What is political ecology and what are the tools that it provides?

This is the question that primarily concerns me with this course. Not having a social science background, the broad and diverse conceptual landscape of political ecology is - as has been noted by Robbins (2004) and Walker (2006) - rather hard to distill, but broadly encompasses research that addresses the question of why environmental systems change and why social systems change? Political ecology is perhaps more easily defined by what it isn’t – an analytic approach to environmental issues that fails to consider political economy’s effects in environmental-human relations e.g. eco-scarcity or modernization (Robbins 2004, p.7). Such things do not happen in a political vacuum or in a way that is fixed. If indeed such generalizations can be said to happen at all, they are produced rather than ordained by some sort of natural law.

Many of the concepts used are esoteric to those ‘outside the academy’ (Walker 2006), and being a concerned citizen, a scientist by training, and hoping to contribute to managing environmental change; I hope to use the perspectives and critical tools that political ecology (hereafter PE) can give me to inform my future work and research. So what are the key foundations that I can draw from to frame my reading and thinking?

As relating to PE, the concept of critical realism for me is important because it informs the disciplines capacity to be normative and look at issue of justice and equity – which it explicitly is. By starting from the premise that there is a reality out there but that the way that this is defined and framed is both socially constructed and reproduced (through: representation, discourse, and imagery (Neumann 2009; Johnson 2009), its allows for the capacity of careful interdisciplinary research to reveal more complex, subtle realities that open up space to create change. It also illustrates the need to shine a light on what is really happening either as part of neo-liberal processes or as part of wider narratives that tackle why environmental systems change and why social systems change.

So what are the key things that will help inform my thinking? Part of the problem for me is the richness and overlapping nature of the ideas that inform PE, I think that my brain is wired to try and find some defined logical framework where there is no clear recipe. Nevertheless, here are a few aspects that stand out for me and make me want to delve deeper.

· · A political-economic analysis. Specifically a greater attention to neo-liberalism and its many facets: privatisation; marketisation; state deregulation; and general creation of a market society (Castree 2010). Especially the idea of commodification as a driving dynamic of capitalism’s relationship with the natural world as illustrated by the reading on Carbon Colonialism (Bumpus and Liverman 2009), and the production of both the objects and subjects of new insurance transactions through climate change research (Johnson 2009), as well as the subsumption of tree’s reproductive biology to serve capital (Prudham 2003).

· · The centrality of what is considered ‘valid’ knowledge and the production of this in shaping discourses and the definitions of problems and solutions (Peet and Watts 2009). This is demonstrated clearly by Bridge (2009) who points out that the current ‘peak oil’ framing of the fossil fuel crisis only serves to distract from the real crisis which involves the energy system which we have produced and can change. Also the case of who has knowledge and who doesn’t under economic systems and it’s effects as illustrated by problems inherent with lack of market knowledge affecting rural farmers. I thought that the justification of government ranching policy in Amazonia based on one key report that suggested soil improvements from ranching was particularly illustrative of how powerful this can be.

· · Power. Power to control discourse, to produce knowledge; to engage in politics; to participate in economic system; to define the terms of trade; to define what has value or what value is. The power to administer rights, and laws (i.e. institutions).

· · The importance of interrogating a wide range of causal factors both in terms of time (the historical roots and context of a problem), and in terms of space, distance and scale (e.g. what effect are the policies of the WB or the projects driven by the CDM having on local spaces)

Despite feeling introduced to these powerful ideas and more. I still feel a stranger to them, I still feel unsure how I would apply them in an analysis of my own. What are the critical approaches to this type of research? Which theories are there in the toolbox and how might I usefully employ them? In particular I feel a need to develop a political-economic understanding. Finally, what data sources should I be looking for and where to find them?

I guess more than anything the readings have spurred my interest and confirmed to me the importance of this type of analysis. I hope that this is something I can develop for myself over the coming weeks.

Peet, Robbins and Watts, Chapter One of Global Political Ecology.

Castree N. 2010. Neoliberalism and the Biophysical Environment. Geography Compass. 4(12), 1725-1746

Neumann, R. P. 2009. Political Ecology. In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by K. Rob and T. Nigel. Oxford: Elsevier.

Robbins, P. 2004. Political Ecology, Chapter 1 and Chapter 11
Walker P. 2006. Political Ecology: Where is the Politics/Ecology/Policy? Progress in Human Geography 29(1), 30(3) and 31(3)

Bridge G. 2011. Chapter 14 in Peet et al. Past Peak Oil: Political Economy of Energy Crises

Bumpus A and Liverman D. 2011 Chapter 10 in Peet et al. Carbon colonialism? Offsets, Greenhouse Gas Reductions and Sustainable Development

Johnson L. 2011. Chapter 9 in Peet et al. Climate Change and the Risk Industry: The Multiplication of Fear and Value

Prudham, S. 2003. Taming trees: Capital, science, and nature in Pacific Slope tree improvement.