The "failure" of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan: A postcapitalist critique of a biased narrative

Ottavia Cima

This paper questions a widespread narrative that presents cooperative initiatives as mainly unsuccessful in postsocialist contexts. Taking the example of cooperative promotion in Kyrgyzstan after its independence from the Soviet Union, it highlights how this narrative is part of a broader hegemonic discourse on development and on the economy. The paper advances an alternative, postcapitalist, reading of cooperatives and cooperation in Kyrgyzstan and postsocialist contexts more in general. 

Validating verdancy or vacancy? The relationship of community gardens and vacant lands in the U.S.

Luke Drake and Laura J. Lawson

Highlights

•Community gardens are often seen as temporary uses of vacant land.

•Gardeners see them as important parts of neighborhoods and cities.

•Local governments and organizations historically planned gardens to be temporary.

•Increasingly, gardeners reproduce those dominant narratives as well.

•Rethinking these transformations can lead to better policy toward vacant land.

 

Abstract

An Orthodoxy of 'The Local': Post-colonialism, Participation and Professionalism in Northern Thailand

Katharine McKinnon

The emergence of a participatory orthodoxy in the development industry has had enormous positive impact, however discourses of participation are also being used in surprisingly political ways. This paper explores how a “pro-local” discourse amongst development professionals in northern Thailand is being deployed in ways that undermine the goals of empowerment and emancipation that are central to the aims of participatory approaches.

Postdevelopment, Professionalism and the Politics of Participation

Katharine McKinnon

In response to the accusation that development can only serve to perpetuate uneven power between the '1st' and '3rd' worlds, this paper explores possibilities for new postdevelopment approaches founded on an understanding of development as a political engagement.

Mapping Economic Diversity in the First World: The Case of Fisheries

Kevin St. Martin

This paper challenges the ways in which the First World/Third World binary, coupled with a "capitalocentric" discourse of economic development, limit possibilities for economies of community, cooperation and participation. Fisheries are used as an example to argue that undermining the presence of capitalism in the First World and making space for that which has been excluded (for example, community-based and territorial fisheries) requires a new economic and spatial imaginary.

Making Space for Community Resource Management in Fisheries

Kevin St. Martin

This article draws on field research in New England to challenge conventional individualized accounts of fishery dynamics and develop a representation of fisheries as diverse sites of community organization and cooperative management of common property. This is a "re-mapping," both literal and figurative, of the landscapes of fishery practice as a strategy to open more possibilities for communal resource management.