6th Global Conference
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Monday 2nd July - Thursday 5th
July 2007
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 10: Knowledge, Development and the Struggle for Justice
Chair: Stephen Woolpert
Valuating Traditional Knowledge in Economic Development
Melisande
Middleton
Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, Paris, France
In addition to being recognized for its cultural and social value, traditional knowledge (IK/TK) of the environment withheld by indigenous communities can be valued as human capital and integrated as such in local economic development processes. An example of this occurs in the use of a traditional irrigation technology (raised fields) in the Peruvian region of Puno. This case study allows for an evaluation of the economic benefits of TK at the community level. The analysis raises the issue put forth in recent WTO discussions regarding article 27.3(b), that IK/TK could be protected by intellectual property (IP) rights patents when it is estimated to be useful as human capital.
Challenges of Using Traditional Knowledge for Environmental Justice
S.
Ram Vemuri
School of Law and Business, Faculty
of Law, Business and Arts, Charles Darwin
University,
Darwin,
Australia
No abstract is presently available
Knowledge and Valuation in Environmental Justice
Struggles
Eurig
Scandrett
Department of Sociology,
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
and
Urban Theology Unit, Sheffield, United Kingdom
Since 2000, Friends of
the Earth Scotland and Queen Margaret University have been providing
education on environmental justice to community activists who are working
to tackling local environmental problems. These activists are largely
from working class communities which are disproportionately affected
by proximity to environmentally damaging activities, social neglect,
disenfranchised minority ethnic communities and trades unions campaigning
for improvements in the workplace environment. What unites these activists
is the identification that their community suffers environmental injustice.
In common with environmental justice struggles throughout the world,
all experience negative economic externalities of capitalist development.
Drawing on Martinez-Alier’s ‘environmentalism
of the poor’ thesis, I will explore the extent to which valuations
of the environment of these (and similar) activists are commensurate
with the economic logics of cost-benefit analysis.
The course uses methodologies
derived from Paulo Freire and popular education to seek to maximise the
relevance of the curriculum to the political struggles in which the communities
are engaged. Such methodologies generate knowledge of environmental justice
derived from dialogue between the experiences of communities of struggle,
the strategic campaigning of Friends of the Earth, and the traditions
of academic rigour of the university.
This paper draws on my experiences
as coordinator of the course, analysed through liberation theology, which
depends on the theologian’s
participation in political struggle as a precursor to theological reflection.
Much ecological theology in the Christian tradition focuses on Creation
narratives originating from Biblical texts whose ideological function
seems to have been the justification of ruling class practices. Incommensurable
valuation is an economic question which enables an alternative ecological
theology to be developed from Prophetic narratives.
The paper will explore
the extent to which such movements for environmental justice form a critique
of contemporary capitalism which is both materialist and prophetic.