Oberlack, C., S. Boillat, S. Brönnimann, J.-D. Gerber, A. Heinimann, C. Ifejika Speranza, P. Messerli, S. Rist, and U. Wiesmann. 2018. Polycentric governance in telecoupled resource systems. Ecology and Society 23(1):16. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09902-230116

Equity has become a major concern in efforts to conserve nature. However, in the Global South, inequitable social impacts of conservation usually prevail. We investigate barriers to equitable governance of four protected areas through an innovative approach linking the tri-dimensional framing of environmental justice with the notion of telecoupling. We conceptualize the creation, support, and implementation of protected areas as telecoupling processes that involve flows, actors, and action situations, and assess them based on a set of indicators of procedural justice, distributive justice, and recognition. We perform the analysis for parallel or competing telecoupling processes that affect the areas and we then investigate the scope and reach of resistance actions to attain more equitable outcomes. Identified barriers include dependence of the PAs on transnational financial flows, presence of competing extractive demands, negative narratives on local practices, wilderness and Malthusian framings, authoritarian rule, narrow development options, and socio-cultural discrimination. These combined barriers create multiple forms of exclusion. Resistance actions are likely to succeed when actors can mobilize alliances and resources across distance. We conclude that justice framings can make power relationships in telecouplings more visible, and that considering distant interactions can elucidate causes of (in)equity in conservation.

Background: It is commonly assumed that indigenous medical systems remain strong in developing countries because biomedicine is physically inaccessible or financially not affordable. This paper compares the health-seeking behavior of households from rural Andean communities at a Peruvian and a Bolivian study site. The main research question was whether the increased presence of biomedicine led to a displacement of Andean indigenous medical practices or to coexistence of the two healing traditions.Methodology: Open-ended interviews and free listing exercises were conducted between June 2006 and December 2008 with 18 households at each study site. Qualitative identification of households’ therapeutic strategies and use of remedies was carried out by means of content analysis of interview transcriptions and inductive interference. Furthermore, a quantitative assessment of the incidence of culture-bound illnesses in local ethnobiological inventories was performed.Results: Our findings indicate that the health-seeking behavior of the Andean households in this study is independent of the degree of availability of biomedical facilities in terms of quality of services provided, physical accessibility, and financial affordability, except for specific practices such as childbirth. Preference for natural remedies over pharmaceuticals coexists with biomedical healthcare that is both accessible and affordable. Furthermore, our results show that greater access to biomedicine does not lead to less prevalence of Andean indigenous medical knowledge, as represented by the levels of knowledge about culture-bound illnesses.Conclusions: The take-home lesson for health policy-makers from this study is that the main obstacle to use of biomedicine in resource-poor rural areas might not be infrastructural or economic alone. Rather, it may lie in lack of sufficient recognition by biomedical practitioners of the value and importance of indigenous medical systems. We propose that the implementation of health care in indigenous communities be designed as a process of joint development of complementary knowledge and practices from indigenous and biomedical health traditions.

This study combines legal and anthropological approaches to investigate how the establishment of a large-scale biofuel agro-industry is reinterpreting and potentially transforming customary institutional arrangements in rural Sierra Leone. The contractual relationships established between land acquirers and local authorities can be seen as an ‘institutional innovation’ that aims at interpreting and overcoming the limits of the national land regime. However, by formalizing customary land tenure structures through land registration, such innovations are exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. We identified four categories of resulting conflicts: interlineage, intervillage, interfamily and intergenerational conflicts. Taken together, these conflicts question the current land-based sociopolitical structures of rural Sierra Leone and could be drivers of societal change.