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and mutual obligations. The highly dynamic ecology demands such porosity - if
territorial boundaries are drawn, they will be circumvented, with such circumven-
tions referred to as corruption. In this way, environmental politics is strongly shaped
by high spatiotemporal variability of resource availability.
A major trend in environmental governance has been the increased reliance on
market mechanisms (Daily and Ellison, 2002). Environmental services are priced
and increasingly traded within government created and managed markets. To be
bought and sold, the features of a natural process, ecological community, or a wild
plant or animal population need to be necessarily abstracted. Moreover, the matrix
from or into which the service is bought or sold is ignored - one wetland, forested
patch, or biodiverse grassland is treated as equal to another in its category. The
characteristics of ecological processes may resist such categorisations and in so
doing change the appropriate scales at which these markets are established and the
different interests and debates implicated in environmental politics. These politics
may increasingly rely on ecological science to stabilise facts and create tradeable
indicators of ecosystem functioning (Robertson, 2006). The actors, discursive strate-
gies and institutions implicated in environmental politics are thus affected by the
ecological relations.
Land management as political instrument
To understand environmental politics, the political ecologist, even in the cases
described above, would need to understand only up to the third level of engagement
with ecological relations (fi gure 12.1). It could be argued that there is no need to
delineate the reasons for increased aggregation, spatiotemporal variability, or the
strong embeddedness in place of ecological features or processes for understanding
how these changes have infl uenced environmental politics. Certainly a more com-
plete story could be told with information about the anthropogenic and non-
anthropogenic processes leading to such resource characteristics but is it necessary
to strive for such completeness to understand environmental politics? Can we think
of environmental politics as simply reactive to the environmental change or is the
intentional reworking of ecological relations to some end part of this politics? The
simple answer to this question is that yes, politics are mediated through ecological
relations to serve particular interests. Political actors' (mis)understandings of eco-
logical response and their reactions to ecological change as it unfolds may very much
be tightly intertwined in the politics surrounding resource use and control. In such
situations, greater engagement with ecological relations beyond level 3 may be nec-
essary to understanding the unfolding of environmental politics.
Relationship between ecological and social change
Arguably, the early explanatory focus of geographical political ecology was to inves-
tigate the relationship between social and ecological change. This is an ambitious
intellectual project especially when one considers the checkered history of environ-
mental determinism, cultural ecology, and human ecology in people-and-
environment research. In different ways, these prior approaches sought integration
of social and environmental change by favouring ecological or social logics in
their choice of common currencies (cash, labour, energy, nutrients, etc.), strong
materialist treatments of society, or strong socialisations of 'nature'. Moreover, there
was a tendency for cultural adaptation and its various functionalist variants to result
