Kendra McSweeney

• PhD, Geography, McGill University
• Professor (Full) at The Ohio State University

Geospatial analyses of human-environment interactions are challenged by the multi-scale, multi-dimensional nature of human-environment systems. Research in such contexts must often rely on integrating multiple, independently produced data sources, which presents heterogenous data qualities and interoperability challenges. Understanding data quality...

We assess how much of Central America is likely to be agriculturally suitable for cultivating coca (Erythroxylum spp), the main ingredient in cocaine. Since 2017, organized criminal groups (not smallholders) have been establishing coca plantations in Central America for cocaine production. This has broken South America’s long monopoly on coca leaf...

Complex social challenges such as narco trafficking can have unexpected consequences for biodiversity conservation. Here we show how international counter-drug strategies may increase the risk of narco trafficking, which is associated with deforestation, in two-thirds of the important landscapes for forest birds in Central America. Soberingly, over...

We reflect on Geography in the US university by focusing on the paths taken by undergraduates into and beyond our classrooms. Those paths reveal aspects of Geography that appear unique to this national context, and include the structural barriers to US students' entry into Geography, from their highly uneven exposure to Geography in school to their...

This commentary takes up a challenge signaled by the papers in the special issue on 'Illicit Ecologies and Contested Environments': to go beyond 'illicitness' as an analytical frame and think about how the socioecologies described here represent political ecologies of prohibition. Prohibitionary law-making is the moment when distinctions between le...

Cocaine trafficking has a significant but understudied influence on Central American economies. The economic implications of this trade have repercussions for both regional development and drug control policy debates, and therefore deserve greater attention. Towards that end, in this paper we provide estimates of 1) the value of trade of primary co...

Despite more than 40 years of counterdrug interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine trafficking, or ‘narco-trafficking’, networks continue to evolve and increase their global reach. Counterdrug interdiction continues to fall short of performance targets due to the adaptability of narco-trafficking networks and spatially complex constr...

Illicit economies have become a major driver of socio-environmental change in Latin America’s rural spaces. The arrival of transnational drug trade networks in rural communities has significantly altered the economic, political, and social dynamics of entire regions. The drug trade has particularly affected the ancestral territories of Indigenous a...

Cocaine traffickers, or ‘narco-traffickers’, successfully exploit the heterogeneous landscapes of Central America for transnational smuggling. Narco-traffickers successfully adapt to disruptions from counterdrug interdiction efforts by spatially adjusting smuggling routes to evade detection, and by doing so bring collateral damages, such as defores...

Long‐standing federal drug‐control policy aims to reduce the flow of narcotics into the USA, in part by intercepting cocaine shipments en route from South American production regions to North American consumer markets. Drug interdiction efforts operate over a large geographic area, containing complex drug trafficking networks in a dynamic environme...

Illicit supply networks (ISNs) are composed of coordinated human actors that source, transit, and distribute illicitly traded goods to consumers, while also creating widespread social and environmental harms. Despite growing documentation of ISNs and their impacts, efforts to understand and disrupt ISNs remain insufficient due to the persistent lac...

On frontiers dominated by illicit activities such as narcotrafficking, criminal organizations’ usurpation of land and resources is profoundly changing rural livelihoods and prospects for biodiversity conservation. Prior work has demonstrated how drug trafficking catalyzes forest loss and smallholder dispossession but does not make clear the extent...

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/VIHZQGB8GRMVPSDMFPUF/full?target=10.1080/2325548X.2021.1843906

Among geographers, recent focus on the illicit and illegal has tended to fall into two camps. Economic geographers focus on regimes of illicitness and corresponding production of specific forms of economic space; political ecologists and land change scholars, on the other hand, have scrutinized how illicit commodity flows shape land and resource us...

Observers have increasingly described the drug-related violence and corruption affecting Central America as the region's ‘Colombianisation’. This narrative is not just confused and misleading; it is dangerous. The Colombianisation discourse perpetuates ineffective and destructive anti-drug policies. It also obscures the circulations and connections...

This research is motivated by the compelling finding that the illicit cocaine trade is responsible for extensive patterns of deforestation in Central America. This pattern is most pronounced in the region's large protected areas. We wanted to know how cocaine trafficking affects conservation governance in Central America's protected areas, and whet...

Illegal activity, such as deforestation for illicit crops for cocaine production, has been inferred as a cause of land change. Nonetheless, illicit activity is often overlooked or difficult to incorporate into causal inference models of land change. Evidence continues to build that narcotrafficking plays an important, yet often unreported, role in...

Reflecting on the 2019 Open Science Meeting of the Global Land Program and on commentaries since, we argue that the time is ripe for the land system science community to fully embrace the thorny issue of land ownership and control. Beyond land governance and institutions, the issue of who actually owns and controls land, and how land holding and re...

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2020/05/13/climate-change-in-central-america-the-drug-war-connection/

This Reflection considers recommendations of the recent report “Climate Change and Land.” Applied climate science largely connects physical outcomes to available social proxies: population density and income per capita. We argue for deeper engagement with social systems, particularly a better understanding of how corporations (agribusiness and ener...

Human Geography

Ecuador’s famed Yasuní National Park is home to Waorani indigenous communities and the Block 16 oil concession, operated by Repsol oil and gas company. Inspired by feminist geographic methodology we carried out qualitative research on Repsol’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs in the Waorani communities of northern Block 16/Yasuní, wit...

Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South American source zones and US markets remain a core US “supply side” drug policy and national security strategy. However, despite a long history of US-led interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine movements to the United States through Central...

This paper uses a global commodity chain (GCC) framework to explore the nexus of illicit economic activities and rural change. We unpack the micro-level economic processes by which a de facto land grab in eastern Honduras’ Moskitia region was catalyzed and accelerated by the region’s ascendance as a global hub of cocaine transit (ca. 2008-2012). We...

Abstract For decades, cocaine trafficking has been a key factor in accelerating the social and eco - logical transformation of rural landscapes across Latin America. In this review article, we explain why and how. Drawing from scholarly, journalistic, and policy sources we identify and theorize the political-economic logics and grounded processes...

Produced by the Open Society Foundations Global Drug Policy Program

Report produced by the Open Society Foundations Global Drug Policy Program

A growing body of evidence suggests that criminal activities associated with drug trafficking networks are a progressively important driver of forest loss in Central America. However, the scale at which drug trafficking represents a driver of forest loss is not presently known. We estimated the degree to which narcotics trafficking may contribute t...

Esta no es una traducción oficial realizada por personal de AAAS, y su exactitud no está avalada por AAAS. En temas cruciales, use como referencia la versión oficial en idioma inglés publicada originalmente por AAAS: Plumb. 2014. Drug policy as conservation policy: narco-deforestation. Science 343 (31 January): 489-490. Reimpreso con permiso de AAA...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become an increasingly popular component of poverty-alleviation policies worldwide. The highly publicized success of Brazil's Bolsa Família program (BFP), the largest such program in the world, has become a model for CCT programs elsewhere, including in highly rural African nations. This is despite the...

This article is about the logic and dynamics of environmental politics when the environment at stake is profoundly socioecological. We investigate the socioecological forests of the coalfields of Appalachian Ohio, where once decimated forests are again widespread. Conceptualizing forests as power-laden relationships among various people, trees, and...

Resumen Este artículo se basa en fuentes etnográficas dispares con la finalidad de examinar la relación entre la urbanización de la población de la Amazonía y su lucha por los derechos al territorio. En el argumento que ésta dinámica contraria a la intuición, merece una mayor atención, especialmente porque recientes políticas sobre la urbanización...

In this paper we review the implications of neoclassical economic framings within the interdisciplinary field of land-change science. We argue that current pressing global environmental problems, such as land grabs, loss of critical carbon sinks and the increasing importance of corporate actors in land-use decision-making, necessitate a reconsidera...

Drug trafficking is taking a toll on Central America's biodiverse forests.

A T LAST, THERE IS gOOd NEwS fROM HONduRAS. Well, maybe. In September, the government of President Porfirio Lobo granted Miskitu people formal ownership over almost 3,000 square miles of their ancestral territory in the northeastern region known as La Mosquitia. This appears to be a vital victory in indigenous Hondurans' struggle for territorial au...

Political ecologists and other critical geographers have been steadily chipping away at the tenets of forest transition theory, which equates forest return with economic modernization. The role of rural smallholders in post-industrial forest recovery, however, remains largely unexplored. These local landowners are the focus of this work, which we g...

Despite improved national censuses and “micro-demographic” studies, demographic processes and health conditions among indigenous populations in Amazonia and elsewhere in lowland Latin America are not well understood. A new source of demographic and health data has emerged in the past decade, namely meso-scale surveys initiated and administered by i...

Two distinct views are evident in research on how rural communities in developing countries cope with extreme weather events brought by climate change: (i) that the resource-reliant poor are acutely vulnerable and need external assistance to prepare for such events, and (ii) that climate-related shocks can offer windows of opportunity in which late...

This study examines the links between economic change and environmental recovery. We first review the influential framework known as Forest Transition Theory (FTT), which uses the experience of the North to posit a causal linkage between economic growth and forest regrowth. We then lay out problems with this theory and offer an alternative. Our cen...

While wildlife conservation efforts have become increasingly aggressive around the world, illicit use of resources in conservation areas has not subsided, raising questions about the ecological character of noncompliance activities. This paper reviews the results of research conducted amongst foresters and households living adjacent to a wildlife s...

In 'Ecuador's Yasuní Biosphere Reserve: a brief modern history and conservation challenges', Matt Finer and colleagues draw from a wide literature to describe the overlapping jurisdictions, confusing designations, and conflicting imperatives that are the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve. Yasuní's complexity is emblematic of 21st-century conservation landsc...

Where large-scale plantation agriculture spatially coexists with smallholding agriculturalists, they interact in multiple ways. A number of researchers have addressed the broader social, environmental, and economic consequences of smallholder/plantation relationships. Few studies, however, have examined the household-level conditions that drive sma...

This paper reviews and synthesizes findings from scholarly work on linkages among rural household demographics, livelihoods and the environment. Using the livelihood approach as an organizing framework, we examine evidence on the multiple pathways linking environmental variables and the following demographic variables: fertility, migration, morbidi...

Indigenous societies across lowland Latin America have recently made impressive political and territorial gains by emphasising their stewardship of and attachment to particular rural landscapes. But surprising new censal and microdemographic evidence shows that these groups have simultaneously been developing a presence in domestic and foreign metr...

Despite efforts to enclose and control conservation zones around the world, direct human impacts in conservation areas continue, often resulting from clandestine violations of conservation rules through outright poaching, strategic agricultural encroachment, or noncompliance. Nevertheless, next to nothing is actually known about the spatially and t...

Conservationists have expressed concern over the possibility that growth of indigenous populations in Latin America's tropical lowlands may compromise local biodiversity and undermine alliances between natives and conservationists. Through a review of demographic data and theory, I show how social science insights can offer conservationists a much-...

Is the rural poor’s ability to self-insure threatened when their access to forests is reduced? Drawing on a Honduran case study, I examine indigenous Tawahka smallholders’ reliance on commercial extraction as they coped with multiple misfortunes following Hurricane Mitch. Although reliance on natural insurance was predicted to intensify under this...

Given some limitations of satellite imagery for the study of land cover change, we draw attention here to a robust and often overlooked data source for use in student research: USGS topographic maps. Topographic maps offer an inexpensive, rapid, and accessible means for students to analyze land cover change over large areas. We demonstrate our visu...

In contrast to the rich scholarship documenting the traumatic post-contact destruction of indigenous populations in the Latin American tropics, little is known about their contemporary population dynamics. What accounts for the "demographic turnaround" reported for some groups? How widespread is population recovery, and what are its implications fo...

For over 300 years, dugout canoes have been traded within and between ethnic groups in the Mosquitia region of Honduras and Nicaragua. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I describe the development and contemporary dynamics of the canoe trade in order to operationalize, in one particular landscape, recent calls by geographers and anthrop...

What is an ‘outback’? Why is the term being applied to landscapes bearing little resemblance to the Australian interior? Based on a survey of the rising international use of this term, and a case study from Ohio, it is suggested that outbacks are discursively produced: (a) where post-industrial relationships between an urban place and its much larg...

The rural poor are known to turn to tropical forest resources in times of need. But what explains differential use of this “natural insurance” policy among households? Drawing from a 1998 survey of 116 indigenous households in Honduras, this article shows that households sell forest products to pay for crop shortfalls and illness, but that loans fr...

Tropical forest resources are known to reduce local residents' vulnerability to income shocks. But what explains differential use of this 'natural insurance' policy among households, and how does it compare with alternative forms of self-insurance? The research described here explores these questions by testing the degree to which earnings from for...

Although researchers have documented the role of anthropogenic huntingpressure on the abundance of game, few have measured the direct effects ofincome or economic development on game abundance. Economic theory tends topredict an ambiguous causal relation between income and the abundance of game.Here we test whether income (a standard proxy of econo...

Latin America's lowland indigenous groups have been characterized in contradictory ways. Are populations shrinking or growing? Do groups face cultural extinction, or are they increasingly asserting their ethnic identities? This article uses a case study of the Tawahka Amerindians of Honduras to show how basic demographic techniques can shed light o...

How researchers describe groups living within or near the world's tropical rain forests has important implications for how and why these groups are targeted for assistance by conservation and development organizations. This article explores how data about market behavior can be used to assess one aspect of forest peoples’ livelihoods: their “depend...

Researchers generally express the local value of tropical rain forests in dollars/ha/year. The approach is problematic because it produces low values to local users, underestimating the importance of the forest expressed as a share of household consumption or earnings. Here we contribute to valuation studies of rain forests by estimating the financ...

Researchers recognize that society needs accurate and comprehensive estimates of the economic value of rain forests to assess conservation and management options(1-7). Valuation of forests can help us to decide whether to implement policies that reconcile the value different groups attach to forests. Here we have measured the value of the rain fore...

Interest in vanishing rain forests has led scholars to say that the adoption of new farm technologies such as improved plant varieties could increase yields, thus reducing deforestation. Results of past studies show that human capital (e.g., schooling, literacy), wealth, and security of land tenure help farmers adopt new farm technologies. These st...

The uneven success of tropical forest product marketing initiatives over the past decade has illuminated our poor understanding of forest peasant livelihood systems. This dissertation explores how , when and why peoples living within biodiverse tropical forests turn to the sale of forest products to meet their needs over time, through a detailed ex...

A survey of Amerindian households in the Honduran rain forest was done to test hypotheses about the effects of household variables on deforestation and identify policies to lower neotropical deforestation. The results suggest that: 1.(a) the relation between income or age and deforestation resembles an inverted U;2.(b) fallow lands and illness had...

Estimates of rates of return on investments in cattle among the Tawahka and Miskitu Amerindians of the Patuca river in Honduras are presented. Internal rates of return and net present values produced similar rankings. The median internal rate of return is 9% and the median net present value is 224 Lempiras (U.S.$33). Positive rates of return sugges...

Although common throughout Belize in lowland forests and agricultural systems, the cohune palm,Orbignya cohune is relatively little used compared with its historic importance, according to a 1992 survey discussed here. Among uses found to persist are leaves for thatch, fruits for oil, and palm heart as food. Exploitation required only simple techno...