Anja Nygren

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The gendered forest [Book review]

Ethnologia Scandinavica, 2010

Presentación del libro Naturaleza y neoliberalismo en América Latina

Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias, UNAM, Mar 25, 2021

Naturaleza y neoliberalismo en América Latina

Durand, L., Nygren, A. y Vega-Leinert, A. C. de la (2019). Naturaleza y neoliberalismo en América Latina: cuernavaca, Morelos : Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias, UNAM, Oct 30, 2019

Este libro fue sometido a un proceso de dictaminación por pares académicos externos al crim, de a... more

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Monipaikkainen etnografia : Sertifoitujen tuotteiden matka Hondurasin yhteisömetsistä Euroopan design-markkinoille

Helsingin yliopisto, Sosiaalitieteiden laitos, 2012

Metsätalous tuo tähän kylään eniten rahaa. Jokaisessa perheessä on ainakin yksi ihminen joka teke... more Metsätalous tuo tähän kylään eniten rahaa. Jokaisessa perheessä on ainakin yksi ihminen joka tekee metsätöitä. Jos et sahaa puita, kannat lankkuja olallasi. Kukaan täällä ei rikastu metsätöistä, mutta ne auttavat pysymään hengissä (...) Se on kovaa työtä. Jo aamuyöstä alan usein pyöriä unissani, kun tiedän, että taas pitää mennä lankkuja kantamaan. Näin kuvaa metsätöitä Río Cangrejalin yhteisömetsätalousryhmään kuuluva, 36-vuotias Arnoldo, kun miehet ovat lähdössä aamuhämärissä jyrkkärinteiseen metsään kantamaan marapolán-puita (Guarea grandifolia D.C.), jotka myydään läheisen kaupungin huonekalutehtaalle. 1 Arnoldolla on kädessään nukkavieru sohvatyyny, jonka hän laittaa olkapäälleen pehmusteeksi, jottei lankkujen kantaminen hiertäisi ihoa rikki. Miehet ovat tyytyväisiä, että töitä metsällä on riittänyt, sillä työmahdollisuudet Hondurasin maaseudulla ovat rajalliset ja toimeentulo pitää hankkia useista eri lähteistä. Metsätuloilla on tärkeä rooli paitsi perustoimeentulon kannalta myös lasten koulunkäynnin sekä äkillisten kriisitilanteiden, kuten vakavan sairauden tai onnettomuuden, aiheuttamien kustannusten kattamiseksi. Nämä Pohjois-Hondurasissa sijaitsevat Río Cangrejalin metsäryhmät ovat maailman ensimmäisiä sertifioituja yhteisömetsätalousryhmiä. Niille myönnettiin Rainforest Alliancen 1 Lainausten käännökset kirjoittajan. Tekstissä esiintyvien henkilöiden ja yhtiöiden nimet on muutettu.

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Microcredit as a socio- political institution in South Africa: the complexity of rules, logic and power relations

Hietalahti holds a Master's degree in Economics from the University of Joensuu, Finland. Her rese... more Hietalahti holds a Master's degree in Economics from the University of Joensuu, Finland. Her research interests include socio-political and economic processes, local institutions, social and economic development and social responsibility. Anja Nygren is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, and Adjunct Professor in Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Helsinki. Nygren's areas of interest include environmental governance, environmental certifications, local livelihoods, political ecology, social responsibility and global value chains. She has published her research results in various international journals, including

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A (2004) Contested lands and incompatible images: the political eology of struggles over resources in Nicaragua’s Indio-Maı́z Reserve. Soc Nat Resour 17

This article analyzes the contested struggles over protection and production in the Nicaraguan bi... more This article analyzes the contested struggles over protection and production in the Nicaraguan biological reserve of Indio-Maı́z as a local example of broader conflicts over wilderness preservation and local livelihoods in the developing world. The main focus is on conflicting views of different stakeholders concerning the access to and control over natural resources. Special attention is given to the local inhabitants’ struggles for everyday survival and social justice on the fringe of the restricted-use reserve. The study emphasizes that in densely populated rural areas, such as Central America, inclusionary conservation represents the politically most feasible and socially most just form of conservation possible.

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Monitasoinen metsien hallinta

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Forest, power, and development: Costa Rican peasants in the changing environment

Culture, Exchange, and Global Ecology: What Role for Anthropologists?

The call by Alf Hornborg for a better consideration of the human dimension in the public discussi... more The call by Alf Hornborg for a better consideration of the human dimension in the public discussion of global environmental change, networks of production and consumption, and structures of knowledge and power is a welcome contribution to efforts to remove mental barriers and institutional forms of governance that limit transdisciplinary understanding of multifaceted environmental problems and political-economic processes. Hornborg’s concern over the limited role anthropologists have played in the mainstream discourse on “our common future” – discussion largely dominated by natural scientists, technologists and economists – is highly relevant and thought-provoking. Equally important is his argument that anthropological analyses of cultural perceptions and symbolic meanings would be crucial for a more holistic understanding of past, present and future concerns with global sustainability issues.

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Water and power, water’s power: State-making and socionature shaping volatile rivers and riverine people in Mexico

World Development, 2021

Water-related disasters have become more unpredictable amidst human-induced climatic and hydroeco... more Water-related disasters have become more unpredictable amidst human-induced climatic and hydroecological changes, with profound effects on people inhabiting fragile river basins. In this article, I analyse drastic waterscape transformations and people's differentiated exposure to water-related vulnerabilities in the Grijalva River lower basin, southeastern Mexico, focusing on how state authority is reinforced through waterscape alterations and how altered waterscapes shape state-making and scalar politics. Examining interlinkages between 1) state-making and governance; 2) resource-making and politics of scale; and 3) hazard-making and the dynamics of socionature, the article contributes to scholarly and development practice discussions on environmental vulnerability. I argue that the goals of consolidating state power and promoting development through massive waterscape changes and resource extractions have provoked hazards that are difficult to control, resulting in differentiated distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. Drawing on archival research, documentary analysis, thematic interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, the study illustrates the overlapping and cumulative effects of state-making, politics of scale, and the dynamics of socionature on socially differentiated vulnerability. Although the forms of governance shift over time, statecraft as a mode of consolidating state authority and controlling lowerbasin environments and residents persists. The government prevents social mobilisation through political persuasion and pressure, and disciplines residents to adapt to altered waterscapes, while allowing few changes in prevalent power structures. Simultaneously, the study demonstrates that water cannot be controlled by political rules and requisites, while local residents reinterpret dominant ways of governing through claim-making, negotiation, everyday resistance, and situational improvisation, albeit within unequal power relations. The study enhances understanding of water-related vulnerabilities resulting from recurrent, yet temporally remoulded agendas of state-making combined with socially differentiating politics of scaling and the dynamics of socionature, which altogether reformulate human-nonhuman interactions and make local smallholders and peri-urban poor increasingly vulnerable to floods.

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Imagining Cities of Inclusion—Formulating Spaces of Justice

Urban Planning, 2020

This introduction underlines some of the topics the present thematic issue focuses on, such as se... more This introduction underlines some of the topics the present thematic issue focuses on, such as segregation and security, control and creativity, resistance and networking, presenting continuities and changes in urban governance and urban justice in different parts of the world. We argue that urban theory should be rethought to consider cities as fora that recentre the ‘political’ in relation to gentrification, rights to the city, justice, and alternative urbanisms. We highlight structural aspects of urban policy and planning, including the intersection of mega-development projects with disruptive acts of social dispossession and efforts to depoliticise institutional control. Simultaneously, we emphasise tactics that reinterpret hierarchical modes of governance and create initiatives for enhanced justice through claim-making, negotiation, improvisation, acts of everyday resistance and organised opposition.

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Flood severity along the Usumacinta River, Mexico: identifying the anthropogenic signature of tropical forest conversion

Anthropogenic activities are altering flood frequency-magnitude distributions along many of the w... more Anthropogenic activities are altering flood frequency-magnitude distributions along many of the world's large rivers. Yet isolating the impact of any single factor amongst the multitudes of competing anthropogenic drivers is a persistent challenge. The Usumacinta River in southeastern Mexico provides an opportunity to study the anthropogenic driver of tropical forest conversion in isolation, as the long meteorological and discharge records capture the river's response to large-scale agricultural expansion without interference from development activities such as dams or channel modifications. We analyse continuous daily time series of precipitation, temperature, and discharge to identify long-term trends, and employ a novel approach to disentangle the signal of deforestation by normalising daily discharges by 90-day mean precipitation volumes from the contributing area in order to account for climatic variability. We also identify an anthropogenic signature of tropical forest conversion at the intra-annual scale, reproduce this signal using a distributed hydrological model (VMOD), and demonstrate that the continued conversion of tropical forest to agricultural land use will further exacerbate large-scale flooding. We find statistically significant increasing trends in annual minimum, mean, and maximum discharges that are not evident in either precipitation or temperature records, with mean monthly discharges increasing between 7% and 75% in the past decades. Model results demonstrate that forest cover loss is responsible for raising the 10-year return peak discharge by 25%, while the total conversion of forest to agricultural use would result in an additional 18% rise. These findings highlight the need for an integrated basinwide approach to land management that considers the impacts of agricultural expansion on increased flood prevalence, and the economic and social costs involved.

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Urban Floods, Clientelism, and the Political Ecology of the State in Latin America

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020

In this article, we examine the coproduction of hazardous urban space and new formations of clien... more In this article, we examine the coproduction of hazardous urban space and new formations of clientelist state governance. Work on hazards and vulnerability frequently demonstrates how hazardous urban spaces are produced, but a critical understanding of state power is often left untouched. Correspondingly, scholars analyzing clientelism and state formation habitually discuss the configuration of new forms of governance and the consolidation of state power without intersecting these processes with the production of vulnerabilities and "hazardous nature." Drawing on ethnographic research in urban areas susceptible to serious floods and landslides in Brazil and Mexico, we argue that clientelist governance and state making, including complex forms of political favoritism, create urban hazardscapes, as much as the management of urban disasters acts to reconfigure patron-client relations within "hazardstates." The article contributes to an emerging body of literature analyzing linkages between urban environmental governance, state authority, and the reproduction of vulnerability.

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Shifting frontier dynamics in Latin America

Journal of Agrarian Change, 2020

The concepts of resource frontier and commodity frontier are often treated interchangeably. This ... more The concepts of resource frontier and commodity frontier are often treated interchangeably. This article suggests the benefits of clarifying these concepts because frontiers remain important analytics for understanding drastic landuse changes and other socio-environmental transformations. Based on long-term field research in different parts of South and Central America, we use frontier concepts as heuristic devices to analyze heterogeneous frontier situations and make broader generalizations. Our synchronic and diachronic analyses of frontier dynamics elucidate different frontier modalities and shifting frontier expansions. The concept of commoditizing resource frontier is introduced to explain recent frontier-makings in Brazilian Amazonia and Cerrado and in the Nicaraguan Río San Juan. Although earlier frontier research took a short-term time perspective and created conceptualizations based on a single modality of a particular period, our longitudinal analysis shows that drastic changes and complex overlappings are the hallmarks of frontier dynamics.

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Green Wars: Colonization and Conservation in the Maya Forest

Conservation and Society, 2019

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Naturaleza y neoliberalismo en América Latina

Este libro fue sometido a un proceso de dictaminación por pares académicos externos al crim, de a... more

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Debating the unknowns of marine oil exploration in Mexico

The Extractive Industries and Society, 2019

Marine extraction accounts for one third of the world's hydrocarbon production. Several analyses ... more Marine extraction accounts for one third of the world's hydrocarbon production. Several analyses suggest that seismic surveys employed in oil exploration harm marine life; however, their long-term impacts have not been extensively studied. We examine debates between fishers, the oil industry, and governmental authorities over the effects of oil explorations in Tabasco, Mexico. The study employs ideas from historical ontology in tracing the contested production of truth-claims about exploration in the context of scientific uncertainty. It shows how actors, through their different engagements with the sea, and with different degrees of power, frame claims about the relations between exploration and fish. We argue that fishers, through their efforts to "think like fish" produce situated knowledges about the effects of oil exploration. They explain a disappearance of fish by their understanding that seismic surveys disturb fish migration, impair the hearing of fish and cause fish death. Oil company and governmental representatives frame the impacts of oil exploration as insignificant by separating environmental and social dimensions, by isolating individual exploration events, and by arguing that possible effects are transitional. Due to scientific indeterminacy, oil exploration is malleable in the hands of powerful political representations that understate its possible impacts on marine socio-environments.

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From divide to nexus: Interconnected land use and water governance changes shaping risks related to water

Applied Geography, 2018

Land use changes have been recognized to have considerable impacts on water; and vice versa, chan... more Land use changes have been recognized to have considerable impacts on water; and vice versa, changes in water use and governance may have implications on land use and governance. This study analyzes recent land use/land cover (LULC) changes, and how changes in land use and water governance are perceived to affect land use and water-related risks in three case-study areas exposed to frequent flooding and inadequate or deteriorating water quality. The areas studied included the Vantaa basin in Finland, a section of the Grijalva basin in Mexico, and the Lower Xe Bang Fai basin in Laos. We show how there are complex and context-specific interrelationships between land use, water governance, and waterrelated risks in each study area. In a remote sensing analysis of LULC changes during the past 30 years, we found that LULC changes have been the most dramatic in Xe Bang Fai, Laos in the form of expanding agriculture and built-up areas; however, there has also been an expansion of built-up areas in the two other sites. According to our stakeholder scenario workshop data, analysis of policy documents and field visits, the nexus between land, water and risks is recognized to some extent in each study area. There have been modest shifts toward more integrated land use and water governance in Vantaa and Grijalva, while the integrated governance seems to have been most absent in Xe Bang Fai. Tighter integration of land and water policies is needed in all the three cases to manage the land use changes in a way that their effects on water-related risks will be minimized.

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At the intersections of multiple marginalisations: displacements and environmental justice in Mexico and Ethiopia

Environmental Sociology, 2018

This article examines the politics of institutional governance of displacements and the intersect... more This article examines the politics of institutional governance of displacements and the intersecting experiences of environmental justice, drawing on case studies of flood disasters and urban displacements in Villahermosa, Mexico, and government-sponsored displacements and resettlements in rural Oromia, Ethiopia. We argue that a fuller understanding of how institutional governance produces multiple marginalisations requires political-ecological and intersectional analyses of residents' experiences of injustices that encompass interlinkages between social position, gender and political power. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mexico and Ethiopia, comprising interviews, participant observation, document analysis and surveys. The study shows similarities and differences in patterns of governance, mechanisms of marginalisation and relations of authority and power concerning differentiated displacements and everyday vulnerabilities in different contexts of the global South. Our analysis enriches theoretical understanding of governance and justice, demonstrating how multiple marginalities are produced, reinforced and contested through political processes imbricated with forms of governance characterised by institutional intrusion and absence.

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Socially Differentiated Urban Flood Governance in Mexico: Ambiguous Negotiations and Fragmented Contestations

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2015

Cities around the world are developing new ways of governing risks and vulnerabilities. In the ne... more Cities around the world are developing new ways of governing risks and vulnerabilities. In the new flood-governance measures, technological risk-prevention is linked to programmes of social resilience and cultural adaptation. By focusing on the catastrophic floods in the city of Villahermosa, Mexico, this article argues that new flood-governance strategies rely on complicated forms of neoliberal governance, in which flood governance is turned into a matter of adaptation and self-responsibilisation, while scant attention is paid to the socio-spatial distribution of vulnerabilities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in three socially differentiated neighbourhoods of Villahermosa, this article demonstrates how flood-governance strategies and the residents' responses to them vary across the city and how the production of flood risk is connected to the uneven production of urban space. The institutional acts of governing aim to render certain population groups governable, whilst being ...

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