Institute of International Studies; University of California Berkeley

**Please see our updated website for 2007-2008**
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/GreenGovernance

Green Governance, Green Peace: Environmental Governance, Community Resource Management, and Conflict Resolution

Mission

Founded in late 1996, the Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics emerged from a long-standing commitment to environmental studies on the Berkeley campus and from the presence of a core group of faculty whose research and scholarly interests linked environment, culture, and political economy. The workshop draws together over fifty faculty and doctoral students from San Francisco Bay Area institutions (the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Davis, and Stanford University) who share a common concern with problems that stand at the intersection of the environmental and social sciences, the humanities and law. The Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics has three broad functions:

• to assist graduate training and scholarly research by deepening the theoretical and methodological toolkit appropriate to understanding environmental concerns in an increasingly globalized world;
• to bring together constituencies of local and international scholars, activists, and policy makers for transnational conversations on environmental issues; and
• to bring community activists and policymakers to Berkeley as Residential Fellows, thus providing synergistic possibilities for developing new learning and research communities.

Intellectually, the Berkeley Workshop is designed to promote and advance research, theory building, methodological development, and policy discussions in the broad area of political ecology. The field of political ecology is a self-consciously interdisciplinary enterprise in which anthropologists, sociologists, historians, geographers, and environmental scientists play a formative role. In seeing environmental degradation and rehabilitation as socially and ecologically constructed, political ecology seeks to show that the environment is framed by relations of political economy and simultaneously contested in political, cultural, and symbolic ways. Political ecology forges links between the actions of resource users within particular political, economic, and environmental settings, and the politics, institutions, and social relations constitutive of those settings. The Berkeley Workshop is especially attentive to the importance of history, ethnography, and the governance in its broad intellectual and substantive mission. Our focus on power, knowledge, and the struggles over meanings and representations -- of forms of access to and control over resources, institutional regulations, and economic practices -- encompasses both the cultural politics and political economy of environmental struggles.

Themes

A major concern of the Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics is to use the tools of a critically reflexive social science to address complex intersections of environmental actors, agencies, and institutions in an increasingly transnational arena of environmental politics and governance. In the late twentieth century, environmental problems are constituted as parts of global discourses, couched typically in moral, technocratic, and managerial languages, and they often transgress national boundaries. The enlarged panoply of actors engaging in environmental management refigures the ways in which global forces articulate with local initiatives, histories, and livelihood practices. The battleground of environmental politics, policy making, and implementation spans diverse sites, constituencies, and contexts. Running through the Berkeley Workshop is a sensitivity to institutional cultures -- the social norms, symbolic forms, and systems of representation and meaning -- which shape the ways that environment and resource questions are framed, adjudicated, contested, and made accessible to human endeavor.

The gradual opening and flourishing of civil society in parts of Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the former socialist bloc has contributed to the proliferation of all manner of local green movements -- to a thickening of civil society. These community-based and grassroots initiatives are not always environmental in any simple sense: they are often movements driven by poverty, custom, human and political rights, indigenous identity, etc. Furthermore, local initiatives are inseparable from global environmentalisms of various sorts, whether the world of the international non-governmental organizations, transnational green networks, or the policies of newly greened multilateral institutions. These globalized environmentalisms can embrace efforts by indigenous people to challenge national sovereignty or the power of transnational companies, struggles between North and South over intellectual property rights, efforts to green the World Trade Organization or conflicts between local and transnational green activists and ngos. What makes these events and eruptions transnational is their recurrence in multiple locations, whether or not they are explicit participants in so-called global social movements. Our goal as a working group is to re-map nature, culture, and political economy onto one another, providing a political ecological view of conflict and cooperation as they are manifest in the realm of environmental politics and environmental governance.

Programs and Activities

The centerpiece of the Berkeley Workshop is the Environmental Politics Colloquium. As a multi-disciplinary enterprise, participants read and discuss papers written by scholars, activists, and practitioners for monthly working sessions. Research papers are circulated in advance to participants and presented by a discussant representing a different field and regional expertise from the author of the paper. The colloquium simultaneously helps individual scholars refine their own work and creates a learning community around a set of core concerns with nature, culture, power, and political economy.

A second activity is the Culture and Environment Forum, which is a vehicle for exploring the complex politics of community resource management, culture, and environmental politics. Funded by the Ford Foundation and run in collaboration with faculty from the University of California, Santa Cruz, the forum has three broad functions. The research and training function includes the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program, which brings short-term residential scholars to the Berkeley campus to take advantage of the seminars, resource people, and policy institutions which abound in the Bay Area region. The service function involves the use of Berkeley faculty as consultants and resource persons to the Ford Foundation regional offices and their local constituencies. The policy function is the publication of a Working Paper series devoted to state-of-the-art ideas on matters of policy and practice.

The workshop also sponsors a third activity, student-faculty Thematic Working Groups. Designed to create cross-generational and cross-regional learning communities around specific environmental themes-for example, marine resource regulation, indigenous movements and green entitlements, or transnational environmental networks-the working groups provide year-round networking and research activities which complement the colloquium and the forum.

During the 2001-02 academic year, the Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics implemented three new initiatives to strengthen our campus presence through increased student participation. These initiatives will continue through the 2002-03 academic year. The first of these is a dissertation workshop that enables students and faculty to engage in intensive discussion of each studentís dissertation project and to conduct interdisciplinary discussions on the general theme of "New Directions in Political Ecology." The Berkeley Workshop will also offer four or five small research grants for graduate students whose dissertation research focuses on "culture and environment." Finally, three undergraduate stipends will be offered to support summer internships for students working with nonprofit organizations engaged in environmental justice efforts, either in the U.S. or abroad.

The Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics benefits from the yearly campus presence of the UC Berkeley Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellows. The fellowship and application process are described at http://research.chance.berkeley.edu/ciriacy/cwpolicy.htm.

If you would like to participate in the Environmental Politics Colloquium, please send your name, affiliation, address, and e-mail address to the EP program: envirpol at globetrotter. berkeley.edu. You will receive e-mail updates about each event in the Environmental Politics Colloquium series. Each e-mail will include the paper to be discussed as an attachment; hard copies of each paper will also be available to pick up at the Institute of International Studies office at 215 Moses Hall on the Berkeley campus. Colloquium meetings are devoted entirely to the discussion of the distributed papers.

Colloquium Schedule | Luce Residential Fellows | Executive Committee | Publications

The Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics is funded by the Luce Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

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