Environment and development

Course syllabus — undergraduate seminar
Taught at Barnard College as Anthropology 3973 in 2009

Course Description:

Recent work has highlighted the interconnectedness of environmental issues and economic development. This has been in terms of using economic development to meet environmental goals, recognizing the role of development in creating or exacerbating environmental problems, managing resources through sustainable use, and encouraging development which is sensitive to environmental impacts through sustainable development initiatives. This course will explore the ways that environmental issues and development have become enmeshed through these kinds of efforts. Through this process, we will investigate how the relationship between environment and economics has been conceptualized, what this means for environmental issues like conservation and climate change, and the kinds of solutions proposed.

This course examines how economic development and environmental conservation have become different means for valuing nature and natural resources. Both of these have sometimes altered and sometimes reinforced inequalities across local, national, and international scales. In this course, students will be asked to think critically about the relationships between global commodities, natural resource management, development organizations, and local ideas about these.

Course Structure and Requirements: There are four categories of obligation in this course

Active participation (15% of total grade): Students are expected to participate in discussions each day by having read all assigned readings for that day, and preparing one or two questions to stimulate discussion about one or more of the readings. Students should be prepared to ask this question during class.

Discussion Leading (15%): Each student will work with one other student in leading one class discussion during the semester.  This will include a brief summary of each reading (no more than 5 minutes), and a discussion of how the readings fit with previous readings (no more than 5 minutes).

Reaction Papers (30% total): Students will write two reactions to assigned readings of no less than three pages. These will be critical, well argued, articulate and clearly written – these will not be summaries of the readings. The topics will be assigned in weeks 3 and 7. They are to be handed in via e-mail as text attachments (.doc, .rtf, .txt) on the Friday before class on weeks 5 and 9, respectively.

Book Review (40%): This will be a thoroughly polished and well-formatted work.  You will choose a topic and then one book to analyze in terms of that topic. Students will need to integrate assigned class readings into the review.  Minimum length: 1000 words. This style of critical comparative book review will be discussed in class. Reviews are due on December 14.

**Please submit assignments on time – no late papers will be accepted in this course. It is your responsibility to keep track of deadlines.  All written assignments should be typed in standard fonts (12 point Times, Palatino, or Arial are recommended) with 1 inch margins.  Please paginate papers and put your name on each page.  Please follow the citation/bibliographic format used in American Anthropologist or American Ethnologist.

Paper and the environment: Printing uses up valuable resources, and as an environmentalist, I encourage you to print as little as possible. I ask you to email me assignments; you will receive my comments by email as well. As for readings, I hope you will either:

  1. Read them in digital form,
  2. Print on both sides of the paper, or use the back of waste paper, and/or
  3. Print two pages per sheet (if you can read this).

Readings: Readings are drawn from a range of sources and represent a variety of approaches within anthropology. Readings are due on the day they are listed on the syllabus. Close reading of the required texts is mandatory, as is attendance at lectures that will introduce additional material and help to integrate the readings.  All of the readings listed on the syllabus are required readings unless noted.

Course readings are on Courseworks.  Required Books:

  • Croll, Elisabeth and Parkin, David. 1992. Bush Base: Forest Farm. Routledege. (ebook available on CLIO) (not available at courseworks because of publisher problem)
  • Walley, Christine. 2004. Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an  East African Marine Park. Princeton University Press.
  • Vivanco, Luis. 2006. Green Encounters: Shaping And Contesting Environmentalism in Rural Costa Rica. Berghahn Books
  • Agrawal, Arun. 2005.  Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Duke University Press.
  • Haenn, Nora. 2005. Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent: Culture, Conservation, and the State in Mexico.  Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Part I: FOUNDATIONS

September 14: Course Introduction: Defining development, defining nature

  • Croll and Parkin 1992. Bush Base: Forest Farm.  Chapters 1-7.

 September 21: Anthropological foundations of development

  • Escobar, A. 1992.  Ch 2 The problematization of poverty, and Ch 3 The space of development. In Encountering Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Ferguson, James and Lohmann, Larry. 1994 The anti-politics machine: ‘development’ and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. The Ecologist, vol.  24(5): 176-181.
  • Recommended: other chapters of Encountering Development (eBook in library), Ferguson, James, Anti-politics machine

PART II: COMBINATIONS

September 28: Combining conservation and development 1: ICDPs

  • Walley, Christine. 2004. Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park. Princeton University Press.

October 5: Combining conservation and development 2: Sustainable development

  • Silva, Eduardo. 1994. “Thinking politically about sustainable development in the tropical forests of Latin America.” Development and Change 25:697-721.
  • Peterson, Tarla Rai. 1997. Sharing the earth: the rhetoric of sustainable development. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Chapters 2, 5, and 6.

October 12: Combining conservation and development 3: Ecotourism

  • Vivanco, Luis. 2006. Green Encounters: Shaping And Contesting Environmentalism in Rural Costa Rica. Berghahn Books

Reading assignment 1 due Friday, October 16.

PART III: COMPLICATIONS: Markets and the state

 October 19: Capitalizing nature

  •  Kathleen Mac Afee. Selling Nature to Save it? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17: 133 (1999).
  • Ferry, E. 2002. Inalienable Commodities: The Production and Circulation of Silver and Patrimony in a Mexican Mining Cooperative. Cultural Anthropology, 17 (3): 331-358.

October 26: Commodity chains

  • Lowe, Celia.  2000.  “Global Markets, Local Injustice in Southeast Asia Seas: The Live Fish Trade and Local Fishers in the Togean Islands of Sulawesi,” in People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Nature Conservation, ed. Charles Zermer.  New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Theodore C. Bestor, 2001. Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City American Anthropologist, Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 76-95.

November 2: HOLIDAY

November 9: Global goods and consumption

  • Wilk, R. 2006. “The Ecology of Global Consumer Culture.” In The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader. N. Haenn and R.R. Wilk, eds. Pp. 418-429. New York: New York University Press.
  • Campbell, Lisa M. 2007. Local Conservation Practice and Global Discourse: A political ecology of sea turtle conservation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 97(2): 313-334.
  • Heyman, J. 2002. The Political Ecology of Consumption. In Political Ecology across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups. Edited by S. Paulson and L. Gezon. Pp. 113-134. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

November 16: Development, environment, and the state

  • Agrawal, Arun. 2005.  Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Duke University Press. All but chapters 3 and 5.

Reading assignment 2 due Friday, November 20

November 23: International NGOs

  • Weisgrau, Maxine K. 1997 Interpreting Development: Local Histories, Local Strategies. Chapters 4 and 5. New York: University Press of America.
  • Chernela, , Janet. 2005. The Politics of Mediation: Local-Global Interactions in the Central Amazon of Brazil. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 107, No. 4, pp. 620-631.

PART IV: ACTIONS: Individuals within these

November 30:  Agency

  • Everett, Margaret. 1997. Ghost in the Machine: Agency in poststructural critiques of dev. Anth Quart. Vol. 70, No. 3 pp. 137-151
  • Li, Tania. 2002. Local Histories, Global Markets: Cocoa and Class in Upland Sulawesi. Development and Change 33(3):415-437.
  • Dove, M. R., A.S. Mathews, K. Maxwell, J. Padwe, A. Rademacher. 2008. The Concept of Human Agency in Contemporary Conservation and Development Discourse. Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology. B. J. M. Bradley B. Walters, Paige West, and Susan Lees, eds. Walnut Creek (CA), Altamira Press.

December 7: Living environmental management

  • Haenn, Nora. 2005. Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent: Culture, Conservation, and the State in Mexico.  Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

December 14: Course wrap-up and book review presentations