期刊
GEOFORUM
卷 54, 期 -, 页码 315-323出版社
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.08.007
关键词
Wastelands; Jatropha; Biofuels; Prosopis
类别
Mirroring global trends in biofuel policy making, the Government of India recently enacted a policy restricting feedstock cultivation to 'wastelands', a government designation for marginal lands. This strategy, the government asserts, will help improve the country's energy security, mitigate climate change and reduce rural poverty through job creation. As other critical biofuels scholarship has documented, land categorizations like 'wasteland' are political constructs homogenously applied to indicate 'empty', 'unproductive' land 'available' for development. While claiming that such constructions mask socio-political relations on the ground, little evidence has been offered analyzing the impacts of these omissions or evaluating how wasteland constructions are sustained. This paper provides such an analysis through a case study of Jatropha curcas biodiesel promotion on wastelands in Tamil Nadu, India. I find that Prosopis juliflora on Tamil Nadu's wastelands currently supports a dynamic energy economy servicing both rural and urban consumers. The Prosopis economy provides substantially more energy services, jobs and economic development opportunities than would Jatropha biodiesel. Yet political relations amongst stakeholders obscure the Prosopis economy from biofuel policy dialogs. That Prosopis was originally spread throughout India as part of a wasteland development program of the 1970s underscores the deeply political nature of the concept of wasteland. These findings demonstrate that marginal lands, as currently constructed, do not exist. By extension, locating biofuels on such lands is not the 'win-win' strategy for simultaneously addressing energy security, climate change and rural poverty that advocates suggest. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据