Rebecca Rutt | University of Copenhagen (original) (raw)

Papers by Rebecca Rutt

The Green City and Social Injustice

Journal of Political Ecology

Timber legality trade restrictions and verification are a bundle of contemporary mechanisms trigg... more Timber legality trade restrictions and verification are a bundle of contemporary mechanisms triggered by global concerns about forest degradation and deforestation. The European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade initiative is a significant effort to not only screen out illegal timber and wood products from the EU, but also support trading partner countries to improve their legality definitions and verification processes. But by using bilateral agreements (Voluntary Partnership Agreements) as a key mechanism, the EU legitimizes trade partner nation-states as the authority to decide what is legal. We engage in a theoretical debate about the complexities of the meaning of legality, and then analyze empirical data collected from interviews in Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam and Europe with policy, civil society and industry actors to understand how different actors understand legality. We find hegemonic notions of Westphalian statehood at the core of 'global' notions ...

Journal of Political Ecology

In this article I explore how the possibilities for commoning and conviviality through small-scal... more In this article I explore how the possibilities for commoning and conviviality through small-scale urban farming initiatives intertwine with neoliberal trends. I do this by recounting the trajectory of a small rooftop garden in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. Drawing on ethnographic research in and around this garden, I show how such communal, anti-capitalist, eco-social endeavors are thoroughly entangled in the city's neoliberal turn over recent decades. Various manifestations of neoliberalism, ranging from formalization processes to austerity pressures, articulate with convivial urban farming initiatives in contradictory and recursive relationships that both nurture and endanger these local initiatives. I describe for example how formalization engenders legitimacy but also homogenization and how green initiatives are celebrated while undermined by austerity measures. This happens within a broader context of neoliberal labor, food systems, and housing policies and politics tha...

Forest Policy and Economics, 2014

by Anna Saave, Barbara Muraca, Corinna Dengler, Dominique Just, Emily Rose McDonald, Evie Kouroumichaki, Janina Dannenberg, Leah Temper, Lina Hansen, Lindsay Barbieri, Manuela Zechner, Natalia - Rozalia Avlona, Rebecca Rutt, Sophie Sanniti, Stefania Barca, and Susan Paulson

Degrowth.info , 2020

The crisis we face as a global community must be understood not only as a public health crisis, o... more The crisis we face as a global community must be understood not only as a public health crisis, or as an economic crisis of the capitalist mode of production, but also, fundamentally, as a crisis of the reproduction of life. In this sense, it is a crisis of care: the work of caring for humans, non-humans, and the shared biosphere. As a group of activists and scholars from the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance, we take this opportunity to reflect on how we can, from our diverse positions, face this moment, organize, and collectively imagine radical alternative modes of living: those with more time for community, relationship building, and care for each other as well as the non-human world.

People, Place and Policy, 2018

This paper interrogates the evolution of struggles over a park in Copenhagen, Denmark. This evolu... more This paper interrogates the evolution of struggles over a park in Copenhagen, Denmark. This evolution is situated between local residents' efforts to obtain socio-environmental justice, and attempts to manage the space by municipal authorities for different agendas. Analytically bringing the concepts of environmental justice and urban managerialism into focus and drawing from lessons and stories of the past, we show how managerial practices and justice struggles evolve iteratively over time. We document how the beginnings of Folkets Park (the People's Park) in the late 1970s were characterized by struggles over distributional justice between economically marginalized residents and urban managers. The conflicts changed to contestation over procedural and interactive justice, due to the formalization of the park and expanding struggles for recognition and claims to the space by a diversifying population. Trends of decentralization to municipal levels and greater inclusivity have also taken root, maintaining urban managers as distributors of justice. Yet, we demonstrate that urban managers do not act in isolation. Local activists are an important force in urban development, producing an iterative evolution of strategies of management and justice struggles in this neighbourhood. Urban managerialism in Copenhagen, including the more contemporary efforts at inclusion, is also (re)shaped, inhibited, and co-opted by the larger context of increasingly neoliberal and socially divisive political agendas. By examining this micro-cosmos of a contested urban park, we show that urban planning and development is an inherently political and contested practice, and argue for urban managers to continuously seek inspiration from local activism in the pursuit of just cities of today and tomorrow.

Environmental Science and Policy , 2018

There has been recent debate around the role of 'fads' in global conservation measures, and the l... more There has been recent debate around the role of 'fads' in global conservation measures, and the lessons they hold for achieving desired conservation and development outcomes. Fads are characterized by initially widespread enthusiasm and major mobilization of resources followed by abandonment in favor of the next fad. Debate centers less on whether such fads exist, but rather on whether they represent opportunities for incremental policy learning, or are symptomatic of the more systemic failure of a market-based conservation agenda and the reinforcement of existing power inequalities. The European Union (EU)'s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan aims to prevent the trade of illegal timber among the EU and its trading partners especially in the 'Global South'. Fifteen years since launching the Action Plan, we ask whether the processes and outcomes of FLEGT, and specifically the Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs), resonate with the dynamics observed in other processes dubbed 'fads' within conservation and development arenas, and if so, what we can learn from this. Drawing from interviews, grey literature, and scholarship, we examine FLEGT VPAs as following three key stages of a fad: (1) there is initial enthusiasm by a wide range of actors for FLEGT as something 'new' or groundbreaking , (2) discrepancies and disagreements emerge about its end goals, i.e. whether it's core purpose is to distinguish legal from illegal wood in the EU marketplace, or to achieve deeper governance reforms; while the means for achieving those goals borrow heavily from previous market-based initiatives (3) actors and champions become fatigued, yet at the same time frame elements of their own involvement as a 'success'. Identifying these fad-like characteristics calls into question the 'newness' of FLEGT, by uncovering its many similarities to other market-based measures such as certification that exacerbate inequalities. Hence, branding FLEGT a success without challenging its role in the unequal concentration of power and resources, is likely to further entrench these inequalities in subsequent conservation fads, while a focus on incremental learning misses the larger failures and injustices of market-based approaches and can reinforce their re-emergence.

Urban Forestry & Urban Greening , 2016

In this short communication, we discuss European urban green space (UGS) research from an environ... more In this short communication, we discuss European urban green space (UGS) research from an environmental justice perspective. We show that European UGS scholarship primarily focuses on functional values and managerial aspects of UGS, while paying less attention to equity in the enjoyment of and decision-making around UGS. On this basis we discuss potentials for European urban green space research to take up a more explicit environmental justice framing to shed much-needed light on injustices in European cities and inspire change in policy and practice.

Environmental Justice, 2017

There is widespread acknowledgment of the crisis nature and injustices around water quality and a... more There is widespread acknowledgment of the crisis nature and injustices around water quality and access in Flint since mid-2014. This crisis led to different forms of grassroots activism demanding political accountability , transparency, and redress. However, residents' experiences and their needs and demands in response to the crisis have been largely ignored. This article explores the mechanisms of suppression at work in obscuring these needs and demands. Specifically, it sheds light on the role of the public sector, the media, and the academic institutions in reproducing these mechanisms of suppression. The article situates the struggles over political accountability within the neoliberalization of public administration and government through emergency management. Capital accumulation can continue and intensifies, whereas emergency management further contributes to suppressing public dissent in the times of crisis via the erosion of political accountability. By illuminating institutionalized mechanisms of suppression of residents' needs and demands, we argue that the Flint water crisis should also be seen as a crisis of government, journalism, and academia.

Public Administration and Development, 2014

Human Ecology, 2014

ABSTRACT REDD+is a mitigation measure against global climate change that offers payments to devel... more ABSTRACT REDD+is a mitigation measure against global climate change that offers payments to developing countries based on the increased volume of forest carbon. It has been argued that affirmative measures should be adopted to ensure that communities, particularly the socially disadvantaged groups among them, receive payments not only to address inequities but also for resource conservation. Drawing on a case study of a NORAD pilot project in Nepal, this paper investigates how affirmative measures adopted under the project affect different social actors and their perceptions and behaviors in relation to forests. Our case highlights the risk that the mere application of affirmative measures may give rise to difficult social and environmental tensions. Thus, this paper calls for such measures to effectively incorporate local perspectives in their designs and to be reflective, by allowing for regular monitoring of impacts and modifications of the measures if adverse effects are detected.

Forest Policy and Economics, 2014

Forest Policy and Economics, 2014

ABSTRACT Technical forest management plans have become a precondition for transferring authority ... more ABSTRACT Technical forest management plans have become a precondition for transferring authority to local institutions in processes of participatory forest management. The plans are intended to safeguard environmental values and are justified by their relevance in daily forest management. To serve these functions, the plans must be informed by accurate information about the forest and be actively used by local communities. Based on studies in Nepal, this paper seeks to further our understanding of the role of so-called scientific planning in community-level management through time series analyses of remote sensing images, detailed forest inventories and interviews with community forest managers and public forest authorities. Results indicate that technical forest management plans have been elaborated haphazardly and that local communities base their management on other sources of knowledge. Further, community-level managers appear well-informed about forest condition and their practices contribute to sustainable forest development. We suggest the need to further scrutinize the regime of scientific management planning as its practical relevance appears questionable.

The Green City and Social Injustice

Journal of Political Ecology

Timber legality trade restrictions and verification are a bundle of contemporary mechanisms trigg... more Timber legality trade restrictions and verification are a bundle of contemporary mechanisms triggered by global concerns about forest degradation and deforestation. The European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade initiative is a significant effort to not only screen out illegal timber and wood products from the EU, but also support trading partner countries to improve their legality definitions and verification processes. But by using bilateral agreements (Voluntary Partnership Agreements) as a key mechanism, the EU legitimizes trade partner nation-states as the authority to decide what is legal. We engage in a theoretical debate about the complexities of the meaning of legality, and then analyze empirical data collected from interviews in Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam and Europe with policy, civil society and industry actors to understand how different actors understand legality. We find hegemonic notions of Westphalian statehood at the core of 'global' notions ...

Journal of Political Ecology

In this article I explore how the possibilities for commoning and conviviality through small-scal... more In this article I explore how the possibilities for commoning and conviviality through small-scale urban farming initiatives intertwine with neoliberal trends. I do this by recounting the trajectory of a small rooftop garden in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. Drawing on ethnographic research in and around this garden, I show how such communal, anti-capitalist, eco-social endeavors are thoroughly entangled in the city's neoliberal turn over recent decades. Various manifestations of neoliberalism, ranging from formalization processes to austerity pressures, articulate with convivial urban farming initiatives in contradictory and recursive relationships that both nurture and endanger these local initiatives. I describe for example how formalization engenders legitimacy but also homogenization and how green initiatives are celebrated while undermined by austerity measures. This happens within a broader context of neoliberal labor, food systems, and housing policies and politics tha...

Forest Policy and Economics, 2014

by Anna Saave, Barbara Muraca, Corinna Dengler, Dominique Just, Emily Rose McDonald, Evie Kouroumichaki, Janina Dannenberg, Leah Temper, Lina Hansen, Lindsay Barbieri, Manuela Zechner, Natalia - Rozalia Avlona, Rebecca Rutt, Sophie Sanniti, Stefania Barca, and Susan Paulson

Degrowth.info , 2020

The crisis we face as a global community must be understood not only as a public health crisis, o... more The crisis we face as a global community must be understood not only as a public health crisis, or as an economic crisis of the capitalist mode of production, but also, fundamentally, as a crisis of the reproduction of life. In this sense, it is a crisis of care: the work of caring for humans, non-humans, and the shared biosphere. As a group of activists and scholars from the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance, we take this opportunity to reflect on how we can, from our diverse positions, face this moment, organize, and collectively imagine radical alternative modes of living: those with more time for community, relationship building, and care for each other as well as the non-human world.

People, Place and Policy, 2018

This paper interrogates the evolution of struggles over a park in Copenhagen, Denmark. This evolu... more This paper interrogates the evolution of struggles over a park in Copenhagen, Denmark. This evolution is situated between local residents' efforts to obtain socio-environmental justice, and attempts to manage the space by municipal authorities for different agendas. Analytically bringing the concepts of environmental justice and urban managerialism into focus and drawing from lessons and stories of the past, we show how managerial practices and justice struggles evolve iteratively over time. We document how the beginnings of Folkets Park (the People's Park) in the late 1970s were characterized by struggles over distributional justice between economically marginalized residents and urban managers. The conflicts changed to contestation over procedural and interactive justice, due to the formalization of the park and expanding struggles for recognition and claims to the space by a diversifying population. Trends of decentralization to municipal levels and greater inclusivity have also taken root, maintaining urban managers as distributors of justice. Yet, we demonstrate that urban managers do not act in isolation. Local activists are an important force in urban development, producing an iterative evolution of strategies of management and justice struggles in this neighbourhood. Urban managerialism in Copenhagen, including the more contemporary efforts at inclusion, is also (re)shaped, inhibited, and co-opted by the larger context of increasingly neoliberal and socially divisive political agendas. By examining this micro-cosmos of a contested urban park, we show that urban planning and development is an inherently political and contested practice, and argue for urban managers to continuously seek inspiration from local activism in the pursuit of just cities of today and tomorrow.

Environmental Science and Policy , 2018

There has been recent debate around the role of 'fads' in global conservation measures, and the l... more There has been recent debate around the role of 'fads' in global conservation measures, and the lessons they hold for achieving desired conservation and development outcomes. Fads are characterized by initially widespread enthusiasm and major mobilization of resources followed by abandonment in favor of the next fad. Debate centers less on whether such fads exist, but rather on whether they represent opportunities for incremental policy learning, or are symptomatic of the more systemic failure of a market-based conservation agenda and the reinforcement of existing power inequalities. The European Union (EU)'s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan aims to prevent the trade of illegal timber among the EU and its trading partners especially in the 'Global South'. Fifteen years since launching the Action Plan, we ask whether the processes and outcomes of FLEGT, and specifically the Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs), resonate with the dynamics observed in other processes dubbed 'fads' within conservation and development arenas, and if so, what we can learn from this. Drawing from interviews, grey literature, and scholarship, we examine FLEGT VPAs as following three key stages of a fad: (1) there is initial enthusiasm by a wide range of actors for FLEGT as something 'new' or groundbreaking , (2) discrepancies and disagreements emerge about its end goals, i.e. whether it's core purpose is to distinguish legal from illegal wood in the EU marketplace, or to achieve deeper governance reforms; while the means for achieving those goals borrow heavily from previous market-based initiatives (3) actors and champions become fatigued, yet at the same time frame elements of their own involvement as a 'success'. Identifying these fad-like characteristics calls into question the 'newness' of FLEGT, by uncovering its many similarities to other market-based measures such as certification that exacerbate inequalities. Hence, branding FLEGT a success without challenging its role in the unequal concentration of power and resources, is likely to further entrench these inequalities in subsequent conservation fads, while a focus on incremental learning misses the larger failures and injustices of market-based approaches and can reinforce their re-emergence.

Urban Forestry & Urban Greening , 2016

In this short communication, we discuss European urban green space (UGS) research from an environ... more In this short communication, we discuss European urban green space (UGS) research from an environmental justice perspective. We show that European UGS scholarship primarily focuses on functional values and managerial aspects of UGS, while paying less attention to equity in the enjoyment of and decision-making around UGS. On this basis we discuss potentials for European urban green space research to take up a more explicit environmental justice framing to shed much-needed light on injustices in European cities and inspire change in policy and practice.

Environmental Justice, 2017

There is widespread acknowledgment of the crisis nature and injustices around water quality and a... more There is widespread acknowledgment of the crisis nature and injustices around water quality and access in Flint since mid-2014. This crisis led to different forms of grassroots activism demanding political accountability , transparency, and redress. However, residents' experiences and their needs and demands in response to the crisis have been largely ignored. This article explores the mechanisms of suppression at work in obscuring these needs and demands. Specifically, it sheds light on the role of the public sector, the media, and the academic institutions in reproducing these mechanisms of suppression. The article situates the struggles over political accountability within the neoliberalization of public administration and government through emergency management. Capital accumulation can continue and intensifies, whereas emergency management further contributes to suppressing public dissent in the times of crisis via the erosion of political accountability. By illuminating institutionalized mechanisms of suppression of residents' needs and demands, we argue that the Flint water crisis should also be seen as a crisis of government, journalism, and academia.

Public Administration and Development, 2014

Human Ecology, 2014

ABSTRACT REDD+is a mitigation measure against global climate change that offers payments to devel... more ABSTRACT REDD+is a mitigation measure against global climate change that offers payments to developing countries based on the increased volume of forest carbon. It has been argued that affirmative measures should be adopted to ensure that communities, particularly the socially disadvantaged groups among them, receive payments not only to address inequities but also for resource conservation. Drawing on a case study of a NORAD pilot project in Nepal, this paper investigates how affirmative measures adopted under the project affect different social actors and their perceptions and behaviors in relation to forests. Our case highlights the risk that the mere application of affirmative measures may give rise to difficult social and environmental tensions. Thus, this paper calls for such measures to effectively incorporate local perspectives in their designs and to be reflective, by allowing for regular monitoring of impacts and modifications of the measures if adverse effects are detected.

Forest Policy and Economics, 2014

Forest Policy and Economics, 2014

ABSTRACT Technical forest management plans have become a precondition for transferring authority ... more ABSTRACT Technical forest management plans have become a precondition for transferring authority to local institutions in processes of participatory forest management. The plans are intended to safeguard environmental values and are justified by their relevance in daily forest management. To serve these functions, the plans must be informed by accurate information about the forest and be actively used by local communities. Based on studies in Nepal, this paper seeks to further our understanding of the role of so-called scientific planning in community-level management through time series analyses of remote sensing images, detailed forest inventories and interviews with community forest managers and public forest authorities. Results indicate that technical forest management plans have been elaborated haphazardly and that local communities base their management on other sources of knowledge. Further, community-level managers appear well-informed about forest condition and their practices contribute to sustainable forest development. We suggest the need to further scrutinize the regime of scientific management planning as its practical relevance appears questionable.