CLARA

For more about the CLARA Research Programme and its activities, please turn to p. 55 in this issue's Pink Pages.

8 SEPTEMBER 2001

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

CLARA Panel at Euroseas

Linking Labour & Environmental Agendas

Environmental studies and labour (and peasant) studies increasingly deal with various overlapping concerns and yet discussions in each field often ignore the rich contribution provided by the other. With the need to bring together two overlapping yet different academic traditions, the CLARA workshop 'Environmental Change and Livelihood Politics' was organized at the third EUROSEAS Conference.

* By BECKY ELMHIRST & RATNA SAPTARI

Environmental studies, on the one hand, have worked in the areas of environmental degradation, resource management, sustainability, and conservation. Labour and peasant studies, on the other, have focused on differential access to the means of production: the forces that restrict control, and the use of existing resources and the conflicts and struggles arising from this. Environmental studies increasingly deal not only with issues of conservation or preservation, but also with concepts of community, indigenous peoples, and entitlements. They often have to place these concepts within the politics of ecological and resource regimes. For some time, labour and peasant studies have also examined the nature of labour relations in spheres of life apart from the workplace, namely within communities and within cultural constructions of gender, class, ethnicity, and religion.

At the policy level, government invoked changes in the management of resource use have had clear consequences on labour populations and at the same time on the social relations that are embedded in the locality-based structures or the networks linking the different localities. Social movements, which may consist of environmental as well labour movements, have not been properly studied in cross-sectoral terms. The competing and, at times, converging struggles and interests of the industrial working class and the land-based peasantry or landless have not been sufficiently examined in the context of the 'red' and 'green' political vocabularies. The papers themselves brought interesting insights into this line of inquiry.

Debating 'the community'

Most of the papers examined how local communities were affected by larger transformations and how they responded to such changes. However the way in which each speaker viewed the concept of community and its workings, differed. Elmhirst in her study of transmigrant settlements in Lampung, was critical of understandings of community, identity, and common interests that tend to be rooted in locality. This brings into question how we view social categories such as spontaneous migrants, who neither come under the purview of 'indigenous peoples' nor that of the settled transmigrant population. For Visser, the concept of community becomes problematic mainly when it is superimposed by government authorities (colonial and post-colonial) who were and are concerned with creating a semblance of order and stability. Parallel to the government imposed administrative units, one can find indigenous forms of community. Whether in the organization of labour in logging areas or in shrimp fisheries, families usually organize themselves along the lines of indigenous power and authority of the raja who were known and trusted as indigenous leaders.

In contrast to Visser, Li questioned the existence of community awareness itself. Among the two communities in Sulawesi that she studied, what materialized in the face of increased commercialization and commodity production was not the type of moral economy and communal consciousness as many scholars had contended, but rather the 'rational' response to market penetration, namely land sales endorsing a more consumptive life style. She argues that 'there are no local institutions either traditional or state-derived, which are generating the kinds of knowledge, practice, or debate that would halt, redirect, or manage the process of agrarian differentiation currently underway'.

Although in her presentation Koning did not directly deal with the concept of community her line of argument parallels that of Li. She also shows that certain members of the village in Central Java which she studied are detaching themselves from village life through their frequent circular migration to the city. This, then, engenders inter-generational conflicts between the young who are more urban-oriented and their parents who are more village-focused. The migration to the cities did not lead to a strengthening of village-based bonds, as remittances were used for individual consumption. For the older generation, however, kinship and social relations retained their utmost importance for access to village land.

Unlike the other speakers, Resurreccion, in her comparison of the Philippines and Thailand, concentrated more on the gender dimension in her handling of 'community'. Struggles for property or resource conservation became more the domain of men, who were engaged in the struggle for ancestral domain by asserting the correct ethnic name. Resurreccion challenged the popular eco-feminist principle that women's interests and the sustainable development agenda are synergetic and compatible.

'politics' vs 'Politics'

Peter Wad dealt with the politics of civil society at the national level and examined different lines of debate as portrayed by the activities of trade unions and environmental movements in Malaysia and South Korea. In the late 1980s, the Koreans' June uprising brought about the transition to political democracy and enlarged space for civil society organizations. Meanwhile, the Malaysians experienced a regress to a more authoritarian regime, which restricted their social space. These trends influenced the way in which patterns of conflicts and cooperation changed and divided trade unions and environmental organizations. In both countries, the environmental movements turned toward more collaborative attitudes and joint ventures with the government, withdrawing more or less from close relationships with the trade unions.

The other speakers took to heart the contradictions between environmental rhetoric at the national level and the experiences of the social categories assumed to be the basis for the larger debates. Elmhirst argued that under the guise of environmental conservation, government rhetoric attempted to redefine vague categories into definitely bounded ones. Visser illuminated how the 'centre' promoted village organization thus underscoring the contradictions with local realities. Her presentation focused on the parallel indigenous structures which were maintained by local traditional authorities. Li argued that government policy, which had condoned large transfers of land, became a target for environmental and other social movements. These claimed to represent local communities, although the local communities themselves are still ambivalent about their own positions. Resurreccion looked at the interconnections between the influence of political interest groups on policy making and implementation, and the discursive regimes that inform policy formation. Changes and continuity in the gender divisions of labour and definitions of what constitutes men's and women's work have fed into and have been constructed and maintained through policy instruments in environmental governance