Forests

Where did your roving researcher come across this stark landscape? Rock remaining where trees once stood. Hills stained by sulphur.Soil mostly eroded away. A desolate scene of bare hills surrounding a former mining town.Which country could possibly allow such poor environmental management to continue until this point was reached?

Read the rest of this entry »

Two internship opportunities have been advertised with the IDRC in climate change related areas. The first deals with local benefits from payments for environmental services (PES) and the second with climate change adaptation - see this link for details. The website mentions other internship opportunities in addition to these two.

PNG gossip column, The Drum, reports today:

TALK on “Deforestation and Forest Degradation in PNG’’ coming up in Moresby Friday next week, with Canberra-based expert Colin Filer leading the debate. He’s clashed with avid environmentalists recently, should be an interesting session (Post-Courier 30 July 2008).

Has CF “clashed with avid environmentalists” recently? The most controversial thing I’ve seem him do in the last seven days was to blow for an own goal when reffing girls U14 soccer last Saturday.

On another front, I’ve made the enigmatic discovery that a certain tome called “Filer’s Files” is to be had for US$13.95 from the National UFO Centre. I was certain he didn’t have the free time.

Filer: preferred umpire role	UFO expert?

This is my last in a series of posts from the 12th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. The final session, a roundtable discussion on Authority, Property and Democracy, was facilitated by Ashwini Chatre and included Jesse Ribot, Andy White, Anne Larson, Melissa Leach and Elinor Ostrom as panelists.

Ribot challenged researchers to move on from discussions on the ‘tragedy of the commons’, which he said was a dead horse, to examine and better understand the dynamic, contested nature of the commons within their larger political economy. A few speakers from the floor responded that the ‘tragedy’ is very much alive and well in the minds of policymakers, leading to related policies of ‘enclosure’, and therefore could not be walked away from just yet.

Leach set out two main challenges for researchers in this field. Firstly, she saw a need to shift global and national institutions towards more deliberative and reflective governance where powerholders understand their own subjectivities. Secondly, related to the first point, we need to bring local knowledge and perspectives into debates - not in a glorified sense, but for their substance and to enable social justice. Read the rest of this entry »

Those interested in reslience and commons research may already know of the editorial by Elinor Ostrom in the May 2008 issue of Global Environmental Change. Ostrom’s keynote at the IASC Conference dinner, like this paper, argued for a need to define a set of diagnostic questions and variables to better understand multi-scale social-environmental systems and the problems these are currently facing. The GEC paper maps out a working set of variables in more detail, which her group aims to further develop through interaction with scholars across disciplines.

As someone who tends to work across disciplinary and spatial boundaries I find this a really important contribution, but also wonder how this fits with the more contextualised knowledge that my colleagues are so good at producing. I think we need both, and conversations between.

The high point of the conference dinner though was sharing a drink (or several) with my friend Floriane Clements of University of Newcastle, who had just successfully defended her PhD thesis that afternoon - Ostrom being one of the examiners. Congratulations Floriane!