Antonio Castellano-Navarette
| Motivated by the complex and often conflictive nature-society relations experienced as a biologist, I have focused on critical social sciences in general and political ecology in particular. Agronomy and soil sciences were an intermediate step in this trajectory for better understanding natural resource management. Currently, I am a PhD Candidate at the Technology and Agrarian Change Group at Wageningen University, at The Netherlands. |
Research on Land-grabbing:
Agrarian struggles, environmental discourses and party politics: obstacles to land grabbing within the biofuel expansion in the Lacandon rainforest
Biofuel expansion constitutes the last modernisation attempt directed to rural communities in Mesoamerica. In Chiapas, this project is advanced by the State through contradictory alliances with agrarian organisations, resource redistribution to key actors and favourable conditions to investors, all couched in the terms of ‘green development’. Paradoxically, biofuel cultivation has been readily adopted by agrarian actors as a strategy to advance their claims. These organisations have appropriated common environmental discourses for very different political and social purposes, often strongly linked to party politics. In the Lacandon rainforest, the double economic and political character of biofuel development is actually limiting land grabbing processes. An apparently neoliberal project has gradually become a populist strategy for both conservative and progressive political parties. Based on an in-depth case study over the period 2011-2012, this study analyse current material and meaning struggles around land (and other natural resources) from a political ecology perspective.
