Véron René

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• Professor
• Professor (Full) at University of Lausanne

In the growing field of urban political ecology, so far not much attention has been paid to air-quality and related policies. In this paper I examine the recent far-reaching air-pollution policies in India’s capital, as well as the role of environmental nongovernmental organizations and judicial activism, in view of their implications for different...

The “Kerala model of development” has won wide international attention for its achievements in regard to social development and, to a certain extent, environmental sustainability. The “old” Kerala model, preoccupied with redistributive policies, failed, however, to induce economic development. As a result, attention is now being given to a “new” Ke...

Urban political ecology (UPE) has mainly evolved within the discipline of geography to examine the power relations that produce uneven urban spaces (infrastructures and natures) and unequal access to resources in cities. Its increasingly poststructuralist orientation demands the questioning of received categories and concepts, including those of (n...

Public-private partnerships are often depicted as an effective institutional arrangement to improve urban services towards sustainable development. In sub-Saharan Africa, the involvement of private parties in municipal solid waste management is believed to bring in technical, managerial and financial capabilities, which municipalities generally lac...

Democratic decentralization and community participation often stand at the center of an agenda of “good governance” that aims to reduce corruption and increase the state’s accountability to its citizens. However, this paper suggests based on empirical studies on the Employment Assurance Scheme in rural West Bengal that the strength of upward accoun...

Waste generation in Sub-Saharan Africa is increasing rapidly. While biodegradable waste remains predominant, it is rarely treated separately by municipal solid waste management systems, thus foregoing the possibility to reduce the volume going to landfills or dumpsites. This paper discusses the unique case of the small city of Dschang, Cameroon, wh...

India’s 74th Constitutional Amendment obliges state governments to devolve responsibilities related to urban environmental resources and services to the Urban Local Bodies. However, the existing literature points to deficiencies in urban decentralization, including a mismatch between resources and responsibilities, financial constraints, and a lack...

This chapter maps the emergence and development of urban environmental history (UEH) in South Asia and the lessons it offers to understand and analyze pertinent questions of urban environmental governance in recent times. However, it acknowledges the limits of historical research (especially due to its reliance on the archival methodology) and poin...

Waste generation in Sub-Saharan Africa is increasing rapidly. While biodegradable waste remains predominant, it is rarely treated separately by municipal solid waste management systems, thus foregoing the possibility to reduce the volume going to landfills or dumpsites. This paper discusses the unique case of the small city of Dschang, Cameroon, wh...

Organic waste is both a refuse and a resource. Focusing on household waste in a city in Western Switzerland, this study examines the practices of waste segregation in relation to the city’s (organic) waste management system. Based on qualitative research with diverse households and experts in waste management, we use social practice theory to discu...

To confront food insufficiency caused by the Great Leap Forward, China's central government promoted a national policy of 'agriculture as the priority'. The Shanghai municipal government launched a campaign to expand cultivated land within its jurisdiction by transforming wetlands on Chongming Island through a military-style campaign. Tens of thous...

In the metropolitan area of Colombo, Sri Lanka, the issue of municipal solid waste management (MSWM) moved to the center of political attention in April 2016 when the accumulated waste mountain of a centralized dumpsite in Meethotamulla, situated at the periphery of the city region, suddenly collapsed. The ensuing landslide-like event killed 28 peo...

This paper focuses on the issues that are pre-dominant in the institutional architecture of municipal solid waste management (MSWM) in Kathmandu. The paper also gives a brief history of solid waste management (SWM) in Kathmandu. It provides an overview of the generation and disposal methods of wastes and the challenges associated in the management...

Urban ponds in India have for a long time been used for multiple purposes and have been accessible to a wide range of social groups; they thus often represent an urban commons. However, recent transformations of urban ponds into infrastructure that serves more limited uses have been accompanied by enclosure and social exclusion. Using an urban poli...

The 74th Constitutional Amendment obliges state governments to devolve responsibilities related to urban environmental resources and services, such as water supply, drainage and sewerage, solid waste management, green spaces and environmental protection, to the Urban Local Bodies (ULBs). However, the literature, largely based on macro-level analyse...

This literature review focuses on exploring solid waste management in Sri Lanka in relation to three key thematic areas namely; (1) the institutional architecture of waste governance (2) the waste chain and related socially differentiated labor practices, and (3) accompanying discourses on waste and waste-work in Sri Lanka. The World Bank (WB) poin...

In this article, we identify different types of urban nature, more or less "wild" or "artificialized", that are produced through the interaction of different actors and the natural environment. Taking cues from Urban Political Ecology, we analyze power relations and environmental imaginaries that result in the production of different urban ecologie...

Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) has become one of the most pressing environmental issues in South Asian cities, the more so as it is closely linked to drinking water quality, sanitation and human health affecting mostly the urban poor, as well as to global climate change. Looking at recent governance initiatives in three South Asian cities...

This paper attempts to understand the production of the city through informality. In particular, informal practices related to the momo (dumpling) industry, concentrated in the ‘urban village’ of Chirag Dilli, are analysed in their dialectic relationship with formal planning and legislation in Delhi. We use a Lefebvrian framework that views city-ma...

This chapter attempts to map different understandings of the "urban" in Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and to render these more explicit while pushing the field for greater conceptual clarity. It discusses the question of how the different strands of UPE understand the "urban": the traditional Marxist UPE as metabolic process shaped by power and the...

Urban parks in India are often discussed as positive environmental projects, and their creation appears as unproblematic in public discourse. This paper presents the creation of a municipal park in a small city in Gujarat, India. Using insights from history and architecture, we stress the importance of reading parks as political and to some extent...

In the framework of the research network on integrated control of zoonoses in Africa (ICONZ) a dog rabies mass vaccination campaign was carried out in two communes of Bamako (Mali) in September 2014. A mixed method approach, combining quantitative and qualitative tools, was developed to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention towards optimiz...

India’s oilseeds sector, which includes its coconut economy, experienced drastic changes in the wake of agricultural liberalization in the mid-1990s. A persistent coconut crisis ‘narrative’ emerged after sharp price declines between 2000 and 2002 in which small farmers in the state of Kerala, India’s main coconut producer, were identified as victim...

While researchers in the growing field of urban political ecology have given significant attention to the fragmented hydroscape that characterizes access to drinking water in the global South, so far the (re)production of other urban waters and its related power relations have been underexplored. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap...

Thirty years after the death of Michel Foucault, notwithstanding the fact that his thought has profoundly shaped the contemporary reflection and contributed to move beyond structuralism, the Urban Political Ecology in general and the Urban Political Ecology of water in particular are still dominated by Marxist-inspired theoretical frameworks. This...

Switzerland appears to be a privileged place to investigate the urban political ecology of tap water because of the specificities of its political culture and organization and the relative abundance of drinking water in the country. In this paper, we refer to a Foucauldian theorization of power that is increasingly employed in the social sciences,...

Urban geography in the era of globalization: the cities of the future. Emerging knowledge and urban regulations Urban geography is the main focus of the research agenda of the Institute of Geography at the University of Lausanne. The emphasis is on globalization-driven changes within urbanization regimes. This article presents the emerging understa...

Some of the most pressing debates in development studies have concerned the relative merits of states and markets, or the means by which markets might be regulated by a range of public institutions from the local to the global scale. These debates have taken shape, most famously, in the contrasting cases of sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, and the...

The traditionally coercive and state-controlled governance of protected areas for nature conservation in developing countries has in many cases undergone change in the context of widespread decentralization and liberalization. This article examines an emerging “mixed” (coercive, community- and market-oriented) conservation approach in managed-resou...

This Practical Note examines the nascent micro-insurance sector in West Bengal, paying particular attention to the corporate-NGO partnership model for micro-insurance distribution, which has been enabled by India's unique regulatory framework. We challenge the popular construction of this model as a 'win-win' for all parties by analysing conflictin...

Development and environmental issues of small cities in developing countries have largely been overlooked although these settlements are of global demographic importance and often face a “triple challenge”; that is, they have limited financial and human resources to address growing environmental problems that are related to both development (e.g.,...

Poor people confront the state on an everyday basis all over the world. But how do they see the state, and how are these engagements conducted? This book considers the Indian case where people's accounts, in particular in the countryside, are shaped by a series of encounters that are staged at the local level, and which are also informed by ideas t...

Poor people confront the state on an everyday basis all over the world. But how do they see the state? This book considers the Indian example where people's accounts, in particular in the countryside, are shaped by encounters staged at the local level, and are also informed by ideas circulated by the government and the broader development community...

Der mit Landwirtschaftsressourcen gut ausgestattete südindische Bundesstaat Kerala ist seit Jahrhunderten in den Weltmarkt eingebunden. Aber selbst in der heutigen Phase der Globalisierung und Liberalisierung weisen die Märkte für Keralas Agrarprodukte Merkmale auf, die nicht nur internationale Verhältnisse zwischen Angebot und Nachfrage widerspieg...

Kerala accounts 40 per cent of India's production of plantation crops. This article discusses two case studies, cashew and natural rubber, and describes the decision-making of small-holders (who are the main producers of plantation crops here), as well as the functioning of "real markets" at various spatial scales. Recent village studies by the aut...

Abstract This paper considers some practical problems associated with organising large-scale comparative field research in eastern India. The focus of the paper is on the use of brainstorming and “modified logframes” as two means by which hypotheses about the working of the local state from the point of view of the rural poor could be turned into c...

The state in its efforts to meet the needs of the poor has four major functions of governance - developmental, empowermental, protective and disciplinary. This paper, based on fieldwork across the rural areas in three states, probes the Employment Assurance Scheme to understand the state's performance on these parameters as well as aspects of parti...

Part I of this paper, which appeared last week, described the patterns of participation of the rural poor in state-sponsored schemes and the characteristics of political society in each of the blocks and districts studied. It also provided evidence on the scale and significane of rent-seeking behaviour, and a preliminary mapping of what has been ca...

The positive roles that political parties might play in development have recently been downplayed in favour of accounts of the virtues of civil society and participatory development. This article challenges some assumptions inherent in this shift in emphasis. It considers how political society has mediated the agency of the rural poor in three loca...

This paper uses the experience of a recent programme of action research in Eastern India to reflect on the use of participatory ideals within governance reform. In a situation where there are profound difficulties in local governance, it assesses the potential for participatory forms of stakeholder engagement to begin a process of reform. It critic...

‘Participation’ has become an essential part of good developmental practice for Southern governments, NGOs and international agencies alike. In this article we reflect critically on this shift by investigating how a ‘participatory’ development programme — India's Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS) — intersects with poor people's existing social netw...

This paper opens a window on the local state in eastern India. It studies the ways in which government officers in five districts of Bihar and West Bengal re-shaped one of India's major poverty alleviation programmes, the Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS). District and Block-level officials in Bihar converted a participatory programme of employment...

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Zürich, 1998.