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| Environmental Change and Livelihood Politics |
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THIRD CONFERENCE OF EUROSEAS 2001 Environmental Change and Livelihood Politics: Linking Labour and Environmental Agendas Panel convenors: Becky Elmhirst (School of the Environment, University of Brighton, UK) and Ratna Saptari (International Institute for Social History, Netherlands) In Southeast Asia, where most people's livelihoods remain directly or indirectly resource-based, there is a need to place analyses of changing labour relations within an understanding of human-environment relations. Moreover, the socially-produced environments that have been wrought through urbanisation, industrialisation and the commodification of rural landscapes impact upon labour, just as these environments are themselves produced through labour relations. In other words, issues linked to resource access and control, environmental degradation, pollution and health appear to be increasingly falling within the remit of labour concerns within Southeast Asia. This is particularly the case in the wake of the region's most recent economic (and political) crisis, which has heightened tensions in social relations to nature in various ways. The aim of this panel is to explore the conceptual and empirical dimensions to the linkages between labour and the environment, thus contributing Southeast Asian perspectives to a vibrant international political ecology literature that has emerged around this issue. The panel considers different aspects of labour - the labour process, labour markets (including migration and the links between resource-based and non-farm livelihoods), labour relations and labour politics (collective and individual resistance, formal and informal labour movements) - and looks at how these relate to the environment, environmental politics, and environmental degradation. Within this broad remit, a number of themes concerning the intersection of environmental and labour agendas are dealt with, implicitly and explicitly. These include: (i) labour relations and labour processes that are embedded in human-environment relations (e.g. where different kinds of labour regimes are connected with different kinds of agricultural commodities); (ii) labour and the politics of the environment (e.g. resource tenure, resource degradation, resource access regimes in both rural and urban areas); (iii) links between resource-based and non-farm work, migration (rural-urban, rural-rural) and environmental concerns; (iv) environmental degradation and its impact on labour (factory pollution, health of workers and so on); (v) links between environmental (green) and labour (red) movements in Southeast Asia; (vi) conceptual concerns about the social relations of nature, labour and Southeast Asian ecologies. Panel Structure: Cash
crop farming, labour migration, and tree-cutting among the Ifugaos in
upland northern Philippines Between
a Rock and a Hard Place: Resource Conflicts and Resin Production in
North Halmahera, North Maluku, Indonesia Gatekeepers
of resources: environmental governance, work identities and gender divisions
of labour Linking
labour and environmental organisations during the East Asian crisis.
A comparative study of Malaysia and South Korea |
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