We begin with inequalities: the health of the planet and humanity depends on our ability to reduce them. Inequalities lead societies into interrelated crises: environmental, climatic, energetic, agricultural, economic, social, and public health. While certain individuals and groups are disproportionately more affected than others, everyone at all levels of society suffer from negative impacts of inequalities. To improve our understanding of these inequalities, we focus on two main areas: the population and the way in which it consumes the planet; and adaptation to stresses, in particular those induced by socio-environmental problems caused by our global socio-economic system. Our contribution is twofold. First, the articles together highlight the need to better understand the complex sources of inequalities, which we group into four main categories: information; issues of power; good intentions for development and their adverse effects; and systemic questions, particularly those related to land. In addition, there is a need to understand the socio-environmental challenges that arise from inequalities, which are: those related to scientific knowledge; linked to dynamic nature of diverse situations; concern implementation of projects that aim to reduce inequalities; surrounding obstacles; and other challenges that involve issues of vulnerability and justice. Based on these understandings, our second contribution is the exploration of some solutions, examined from local, national, to global scales. Systemic solutions at different scales are integral to tackle inequalities, in order to achieve a more equitable and just world.

The burning of agricultural residue during the dry season in rural northern Thailand has been identified as an important source of air pollution at the heart of an ongoing haze crisis particularly felt in the region's urban areas. Public outcry in Chiang Mai over poor air quality pressured the government into developing fire management and prevention efforts in areas with high numbers of open-air fires, such as Mae Chaem district. Nevertheless, the haze situation deteriorated, prompting the 2014–2019 military-led government to develop a pilot fire-reduction project known as the Mae Chaem Model, whose original design to mitigate and prevent fires in the district evolved into a series of sustainable development objectives. Given optimistic discourses surrounding the project's novel and participatory nature, this paper offers a critical analysis of initial project results. The project claims to offer prized benefits such as tenure security in exchange for the collaboration of villagers in the project. Interviews with villagers and other stakeholders reveal a series of concerns regarding 1) the production of land use history maps for 2002, 2011 and 2016, and 2) substantial expropriation of farmland and other severe land use restrictions. Our calculations suggest that, under a likely scenario, an average of 66% of farmland would be expropriated in the process (88% in one community). In accordance with villagers interviewed in two villages of Mae Chaem district, we are concerned about the capacity of local villagers to sufficiently intensify their production or otherwise limit the negative impact of such drastic land use restrictions on their livelihood. The paper also outlines other problems related to the temporary and revocable nature of the benefits offered and the rather dubious claims of coercion-free 'participation'.

MÉRENNE-SCHOUMAKER, Bernadette (2020) Atlas mondial des matières premières. Incertitudes et défis. Autrement (3e édition), 95 p. (ISBN : 978-2-8107-0683-9). Un article de la revue Cahiers de géographie du Québec (Revisiter la pensée de Paul Vidal de la Blache) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Cette contribution interroge la mise en tourisme du Guizhou, en Chine du Sud, à travers le cas de trois villages de la minorité ethnique shui. La promotion de ces villages au rang de sites touristiques officiels suit un modèle d’aménagement standardisé, ayant pour double objectif le développement économique et la construction d’une identité nationale. Elle implique aussi des transformations souvent importantes du paysage quotidien des populations. Pris entre les actions développementalistes de l’État et les stratégies aménagistes locales, les paysages constituent un véritable enjeu : au final, à qui appartiennent les paysages de ces villages shui ? Après la présentation de trois situations contrastées, les représentations qu’ont les habitants des transformations de leur paysage sont analysées. Celles-ci révèlent l’évolution de leur regard et leur adhésion au modèle dans ses principes d’aménagement. Mais des tensions émergent, ce qui témoigne du faible pouvoir dont disposent les populations dans le processus économique et politique de développement touristique.

Este artículo pone a prueba la hipótesis de que la doble imagen de identidad étnica y medioambiental de un grupo -que denominamos eco-etnicidad- puede explicar gran parte de su emancipación; así, estar dotado de una eco-etnicidad significativa podría proporcionar a ese grupo un soft power sustancial procedente del turismo. El texto se basa en una investigación cualitativa sobre el terreno, en la que se comparan tres estudios de caso de las tierras altas de Nepal (Annapurnas), China (Guizhou) y Laos (Luang Namtha). El desarrollo local del turismo resalta la etnicidad y los conocimientos medioambientales locales, pero en grados muy diferentes. En conclusión, la eco-etnicidad no aparece como un factor de emancipación económica determinante.

This article tests the following hypothesis: What we call "eco-ethnicity" – the dual images of ethnic and environmental identity of a group – can explain to a large extent the empowerment of local groups; being endowed with significant eco-ethnicity could thus provide substantial "soft power" to a group from tourism. The paper is based on qualitative fieldwork research comparing three highland case studies in Nepal (Annapurna), China (Guizhou) and Laos (Louang Namtha). There, local tourism highlights ethnicity and local environmental knowledge, although to very different extents. In conclusion, eco-ethnicity does not appear to be a decisive factor for economic empowerment.

Cet article teste l'hypothèse suivante : la double image identitaire ethnique et environnementale d'un groupe – que nous appelons éco-ethnicité – peut expliquer dans une large mesure son émancipation ; ainsi, le fait d'être doté d'une éco-ethnicité significative pourrait fournir à ce groupe un soft power substantiel tiré du tourisme. Le texte s'appuie sur une recherche qualitative de terrain comparant trois études de cas en altitude au Népal (Annapurna), en Chine (Guizhou) et au Laos (Louang Namtha). La mise en tourisme locale y souligne l'ethnicité et les connaissances environnementales locales, mais à des degrés très divers. En conclusion, l’éco-ethnicité n’apparait pas comme un facteur d’émancipation économique déterminant.

Why is rural tourism growing in some “marginal” Asian highlands but not in others? Why, in the regions with growing rural tourism, are “local people” impacted in different ways? Based on qualitative fieldwork research, this paper addresses these issues through a comparison of five highland case studies in India (Kumaon), Nepal (Annapurna), China (Guizhou), Vietnam (Lam Dong) and Laos (Luang Namtha). It tests the following hypothesis among others: What we call eco-ethnicity – the dual visibility of ethnic and environmental identity of a group – explains to a large extent the empowerment of local groups. Being endowed with a significant eco-ethnicity can provide substantial soft power to a group.

RAFFESTIN, Claude (2019) Pour une géographie du pouvoir. Lyon, ENS Éditions, 249 p. (ISBN 979-1-03620-113-4). Un article de la revue Cahiers de géographie du Québec (Les villes et les territoires face au genre : état des lieux) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Five case studies are presented, all located in highland regions of South Asia and inhabited by ethnic minorities (India, Nepal, China, Laos, Vietnam), in order to analyze the consequences of narratives, actions and transformations of governance via the landscape. How does the landscape become, through tourism, a "way of seeing" territories, how does it foster renewed governance of these territories? After having shown how the use of landscape resources leads to the development of a landscape culture via tourism, we will see that the landscape occupies various places in the processes of territorial governance. A final typology will be based on three criteria : consciousness of the landscape, governance process, and tourism expansion.

Five case studies are presented, all located in highland regions of South Asia and inhabited by ethnic minorities (India, Nepal, China, Laos, Vietnam), in order to analyze the consequences of narratives, actions and transformations of governance via the landscape. How does the landscape become, through tourism, a « way of seeing » territories, how does it foster renewed governance of these territories ? After having shown how the use of landscape resources leads to the development of a landscape culture via tourism, we will see that the landscape occupies various places in the processes of territorial governance. A final typology will be based on three criteria : consciousness of the landscape, governance process, and tourism expansion.

The adaptation of human societies to the deep transformations imposed by the globalisation of the world economy and related changes to various environments constitutes probably the most prominent challenge for the 21st century, especially in mountainous and marginal areas occupied by ethnic minorities. In Southeast Asia, modern states are continuing to build their territorial legitimacy, integrating areas inhabited by groups that have become ethnic minorities. In Vietnam’s Lâm Đồng province, Dalat is thus more and more integrated into national and international economic networks, especially those of tourism and agricultural production (coffee, flowers, vegetables, etc.). This integration has transformed the life of the people living in nearby villages. Our hypothesis is that there is a differentiation in this process as ethnic minorities are mostly marginalised compared to Kinh (or Vietnamese) people. In this text, we examine the general context of agrarian and urban transitions and how it has affected three villages, Da Sar, Da Nhim and Da Chaïs, in Lac Duong district. This study is mostly based on fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 as a comparison with previous research done since 2007 in the same area.

This chapter is about protected areas in mainland Southeast Asia and how they contribute to transform the whole geography of people who live within them or in their vicinity. Ethnic minorities in mountainous areas are particularly vulnerable. Our hypothesis is that ethnic minorities in general are marginalized in this process of integration into national territorial projects and the world’s economic system. Though, marginality appears at various geographical levels, from internal local village systems to the larger national and international ones. To contribute to study this question, we will rely on the case of Luang Nam Tha province in Lao PDR. In this country, a large protected area system has been created since 1993, mostly with international funding and training. This chapter aims first to present some recent context of protected area development in mainland Southeast Asia, focusing on Laos: what is the geographical portrait and how it contributes to build national territorial projects. Secondly, mostly using the case of Luang Nam Tha province, we identify and analyze how protected areas contribute to transforming the socioeconomic geography of local people and how fast. Cash crops and ecotourism developments are part of this process, an ‘integration process’; and other state endeavours accompany these efforts and add up to this changing local geography. Thirdly, using information gathered in 13 villages in 2008, as well as from several visits since then, including in 2017, we aim to document the local impacts of this integration process. Our conclusion is that the speed of changes constitutes an important variable to measure whether local people are able to adapt during this integration process. The faster the process, the more people that are marginalized.

Landscape aesthetics provides humans with health and social benefits contributing to overall well-being, thus representing a cultural ecosystem service. Landscape biophysical and social attributes create information that is interpreted as either beauty or blight by the mind of the beholder. The ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES) modelling platform is quite suited to the landscape aesthetics paradigm, since it is characterized by both a strong focus on the spatial connectivity between ecosystems and beneficiaries and by the employment of Bayesian networks to quantify and communicate uncertainty. A conceptual framework based on landscape aesthetic abstraction levels was proposed to build these Bayesian networks, progressively linking tangible indicators to abstract dimensions and concepts. As input to ARIES, a simple and rapid participatory methodology was designed to weight indicators according to stakeholder preferences, from which values the probabilities were derived for use in canonical probabilistic models. The participatory indicator identification methodology generated both abstract and concrete terms, suggesting that the process should be supervised to obtain clear and tangible indicators. A sensitivity analysis revealed that individual visual blight indicators had more profound impacts on landscape aesthetic while the effect of beauty indicators was more subtle and balanced. Although the methodology may require a relatively large number of participants to derive probabilities, the procedure was not overly challenging for the participants. This methodology has the potential to be implemented widely, in various contexts and for different periods, accounting for alternative spatiotemporal variations and land cover contexts.

GHORRA-GOBIN, Cynthia et REGHEZZA-ZITT, Magali (dir.) (2016) Entre local et global : les territoires dans la mondialisation. Paris, Éditions Le Manuscrit, 280 p. (ISBN : 978-2-30404-584-0). An article from journal Cahiers de géographie du Québec (Mémoires collectives et production des territoires urbains), on Érudit.

Aborder l’oeuvre de Rodolphe De Koninck, géographe québécois dont la carrière couvre plus de cinq décennies, doit se faire sans prétention tellement les portes d’entrée sont nombreuses, depuis sa première publication majeure,Les Cent-Îles du Lac Saint-Pierre, parue en 1970. À partir des transformations agraires, d’une part, et de la construction des États modernes, d’autre part, l’objectif est d’examiner l’évolution de la contribution du géographe à la compréhension de ces questions, tant en Asie du Sud-Est que dans leur universalité. Considérant les enjeux actuels, liés entre autres à une transition agraire source d’inégalités et aux impacts environnementaux néfastes, il s’agit de suggérer en quoi les recherches de Rodolphe De Koninck contribuent à mieux faire comprendre ces enjeux.

Reviewed by: Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam by Pamela D. McElwee Steve Déry (bio) Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam. By Pamela D. McElwee. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Pp. 312. $30. Pamela McElwee and I both started working in Vietnam in 1996, a time when “forests were on everyone’s mind” (p. xi). We started studying two sides of the same coin, or rather, two sides of the “same” piece of (high)-land: I researched agricultural colonization in Lam Dong; she was looking at deforestation and forest management in Ha Tinh. Her book is based on extensive fieldwork and archival research both in France and in Vietnam, as well as on various government, grey, and academic literature in Vietnamese, English, and, at times, French. Thus, Forests are Gold is the product of a long (20 years!) maturing thought on what is going on in Vietnam around “Trees, People” and forests. This book deservedly won the 2017 EUROSEAS (European Association for Southeast Asian Studies) Social Science Book Prize. Unlike so many books published worldwide, it represents so much more than a collection of past articles published in journals and assembled to sell a book. Actually, McElwee has never before used in her publications a concept that constitutes the thread of her book: “environmental rule.” During all these years, she witnessed processes of deforestation, afforestation, land use transformations, protected areas creation, and migration of lowland Kinh (majority Vietnamese people) through the implementation of various government programs, from sedentarization in the 1990s to the more recent “payment for ecosystem services” (PES), and all the impacts on the lives and identities of ethnic minorities. What connects [End Page 181] the dots? According to McElwee, it is “environmental rule.” It “occurs when states, organizations, or individuals use environmental or ecological reasons as justification for what is really a concern with social planning, and thereby intervene in such disparate areas as land ownership, population settlement, labor availability, or markets” (p. 5). To make her point, McElwee uses various theoretical tools, including the concept of governmentality (Foucault), the scope of which she broadens through the use of the actor-network theory: it “gives us a more complete picture of how environmental rule happens than governmentality alone” (p. 23). Her study “falls . . . into a field known as political ecology” (p. 12), though the task (to political ecologists), quoting Bruce Braun, is “to understand ‘the underlying processes through which particular global assemblages of nature and society are produced’” (Bruce Braun, “Environmental Issues: Global Natures in the Space of Assemblage.” Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 5: 644–54, at 647). I dare say: this is the bread and butter of geography! Regardless of the discipline to which her book contributes the most—her endeavors are clearly multidisciplinary—what is important is that throughout five chapters, McElwee tracks how knowledge is produced and valued. Through what she calls the “knowledge networks” (p. 182), she tracks how it creates and defines problems, how it shapes politics and programs, and how it sways “individual subjectivities” at all levels. That is where you can find power relations and their systemic organization. To understand its evolution since the 1990s, McElwee puts forest management into historical perspectives, tracking the emergence of environmental rule through the vagaries of colonialism during the French era (1858–1954) (Chapter 1), the communist management period (1945–86) (Chapter 2), and the đổi mới era that started “market socialism” in 1986, which eventually developed into neoliberalism after the end of the U.S. embargo. During the last thirty years or so, environmental rule in Vietnam has followed the quick pace of socioeconomic transformations. Changing definitions, changing rules, and changing management have contributed to the “emergence of ‘deforestation’” (Chapter 3, p. 100), the switch of focus on reforesting the “bare hills” (Chapter 4), and eventually, the view of trees as carbon accumulators (Chapter 5). In the end, it seems that what I would call the “complex geographical system” of environmental rule changes through the course of time more in response to market stimuli than any other power, even when it is filtered through the state apparatus. But given the...

BAILLY, Antoine, BÉGUIN, Hubert, et Renato SCARIATI (2016) Introduction à la géographie humaine. Paris, Armand Colin, 240 p. (ISBN 978-2-200-61155-2). An article from journal Cahiers de géographie du Québec (Prospective territoriale participative), on Érudit.

REDON, Marie, MAGRIN, Géraud, CHAUVIN, Emmanuel, PERRIER BRUSLÉ, Laetitia et LAVIE, Émilie (dir.) (2015) Ressources mondialisées. Essais de géographie politique. Paris, Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne, 336 p. (ISBN 978-2-85944-908-7). An article from journal Cahiers de géographie du Québec (L’Afrique : environnement, développement, sociétés (suite)), on Érudit.