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Lecture and Reading summary - Environmental Politics - 2024 - Grade 9.5
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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.
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