Lecture notes
Lecture and Reading summary - Environmental Politics - 2024 - Grade 9.5
- Module
- Institution
All lecture and reading notes for the course
[Show more]
Seller
Follow
teaksgardens-0r
Reviews received
Content preview
Notes – Environmental Politics 2024Lecture 01: 08/04/2024
Power and the Environment
Political Ecology
- Sees the environment through the lens of power.
- Highlights how power shapes the environment and vice versa.
- Power dynamics between people can structure:
- Access to resources
- Distribution of environmental goods and bads
- Ways environmental issues are defined, prioritised, and addressed
- Physical contours and composition of material environments
- Key concepts:
- Marginality
- Ecology
- Political Economy
Implications
- Environments are socially constructed.
- The environment and nature are not the opposite of society and culture but interconnected with
them.
- Environmental disrepair is a social, political, and economic challenge (not merely a
technical or scientific one) and so will require a social, political, and economic response.
Case study Chile (Budds)
- Neoliberalism
- The free markets are more efficient, equal, and neutral to allocate resources than the state.
- Informed development economics in 1980s Chile and the way Chileans interacted with their
environment.
- Neoliberal though encouraged developing nation-states, like Chile, to privatise and marketise natural
resources to increase their exports and grow their economies.
- Following this logic, the Chilean government privatised water rights.
- However, this ultimately increased water scarcity and aggravated social inequality.
- 1981: Pinochet military government rewrites the Chilean Water Code
- Water remained a public property, but the state granted the private right of use, which can be
bought and sold on the market.
- It was expected to increase the efficiency of water use by channelling it into high value projects.
- The Water Code incentivised private investment in lucrative, export-driven commercial agriculture,
namely water-intensive, fruit production (avocados).
- This increased the demand for water and rights of use, which largest producers laid claim to.
- Power shapes:
- Agricultural producers’ ability to compete for access and use of water.
- Chilean state’s compliance with tenets of neoliberalism.
,Notes – Environmental Politics 2024
Environment shapes power (Mitchell)
- Carbon democracy
- Different energy regimes can support different kinds of politics by facilitating different kinds of
political activity and empowering different kinds of actors.
- 19th century coal regimes supported democracies:
- The extraction, production, and transportation of coal were worker intensive.
- This empowered workers to make demands others had to listen to.
- Workers used this power to democratise politics (strikes, etc.).
- 20th and 21st century oil regimes undermine democracies:
- The extraction, production, and transportation of oil is not worker intensive.
- This makes it harder for workers to translate labour power into political power.
- The material properties of different natural resources and the way that societies use them can impact
politics.
Depoliticisation and post-politics
- Depoliticisation
- Removes an issue from politics, closing it to democratic contestation and deliberation.
- Decouples an issue from questions about the language of power.
- Post-politics
- Rejects disagreement.
- Champions consensus or a political viewpoint framed as if it were a universally agreed on
perspective.
- Endows consensus with normative power while also obscuring this power.
- Depoliticisation and post-politics prioritise:
- An expert-led social administration
- A technical-managerial order
- Implications
- Governance and policymaking tend to affirm the status quo.
- Politics becomes something experts do, not something democratic citizens do.
Environmental depoliticisation (Swyngedouw)
- The question of how best to respond to environmental degradation is closed to public deliberation.
- Because we all allegedly already agree on what must be done:
- Reduce the amount of CO2 in the air by commodifying carbon.
- Framed as a point of consensus, this perspective becomes difficult to challenge or otherwise critique.
,Notes – Environmental Politics 2024
Depoliticisation and nature discourse
- Three common discursive invocations of nature:
- Nature as a floating signifier or montage
- Nature as a law or norm
- Nature as a desire for harmony
- All these discursive invocations are depoliticising:
- They present nature as a fixed entity and so with an uncontestable meaning.
- Standard ways of talking about nature locate it beyond politics and public deliberation.
- Nature discourse disavows heterogeneity, unpredictability, and social construction in favour of
attributing static meaning to a homogenised and singular nature.
Depoliticisation and climate discourse
- Climate change discourse is strangely bifurcated:
- Discourse 1: climate change poses an apocalyptic threat to human survival.
- Discourse 2: nothing fundamentally needs to change; existing social, political, and economic
institutions just need to be reformed.
- What unites them, Swyngedouw argues, is their depoliticising effect:
- Discourse 1: achieves this effect by invoking crisis and delegitimating conflict.
- Discourse 2: achieves this effect by suggesting existing institutions are environmentally
irreproachable/ blameless.
Depoliticisation and fetishising carbon
- For Swyngedouw, ‘fetishising carbon’ refers to reducing and equating environmental harm to the problem
of excess atmospheric carbon.
- This constrains environmental politics and predetermines its content: emissions reduction.
- Swyngedouw argues that this may be a worthy goal, but it is just one way of framing environmental
politics and what it would mean to repair environmental harm.
- Fetishising carbon contributes to environmental depoliticisation by:
- Framing CO2 as a common, external enemy which:
- Identifies environmental harm as extrinsic to existing social, political, and economic
institutions and
- Rules out dissensus by suggesting humanity must fight back as one united and uniform
bloc.
- Framing CO2 as a commodity which:
- Likewise identifies environmental harm as extrinsic to existing institutions and
- Turns environmental politics into a technical project to be executed by technicians and
technocrats.
Environmental repoliticization (Swyngedouw)
- Seeing natures as neither fixed nor singular allows the environment to be linked back to power.
- Acknowledging that politics cannot help but be divisive/ contentious enables repoliticization, including
environmental repoliticization.
- Because environments can be politicised in all sorts of ways, we should be aware of and pursue their
equal repoliticization.
- Which is facilitated by remaining open to an array of socio-ecological futures, including those
that, from the perspective of the consensus, are otherwise rejected as impossible or impractical.
, Notes – Environmental Politics 2024
Budds: Power, Nature, and Neoliberalism
- What is political ecology? What, according to Budds, are its key concepts and claims?
- Political ecology is defined as an approach that examines the complex interactions between
nature and society.
- Key concepts:
- The politicisation of environmental issues.
- The influence of political and economic contexts on environmental changes.
- The power structures underlying resource management.
- How does Budds deploy a political ecological perspective in her analysis of water use in Chile?
- Budds uses a political ecological perspective to critique the application of economic principles and
market mechanisms to water resources management in Chile.
- Budds argues that the approach has led to social inequities and environmental conflicts,
particularly in the context of Chile’s neoliberal water management policies.
- Where is power located in Budds’ study? Who or what exercises power on her reading of the Chilean
case?
- In Budds’ study, power is in the control and management of water resources.
- Large-scale farmers and private interests exert significant control over water, often at the
expense of peasant farmers.
- The neoliberal policies and the market-based management of water rights have
facilitated these power imbalances in Chile.
- Budds reads the Chilean case as an example of how neoliberal reforms can lead to the
concentration of power and resources in the hands of a few, leading to broader social and
environmental issues.
- Political ecology
- An approach to, but far from a coherent theory of, the complex metabolism between nature and
society.
- Land management is an inherently political rather than a neutral and purely environmental issue.
- New definition of political ecology:
- The concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy.
- Nature is socially constructed and is perceived differently by actors (science is never
neutral because of the inherent biases of scientists).
- Political ecology stresses the need for political solutions rather than technical or policy ones.
The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:
Guaranteed quality through customer reviews
Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.
Quick and easy check-out
You can quickly pay through credit card for the summaries. There is no membership needed.
Focus on what matters
Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!
Frequently asked questions
What do I get when I buy this document?
You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.
Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?
Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.
Who am I buying these notes from?
Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller teaksgardens-0r. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.
Will I be stuck with a subscription?
No, you only buy these notes for £11.60. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.
Can Stuvia be trusted?
4.6 stars on Google & Trustpilot (+1000 reviews)
67096 documents were sold in the last 30 days
Founded in 2010, the go-to place to buy revision notes and other study material for 14 years now