Political ecology,development, and human exceptionalism

The sub-discipline of Political Ecology devotes much critical attention to the complex and often pernicious socio-ecological impacts of mainstream development - developmentality - across the world. However, despite the ’ecology’ in its name, Political Ecology continues to be predominantly anthropocentric which, we contend, compromises its critique of developmentality’s excesses. Drawing on recent literatures in philosophy, political theory, and human geography, we argue that both the more-than-human and social impacts of developmentality are enabled by zoöpolitical logics of human exceptionalism which support anthropocentrism. We suggest that the adverse effects of development are co-constituted with the positive vision of human wellbeing which runs through developmentality. Thus, an effective critique of development will necessarily have to address the zoöpolitical logics that underpin anthropocentrism. Doing so will strengthen the rigour of political ecology’s engagement with developmentality and widen its attention to the diversity of life harmed by mainstream development.     

The political ecology of biodiversity conservation on the Malagasy Highlands

During the past two decades biodiversity conservation has become the major focus of international interventions by donor organizations and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) working in Madagascar. Despite these efforts, biodiversity losses continue unabated and the conservation activities undertaken to date appear ineffective. This paper summarizes the findings of a research study conducted on the central highlands of Madagascar that sought to examine possible reasons for the continued erosion of biodiversity in the country. A political ecology research framework is used to identify different social actor groups vying for access to natural resources and the extent to which their actions influence biodiversity on the island. The application of this framework reveals three major findings: (1) the existence of tensions between groups of social actors vying for access to and use of natural resources; (2) the characteristics and role of power differs greatly by actor group and it is the maldistribution of power, and its manifestations of use, that have detrimental effects on regional biodiversity; and (3) there are numerous aspects of the `conventional wisdom' that have permeated the thinking of staff from extralocal actor groups (especially NGOs, donors, and government agencies) and are largely false. Such `wisdom,' perpetrated by discourse and media, lacks understanding of local livelihood patters and local needs. However, endowed with political power and financial influence, this wisdom dominates local knowledge and ultimately leads to the conception and realization of conservation projects that fail to achieve their stated objectives. The behaviors of all of the actors in this situation perpetuate the status quo, including current patterns of biodiversity elimination.     

Defining the forest,defending the forest: Political ecology,territoriality, and resistance to a protected area in the Dominican Republic

Political ecologists have considered the social and economic impacts that nature reserves, national parks and other forms of protected area can have on neighbouring communities, and how this can generate conflicts between them. This paper analyses such conflicts through the lens of territoriality, considering how the way protected area territories are created, delineated, and defined is linked to the social impacts experienced by local people. Conflicts between locals and conservation authorities over protected areas are about rival attempts to define the boundaries of protected areas, who the land should belong to, what it should be used for, and what its purpose is. Yet the ability of local people or conservation authorities to impose their meaning is unequal. It illustrates these processes with the example of a scientific reserve in the Dominican Republic, and a decades-long conflict to define what the reserve should mean, what it should look like, and who it should belong to.     

Political ecology and the epistemology of social justice

Piers Blaikie’s writings on political ecology in the 1980s represented a turning point in the generation of environmental knowledge for social justice. His writings since the 1980s demonstrated a further transition in the identification of social justice by replacing a Marxist and eco-catastrophist epistemology with approaches influenced by critical realism, post-structuralism and participatory development. Together, these works demonstrated an important engagement with the politics of how environmental explanations are made, and the mutual dependency of social values and environmental knowledge. Yet, today, the lessons of Blaikie’s work are often missed by analysts who ask what is essentially political or ecological about political ecology, or by those who argue that a critical approach to environmental knowledge should mean deconstruction alone. This paper reviews Blaikie’s work since the 1980s and focuses especially on the meaning of ‘politics’ within his approach to political ecology. The paper argues that Blaikie’s key contribution is not just in linking environmental knowledge and politics, but also in showing ways that environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of socially vulnerable people. This pragmatic co-production of environmental knowledge and social values offers a more constructive means of building socially just environmental policy than insisting politics or ecology exist independently of each other, or believing environmental interventions are futile in a post-Latourian world.     

Political ecology and habitat conservation for endangered species planning in Southern California: Region, places, and ecological governance

The county of Riverside California has a long history of land conservation. In this comparative case study between Western Riverside County and the Coachella Valley area in the county we show how governance institutions that encompass regions that have very different ecologies, are governed by rules and regulations that are undifferentiated relative to those differences. The study argues, however, that what may differ are the workings of the local urban regimes and the metabolic appropriation of ecosystems for economic growth. In this close investigation of the sprawling county of Riverside we find very different approaches to habitat preservation and the enrollment of nature for wealth production by the local urban regimes.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

In search of common ground: Political ecology and conservation in the development age

In this essay, we respond to Menon and Karthik’s recent comments on our earlier critical review, which appeared in this journal. We clarify some of our original arguments and also draw out practical implications of the conceptual interventions made earlier. Specifically, we draw attention to the common ground shared by political ecology and the social formation of conservation by pointing to why conservation becomes necessary in the first place. We thus urge for a refocusing of political ecological attention from limited and limiting critiques of conservation to the root cause of socio-ecological marginalization in today’s world: the pursuit of development at multiple scales.     

(Re-)Conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework

This article demonstrates how a feminist political ecology (FPE) framework can be utilized to expand scholarly conceptualizations of water inequality in Delhi, India. I argue that FPE is well positioned to complement and deepen urban political ecology work through attending to everyday practices and micropolitics within communities. Specifically, I examine the embodied consequences of sanitation and ‘water compensation’ practices and how patterns of criminality are tied to the experience of water inequality. An FPE framework helps illuminate water inequalities forged on the body and within particular urban spaces, such as households, communities, streets, open spaces and places of work. Applying FPE approaches to the study of urban water is particularly useful in analyzing inequalities associated with processes of social differentiation and their consequences for everyday life and rights in the city. An examination of the ways in which water practices are productive of particular urban subjectivities and spaces complicates approaches that find differences in distribution and access to be the primary lens for viewing how water is tied to power and inequality.     

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.     

Turn up the heat! Contesting energy poverty in Buffalo,NY

Energy poverty – or the condition of households that cannot adequately heat their homes – is produced at the confluence of multi-scalar processes, from regional labor market restructuring, to urban disinvestment, to geopolitical and geoeconomic struggles over extraction. Critical theorization of the concept is in its nascent phase and the notion itself has received relatively little attention in the United States. Our paper aims to address these lacunae by mobilizing an urban political ecology framework to consider a community-based campaign that targeted residential energy conservation funds in Buffalo, New York. We analyze how the community campaign drew upon the “network crisis” of the energy-poor home to frame critical justice demands that foregrounded energy poverty as the product of uneven socionatural development. Through spatial claims and scalar strategies, the campaign highlighted the contribution of neoliberal conservation programs to deepening patterns of uneven development, and demanded redress of disinvestment in urban housing stock through funding of weatherization for low-income households. We argue that contests over urban energy metabolism offer a fruitful area to explore the possibilities of transforming uneven development from below.     

Permeable homes: A historical political ecology of insects and pesticides in US public housing

This paper traces changes in the political ecology of insects and chemicals in US public housing since Congress founded public housing in 1937. Drawing upon the literature of critical geographies of home, urban political ecology, and medical history, it argues that the constitution of “public” and “private” space within public housing was deeply entangled with pest control practices there. Prior to 1945, reformers treated the housing as a commons, in part compelled by the mobility of bedbugs and the pesticide used to combat them, both of which were seen as serious health threats. Managers were also motivated by social welfare ideologies, while residents eagerly assisted with communal control policies in order to achieve freedom from the health insults of bedbugs. Following 1945, however, new synthetic pesticides like DDT seemed to stay safely within one apartment unit, encouraging housing managers to abandon community-oriented pest control practices. Meanwhile, curtailed budgets, particularly after the Housing Act of 1949, left the infrastructure of public housing to decay, rendering units more physically permeable even as managers neglected the communities there. The new pesticides nearly eradicated bedbugs, but tenacious populations of German cockroaches blossomed thanks to the permeable buildings and synthetic pesticides. Residents grew increasingly resistant to pesticide use as they observed that cockroach populations went unabated. The paper serves as a case for applying political ecology frameworks to domestic spaces, and also argues that housing quality and domestic pesticide use are not merely private responsibilities but should be regarded as environmental justice issues.     

Agricultural diversification and dietary diversity: A feminist political ecology of the everyday experiences of landless and smallholder households in northern Ghana

There is an emerging literature suggesting that when smallholder households diversify their agriculture, a wide range of food groups will be available, and consequently, dietary diversity will be improved. The present article brings this literature into critical conversation with research in feminist political ecology. Grounded in five years of repeated fieldwork, the article weaves together 70 in-depth interviews, and dietary as well as farm production diversity data from 30 households in northern Ghana. This dataset is analyzed by considering not only the diversity of farming systems, but also household headship, including male-headed, de facto female-headed, and de jure female-headed. Among other findings, the paper suggests that dietary diversity scores are lowest for households who have lost their farmlands to on-going land grabbing in Ghana. Furthermore, the paper suggests that while agricultural diversification is essential, it is not sufficient in itself to address nutritional challenges confronting smallholder households. In the contested and political arena of the household, the gendered politics of access to food can deeply shape how agricultural diversification contributes to dietary diversity. Overall, I do not wish to conclude that there are no benefits of increasing the diversity of farm production. Rather, I wish to stress that farm production diversity might not be the best or only strategy to improving dietary diversity among rural households. Through this case study, I also contribute to emerging research in new feminist political ecologies by demonstrating how the intersection of gender, seniority, marital status, and sexual politics shapes resource access and control.     

Urban agriculture and political ecology of health in municipal Ashaiman,Ghana

This paper examines the multiple processes that shape the use of agrochemicals and wastewater irrigation in Ghanaian urban agriculture. It further explores whether and how these processes present bodily health challenges for women and men farmers. Qualitative fieldwork was conducted in Ashaiman, a municipal area located about 30 km north-east of Accra, Ghana’s capital. Methods of data collection involved in-depth interviews, focus groups and participatory risk ranking and scoring. Conceptually, the paper brings political ecologies of health into closer conversation with scholarship on embodiment and gender. Overall, the findings demonstrate how specific urban agricultural practices are socially produced, how these practices come to affect the human body, and the long-term gendered consequences. One of the contributions of the paper is to draw attention to the nature and cost of urban agriculture in Ghana, a cost not in financial or environmental sense, but in the realm of embodied experiences of exposure to agrochemicals. The paper argues that the current problem confronting urban agriculture in Ashaiman, Ghana, cannot be adequately addressed unless understood as socially produced and historically determined. Further, the health impact of urban agriculture is not only a full bodily experience, but is also gendered. In the end, a case is made as to why gendered bodies demand more critical analysis in scholarship involving political ecologies of health.     

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.     

Politics of scale and community-based forest management in southern Malawi

This article uses insights from theory on the social production of scale and multiple social and natural science methods to interrogate village-scale community-based forest management (CBFM) in southern Malawi, focusing on boundary demarcation, rule formulation and scaling, and dynamics of external facilitation. Examination of political agendas of those who pursued, gained from, or protested particular scalar CBFM arrangements uncovered otherwise hidden scalar politics, whose outcomes impeded more than they advanced CBFM goals. I argue that clarifying the scalar politics and configuration of forest governance arrangements can lead to a more nuanced understanding of CBFM challenges and create new opportunities for addressing them. Containerized, single-level CBFM institutions mismatched interacting social, ecological and institutional scalar configurations and relations, and confounded CBFM. Unequal international-donor/national and national/community scalar relations were as important as intra-community dynamics in explaining performance of CBFM. They constructed CBFM on a shaky foundation that put institutional and personal agendas and short-term goals over long-term socioecological sustainability. The politics of rescaling forest rules from village to (broader) Traditional Authority level alienated them from communities and undermined enforcement. Diverse motivations behind a scale-related strategy that separated usufruct from territorial rights in allocating forests mostly undermined socioecological CBFM goals. While scale is not the key or only explanation of CBFM performance, negotiated scaling offered a proactive way to anticipate scale-related conflicts in particular settings, and for communities to create institutional forms that minimize such conflicts at local or intermediate scale levels. Findings support strong, well-resourced states and caution against donor-driven quick fixes.     

Coastal flooding due to synoptic scale,meso-scale and remote forcings

Coastal flooding occurs due to storm surges generated by tropical and extra-tropical cyclones on the globe. The meteorological forcing fields for the generation of storm surges are the tangential surface wind stress on the ocean surface and the normal atmospheric pressure gradients associated with the weather systems. The large scale forcing from the cyclones is referred to as the synoptic scale and storm surge prediction from synoptic scale forcing is well developed and is reasonably satisfactory around the world. However, coastal flooding also occurs from weather systems, with forcing on a meso-scale and also from remote forcing. It is proposed here that the term “Storm surge” be used to only refer to coastal flooding from synoptic scale forcing and the terminology “Rissaga” be used for coastal flooding from meso-scale forcing. For flooding due to remote forcing, a new term “Kallakkadal” is proposed.     

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.