Environment and Collective Action Under Threat: Tales from the Hindukush

Neoliberal globalization has over-privileged markets and individualism as the way in which the interaction between livelihoods and natural resources are managed. Sustainability of the environment and development is to be achieved through rationing via price, the presumption of a calculus in which as scarcity becomes more evident the economic pressure for conservation increases as the costs of depletion are internalized. However, the magic of the market to deliver sustainable outcomes (the invisible performance of rationality), relies upon assumptions of immobility with respect to space and resource-use dependency, neither of which reflects the reality of mobility and resource hopping in which capital resembles the locust rampaging through the grain fields. Global markets allow for resource hopping, relying upon continuous technological innovation to overcome the constraints of previously depleted technologies and associated resources. It is thus hard to argue that global markets are compatible with sustainability. But what happens where global markets are weaker, where the condition of immobility is much stronger but nevertheless threatened by the carrying capacity of the local environment interacting with population growth and the presence of exit options? What happens when a local population experiences a paradigm shift of principles and values by which the interaction between livelihoods and key local resources is organized?