Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1. Under what conditions are the goals of political ecology scholarship advanced
by a serious engagement with ecological relations?
2.
How may ecology as a science be implicated in understandings of environmental
politics by political ecologists?
Political Ecology's Engagement with Ecological Relations
Political ecology is a maturing, rapidly expanding fi eld in geography and to a lesser
extent, allied disciplines such as anthropology, rural sociology and development
studies. Its major lineage in geography developed out of the uneasy marriage
between cultural ecology and agrarian political economy - a marriage that emerged
from an interest in the political and economic roots of land degradation in rural areas
of the developing world (Watts, 1983; Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie and Brookfi eld, 1987).
Geography's political ecology, as originally framed by Piers Blaikie and Harold
Brookfi eld, engaged critically with dominant environmental analyses (those strongly
shaped by neo-Malthusian and 'Tragedy of the Commons' concepts) and sought to
combine a detailed understanding of rural producers' use of the natural resources as
conditioned by their 'access to resources' which is, in turn, shaped by changes in the
biophysical environment and the broader political economy. The explanatory focus
was the dialectical relationship between social and environmental change with a
particular emphasis on the connection between poverty and environmental misman-
agement. Since the early 1990s, there has been a movement away from its structural
roots. In addition there has been a diversifi cation of political ecological scholarship,
refl ecting the rapid growth of this fi eld, which has attracted scholars to its promise
for drawing connections between: social and ecological change, the environment and
social justice, global and local change, and political interests and the construction of
dominant views of environment. Outside of the land-use and land cover change fi eld,
a large fraction of people-environment geography now self-identifi es as 'political
ecology.' As a result, it has become diffi cult to specify a common theoretical or meth-
odological framework for political ecology in geography (but see Forsyth, 2003;
Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003; Robbins, 2004; Neumann, 2005).
One could describe much of political ecology work as analyses of society-
environment relations, contextualised by history and place, with a particular empha-
sis on environmental and social justice implications of broader political economic
change. Such a broad description hides many differences within the fi eld. A minority
of contemporary political ecology work remains focused on understanding the
relationship between social and environmental change (Walker, 2005). A much
larger fraction of contemporary political ecology is not concerned with environmen-
tal change
per se
but with the politics surrounding the use of, and struggles for,
access to natural resources. In the sections below, I will discuss the experience and
future potential of engagements with ecological relations for these two areas of
inquiry within political ecology.
Different encounters with ecological relations
The history of approaches to the study of people-environment relations is one that
has been plagued, from the start, with analytical conundrums associated with the
drawing of boundaries between 'human society' and 'nature' as well as the identifi -
cation of mediators between environmental and social change, once boundaries are
