Transcript What is political ecology?

What is political ecology?
Tor A. Benjaminsen
Noragric, UMB
What is political ecology?
• Loosly defined as: The study of power relations in
land and environmental management
• Combining various scales
• Power (unequal costs and benefits, winners and
losers)
• History matters
• Conflicts: Struggles over meanings as well as over
land and resources
• Explicitly normative and political (in contrast to
’apolitical ecology’)
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
2
Some current research topics in
political ecology
• Conservation areas (winners & losers)
• Environmental change (who defines how
landscapes ought to look like?)
• The environmental impacts of
commodification
• Gender, power and the environment
• Land tenure
• Environmental conflicts
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
3
Apolitical ecology
(two main types)
1. Ecoscarcity (Malthus)
2. Modernization and win-win approaches
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
4
Political implications of apolitical ecology
• Neo-malthusianism:
– ’Blaming the victim’
– Local/indigenous
knowledge is
underestimated
– The solutions are at the
national or
international level
(with ’the experts’)
18/07/2015
• Modernization:
– Solutions to environmental
problems are based on
technology diffusion,
establishment of markets,
establishment of clear and
exclusive property rights,
and the pricing of
environmental goods
Political ecology lecture 1
5
• Political ecology
• Apolitical ecology
– Explicitly normative
(values: justice, human
rights, pro-poor and
marginalized groups)
– Structure and actororiented
– Focus on linking the
local to the global, on
conflicts and on
understanding actors’
rationality in political,
social, and
environmental context
18/07/2015
– Presents itself as
’objective’ and ’neutral’,
but still strongly
influenced by values and
interests
– Actor-less analysis
(’We’)
– Focus on population
growth (neomalthusianism) or winwin solutions
(modernization)
Political ecology lecture 1
6
The hatchet: PE as critique
• Deconstruction of myths, narratives &
discourses linked to the quest for control
over land and resources
• E.g. The idea of a ’pristine’ environment,
desertification, carrying capacity...
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
7
The seed: PE as equity and
sustainability research
• Detailed analysis of local practices
(knowledge, perceptions), which can be
used to point at alternatives to current
polices. As a result of some of this research,
new knowedge has been created on issues
of range management, deforestation, soil
fertility, agricultural development, land
tenure, biodiversity management etc.
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
8
History of PE
1970s-1985: Neo-Marxism
• Reaction against neo-Malthusianism and
human/cultural ecology
• Influenced by dependency theory and other
radical development theories
• But only a handful of contributions within
PE in this period (field of marginal
importance)
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
9
1985-1995: Eclectisism
• A range of theoretical sources and
approaches used
• Combination of structure and agency appr.
• Blaikie (1985), Blaikie and Brookfield
(1987) key contributions
• Chain of explanation
• ’Degradation’ is a perceptual term
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
10
1995-present: Poststructuralism
• Postmodern influence
• Poststructuralism originated in language philosophy and
the study of language, methaphors, myths, narratives,
stories, and discourses play an important role (discourse
analysis, Foucault)
• Ideas are never innocent, but either challenge or reinforce
existing social and economic arrangements
• Contructionism vs realism
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
11
Critique against PE
(Vayda and Walters 1999)
• PE starts with a priori judgments about the
primacy of political factors in explaining
environmental change (‘putting politics first’)
• Concentrates on factors assumed in advance to be
important
• Tends to deal only with ‘politics’ and not with
‘ecology’ (‘politics without ecology’)
• PE should instead be called ‘natural resource
politics’, ‘political anthropology’, or simply
‘political science’
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
12
Event ecology as an alternative
• No prejudgment of the importance of individual factors
• Begins with environmental events, and then works
backward in time and outward in space so as to construct
chains of causes and effects leading to those events
• Research is guided by open questions
• By contrast, political ecologists are said to always start
with a political analysis and hence would end up with
political causes of events, despite the fact that causes are
sometimes natural. This will be missed by political
ecologists
• Political-economic factors are often key causes of
environmental change, but not always
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
13
Two schools in PE (broadly speaking)
• Blaikie (UK based)
–
–
–
–
Structure & agency
Empirically oriented
Eclectic
Critique: lacks a theory
(’atheoretical’)
– No politics
18/07/2015
• Watts (US based)
–
–
–
–
Structural approach
Theoretical (Marxist)
Political
Critique: pre-made
explanations
(’structural
determinism’)
– No ecology
Political ecology lecture 1
14
• The Vayda and Walters critique is basically
against the Watts tradition.
• Event ecology appears similar to Blaikie’s
chains of explanation.
18/07/2015
Political ecology lecture 1
15