The Final Frontier: China,Taiwan, and the United States in Strategic Competition for Central America

China’s rise as a global power corresponded with a diminution of Taiwanese diplomacy, which has left Central America as the last region to host a continuous bloc of countries that recognize the ROC. In this article, we argue that China’s success in gaining diplomatic recognition from Taiwan’s former allies has largely resulted from China's economic policy, specifically its promises of large-scale infrastructure projects and the integration of Central American economies with Chinese markets. However, there are limits to how far China has advanced in gaining full recognition from the region. The competing political and economic interests of China, Taiwan, the United States, and the Central American countries themselves, continue to influence patterns of diplomatic switching. More specifically, we argue that the threat of punitive measures from the United States combined with a turn in Taiwanese diplomacy toward assistance efforts to combat Covid-19 may deter future switching in the short to medium-term. Our analysis offers case studies of four Central American countries (Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador and Nicaragua) to illustrate the multi-year processes by which China’s economic strategy leads to diplomatic switching and examine the paths ahead for the remaining holdouts facing the prospect of economic and political penalties by the United States.

     

Re-inventing the commons: community forestry as accumulation without dispossession in Nepal

The commercial appropriation of the commons by displacing communities has been a historical feature of development. In recent years, however, this paradigm has shifted toward re-inventing the commons by creating new relations of production for both the market and subsistence. Such shifts in managing the commons are producing new forms of commoning instead of enclosure and dispossession. Through the analysis of community forestry programs in Nepal, this paper demonstrates that community-based development has been effective in mobilizing the collective potential of local communities and dynamics of commonly held forest ecosystems for the expansion of highly profitable commercial endeavors. Community forestry can be understood neither as an enclosure exclusively for commodity production nor as the extension of entirely subsistence economic activities. In Nepal, community forestry has become a form of accumulation without dispossession where communities’ ownership over the common forestlands is ensured but market apparatuses for commercialization are also institutionalized simultaneously. This paper argues that while transforming the commons and communities as part and parcel of capital accumulation, community forestry generates possibilities for both commercial and subsistence modes of production, reproducing the conditions for accumulation without dispossession.     

In Search of Alternatives: Pro-Poor Entrepreneurship in Community Forestry

Community forestry is quite likely the most prominent form of development intervention in the present era. It has gained momentum since the 1970s, and now covers more than 25 per cent of the total forestlands globally. However, the introduction of commercialisation into community forestry, controlled by private capital, has not only undermined the livelihood requirements of poor people, but also swiftly deteriorated forest conditions. By unfolding the nature of commercialisation in community forestry in Nepal, this article argues that pro-poor entrepreneurship models of producing forest resources through a partnership between poor people and community groups could be an appropriate alternative to develop economic opportunities and forest conservation.