Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) is based on the idea that resource management problems are the result of the absence of both institutional capacity and incentives to manage resources sustainably. In 1989, the government introduced CAMPFIRE, a new system that assigns group ownership rights to communities and provides institutions for resource management for the benefit of these communities (Martin 1986). This was implemented through an amendment to the Parks and Wildlife Act of 1975 that enables the government to delegate ‘appropriate authority’ over wildlife to ‘communal representatives’.

The chapter explores whether CAMPFIRE has succeeded in devolving ownership over wildlife to communities and in generating benefits for these communities. I begin by evaluating the extent to which CAMPFIRE has achieved resource tenure reform by assigning clear and unambiguous rights to communities. I then seek to establish the extent to which benefits from wildlife management have become integrated into household livelihood strategies.

Communal Tenure

The CAMPFIRE programme is designed principally for the communal lands of Zimbabwe and aims to strengthen communal tenure regimes. Communal lands, formerly known as Reserves and later as Tribal Trust Lands, are areas that were designated for the African population of the country during the colonial era, alongside the expropriation of lands for the white settler community and subsequent policies aimed at creating labour reserves and undermining African agricultural livelihoods (Phimister 1986). There is considerable debate concerning the nature of the tenure system in the communal areas today.

Introduction

Scientists believe with high certainty that the impacts of current greenhouse gas emissions have started but may not be completely felt for 100 years or more. The long-term nature of the climate problem requires fundamental, long-term changes in how economies produce goods and services. One of the most likely policies to encourage the transition to reduced use of fossilfuel energy is a system of overlapping national and international emissions permits (Victor et al. 2005; Hultman 2004). The Kyoto Protocol set up one international trading system, but even if this Protocol ultimately fails, the movement towards a global emissions market is likely to continue for several reasons. First, most major polluting countries have endorsed the aims and the mechanisms of Kyoto. Second, the European Union has already implemented a broad coverage emissions-trading system parallel to Kyoto's. Third, many large industrial and energy corporations — including the major European energy oil companies — have endorsed the mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol, and some have initiated their own emissions trading systems.

The world therefore is likely see the emergence of multiple linked markets for greenhouse gas emissions permits over the next five to ten years. These systems, implemented soundly, should help reduce humanity's impact on the global climate by internalizing some of the costs of climate change. At the same time, these permits will be assets that have an economic value and provide economic benefits.

Reclaiming Nature offers a hopeful new vision of the relationship between people and nature. The contributors to this volume have nothing in common with the see-no-evil optimists who dismiss the reality of the world's mounting environmental problems. But neither do they succumb to the bleak pessimism of many ‘environmentalists’. Charting a course between denial and despair, they realize that human activities can have positive impacts on nature's wealth as well as negative ones. The crucial question is how we can tip the balance in favour of the positive.

The relationship between humans and nature is shaped by relationships among people. To understand what we do to nature, we must ask who does what to whom. Among the myriad species on Earth, we are distinctive not only in our power to use reason and learn from experience, but also in the fact that we live in differentiated societies where some, in George Orwell's phrase, are ‘more equal than others’. Not everyone has the same impact on the environment, nor do all bear the same environmental consequences. The distribution of environmental benefits and costs has profound effects on our overall environmental impact.

This book puts forward three core propositions:

• First, environmental degradation is not the result of an inherent conflict between humans and nature; it is a result of conflicts among people.

• Second, every person has an inalienable right to share in nature's wealth, including the right to a clean and safe environment.

• Third, we do not face a grim choice between protecting the environment and reducing poverty. Instead the two can, and often must, go together.

Introduction

In the 1990s, the global mining industry experienced unprecedented expansion, establishing a presence in countries with no prior history of commercial mining, particularly, in the global South. Latin America became the world's most important destination for mining-related investment capital. The regions of West Africa and South-east Asia also experienced rapid growth in mining activity (Chalmen 1999, 2000). Expansion was driven by rising mineral prices in response to growing demand, and was also promoted by the policies of the international financial institutions, which favoured privatization and permitted foreign investors to enter economic sectors and exploit natural resources that had previously been inaccessible.

The boom has imposed high environmental and social costs on communities in the global south. In some cases, mining threatens the very survival of local subsistence economies. Consequently, conflict between mining companies and communities has grown in parallel with the industry. This poses enormous challenges for communities, who often lack the skills and tools that are needed to address conflict adequately and constructively.

Communities have begun to develop a number of strategies to secure greater control over mining activity. In some cases, communities seek to impede the development of mining projects in their territories, judging them to be incompatible with local development. In other cases, communities have accepted the presence of mining activity and have attempted to establish a new, more equitable relationship with industry that integrates mining with local strategies for sustainable development.

Introduction

Across the globe, vibrant social movements are emerging that link together issues of resource access, social security, environmental risks and disaster vulnerability. Although all people suffer the effects of pollution, global warming and resource exploitation, poor people are especially vulnerable since they live closer to the margin of survival and are less able to afford cushions from environmental ills. Moreover, as in the case of the United States described by Manuel Pastor in this volume, poor communities often face disproportionately heavy burdens from environmental degradation. Increasingly, low-income urban and rural communities around the world are organizing to fight for environmental justice — that is, for more equitable access to natural resources and environmental quality, including clean air and water. These new environmental movements connect sources and sinks; North and South; ecology and equity; and asset building and hazard vulnerability. They have begun to articulate new ideas about the quality of life, and the meaning of development and modernization.

There is mounting recognition that environmental pollution and natural resource degradation are not simply ‘quality of life’ issues primarily of concern to middle-class people of the global North. In cities of both the North and the South, residents of poor neighbourhoods often are most exposed to air fouled by car exhaust, diesel fumes, and deliberate and accidental industrial emissions. As urban growth accelerates worldwide, neighbourhoods struggle for access to green space, public transportation, sanitation, and clean water and air.

‘Daylight on the wreck’: The Family in decline

Yonge's investigation of the potential of Familial altruism as the basis for social good is incomplete because of the sheltered social milieu within which it is conducted. In The Mill on the Floss, a novel thematically permeated by economic and social friction, George Eliot undertakes a more rigorous exploration of the same theme. She examines the tension between individual will and communal bonds – between the notion of the human subject as rational agent of self-regarding choice on the one hand, and as constituted by given material and emotional relationships on the other – with particular regard to an identifiable debate about what the family really is or should be.

The clannishness of the Dodsons is the besieged and etiolated remnant of the spirit of the traditional Family. Judith Lowder Newton has noted that the ‘Dodson creed’ ‘confers status upon the production and the producers of domestic goods …a vestige from another time, when the comfortable middle-class family was an economic unit and when women of the middle ranks had greater status as persons making visible contributions to the subsistence and income of the family’. The Dodsons put great store by their own ‘particular ways of bleaching the linen, of making the cowslip wine, curing the hams and keeping the bottled gooseberries; so that no daughter of that house could be indifferent to the privilege of having been born a Dodson’ (MF, I:vi:38).

Introduction

Brazil occupies four-fifths of the Amazon Basin and is home to the world's largest remaining area of tropical rainforest, 3.5 million square kilometres (km2). Despite three decades of settlement and intensive development, the forest is still relatively intact compared with similar areas elsewhere. The region is an increasingly important source of natural assets for both regional and national economic growth, and provides livelihood support to a population of several million. In addition, the Amazon supplies key environmental services in terms of the conservation of biological diversity, climate regulation and watershed management, as well as sequestering an estimated 10 per cent of global carbon emissions.

Traditional forest-dwelling populations such as rubber tappers and indigenous groups have been stewards of the natural resource base in Amazonia through their use of non-destructive technologies at low demographic densities. As the frontier has advanced, however, they have come under growing peril from rent-seeking interests that threaten to destroy the forest and people's livelihoods with it. Official policies have tended to reward such predatory forms of occupation through generous subsidies, while ignoring the ecological services provided by local populations. Brazil's rubber tappers were the first social group to pose a major challenge to this ‘development’ model. Making a pre-emptive strike against cattle ranchers and land speculators, they have appropriated for themselves large areas of forest at risk of becoming ‘open access’ to all comers seeking profits.

Introduction

The degradation of the world's ecosystems is undermining their capacity to provide environmental services that are vital to humankind. This has fuelled experimentation with compensation schemes that reward people for managing ecosystems to provide environmental services, based on the premise that positive incentives can lead to changes in land-use practices. In the Americas, such experiments have concentrated on watershed management for hydrological services and on conservation of biodiversity and scenic beauty. If and when international negotiations yield a suitable framework for climate change mitigation, carbon dioxide sequestration could be added to the mix.

The prevailing approach to compensation has focused on payments, rather than other possible rewards such as greater provision of local public goods or enhanced social status. In many cases, payment for environmental services (PES) schemes have been characterized by designs that seek the lowest cost possible for achieving environmental goals; concentrate on single environmental services (such as carbon sequestration), sometimes at the expense of other ecosystem services; and accord priority to simplified, largescale ecosystems, preferably controlled by a few people, so as to reduce transaction costs.

This approach can have adverse — even devastating — impacts on poor and marginalized rural communities. At the same time, it misses opportunities for tapping into the crucial roles that these communities often play in ecosystem stewardship and the provision of environmental services. When poor communities hold secure rights over lands that provide environmental services, they are most likely to benefit from compensation schemes, and the goals of environmental protection and poverty reduction are mutually supporting. More often, however, community rights to natural resources are limited and insecure.

Introduction

‘Certification systems’ are relatively new tools that have evolved globally to encourage and reward higher levels of social and environmental responsibility— and accountability— among producers of all sorts. They have been designed primarily to alter the performance of otherwise unreachable transnational corporations in the fields of natural-resourcebased production, such as forestry, agriculture, mining and tourism. This chapter explores the question of whether these systems, which have not generally been designed explicitly as poverty alleviation tools, can, in fact, assist poor people, either individually or in community-based and small-tomedium production units, to build their natural assets as a basis for sustainable livelihoods and poverty alleviation. From the point of view of the purposes of this volume, the question is whether these systems, developed largely in the global North, have become— or could become— important new international tools for alleviating poverty in diverse international contexts.

The two leading certification systems of this time, the Forest Stewardship Council™ and the Fair Trade Certified™ system, are analyzed extensively here from the point of view of their impacts upon the poor and their ability to contribute, directly and indirectly, to the alleviation of poverty through building natural assets. Emerging certification systems in tourism and mining are also examined, but to a lesser extent, because their standards have not yet been codified, although considerable movement toward that end has occurred in both cases.

The Centre for Natural Resources Studies (CNRS), since 1992, has implemented community-based environmental restoration projects in Bangladesh that seek to protect and renew floodplain ecosystems. These efforts grew out of a situation where the country's aquatic resources were under assault by massive flood control projects. The CNRS strategy was inspired by research showing that the rural poor in Bangladesh rely on a rich diversity of fish species for their diets and livelihoods. Most of these fish species depend on the annual inundation of flood waters for their reproduction and growth. Yet these crucial social and biological realities were either unseen or ignored by the leading development agencies concerned with water management, flood control and fisheries in Bangladesh. The CNRS projects have shown that an alternative strategy, based on investment in ecological restoration, can benefit both the fish and people.

Inland Fisheries in Bangladesh

In his classic book, Fish, Water and People: Reflections on Inland Openwater Fisheries Resources of Bangladesh, the late Dr. M. Youssouf Ali described the link between fisheries and rural livelihoods in the Bengal delta:

Victorian and postmodern collisions

For the central currents of post-colonial and new-historicist criticism, ‘history’, as it is usually thought of, is in every sense the History of the West. As Robert Young puts it, ‘History, with a capital H …cannot tolerate otherness or leave it outside its economy of inclusion. The appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge within a totalising system can thus be set alongside the history (if not the project) of European imperialism’. Young argues that History's linear narrative of logical cause and effect, teleologically tending towards totality, rhetorically occludes other ‘histories’, and rhetorically legitimates the subjugation of other peoples in the cause of ascendant western man's supposedly preordained mission to unite the globe under his rule of enlightenment.

The family and political theory: Rehearsing old dilemmas

In this chapter and the two that follow, I move away from questions to do with the representational modes of Victorian fiction, and the metaphysical stance implicit in or propagated by those modes. For alongside the imposing battery of arguments against the novel on these fronts, politicized criticism has marshalled forceful objections against its subject matter.

Foremost among these is the objection to the ‘personal’ focus of Victorian fiction. Various allegations have been made against this focus. It is said to divert readers' attention away from political problems and political solutions towards a preoccupation with ‘human nature’ – a trans-historical notion that, far from reflecting anything outside the structures of language and power, serves to curtail political critique. It is also said to perpetuate the arch-ideological illusion that it is people, rather than political structures, that make history; in other words, that human subjects are ontologically prior to, rather than mere effects of discourse. And, finally, it is said to reinforce the deep division in Victorian ideology and practice between the private and the social, and by doing so to facilitate the strategic displacement of criticism away from the latter.