Environmental Policy, Legislation and Construction of Social Nature (original) (raw)
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Social rights and natural resources
International Handbook on Social Policy and the Environment
Introduction: Genesis vs. Gaia This chapter considers the competing ways in which human beings socially construct their claims upon natural resources. The axis around which conventional thinking tends to revolve is a distinction between anthropocentrism on the one hand and eco-centrism on the other. The former entails a set of assumptions about the primacy of humanity over Nature: assumptions that are challenged by the latter. The foundations of anthropocentrism run deep. The Biblical account of the Earth's creation conceptualises the Earth as an environment created for humanity: a world created for a free-willed species supposedly made in the creator's image. The Genesis narrative has not only informed the major religions of the world, but its allegorical potential has resonated with Western Enlightenment thinking, insinuating itself into the conceptual ethos and cultural norms of believers and non-believers alike. The challenge to this orthodoxy has equally ancient roots in Greek mythology, which on the one hand warns humanity against the hubris of Prometheus, who stole fire from the Gods to give to mere mortals, while on the other celebrating Gaia, the primordial Earth Mother, whose name has been appropriated by a contemporary hypothesis that the Earth as a self-sustaining organism will defend itself against the reckless encroachments of mortal humanity. The Genesis narrative gives humanity licence to take from Nature. The Gaia hypothesis commands that humanity must live in harmony with Nature-or not at all. This is, if not a false dichotomy (Cockburn, 2010), a tired and oversimplified characterisation of a complex morass of ideas that this chapter will try in part to unravel. It will begin by recounting an earlier discussion concerning competing ecological discourses, before turning to a related discussion of competing approaches to human needs and social rights. It will attempt a synthesis between these two discussions and suggest the basis upon which social rights claims in relation to natural resources might in future be negotiated. It will conclude by reexamining the relevance to that negotiation of Marx's concept of stoffveschel, suggesting that it offers the possibility of a decisive break from the Genesis vs. Gaia dichotomy and an alternative understanding of social rights and natural resources. Ecological discourses In a previous article I attempted to model the different ways in which 'green citizenship' might be conceptualised (Dean, 2001) and suggested that prevailing discourse draws upon analytically distinctive ecological moral repertoires that may be defined not so much in relation to the Genesis vs. Gaia dichotomy, as a twofold distinction reflecting
Environment and Human Rights: An Introductory Essay and Essential Readings
2006
This essay provides glimpses of the erosion of environmental human rights, and their revival and protection, in different sectors and sections of Indian society. It starts with a conceptual background to the issue, followed by the constitutional, legal, and historical context of the value of natural resources in human rights terms. The following chapters are arranged according to major ecosystems; this is because community livelihoods and cultures are predominantly organised according to the ecosystems and resources they depend on. These are succeeded by chapters that focus on the conflicts between dominant forms of 'development' and environmental rights. Finally, a detailed chapter goes into the actual and potential alternatives being adopted by various communities, such as the need to move towards an integration of deep ecological sensitivity and human values, rights and responsibilities - to inform our choice of human welfare and development strategies, and of economic and technological systems. Decentralised decision-making, access to information, respect for community-based and individual knowledge, recognition of the rights of other species, searching for local solutions to local problems, and educational systems that build ecological and human sensitivity, are some of the major elements of a sustainable future, which are discussed.
The Forest Rights Act: The Political Economy of "Environmental" Questions
Economic and Political Weekly, 2017
The Forest Rights Act represented a historic step forward for forest management in India, and it is often hailed as such. However, it did not emerge from struggles for the control over forests alone, but was a product of an ongoing intersection between political conflict, features of Indian capitalism, and the conceptions of “environment” and “development” in India’s political discourse. In that sense, it is not only an “environmental” legislation, but an economic and social one, and one that belongs to a particular political conjuncture, representing both its limitations, and more importantly, its liberatory possibilities. This paper looks at the FRA in this context and explores how it grew out of this kind of politics, being marked both by the constraints of this period, and by the spaces it created for genuinely new conceptions and processes of development.
The Politics of Rights-based Approaches in Conservation (Land Use Policy, 2013)
Scholars and advocates increasingly favor rights-based approaches over traditional exclusionary policies in conservation. Yet, national and international conservation policies and programs have often led to the exclusion of forest-dependent peoples. This article proposes and tests the hypothesis that the failures of rights-based approaches in conservation can be attributed in significant measure to the political economic interest of the state in the tropics. To this end, the article presents findings from the empirical analysis of the Forest Rights Act of 2006 in India. Two key recommendations emerge from this analysis. One, the proposals for operationalizing rights-based approaches will likely be far more effective if they protect the inalienability of a minimal set of rights critical to the subsistence and well-being of forest people, as opposed to promising the protection of an expansive set of rights subject to the instrumentality of conservation. Two, the proponents of rights-based approaches in conservation need to guard against their actions reinforcing the institutional status quo of the state control of forests. This, in turn, requires international conservation groups to join hands with national forest rights movements. Full text is available here http://tiny.cc/i8df9w
A Critique of India's Environmental Laws Amendment Bill, 2015, submitted to Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change