ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the vertical dimension of transnationalizations and the workings of transpatriarchies, from the level of a major UN agency to the concrete state level, and further down to the level of local communities, and even individuals living in those communities, at the semiperiphery of Europe, in Serbia. The case study analyses mechanisms which enable transnational clientelism, which functions as a network of ‘dispersed centres’, to create conditions for the profound inversion of official aims of a ‘sustainability’ related project into a direction which supports land grabbing and the silencing of the voices of the disempowered and impoverished. It shows how ‘sustainability’ is just another ideological construct that serves as a cloak to enable power growth of both transnational (male) elites and the national/local counterparts, and which in fact supports land grabbing as a parallel process. This often leads to the fuelling of a further negative spiral of destruction of both humans and nature. In this case, as in many other cases, it is clear that the problem is not the ideal of ‘sustainability’ as such, which is clearly an ethical and legitimate goal, but, even more so, the way it is interpreted and executed within the concrete contexts of neoliberal globalization and within semi-peripheral societies, with weak and weakening state sovereignty. ‘Sustainability’ projects defined within the context of neoliberal globalization and de-development of the semiperiphery are necessarily advocated, managed and executed in line with financialization, commodification of human and natural resources, privatization and corporatization, and they are supportive not of the environment, but overall of the transnational patriarchies, horizontally and vertically.
