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Complete lecture notes (1-9) Environmental Politics
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This document contains lecture notes on all the lectures of Environmental Politics, given in the last block of the 2nd year of IRO at Leiden University.
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Environmental Politics (2022-2023)Summary of all the lectures (Total: 39 pages)
Content:
Lecture 1: Introduction (no notes)
Lecture 2: Power and the Environment
Lecture 3: Modernity and the Environment
Lecture 4: Environmental Authoritarianism and Fascism
Lecture 5: Eco-socialism
Lecture 6: Colonialism, Racism and Environmental Justice
Lecture 7: Migration, Gender and Environment
Lecture 8: The Politics of Eco-Grief, -Guilt and -Anxiety
Lecture 9: Climate (In)Action and (Dis)Engagement
,Lecture 2: Power and the Environment
Political ecology= a multidisciplinary field that studies the complex interactions between
social, economic, and ecological processes. It seeks to understand how power relations,
institutions, and cultural values shape environmental change and resource management
Power shapes the environment:
● Access
● Use
● Distribution
● Degradation
Key concepts:
● Marginality
● ..
● ..
Implications:
● Environment social construction
● Entanglement of nature and society
- vs. nature/society dichotomy (e.g. environmental management=
humans control environment in how they want it to act, radical
ecocentrism= prioritizing ecological issues before human issues →
both concepts divide nature and society)
● Environmental disrepair social
- vs. biological, organizational, technological diagnoses
Political Ecology example: Water use in Chile
● Neoliberal economic development
- Privatize natural resources
- Marketize natural resources
● 1981: Chilean water code
● Increased commercial agriculture for export (annual crops → fruit
production)
● Increased demand for scarce water
● Large producers claim water rights
Mitchell: Carbon Democracy
● Dominant energy source shapes political activity, actors
● The rise of modern mass democratic politics were facilitated by coal
● Extraction, production and transportation of coal empowers workers
● Who can make effective demands for work or politics?
Coal energy was concentrated in large quantities, at specific sites, the consequence of this
is that people concentrated around these sites. These people could potentially slow, disrupt
or cut off energy. In other words, people could start to turn on and off the energy that fueled
a whole economy. Previously, this could not have been done, because people could not
‘turn’ on the sun whenever they wanted.
,Coal and politics:
● Labor power
- Strike
- Sabotage → Small issues implemented in the right place on the right
time could cause widespread consequences
- Slow down
● Political power
- Suffrage
- Right to unionize
- Mass parties
Oil:
● Production
- Industrially isolated
- Geographically remote
● Fewer, more easily surveilled workers
● Fewer opportunities for worker disruption
● Fewer opportunities to translate labor power into political demands (unlike coal)
Depoliticization=
● Removes issues from political discourse
● Closes issues to debate, deliberation, contestation
● Decouples issues from questions of power
Post-politics:
● Consensus > dissensus (challenge to consensus) → the agreed upon
opinion is so powerful
● Universalizes particular political positions and demands
● Hidden normative power
● Expert-led administration
- Discourages heterodoxy
- Sidelines demos
● Associated with ‘end of history’
- After the Cold War absence of ideological division
Depoliticized environments:
● Timing and character
- Larger post-political context
- Lack of emancipatory subject
● Urgency and immediacy
● Denialism
● Commonplace notions of ‘nature’
- Uniform and singular
- Realm of necessity
Discursive mechanisms:
● Depoliticization via scientization
, ● Depoliticization via economization
● Depoliticization via moralization
Scientization and economization:
● Predetermines environmental politics
● Making democratic deliberation unnecessary
● Empowers experts → disempowers citizens
Moralization:
● Good vs. Bad
● Depoliticization when
- Good= beyond debate
● Depoliticization when
- Good= permissible
- Bad= impermissible
Repoliticization? Swyngedouw:
● Understanding → that nature is open-ended and multiple (so there is not
one set of social, economic and cultural solutions for engaging with
nature)
● Recognizing → that politics is always decisive
● Affirming → equality
● Acting → from a place of ‘can’
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