Contesting Moral Capital in an Extractive Frontier

Our HOT SEATS are the College-internal seminars, where the speakers are presenting a more personal view of current affairs and talk about their own biography. Closed meeting. Chatham house rules.

Wolfram Dressler (ARC Future Fellow, School of Geography) is a critical interdisciplinary researcher in political ecology with a focus on market-based conservation, agrarian change and social justice in rural Southeast Asia. His seminar concerns the role and legitimacy of civil society in the context of new governance regimes that overlap with deepening commodity production in frontier areas.  In his paper, 'Contesting Moral Capital in an Extractive Frontier', he examines hows NGOs in the Philippines increasingly reflect on the legitimacy of their advocacy and interventions in terms of how local farmers view the contrasting benefits being promised from both governance (REDD+) and commodity production (palm oil etc).