Euroseas Panel:
Environmental Change and Livelihood Politics: Linking Labour and Environmental Agendas
(Saturday, 8 September 2001)

By Becky Elmhirst (School of the Environment, University of Brighton, UK) and Ratna Saptari (CLARA, Netherlands)

This panel was meant to bring together two overlapping yet different academic traditions, namely environmental studies and labour(and peasant) studies. This need was felt because increasingly these two traditions deal with various overlapping concerns and yet discussions in each field often ignores the rich contribution provided by the other. Six papers were presented in two sessions. The speakers were Tania Li (Dalhousie University, Canada); Juliette Koning (Tilburg University, the Netherlands); Bernadette Resurreccion (Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand); Rebecca Elmhirst (University. of Brighton, U.K.), Leontien Visser (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) and Peter Wad (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark).

On the one hand environmental studies have worked in the areas of environmental degradation, resource management, sustainability, and conservation. On the other hand labour and peasant studies 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 are increasingly having to deal not only with issues of conservation or preservation but also with concepts of community, indigenous peoples, entitlements, often having to place these concepts within the politics of ecological and resource regimes. Labour and peasant studies have for some time examined the nature of labour relations also in other spheres of life apart from the workplace, namely within communities, within cultural constructions of gender, class, ethnicity and religion.

At the policy level, changes in resource use management invoked by governments have had clear consequences on labouring 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 to the understandings of community, identity and common interests that tend to be place-based. This brings into question how we view as 'problematic' social categories such as spontaneous migrants who neither come under the purview of 'indigenous peoples' nor the settled transmigrant population. For Visser the concept of community becomes mainly problematic when it is superimposed by government authorities (colonial and post-colonial) who were and are concerned with creating 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 different 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 happened in the face of increased commercialisation and commodity production was not the type of moral economy and communal consciousness as many scholars had contended, but more 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 in showing 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 engendering 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 where remittances were used for individual consumption. For the older generation however kinship and social relations of major 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' as 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.

Local 'politics' versus national '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 movement 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 organisations, while the Malaysians experienced a regress to more a authoritarian regime which restricted their social space. These trends influenced the way in which patterns of conflicts and co-operation changed and divided trade unions and environmental organisations. In both countries the environmental movements turned toward more collaborative attitudes and joint ventures with the government, withdrawing more or less from close relations with the trade unions.

The other speakers looked more at 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 illuminates how the 'centre' promoted village organization were underscoring the contradictions with local realities. In her presentation focus was given to 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 which assumed to represent local communities, although the local communities themselves are still ambivalent about their own positions. Resurreccion: looks at the interconnections between the influence of political interest groups on policy making and implementation, the discursive regimes that inform policy formation. Changes and continuity in the gender divisions of labor 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.

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