Probing the (in)compatibilities of social theory and policy relevance in Piers Blaikie’s political ecology

One of Piers Blaikie’s most important contributions to the development of political ecology is his critique of land and resource conservation policy in the global South. In this paper I trace the development of Blaikie’s ideas about the policy relevance of political ecology, focusing particularly on the challenges posed by the introduction of poststructural social theory into the field. I begin by revisiting Blaikie’s earlier critiques of environment and development policy. This will provide the departure point to explore how his thinking on the relationship of theory and policy and of academic and development practices has evolved in subsequent writings. I have invented two personas, “early Blaikie” and “late Blaikie”, to facilitate this task. Second, I want to probe some of the challenges that late Blaikie presents for doing political ecology research, to some extent by pitting early Blaikie against late Blaikie and letting them hash it out. Third, I turn to my own and others’ research and consultation experiences as a way to examine the possibilities for reconciling theoretically driven critiques with policy relevant research.     

Political-industrial ecology: Integrative,complementary, and critical approaches

“Political-industrial ecology” has been proposed as an emerging subfield of nature-society geography. In mapping out the landscape of this subfield, this paper develops a typology of three approaches to connecting politics and industrial ecology: (1) Integrative research that incorporates social, political, policy, institutional, and/or spatial considerations into industrial ecology analyses (“politics in industrial ecology”); (2) Complementary research that couples findings or frameworks from industrial ecology with social and political research (“politics and industrial ecology”); and (3) Critical research that examine how values, norms, groups, political relations, or institutions shape the production, interpretation, and usage of industrial ecology knowledge (“politics of industrial ecology”). This broad framing of political-industrial ecology invites contributions from many social sciences, including political ecology, political geography, political economy, sociology, public policy, management, environmental history, and science and technology studies.     

Gramsci Lives!

Antonio Gramsci’s writings provide a valuable conceptual and political sensibility for critical approaches to nature. In this editorial introduction to a theme issue on Gramscian Political Ecologies we establish the broad contours to such an approach, stressing Gramsci’s integral marxism and commitment to a transformative politics relevant to the contemporary moment. Subsequently, we provide an introduction to existing political ecological research inspired by Gramsci’s wide-ranging writings. In order to stimulate future research, we question Gramsci’s reflections on ’nature’ in order to examine the embyonic possibilities and limitations therein. Gramsci, we suggest, provides stimulating commentary on the differentiated unity of nature and society: in part, this anticipates recent arguments on this subject. Similarly, we reflect on how Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony relates to core issues within political ecology. Given the centrality of ’environmental issues’ in the contemporary moment, it is necessary to consider how social groups enrol natures and environments (both material and symbolic) in their struggles for hegemony. We conclude the editorial by introducing the articles included in the theme issue.     

The time and place for political ecology: An introduction to the articles honoring the life-work of Piers Blaikie

Political ecology (PE) is experiencing a renaissance and embrace similar to that of Geography itself. Just as there is a rediscovery of the importance of place and thus Geography, Geographers and others are discovering that this critical approach to the human-environment dialectic provides unique theoretical, methodological, and practical insights for unravelling the complexities of this contentious nexus. The host of new volumes that introduce students and the larger academic community to PE each emphasize different theoretical and thematic confluences. This volume is organized around the life-long work and intellectual history of a leading political ecologist, Piers Blaikie, and as such it is both a tribute to that work, and an alternative means to discover what PE is today. Piers Blaikie’s life-work also encompasses research and writing on natural disasters and risk, development policy and practice, international environmental policy, conservation and biodiversity, AIDS in Africa, livelihoods, and books on India and Nepal. By assessing Blaikie’s long and productive career, from pioneering foundational texts, through transdisciplinary exchanges in the fields of Geography, Development Studies, and policy, to constructive and critical engagement with the post-modern turn, and questions of epistemology and methodology, the contributions to this themed issue provide a diverse yet coherent set of insights. The three sessions of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Conference in Denver in 2005 and group of articles that emerged from them to form this collection serve to clarify the major convergences and dissonances in the field and its ongoing vitality. In Piers Blaikie’s case, as a central actor in both the theory and practice of PE, a collection based upon a critical overview of his contributions to PE provides a new window into seeing and understanding the past, present, and future of the field.     

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.     

Political ecology in the key of policy: From chains of explanation to webs of relation

Political ecology (PE) is rooted in a combination of critical perspectives and the hard won insights distilled from field work. The theoretical base of political ecology was joined, by Piers Blaikie and others, to an unflinching commitment to empirical observation of biophysical and socio-economic phenomena in place. To this already ambitious mix was added a practical intent to contribute to material as well as social change: a practical political ecology of alternative development ran beneath the surface of much of this work. For many this led to serious encounters with policy and the machinery of policy research institutions. While seemingly contradictory with the critical tenets of political ecology, Blaikie’s pursuit of this pathway led beyond the ivory tower to Political Ecology in the Key of Policy, initially to inform national and international policy and eventually expanding - through the work of second-generation PE - to address internal policy in social movements and alternative development networks. Among recent variations on political ecology that have built partly on the work of Blaikie, Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) expands PE to address women as a group, and gender as a category. FPE and post-structural PE are based on multiple actors with complex and overlapping identities, affinities and interests. An emergent wave of political ecology joins FPE, post-structural theory, and complexity science, to address theory, policy and practice in alternatives to sustainable development. It combines a radical empiricism and situated science, with feminist post-structural theories of multiple identity and “location”, and alternative development paradigms. This approach honors the legacy of Piers Blaikie and other PE founders yet incorporates the insights and political projects of feminism, post-structural critique and autonomous or alternative development movements.     

The rise and transformation of the Brazilian landless movement into a counter-hegemonic political actor: A Gramscian analysis

The Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) is widely acknowledged as one of the most organized, dynamic, and influential social movements in Latin America. The MST has increasingly inserted the struggle for land within larger political contestations for broad social change, leading conservatives and leftists alike to describe it as a “first class actor” in Brazilian politics. What explains the move from corporatist struggles for land to broader counter-hegemonic contestations; put differently, how did the MST come to acquire ‘global ambition’? Much of the literature on the MST analyzes its external actions but without explaining what drives these actions. This paper utilizes a Gramscian political ecology approach to comprehend the MST’s political actions and its rise and transformation into a counter-hegemonic political actor. Specifically, I evaluate the development of the MST’s organizational praxis from corporatist struggles for land in the late 1970s to ‘global ambition’ and changing nature-society relations by the early 2000’s. Such an approach brings to light the role of organization building, political education, alliance building, and subaltern agency in propelling the MST’s political mobilizations. In so doing, this paper contributes to the literature on the MST and collective action. This paper also engages with a ‘politics of scale’ since the conquest of geographic scale is critical to understanding the MST’s national growth and political actions. This paper concludes by arguing that the rise and transformation of the MST into a vibrant counter-hegemonic actor in Brazilian politics was a gradual process that matured as it territorialized into a national movement.     

Something in the Air: Civic science and contentious environmental politics in post-apartheid South Africa

The emergence of an environmental movement in post-apartheid South Africa has involved the reframing of the environment as a ‘brown’ issue, articulating the discourse of social and environmental justice and a rights-based notion of democracy. Environmental movements have pursued a dual strategy of deliberation and activist opposition. Environmental movements have deployed science to pursue the strategic task of democratic opposition and have established networks of environmental knowledge and expertise. Ecological modernization is the dominant approach to environmental governance and adopts a science-based policy approach. In this context the regulation and management of the environment is premised on the need for science, which provides the authoritative basis for a regulatory response. In local environmental movements, there exists a fundamental tension between a cumulative history of lay knowledge about pollution and the lack of official acknowledgement of qualitative narratives. This is accompanied by a lack and suspicion of reliable official data. Environmental movements have thus employed ‘civic science’ strategically to place the issue of air pollution on the political agenda. This paper uses the case of environmental politics in Durban to reflect on the ways in which civic science and lay knowledge, together constituting community hybrid knowledge, are produced and disseminated in order to pressure the state and capital. The three ways in which knowledge is deployed are: to frame environmental problems, in strategies of oppositional advocacy, and in deliberative policy forums. Empirical analysis shows that civic science is produced through knowledge networks, and both lay knowledge and civic science are opportunistically used by environmental movements to engage both inside and outside formal policy making arenas. This deployment of hybrid knowledge by environmental movements represents a broader challenge to the power of science and technology based on increasing evidence of the hazards and risks facing ordinary people in their daily lives.     

Seeing the local in the global: Political ecologies, world-systems, and the question of scale

Scale, as concept, has featured prominently in political ecology and remains, even if implicitly, a crucial point of analytical reference. Recent studies, drawing from both human geography and ecology, have sought to demonstrate how scales, rather than pre-existing ontologically, are both socially and environmentally produced. Given the different scales through which social and environmental processes occur, the study of society-environment relations can be improved by analysing varying scalar configurations of interaction. This recent and promising methodological corrective would greatly benefit from a dialogue with world-systems approaches, which integrate diverse scale-producing processes and to some extent overlap in scope with political ecology. World-systems perspectives, by focusing on the long-term systemic character of people-environment relations, effectively connect micro- to macro-scale social and ecological processes and explain long-term internal dynamics and interrelations of systems at different scales. Conversely, world-systems approaches could learn much from political ecologists’ consideration of nonhuman processes into understandings of scale and society-environment relations, which has a long tradition in geography, as well as from the more context-sensitive analytical framework brought to those understandings. Case studies are discussed to demonstrate not only how these two perspectives could be integrated, but also how explanations of environmental change can be thereby improved. Combining the two approaches provides the basis for a more ecologically oriented world-systems paradigm and, in political ecology, for greater sensitivity to socially large-scale systemic processes and, given the originally anti-capitalist underpinnings of both paradigms, for more political coherence.     

Contested H2O: Science, policy and politics in water resources management in Chile

This paper critically explores the politics that mediate the use of environmental science assessments as the basis of resource management policy. Drawing on recent literature in the political ecology tradition that has emphasised the politicised nature of the production and use of scientific knowledge in environmental management, the paper analyses a hydrological assessment in a small river basin in Chile, undertaken in response to concerns over the possible overexploitation of groundwater resources. The case study illustrates the limitations of an approach based predominantly on hydrogeological modelling to ascertain the effects of increased groundwater abstraction. In particular, it identifies the subjective ways in which the assessment was interpreted and used by the state water resources agency to underpin water allocation decisions in accordance with its own interests, and the role that a desocialised assessment played in reproducing unequal patterns of resource use and configuring uneven waterscapes. Nevertheless, as Chile’s ‘neoliberal’ political-economic framework privileges the role of science and technocracy, producing other forms of environmental knowledge to complement environmental science is likely to be contentious. In conclusion, the paper considers the potential of mobilising the concept of the hydrosocial cycle to further critically engage with environmental science.     

Indigenous knowledge and the desertification debate: problematising expert knowledge in North Africa

In Morocco the crisis narrative of desertification has been invoked for decades to facilitate and justify policy and legal changes that have systematically disadvantaged pastoralists and damaged the environment. The existing data from southern Morocco, however, do not support the claims of widespread desertification due to overgrazing or other pastoral activities. Furthermore, many anti-desertification and range improvement projects in southern Morocco have not succeeded. In an effort to rethink desertification and range ecology in Morocco, this paper presents an overview of the indigenous knowledge of range ecology among the Aarib, a group of camel pastoralists in southern Morocco, and compares it to the “expert” knowledge of Moroccan range managers. It suggests that this expert knowledge is based on questionable evidence and that it has been privileged over local knowledge primarily for political, economic and administrative reasons. The discrepancies between expert and indigenous knowledges of range ecology presented here underscore the need to reconsider range ecology in Morocco, taking indigenous ecological knowledge into account. Doing so may point the way to more successful development and conservation projects which are more environmentally appropriate and socially just. Not doing so will likely exacerbate environmental degradation in the region.     

The urban political ecology of plastic bag waste problem in Nairobi, Kenya

Over 24 million plastic bags are consumed in Kenya monthly. More than half of the bags end up in the solid waste stream. Plastic bags now constitute the biggest challenge to solid waste management in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and home to three million people. As a result, plastic bag waste has attracted great political and public attention, especially because the waste has myriad unique environmental problems. This paper seeks to unravel the problem of plastic bag waste in Nairobi through an urban political ecological perspective. Urban political ecology has done much to excavate economic, political, and cultural processes, as well as ecological dynamics that create and re-create urban environments. Little has been done in this context with respect to urban solid waste problems, with the exception of urban political ecology of environmental justice. However, research done within the context of urban political ecology of environmental justice has mainly focused on solid waste problems in the Western World, particularly USA. Drawing on research conducted in Nairobi, as well literature on business and politics, and solid waste management in Kenya, this paper examines the nature of plastic bag waste problem, its political–economic roots and implications for environmental justice.     

There’s nothing inherent about scale: political ecology, the local trap, and the politics of development in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper argues that research in political ecology would benefit from more explicit and careful attention to the question of scale and scalar politics. Although political ecologists have extensively considered scale as a methodological question, they have yet to develop an explicit theoretical approach to scale as an object of inquiry. We highlight one principal drawback to this underdeveloped approach to scale: what we call “the local trap” in which political ecologists assume that organization, policies, and action at the local scale are inherently more likely to have desired social and ecological effects than activities organized at other scales. Over the past 10 years or so, an increasingly sophisticated literature on scale has been developing among scholars in geography working in the political economy tradition. This literature has argued that scale is socially produced rather than ontologically given. Therefore, there is nothing inherent about any scale, and so the local scale cannot be intrinsically more desirable than other scales. We suggest that a greater engagement with this scale literature offers political ecology a theoretical way out of the local trap. As a first approximation of the kind of scalar analysis we advocate, we present a case study that examines the scalar politics that have shaped environmental change in the Brazilian Amazon.     

The dilemma of decontamination: A Gramscian analysis of the Mexican transgenic maize dispute

An intense environmental dispute surrounds the maize-fields of Mexico. Mexican maize traditional varieties (or ‘landraces’) constitute a global genetic resource that may well be critical to future agricultural development and corn breeding. Many environmentalists, farmers, and consumers in Mexico are therefore concerned that their maize landraces may have been ‘contaminated’ by imported transgenic maize, grown in the USA. The criticisms of this transgenic technology are complex and call into question the nature of the boundary between political and ecological (i.e. scientific) disputes. Our paper surveys these criticisms, and this political-scientific boundary, in a three-part analysis. First, we turn to Gramsci’s notes on science from his eleventh prison notebook to rethink the political ecology of transgenic maize, i.e., the way the ecological analysis of transgenic introgression is treated as politics. Second, we present the multiple criticisms of transgenic maize as scalar phenomena. Third, we review the recent scientific literature on transgene introgression to evaluate recent calls for the ‘decontamination’ of Mexican maize. Our reading illustrates two dilemmas facing the group that occupies the hegemonic subject-position in this dispute, ecological scientists. First, the popular desire to ‘decontaminate’ Mexican maize exceeds their capacities (due to complications involved with sampling). Second, although the political debate surrounding ‘contaminated’ Mexican maize exceeds science, the boundary between the dispute’s scientific and parascientific elements cannot be adjudicated scientifically. In other words, the boundary between science and politics is porous. Thus in two respects the dispute is ecological, yet beyond the capacity of this science to resolve. Yet, following Gramsci, these findings should not lead us to see science as mere ideology, or apolitical, or encourage a retreat into metaphysics. Rather it points to the need for a social transformation that sees science as “humanity forging its methods of research … in other words, culture, the conception of the world.” By exploring the dilemmas of decontamination, the dispute over transgene introgression in Mexican maize-fields provides an opportunity to elaborate upon Gramsci’s neglected insights into the politics of science.     

Political ecology and development: Intersections, explorations and challenges arising from the work of Piers Blaikie

While most contributions to this collection focus centrally on political ecology (PE), this paper approaches the work of Piers Blaikie through a somewhat different lens, situating his political ecological contributions within the broader context of his engagement with related themes in development studies. I trace and discuss his work in approximately chronological terms, from the spatial organization of North Indian villages through the political economy of agrarian change and of peripheral capitalist (under-)development in Nepal to political ecology, pathbreaking work on the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Uganda, more general disaster vulnerability and recoverabililty, and a survey of post-structural challenges in development theory. Not only does this approach provide a distinctive view of Blaikie’s evolving concerns over the course of his career and thematic connections between them, but it also reflects my personal experience of his work and its influence. This foundation then enables an exploration of several issues about current directions in, and possible future extensions of, PE which should help to ensure that PE does not, as some critics claim, have only limited remaining shelf-life.     

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 Politics of Nature in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest

Environmental politics, argues French philosopher Bruno Latour, have been a ‘disappointment’. Rather than trying to bring environmental concerns into a political world split into two - between Nature/Science and politics/society - Latour argues that environmental movements ought to focus on destroying this two-house collective, and develop ‘an understanding of ecological crises that no longer uses nature to account for the tasks to be accomplished’. In this paper I put my research on the politics and science of the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR), a large tract of temperate rainforest on the central and north coast of British Columbia, into direct conversation with Latour’s arguments about science, epistemology and environmental politics. The GBR was a site of intense political struggle focused predominantly on the scale and scope of industrial forestry, a struggle which ‘ended’ in 2006 with what some call a historic compromise between some high-profile environmental groups, First Nations, the Provincial government, and the forest industry. This paper focuses on two interlinked questions: do the environmental organizations at the centre of the struggle demonstrate the maladies identified by Latour; are they too preoccupied with representing Nature through Science? And second, do these maladies help us explain or understand the politics over the GBR? Were the politics of the GBR limited by environmentalist invocations of a singular Nature through Science, what Latour calls ‘Naturpolitik’? The encounter between theory and practice leads to a more cautious and critical assessment of the environmental politics in the GBR, but also tempers Latour’s arguments. Environmentalists in the GBR do exhibit Latour’s maladies, but in tracing the Politics of Nature there, it seems that Naturpolitik is not as powerful as Latour argues.     

Environmental inequalities in New Zealand: A national study of air pollution and environmental justice

Research has established that many socially deprived, low income and ethnic minority communities are exposed to disproportionately high levels of outdoor air pollution. Whilst there is a burgeoning literature documenting these environmental disparities, most previous studies have taken place in North America and few researchers have examined local scale variations across an entire country. Further, there has been little work systematically evaluating disparities in the local exposure to air pollution from different sources. In this New Zealand research we use mean annual estimates of outdoor particulate air pollution for different sources for neighbourhoods across urban New Zealand to evaluate whether air pollution varies between local areas of differing socioeconomic circumstances. We find that outdoor pollution levels are higher in socially deprived areas (using a neighbourhood measure of disadvantage) and neighbourhoods with a high proportion of low income households. However, although ethnicity was also related to mean total pollution, levels were elevated in areas where the proportion European was higher and other ethnic groups (including Māori) were lower. We also find that the disparities in pollution levels are specific to the pollution source. The results are discussed in the context of the policy framework in New Zealand, including the tensions fashioned by the Resource Management Act 1991, which have effectively ‘desocialised’ environmental concerns. We argue that the regulatory framework is fixated on ‘environmental bottom lines’ rather than social concerns that are integral to the environmental justice framework. Some priorities for future research into environmental justice in New Zealand are also considered.     

Intervening in the environment of the everyday

This paper seeks to explore the radical democratic potential in urban artistic interventions. It does so through bringing Gramsci’s concept of nature together with his ‘cultural writings’ and broader debates around avant-garde artistic practice. Empirically, I focus on the work of City Mine(d), a Brussels-based interventionist collective, and Siraj Izhar, a London-based artist-activist. Within Gramsci’s writings, I argue, socio-natural relationships emerge through sensuous activity or work. Making a somewhat more ambitious claim, I suggest that Gramsci’s concept of nature rests on what geographers have come to understand as the production of nature. Whilst attention has only recently turned to this implicit political ecology, much greater attention has been focussed on Gramsci’s cultural insights. For Gramsci, cultural struggles are an integral part of the effort to shape a new reality. Whilst he emphasises the ‘bottom up’ nature of such struggles, the intervention of enlightened outsiders is often a necessary and frustrating complement. However, by turning attention to the manner in which hegemony relates to the production of nature, and through bringing this into dialogue with radical artistic practice, such implicit elitism might be challenged. City Mine(d) and Izhar, I argue, develop a non-vanguardist politics that sees the contestation of hegemony as a struggle integral to the day-to-day nature of cities.