If you’re not a local, you can watch a video of her research. Catherine presented her video at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) Millennium Conference: Water-Ecosystem Services, Drought and Environmental Justice (click on the video icon, hers is the third down) held in Georgia last year.

Catherine writes:
Concepts of justice and the distribution of public resources have been an important aspect of social debate for centuries.  Finding fair and just allocations of natural resources remains a major preoccupation for national governments and their constituent communities.  Where such allocations or decisions are perceived as unjust, underlying social tensions can emerge and result in social conflict.  This study examines two such social conflicts: a 2006 NSW government action to cut a water allocation and the Victorian government’s North South Pipeline and Food Bowl Modernisation Project.

This study investigates these conflicts from a justice perspective, concentrating on notions of fairness and justice. Using a transdisciplinary investigative framework the thesis explores these notions through stakeholder perceptions of procedural justice and distributive justice.  Procedural justice is concerned with the fairness of elements of the decision-making process and distributive justice with the outcome or decision.  The study aims to find out how people perceive fairness and justice within the social context of the decision-making process and how these perceptions contribute to their acceptance of an outcome. The seminar will explore how justice constructs can be used in decision-making processes to increase the acceptance of outcomes and how better outcomes might be achieved.

He was referring to the Filipino artesanal fishers that we were to invite to a workshop on how addressing the fact that it often costs the fishers more to go fishing than to stay at home. Fishing is not very profitable  in the now sparsely populated coastal waters of northern Luzon, especially if you’re sticking to the legal handlines and traps rather than the illegal cyanide and dynamite.

Very soon after, another colleague took a photo of the fish we had been served for dinner, with his wedding ring as a reference point. Yes, the fish were increasingly small, and the incomes of the usually poorly educated fishers, even smaller. Words like intractable and insurmountable came far more easily to mind than hope and encouragement.

But Perry’s words have often come back to me, and I think they apply as much to the fishers as it does to  the countless development, disaster and research practitioners who are looking to improve the depressing trajectories that confront us every time we string a time series graph together. If we can’t hope, if our clients, participants and patients can’t hope, what will we have left? Philip Prett calls hope – substantial hope – ‘cognitive resolve’, and Braihwaite, Courville and Piper talk about the “bootstrapping that takes place between hope,
empowerment, ideas for change, and action”,  writing “hope is the most enduring of these,
lying in wait through cycles of adversity and resistance to change.”

Time to plot out a framework of the enabling role of hope in sustainability.

<<Thanks to a timely suggestion from our resident super star Lorrae Van Kerkoff,  I have been delving into the hope literature inspired by work of Val Braithwaite and colleagues.  See the special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2004; 592; 6 – the quotes are from Val Braithwaite’s preface “collective hope”.>>

Special saludo to Ines of Lisbon, who wants to join our community of practice through her work on sustainability and migration. Welcome Ines!

For this Forum, Penelope Marshall led us through a work in progress on the current troubled importation of the Savannah Cat into Australia. This involved stepping back from the controversy to look at how this case depicts tangled webs of failing governance and deliberation, alongside the problematic consequences of humanities project of modernity and ethical dilemmas at the heart of how we think the world should be.

Savannah Cats are a relatively new (1980s) hybrid domestic cat, breed first in the USA. They are a cross between the Serval, Felis serval, an African wild cat of up to 20kg weight, and Felis catus, the Domestic Cat of up to 7kg in weight on average, topping out with certain breeds at 11kg. The Savannah Cat, dependent on generation, weighs up to 11kg (although unsubstantiated reports state to 18kg). It is further reported that the Savannah has some of the skills of Serval’s, including high intelligence and a strong jumping capability. In the USA, Savannah Cats are legal in some states and illegal in others. There is a proposal to import them into Australia and the Commonwealth Government produced a draft assessment on the importation of the Savannah Cat in June 2008. Against importation are groups like the Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). The CRC hold that Australia has a poor record controlling introduced animals and that escaped domestic cats are already a key threatening process to Australia’s wildlife (and so why further exacerbate that with yet another complication to the already difficult to manage domestic cat). For importation are groups like Savannah Cats Australia who hold that the Savannah has an outgoing, predictable personality that is somewhat doglike (eg., can be walked on a leash) and that when on sale the cats will be de-sexed, micro-chipped and only sold to reputable owners. Presiding over this is the (Australian) Vertebrate Pests Committee, a co-ordination body for vertebrate pest policy and planning drawing from a variety of expert bodies, state and commonwealth departments plus the New Zealand government.

Penelope used the Savannah Cat issue to interrogate at least three differing aspects to the complex world we live in: (1) the governance of wildlife-human interactions in Australia; (2) the institutional structure (and failures) of modernity; and, (3) the ethics of how we, deep in our towers of abstraction, manipulate other life without regard to the actual unfolding consequences (and potential pain) for all life of such manipulations. We were confronted in the Forum space with the difficulties of drawing boundaries in regards human-nature inter-relationships of which the Savannah Cat case is replete with examples. We looked into:

• how the debate around the cats resonated with a moral panic that disguises the real complexity, ambiguities and hypocrisies of our inter-relationships with animals;
• the way that the cat was the locus of goods/bads which distracted from how the debate was shaped in various ways by the actors involved;
• how the language used was often full of problematic imagery and ideas that where often irreconcilable and further detracted from opening up discussion;
• how the debate drew heavily on science but could not be settled by science;
• how the regulatory systems informing the debate (especially that embodied in the Vertebrate Pests Committee) were not readily transparent nor easily accountable; and,
• how our ability to overcome the systems level inhibitors on dealing with this and other difficult socio-natural conundrums were poor to non-existent.

Although Penelope is still working on finalising her ideas, the story of Savannah cats and our incapacity to reasonably determine what is right regarding what we can so manifestly do in and to the world is a further cautionary tale on other intractable problems we are currently sunk in.