What is political ecology?

1
What is political ecology?

• Tor A. Benjaminsen
• Noragric, UMB

2
What is political ecology?

• Loosly defined as The study of power relations
  in land and environmental management
• Combining various scales
• Power (unequal costs and benefits, winners and
  losers)
• History matters
• Conflicts Struggles over meanings as well as
  over land and resources
• Explicitly normative and political (in contrast
  to apolitical ecology)

3
Some current research topics in political ecology

• Conservation areas (winners losers)
• Environmental change (who defines how landscapes
  ought to look like?)
• The environmental impacts of commodification
• Gender, power and the environment
• Land tenure
• Environmental conflicts

4
Apolitical ecology (two main types)

1. Ecoscarcity (Malthus)
2. Modernization and win-win approaches

5
Political implications of apolitical ecology

• Neo-malthusianism
• Blaming the victim
• Local/indigenous knowledge is underestimated
• The solutions are at the national or
  international level (with the experts)

• Modernization
• Solutions to environmental problems are based on
  technology diffusion, establishment of markets,
  establishment of clear and exclusive property
  rights, and the pricing of environmental goods

6

• Political ecology
• Explicitly normative (values justice, human
  rights, pro-poor and marginalized groups)
• Structure and actor-oriented
• Focus on linking the local to the global, on
  conflicts and on understanding actors
  rationality in political, social, and
  environmental context

• Apolitical ecology
• Presents itself as objective and neutral, but
  still strongly influenced by values and interests
• Actor-less analysis (We)
• Focus on population growth (neo-malthusianism) or
  win-win solutions (modernization)

7
The hatchet PE as critique

• Deconstruction of myths, narratives discourses
  linked to the quest for control over land and
  resources
• E.g. The idea of a pristine environment,
  desertification, carrying capacity...

8
The seed PE as equity and sustainability research

• Detailed analysis of local practices (knowledge,
  perceptions), which can be used to point at
  alternatives to current polices. As a result of
  some of this research, new knowedge has been
  created on issues of range management,
  deforestation, soil fertility, agricultural
  development, land tenure, biodiversity management
  etc.

9
History of PE1970s-1985 Neo-Marxism

• Reaction against neo-Malthusianism and
  human/cultural ecology
• Influenced by dependency theory and other radical
  development theories
• But only a handful of contributions within PE in
  this period (field of marginal importance)

10
1985-1995 Eclectisism

• A range of theoretical sources and approaches
  used
• Combination of structure and agency appr.
• Blaikie (1985), Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) key
  contributions
• Chain of explanation
• Degradation is a perceptual term

11
1995-present Poststructuralism

• Postmodern influence
• Poststructuralism originated in language
  philosophy and the study of language, methaphors,
  myths, narratives, stories, and discourses play
  an important role (discourse analysis, Foucault)
• Ideas are never innocent, but either challenge or
  reinforce existing social and economic
  arrangements
• Contructionism vs realism

12
Critique against PE (Vayda and Walters 1999)

• PE starts with a priori judgments about the
  primacy of political factors in explaining
  environmental change (putting politics first)
• Concentrates on factors assumed in advance to be
  important
• Tends to deal only with politics and not with
  ecology (politics without ecology)
• PE should instead be called natural resource
  politics, political anthropology, or simply
  political science

13
Event ecology as an alternative

• No prejudgment of the importance of individual
  factors
• Begins with environmental events, and then works
  backward in time and outward in space so as to
  construct chains of causes and effects leading to
  those events
• Research is guided by open questions
• By contrast, political ecologists are said to
  always start with a political analysis and hence
  would end up with political causes of events,
  despite the fact that causes are sometimes
  natural. This will be missed by political
  ecologists
• Political-economic factors are often key causes
  of environmental change, but not always

14
Two schools in PE (broadly speaking)

• Blaikie (UK based)
• Structure agency
• Empirically oriented
• Eclectic
• Critique lacks a theory (atheoretical)
• No politics

• Watts (US based)
• Structural approach
• Theoretical (Marxist)
• Political
• Critique pre-made explanations (structural
  determinism)
• No ecology

15

• The Vayda and Walters critique is basically
  against the Watts tradition.
• Event ecology appears similar to Blaikies chains
  of explanation.