily manipulated. In this struggle, the movement hascreated space and time for broader subjective and community imaginaries to be nurtured from an acceptance of other life-worlds as equallyvalid. Rosieni ventured into the unknown of what their identities could
become. This gave them the courage to act from a position of ambiguity
and the strength to accept the consequences of disputing and losing!"#

foundational securities or standards.

Non-Foundational Politics and Implications for Democracy
During the autumn of 2013 people were shouting: “The corporation
should not make legislation!” and “This is the revolution of our generation” in the streets of major cities of Romania. Perhaps, they imply
their generation needs to produce something else from this new level ofconsciousness and not be allowed to live comfortably numb in the lies
of representative consumer democracy. It was also a way of rethinking
democracy by rethinking the subject of the ‘revolutionary collective’. Forging solidarities and collectives does not have to mean pushingfor essential positions, identities or loyalties, be they workers or environmentalists. When democracy remains only about demanding formal
rights, democracy is emptied of its core substance: by the people, forthe people.
From a foundationalist perspective, democratic politics tends toassume that an identity (or a value-foundation) must first be in place inorder for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, action
to be taken. But any foundational (identity) category is also a productof the very structures it is supposed to criticize in order to emancipate,liberate or represent itself. Power in general could be seen as productive (of subjects) rather than merely repressive (Foucault et al., 2003).
Any foundation (identitarian, ideological etc.) is a historical contingent
product of power relations. Democracy requires imagining new typesof relations among beings aware of own embeddedness within power
relations and disrupting “all logics that purport to found domination onsome entitlement to dominate” (Rancière, 2004).
In other words, rethinking democracy requires politicizing any formof foundational politics in order to avoid romanticization or naturalizationeven for the purpose of coalition building. A non-foundational politics
could consider building solidarities and collectives also based on therecognition of fluid and ambiguous identities, and partial or temporary
loyalties or interests. What we can do in our continuous construction ofopen democracies is to always repeat differently and subvert fixed
representations that may imprison people further.
What was suggested here through describing events of subjectifi-!"#

cation is that, in search for democratic justice, there is need for continuous staging (performing or instituting) of egalitarian subjects and lifeworlds, beyond political representation and the compassionate “causeof the other”. Democratic politics is not only a practice of contesting or
capturing of power, but also of performing alternative spheres of experience and ways of being. For such subjectification and performing
to happen, one has to see the political with a “constitutive lack ofground” (Swyngedouw, 2011). This implies replacing the prevailing public reason (such as economic efficiency, human rights etc.) with theabsence of a final public reason. The acceptance of such a void liberates us from the various invented prisons of colonial nature. The humanpoetic will to meaning-making can produce other stories and meanings
given the lack of a higher standard (or ‘true’ account of the world) tomeasure some knowledge against others.

!"!

4.4 Deconstructing public health, enabling health empowerment. A case from the Mekong Delta, Vietnam
Panagiota Kotsila

Public health as a question of democracy
Extreme climatic phenomena, environmental crimes and the severing of populations from balanced and functioning ecosystems, have
escalated human health challenges worldwide. Meanwhile, the everexpanding sector of biomedicine does not necessarily benefit of vulnerable populations who are put at risk by changing environmental conditions, as the health industry is generally oriented to serve the interestsof markets and powerful elites. As the case of Campania in Italy (see5.4) exemplifies, health risks are unequally distributed and are the product of political processes.
Inequalities in exposure to physical extremes, epidemics, toxic
substances and other types of harm-imposing situations often manifest
along lines of gender, ethnicity and/or class, as well as between the
global North and South. As highlighted in this chapter, when decisions
are made based on scientized technocratic dogmas about how “development”, “economic growth” and “environmental management”
can or should be achieved, the voices of those whose health and wellbeing is at stake are rarely taken into account. Moreover, such decisions are often taken in spaces and contexts far removed from where
their consequences are experienced. This renders health both a question of environmental justice and democracy.
Questions of disease emergence, spread and prevention have-in the modern age-been predominantly considered issues for medical“experts” to answer. Research from the humanities, however, has repeatedly shown that relevant and effective answers to health problems
can only grow when contextualized, historicized and politicized questions are posed. Such questions and answers must arise from within
the communities whose health is at stake.

!"#A political ecology approach to health
Looking at the interactions and inter-dependencies between health risks or disease
and phenomena, such as:• Polluted ecosystems, extreme climatic phenomena, climate change impacts• Deforestation, agricultural intensification, use of pesticides, monocultures• Access to safe water and sanitation, access to sources of livelihood• Urban landscapes, ecosystem services, gentrification
Examining the socio-political context and interrogating aspects of:• Dominant modes and discourses of development, commodification of health, privatization of health services, individualization of health responsibilities• Availability and accessibility of preventive health and healthcare / trust in and use of
medical establishments• Abuse of medical authority and doctor-patient relationships• The presence and role of traditional/alternative health/disease knowledge• Health policy and practice in relation to social equity, human rights, minority populations, gender, ethnicity and class• The interaction of state & society in regional and national scales / micro-politics andpower structures within local societies• Cultural values and social norms associated with bodily practices and disease.

A framework for understanding and acting in health
Health injustices have long been subject of academic research
and a reason for vociferous social reaction. The gap that exists between critical social science and depoliticized biomedical explanations often makes it difficult for social movements to find the scientific backup
for their efforts to reclaim public health. The role civil society can playin strengthening these voices is crucial, not only for improving humanhealth but also for the expanding and enhancing democratic processes. Some of the core principles for the democratization of health andits re-positioning in the socio-environmental and public domain, include:
Human health is an emerging attribute of socio-ecological interaction and thus in constant correlation to the changes taking place inpeople’s environment;
Public health is more complex than a sum of medically explained bodies; its explanation needs to involve aspects of everyday lifeand social interaction, including power relations, cultural beliefs, moral
symbols and local knowledge(s);Trends of capital accumulation, ideological shifts and the ethics
behind legal/policy text, affect the spread of disease in ways than bio-!"#

medicine alone cannot explain.

Diarrheal disease in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam
Vietnam is a one-party state in which “the Party is the people andthe people are the Party”, as often advocated by dominant state discourse. In the current historical moment of market socialism, this representation of people’s desires and needs by the central government
and the wider state bureaucracy has been often in question. The caseof diarrheal disease presents a good example of how the Vietnamesestate maintains its legitimacy through abdicating its responsibilities andperpetuating (health) inequalities.
The Mekong Delta, in Vietnam, is a fertile region whose residents
have developed a culture revolving around water. Situated in a wetland
rice-cultivating area, with a climate of monsoons and annual floods,
the history and culture of the people in the Delta is tightly connected totheir hydro-environments. Up until 1990, the practice of using surface
water for drinking was maintained by nearly 20% of the population in
the whole country, while nearly 40% was exercising open defecation inrivers and canals.
Local residents are vehement about the deterioration of water
quality in their surrounding attributing this to dense urbanization, waste
accumulation and agricultural intensification. Untreated human waste,pesticides and fertilizers from the surrounding rice-fields, as well as
manure and antibiotics from the aquaculture sector have indeed been
exacerbating water contamination in the Delta for the last 20 years.
But the unwillingness of the Vietnamese state to control water pollution
and mitigate such degradation of aquatic environments does not figure
prominently in the official discourse; and especially not when discussing risk factors for diarrhoea; a disease that is caused mainly by the
consumption of contaminated water or food.
Casting blame, legitimizing the state
Based on statistics that demonstrate a continuing expansion ofwater supply and sanitation (WSS) infrastructure, state representatives
paint a picture of success with regards to diarrhoea prevention. Whenpresented with data showing over 800.000 of diarrhoea cases in 2010!""

- and Southern Vietnam being the second most hit of the 4 main regionsin Vietnam - state representatives fall into a discourse of renouncing responsibility and casting blame. Those who “don’t want to invest in WSS
facilities”, the “stubborn who don’t treat their water,” “the poor”, thoseliving “in remoterural areas” or“in floating houses by the river”;
are all identities
constructed on
the basis of behaviours that are
rendered wrong
and accountablefor public healthproblems.
ThroughFigure 38: “Floating houses” constructed at the edge of canals in urban Ninh Kieu district (source: Panagiota Kotsila) suchnarrative,
diarrhoea is presented as an issue of obstructed modernity and lack ofwillingness from the side of (some!) local population.
Indeed, many people in the Delta do not follow safe practices ofwater supply and sanitation, but this owes to the dispossessions they
are experiencing in material and knowledge terms. The poor -and mostly those in urban areas- are constrained from accessing micro-credit
schemes or subsidies for WSS improvements in the region. This is firstly due to their low financial credibility and political power, but also dueto the focus of such programs on rural areas - were statistics of WSS
access are lower. A chase of numerical targets, based on indicators of
WSS, thus becomes the equivalent of disease prevention policy. This,on the one hand ignores those that remain financially restricted to access safe WSS, and on the other, it misreads the existence of infrastructure as a reduction of disease risk (V. Curtis, Cairncross, & Yonli,
2000; Heller, Colosimo, & Antunes, 2003; Jensen et al., 2002; Mintz,
Bartram, Lochery, & Wegelin, 2001). Interviews with 131 households
revealed that the majority of people have confused, contradictory or
unclear perceptions on what makes them sick with diarrhoea and how
they can avoid it, in individual or community level. About 20% were notapplying the adequate treatment to water before drinking it, and more!"#than half had toilets that were discharging sewage directly into the river.
Local perceptions of “clean” or “dirty” did not always agree with water
quality assessments and most people would judge water safety basedon its smell, turbidity or taste and not on information about its origin or
prior treatment.
Figure 39: Plant used to curediarrhoea and the selling of medicinal herbal mixtures. In thegarden of the Traditional Medicine Hospital of Can Tho City,
there are three more plantsthat are known to help withthe symptoms of diarrhoea.
Despite the claims of the hospital’s director, growing andpreparing such plants in one’s
own garden was not common
in the interviewed households(source: Panagiota Kotsila).

These types of perceptions were not statistically correlated to people’s location or average income; both poor, middle-class and betteroff people carried certain misconceptions or contradictive behaviours
around water safety and diarrhoea prevention more generally.
Beyond circulating a narrative of blame and stigma for the“backwards” rural and the “dirty” poor, state-backed reports overestimated the access to safe and hygienic WSS as the results of thehousehold survey demonstrated. Triangulation of legal text, in-depth
discussions with informants and official state documents, revealed
that reporting success in WSS expansion increases the likelihood ofa province receiving funding in the future - either from external development aid or the central government. At the same time, a huge fiscal
discrepancy was noticed in the public funds assigned for WSS: morethan half of the provincial budget was not justified by the evidenced oreven the reported constructions. In other words, 15 billion VND (almost
660.000 US dollars) worth of funding appears to be unknowingly spent.
In light of these findings, the “success stories” in WSS development
and their proclaimed health benefits can be understood more as a way
to ensure inflow of capital to local bureaucracies than a concerted effort to bring down disease. Prioritizing “hardware” WSS infrastructure!"#while undermining “software” health education measures proves a successful strategy for local governments to capture resources.
Top-down health messages and the moralization of disease
Apart from the paltry budget that ends up allocated for healtheducation, there is another type of health dispossession: traditional knowledge is excluded and replaced with a discourse of (health)behaviours as moral obligations. Based on tenets of biomedicine andepidemiology, health communication comes in the form of bullet-point
instructions, excluding the richness of Traditional Vietnamese Medicine that many people practice and consider valuable. Moreover, health messages are attached a strong sense of individual or community
obligation towards the collective - represented by facets of the state,through a morally charged language. Public health thus turns from astate responsibility of social welfare to a personal choice representing
citizenship morality.
As plethora of research has demonstrated, such approaches create outcomes that effectively bring the opposite of desired impacts.
People develop negative responses to state advice or obligations
when they feel state policy and practice marginalizes and stigmatizes
them. This combination of moralizing disease and disassociating thenew (biomedical) approaches from old engrained systems of (traditional) understandings contributes to why preventive messages remain
distant, not welcomed in practice and not disseminated to the people
health promoters wish to reach.
As people are alienated from both the resources and the knowledge that will allow them to understand the problem of disease holistically and thus be able to manage it, the policies and practices that
the Vietnamese state uses create a gap in the democratic space of
informed health decisions at the individual and collective level.

Tools for civil society
Participatory and critical approaches to health• Researchers and public health officials engaging local communities around the causes and the expressions, but also the nature of,disease. Reframing health/disease “from below”, to reflect the opi-!"#

nions, worldviews and desires of communities.
• Official data should be considered with caution, questioning themethods and the motives behind their generation. Complementary &comparable data can be generated together with local communities.
Popular epidemiology can create counter-narratives when a healthcondition related to environmental change is under-reported, bio-medically ambivalent or contradicts scientific wisdom.
Promoting and building empowering health education• Organizing public events to promote mutual learning between scientists and citizens. Making these events a platform for citizenscience-activist networks and engaging in discussions with movements
reclaiming environmental health and social justice.
• Demystifying complex medical terminology. The use of narrative tools like visualisations and metaphors that draw from local tales,
historical aspects of life and other elements of local culture can involve
the public and facilitate understandings of new information.
• De-stigmatizing disease and empowering communities byemphasizing on community strengths, beauty and potential rather thanphysical or moral “deficits”.
• Placing traditional approaches and methods on eco-bodily interactions side by side with biomedical knowledge. Enhancing diversity in prevention and healing, along with peoples’ confidence in avoiding and fighting disease.
Futher readings
Baer, H. A., Singer, M., 2009. Global Warming and the Political Ecology of Health:
Emerging Crises and Systemic Solutions, Left Coast Press, Inc., Walnut Creek.
Nations, M., Monte, C., 1996. I’m not dog, no!”: Cries of resistance against cholera
control campaigns. Social Science & Medicine. 43(6), 1007–1024.
Nichter, M., 1996. Anthropology & International Health: South Asian Case Studies.
Routledge.
Rose, G., 1992. The strategy of preventive medicine. Oxford University Press Inc.,New York.
Wallerstein, N., Bernstein, E., 1988. Empowerment education: Freire’s ideas adapted
to health education. Health Education & Behavior. 15(4), 379–394.

!"#

4.5 Reclaiming democracy through alternative economies activism: lessons from agrifood movements in the Basque Country
and Greece
Rita Calvário

So-called alternative agrifood movements such as organic farming, fair trade, slow food, community-supported agriculture, and local
food networks have proliferated since the 1990s worldwide. Arising as a
critique and an alternative to the corporate control of agrifood systems,
the industrial model of agriculture, and neoliberal globalization, they
ask the fundamental democratic questions of what needs, rights andlives people recognize, desire and demand.
The turn into local scales of action and activism through market
choices, however, has undermined the transformative potential of agrifood movements. Whereas some argue that diverse food economies
create spaces for progressive discourse to imagine and create alternative food worlds, critics sustain that, without confronting political andeconomic centres of power, alternatives complement -rather than oppose- conventional agrifood systems, thereby, failing to address social
inequalities.
Political economy approaches followed by the international peasants’ movement La Via Campesina and embodied in the politicalframework of food sovereignty, point to the limits of individual choice,alternative lifestyles, and the gradual expansion of alternative food networks. They instead put weight on collective action, structural reforms
to markets and property regimes, and social equality, while they focus
their action in agroecology, peasant economies, re-localization, land
reform, and the human right to food. Food sovereignty is about democracy as it urges to regain social control over the agrifood systems
and policies away from the power of corporations and capital interests.
Therefore, it reclaims the right of (and power to) producers, consumers,
and communities to decide on what to produce, how, where, from who
and to whom.
Next, we present two different cases, one from the productionside, other from the consumption side, showing how struggles for foodsovereignty combine the practice of alternative food economies with!"#the direct confrontation with the hegemonic powers of capital, including
state power.

Peasant movements in the Basque Country
EHNE-Bizkaia is a small-scale producer’s trade union, born in1976 in Bizkaia, a small and densely urbanised province of Euskadi(Basque Country, Spain). In the late 1990s they decided to supplementa more ‘classic’ trade-union type of protest-action -centred in economic and political demands and collective mobilisations-, with alternative
food economies.
This decision was informed by the debates in La Via Campesina
movement, where EHNE-Bizkaia actively participates, as well as fromthe felt effects of agrarian capitalism over small farmers. After years ofmodernisation oriented to an intensive, competitive and indebted agriculture, neoliberal policies were aggravating the destruction of smallscale farmers’ livelihoods, agricultural resources, and local community
relationships. Something needed to be done more than complain andcentre demands on prices, subsidies and policy-reforms. Approaching
critically the models of production and territorial development, followedby the setting-up of alternatives, there was a felt need in order to empower the struggles of small-scale farmers. As a result, they adopted afood sovereignty political framework and followed a strategy of ‘repeasantization’, e.g. cut of external dependencies from capitalist markets through agroecological production, solidarity food economies andre-localisation. This way, they would not justrespond to the survival needs of the producers, they would transform their ‘problem’ froma “professional” to a social question and broaden alliances in society, while envisioning an
economic alternative for the whole of Euskal
Herria (the cross-border Basque territory).
Figure 40 Poster of the 3rd Meeting of Young Peasantsin Euskal Herria. Source: http://www.elikaherria.eus/

In practical terms, they decided to pro-!"#

mote only agroecology and stopped giving training in capital-intensivemodes of farming. They also directed to society their training programs
and communication tools and they centred their discourses on food rather than on agriculture. Moreover, they gave primacy to attracting newyoung ‘peasants’ to face an ageing sector and developed a networkof community-supported agriculture, the Red Nekasarea, based on
producers’ cooperation and on producer-consumer alliances. Finally,
they supported the diversification of rural economies through the development of cooperatives and social businesses.
Their concern, however, was not to offer market alternatives to
producers and consumers, neither to simply prove that another agrifood model is possible and better. Re-politicisation of agrifood issues israther accompanied, on one hand, by ideological work on the emancipatory agenda of food sovereignty, and, on the other, by a projectof making producers and alternative networks converge, together withother organisations and social movements, within an enlarged social
movement struggling for food sovereignty in Euskal Herria. In 2011, thismovement emerged under the name Etxalde.
This work is followed with struggles to change policies and institutions. EHNE-Bizkaia is aware that to advance food sovereignty it needs
to confront institutions and demand policy reforms. This is evident on
the question of access to land, one of the main problems youngsters
face when they want to enter the agrarian sector. Land reform is thus
a major stage of confrontation with institutions. But, for EHNE-Bizkaia,
land reform is not about redistribute land ownership. Instead, it is about
ensure land is used to fulfil its social function of producing food for the
population, regardless of the property regime. In this case, the state iscalled to be the sovereign power in order to plan land-uses according
to social needs, and intervene in property to ensure land is used according to its social function. Again, in addressing social justice concerns,
EHNE-Bizkaia is aware it cannot solve food poverty through prices andwithout an intervention of institutions. But, for them, this implies to go
against the charity and philanthropic logic of food banks, and ensuresocial redistribution policies that address the food sector. In general, when they confront institutions, they demand short-term transitional
reforms that are socially relevant within a long-term transformative horizon, and they struggle for changing institutions in order to re-cover its
public function in meaningful ways and to re-distribute power in society.

!"!

The ‘no-middlemen’ movement in Greece
Global crisis and austerity policies have hit Greece hard, especially since 2010. Economic meltdown was accompanied with the withdrawal of welfare policies, growing levels of unemployment, poverty andsocial inequalities. In the midst of social hardship and mass anti-austerity protests, solidarity networks arose to respond to immediate basic
needs, expand resistance struggles and offer alternative pathways thatre-think the economy and democracy.
Food was no exception in these changing
conditions. For the firsttime in decades, food consumption declined. Signsof hunger and nutritional poverty were evident
around Greece, while relative prices of food kept
increasing. Moreover, in acontext where ‘food’ and‘solidarity’ have become
Figure 41: “No-middlemen” distribution in Faliro, heavily politicised - thegovernment, religious acAthens (Source: Rita Calvario)
tors, and the media were
promoting charity, philanthropy and the entrepreneur spirit, while neonazi groups were organising food banks for ‘genuine’ Greeks - there
was a felt need to build alternative narratives and social relationships
based on equity.
After the emergence of a number of grassroots solidarity foodbanks, soup kitchens, and social groceries, in 2012 the ‘no-middlemen’initiatives were created. Such initiatives bypass traders in the exchange between producers and consumers allowing fair prices and direct
payment to the former and quality food at low cost to the latter. The
first initiative appeared in the town of Katerini, in Central Greece, andrapidly spread across the country, especially in the bigger cities where
deprivation is higher. Many of the existing 50 local groups, are also
involved in other solidarity actions in health and education.
In general, no-middlemen actions consist of open-air distribu-!"#

tions where producers and consumers meet, after activists from thelocal groups have selected producers, products and negotiated prices- the criteria are social, quality-based and in some cases environmental. Producers are also asked to give for free a percentage of their sales
in food products for poor households.
‘No-middlemen’ distributions arose to face the paradox of producers who could not sell their products due to low prices paid by traderson the one side, and of consumers who could not buy food due to foodinflation and austerity-squeezed incomes, on the other. This paradox
highlighted the failure of conventional agrifood systems and neoliberalpolicies to ensure social needs.
In face of the sovereign debt and austerity policies, agriculture
and food re-emerged as a strategic sector without which no politicaluprising is possible. Apart from responding to the basic needs of urban consumers, a central aim of these initiatives is to participate in thereconstruction of the economy, with the recognition that this is not
only a top-down task of the state. One of the prospects in the food movement is to reorganise production and exchange towards the solidarity
and cooperative economy
The original aim of these initiatives was, thereby, not to supplementa neoliberal austerity state or show that the economy can be diverse.
These initiatives are an integral part of the broader political movement
directly confronting austerity governments and policies, while they arealso struggling for an economic alternative for the agrifood system andthe overall economy, in which the state is called to participate but also
to transform itself. After the change of government in January 2015 to
the left-wing party Syriza, these initiatives remain active.
In practice, solidarity food actions work to provide hope against
despair and self-empowerment, while they promote mutual-aid, reciprocity, self-organisation, cooperation, and direct democracy. These
actions try to politicise and empower citizens for challenging austerity
policies and change society in the long run. Food distributions are festive and politicised with banners and multiple debates, and many groups
organise convivial and political activities in their neighbourhoods andget involved in local struggles such as against electricity cuts and public
services privatization. Moreover, each group takes decisions by consensus in open assemblies where all participate on an equal basis.
The groups gather together in regional networks and national me-!"#etings to share experiences, discuss challenges and take decisions formoving forward. This reinforces their capacity to act, envision possibilities, and discuss collectively political proposals to restructure the foodsector, while strengthens the movement’s politicisation. Their relation
with the state is one of confrontation, as they are independent structures. They demand policy reforms that, on one side, can allow the initiatives to grow (as the law does not allows or puts barriers to this typeof food initiatives) and, on the other, push for the reconstruction of theagrifood system through the solidarity economy. They do not dismissor aim to replace the state, but envision to transform the state and redistribute power in society, claiming for a real democracy.

Lessons for political ecology and democracy
This entry highlights that tackling agrifood injustices and reclaiming real democracy involves challenging the political and economic
powers that are structuring agrifood systems. For this to take place, it
is not possible to separate the practice of alternative economies fromthe struggles to change the rules of the game as determined by institutions, policies and corporations. Whereas the practice of alternative
food economies contributes in opening imaginaries and politicize foodissues, they can easily complement the neoliberal (austerity) state if
they do not engage in a more confrontational politics that, on one side,
does not refuses to engage with the state, but, on the other, aims to go
further than policy reforms to change the state itself.
Both cases show also the importance of enacting alternative foodeconomies to strengthen struggles and confrontational politics, movingfrom mere reactive positions to rising issues in the political agenda andforcing the state and capital powers to react.
In sum, it is from intertwined interventions in the economic, socialand political realms that people’s power to govern and be sovereign of
their collective and individual lives can be reclaimed.

!"#Futher readings
Connolly, W. E., 1985. Taylor, Foucault, and otherness. Political Theory. 13, 365-376.
Connolly, W. E., 2002. Identity, difference: democratic negotiations of political paradox. U. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London.
Constance, D. H., et. al., (ed.), 2014. Alternative Agrifood Movements: Patterns ofConvergence and Divergence. Research in Rural Sociology and Development. 21,
Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Ferguson, J., 1990. The anti-politics machine: “development”, depolitization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. CUP Archive.
Foucault, M., et .al., 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College deFrance, 1975- 1976. Macmillan.
Goodman, D., et. al., 2011. Alternative food networks: Knowledge, practice, and politics. London: Routledge, London.
Guthman, J., 2011. Weighing in: Obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism.
University of Berkeley Press, Berkeley, CA.
Martinez-Alier, J., 2014. The environmentalism of the poor. Geoforum. 54, 239-241.
Mitchell, T., 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. University of California Press.

!""

Futher readings
Morgan, K., et. al., 2006. Worlds of food: Place, power, and provenance in the foodchain. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Moufee, C., 2009. Agonistic politics and artistic practices, New Patrons: A Proposal for
Promoting Art in Civil Society.
Rancière, J., 2004. Introducing disagreement. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 9 (3), 3-9.
Ranciere, J. 2012. Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century
France. Verso Books, London.
Robbins, P., 2011. Political Ecology. A critical introduction. John Wiley & Sons.
Swyngedouw, E., 2011. Interrogating post-democratization: Reclaiming egalitarianpolitical spaces. Political Geography. 30 (7), 370–380.
Vagholikar, N., Das, P., J., 2010. Damming Northeast India. Kalpavriksh, Aaranyak, &Action Aid India, Pune, Guwahati, New Delhi.
Zizek, S., 2011. Crisis of democracy.
Civil Society organizations working on agrifood issues
La Via Campesina
International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty
Elikaherria (Basque Country)
Solidarity for All (Greece)
Landless Workers Movement (Brazil)
Food First (USA)Confédération Paysanne (France)!"#Chapter 5.
Movements in motion. Sharing
Experiences, Building
Socio-Ecological Struggles

Santiago Gorostiza
Gustavo García López
Salvatore Paolo De Rosa
Melissa Garcia-Lamarca
Editor: Panagiota Kotsila

5.1 Introduction
People often decide to mobilize, organize and represent themselves politically and collectively in counter-reaction to changes in environmental conditions and livelihoods (Scott, 1976, Martinez-Alier 2002,
Robbins, 2o12): for example, where and how dams are built, oil or gold
is extracted, waste is dumped. In many of these and other cases, there
is a sense of a loss of control over the conditions and effects of “development” plans, usually described as injustice. In Political Ecology,
these forms of injustices have generally been described as the disproportional exposure of poorer and/or minority communities to intensive
resource extraction, hazardous waste or more generally, poor environmental conditions (Bullard 1990; Pellow 2000; Pulido 2006; Schlosberg 2007).
In this chapter we refer to cases of injustices both in urban andrural areas that have driven people in various communities to initiate
movements for greater autonomy and control over the terms of development, reproduction of lives and dignity. We are particularly interested in those social movements or actors of struggles for justice andegalitarian socio-ecological futures which are re-politicising aspects ofsocial and ecological life advocating and practicing direct forms of democracy and self-governance in various forms. We do not intent to offer a theoretical perspective on the complex and highly heterogeneous
movement-building process: rather we are drawing lessons from thespecific cases and introduce different strategies, tools and practices
that have helped movements to advance their goals in the different,
although still similar, political contexts of Italy, Spain and Puerto Rico.
Through this, we seek to provide transferable knowledge that could be
useful to movements and activists in other contexts.
The chapter shares some ways in which Political Ecology canbring new understandings on movements across the world: what seemto be local problems reverberate into global structural issues which
concern all of us. Movements play a fundamental role in the defenceof the environment, common resources and people’s livelihoods,
in preventing processes of dispossession and in creating spaces for society outside or beyond capitalist relations. Most importantly, they makevisible the interconnections between political and ecological issues.
At the same time, Political Ecology warns us of the tendency to!"#romanticize such movements. We thus start from an awareness of suchrisks, and in addition to offering an insightful account of the successful
stories of these collective struggles, we will speak about their tensions
and complexities. Therefore, we do not intend to give a simple definitionof movements, as they are phenomena in constant motion (Walker
1994). The prevailing discourse that in order to be effective movements
must seek particular institutionalized effects is problematic because thetarget of dissent (capital, states, Mafia etc.) also moves and transforms
its practices (Deleuze 1992, Rupert and Solomon 2006, Velicu 2014).
As Benjamin Arditi14, Professor of Politics at the National University of
Mexico (UNAM) notes, the protest, or emergence of a movement, may
be “something unplanned and difficult to capture within a system ofrules because rules are precisely what are being put into question.” Inother words, faced with their own displacement, people may choose todisplace the exact cognitive maps that allow their territorial maps to be
re-written. That is because the dominant discourse of development, in
its desire for profit making no matter the costs, claims to be an omnipresent, atemporal truth (Escobar 1998). Therefore, to seriously consider
the political possibilities of movements, it may be necessary to be moreaware of the limits of our own thinking about these possibilities (Walker
1994).
We suggest that one way to think of these political possibilities is totravel through time towards the collective histories that have been silenced in the processes of modernization/industrialization, urbanization or
generally, capitalist development. Community self-narration of its past
could be an insightful alter-story to the history told by the state. Whether
reframing campaigns in Barcelona or inspiring action in Puerto Rico,such alternative (hi)stories, resonating with practices of people undercolonialism, remind us of knowledge, languages, identities and actions
which have been erased in the process of internalizing and taking for
granted capitalist development.
People are doing Political Ecology in movements; therefore, as an
academic field, it has grown in the context of activism. In this sense,14
Benjamin Arditi. Insurgencies don’t have a plan – they are the plan: Political
performatives and vanishing mediators in 2011. JOMEC Journal: Journalism, Mediaand Cultural Studies. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/1-june2012/arditi_insurgencies.pdf!"#

movements are sources of knowledge in and of themselves. Perhaps,
sometimes, an engaged-activist scholar could push some boundaries through his or her knowledge and connections. For instance, fromthe first contribution of this chapter we find out that research and dissemination about historical movements carried out by activists canbe insightful for present day’s social movements to imagine and configure alternative futures. In the first section of this chapter, he shows
us how through historical narration, activists in Barcelona re-articulate
the struggle connecting the present with the past in shaping desired
futures.
Moreover, telling us a personal story of childhood neighbourhood, the second contribution shows the interconnections between a historical process of suburban expansion into green spaces which
can be traced to the colonial context and contemporary widespread
urbanization of Puerto Rico. By contrast to government involvement inenvironmental issues, individuals come together to restore and protect
their urban green spaces and forests and in the process, they become
involved in struggles over democratic decision-making over land use.
The case of Cupey thus offers an example of movement development
for reclaiming not only the ecological but also the civic commons, notonly the forest but also democracy.
The third contribution narrates the controversial problem of waste
in Naples through a historical perspective of a population that has longsuffered the consequences of a Biocide: in response to such violence,people in Campania have transformed their grievances into a longterm struggle for imagining alternatives, and have created alliances
beyond identities and divisions in order to perform their equal right tolife and democratic decision-making. He shows how movements tackle
the connections between local manifestations of structural processes,
turning this framing into a political device for enlarging the scope ofactivism towards other issues and movements. The ‘permanent revolution’ that people are living in their everyday lives is both a means to find
new ways to represent themselves politically as well as a revival of theirliving in common, through joyful actions with unexpected outcomes.
Similarly, the last contribution is focused on the problem of energy
poverty in Spain, and highlights how an alliance of social-ecologicalmovements tackles the issue on the streets and through legal andinstitutional mechanisms. This contribution shows how pedagogy plays!"!

a critical role in collective organising, bottom-up action against energy
poverty and in raising awareness on that our equal right to consume
energy has to be connected to energy as a commodity that produces
social and environmental costs for people elsewhere on the planet.
Movements are means for the rediscovering and recovering of
crucial commons, from forests to housing, energy, cities or social relations themselves within a community. This shows us that in the movingof movements, one can read the constant struggle for democracy, as
an open never-ending process shaped by history and geography, desires and discourses, ideas and sensibilities.

!"#

5.2 Memory, Historical Research and Activism. The case of
Segle XX building and the neighbours of Barceloneta (Barcelona)Santiago Gorostiza

When Aymara people in South-America look ahead they are facing
the past. Literally. Researchers who investigated Aymara language andgestures have established that, unlike all the studied cultures and languages of the world, they refer to the past by gesturing ahead, while
the future is situated in the back of the self. The example of the Aymara
indigenous people, when reflecting on how history can be useful for
activists participating in socio-environmental conflicts, challenges our
preconditioned views (see Chapter 1.). We can put history into the foreground, not just as the background or the context of present events but
as a central resource for the present and the future.
“All history is contemporary history” – famously asserted Benedetto Croce. But it is not only that we all write and research within
the context of our time. It is also that the stories and narrations that
we unveil impact on today. They can affect how we look at the past –but especially, when it involves social movements, they can also shape
how we look at the present and at the future, at what is conceived as
possible and impossible today and tomorrow.
As the Zapatistas claim, it is necessary to “open a crack” in history. On January 1st 1994, the very same day that the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force, the Zapatistas launched their revolt in the mountains of Southeast Mexico. From their very
First Declaration, they emphasised they were the result of 500 yearsof resistance to colonialism. One of the expressions of such resistanceis precisely their critique to how history has been written. A history thattells the story of the elites just makes the present state of things seem
natural, leaves aside the subalterns and silences their past. Against
this type of history appropriation, Zapatistas claim the need to “open acrack”– to write the history of the exploited. A crack that disrupts also
the idea of unidirectional, non-linear history, opening a loophole thatchallenges views of what is in front of us and what in our backs. A crackthat permits us to look to the past ahead – as the Aymara – as memories of the alternative non-disposable future. Once the past is reclaimed,!"#the door to reclaim the future swings open (for the importance of place,see also 5.4).
Reclaiming silenced pasts is a task to be done both in the archives and the streets, both in libraries and mountains, listening to stories
and reading dusty records. It can be about how a revolution was silenced and obliterated from history, as shown in the work of Michel-Rolph
Trouillot on the late 18th century in Haiti. And also about how dictatorships try to wipe out the memory and heritage of those who opposed
them. When, like in Spain, elites have succeeded to remain in powerfor decades, the stories of disappeared workers and activists and theiremancipatory projects frustrated by a 40-year long dictatorship risk
being left aside and silenced forever (on storytelling, see 2.4).

The Case of Segle XX building in Barceloneta
In December 2013, neighbours from La Barceloneta (Barcelona,
Spain) announced a demonstration to reclaim the empty building of
El Segle XX (“The Twentieth Century”) cooperative for its public use.
El Segle XX had been founded in 1901, but after years of decadence
during the Francoist dictatorship, the cooperative was dissolved in thelate 1980s and the building later abandoned.
At least since 2008, La Òstia neighbourhood association begancollecting information about the history of the neighbourhood and interviewing veteran neighbours. The importance of several cooperatives– El Segle XX among them – as spaces of socialization, consumption
and cultural centres since the late Nineteenth century soon emerged
as a central aspect of the neighbours’ memories. Later, the ResearchGroup of Cooperative Memory of Barceloneta (Grup de Recerca dela Memòria Cooperativa de la Barceloneta) continued the work of theassociation focusing on the history of cooperatives by diving into archives, recording interviews, organizing guided tours and other activities.
In Barceloneta, historically a working-class neighbourhood with low
salaries and few public and social facilities, now under a high touristicpressure, the use of El Segle XX building became a symbolic claim to
the municipality. The historical connotations of the building and ofcooperatives’ movement were manifest. Since the last decades of the
Nineteenth century, the importance of the organisation of cooperatives!"#

in Barcelona grew and was part of a wider international movement.
In Catalonia, cooperatives had their heyday during the democratic period of the Second Republic (1931-1939), when thousands of families
were members of them. Very often, they had their own theatres, bars,
and shops. Through consumption cooperatives, they allowed avoiding
intermediaries between consumers and producers and thus also represented a nexus of the urban space to the surrounding agriculturalenvironment that fed it. However, following a military coup that unleashed the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and with the victory of Franco over the Republicans, cooperatives never regained the activity thatthey had had before. In fact, during the conflict, Barcelona was on the
Republican side and Barceloneta was bombed so heavily that it had
to be evacuated. El Segle XX was hit by Fascist bombings and reduced to ashes. Despite the building was rebuilt after the war, during the
dictatorship its activity languished, and most cooperatives were dissolved and buildings sold. El Segle XX building passed to private hands
at some point during the early 1990s, following an irregular processof dissolution of the cooperative. In recent years, despite the land on
which the building is built was categorised by the City Council as apublic facility, rumours of private commercial projects for the building
circulated along with the growing pressure of gentrification and tourism
in the maritime neighbourhood of Barceloneta. This spread uneasinessamong the neighbours. During the last days of 2013, two weeks before
a scheduled demonstration, an apparently fortuitous fire damaged partof the building. This event fostered a united front of the associations
and neighbours of the quarter, and just a few weeks later, more than 30
organisations signed a statement asking theDistrict to either expropriate or buy the Segle
XX building. They also demanded a transparent investigation about the fire and the legal
state of the building property, as well as thecommitment of the City Council to keep the category of the building area as a public facility.
Figure 42: Poster “El Segle XX és pel barri” (“TheTwentieth Century is for the neighbourhood”).
(Source: Grup de Recerca de la Memòria Cooperativa
de la Barceloneta)!"#

At the end of the demonstration, in front of El Segle XX building,several neighbours intervened emphasising the historical role of thecooperative in Barceloneta. The march ended with the sticking of two
posters on the wall of the building. One vindicated the historical memory of cooperativism with a quote from 1899; the other was a blank poster to be filled by participants with their ideas for the future uses of thespace, under the title “What do we want for El Segle XX?” (“Què volem
per al Segle XX?”). In the same fashion, the website of the ResearchGroup of Cooperative Memory of Barceloneta, whose members had an
active role in the march, stated clearly their views on the uses of thememory of cooperativism: “More than an exercise of historical memory,
it comes to us as a memory of the future: the practices of cooperation
give us a powerful tool to face a present of cutbacks in social services
and to build a shared future”.

Unearthing stories of the past, reconnecting struggles for the
futureIn a rapidly changing barri (neighbourhood), with a growing luxurious touristic pressure stimulating higher rents and pushing former
neighbours out, associations have resorted to historical research toenhance their struggle. Recording memories, collecting old scanningpictures, and newspapers, finding old records or mapping places disappeared neighbours are also a way to narrate their own story.
As highlighted by activist researcher Emma Alari, participatory
mapping has been an essential tool in the neighbourhood struggle. On
one hand, maps were used by neighbours in Barceloneta to display
the different threats suffered by the neighbourhood. In this regard, thecollaboration with mapping activists Iconoclasistas constitutes a good
example of the use of collaborative mapping for social movements. But
mapping can also be a historical project. By mapping both long and recently disappeared places in “Geografia Esborrada de la Barceloneta”(“Barceloneta Deleted Geography”), neighbours not only narrate their
history but configure an emotional geography of the barri that binds together the stories of squatted houses already demolished with the story
of El Segle XX or the Escola del Mar, a wood-made school in the seaside that was burnt by the Fascist bombings during the Spanish Civil War.

!""

Such stories are disseminated by walking and talking together with neighbours (organised guided tours) but also leaving the option of doingit alone listening to the audio contents available in the web. Throughthe map, these stories weave new connections between the past, thepresent and the imagined futures. Guided tours provide chances for theinteraction between those researching the history of the neighbourhoodand their inhabitants, confronting and enriching each other’s stories.
Altogether, this strengthens the claim of spaces such as El Segle XX forthe common uses in the neighbourhood, by reconnecting the stories of
the neighbours’ relation to this space with the historical research about
its function in the social movements of the past.
After years of actions and campaigns in the neighbourhood, Barcelona City Council has finally committed to start the process of expropriation of El Segle XX building to give it back to the barri. The
struggle, however, is far from over. As the recuperation of the building
is close to become a reality, the neighbourhood platform designs its
own project for the uses of the building through a grassroots process.
In a major open meeting in the square, neighbours wrote their ideas forthe future uses of the cooperative building on several large-size copiesof the 1939 project drawings to rebuild the cooperative after the war,
which they had located in the archives. Not only it was a practical way
to collect all the ideas for the different building floors and a reminderof the building past. It was also an inadvertently symbolic gesture: themaps of the project to rebuild El Segle XX after the Fascist bombingsand occupation of Barcelona in 1939 were recycled 76 years later todiscuss an alternative future with the barri’s neighbours. Past can be aresource for imagining alternative futures – ina very material way.
Figure 43: Planning the future of El Segle XX cooperative on the base of the 1939 maps located in themunicipal archive. (Source: Santiago Gorostiza)

While some would see a gloomy andnostalgic flavour in this struggle, activists
explicitly state that they don’t intend to idealize neither romanticize a return to a static
lost past. They want to learn lessons aboutpast experiences tried and failed, understand!"#past hopes for imagined futures, explore the daily life and problems ofthe neighbourhood in the past and its connections to today. Following
Walter Benjamin, in this way nostalgia can be an emotion connected totransformation and even revolution. Past experiences are opportunities
for reinvention, possibilities for alliances across time. Stories like theone told by El Segle XX building can be, as Italian authors Wu Ming and
Vitaliano Ravagli have asserted, “axes of war to be unearthed”.
Futher readings
Alari, E., 2015. «El barrio no se vende» Los mapeos de la Barceloneta como herramienta de resistencia vecinal frente al extractivismo urbano. Ecología Política, 48,
36-41.
Armiero, M., 2011. A Rugged Nation. Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy. The
White Horse Press, Cambridge.
Barca, S., 2014. Telling the Right Story: Environmental Violence and Liberation Narratives. Environment and History. 20, 535-546.
Lowy, M., 2005. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’.
Verso, New York.
Ming, W., Ravagli, V., 2005, Asce di guerra. Giulio Einaudi Editore.
Núñez, R., Sweetser, E., 2006. With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence
From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial
Construals of Time. Cognitive Science, 30(3), 401-450.
Ponce de León, J. (ed.), 2001. Our word is our weapon. Selected writings of subcomandante Marcos. Seven Stories Press, New York.
Pulido L., et. al., 2012. The collection of 115 places & stories of the city of Los Angeles, in: Pulido L., Barraclough, L., Wendy Cheng. A People’s Guide to Los Angeles.
University of California Press.
Risler, J., Ares, P., 2013. Manual de mapeo colectivo: recursos cartográficos críticos
para procesos territoriales de creación colaborativa. Tinta Limón, Buenos Aires.
Trouillot, M-R., 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon
Press, Boston.

!"#5.3. Struggles over urban greenspace in San Juan, Puerto
Rico: Reconnecting ecology and democracy
Gustavo García López

Urban areas have increasingly become sites of social-ecologicalstruggles as communities seek to defend and re-make their neighbourhoods and challenge processes of community displacement and social and environmental degradation. This is the story of the Cupey Arboretum, a small group of middle-class suburbanites who (sometimes)
came together with a simple idea –to beautify their neighbourhood andrestore a small remnant of forest by planting trees; and of how in theprocess of their struggle, they become ‘politicized’ and integrated into alarger movement challenging the political economy of urban planning.
The analysis emphasizes the importance of individual actions, even if
small, and of explicitly ‘connecting the dots’ between local processes
and the supra-local political economy driving urban transformations.
It also invites reflection on the role of lived experiences as a basis forengagement.

The political economy of the urban growth machine
Puerto Rico, a small archipelago in the Caribbean, is a colony of
the United States since 1898. Until the 1940s, its economy was mostly
agricultural. A large ‘development’ project called Operation Bootstrap
implemented by the local government with strong backing from the US,
gradually transformed the country’s economy into an industrial andurban one. US colonialism also meant the implementation of the US
model of urbanization, known as (sub)urban sprawl: low-density, cardependent urbanization spread away from city centres. Today, most of
Puerto Rico’s population lives in low-density gated suburban communities –abandoning both rural (agricultural) areas and urban centres;
almost everyone (about 90%) uses private cars as their main transportation; and we have one of the densest networks of roads in the world(Gautier and Santana, 2001). A clear ecological consequence of thishas been the enclosure and destruction of large swaths of green and!"#blue spaces (forests, mangroves, agricultural lands, water bodies, etc.)
in and around the expanding city. Developers cut mountains, paved
over creeks and prime agricultural lands labelled as ‘idle’ or ‘wasted
spaces’. Local activists have a word for this type of ‘development’: desastrollo15, which we could roughly translate as disasterment (see also
Chapter 2.).
The typical apolitical explanations of urbanization state that it isspontaneous and inevitable (Otero et al., 2013); the state (through its
planning system) and market (through the construction sector) simply
respond to consumer demand for housing through a rational, ‘expertbased’ decision-making process. Political ecology questions this perspective because it ignores the deliberate, power-laden political choices that make urbanization possible, as well as the resistances thatchallenge it and underscore its unequal and undemocratic nature. Itshows that there is a structural process of an “urban growth machine”(Molotch, 1976)
Sprawl would not survive without what political ecologists’ call facilitation (Collins, 2009). In Puerto Rico, sprawl has been facilitated by
the drastic expansion of the road network, entirely built and maintainedby the government, the significant financial and regulatory benefits tothe construction industry, the approval of most construction projects
through exceptions to planning rules, and the soft hand and complicity in environmental violations. This is strengthened by corrupt andrevolving door relations between the political and construction elites
and severely undemocratic decision-making processes in a context ofan “emergency” regime which limits public participation and criminalizes protest. Finally, suburban sprawl is also supported by an ideology
which has historically linked construction to progress and development
which makes any proposal for urbanization appear inherently good andalmost inevitable.

15

!"#

Instead of the spanish translation of “development”, desarrollo.

Guerrilla gardening against sprawl in the Cupey Arboretum
The neighbourhood of Cupey was one of the first suburban expansions of the city of San Juan to the rural/agricultural lands
south of the city, in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the neighbourhood was a
growing but still quasi-rural, located in the frontier of forested hills. Today, it is San Juan’s third most populated neighbourhood. In 1992, themain road to Cupey was expanded, cutting through forested hills andfacilitating further suburban growth of the neighbourhood. A group ofneighbours had unsuccessfully tried to block the project and to achieveconservation of the area’s remaining forest.
In the mid-1990s, Don Esteban González, a retired resident of theneighbourhood, had an idea: a reforestation project to beautify and restore the area impacted by the road, which the government had left
completely devoid of vegetation, and to serve as a green buffer for thecreeks that flowed next to the road and connected downstream with thecity’s only river, the Piedras River.
Don Esteban’s idea was both ecological and aesthetic: he was
especially keen on yellow flower trees, for being a bright and highly
visible colour, and perhaps also because it is a colour associated withjoy. The name Arboretum, which in a narrow sense means a collectionof trees but is used as reference of urban and botanical gardens, camefrom a previous movement which in the early 1980s had promoted thecreation of an Arboretum for San Juan.
Esteban started recruiting some neighbours for his idea, including
his doctor, Basilio. Basilio suggested to a local school’s Boy Scouts
troop, and held several meetings to organize a first reforestation event.
The activity was held in 1999 with the troop, with the collaboration of thestate and local government and a national environmental organization.
Over the next few years they would organize other large reforestation events in collaboration with government agencies and non-government organizations, until they completely reforested most of thearea’s green spaces. By 2014 the Arboretum had planted more than
3,000 had been planted, all in an area less than 5 kilometres long. We
are not talking about the ‘photo-op’ with a pre-planted tree frequently
used by politicians and corporate CEOs.
Esteban preferred action to meetings and planning, and he wasadamantly independent: he was a ‘man on a mission’. He created a!"!

makeshift tree nursery in his front yard and in a small patch of the Arboretum. He would collect tree saplings from different parts of the city andwould obtain some from the government’s greenhouse staff, with whom
he developed a close relationship. Locally raising the trees made themmore adapted to local conditions, hence more resilient over their lifetime, but also gave the Arboretum independence from the government
for its reforestation initiative; in fact on occasions the Arboretum supplied saplings of various species to the government’s nurseries.
In the afternoons, Esteban
would plant trees in any open greenspaces he could find. Sometimes he did this with the collaboration of other small groups of nearby
residents, university students andschoolchildren, but most of the times by himself or with one or two
friends. Over the weekends, theywould take care of the area –forinstance, by removing trash andweeds from recently planted trees.
Figure 44: Arboretum logo (Source: Ar- These self-organized activities toboretum)
recover abandoned urban spaces
and turn them into urban commons are sometimes called “guerrillagardening”.

Reconnecting ecology and people
For the Arboretum, in the words of Basilio, the objective was tocreate a harmony between nature and the communities’. Through thereforestations and interpretive guided walks through the Arboretum,as well as its promotion of local school projects in the forest, the Arboretum fostered emotional/spiritual connections with ecology. The
importance of these encounters of suburbanites (especially kids) –increasingly isolated inside private homes with TVs, smartphones andvideogames– when they come out, play and discover in a forest, planta tree and connect their hands to the soil, touch leaves of different
shapes and textures, or encounter for the first time a bird or the creek!"#

and their sounds, should not be underestimated. Perhaps what Esteban was talking about, was that the “only road to freedom is throughbeauty”16 reminding us that our freedom, when practiced, blossoms us
like the yellow flowers he was planting.
Through these activities, the Arboretum also broke the ecologicalgeographical illiteracy of many of the suburb’s residents, who did nothave the local ecological knowledge or the connection to the territorythat comes with sustained long-term interactions with our surrounding.
They learned that inside the forest lied a great deal of life. Moreover,
the Arboretum linked the forest’s permanence to our well-being – forinstance, to the protection from the noise and pollution from the area’s
traffic, and from the flooding suffered by sectors of the neighbourhood.

Figure 45: Left side picture: School and government volunteers in the Arboretum
with Don Esteban, second from right. Right side picture: Don Esteban with a friend
in a reforestation activity. (Source: Gustavo García López)

Challenging growth, recovering commons and democracy
Contrary to the common perception as a suburban ‘leisure’ activity
and as material for television programs, gardening is historically tightlyinterwoven with struggles over land use planning and greenspace (McCay, 2013). Ecology becomes political in these struggles; moreover it
becomes a collective concern. The Arboretum’s apparently apoliticaland aesthetic ‘reforestation’ actions were actually the contrary. As they
connected people to each other and to the local ecology, they politicized nature as an autonomous sphere of experience outside profit or16

Quoting the philosopher Friedrich Schiller in The Aesthetic Education of Man!"#

state mandates, transforming the vision of the value of an urban forest
and of whose domain of action it is: from an exclusively ‘public’ (i.e.
government) and ‘private’ (i.e. market) space into a commons, a collective endeavour by and for the communities. In doing so, it was challenging the privatization of the public sphere of the contemporary city.
The Arboretum also politicized as it inevitably clashed with the political economy of the suburban sprawl machine. Protecting the last
stretches of greenspace in Cupey confronted the construction sector’splans and the Arboretum’s leaders realized that the problem was muchbroader than the local. As Basilio explained, the Arboretum ‘emerges
from the neighbouring communities’ reaction to the accelerated deforestation and the insatiable, poorly planned urbanism that the region
suffers, as in all of Puerto Rico.’ The greenspace became, as McKay(2011) suggests, a “special zone for the common articulation of socialchange...the critical rejection of some aspects of society, and...the confrontation with authority.” (p. 12)
This recognition of the scale of the problem fostered a connection
with a larger network of neighbourhood associations and communityenvironmental groups which had been struggling since the 1990s toprotect its dwindling greenspace and interconnected water bodies of
San Juan from urban sprawl machine and the related enclosures taking place in San Juan. It had slowly coalesced into an alliance promoting the creation of the “San Juan Ecological Corridor” (SJEC) in the‘ain contiguous forest of San Juan, through which the Piedras Riverflowed. In 2003 the SJEC became legally protected. This network inturn led the Arboretum activists’ to emphasize the broader ecologicalflows of forests and water which connected their local greenspace to
the SJEC. In 2004, with the support of the SJEC movement and othercivil society organizations, the Arboretum became legally protected.
The victory, however, was short-lived, and showed the limits oflegal strategies. Even after the legal protection and recognition of thelocal ‘civic’ ecological responsibility, the government continued to approve construction projects in the area. The ‘expert’ planning process
and the ‘participation’ of public hearings proved once again a farce. The
group’s fight, therefore, became increasingly one about democracy, denouncing the government’s cronyist relations with developers and thefarce of the planning process. In numerous letters, Esteban called out
the ‘leonine’ contracts that gave away greenspace for more shopping!"#centres and housing, and pointed to the government as the biggest
predator of ecology and community. The group became increasingly
involved in draining court battles that demobilized the collective.
In recent years some of the Arboretum activists sought to revive the
networks of collaboration to break this impasse and integrate into thebroader ecological landscape of the Piedras River watershed. In 2011,
they organized the first ever Piedras River cleanup and reforestation
day. The activity, which has been repeated every year since, mobilized
hundreds of volunteers from the community’s schools and neighbours,
as well as from various civil society organizations, giving visibility to theArboretum as part of the efforts by other larger and powerful organizations to protect the Piedras River watershed and the associated San
Juan Bay Estuary. In other words, broadening the ecological scope wasa way for increasing the community’s power.
Naming the agents of destruction
To plant trees was to metaphorically cultivate democratic change… breathe new life into the dead metaphor of grassroots democracy… At the heart of this symbolic nexus was a contest overdefinitions of growth: each tree planted by the Green Belt Movement stood as a tangible, biological image of steady, sustainablegrowth, a dramatic counter-image to the ruling elite’s kleptocratic
image of growth, a euphemism for their high-speed piratical plunder of the nation’s coffers and finite natural resources…[it] inverted
the syntax of violence by naming the agents of destruction. (Nixon,
2011 p. 135-36)
The conflicts around loss of greenspace as a result of urban expansion has become increasingly common across Puerto Rico. Inmany instances these are localized fights against particular construction projects. Some have criticized these movements as NIMBYists(“not in my backyard”, see 1.3). However, the experience of the Arboretum, as many others around the world, demonstrates that through theireveryday engagements, people can open to broader understandingsof core issues relating the environment with politics and the economy
through a grounded experience in the local, but which at the same time
surpasses a localist understanding. Political ecology contributes tothis task by connecting issues of democracy, economy, and ecology.

!"#In doing so, it makes visible the need for broader alliances with otherstruggles.
Futher readings
Anguelovski, I., 2014. Neighborhood as refuge: Community Reconstruction, Place
Remaking, and Environmental Justice in the City. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Collins, T.W., 2010. Marginalization, Facilitation, and the Production of Unequal Risk:
The 2006 Paso del Norte Floods. Antipode, 42 (2), 258–288.
McKay, G., 2011. Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden.
Frances Lincoln.
Molotch, H.,L.,1976. The city as growth machine: Towards a political economy of place. American Journal of Sociology, 82(2), 309-332.
Nixon, R., 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.
Otero, I., et. al,. 2011. Water scarcity, social power and the production of an elite suburb: The political ecology of water in Matadepera, Catalonia. Ecological Economics,
70, 1297-1308.
Guerrilla Gardening!"#

5.4 Linking fronts, building the alternative, enhancing autonomy: Lessons from 15 years of Campania’s social mobilizations
Salvatore Paolo De Rosa

The 15 years-long grassroots mobilizations emerged in reaction toenvironmental contamination in the Campania region of Southern Italy,
represent a useful entry point to distil important lessons for bottom-up
activism. In this contribution, it will be provided an overview of theirpath from a constellation of unrelated citizens’ committees resisting localized threats, to a regional coalition acting at several scales for implementing new models of democracy, economy and community wellbeing. In particular, three organizational tools will be highlighted that,beyond strengthening collective action, are addressing structural andecological dimensions. After introducing the processes leading to livelihoods degradation in Campania, the following features of the social
movements will be analysed: the linking of different fronts of struggle
at regional and national scales; the widening of the scope of the movement; and the work on community’s autonomy through practices of
re-appropriation, that is, the reclaiming of space and knowledge.

Trashing bodies and ecosystems
Over the course of the last twenty years, the provinces of Naples
and Caserta, an area of Campania region stretching on 3.800 sq. km
and inhabited by approximately four million people, have been turned
into a huge trashcan. The joint actions of government-sponsored urban
waste management project and of a complex network of mafia groups,
industrial mangers, corrupted white collars and public officials, createda system for the extraction of profits from the disposal of waste at theexpenses of local livelihoods.
On the one hand, the authoritarian governance of the urban waste
management for the entire region, framed by the government as an“emergency”, became a succulent business for private investors that
could enjoy law derogations and optimal contractual conditions for the
implementation of facilities according to a project centred on incine-!""rators, landfills and storage sites. On the other, the infamous mafialed trafficking, wild dumping, open-air burning and illegal disposal ofhazardous materials, mostly from industrial production, turned every
available hole in the region into a sink of toxic scraps.
Both processes shifted onto communities and ecologies the environmental costs of industrial production and waste disposal. This translated into a toxic environment for the local population, affected today
by threats to health, reduction of cultivable land and stigmatization.
More than 2000 potentially contaminated sites have been recorded in2008 by the Regional Agency for Environmental Protection, and thecomplex links between those contaminants and the increasing cancer
diseases among the locals have been investigated by several scientificstudies.
Moreover, the stigmatization of Campania’s land as hopelessly
contaminated had a generalized impact on agricultural sales from theregion: even when products are certified as safe, buyers avoid them,
forcing many active farmlands (the traditional landmark and most valuable sector in Campania) to close down, providing further land for speculation. The hazards to public health have been recognized by the central
government through the insertion of three wide areas within Campaniain the national record of polluted sites in need of remediation, together
with other 50 places all around Italy. Nevertheless, cleaning-up works
are still minimal and the authoritarian governance of environmental management and land-use planning still dominates the Italian landscape.

Framing local threats as structural inequalities
When the “emergency regime” declared by the Italian government
for the management of urban waste in Campania begun in 1994, people in the municipalities of the plain targeted by the imposed facilities
reacted on a local basis. During the battle against the incinerator of
Acerra in 2000, for example, the local committee made of ordinary people, farmers and students, did not receive substantial support fromother municipalities or organized groups. The self-formation of the activists focused on a critique to the technology of incineration and on thecontamination already present in the rural areas of the town. The battleof Acerra was lost in 2004 under the batons of hundreds police sent by!"#

the government, but the state-sponsored attack to territories moved
around in other spots where landfills and storage sites were planned.
The linking of the Acerra’s committee with the citizens’ groups
emerging in Chiaiano, Pianura, Serre and Giugliano was pursued by
activists through the identification of recurring patterns: the technomanagerial approach to urban trash management, the authoritarian governance model, the State facilitation of illegal toxic waste disposal, thelack of people involvement in decision-making processes, the dismissal of alternatives, and the risks posited to humans and environments
by outdated facilities and contaminated sites. In few years, relying on
extensive and transversal information campaigns, regional allianceswere formed, and delegations were travelling from one place to anotherfollowing the eruption of new frontlines. At the collective assemblies,
through knowledge exchanges and the elaboration of a shared vision of
the problem, the committees came to the conclusion that incinerators,
landfills and illegal disposal were part of a wider project for the topdown implementation of an economy revolving around waste.
The work of cooperation between local committees united into alliances produced between 2010 and 2013 a broader conceptualizationof the enemy they were facing: Biocide. In the conception developedby activists, Biocide articulates the relationships between political-economic processes and their complex interaction with ecosystems andbodies: it connects
the “killing of life” tostrategies of profit
making. The notion
illustrates the interdependent featuresof cost shifting andlife-killing as a deliberate project towhich a territory issacrificed: for every
contaminantreleased into the enviFigure 46: First demonstration of Campania’s Grassropowerfulots Movements as a regional coalition, under the banner ronment,of #fiumeinpiena (raging river) and Stop Biocidio (End economic actors are
the Biocide), Napoli, 16 November 2013 (Source: Salva- able to displace thetore Paolo De Rosa)!"#burden of their compliance costs onto people and ecologies. Such concept helped to frame the issue of contamination beyond the specificityof the contested process (waste) and turned out to be fundamental inorder to build alliances between similar struggles and with other social
movements engaged against the same, underlying, structural processes. Since then, the coalition Stop Biocide has been growing nationally, embraced by movements fighting against oil extraction, megainfrastructural projects, polluting industries and land speculations.

Elaborating alternatives within a wider project
The contradiction faced by activists, caught between the need tofocus on the specific threat suffered by their community and the needto address the wider, structural causes of the localized problem lies atthe core of the difficult path from resisting locally to joining forces andpro-actively fight to change the world. Struggles focused only on local
litigations have short life, either they win or lose, unless the social movement is able to frame the causes of the specific problem into wider
political-economic arrangements, and unless it formulates alternatives
within a broad project of people’s led change.
For the Stop Biocide coalition, it was a long path, reaching a turning point during the preparations of the first demonstration in Naples
as a regional force in 2013. Before, during and after the assemblies,
through mail exchanges and working groups, the coalition drafted ashared platform aimed at gathering knowledge from all the localized
mobilizations to insert proposals and visions within a project of wider
political scope, serving as a set of general and common objectives forrethinking participation, economy, ecology and society.
Beyond technical indications on how to reduce and to manage urban waste, how to deal with hazardous materials’ disposal and how
to address the health concerns of the population, the platform laid out
the connections between the capitalist mode of production and thecreation of environmental injustices in the form of sacrificed zones. The broader scope of the critique was tied to the prefiguration of
the desired world. The shared platform reclaims “true democracy” bytackling the procedures through which land-use planning and territorial development unfold and by proposing a model of socio-ecological!"#transition for the regional economy. As Lucio narrates “We have to beable as a community to demand, at the administrative level, mechanisms of participatory democracy: participatory budgeting, assemblies,
city councils, an urban plan that must be studied and approved in a
public meeting and public consultation processes for deciding how to
use local resources”.

Building autonomy and self-organization through re-appropriation
Throughout its history of struggle against Biocide, the social coalition of Campania had to overcome the attempts by the media to criminalize its actions and the efforts of politicians to co-opt its leaders. The
objective of the elites was to perpetuate the exclusion from the political arena of the radical claims embodied by the requests of alternative democratic procedures. The social coalition therefore has focusedon producing and spreading autonomous narrations of the crisis,grounded in the merging of scientific expertise and first-hand experience of activists, that could resist negation and mystification attempts. To
impose the framing of the problems by local communities in the realmof media and politics meant to conquer fundamental spaces into thecollective imaginary of the nation so to trigger responses and inclusionby the government. On the one side, this strategy implied addressing
the nearest representatives of the government, as Vincenzo. explains:“We aim to the accountability and empowerment of local administrators
for the safeguard of territory. So far, the environmental sphere was thelast of their preoccupation. We managed to make it a priority”.
On the other hand, the target of changing national political parties’
priorities remained fundamental: “We must have a ‘contaminating’ effect, influencing the palaces where decisions are taken and the worldof political parties. This doesn’t mean that we have to become a political party ourselves. However, we must be able to strongly influence
their agenda. We have to condition the wider political landscape. We
know that, today at least, the traditional political parties are hostagesof the lobbies, as are the institutions. Everything is rooted there. In reappropriating the value of the policy at the service of citizens and not of
the industrial lobbies”.

!"!

The work on media campaigns has also been pursued through the
involvement of citizens in grassroots mapping projects. To answer to theminimization by political representatives of the claims that countryside
was being turned into open-air trash cans, the movement organized
the D-Day: a denunciation day in which hundreds of people walked
the rural areas to document with GPS and cameras the places wherewaste was illegally dumped or burned. In the words of Sara: “We go
to photograph the condition of places and we show that, despite theannouncements of the government, nothing is changed. In this way wehave been able to arrive in the news, in the newspapers, we broke thewall of silence, because those media were the most under control bylobbies”.
Beyond changing the representation of the problem through autonomous framing aimed to re-appropriate media and political spaces,
the strongest enactment of the alternative that the coalition brings has
been achieved through the application “here and now” of the modelof the desired futuresociety.
This project
has entailed
a growing
cooperation
withfarmers,themost
hit by thewidespreadpollution.
Figure 47: “G.A.S. (Solidarity Purchase Group), an answer to the
Biocide. Short supply chain Km. 0” from and event organized in A c c o r d i n g
the social cooperative of Chiaiano, 2014 (Source: Salvatore Paolo to the coDe Rosa)
alition, theagricultural sector could become the productive base for the re-appropriation by the people of a regional social economy grounded in thepreservation of territory and the care of the commons. In the beginning,the denunciation of committees had antagonized the farmers: the stigmatization of the land threatened the selling of agricultural products.
But then, activists and farmers discovered to be on the same path:!"#“Farmers were against us. We had to work hard to make them understand that we are on their side. Today we cooperate from the bottom up,through a community-check: with the self-certifications, farmers givethe guarantee of a safe product and we in turn help them to create acircuit of Km-0 economy through solidarity purchase groups”.
The work with farmers is aimed at building alliances in the actual
places where the illegal dumping is happening. The interest in enhancing agriculture wants to prevent further land speculation after active
farmlands are forced to close down. Territory in this way becomes embedded in the political strategies of the coalition (Escobar, 2008), also
through recovering the beauty that has been tainted by pollution, because to “recover the beauty means to re-appropriate space, territory,
liveability for all”. The autonomy of the community is built also throughthe linking with other activists’ projects that resonate with the coalition’s
goals. This has been the case of the cooperation with the anti-mafia
movement. Again Lucio explains: “Our path is interlinking with the antimafia movement and with the social cooperatives that cultivate lands confiscated to the mafia. Social economy is the future. To reclaim
assets confiscated to mafia, making them productive for social aims,
giving job opportunities to disadvantaged people, this is the model ofthe alternative. To trigger cooperation that becomes social economy”.
It is precisely the building of the alternative model “here andnow” that makes stronger the campaigns waged by the coalition ofsocial movements in Campania. To self-organize a social economy based on communal structures, on sustainable use of local resources, on
democratic confrontation and popular initiative contributes to the reorientation of the common sense while providing the material goods
that are lacking. It engages ordinary citizens, brings them near to theuniverse of meaning constructed by the activists, involves producers,
administrators and other associations, and reshapes geographies andimaginaries. It is through these seeds of the future society that the oldsocio-economic model will be made obsolete and will fall. Because people decided that it is not viable anymore and they already self-organized the alternative.

!"#

Futher readings
Escobar, A., 2008. Territories of difference. Place, movements, life, redes. Duke University Press, London & Durham.
De Rosa, S., Caggiano, M., 2015. Social Economy as Antidote to Criminal Economy:
How social cooperation is reclaiming commons in the context of Campania’s environmental conflicts. Partecipazione e Conflitto The Open Journal of Sociopolitical Studies, 8 (2), 530-554.
Shared platform of the Campania Grassroots Movements’ Coalition (in Italian), 16
November 2013.
2064, a foretold biocide. Photographic project on destruction and resistance in Campania, by Mauro Pagnano.

!"#5.5 Energy struggles: organising from the bottom up to combat energy poverty in Catalonia
Melissa Garcia-Lamarca

Household access to energy and water remains an urgent issue
for well over a billion people around the world, largely in the global
South. Yet it is increasingly difficult for many households in the global North to pay their energy and water bills due to sustained unemployment and rising energy prices. Increasingly unequal distributional
effects are becoming more and more apparent as energy and watercompanies generate exorbitant profits due to deregulation, government
subsidies and increasing prices. This model is based in the logic of thecapitalist appropriation of nature that results in energy poverty for the
many and mammoth profits for a handful of companies, their CEOs andshareholders.
Spain is one country where energy poverty – understood here as
limited or no access to basic services such as water, electricity and gas
due to a person’s inability to pay – has increased dramatically with thecrisis, as 17% of the population has difficulties paying their electricity,
gas or water bills. Within the context of growing rates of energy poverty specifically in Catalonia, this contribution seeks to explore theenergy struggles of the Alliance Against Energy Poverty, focusing
on their strategies, ways of organising and lessons learned. Their success is based on uniting historic and current street-based movementswith technical entities to bridge social, ecological and political issues,
creating social clamour and building solutions at grassroots as well as
institutional levels.
The Alliance, formed in 2013 by neighbourhood associations,workers’ assemblies, and water and housing rights platforms, aims toguarantee universal access to basic services (water, electricity andgas), to avoid indiscriminate service cuts and to defend human rights.
A brief overview of energy inequalities in Catalonia is first outlined tocontextualise the Alliance’s struggle. Based on an interview with two Alliance activists, attending a collective advising assembly in Barcelona,
as well as the Alliance’s published materials and website, focus is thenplaced on the Alliance and how they act on various fronts.

!"#

Why act? Energy inequalities in Spain, Catalonia and beyond
The Spanish electricity system is captured by a handful of powerfulcompanies that are impoverishing Spanish people, a situation that has
become more extreme after eight years of crisis alongside increasinglevels of unemployment and precariousness. The electricity oligopolythat operates in Spain – including Endesa, Gas Natural-Fenosa, Iberdrola, EON Espanya and EDP – registered €7.6 billion in profit during
the first three trimesters of 2013, double that of other European electricity companies. The University of Barcelona researcher Aurèlia Mañé
Estrada highlights the depth of their power in stating that Iberdrola andEndesa control outright the legislative branch of the Ministry of Industry
and Energy (Mañé Estrada, 2013). Endesa alone, the main distributorof electricity in Catalonia, declared over €1.8 billion in profit in 2013.
Such exorbitant profits are also fruit of a 60% increase in electricity
prices since 2008 and Endesa and Iberdrola in particular having theirtentacles spread throughout Latin America (Endesa) and investmentsin the UK, USA and Brazil (Iberdrola). Yet despite colossal profits, in2013 Endesa and Iberdrola cut the electricity access to 931,263 homes
across Spain.
As unemployment affects 22% of the population in Catalonia, andall members of over 200,000 households are unemployed, being able
to pay water bills is also a concern for many households. The price ofwater has increased 65% since 2008 and the Spanish Association ofEnvironmental Sciences notes that in the Barcelona metropolitan area
alone, the number water supply cuts rose from 27,359 in 2011 to 72,039
in 2012.

The Alliance: uniting street-based social movements andtechnical entities
To combat and find solutions to these injustices, the Alliance
Against Energy Poverty was founded in November 2013 to unite a range of entities to fight for the right of all to basic energy, gas and watersupplies.

!"#

Members of Alliance Against Energy Poverty• The Coordinator of the Unemployed Workers Assembly Movement (Coordinadorad’aturats/des de Catalunya), connecting 14 unemployed workers’ assemblies acrossCatalonia• Water is Life (Aigua és Vida), a platform of social, neighbourhood, union and ecological associations towards a non-commercial management of water in Catalonia• The Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH: La Plataforma de Afectados por la
Hipoteca), a movement with over 70 branches in Catalonia and 210 across Spain thatfights for mortgage debt forgiveness and the right to decent and affordable housing
for all• The Confederation of Neighbourhood Associations of Catalonia (Confavc: Confederació d’Associacions Veïnals de Catalunya), a non-profit organisation founded in 1988
coordinating 541 neighbourhood associations and 22 federations in Catalonia• The Federation of Neighbourhood Associations of Barcelona (Favb: Federació d’Associacions de Veïns I Veïnes de Barcelona), a civic entity founded in 1972 that brings
together over 100 neighbourhood associations in Barcelona to improve the quality oflife in the city
• Civic Front (Front Cívic), a call to all citizens to debate and write a programme withconcrete proposals that provide an alternative to the current situation• Energy Sovereignty Network (Xarxa per la sobirania energètica), associations andgroups made up of over sixty citizens from across Catalonia• Ecologists in Action (Ecologistes en acció), a confederation of more than 300 environmental groups distributed across Spain• Iaioflautas, grandparents who “fight and achieve a better future for our sons anddaughters”• Pensioners Tide (Marea Pensionista), a platform that aims to promote the defenceof pensions

The Alliance brings together various entities, diverse in theirideological positions and in their ways of organising, like streetbased social movements, both recent and historic, and more technical entities that have worked on electricity, gas or water issues for years. While such a strategy has its challenges, as each movement has
many actions and some participants don’t have the energy to engage ineverything, overall the Alliance is made stronger through the complementarity of its groups. “The technical entities lack a movement vision,
while the street-based movements lack a lot of information to really
understand what is happening”, as one activist explained. In this way,“each component teaches each other and learns from one another. We
are not two fronts; we work together”.
A process of mutual learning also emerges between movements!"#

in the Alliance that are more ecologically focused and those with a moresocial emphasis, illustrating the vital importance of an integrated approach. The two Alliance activists interviewed come from the PAH, a housing rights movement, and found that other groups held many misconceptions about what the PAH fights for. Similarly, one stated that “whenI came into the Alliance I had no idea about environmental issues… But
now seeing all work [the environmental groups in the Alliance] do and it
has completely changed my view… I think the opposite has happened
too. People who have had no contact directly with people unable to pay
their energy or water bills were blown away when they came to their firstcollective advising session”.

Visibilising a scam
The groups that founded the Alliance were pushed to come together as energy and water companies “are scamming everyone, with thehelp of the government: here in Catalonia and in the rest of Spain”. It
was critical to give visibility to the movement in order for the administration to see people organising to fight for solutions to the situation.
Creating this visibility is fundamental as energy poverty is very mucha hidden problem, and the strategy of companies is absolute silence:“the aid provided by Social Services avoids electricity and water cuts.
But if they permanently avoid cuts in Barcelona, it seems like there arenone….The city government pays and there are no cuts. The companies…you call them and they avoid the cut”. In other words it is easiest
for the authorities and companies to quietly respond, resulting in animage that the problem does not exist.
How does the Alliance give visibility to the problem? The core way
is by interacting with and mobilising the people who are living the problem through collective advising assemblies. For example, one of thefounding groups Aigua és Vida has been denouncing Agbar, Barcelona’s private water company, for many years, “but if there are not people
whose water has been cut, who are living the problem, it seems that themedia doesn’t pay any attention and that politicians are not interested
in solving the problem. Because there is no social clamour.” So creating
this “social clamour” is an important objective of the Alliance.

!""

The Alliance’s strategies: “we are working for a future, for apresent and for a future”
The Alliance operates at both grassroots and institutional levels,and like most movements develops its strategy through trial and error.
Certain movements that form part of it participate in local governmentorganised third sector tables, specifically one on energy poverty, andwith the ombudsman. The Alliance also collaborated with the PAH tosubmit a Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP) to the Catalan Parliament
with housing rights and energy poverty demands. The latter include
stipulations for people in a situation of vulnerability to have guaranteedaccess to electricity, gas and water for 3 years, paying according totheir capacity, with associated costs and debt assumed by the companies. Three times the required 50,000 signatures were gathered forthe ILP, and it was unanimously approved in the final parliamentary
session in July 2015. How and if it is implemented remains to be seen,
depending on upcoming regional elections and future rulings from the
Spanish Constitutional Court regarding competencies for the executionof the ILP, a reality that points to the need for continued struggle.
The core grassroots element of the Alliance’s approach is holding
bi-monthly assemblies where people having trouble paying their bills
or who have had their energy or water cut explain their problem to thegroup, and solutions are found among all. Such solutions can include
accompanying people to the company’s offices, or suggesting they go
to government social services; there is also direct contact with the mainelectricity and water companies in Barcelona and phone calls can bemade in extreme situations. The idea is to exhaust all paths so that latera company or the local government cannot say all formal paths weren’t
used.
Assemblies are places where affected people come together withsolidarity activists to fight for their rights and to collectivise problem
solving, where it is underlined that this is a problem that goes beyond
our own bills. The fact that this fight is against multinational companies
is emphasised in the assembly, where it is underlined that it is not justabout a person coming to solve their individual problem: “We have toknow that these companies export themselves and extract natural resources, and leave massive amounts of devastated forests.... At least
when people solve their problem, they have a little knot in their stomach!"#

that says, man, thisgoes much further. I
have solved my problem, but this company keeps doing
what it is doing”. At
the same time, theAlliance’s work ismoving slowly, stepby step. An activist reflected thatperhaps it is not
Figure 48: Occupying the energy supplier Endesa’s Bar- easy to mobilise people who are unablecelona office in March 2014. (Source: Robert Bonet)
to pay half of a €100
energy bill, and scrape together money from wherever possible to
avoid electricity cuts; others manage to pay but are however motivated
to complain and mobilise.
When the Alliance was first founded it had an action-based strategy, feeling that they needed to go and organise a macro protest; tothis end – to chants of “Endesa steals and the government collaborates!” – Barcelona’s Endesa office was occupied by 300 people for overhalf a day in March 2014 (Figure 44). This action achieved a meetingwith Endesa’s Director of Endesa’s Catalan Office and Customer Services, and resulted in five specialised attention points for people who
cannot pay their energy bills set up across Catalonia. However activists
left the meeting with the feeling that “we were speaking to a wall”, asthey had very concrete maximum demands that the company, evidently, was not going to meet. Perhaps “now if someone goes to Endesa
in the name of the Alliance Against Energy Poverty, they are treateddifferently”, but overall there is a feeling that there is a long road aheadin terms of collective action, as the experience from other movements
has shown that many actions are needed before concrete results are
obtained. The scale of mobilisation is also critical: one of the activists
noted that until they have a critical mass, the Alliance can’t spend theirenergy doing something just to show the “enemy” that they have difficultly mobilising people. Overall, organisers are very optimistic, but
move one step at a time; as one activist underlined, “we are working for!"#a future, for a present and for a future”.
Futher readings
Bouzarovski, S. Social justice and climate change: Addressing energy poverty at theEuropean scale.
Mañé, Estrada, A., 2013. The Spanish electricity market – a critical review. Energy
Vulnerability and Urban Transitions.
Tirado Herrero, S., 2013. Energy poverty in Spain: the politicisation of energy vulnerability at an early stage. Energy Vulnerability and Urban Transitions.

!"!

Chapter 6.
Conclusions

Panagiota Kotsila

6. Conclusions
Panagiota Kotsila

The field of political ecology has evolved well beyond its origins
concerning critical studies on environmental facets of development in
the “third world” (Bryant and Bailey, 1997). Political ecology now encompasses discussions of justice, gender, identity and knowledge in
relation to questions of ecology and in settings that span the globe. The
broadening of the field has happened, in part, because of the increasingly attention paid by political ecologists to social movements around theworld. Research has been conducted into the practices and discoursesof groups, communities and collectives that were articulating and performing a political ecology from below (see for example: Escobar, 1998;
Peet and Watts, 2004; Scott, 2008), driven by “a practical political engagement with new social movements, organizations, and institutions ofcivil society challenging conventional notions of development, politics,
democracy and sustainability” (Peet and Watts, 2004).
As in activism or civil society organizing, there is not just one wayof doing in political ecology. The contributions in this manual show thatthrough the methods and tools in the field (combination of hard datawith qualitative and participatory research, transcending disciplines,
performing cross-scale analysis, linking historical to contemporary
phenomena), what is often presented as “neutral” scientific fact can be(re)politicized and thereupon, the distribution of socio-ecological risks,
harms and benefits arises as a question of power relations. Political
ecology recognises winners and losers in environmental conflicts with
scientific rigorousness, at the same time acknowledging that neutrality and positivism may not be the best way to conduct analysis thatchallenges such power relations and the status quo of inequality andinjustice.
Political ecology sheds light on issues of environmental justice,on the commons, on socio-ecological disasters and on questions ofdemocracy, as well as on the conflicts and the social movements
created around or inherent to such issues. A field that not only studies
but also enters into such movements and everyday struggles is what
we, ENTITLE fellows, aspire to see political ecology become. Civil so-!"#ciety and social movements have been actively using scientific findings,
resources and tools, as well as forming those coalitions that help themachieve their goals and develop their visions, both within and beyond
academia. We want to invite an academia-activist collaboration that
goes beyond apolitical and state-dependent policy recommendations,in order to unleash trans-disciplinary action, collaboration and learning,with the explicit goal of challenging the established power structures.
Despite the presentation of cases under thematic chapters, manyof the cases involve overlapping and interrelated issues that connect
each chapter to the other. When discussing the management or remaking of commons, for example, one cannot avoid asking questionsof rules, decision-making and state institutions, touching on issues that
go beyond classical cases of enclosures and extractivism. The potentialities, dynamics and variety of challenges for socio-ecological change“from below”, are as central for the chapter on democracy as for theexamined cases of environmental conflicts. They are as crucial forunderstanding disaster capitalism, as in the analysis of social movements. Likewise, the five chapter themes are not closed categories, butrather different entry points for discussing the nexus of socio-politicaland biophysical interactions across and between scales. Although such
divisions are in a sense artificial, they serve the purpose of highlighting
the diversity of angles from which issues such as those discussed canbe approached.
By speaking of disaster capitalism, we want to problematize not
only how the aftermath of catastrophic socio-environmental events isused to broaden and deepen neoliberal reforms for the benefit of elites, but also interrogate how those events are themselves the result ofsystemic inequality and capitalist expansion. By zooming in, out andacross scales (local, national, global) and scrutinizing different fields
of economic activity, we underline the multifaceted nature of “accumulation by dispossession” - inherent in neoliberal capitalism - which
inevitably encompasses socio-ecological dimensions. This inter-connectedness of sectors and scales comes out as a crucial lesson if weare to understand the “causes behind the causes” of so-called natural
disasters, economic crises or humanitarian failures.
Important insights come from contributions in this book that describe the struggles of citizens and social movements against hegemonic
forces of exploitation and capital accumulation, such as states, corpo-!"#

rations or powerful social groups. Although those are spread in all fivechapters, such lessons come out particularly strong from the chapter onsocial movements, in which we highlight how people are doing what
political ecology is talking about: fighting for justice, for equal access toresources and services and for a dignified and meaningful life. Social
movements make visible the dense connections between political andecological issues, take control over the terms of development and create spaces for society outside or beyond capitalist relations.
In these struggles, members of social movements often need to discuss and debate the management of the commons, the organizationof economic activities, the use of public space and the exposure to conditions harmful for human health - all aspects that are discussed under
different themes in this book. Seeing the contributions on gold mining,for example, we see how “uneven geographies” are formed within a
global web of capitalist financial relationships (see 2.2), creating local
dilemmas, conflicts and resistance related to its impacts (see 4.3), as
well as violence and loss of human lives as the mining operations expand against the will of local communities (se3 3.3). At the same time,social movements should not be romanticized as necessarily egalitarian or democratic. The case studies from Mexico, Ethiopia and Bolivia (chapter 3.) show that there can be inter-community enclosure ofcommon property and exploitations along lines of gender, generation or
ethnicity/indigeneity. Political ecologists need to be as attuned to micropolitics and power relations within communities as they are to state
hegemony or corporate rule.
Social movements are not necessarily inspired by counter-hegemonic, egalitarian or emancipatory principles. They too need to consistently confront their internal politics and visions of society while simultaneously pursuing their broader goals. Democracy arises both asa projected objective and an internal issue within movements. Whose
voices will be heard and which type of knowledge will be given validity
are central questions in the struggles for democracy, often taking theform of latent or violent conflicts. The environment (whether natural
or constructed, rural or urban, in the form of material resources or in
the values that are attached to them) occupies a central pace in suchconflicts. Human health and well-being stand in the heart of many suchconflicts, as in Campania’s 15-year long mobilisation against toxic waste (see 4.4), but also the latent tensions and controversies in Malaysia!"#

(see 1.2), with the threat of disease being a central argument against
the spread of bird nests. In similar ways, the case of diarrhoea in Vietnam demonstrates how health becomes a central question of justiceand democracy when discourse about disease prevention evades thespace of public debate and local knowledge (see 4.4).
Some of the methods and tools presented in this book have been
widely deployed by political ecologists to re-politicize issues, mobilize
critical consciousness and strengthen democratic resistance.
Some of the methods and tools• The use of historical records and artefacts, to connect past stories to present struggles.
• Discourse analysis (of media, governmental/legal material, cultural products andother sources), to discover underlying argumentation, values and ideologies and tounderstand the multiple sides of a conflict.
• Close observation and involvement in the activities of (other) civil society organizations, social movements and groups, to gain insights on the inner dynamics andpotentials of building resistance.
• The use of pedagogy in collective organising and bottom-up action.
• The building of connections with other movements in multiple scales for (re-) discovering common goals and lines of action.

These methodological tools, exemplified in the case studies presented, can prove useful when civil society organizations perform theirown investigations, generate new knowledge and provide proof forphenomena that local communities observe to advocate for more justsocio-natures. We hope that the case studies discussed in this book will
be used as examples for building stronger arguments, framing and contextualizing problems, or formulating educational output materials thatwill help civil society actors to strengthen their collective struggles.
In the exploration of historical co-existences, co-formations andco-dependences of social and biophysical systems, political ecology
is characterized by certain theoretical, methodological and politicalcommitments (Perreault et al., 2015). For these commitments to materialize, the actions, resources and experiences of civil society movements and organizations are vitally important. The role of civil society
organizations is paramount in order to bring forth issues that concern
vulnerable communities affected by various types of socio-ecologicaland economic changes. At the same time, the rich empirical researchand ground-up theorization that develops through the work of political!"#ecologists has been strengthening this dialogue and thus the relevanceof academic insights for social action. Political ecology has been exemplary in showing the fictitious division of social and environmental spheres, showing interactions of capital and power in global and local scales
that are often concealed in mainstream (environmental) discourse. We- as in all political ecologists - now need to make findings more “readable” and shape research alongside civil society, building an even more
substantial dialogue.
Connecting the efforts of grassroots, bottom-up initiatives andorganizations that voice the concerns of local populations with thoseof academics who study the significance and interrelatedness of suchphenomena with wider tendencies of global politics and environmental
governance, is pivotal for building a movement of socio-ecologicaltransformation. It becomes increasingly clear that the on-going processes of socio-ecological doing and learning need both militant andacademic aspects. How can we achieve a political ecology that is not
only inspired by, but also part of, civil society? How can our research
be informed not only by the practices but also by the desires of social
movements? Both those aspects could be embodied by individuals, coordinated within organisations and/or attempted among collaborativecollectives. We need to build more alliances, learn from and througheach other’s work, make people’s concerns central research questions,learn to co-produce knowledge with non-academics, learn to keep movements open and evolving, and attempt to involve them in research
projects.
This manual is an attempt to make our research relevant tocivil society and to share the experiences we have had with social movements. Through the wider ENTITLE project, the challengeof contributing to and continuing dialogues between academia and civilsociety is taking a more concrete form. We, as ENTITLE fellows andauthors of this manual, are committed to discuss and explore what new
fields of research and new forms of action can be created throughthis conversation.

!"#

Futher readings
Bookchin, N., et al., 2013. Militant Research Handbook. New York University.
Bryant, R.L., Bailey, S., 1997. Third world political ecology: An Introduction. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Escobar, A., 1998. Whose knowledge, whose nature? Biodiversity, conservation, andthe political ecology of social movements. Journal of Political Ecology. 5, 53–82.
Fundacion Rosa Luxembourg, CENSAT, Radialistas Apasionados y Apasionadas,2013. Alternativas al Desarrollo. La destruccion del planeta no es un destino. Quito.
Gramsci, A., et al., 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci.
Ed. Hoare Q., Nowell Smith G. International Publishers, New York.
Healy, H., et. al., 2013. Ecological economics from the ground up. Routledge.
Kay, J., 2006. Intellectuals and power: A conversation between Michel Foucault andGilles Deleuze. September 9, 2006.
Peet, R., Watts, M., 2004. Liberation ecologies: environment, development and social
movements. Routledge.
Perreault, T., et. al., 2015. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. Routledge.
Scott, J., C., 2008. Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. Yale
university Press.

!""

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