Browsing by Author "Margulies, Jared D."
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Item Understanding drivers of demand, researching consumption of illegal wildlife products: A reply to Bergin et al.(Pergamon, 2020) Margulies, Jared D.; Wong, Rebecca W. Y.; Duffy, Rosaleen; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa; City University of Hong Kong; University of SheffieldItem The Unfinished River: a Political Ecology of Restoration and Nonhuman Erasure on the Ganga River(University of Alabama Libraries, 2026) Choudhury, Utkarsh Roy; Margulies, Jared D.This dissertation investigates the governmental logic of contemporary river restoration in India through a political ecological analysis of the Namami Gange program. This work argues that the program's apparent contradictions function as a central, functional component of a productive and politically durable system of governance. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography, this study analyzes government policy and financial documents, conducts observation at national water governance forums, and draws on semi-structured interviews with state officials, consultants, scientists, and conservation practitioners. Through this approach, this study demonstrates that the program operates through a coherent logic designed to maintain the Ganga River in a perpetually profitable and politically generative state of crisis. The research develops a multi-scalar theoretical framework to explain this system. First, it introduces the concept of maintained disrepair to analyze how the program functions through two interdependent components: a financial engine of ‘Accumulation by Restoration' that transforms pollution into de-risked assets for private capital, and a political engine that manufactures public consent through a ‘spectacle of repair.' Second, it reveals the institutional mechanism of the politics of invisibilization, where environmental performativity reduces the river to a simplified ‘governance object.' This is achieved through calculative practices that define the river's health in narrow, anthropocentric terms, such as sewage treatment capacity, effectively erasing its multispecies complexity. Finally, the dissertation examines the material consequences of this system by theorizing the state's strategy of ecological substitution. This concept explains how the state resolves conservation-development conflicts by manufacturing the perception of a habitat's ‘failure' through the strategic production of ignorance, thereby justifying its removal for a compromised alternative. Ultimately, this dissertation provides a critical framework for understanding an emergent mode of environmental governance that, instead of resolving ecological crises, thrives on perpetually and profitably managing them.