Neoliberal energy transitions in the South: Kenyan experiences

What is the relationship between the direction and form of an energy transition and the political economy within which it is embedded? This paper explores how the nature of (low carbon) energy transitions is strongly influenced by the process of neoliberalisation that shape energy policy in the South. We seek to understand emergent energy transitions and to advance their theorisation through an account of the political economy of energy transition in Kenya. In contrast to the often techno-managerial orientation of literatures on socio-technical transitions, we explore the political terrain upon which competing visions of energy futures and material interests collide and seek to accommodate one another. We develop a political economy account that emphasises the structural and disciplinary power of capital and global institutions to set the terms of transition. This expresses itself in both delimiting the autonomy of state actors and by reconfiguring domestic institutional and social power in ways that shape the distributional politics of transitions.     

Locating international REDD+ power relations: Debating forests and trees in international climate negotiations

The Reduction of Deforestation and Forest Degradation initiative (REDD+) was initially hailed widely as a smart and cost-effective way to mitigate climate change and has moved quickly compared to other strands of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. Much of the initiative’s original appeal – and a good deal of subsequent controversy around it – relates to framing the world’s tropical forests as carbon sinks and compensating developing countries that manage to reverse or avoid deforestation. REDD+ negotiations can thus be seen a site where the standard divisions between Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 (‘developed’ and ‘developing’) were being challenged and interrogated by the negotiating parties and the broader network of actors around the climate regime. This article suggests that such complex and changing global governance policy fields need to be analysed as ‘places’ in their own right, populated by actors engaged in field-specific power relations that may not reflect international hierarchies or power relations manifested in other international settings. Based in a unique set of interviews supplemented by primary data analysis, this article unpacks the power relations of REDD+ negotiations by examining how those involved seek to assume competence, designate and recognize leadership, and shape outcomes. In tracing the dynamics of claiming competence, the ‘competition’ between two disciplinary milieus around forests as an international policy object and also delegates’ shifting between reliance on expert knowledge and political ‘know-how’ in the negotiations themselves are identified. To understand the politics of recognition – that is to have a claim to competence or position acknowledged by others – the perceived qualities and resources of recognized leadership are examined and the absence of global superpowers amongst REDD+ leadership is problematized and discussed. Finally, in terms of wielding influence over outcomes, the fate of two quite similar ideas – one that has become incorporated into REDD+ methodology and another that is failing to be – further illustrate how the field is marked by internal power practices and that not all actors are equally well-positioned to achieve desired outcomes.     

A political ecology of scaling: Struggles over power,land and authority

This paper integrates insights from political ecology with a politics of scaling to discuss the construction and transformation of scalar topographies as part of the politics and power dynamics of natural resource management. The paper details two case studies from Community Based Natural Resource Management in the forest and wildlife sectors of Tanzania to: (1) analyse the devolution of power from the state to the local level; and (2) investigate the constant renegotiations and scalar transformations by actors across multiple levels in attempts to manipulate the governance system. The paper highlights the sociospatial aspects of the struggles and politics of natural resource management, and emphasises that whilst these processes of scalar negotiation and struggle are distinct between the two examples, they both revolve around the same political struggle over power. This indicates an important structuration element of power and scale as they are shaped by both the structural configuration of power within each sector alongside the agency of different actors across multiple levels.     

Enrolling a goddess for Delhi’s street vendors: The micro-politics of policy implementation shaping urban (in)formality

In a world of persistent and growing informality of working and living conditions in cities, and increasing policy efforts to formalise the informal, why are some forms of informality criminalized while others enjoy sanction of the state? This paper argues that analysis of the politics of policy implementation of formalisation efforts can provide rich insights into urban formal-informal relations in cities of the global south, to complement policymaking or policy impact analyses. We present an in-depth case study analysis of the contested implementation of a unique policy effort to formalise street vendors in Delhi, India. A public authority lens reveals the micro-political practices employed by non-state and state actors in bureaucratic, judicial, political, market and other arenas aiming to control urban space. We argue that policy implementation outcomes are significantly shaped by ‘horizontal' contestations within society and within the state, to complement and intermesh with ‘vertical' state-society struggles. Moreover, contestants for public authority exploit official rules but also informal practices by the state, to engage and advance state fragmentation, enduringly shape cityscapes and to affect which forms of informality are condoned or condemned.     

“You kill the dam,you are killing a part of me”: Dam removal and the environmental politics of river restoration

River restoration through dam removal provides an opportunity to investigate the changing nature of environmental conflicts and politics in long-humanized landscapes. In New England, where over 14,000 dams fragment the region’s rivers, dam removals are often highly contested. This is due, in part, to how the intertwined roles of history, identity, and aesthetics coalesce to create attachment to place and inspire the defense of dammed landscapes. Dam removal provides a useful lens to consider the following: How do the historical and geographical contingencies of this region shape and alter conflicts over dam removal in specific ways? In instances where conflicts emerge, what do the conflicts reveal about the politics of ecological restoration in highly altered landscapes? We use a political ecology approach to reveal how complex cultural dynamics, competing interpretations of science and the environment, micropolitics, and the role of multiple actors generate and shape conflicts over dam removal. We show that the historical geography of New England influence conflicts over removal in important ways, particularly with regard to the roles of aesthetics and identity in landscapes that are characterized largely by consumptive as opposed to productive uses. Our findings also suggest that restoration in long-humanized landscapes will embroil new constellations of human and nonhuman actors, requiring attention to the political and cultural, as well as the ecological, dimensions of restoration. This paper contributes to research on the political and social dimensions of dam removal, as well as to research at the nexus of ecological restoration and environmental politics.     

Science and security expertise: Authority,knowledge, subjectivity

What role does science play in shaping the political? This themed issue brings together scholars from political science, human geography, natural science and related fields with the common aim of exploring links between science/expertise and politics with a specific focus on security implications. The increasing attention to threats and risks related to issues such as climate change, migration, energy security, or emerging technologies creates a demand for new types of experts and expertise relevant for security politics. By looking at the actors who operate at the boundary between science, bureaucracy and security politics, this themed issue seeks to destabilize the notion of an apolitical sphere of science and expertise, while at the same time demonstrating how the politics of expertise shapes the authority and subjectivity of scientists and reconfigures the meanings and roles of scientific knowledge. In this editorial, we connect relevant literatures and introduce the individual articles that compose the themed issue.     

Introducing new feminist political ecologies

Political Ecology is firmly established as an important area of enquiry within Geography that attends to many of the most important questions of our age, including the politics of environmental degradation and conservation, the neoliberalisation of nature and ongoing rounds of accumulation, enclosure and dispossession, focusing on access and control of resources, and environmental struggles around knowledge and power, justice and governance. This short introductory paper considers how feminists working in this field of enquiry consider the gender dimension to such issues, and how political ecologies might intersect with a feminist objectives, strategies and practices: a focus for early iterations of a promising sub-field, labelled Feminist Political Ecology. It considers a number of epistemological, political and practical challenges that together may account for the relatively limited number of works that self-identify as feminist political ecology. Whilst this has made it difficult for Feminist Political Ecology to gain purchase as a sub-field within the political ecology cannon, this introductory piece highlights fruitful new ways that developments in feminist thinking enrich work in this field, evident in a flowering of recent publications.     

The ebb and flow of power: British flood risk management and the politics of scale

This paper examines the rescaling of flood risk management (FRM) in Britain over the past 70+ years. Drawing on recent research in geography and elsewhere – which has engaged the politics of scale literature with the rescaling of water and environmental governance – we seek to illustrate the mis-match between the rescaling of the geographical unit of management and the nexus of power and control of those engaged in FRM. For those seeking positive examples of multi-level decentralised governance in water resource management, where power is shared across the spatial scales, our historical analysis struggles to find evidence. Rather, despite attempts to ‘hollow-out’ the state through the scaling ‘out’ and ‘down’ of FRM responsibilities, our evidence suggests that the control over key decision-making tools, resources and other modalities of power remains in the hands of a few key national-level decision-makers; it is the responsibility that has been decentralised, not least to those at risk of flooding. The application of the politics of scale theorising in a FRM context is innovative and, importantly, our case study demonstrates that such politics does not have to involve open conflict but is much more subtle in its deployment of power.     

Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict

This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of ‘resource struggles’ and ‘resource conflicts’ are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonly-used terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.     

Young people’s voiceless politics in the struggle over urban space

This article discusses the particularity of young people’s politics as it unfolds in the practice of everyday life. By exploring a conflict concerning the use of a public park in the City of Oulu, Finland, we discuss how young people may participate in struggles over urban space trough politics that is not based on voice but voicelessness. This political engagement can be understood as a form of nonparticipatory politics that is easily left unnoticed—politics that shirks civic involvement, customary participatory practices and articulated resistance. We deem it important to acknowledge such action as political for two reasons. First, voiceless politics is a weapon of the weak: It is used when other political agencies are not feasible e. Viewing non-participation as apolitical will only further marginalize those who practice politics in such ways. Second, it is important to find ways of acknowledging nonparticipatory action because, while not commonly understood as politics, it is not easily bypassed in political struggles either. By distinguishing political aspects from young people’s urban behaviors, instead of hearing their presence as mere noise, provides tools for bringing their politics to the public agenda and thus developing more democratic urban spaces.     

Mining conflicts and transformative politics: A comparison of Intag (Ecuador) and Mount Ida (Turkey) environmental struggles

This article argues for an understanding of local socio-environmental struggles as political spaces that present possibilities for the transformation of subjectivities of the social actors participating in them. Relying on Gramsci’s theorization of state and society relations the paper analyzes whether and how these struggles foment challenges to hegemonic understandings and practices of development, environment and democracy. The analysis builds on a comparison between two mining conflicts—one in Ecuador’s Intag region, the other in Turkey’s Mount Ida region. The paper suggests that the two conflicts differ in the ways political subjectivities of the peasants opposing the mining projects were constructed. In Intag, the peasants framed their opposition to the copper mine project as a struggle for their right to have control over their lives and territories. They have participated in the construction of a vision of local development based on the promotion of sustainable economic activities, and of an organized society actively building its future. In Mount Ida, the peasants resisting gold mining have emphasized the distributional inequalities; yet have not linked their concerns to broader rights-based discourses or political and ethical principles. Their opposition has been confined to a particularistic defense of the place. The paper discusses the role of the state in the making of subjects, and the relationships among the resistance actors as crucial factors accounting for these differences.     

Enacting environmental justice in Singapore: Performative justice and the Green Volunteer Network

Environmental justice research has of late expanded beyond its’ original focus on the distribution of environmental ‘bads’ to debate injustices at a wide array of sites and scales. Despite this expansion, the applicability of an environmental justice framework to seemingly apolitical and banal expressions of environmental concerns remains open to question. This paper argues that environmental justice struggles can be located in the mundane environmental politics of Singapore, by employing a performative rather than rights-based approach to both justice and politics. It draws on qualitative research into volunteers’ practices in one Singaporean environmental organisation, and asserts that through their focus on experiential learning and re-inscribing ‘developmental’ spaces as spaces of care and justice, volunteers seek to redress the social, political and environmental injustices replete within the spatial politics of Singapore.     

Grassroots scalar politics: Insights from peasant water struggles in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Andes

Based on insights from peasant and indigenous communities’ struggles for water in Andean Peru and Ecuador, in this article we argue that the defense of grassroots interests -and with it the advancement of more equitable governance- greatly hinges on the capacity of these groups to engage in grassroots scalar politics. With increasing pressure on water resources in the Andes, the access to water of many rural peasant and indigenous communities is being threatened. The growing realization that their access to water and related interests are embedded in broader regional and national politics, legal frameworks and water policies, has led many communities and peasant water user associations to engage in networks and create alliances with other water users, governmental institutions and non-governmental actors. To better understand these (and other) grassroots struggles and strategies, in this contribution we develop the concept of grassroots scalar politics, which we use as a lens to analyze two case studies. In Ecuador we present how water users of the province of Chimborazo have defended their interests through the consolidation of the Provincial Water Users Associations’ Federation Interjuntas-Chimborazo and its networks. Then we focus on how with the support of Interjuntas-Chimborazo the Water Users Association of the Chambo irrigation system defended their historical water allocation. In Peru we analyze the conformation and achievements of the federative Water Users Association of Ayacucho (JUDRA) and present how the community of Ccharhuancho in the region of Huancavelica, managed to defend its waters and territory against the coastal irrigation sector of Ica.     

Intergenerational dynamics and local development: Mining and the indigenous community in Chiu Chiu,El Loa Province,northern Chile

Water conflicts are a significant issue in northern Chile, especially when linked to neoliberal economic activities – mainly mining – on the lands of indigenous peoples. In fact, political ecology tends to accentuate the ways in which their communities unite around a water-based territoriality and/or cultural politics when faced with ‘threatening’ outsiders. However, internal differentiation has become especially relevant to enable a more nuanced appreciation of local struggles and claims. Taking a political ecology of water perspective, this article analyses in what ways Intergenerational Dynamics (hereafter IGDs) shape the way indigenous communities articulate their collective vision of development when dealing with mining companies. In addition, it examines to what extent IGDs shape the key elements that constitute different positions regarding territory, and also assesses how such dynamics reflect age-related traditional interests and cultural senses of identity and territoriality.     

The Circle of Hydro-Hegemony between riparian states,development policies and borderlands: Evidence from the Talas waterscape (Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan)

Since the 1990s, transboundary water management has come to play a key role both in global environmental politics debates and in the shaping of international development policies, specifically in the Global South. As a consequence, a growing body of literature in the framework of critical hydropolitics has emerged reflecting on the role that power, discourses, and strategies play in shaping transboundary water policies and in influencing riparian relations. The focus on a state-centric perspective, however, often has led to neglect of the role of international development actors in shaping these policies. Through a critical application of the Circle of Hydro-Hegemony (CHH) and ethnographic qualitative field research in borderlands, this contribution aims to analyse how the establishment of a development initiative known as the Chu-Talas Commission, supported by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and other donors, has influenced and shaped transboundary water politics in the Talas waterscape, which is shared by Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The evidence shows that despite the international narration of the Chu-Talas Commission as a success story for water cooperation in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, through the deployment of both material and bargaining power strategies, has been able to shape UNECE development policies in its favour, impose its agenda on Kyrgyzstan, and emerge as the basin hydro-hegemon.     

Certified discourse? The politics of developing soy certification standards

Certification systems are an increasingly prominent feature of privatized, market-based environmental governance. While the potential of such systems to effectively lead to sustainable outcomes continues to be of concern to researchers, a growing body of literature focuses instead on the ways in which certification systems embody politics and reflect existing power relations. This paper contributes to this literature by analyzing the processes involved in developing production standards for the certification of ‘responsible’ soy, within the emergent certification system initiated by the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS). The Discourse Coalition Framework (DCF), highlights several aspects of the RTRS that illustrate how the process of developing standards for responsible soy has been highly contested and has featured political struggles. First, broad discourse, rather than specific technical knowledge, is the basis for cohesion of different stakeholders within the RTRS. Secondly, opponents have effectively challenged the RTRS at the level of broad discourse (as opposed to specific technical criteria), but the challenge has curtailed possibilities for widespread participation in the RTRS. Thirdly, the broad discourse of responsible soy has enabled unlikely alliances that have consolidated power with profoundly political effects. These findings provide an alternative basis for critically analyzing certification systems, beyond outcome effectiveness.     

Undoing environmental justice: Re-imagining equality in the Rosia Montana anti-mining movement

In this paper we outline the limitations of Environmental Justice theory when it comes to explaining and theorising the politics of contemporary environmental movements. Justice, we argue, needs to be understood not as a formalised and preconceived ‘thing’ to be delivered or applied but as an open egalitarian ideal that movements across the world continuously redefine in embodied and performed ways which are historically and geographically distinct. Drawing upon the fifteen year long anti-mining struggles of Rosia Montana, Romania, we explore the tension between seeking ‘traditional’ forms of justice (i.e. dialogic consensual politics) and putting forward more radical demands for socio-ecological change, in which representation and recognition are seen as insufficient practices for distributing justice. Visibility (rather than recognition) and egalitarian politics (rather than distribution) become the quilting points of struggles of many contemporary environmental movements, equality can only be enacted (or staged) through praxis that disrupts the distribution of the sensible experience and exposes the arbitrariness and incompleteness of power. We argue that in order to analyse and theorise the praxis of contemporary environmental movements, it is imperative for geographical literature to engage with post-foundational theory, and ‘un-do’ pre-conceived ideas and theorisations of (environmental) justice.     

A political ecology of REDD+: Property rights,militarised protectionism,and carbonised exclusion in Cross River

This paper offers a critical assessment of REDD+ in Nigeria through a political ecology perspective. Focusing on questions of property rights and resource access, it maps the discursive articulations and contestations through which carbon rights are being determined. It also shows how these articulations and contestations are linked to land and forest rights, and how they shape everyday access to the forest. Evidence from the Nigerian case suggests that factors that complicate rights and undermine access to resources for forest communities under REDD+ are immanent to the contested terrain constituted in part by REDD+ proposals, proponents’ discourses and practices geared towards securing the forest for REDD+. Efforts to secure property rights and guarantee the permanence of REDD+ forests align with economic, ecological and ideological aspirations of state and non-state actors to produce a regime of militarised protectionism. I demonstrate how, in addition to its material and symbolic facilitation of the emergent carbon forestry economy, militarised protectionism as a regime of exclusion also constitutes collateral political economies of ‘more-than-carbon’ forest resources (such as timber and non-timber forest products) which perpetuate capital accumulation by the elites. It is this kind of exclusion–accumulation dialectic, legitimised by carbon forestry claims that this paper describes as carbonised exclusion. The paper thus furthers debates on the political ecology of REDD+ and other carbon forestry projects, while productively engaging technocentric literature on REDD+ and property rights.     

The cultural politics of local economic development: meaning-making, place-making, and the urban policy process

A major concern of work in urban and political geography in recent decades has been to analyze how and in whose interests local space economies are produced and reproduced. A common focus is on the role local elites play in gathering support for their development agendas. Drawing from these literatures, this paper focuses on how various visions of the future of localities are contested in the local policy process. It argues that this struggle can be usefully understood as a cultural politics in which meanings are defined and struggled over, where social values are naturalized, and by which `common sense' is constructed and contested. The use of the term `cultural politics of local economic development' is, then, intended to indicate that meaning-making and place-making occur simultaneously in struggles over the future of space economies. It is also an attempt to overcome the problematic distinction between `culture' and `economy' that continues to haunt a great deal of work on urban politics. Through a case study of urban politics in Lexington, Kentucky in which discursive strategies are highlighted, it is argued that this approach is useful in that it provides insight into non-elite perspectives on local economic development and that it underscores the role played by everyday life in constituting political action. The paper concludes by suggesting that any problematization of the conceptual distinction between `culture' and `economy' must be carried out in and through detailed analyses of how groups involved in social struggle frequently construct rhetorical strategies in reference to it.     

The politics of imaginaries and bioenergy sub-niches in the emerging Northeast U.S. bioenergy economy

As part of a transition to lower carbon energy systems, bioenergy development is often assumed to follow a uniform pathway. Yet the design, organization, and politics of bioenergy production in specific regional contexts may be contested. This study examines contestation within an emerging perennial crop bioenergy sector in the U.S. Northeast. Synthesizing conceptual contributions from the multi-level perspective on the significance of niches and sub-niches in sustainability transitions and from science and technology studies on the material and moral implications of sociotechnical imaginaries and object conflicts, this paper analyzes the politics of bioenergy sub-niche imaginaries. It identifies two main bioenergy sub-niches centered on (1) regional production and (2) community energy. Examining proposed and current production of perennial energy crops on marginal land, the study draws on 42 semi-structured interviews with bioenergy actors (e.g., scientists, industry representatives, policymakers, farmers/landowners) and secondary documents. The two bioenergy sub-niche imaginaries revealed political contestations around scale of operations, control and beneficiaries, and about definitions and uses of marginal land relative to livelihoods and community. This study highlights the potency of rival imaginaries within a developing sociotechnical niche and implications for sustainability transitions. Tracing the contours and emphases of, as well as conflicts between, bioenergy sub-niche imaginaries can clarify which pathways for transition to a lower carbon energy future could garner political and public support. The paper concludes by considering how disagreements between sub-niche actors could lead to productive mutual learning and the possibility of forging solutions contributing to more robust and equitable sustainability transitions.