ANTH 320/DEVS 321 PEOPLE AND DEVELOPMENT Fall 2018
I acknowledge that St FX is in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People.
Oct. 29 Climate change, NGOs, states and adaptation
        READ: Hirsch, Eric (2017)  The unit of resilience: unbeckoned degrowth and the politics of (post)development in Peru and the Maldives. Journal of Political Ecology 24: 462-475

NOTE: Nov. 2: COURSE DROP DATE FOR FIRST TERM THREE-CREDIT COURSES


Hirsch: article points to the importance of precise definitions, units of analysis; also to careful and rigorous research

- how does climate change affect development, especially for communities in vulnerable eco-systems?
    - what is the issue for the Colca Valley, in Peru?
    - what is the issue for the Maldives?
- concepts: what is “resilience” (also, this definition is Hirsch’s argument)
        - why is the definition of the unit of resilience a political act?
    - what is degrowth/Degrowth?
    - what is development/Development?
- why might “degrowth,” rather than economic development and growth, be controversial? For whom?
- Peru
    - how did the NGO, DESCO, define the unit of resilience?
    - how did this change and why? How did NGO funding come into doubt and what replaced it?
    - why is mining both “problematic and promising”? How does it ensure the permanence of the household, but jeopardize the community’s ecological sustainability?
- Maldives
    - what are the implications of the different framings of the unit of resilience as the world, the nation-state, and the individual?
    - how did Bluepeace officially define its goal?
    - how did its director reframe resilience in terms of individual resilience?
- why is defining the unit of resilience, that is, the thing that is taken to have to survive, so political, and have such implications for what is done?