Anthropology Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2742
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item Beyond Consultation: Rethinking the Indigenous Right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent in Costa Rica(2024) Breitfeller, Jessica Ashley; Chernela, Janet M.; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is an international legal norm meant to ensure Indigenous Peoples’ right to be consulted about projects that affect their lands. Over the past decade, the small Central American country of Costa Rica has strived to develop and implement a series of new, ‘culturally appropriate’ consultation protocols to better uphold the right to FPIC. This dissertation investigates the concept of FPIC as it applies to the Indigenous Bribri in the context of Costa Rica's burgeoning national forestry and climate change strategy known as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program. Drawing on extended, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this dissertation addresses the issues of Indigenous agency and autonomy by considering the ways in which the country’s REDD+ consultations and emerging FPIC processes serve to both strengthen and weaken communities’ rights to participation and self-determination. Weaving together a conceptual framework from political ecology, critical development theory, and political and legal anthropology, this study reveals that the country’s current FPIC protocols perpetuate historical state-Indigenous relations while simultaneously creating new opportunities for negotiation, compromise, and resistance. I demonstrate that FPIC consultations are all at once sites of ontological conflict, a legal instrument for the ontological defense of territoriality, and participatory spaces of (re)negotiation and resistance wherein ontological differences are arbitrated in an effort to shape policy and transform age-old power relations. Ultimately, this research deepens our understanding of how Western mechanisms designed to protect human rights and natural resources intersect with Indigenous ways of knowing and being to inform broader debates on Indigenous self-determination and climate justice. In doing so, it asks us to consider how we—as scholars, advocates, and practitioners—may go about collaboratively reimagining and rethinking FPIC in the future.Item An Environmental Anthropology of Modeling and Management on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed(2017) Trombley, Jeremy M.; Paolisso, Michael; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the last few decades, computational models have become an essential component of our understanding of complex environmental processes. In addition, they are increasingly used as tools for the management of large-scale environmental problems like climate change. As a result, understanding the role that these models play in the socioecological process of environmental management is an important area of inquiry for an environmental anthropology concerned with understanding human-environment interactions. In this dissertation, I examine these roles through an ethnographic study of computational environmental modeling in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The Chesapeake Bay region is an excellent place to investigate modeling and management because, for over thirty years, it has been the site of a watershed-scale effort to reduce nutrient pollution (nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment) to the Chesapeake Bay. In order to carry out this management process, the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) was created as a partnership between the federal government and seven watershed jurisdictions. In addition, modelers at the CBP have been developing a complex computational model of the watershed known as the Chesapeake Bay Modeling System (CBMS) in order to identify and track the sources and effects of nutrient pollution on the estuary. In this dissertation, I explore the role of the CBMS and other models in our understanding and management of nutrient pollution in the region through three articles written for publication in peer-reviewed journals, each of which addresses the question in a different way. The first discusses the ways that the process of building and implementing a computational model is affected by its inclusion in a management institution. The second describes the ways that the computational models themselves are affected by the management contexts in which they are developed and deployed. The third examines the various roles that they play in building and maintaining the relationships that underlie the management process. Together, these articles shed light on the ways that computational models mediate human-environment interactions by way of environmental management, and will help to plan more inclusive and effective modeling and management approaches in the future.