Recent political ecological studies have also focused on the ways individual and group subjectivities and environmental subjects are produced or not within participatory nature conservation. They have primarily considered institutional arrangements and participatory mechanisms and socioeconomic incentives as regulatory practices that shape environmental subjects and subjectivities (Li 2007; Agrawal 2005). For instance, Agrawal (2005) examines the transformation in environmental subjectivity with the introduction of new participatory forest governance in India. He claims that rural
villagers and leaders who were previously engaged or complicit in forest-related criminal activities changed into the new environmental subject, the subject who acts and thinks and cares about the forest. Agarwal argues that the degree of people’s involvement in regulatory practices such as engagement and participation in monitoring and enforcement shapes environmental subjects and subjectivities. He described the term
"environmentality” and pointed out that the emphasis on institutional arrangements and participation in regulatory rules and practices are central to the analysis of environmental subject formation. Similarly, Li (2007) argues that international conservation and
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development institutions that introduced regulatory rules and promoted the engagement of people in conservation were introduced to produce new environmental subjects. The negative effects of a national park in access to and control of land and resources, and the failure of improvement projects to ensure the welfare of rural people’s lives and
livelihoods generated a political response. The failures were related to the experts’ simplification of local socioeconomic and political realities and their reliance on
technical, non-political solutions. The introduction of participatory projects that followed a previous improvement project in highland Indonesia aimed to reduce the political response and transform the belief and aspirations of local people. In her book, Li (2007) argues that the forest conservation rules were made flexible as a compromise or to accommodate peoples’ challenges. In particular, the rules included flexibility in time and space of resource collection and uses inside the park. The park spaces were divided into different use zones (buffer zone where the activity is allowed) and non-use zones (a wilderness zone). Spatial strategies included the monitoring and enforcement of the park area. That is, the non-use zone was policed and enforced. The conservation project also included participation of local communities in techno-scientific practices such as
mapping the zones and other spatial activities. It also included joint monitoring activities and education programs.
Disciplinary practices of institutions or authorities are, however, not totalizing in their effect. Not all populations are disciplined or become subject to discursive practices and regulatory rules. That is, the practices differentially impact the heterogeneous people situated in diverse spaces and times. However, contrary to many political ecological findings of the importance of identities and agencies of people, Agrawal (2005) puts less
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emphasis on the role of preexisting subject categories such as gender, caste, or ethnicity as the primary mechanism of the changed beliefs and thoughts. Many scholars have documented the role of preexisting identities and the ways they shape subjectivities in general. For instance, Nightingale (2011) shows the ways preexisting multiple social identities—intersectionality—(re)produce social difference, hierarchy, and subjectivities. She highlights the embodied performance of difference (movement of bodies, work practices), agro-forestry practice (forest harvesting, agricultural work), food
consumption, and ritual practices, and the ways these social practices are manifested in material spaces (Nightingale 2012). These everyday embodied symbolic performances and spatial practices shape subjectivities and hierarchy. Similarly, Birkenholtz (2009) documented the ways preexisting identities such as caste, class, and ethnicity and political, economic contexts shape environmental subjectivities in decentralized groundwater governance in India. Also, Nightingale pointed out the dynamic nature of subjectivities and the ways subjectivities change according to the changing context and power relations (Nightingale 2011a, 2011b).
Describing the role of socioeconomic and political contexts and social power relations, scholars have also enriched the concept of environmentality in particular and post-structural understandings of subject formation in general. Scholars have shown how regulatory norms and social and political-economic contexts and social power relations shape the formation of subjects and subjectivities (Nightingale 2011; Brikenholtz 2009). Robbins and Sharpe (2003) studied subject formation in the residential yard of the United States. They examine the formation of a "lawn people," the people who use chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides in their residential yards, despite the knowledge of
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its harmful effects. They argue that the increasing use of pesticides is related to
socioeconomic and cultural contexts at multiple scales, beginning with the restructuring of the chemical industry and new marketing strategies by the lawn chemical industry at the global scale. Second, increasing lawn inputs are related to residential class structure and the identity of the community. Lawn maintenance has become the symbol of pride, status and class identity and a symbol of family values. It reflects the authentic
experiences of community, family, and connection to nature. Third, they argue that the growth of the moral economy of lawn management expands the growth of harmful chemical use. The formation of community and fear of alienation from community and family intensified local demand. Lawn management has become an activity or practice to maintain positive neighborhood cohesion, playing a role in the production of community.
Other scholars have looked at the ways spatial strategies—territorialization— plays a role in the production of a new subject. As territorialization practices produce new spaces with the demarcation of fixed boundaries and the maintenance of boundaries by authorities through regular monitoring and enforcement of rules, such practices control people and resources inside and outside the boundary. Authorities monitor and regulate people’s movements, activities, and practices within the boundary. Besides, authorities teach or educate people about things and practices allowed and restricted within the boundary. Furthermore, signposts or any communication tools are used to communicate rules and policies. Authorities also record people’s behavior related to boundary crossing. Fines and punishment are used as enforcement of rules. Neumann (2001), for instance, looked at the Selous Conservation Program carried out by the state and non-state organizations at the community wildlife management area of Tanzania. The
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GTZ – Germany's bilateral organization—started integrated conservation and
development activities in the buffer zone of the game reserve. The key intervention was the partitioning of land through surveying and titling, which facilitated the monitoring and surveillance of local people in the wildlife management area and the game reserve. Game scouts were appointed and provided with training in monitoring and surveillance. Thus he argues that the failure of conservation agencies (central government and non- state) to control illegal hunting and poaching of wild animals through violence and the non-cooperation of local communities in sharing information about illegal activities was surmounted through the design of more-subtle ways of self-surveillance by communities at the village level. This was achieved when the people entering the spatial demarcation of the village wildlife management area had to be conscious of the presence of game scouts and their presence inside the management area. Thus, he claims that the buffer zone plan serves as the "disciplinary mechanism to create a different kind of peasant consciousness toward wildlife based on a schema of generalized surveillance" (Neumann 1979,209). Highlighting more discursive aspects associated with the concept of the “internal territorialization,” Peluso and Vandergeest (2001) examine genealogies of "political forests." This particular idea of state forest illustrates the constructed nature or political nature of a forest. They argue that these political forests, associated with colonial forest practices including "scientific forestry" and "customary forests" are particular discourses of land declared as forest, which had played a role in colonial state-making, and in the constitution of racialized landscapes and distinct subjects. They further claim that "the ways colonial governments resolved the question of native or "minority" rights to land and forest resources contributed to the creation of people (as "natives, "Foreign
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Orientals, " "primitives, " or "minorities") and frequently territorialized these identities as well as patterns of resource access" (2001, 800). These all served to extend colonial power and territorial control, helped in transforming landscapes and property relations and played a role in the constitution of new subject categories
In a similar fashion, Ybarra (2012) examines a territorial project and the ways it produces non-environmental subjects. The military counterinsurgency campaigns, which aligned with conservation practices, is a spatial strategy to control the jungle and people. It used spatial strategies of dividing and delineating the jungle into nature and agriculture and enforcing the boundary. They represented the jungle, which was a base of guerrilla fighters, as “wild and savage" and a "guerilla haven," utilizing a binary representation of society as safe civilization and nature as a dangerous jungle full of narco-peasants. Also, she writes most of the military from the east saw Petans as "an unhealthy place populated by dangerous Indians," and the Maya indigenous people were looked at like suspect citizens. The discourse of space (ungovernable), people (narco-peasants) and forest condition (crisis narrative) by foreigners and local elite helped to produce territorial projects to save the place and save the forest from migrants and displaced people. Consequently, the conservation projects, similar to military practice, celebrated the identity of some "traditional indigenous" groups as forest conservationists and sustainable and immigrants as destructive and reproduced racialized landscape and identities shaping access to and eviction from the territory.
Ojeda (2012) examines the ecotourism project around Tayrano National Park in Colombia. She argues that people living and working in Tayrano National Park who opposed neoliberal goals were considered not-green-enough subjects and considered as
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bodies out of place – the eco-threats. Social and spatial demarcation and representation of people and practices play a role in criminalization. For instance, Colons peasants and fisherman living and working inside Tayrano National Park were considered invaders, illegal occupants, and environmental destroyers. Conservationist and development organizations represented fishermen’s practices as improper environmental behavior because of a lack of consciousness with respect to coral reefs and fish shortages and represented the men as para-militaries and narco allies, not as real fishermen. These organizations also represented peasants as coca growers and coca pickers and framed their illicit crops as the cause of forest depletion. On the other hand, other Colons peasants living in the buffer zone of Tayrano National Park were represented as eco- guardians. This was because they participated in a tourist lodge project, which was a combination of conservation, illicit crop eradication, community building and ecotourism development. They not only learned to conduct touristic businesses but committed
themselves to maintaining conservation and tourism development by starting sustainable economic activities such as beekeeping, organic farming and other “green” projects. They complied to be transformed from coca growers and pickers to tourist hosts and became green peasants, neoliberal entrepreneurial subjects involved in the
commodification of nature through ecotourism business practice. She claims that the representation of some people and practices as eco-guardians and others as eco-threats have produced distinct environmental and non-environmental subjects, tourist spaces such as beaches and buffer zones to further the neoliberal goals of capital accumulation, and tourism promotion.
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