Political Ecology Case Studies and Readings

Destruction of nature: human impact and environmental degradation; Robbins, 2012

Environmental knowledge; it is difficult to define and measure environmental degradation objectively; what counts as degradation depends on what is being measured, the baseline used, and whose interests determine what a desirable narrative is; questions whether the baseline is reliable because ecosystems are naturally dynamic; 4 ways of assessing environmental destruction —> loss of natural productivity, loss of biodiversity, loss of usefulness, creating or shifting risk ecology

Kissidougou/Second Nature; Fairhead & Leach, 1996

Environmental knowledge; conventional assumptions about African environmental degradation can be misleading because population growth and local land use do not necessarily cause deforestation; forest islands in savanna were assumed to be remnants of a once-larger forest destroyed by human activity, but paper shows that local communities actually expanded forests around settlements; vegetations is constantly changing so assuming a fixed historical baseline can lead to inaccurate conclusions about environmental change; combined methods (aerial photos, colonial archives, oral histories, participant observation) allow researchers to cross-check claims

Desertification in Maghreb; Davis, 2005

Environmental knowledge; uses mixed methods like local knowledge, biodiversity measurements, and NDVI; pastoralists have been forced to settle permanently and herd numbers have been reduced; communal land has been privatised, further limiting livelihood and mobility; anti-desertification programs include range improvement projects, plant “green belts”, and stabilising sand dunes; “expert” knowledge emphasizes an assumed climax state and outweighs indigenous knowledge, crisis narratives attract funding; by restricting herders to smaller parcels of land, there is more pressure on that land

Environmental science and myths; Forsyth, 2002

Environmental knowledge; environmental orthodoxies are generalized statements referring to degradation or causes of change that are accepted as fact, but have shown to be inaccurate and leading to policies that restrict certain groups of people; orthodoxies often based on images of environmental change as crisis due to human action

Elephant poaching in Africa; Naidoo et al., 2016

Environmental knowledge; analysis is guided by welfare economic theory to argue elephant conservation pays for itself through tourism revenue; models tourism losses from declining elephant populations against anti-poaching costs, creating a simplified narrative that anti-poaching is the solution; anthropocentric focus on economic value and ignores the distribution of costs/benefits, local livelihoods, crop damage, human-elephant conflict, violence and alternative solutions; assumes more elephants mean more tourism while overlooking tourism’s environmental impact; reveals how economic models and dominant conservation narratives can prioritise tourism and wildlife over local people, obscuring power inequalities and structural causes of conflict

Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices; Trisos et al., 2021

Environmental knowledge; colonialism led to Euro-American centricity and ongoing power imbalances; calls for actively undoing those systems and ways of thinking; can be done through decolonising mind, ecology, access, expertise, knowing histories, and practising ethical ecology in inclusive teams

Decolonial Bandwagon; Moosavi, 2020

Environmental knowledge; argues that the recent interest in academic decolonisation in Northern academia risks overriding, coopting, and deflating original Southern decolonial perspectives; points to 6 dangers (erasure of decolonial scholars from the Global South, reduces intellectual decolonisation to a simple task, appropriation, overlooking the multifaceted nature of marginalisation in academia, nativism, tokenism)

Situated knowledge and feminist perspectives; Thompson, 2015

Environmental knowledge; feminist perspectives stress the partiality and situatedness of knowledges; offers concrete guidance on how to avoid the pitfall of relativism

The Big Woods of Minnesota; Sprugel, 1991

Environmental knowledge; current maple-elm-basswood forests believed to be the climax vegetation of the area by first European settlers; research shows that the area before 1650 was a less dense oak woodland; “Little Ice Age” tipped the balance to reduce fire frequency; farming and housing have replaced original forest making it difficult to know if oak would have remained dominant

The war on charcoal in Tanzania; Mabele, 2020

Environmental knowledge; creates paradoxical development effects in Tanzania; policymakers find it easy to illegitimise charcoal while deriving revenues from it; sustainably produced charcoal can offer organised policy response to paradoxes

Suledo pastoralism-forestry in Tanzania

Environmental knowledge; examines how pastoralist communities are represented as threats to forests because livestock is named as a cause of deforestation and degradation; evidence to support these claims are scarce; need to recognise that pastoralism can coexist with forest conservation; post-colonial legislation largely retained colonial forestry structures

A companion to Marx’s capital; Harvey

Political economy; AbD; argues that AbD is an ongoing, permanent feature that reignites whenever capitalism faces a crisis of overaccumulation

Gramsci

Power; Emphasises how consent is built through hegemony as a way for the ruling class to remain dominant; Marxist thinker; political power takes shape through historically and geographically specific socio-natural relations; power is spatial and historical

Foucault

Power; emphasises how power is also productive by shaping people’s perceptions and desires; power is everywhere; criticises modernity and the assumption of progress; modern forms of power create new forms of domination

Scott

Power; emphasises how domination is always met with resistance that may either be public or hidden; writes about how authority exerts itself, how ordinary people resist or avoid that authority, how resistance may not always be loud and open

Degrowth, Kallis

Political economy; production and consumption intertwine, the consumers are tied to societal infrastructure, less is necessary from a biophysical perspective (in Global North), but not a good mobilising frame; personal change, collective preconfiguration and political conflict can work hand in hand

Social reproduction theory; Bhattacharya

SRT is about social processes that produce labour power as a commodity; narrative of what happens outside of working hours, who produces that work (bed, house, food all contribute to the fact that the worker is able to work), SRT is much wider than the family is not just about work done within