| 1. |
- Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986, et al.
(författare)
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Disagreeing well in an unparadigmatic field: a response to Bodin (2021)
- 2023
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Ingår i: Sustainability Science. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1862-4065 .- 1862-4057. ; 18, s. 1049-1052
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In a recent opinion article, sustainability researcher Örjan Bodin claims that a shift leftward in sustainability science has rendered certain topics and research methods taboo, thus inhibiting the field’s ability to contribute to achieving Agenda 2030. In this response, we problematise Bodin’s framing of sustainability science, arguing he has misrepresented the field as “normal” rather than acknowledging its unparadigmatic character. It is precisely the unparadigmatic character of sustainability sciences (plural emphasised) that allows the field to begin addressing the wicked problems of our time. The question is then how to “disagree well” and assure quality in this unparadigmatic field.
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| 2. |
- Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986, et al.
(författare)
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A teleological approach to the wicked problem of managing Utría national park
- 2017
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Ingår i: Environmental Values. - 0963-2719 .- 1752-7015. ; 26:5, s. 583-605
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Utría National Park is a remote biodiversity hotspot in Colombia. It encompasses ancestral territories of the Embera indigenous peoples and borders territories of Afro-descendant communities in El Valle. We explore environmental value conflicts regarding the use of the park, describing them as a Wicked Problem that has no clear solution. Juxtaposing how the territory is perceived by different communities, we employ Faber et al.’s heuristic of the three tele of living nature to search for deficiency in the third telos, service, which we take to be symptomatic of Wicked Problems. Based on field data encoded using the three-tele heuristic, concerning how the respective communities would like to use the park area, we identify deficiencies in the third telos and develop recommendations regarding how these might be addressed.
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| 3. |
- Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986
(författare)
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Can direct democracy deliver an alternative to extractivism? An essay on popular consultations
- 2022
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Ingår i: Political Geography. - : Elsevier BV. - 0962-6298. ; 98
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Between 2013 and 2018, ten different municipalities in Colombia held popular consultations in which people were asked to decide whether they wanted or not extractive industries in their territory. Promoted and articulated by environmental movements for the defence of water resources and local livelihoods, popular consultations led to surprising alliances of traditionally opposed actors, that found their interests temporarily aligned in opposition to resource extraction. In all of the ten popular consultations people voted massively against allowing the industry to enter. Through the defunding of the popular consultations and through a series of legal challenges, the government rushed to stop an additional 54 votes from happening that threatened to derail its finances and model of development. In this essay, I identify three main boundaries in the literature concerning popular consultations: between what counts as legal and legitimate, between the centre and the periphery as loci of political power, and between people and nature as bearers of rights. By providing an analysis of the absent elements of the political and academic discourse, I argue that popular consultations as spaces of experimental autonomous activity have the potential to engender alternatives to extractivist development. Hence, building on the notion of 'resource sovereignty' and contemporary discussions on autonomy as a prefigurative force, I reconfigure the three boundaries into a theoretical framework to guide research and political action for alternative post-extractivist futures.
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| 4. |
- Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986
(författare)
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Catching the White Fish: gossip and cocaine on Colombia's Northern Pacific coast
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. - : Wiley. - 1359-0987 .- 1467-9655. ; 27:1, s. 128-145
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- What is life like after drift-cocaine arrives in a village on Colombia's Northern Pacific coast? Drift-cocaine is a side-effect of the interdiction of drug transport boats heading towards Central and North America as part of the US-Colombian War on Drugs. Villagers refer to drift-cocaine as the White Fish. Through ethnographic engagement with Afro-descendant peoples in Chocó, this article explores the effects and relations that emerge from an ocean turned into an amphitheatre of fishing livelihoods, drug traffickers, and military operations. By taking seriously the White Fish as the way people refer to cocaine, I focus on gossip and rumour as the strategies they employ to discuss the pervasive effects of the drug trade. I trace three interrelated discussions – concerning violence, cocaine, and the White Fish – in order to argue for the usefulness of gossip and rumour in investigative ethnographies of violence.
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| 5. |
- Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986
(författare)
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Chocó challenges : communities negotiating matters of concern and care on Colombia’s margin
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Chocó is a remote and biodiverse region located on Colombia’s Northern Pacific Coast. The region is home to indigenous Embera and Afro-descendant communities. Both communities share and contest a legacy of colonisation, violence, dispossession and discrimination. This thesis explores the ways in which the local communities of Chocó challenge and transform the matters that concern them. It focuses on their concerns over the effects of biodiversity conservation, development, and drug trade on their communities. It first investigates the challenges associated with doing research concerning both global and local concerns. Then, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Chocó, it develops a methodology to address environmental value conflicts over the use of Utría National Park, located in the region. Third, the thesis studies the social protest of both local communities for the construction of a small hydroelectric power plant inside the park, finding that this protest for electricity reflects a complex post-colonial politics complementary to the discourse concerning political resistance as expressed by local and indigenous communities protesting against development. Fourth, drift-cocaine has been arriving recently to the coastal region of Chocó as a side effect of the country’s war on drugs. In Chocó, this phenomenon is referred to as the White Fish and is investigated here by situating its associated practices and transformations within the local context. Fifth, Utría National Park is explored visually as a place of rhythms and temporalities. Lastly, it argues that the mechanisms, grounded in concepts of solidarity and co-existence, which are employed by the local communities in negotiating the matters that concern them, provide alternative narratives to the ones often used to described them as in “poverty” and in need of “development”.
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| 6. |
- Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986
(författare)
-
Narkostaten
- 2021
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Ingår i: Clarté. ; 3, s. 32-34
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- I en narkostat övertar organiserad brottslighet en del av statsmaktens uppgifter. Sverige är inte på väg dit. Men ta lärdom av Colombia ändå! Den nyliberala politikens klassklyftor skapar utrymme för kriminalitet och korruption.
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| 7. |
- Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986, et al.
(författare)
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Oil and water: unlikely alliances in the opposition to extractive industries during popular consultations in Colombia
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Peasant Studies. - 0306-6150.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In 2017, 97,61% of the people of Cumaral, Colombia, voted in a popular consultation against having the oil industry in their municipality. However, this historical result was challenged by the government in court and ultimately overturned in 2018. By looking into the origins and strategies employed by Cumaral's environmental movement, we argue that their success involved turning a diverse, and even contradictory, collective into a singular voice that could reject the state's development agenda. We thus highlight the combination of factors that led to the consultation result showing that an effective way of resistance can be achieved through the state.
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| 8. |
- Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986, et al.
(författare)
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Take back your fish: questioning NGO-mediated development in Caqueta, Colombia
- 2022
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Ingår i: Third World Quarterly. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0143-6597 .- 1360-2241. ; 43:1, s. 148-165
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Could aquaculture lift farmers out of poverty and provide stability and an alternative livelihood to coca farming? Currently, aquaculture is pursued on a moderate scale, with the involvement of around 1500 small-scale farmers, in Caqueta, a department located in the Amazonian bioregion of Colombia. Some 400 farmers are organised in a grassroots non-governmental organisation (NGO) called Acuica. Cultivation and sale of fish provide a means for local fish farmers to move away from coca production and diversify their economic activities beyond cattle ranching and dairy production. In this article, we analyse the relationships among fish farmers, the state and Acuica. We argue that NGO success in securing donor funding can be underpinned by an NGO developmentalist gaze that homogenises its constituencies, which in the case of Acuica obscures different logics of fish production. This not only helps explain the mixed results in achieving development objectives but also suggests that initiatives that are intended to help farmers can imperil those who are already vulnerable. On the other hand, we argue that farmers' strategic dependency on development initiatives displays their complex agency, as they are active consumers both engaging with and resisting the state's NGO-mediated project of development.
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| 9. |
- Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986, et al.
(författare)
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The coloniality of power on the green frontier: commodities and violent territorialisation in Colombia's Amazon
- 2022
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185. ; 128, s. 192-201
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The dynamic frontier-making in Colombia's Amazon department of Caquet ' a is the focus of this article. Since the mid-nineteenth century, booms and busts of commodity production have been associated with violent struggles as actors have challenged pre-existing orders and authorities. At different times, the area has been controlled by the Catholic Church, the Colombian state, FARC and paramilitary groups, following the different boom-and-bust cycles of commodity production. We use this case to theorise on the general mechanisms behind frontier-making. Reading the frontier literature through the lens of the coloniality of power, we draw four interrelated categories to access frontier-making analytically: commodity production, dispossession, hegemon, and subjectivities. These are used to explain six distinct periods in the political economy of Caquet ' a and its spatial reconfigurations. We argue that current issues of distrust on the state, violence, and land grabbing, are best understood as part of a historical continuum of multiple actors keeping the area as a frontier space.
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| 10. |
- Heikkinen, Hannu I., et al.
(författare)
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Context-sensitive political ecology to consolidate local realities under global discourses: a view for tourism studies
- 2016
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Ingår i: Political Ecology and Tourism. - London : Routledge. - 9781315723471
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this paper, we explore global change challenges based on experiences encountered during the EU Life+ VACCIA project (Vulnerability Assessment of ecosystem services for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation), which took place between 2009 and 2011 (Bergström, Mattsson, Niemelä, Vuorenmaa & Forsius, 2011; Forsius et al., 2013). This project aimed at developing adaptation measures based on the understanding of: 1) the likelihood of local change due to climate change, 2) the vulnerability of specific sectors to predicted climate change, and 3) knowledge production regarding local-scale possibilities for adaptation. VACCIA’s Action 12 on tourism arranged participatory workshops and interviews with local nature-based tourism stakeholders in the tourism destinations of the town of Kuusamo and the municipality of Sotkamo in Northern Finland (Lépy et al., 2014; see Figure 13.1). One of the main challenges was to transform the long temporal scope of climate change studies into locally meaningful weather events and to translate the concept of ecosystem services into understandable environmental benefits and changes for local tourism entrepreneurs. Another important challenge was related to the effect of global discourses that could easily have suppressed local concerns about the nearby mining development of Talvivaara by keeping a narrow focus on the predetermined global climate change research agenda. From the political ecology point of view, by limiting the discussion on the original agenda of climate change, the researchers would have been forced to take part in the local politics in an apolitical camouflage, which would have stifled people’s actual worries (Robbins, 2004). Such observations led us to acknowledge the need for context-sensitivity and bottom-up approaches in global change research agendas in tourism studies.
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