1 | Page
Thesis presented to obtain the degree of
Master of Science in Human Ecology: Culture, Power and Sustainability
May 13th, 2011
Salmon. Gender. Chiloé:
Reflections on Sustainable Development.
Supervisor: Dr. Susan Paulson
Submitted by: Teresa-Laura-Maria Bornschlegl
Human Ecology Division
Department of Human Geography
Faculty of Social Sciences
Lund University
Table of Content:
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………..3
Acknowledgment……………………………………………………………………………...4
List of abbreviations………………………………………………………………………...... 6
List of tables…………………………………………………………………………………...6
1 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………….7
2 Research design…………………………………………………………………………8
2. 1 Conceptual framework…………………………………………………………………....8
2. 2 Methods and blind spots……………………………………………………………..…..13
2. 3 Times and spaces……………………………………………………………………..….15
3 Findings on Gender and sustainable development……………………………16
3. 1 What is the (sustainability) issue in Chiloé?...... 16
3. 1. 1 The salmon boom……………………………………………………………………..16
3. 1. 2 Regarding social sustainability……………………………………………………...... 17
3. 1. 3 Regarding ecological sustainability…………………………………………...………19
3. 2 Livelihoods, and capitals…………………………………………………………….....20
3. 2. 1 Chiloé 1960 – 1990…………………………………………………………………...20
3. 2. 2 Chiloé 1990 – 2009………………………………………………………...…………24
3. 3 Social coalitions …………………………………………………………….………….31
3. 3. 1 Pro and contra salmon: social coalitions in Chiloé…………………..………………31
3. 3. 2 The matrix of social coalitions: participation and organization………………………32
3. 3. 3 … towards economic diversity and economic self-reliance? ………………………...34
3. 3. 4 …towards social inclusion and social justice?...... 35
3. 3. 5 … towards ecologically sound legal institutions? ………………………….………...36
4 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………40
Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………...…….46
Abstract:
This study discusses sustainable development with the help of a case study of the Chilean province Chiloé between 1960 and 2009 – main scene of the salmon industry that developed very rapidly in recent decades. Today,Chiloé faces the now common dilemma of ecological devastations and increasing income disparity, widely perceived as inevitable side-effects of development leading to local employment opportunities and national economic growth. Integrating gender into institutional analysis in the context of sustainable development, the study looks at implications of gender for the distribution of assets before and after the establishment of the salmon industry, the formation of social coalitions, the monitoring and control of legal institutions in Chiloé. The study aims to provide a more detailed picture of the territorial dynamics of Chiloé for potential policy recommendations towards a kind of development that would support social inclusion, ecological sustainability, and a stable economy.
Keywords: salmon farming, gender, institutions, coalitions, sustainable development, Chiloé
Acknowledgement:
First, and foremost, I’d like to thank my family (who is always there, and who taught me how to swim, and how to fish), Christine Ambrosi (who changed my life in many ways), Peter Robertson (who changed my life in many other ways), my two- handful- friends (from whom I am life-long learning), and the Japanese Karate Association (who gave me a direction).
Tusen tack to Dr. Susan Paulson for having connected me to the world of sustainable development in general, and to Rimisp – Centro Latinoamericano para el Desarollo Rural - in detail. I owe Rimisp thanks not only for the financing of my research, but also for the access to the huge amounts of data accumulated during all the years of their on-going research on Chiloé.
With Rimisp, I am grateful for having had the chance to be integrated into the marvellous research team within the Rural Territorial Dynamics Program (DTR) on Chiloé Island, Chile.Special thanks to Eduardo Ramírez, Felix Modrego, Rodrigo Yáñez, and, of course, Julie-Claire Macé– my “gender-team”-colleague with whom I carried out a gender analysis within the project. Our report– published as a DTR working paper under the title: “Gender System Dynamics in Central Chiloé, or the Quadrature of the Cycles” - builds an analysis of some aspects of my thesis research, and contributes material and understanding to this thesis.
Finally, thanks to all the people I encountered in Chiloé, for their patience, their trust, and their wisdom. They all taught me memorable lessons.
Dedicated to the wild fish.
List of abbreviation
CONAMA Comisión Nacional del Medio Ambiente
CEPAL Comisión Económica para América Latina
EIR Environmental Impact Report
FCR Feed Conversation Ratio
NGO Non Governmental Organisation
ProChile Dirección de Promoción de Exportaciones
PRODEMU Fundación para la Promoción y el Desarrollo de la Mujer
SEIA Sistema de Evaluación de Impacto Ambiental
SERNAPESCA Servicio Nacional de Pesca
SUBPESCA Subsecretaría de Pesca
Rimisp Centro Latinoamericano para el Desarollo Rural
List of tables:
Table A: Women’s cultural capital per year, and differences between 1990 and 2009
Table B: Men’s cultural capital per year, and differences between 1990 and 2009
Table C: Differences in men and women’s cultural capital per year, and the change in differences between 1990 and 2009
Table D: Social and political participation of men and women in year 1990 and 2009
1 Introduction
“Because ´development´ is a word—like saying ´democracy´—we all think of something different”
Former Director PRODEMU, Interview, 2010
Chile is often held as theexample for succesfull development in Latin America: from the 1980s on, the country experienced a pronounced economic growth marked by a sustained increase in savings, investments and export sectors. However, this succesfull boom –commonly refered to as the “Chilean Miracle” - has a downside: the over-exploitation ofnatural resources, and rather harsh working conditions for the human labor force.
Thus, the long-term prospect of this kind of development and therewith its role model raises questions. And while there is much research looking for explanations of what made the “Chilean Miracle” so succesful (Cypher, 2004), the overarching topic of my thesis consists in an assessement of what made it so unsuccesful in terms of ecologcial and social sustainability.
My object of examination (under the microscope) is a case study of the development of the Chilean provinceChiloébetween 1960 and 2009 – the main scene of the salmon sector. The latter ranges amongst the most contributive parts to the “Chilean Miracle”, with a production growth of 1745 % within a time span of only ten years, generating annualy USD $ 2 billion, and the employment (direct and indirect) of 50,000 persons.
Previous to the arrival of the salmon industry at site, the province Chiloé - an archipelago of more than 40 islands located in South Chile - was marked by a mostly subsistence economy based on small -scale agriculture, shellfish collection, forestry, wool-based crafting, complemented by temporal emigrations to northern and southern Chile and Argentina (Macé & Bornschlegl, 2010). Along with the establishment of the salmon industry,Chiloé experienced a growth in income and local employment opportunities, but also an increase in ecological devastations, energy use, and social disparity.
Thus, my main concern within that thesis is to analyse the recent historical development of Chiloé in the light of issues of social and ecological sustainability. My approach draws oninstitutional theory, placing the weight on the social process of institutions, that is, their interaction with different livelihood strategies of diverse actors. I set out to demonstrate if and how a gender analysis of such social process could enrich research of sustainable development. Thus, my research questions are: How does gender play out within the institutional analysis in terms of the distribution of assets before and after the establishment of the salmon industry? How within the formation of social coalitions, and the making and enforcement of legal institutions in Chiloé?
The objective of my thesis consists primarily in painting a more accurate picture of Chiloé’s development in order to understand - as the inspector is looking at the dead body: what had happened exactly. The purpose is to present that picture in a way that will contributing to thought and policy on how a more sustainable development in Chiloé could be achieved, and how the research results could lead into some practical applications.
2 Research design
“The theory decides what can be observed”
Albert Einstein, 1926
2. 1 Conceptual framework
The following sections define the main concepts that helped me to illuminate my research questions with a theoretical light: institutional theory (institutions, capitals, livelihoods of actors, and social coalitions), and gender – both seen as established theoretical tools in the context of sustainable development.
There had been already a lot of academic debate about the meaning of “development” (Rostow, 1971; Cowen & Shalton, 1996), and the number of opinions about what “sustainable development” would mean are certainly not less plentiful (WCED, 1987; Ekins, 1993; Wackernagel & Rees, 1996; Dincer&Rosen, 2005). For the following thesis, I set the definition of a sustainable community by Bridger and Luloff (2001)as Archimedean point for my understanding of sustainable development. Their ideal typical sustainable community is demarcated along five interrelated dimensions:
“First, as is the case with standard economic development strategies, there is an emphasis on increasing local economic diversity. Second, virtually all definitions stress the importance of self-reliance, especially economic self-reliance. This is not to be confused with economic self-sufficiency. Self-reliance entails the creation of local markets, local production and processing of previously imported goods, greater cooperation among local economic entities, and the like. Self-reliant communities would still be linked to larger economic structures, but they would have vibrant local economies that would better protect them from the whims of capital than is currently the case. The third dimension centers around a reduction in energy use coupled to the careful management and recycling of waste products. Ideally, this means that the use of energy and material is in balance with the local ecosystem’s ability to absorb waste. The fourth dimension focuses on the protection and enhancement of biological and environmental diversity and wise stewardship of natural resources. Sustainable communities provide a balance between human needs and activities and those of other life forms. Finally, sustainable communities are committed to social justice. Sustainable communities provide for the housing and employment needs of all residents, and they do so without the kind of class and race-based spatial separation that is typical of many localities. As a result, they also ensure equality of access to public services. And perhaps most important, sustainable communities strive to create an empowered citizenry that can effectively participate in local decision-making”. (Bridger & Luloff, 2001: 462)
Following institutional theory within sustainable development research (Ostrom et al,2005; Berkes, 1989; Agrawal, 2001) I further assume that institutions are the meansguiding the economic development (that is, the possible livelihood strategies of actors, or, the possible ways for human beings to make a living), preferably towards those stated five dimensions in order to meet the goal of social and ecological sustainability.
By institutions I mean the set of established and embedded rules that structures social interactions and their particular enforcing characteristic (North, 1991; Hodgson, 2006). Those rules can be of legal or non-legal character: both types set an agenda of limited probabilities by constraining different options of an actor’s behaviours within a particular situation X to the chance of a certain possible response Y.
Since human beings tend to align their actions with their assumptions about the probable actions of their social environment (hence actions are always “reactions”), institutions are mostly thought of as ways to reduce uncertainties resulting from collective action problems between asymmetrically informed actors (Ostrom, 1986; Hall, 1996). Institutions are not to conflate with “organizations” – the latter are structured organizational agencies composed of actors oriented towards rules.
Defining institutions as rules, however, does not settle the matter entirely: to become a rule, legal or non-legal regulations also must be recognized and enacted implying a potential sanction in case of defection. Rules are not necessarily what is common in the sense of a majority behavior (or, “the average”), but what is normative. It is the potential sanction that distinguishes rules from mere repeated practices. Literal enforcement of rules is expensive in terms of transaction costs, and so in most contexts, enforcement is “assured” through legitimacy[1].
The occurrence of sustainability problems in the terms of those five dimensions can thus be attributed initially to malfunctioning on the level of institutions – there are either “bad” institutions; or “good” institutionsare not sufficiently monitored or enforced. The possible livelihood strategies of actors would then be guided towards an unsustainable direction. Stating that is, however, not to say that there would be an ideal set of institutions for solving universally all sustainable problems across space and time (Ostrom et al, 2005).
Livelihoodsof actors in the context of sustainable development are to be understood in terms of theiraccessto and disposition of capitals (Bebbington, 1999). In reference to Bourdieu (1985), I distinguish hereby between social, economic, cultural and symbolic capital, adding the notion of “natural capital” (Ekins, 1993). The latter equals the stock and flows of non-renewable and renewable natural resources; economic capital corresponds to the financial means in terms of income and access to credit. Cultural capital equates the knowledge and education within a particular social system. Social capital refers to the network or social contacts an actor disposes of. Emphasis lies in the goal oriented dimension of social capital: returns are (and can be) expected from a contact. Social capital is not synonym to civic engagement and participation in social organizations or to conflate with “community”.
Social capital does not equate with social coalitions (sometimes also termed within institutional theory: structured interorganizational cooperation). While being an important part of it, the formation of a social coalition involves all kind of capitals on the part of the actors (and the question remains under which circumstances it leads to that). A social coalition is the assemblage of different organizations, and depends hereby on the participation of actors in as well as on the communication between such entities. On the one hand, the negotiations and struggles taking place in the process of forming and advocating social coalitions are directed by institutions through e.g. the assurance of trust by reducing uncertainty and fulfilment of mutual expectations. On the other hand, social coalitions can influence the creation and enforcement of institutions. According to Elinor Ostrom (1986), the latter follow from:
“(1) creating positions (e.g., member, convener, agent, etc.); (2) stating how participants enter or leave positions; (3) stating which actions participants in these positions are required, permitted, or forbidden to take; and (4) stating which outcome participants are required, permitted, or forbidden to affect.”(Ostrom, 1986: 18)
The degree to which a social coalition determines such setting of an institutional agenda by negotiating/struggling with other actors/social coalitions depends on the strength of the aggregated value of the capitals brought by actors into the coalition. That is, the stronger social coalition the more influence on the creation and enforcement of institutions.The strength of the single actors, in turn, rests on the kind and the proportional composite of capitals the actor has access to or disposes of. We can think of capitals as different suits in a card game, the composite of capitals as the hand the actors got dealt out, and institutions as the rules according to which the card game takes place.
However, all capitals discussed so far are not fix values in themselves (nor substitutable with each other). Their value is determined by the (temporally and spatially varying) symbolic capital - “commonly called prestige, reputation, renown, etc., which is the form in which the different forms of capital are perceived and recognized as legitimate” (Bourdieu, 1985: 274). In that sense, capitals are not only means for making a living in a purely material sense, but they also “give meaning” to the actor’s world (Sen, 1997).
In sum, problems of ecological and/or social sustainability resulting from “bad” institutions, or a lack of enforcement of “good” institutions, can be delegated to the level of social coalitions, and so to the distribution of capitals, and which suit of capital is classified as trump. While the framework of institutional theory renders the concept of sustainable development therewith better operational through such classifications, it often remains a gender blind block (North, 1991; Hodgson, 2006; Ostrom et al,2005).
of sexes, but rather products of social relations embedded in spatial and temporal contexts[2]. In turn, in the context of sustainable development gender has sometimes been reduced to “women’s studies only”. Or: to “projects to help barefoot, poor women”, respectively. Such approaches as stirred by “ecofeminism” commonly hold that women inherent a closer relationship to “nature” – what means not only that the subjugation of women (by the patriarchy/capitalism/ect.) is linked to the subjugation of nature (will say: ecological degradation). Furthermore, women are said to be “naturally” better targets and vehicles for sustainable development projects (Shiva, 1989). That “synergism” found adaption by agencies such as the World Bank writing into their sustainable development programs the support (“empowering”) of women for overcoming poverty (through giving micro-credits), stimulating economic growth (through incorporation in the labor market), checking population growth (through education).
That instru-mental, women- focused essentialism did not remain uncontested: critics (Jackson, 1993; Paulson, 2010) hold that “women” are not a single homogenous unitary category, that women’s relation to the environment cannot be understood in isolation from the ones of men, and that there aren’t, anyway, such things as “natural” qualities In order to understand men’s and women’s incentive towards sustainable development, a more systemic gender analysis would be needed.
Accordingly, in this thesis, gender is embedded into institutional theory and conceptualized as “constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” and as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Scott,1986: 1076). That differences are perceived is to say that certain distinctions are deemed to be significant within a particular social system: differences do not exist in and of themselves. They are made differentiations: order from noise (Luhmann, 1984; von Förster, 2002).
In this sense, gender structures perception, implying a normative dimension of how human beings are expected to behave appropriately according to their “gender category.” Gender means hence the assumptions as well as the performance of practices in everyday life that are largely patterned via and in terms of a distinction between the perceived different sexes(Acker, 1992). Gender is an organizing principle within social relations whose fulfilment in terms of gendered expectations varies through time and space.
Gendering institutional theory then means recognizing that the position and accessing of capitals of each particular actor, the regularized leaving and entering of positions and the particular prescribed actions differ in terms of gender.Furthermore, gender is crucial in understanding how actors are created through social interactions with other actors through mutual behavioural expectation according to the respective cultural beliefs: women become women, men become men. Gender is happening at a micro – and macro level - and serves thereforeas an analytic observable to understand legitimation processes of power.