Dear all, Please consider submitting an abstract, or forward to those who might be interested. Thanks, Stefano
CfP for the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting April 10 - 14, 2018, New Orleans Complexity Galore: Multi-stakeholder Sustainability Initiatives confronting Uneven Environmental Degradation in the Global South Organizers: Stefano Ponte, Copenhagen Business School Opportuna Kweka, University of Dar es Salaam Bram Büscher, Wageningen University Sponsored by Cultural and Political Ecology, Development Geographies and Economic Geography Specialty Groups Anyone interested in participating in the session should send an abstract conforming to the AAG guidelines (http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers/abstract_guidelines) by October 15, 2017 to Stefano Ponte (sp....@cbs.dk<mailto:sp....@cbs.dk><mailto:sp....@cbs.dk><mailto:sp....@cbs.dk%3e>). New and more complex initiatives and partnerships are emerging to address the equally complex environmental effects of 'uneven geographical development' (UGD) in the Global South. These initiatives variously link donors, governments, community-based organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), business, consultants, certification agencies and other intermediaries. High expectations and many resources have been invested in them. Yet, we do not know whether more sophisticated organizational structures, more stakeholders involved, and more advanced participatory processes have delivered better social and environmental outcomes - and if so, in what places and sectors, under what circumstances, and with what distributional effects. These sustainability initiatives are taking shape as contexts of, and narratives about, resource depletion, biodiversity loss and extinction are rapidly changing - bringing new international audiences, alliances and policies to bear on previously local and national issues. Central to these contexts and narratives is a growing sense of urgency about the enormity of intensifying yet uneven dynamics of environmental degradation. Political ecology approaches have shown that these processes are creating new kinds of values to previously existing resources and attracting more actors in competing for their access and utilization. New actors, partnerships and modes of governance (including those based on big data) are appearing or becoming more prominent as 'old' products and services (e.g. timber, fish, wildlife tourism) come under processes of sustainability certification or are more closely monitored and managed. Yet, we ask, can these increasingly complex sustainability initiatives keep up with, or do justice to, the equally increasingly complex environmental effects of recent waves of UGD in the global South? What types of politics, institutions and forms of governance result from this 'complexity galore' in different contexts? And how do these politics, institutions and forms of governance deal with the contradictory fact that many new sustainability partnerships are steeped in similar commodification logics that also inform more general processes of UGD? This session invites contributions that theoretically and empirically engage in understanding the relation between complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives addressing complex, multi-level, and uneven environmental problems. Papers may examine topics related to multi-stakeholder sustainability initiatives and/or uneven environmental degradation in the Global South that include, but are not restricted to: processes of commodification; changing governance features; the politics and effectiveness of multi-stakeholder participation; co-management; determinants of complexity; decentralization and devolution; and their influence on social and environmental outcomes.
