![Sample our Environment & Agriculture journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5934/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Environment-Agriculture.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article dwells upon rural reconstruction projects that have been implemented under the rubric of ‘Sustainable Rural Cities’ (SRCs) since the late 2000s in Chiapas, Mexico. It aims to examine the motivations of the central and local governments in designing and executing these projects. While the goals behind these projects were stated as mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty, this article claims that SRCs could be understood as part and parcel of the overall transformation of the rural structures with policies informed by market-friendly rural development perspectives on sustainability. Tracing the clues in the official documents of the state and regional integration initiatives such as Puebla Panama Plan and Mesoamerica Project, this study suggests that rural reconstruction projects in Chiapas are to boost the integration of local economy into the world market while converting peasants into rural industrial proletariat, dispossessing them of their land to be used for more productive -i.e. profitable- aims. Therefore, the parable of SRCs in Chiapas suggests that the concept of sustainability has increasingly in practice come to accommodate the logic of capitalist accumulation and exploitation. In the face of climate change, the concept of sustainability has been redefined as business as usual.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Aylin Topal is an Associate Professor of Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Middle East Technical University. She is also the chairperson of Latin and North American Studies Program at the same university. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the New School for Social Research in New York. Aylin Topal’s research interests lie in the political economy of development and agrarian change. She is the author of Boosting competitiveness through decentralization: A subnational comparison of local development in Mexico (Ashgate Publishing, 2012; Routledge 2016). She has published several articles and chapters in edited volumes on regional, urban and rural development in Mexico and state-capital-labour relations under neoliberalism in Turkey.
Notes
1 There have been allegations that the landslide has only not been due to heavy rains, but it was indeed caused by dynamite explosions used for two constructions (for a new hydroelectric dam) on the Grijalva River undertaken the Federal Electricity Commission with subcontracting to one of biggest business groups, Grupo México. Mirada Sur ‘Exigen libertad de presos de Juan de Grijalva’ 9 June 2011.
3 There appears to be certain ambiguities as to whether the SRC in Soconosco would be continued as planned.
4 The Coalition for the Well-being of All (Coalición para el Bien de Todos) was formed by three political parties as a platform against Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party –PRI). Those alling parties in the Alliance were Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Democratic Revolutionary Party-PRD), Partido de Trabajadores (Labour Party –PT) and Convergencia (Convergence).
5 Report of the Program was published in November 2011.
6 The ‘+’ sign in the acronym refers to promoting conservation and sustainable management to enhance forest carbon stocks.
7 EDF is a leading California headquartered nonprofit organization with offices in China and Mexico and partnerships in Brazil, India, Russia and other countries. http://www.edf.org/climate/redd
8 For this and further information on the Sustainable Rural Cities see http://www.ciudadesrurales.chiapas.gob.mx/vision Access date: 25 March 2015.
10 Some documented testimonies show that the communities were threatened to cut off their electricity if they resisted against moving into these cities (cited in Reyes, Citation2010).
11 http://www.ciudadesrurales.chiapas.gob.mx/vision. However, it should be also noted that the public services from portable water to health facilities are in overwhelming low conditions (Authors observation and interviews).
12 The houses in the Nuevo Juan de Grijalva are 60 square metres with two bedrooms, a bathroom and a living room. The roofs are aluminum and the walls are brick. They are constructed on 300 square metres’ land plots. The houses in Santiago el Pinar are made of pressboard and 30 square metres with two bedrooms, a bathroom and a living room. They are constructed on 200 square metres’ land plot.
14 http://www.proyectomesoamerica.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47&Itemid=172, accessed: 10/4/2015
15 http://www.proyectomesoamerica.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47&Itemid=172, accessed: 10/4/2015
18 As argued in one of the reports of the Center of International Forestry Research ‘the success or failure of REDD+ … depends on the possibility of designing interventions that at the very least do no harm to local populations, and in the best case scenario lead to favourable joint outcomes of reduced net carbon emissions and improved rural livelihoods’ (Jagger, Jagger, Sills, Lawlor, & Sunderlin, Citation2010, p. 6).
20 ‘The GCF seeks to advance jurisdictional programmes designed to promote low emissions rural development and reduced emissions from deforestation and land use (REDD+) and link these activities with emerging greenhouse gas (GHG) compliance regimes and other pay-for-performance opportunities.’ http://www.gcftaskforce.org/about
21 http://tropicalforestgroup.blogspot.com/2010/11/text-of-ca-chiapas-acre-mou-on-redd.html
http://greentechleadership.org/documents/2013/07/row-final-recommendations-2.pdf
22 La Jornada, ‘Organizaciones indígenas se oponen a la construcción de ciudad rural en Chenalhó’ 11 August 2010.
24 While rural poverty and inequality have been the inevitable end results of the abandonment of the pre-1980s agricultural policies and state subsidies (Cornia, Citation2004), solutions to these problems were searched for elsewhere. In this framework, agricultural policies are no longer considered to be the backbone of rural development.
25 See Wilson (Citation2014a) for an analysis of Millenium Villages Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa compared to the Sustainable Rural Cities Projects in Chiapas.