In case you missed our recent talk on the Environmental Governance in South Asia with Professor Jayashree Vivekanandan, not to worry. You can listed to her talk below, which runs about 20 minutes, followed by another 30 minutes of Q&A. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations, South Asian University, New Delhi, India.
Professor Vivekanandan’s talk focused on the Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation and Development Initiative (KSLCDI) and its potential relations to questions of interest to international relations (IR) scholars, in particular state sovereignty and citizenship. The KSL is an area of approximately 31,000 km2, and covers parts of India, China (TAR) and Nepal. One of the most interesting, and provocative, questions she asked was what would it mean to place the idea of “ecological citizenship” at the heart of the KSLCDI?
Some of the topics she covered in her talk included:
- Whether or not creating wildlife corridors between isolated natural areas will be enough to sustain long-term biodiversity in the region
- The challenges of a transboundary conservation initiative when there is not an open policy of sharing information between all three countries
- Implications of reproducing the artificial development binaries of nature vs culture in a region where this understanding is often foreign to local communities, who are far more integrated into the local landscape in both their thinking and their practices
- What it might mean to be a “Kailash citizen” or an “ecological citizen” for whom national boundaries are meaningless ideas, and what these border biographies might look like in practice
- Problem of China excluding Tibetan communities from any participation in the development of the KSL project on the China side, while using the rhetoric of “collaboration” and “conservation” to further disenfranchise nomadic communities within the project area
- How notions of mobility challenge both the KSL and state notions of sovereignty and legibility
- The challenges of using an ecosystem level analysis within traditional IR and development discourses
There were many other interesting issues discussed, as well as some comparison with her other work looking at the Sunderbands and the issue of tigers in environmental and state discourses. So take a listen for all the details.
[audio:http://www.indiachinainstitute.org/audio/Jayashree%20Vivekanandan%20-%20Kailash%20Sacred%20Landscape%20and%20IR%20Talk%20(4.1.2014).mp3]