Papers by Nefratiri Weeks
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020
In rural northwestern China, the tension between economic growth and ecological crises demonstrat... more In rural northwestern China, the tension between economic growth and ecological crises demonstrate the limitations of dominant top-down approaches to water management. In the 1990’s, the Chinese government adopted the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approach to combat the degradation of water and ecological systems throughout its rural regions. While the approach has had some success at reducing desertification, water shortage, and ecological deterioration, there are important limitations and obstacles that continue to impede optimum outcomes in water management. As the current IWRM approach is instituted through a top-down centralized bureaucratic structure, it often fails to address the socio-political context in which water management is embedded and therefore lacks a complete treatment of how power is embedded in the bureaucracy and how it articulates through economic growth imperatives set by the Chinese state. The approach has relied on infrastructure-heavy and technocratic solutions to govern water demand, which has worked to undermine the focus on integration and public participation. Finally, the historical process through which water management mechanisms have been instituted is fraught with bureaucratic fragmentation and processes of centralization that work against some of its primary goals such as reducing uncertainty and risk in water management systems. This article reveals the historical, social, political, and economic processes behind these shortcomings in water management in rural northwestern China by focusing on the limitations of a top-down approach that rely on infrastructure, technology, and quantification, and thereby advances a more holistic, socio-political perspective for water management that considers the state-society dynamics inherent in water governance in rural China.
Handbook of Eating and Drinking
International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology
As industrialized animal agriculture expanded rapidly in the last decade, the resultant pollution... more As industrialized animal agriculture expanded rapidly in the last decade, the resultant pollution has generated widespread despoliation of natural resources and environmental victimization in rural China. This study examines the formulation and implementation of national environmental regulations from 2014 to 2019 and finds that the juxtaposing ministerial and provincial jurisdictions resulted in conflicting interpretations of the scale and evaluation criteria of the national policy. We argue that the regulations are more than centralized conservation programs designed to reduce environmental pollution caused by the expansion of animal husbandry. Instead, these regulations are fundamentally state-led rural development initiatives that utilize the designations of ecological protection zones to reconfigure land use and promote scale-up production in agricultural structural adjustment initiatives. The enforcement of these environmental regulations, therefore, constitutes a treadmill of...
Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene, 2021
In the last three decades, China’s explosive economic growth has drastically raised the standard ... more In the last three decades, China’s explosive economic growth has drastically raised the standard of living for most citizens. However, its capitalist turn has also contributed to the global despoliation of natural resources and detrimental environmental harm for its most vulnerable populations. Environmental justice for China’s rural populations is especially important in the context of China’s multi-faceted environmental crises as existing disparities have exacerbated the unequal distribution of economic wealth and environmental harm between rural and urban communities. This chapter examines two environmental intervention programs in China to evaluate environmental justice outcomes under authoritarian environmentalism. The first case study analyzes how the Chinese central government responded to desertification in the Shiyang River watershed in Gansu province by regulating groundwater extraction and promoting agricultural adjustments. The second case study analyzes state response to grassland degradation and ecological migration in the Alxa League of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Our analysis is guided by the following research questions: How have centralized environmental intervention programs addressed northwestern China's environmental and social crises? What are the environmental justice outcomes of top-down implementation of authoritarian environmentalism, and how does the exercise of authoritarian state power shape the equity implications of environmental regulations in China? How might we adapt and modify China’s environmental governance approach to a more just and alternative resource management model in the current era of Anthropocene? Our analysis is guided by a critical environmental justice framework and based on 136 in-depth interviews from farmers, herders, and grassroots cadres as well as government documents, official statistics, and reports from state-owned media in China between 2009 and 2016.
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Papers by Nefratiri Weeks