Essential Readings
Robbins, P., (2019) Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell
Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B. and Wangari, E. (2013[1996]) Gender and Environment:
A feminist political ecology perspective. In: Feminist political ecology: Global issues and
local experiences. London: Routledge, pp.3-24
Key words:
Type: Book
Abstract
Aims to highlight that political ecology is something that people do. – it is a
community of practice characterising a certain kind of text
Political ecology now: degradation and marginalisation, conservation and control,
environmental conflict, environmental subjects and identities, political objects and
actors
Chapter 1 Political versus Apolitical Ecologies
A political ecology; identifies the impacts of broader systems rather than blaming
proximate and local forces; views ecological systems as power-laden rather than
politically inert; and between taking an explicitly normative approach rather than
one that claims the objectivity of disinterest.
Poltiical ecology; “to understand the complex relations between nature and society
through a careful analysis of what one might call the forms of access and control
over resources and their implications for environmental health and sustainable
livelihoods” (Watts, 2000, p. 257) Explaining environmental conflict especially in
terms of struggles over “knowledge, power and practice” and “politics, justice and
governance”
“Even if populations rise on a limited land area, for example, the demand for land
and rising land rents will increase its efficiency of use”… “if petroleum becomes
scarce, the rising price per barrel will encourage the use of otherwise expensive
alternatives like wind and solar power, or simply cause consumers to drive less”
hence resources are constructed rather than given
“assertion that modern technologies and markets can optimize production in the
underdeveloped world, leading to conservation and environmental benefits, has
proven historically questionable. The experience of the green revolution, where
technologies of production developed in America and Europe were distributed and
subsidized for agrarian production around the world, led to what even its advocates
admit to be extensive environmental problems: exhausted soils, contaminated
water, increased pest invasions (Lal et al. 2002)”
Common premise of political ecology is to envision environmental change and
ecological circumstances as the product of political processes intertwined within
local historical an socio-economic contexts
, ‘winners and losers’ – that the costs and benefits associatd with environmental
change are distributed unequally amongst actors” (Bryant and Bailey, 1997)
Chapter 3 The Critical Tools
Commons are a theory that resources – including land, pastures and other materials like fish
and wood – over which struggles frequently occur, are shared and traditionally managed as
a collective to maintain subsistence
Challenges the conventional wisdowm based on privatisation and that collective use of
resources tends towards overexploitation and degradation – a ‘tragedy of the commons’
assuming self-interest will invariably bring destruction through overgrazing, overharvstigng
Success of collective management is that commons are not unowned but commonly held
property
Factors affecting the existence of smallholders; how traditional rules work (i.e. commons)
and whether they can adapt to socio-eocnomic change
“The “tragedy of the commons,” places the fault of degradation to disempowered local
communities, actually disguises and supports this outcome – a fundamental observation to
political ecology”
Marxist Political Economy two key precepts: 1. Social and cultural systems are based in
historical (changing) material conditions and relations – as social production and interwoven
relations of production change, then society changes as a result (Foster, 2000), 2. Capitalist
production required the extraction of surplus from labour and nature – follows with a
‘creative destruction’ of life that is capitalists ‘antithesis’
,Dependency; “the marginal conditions of the world’s poorest nations were directly the
result of the terms of trade established during the colonial period, when most colonized
countries were forced to produce primary products, rather than more valuable industrial
and craft goods” = solidified a perpetural economic order of underdevelopment
“For crop production, for example: “all progress in capitalistic agriculture is the progress in
the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing
the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the more lasting
sources of that fertility” (Marx 1990)”
““The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in
the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their preservation and
production is completely insignificant in comparison” (Marx 1992)”
Political ecology’s main proclamations : 1. “social and cultural relationships are rooted in
economic interactions amongst people and between people and non-human objects and
systems”, 2. “exogenous imposition of unsustainable extractive regimes of accumulation
results in environmental and social stress”, 3. “production for the global market leads to
contradictions and dependencies.”
Therefore political ecology is engaged with a ‘broadly defind political economy’ -> “The
systems that govern use, overuse, degradation, and recovery of the environment are
structured into larger modes of social production and relations, all revolving around the
control of nature and labour (Althusser and Balibar 1970).”
“No explanation of environmental change is complete, therefore, without serious attention
to who profits from changes in control over resources, and without exploring who takes
what from whom”
The Producer is the Agent of History; Peasant studies
Definition of peasant; “term “peasant” has always been contentious. Often used as a
pejorative term for smallholders – “rural cultivators practicing intensive, permanent,
diversified agriculture on relatively small farms” (Netting 1993) – importance of moral
economy and everyday resistance
Scott and the moral economy; (a political and economic logic for smallholder production)
1. small producers are faced with subsistence risks that help to create social systems of
mutual assistance and tolerable exploitation”, a strategy for risk aversion hinged of social
reciprocity and redistribution of resources – practices exposing risk forwards efforts to
challenge political and economic authority, formenting social upheaval as resistance, 2.
When faced with exploitative relationships with elites, peasants engage with everyday forms
of resistance, from work slow down to (swidden burning) rather than engaged with direct
armed violence (Bowen, 1986) – For example, “When the authorities in Madagascar restrict
the setting of fires, an important traditional tool of local subsistence production, local
smallholders respond in acts of everyday resistance by lighting more fires (Kull 2002).” –
(state criminalized burning due to concern that fire destroys the island’s natural resources
and blocks development – act exploits the natural character of fire (its inevitability, easy
, anonymity, and self-propagation), and third, the ambiguity between fire as explicit protest
and fire as a livelihood technique used at politically opportune moments )
Critique of Scott’s Moral economy approach; ““top down” view of ideological control
(Akram-Lodhi 1992), his risk-centered view of producer logic (Roeder 1984), and his
overlooking of gender and the extraction of female labor value in peasants’ households
(Hart 1991)”
Chapter 4 Political Ecology Emerges
Four Objectives of political ecology:
• track winners and losers to understand the persistent structures of winning and
losing; justice and injustice
• narrated using human–non-human dialectics;
• start from, or end in, a contradiction;
• simultaneously make claims about the state of nature and claims about claims about
the state of nature.
using tool such as Blaikie and Brookfield’s (1987) Chains of explanation framework tracing
the “contextual forces that constrain and direct more immediate outcomes, and write an
explanation of these outcomes that is also, simultaneously, a map for the way value flows
out the landscape, through local communities, and towards sites of accumulation
