JPEÂ is a peer reviewed journal (ISSN: 1073-0451), one of the longest standing, Platinum Open Access journals in the social sciences. It began in 1994 and welcomes submissions in English, French and Spanish. We only publish research into the linkages between political economy and human environmental impacts, across different locations and academic disciplines. Articles need to show a real contribution to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology, otherwise we will suggest publication elsewhere. The Editors managing articles are Simon Batterbury (University of Melbourne/Lancaster University: speaks English and French) and Casey Walsh (UC Santa Barbara, USA: speaks English and Spanish). Walsh handles articles dealing with the Americas: Batterbury for the rest of the world. Articles are double-refereed, which can take up to 3 months [longer if referees do not reply!] . Â
Submissions must be the author's(s') original work and not previously published. An article based on a section from a completed graduate dissertation may be published in JPE, but only if this is allowed by your university rules. Journal of Political Ecology (JPE) operates a CC-BY © license for journal articles. Copyright remains with the author, but JPE is licensed to publish the paper, and the author agrees to make the article available with the CC-BY license. This operates from 2014; prior to this, authors assigned JPE the copyright for material they publish in JPE, but JPE granted its authors a license as the original source. This means that authors can include their JPE articles in dissertations and in edited books later (with full citation to the original JPE article). Reproduction as another journal article in whole or in part, unacknowledged, would be plagiarism. JPE reserves all rights except those granted in this copyright notice. See previous Journal articles for formatting. SB, May 11, 2018 Â
For food space: theorizing alternative food networks beyond alterity
In response to calls by scholars to deepen theoretical engagement in research on Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), in this article we critically discuss and assess major theoretical approaches deployed in the study of AFNs. After highlighting the strengths and limitations of each theoretical approach, we provide an alternative framework – which we refer to as the Geographical Political Ecology of Food Systems – that integrates the contributions that have emerged in the study of the alternative geographies of food with an understanding of capitalist processes in the food system. We do this by bringing together literature on the political ecology of food systems and multiple spatialities, including Doreen Massey's understanding of space as a heterogeneous multiplicity and Eric Sheppard's conceptualization of sociospatial positionality. We utilize research on agrarian change and AFNs in Eastern Europe to elaborate this approach. We argue that this new perspective helps navigate tensions in AFN scholarship, and provides new avenues for research and action. We focus particularly on the ability of AFNs to provide a sustainable livelihood for participating farmers, thus far a neglected topic in AFN research in Europe. Keywords: Alternative Food Networks, Eastern Europe, spatialities, positionality, livelihoods
Copyright (c) 2020 Renata Blumberg, Helga Leitner, Valentine Cadieux http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Conservation and crime convergence? Situating the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference
The 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) Conference was the fourth and biggest meeting on IWT convened at the initiative of the UK Government. Using a collaborative event ethnography, we examine the Conference as a site where key actors defined the problem of IWT as one of serious crime that needs to be addressed as such. We ask (a) how was IWT framed as serious crime, (b) how was this framing mobilized to promote particular policy responses, and (c) how did the framing and suggested responses reflect the privileging of elite voices? Answering these questions demonstrates the expanding ways in which thinking related to crime and policing are an increasingly forceful dynamic shaping conservation-related policy at the global level. We argue that the conservation-crime convergence on display at the 2018 London IWT Conference is characteristic of a conservation policy landscape that increasingly promotes and privileges responses to IWT that are based on legal and judicial reform, criminal investigations, intelligence gathering, and law enforcement technologies. Marginalized are those voices that seek to address the underlying drivers of IWT by promoting solutions rooted in sustainable livelihoods in source countries and global demand reduction. We suggest that political ecology of conservation and environmental crime would benefit from greater engagement with critical criminology, a discipline that critically interrogates the uneven power dynamics that shape ideas of crime, criminality, how they are politicized, and how they frame policy decisions. This would add further conceptual rigor to political ecological work that deconstructs conservation and environmental crime. Keywords: illegal wildlife trade, poaching, conservation, crime, event ethnography, criminology
Copyright (c) 2020 Francis Masse, Hannah Dickinson, Jared Margulies, Laure Joanny, Teresa Lappe-Osthege, Rosaleen Duffy http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Political ecology and decolonial research: co-production with the Iñupiat in Utqiaġvik
Environmental social science research designs have shifted over the past several decades to include an increased commitment to multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary team-based work that have had dual but complementary foci. These address power and equity in the substantive aspects of research, and also to adopt more engaged forms of practice, including decolonial approaches. The fields of political ecology, human geography, and environmental anthropology have been especially open to converge with indigenous scholarship, particularly decolonial and settler colonial theories and research designs, within dominant human-environmental social science paradigms. Scholars at the forefront of this dialogue highlight the ontological (ways of knowing), epistemological (how we know), and institutional (institutions of higher education) transformations that need to occur in order for this to take place. In this article we contribute to this literature in two ways. First, we highlight the synergies between political ecology and decolonial scholarship, particularly focusing on the power dynamics in research programs and historical legacies of human-environmental relationships, including those of researchers. Second, we explore how decolonial research pushes political ecologists and other environmental social scientists to not only consider adopting international and local standards of working with, by and for Indigenous Peoples within research programs but how this work ultimately extends to research and education within their home institutions and organizations. Through integrating decolonized research practices in the environmental social sciences, we argue that synthesizing multiple knowledge practices and transforming institutional structures will enhance team-based environmental social science work to improve collaboration with Indigenous scientists, subsistence practitioners, agency representatives, and sovereign members of Indigenous communities. Keywords: Alaska; collaboration; co-production; decolonial; Indigenous Knowledges; Iñupiaq Peoples
Copyright (c) 2020 Laura Zanotti, Courtney Carothers, Charlene Aqpik Apok, Sarah Huang, Jesse Coleman, Charlotte Ambrozek http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
SandLife and the death of dunes: political ecology discourses from conservation to restoration in Haverdal, Sweden
This study concerns narratives and practices developed within landscape management in a Natura 2000 area in the south-west of Sweden. This European Union-funded project shifted focus from morphological and passive conservation management to intervening in biological management. I investigate some of the consequences of re-politicized discourses and practices during this period. I ask how a traditional policy view on conservation was handled during this change, and what role EU funding has in preserving or changing a traditional management policy for landscape conservation. The conclusions are that landscape protection is driven by political and ideological values connected with institutionalized aesthetic components that are adjusted to whatever disciplinary focus prevails at the time. However, traditional approaches are retained, excluding participatory methods and the social dimensions on landscape management. To some extent, the available EU funding leverages alignment of project goals and management, influencing landscape alteration. Keywords: SandLife, political ecology discourses, landscape restoration and management, aesthetics, morphology and biology, EU projects
Copyright (c) 2020 Mikael S-O Ring http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Conservation narratives and conflicts over protected areas in post-socialist Romania
Environmental protection is never a controversy-free endeavor. Conflicts arise over land ownership, use, and access. Political ecologists have paid extensive attention to protected areas, especially in relation to power, rights, and marginalized peoples. This article draws on political ecology to examine a new proposed national park in the context of post-communism and neoliberalization in Romania. Using mixed-methods (semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation), this research investigates conservation narratives as articulated by different actors (environmental non-governmental organizations, local decision-makers, and local community members) with various levels of involvement in the proposed national park. Three chief narratives can be observed pertaining to tourism, restrictions, and deforestation. These narratives are embedded in the history and socio-economic context of the area, but also reveal the agendas of different actors regarding landscape values. Assessing these narratives, this research reveals how actors position themselves and the points of contention among the different actors in the brewing conflict that the national park represents. Keywords: Political ecology, conservation, conflict, power
Copyright (c) 2020 Marie Louise Aastrup http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A historical, scaled approach to climate change adaptation: the case of Vietnam
This article sheds light on how scaled, historical dynamics inform the framing of climate change adaptation programs. It looks particularly at the influence of domestic versus global rationalities in adaptation programs through a novel joint governance and political ecology framework. It does this in the setting of water management in Vietnam. Based on a historical view, semi-structured interviews and document and policy reviews, I examine historical water management in Vietnam and current water management programs identified as climate change adaptation. By analyzing how historical, scaled political rationalities inform the framing of current adaptation programs, I find that program formulation reflects domestic(ated) rationalities rather than novel global adaptation agendas. This suggests that universalizing accounts of climate change adaptation overlook the significance of situated, historical factors in the formulation of adaptation programs. Furthermore, the article illustrates how political rationalities can be rescaled, gaining traction within new institutional scales and the programs enacted from them. Finally, the article underlines the inherent power implications of the struggle to determine whose rationalities prevail in program formulation. Keywords: Climate change adaptation, water management, scale, rescaling, political rationalities, Vietnam
Copyright (c) 2020 Lili Salloum Lindegaard http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Imposing legality: hegemony and resistance under the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade (FLEGT) initiative
Timber legality trade restrictions and verification are a bundle of contemporary mechanisms triggered by global concerns about forest degradation and deforestation. The European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade initiative is a significant effort to not only screen out illegal timber and wood products from the EU, but also support trading partner countries to improve their legality definitions and verification processes. But by using bilateral agreements (Voluntary Partnership Agreements) as a key mechanism, the EU legitimizes trade partner nation-states as the authority to decide what is legal. We engage in a theoretical debate about the complexities of the meaning of legality, and then analyze empirical data collected from interviews in Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam and Europe with policy, civil society and industry actors to understand how different actors understand legality. We find hegemonic notions of Westphalian statehood at the core of 'global' notions of legality and often contrast with local understandings of legality. Non-state actors understand these hegemonic notions of legality as imposed upon them and part of a colonial legacy. Further, notions of legality that fail to conform with hegemonic understandings are readily framed by nation-states as immoral or criminal. We emphasize the importance of understanding these framings to elucidate the embedded assumptions about what comprises legality within assemblages of global actors. Key words: FLEGT, timber legality, hegemony, power, globalization
Copyright (c) 2020 Rodd Myers, Rebecca L. Rutt, Constance McDermott, Ahmad Maryudi, Emmanuel Acheampong, Marisa Camargo, Hoàng Cầm http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A perfect storm: embodied workers, emplaced corporations, and delayed reflexivity in a Canadian 'Risk Society'
At the turn of the 21st century, an occupational disease epidemic began to unfold in Sarnia, Ontario, home to the petrochemical complex known as Canada's 'Chemical Valley.' Given the long latency periods for these diseases, the hazardous exposures that produced them would have occurred over a period of decades during the latter 20th century. This suggests a paradox: what accounts for unionized Canadian men working for decades in conditions that posed such grave risks to their health? Or, put in terms of Ulrich Beck's compelling and influential model: given that Chemical Valley during the second half of the 20th century constituted a quintessential "risk society" of the modern West, where were the forces of "political reflexivity" – resistance leading to change – typically provoked by the excesses of such societies? In this article, I seek to resolve this paradox with a political ecology approach that focuses on workers' embodied experience in the micro-environment of their workplace and community, as well as on the material and social emplacement of petrochemical facilities in the region. The analysis reveals a 'perfect storm' of converging ecological, cultural, political, and economic conditions that allowed local corporations to achieve extraordinary power. Consequently, even as activism for occupational and environmental justice was effecting change in similar industrial centers throughout Ontario and the Great Lakes region, these changes failed to take hold in Chemical Valley. The article concludes by suggesting that those 20th century power dynamics have continued into the 21st century, where reflexivity delayed might well have atrophied into reflexivity denied. Keywords: embodiment, emplacement, risk society, petrochemical corporations, industrial workers, Canada, Great Lakes region
Copyright (c) 2020 Deborah D. Jackson http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The 'nature' of fisheries governance: narratives of environment, politics, and power and their implications for changing seascapes
This article responds to recent calls for more engagement from political ecologists in ocean and coastal governance concerns, and employs a controversy over the practice of gill netting in North Carolina as a lens into questions about how narratives of nature and power affect fisheries policymaking processes. The article analyzes commercial and recreational fisher narratives about marine 'nature,' including perceptions of resource health, expressions of blame or responsibility, and storylines about the different roles of fishers and managers in the process of governing fisheries. The article focuses particularly on how fishers perceive the politics of fisheries management and where they believe power lies in negotiations about the 'right' ways to steward and allocate fishery resources. Fisher narratives are then compared to those of fishery regulators themselves. The article asks how the perceptions of different groups about politics and power in fisheries management affect their levels of trust and engagement with each other and with the policymaking process. It offers insights into the complex negotiations over the meaning of terms like 'conservation,' 'endangered,' and 'livelihood,' and analyzes the implications of these narratives for stimulating material changes in the coastal seascape and the lives of fishers. Key Words: political ecology, governance, fisheries, nature, narrative analysis
Copyright (c) 2020 Noëlle Boucquey http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"Critical Ecosystems" as a concept in political ecology – developing a comprehensive analytical framework
Political ecology is supposed to be a field of two parts of equal importance – "politics" and "ecology." However, critics have pointed to the fact that it dwells on the politics, while rendering ecology secondary in its focus. Political ecologists have hardly used the structure that the concept of ecosystem services brought to the field of ecology, and this lends credence to this critique. In this article, I introduce the concept of "critical ecosystems" that reinforces understanding of the science of "ecology", as an important dimension of political ecology. I use components of the framework of ecosystem services in context of unequal power relations. Some local people who have symbiotic relationships with their environment owe their existence – both their livelihoods and culture – to specific natural resources whose decline has proximate and tangible consequences for them. However, they often lose these "critical ecosystems" in times of natural resource exploitation due to their relative powerlessness. I argue that it is important that political ecologists utilize the framework of ecosystem services in our inquiries, to prioritize those ecosystems that are intricately connected to the survival of the local population. Based on this, I introduce the "critical ecosystems" model, and how it can be modified to fit specific cases and can reconcile the sociological and political dimensions of political ecology, with biophysical understanding of ecological processes. This holistic inquiry, I argue, will make political ecology worthy of its name. Keywords: Political ecology; ecosystem services; unequal power relations; Millennium Ecosystems Assessment; Ghana
Copyright (c) 2020 Michael Acheampong http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Geopolitical ecology of solar geoengineering: from a 'logic of multilateralism' to logics of militarization
Solar geoengineering technologies intended to slow climate change by injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere are gaining traction in climate policy. Solar geoengineering is considered "fast, cheap, and imperfect" in that it could rapidly reduce planetary temperatures with low cost technology, but potentially generate catastrophic consequences for climate, weather, and biodiversity. Governance has therefore been central to solar geoengineering debates, particularly the question of unilateral deployment, whereby a state or group of states could deploy the technology against the wishes of the international community. In this context, recent, influential scenarios posit that – given technological and political complexities – solar geoengineering deployment will likely be guided by a "logic of multilateralism." I challenge this assertion by arguing that solar geoengineering is defined by equally compelling 'logics of militarization.' I detail recent involvement in solar geoengineering development on the part of U.S. defense, intelligence, and foreign policy institutions, geoengineering scenarios that adopt militarized logics and expertise, and Realist international relations theories that undergird leading governance scenarios. I then demonstrate that the U.S. military has a strategic interest in solar geoengineering, as U.S. hegemony is predicated on expanding fossil fuels, but the military deems climate change a threat to national security. The unique spatio-temporal qualities of solar geoengineering can bridge the gap between these contradictory positions. In examining the militarization of solar geoengineering, I aim to ground recent conceptions of "planetary sovereignty" in the emergent field of "geopolitical ecology" through the latter's more granular approach to the world-making powers of key geopolitical-ecological actors. Key Words: solar geoengineering, geopolitical ecology, militarization, U.S. hegemony, climate intervention
Copyright (c) 2020 Kevin Surprise http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Fit for purpose? Clarifying the critical role of profit for sustainability
This conceptual article contributes to the post-growth strand of political ecology literature, which seeks to find sustainable ways of organizing the economy that do not require economic growth. It explores the idea that transitioning to post-growth societies requires a transition in the relationship-to-profit of business. I first conceptualize relationship-to-profit as the intersection of purpose, investment, and ownership of firms. Specifically, for-profit business structures entail a financial gain purpose, private ownership, and unlimited returns on investment; whereas not-for-profit business structures have a social benefit purpose, collective ownership, and limited returns on investment. I then outline ideal types of for-profit and not-for-profit economies, based on the differences between these two kinds of relationship-to-profit. The first ideal type shows how the for-profit business structure drives consumerism, economic growth, and ecological harm, as well as inequality and political capture, preventing post-growth transitions. These dynamics might be slowed down by businesses that seek to balance private financial gain with social benefit (known as dual-purpose businesses). The second ideal type describes the dynamics that might be expected in an economy consisting of not-for-profit businesses, which have a legal mandate to pursue only social benefit. This analysis explains how transitioning from for-profit to not-for-profit forms of business might change some of the most problematic dynamics of the economy, allowing for post-growth transformations. A brief discussion of the possible shortcomings of a not-for-profit economy is also offered. Keywords: Not-for-profit business, nonprofit enterprise, for-profit business, relationship-to-profit, post-growth, degrowth, economic growth, sustainability, sustainable econom
Copyright (c) 2020 Jennifer Brooke Hinton http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From water abundance to water scarcity: the case of the Chontalpa, Mexico
This article uses original ethnographic data to show how a development program known as Plan Chontalpa failed to extend potable water provision to rural people in Chontalpa, in Tabasco, Mexico. Despite arguably short-term benefits, this large state-led, large-scale hydrodevelopment program created overly large infrastructures and imposed a hierarchical water management regime on previously open-access water resources, negatively impacting the communities it purported to serve. This article demonstrates how, in lieu of the vulnerabilities created by the Plan, residents have resiliently devised their own water management system that combines customary techniques, such as harvesting rainwater, with formal and informal ones. In conclusion, this article insists that water management resilient practices at the household level can teach us alternative ways of decision-making that can transform local development efforts. Keywords: resilience, political ecology, water harvesting technique, household management, hydrodevelopment
Copyright (c) 2020 Gisela Lanzas http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sacrifice zones and the construction of urban energy landscapes in Concepción, Chile
This article examines how national energy policies in Chile constitute urban energy landscapes characterized by environmental and spatial inequalities. The concept of urban energy landscapes is deployed to explain the spatial patterns resulting from energy governance and energy conflicts in the metropolitan area of Concepción, a metropolitan region of strategic importance in the configuration of national energy policy. These urban energy landscapes result from the constitution of 'sacrifice zones' that reflect an extractivist model of energy production. The combination of qualitative interviews and transect walks reveals different aspects of a dual arrangement of energy infrastructure and urbanization. The city's fragmented landscapes emerge from the coexistence of energy infrastructure and associated industries, with daily activities of communities that have little to do with these industries but live in their shadow. Conflicts in these urban energy landscapes are intense, with every inch of space contested by competing modes of 'being urban.' The urban energy landscape in Concepción is an expression of a clash of social and economic power with local priorities. Keywords: urban energy landscapes, industrial landscapes, sacrifice zones, energy conflicts, coal energy, Chile
Copyright (c) 2020 Vanesa Castán Broto, Martín Sanzana Calvet http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Environmental justice dialogues and the struggle for human dignity in the deciduous forest of Bangladesh
The article presents environmental justice dialogues in, and affecting, the Madhupur Garo community in Bangladesh. The Garo community, which identifies itself as adivasi meaning 'indigenous', has occupied the deciduous forest of Madhupur in Bangladesh for centuries, developing a symbiotic relationship with nature. An environmental justice movement, called the "Eco-park Movement" has long protested a government development plan to establishing an 'eco-park' in the Madhupur deciduous forest. The eco-park plan interfered with the Garo's right to life and livelihood as well as threatening them with possible eviction from their traditional land. From their protest movement, the concept of environmental justice has acquired a meaning with emphasis on human dignity. The Garo community not only defines environmental injustice as a lack of access to the decision-making process, information and the judiciary, but includes other elements: obstruction to fair access to environmental resources for livelihood, as threat to the economy, health, trade, education, security, privacy and right to life. Finally, the Garo connect all these environmental human rights issues with rights to self-determination and human dignity. Key words: Sustainable development, environmental justice, political ecology, capabilities and conflicts, human dignity, eco-park movement, right to life.
Copyright (c) 2020 Farid Ahmed, Nicholas P. Low http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Payments for environmental services, gendered livelihoods and forest management in Vietnam: a feminist political ecology perspective
Economic approaches to combat environmental degradation and deforestation have resulted in development initiatives such as the Payment for Environmental Services program (PES). This study deals with the effects of PES on women's livelihoods in Thuong Lo commune, Central Vietnam. Employing a feminist political ecology perspective and adopting a qualitative approach, we analyze the gendered roles, responsibilities and effects of PES on local livelihoods. We found that the women in our study portrayed different preferences and knowledge in relation to PES, forest management and livelihoods. Women are often excluded in PES projects due to a range of various socio-cultural factors. Keywords: Payments for Environmental Services; forest management; gender; women's empowerment; livelihoods; Central Vietnam; Co Tu people
Copyright (c) 2020 Wouter Tuijnman, Mucahid Mustafa Bayrak, Pham Xuan Hung, Bui Duc Tinh http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Selling women the green dream: the paradox of feminism and sustainability in fashion marketing
This article explores the paradox of corporations using social and environmental justice concerns to market products that are themselves made in conditions of environmental and social injustice, most often in the Global South. The effects of the fashion industry on people is two-pronged: 1) the unsafe and exploitative conditions under which many garment workers operate, and 2) the severe and harmful water and air pollution caused by fashion industry factories. There are thus contradictions inherent in the manner in which corporations, through their marketing, seek to foster feminism and environmentalism, whilst sourcing their garments from factories that operate in problematic ways. Using case studies of advertising campaigns from three Swedish companies, H&M, Monki and Gina Tricot, we conducted a discourse analysis to understand the messages to consumers as well as the image of the company that is portrayed. Through our political ecology analysis, we suggest that the promotion of feminism and environmentalism is not consistently applied by companies in their own practices and could at worst be labeled green and 'fem washing.' These approaches can also be deeply problematic when they lead to the exotification of others, and cultural appropriation. We further find that the marketing strategies in fashion serve not only to promote the sale of products but also have the effect of placing environmental responsibility onto individual consumers. Ultimately, fashion marketing serves to obfuscate ecologically unequal exchange and the true costs of fashion. Key words: gender, marketing, consumption, feminism, fashion, textiles, advertising, ecologically unequal exchange, sustainability
Copyright (c) 2020 Mariko Takedomi Karlsson, Vasna Ramasar http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Political ecology, privation and sustainable livelihoods in northern Thailand's national parks
National parks provide a wide range of ecological, social and economic benefits. However, in some cases the establishment of national parks has also lead to the displacement of indigenous people, the disruption of their livelihoods, and ongoing social conflict. Northern Thailand's national parks are home to approximately one million indigenous people. Balancing the interests and needs of national park authorities with those of indigenous communities within and adjacent to these parks poses significant challenges. This article employs qualitative research methods to assess the livelihood strategies of six indigenous hill tribe communities residing within three national parks in Northern Thailand. Due to the criminalization of the traditional farming systems and restrictions imposed on land use, these communities have had to adapt their livelihood practices to survive. Our findings suggest that communities remain in a state of flux and are continually adapting to changing circumstances. It is argued that greater community empowerment and participation in collaborative decision making is crucial to strengthen both sustainable livelihoods and environmental conservation efforts within Northern Thailand's national parks. Keywords: Sustainable livelihoods, co-management, Northern Thailand, national parks, social justice
Copyright (c) 2020 Aurathai Phongchiewboon, Trisia Farrelly, John Holland, Karen Hytten http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Two ontologies of territory and a legal claim in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon
The Secoya nation (Siekopai) of the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon, in its request for recognition of indigenous territories in a protected area, has appeared before the Republic of Ecuador's conservation regime with arguments based on an administrative and physical concept of territory. The Secoya worldview and culture, however, supposes an ontology of territory in which the geographic space, updated rituals, and their relationship with nature converge. In this article we analyze this important ontological difference in detail. We compare the territorial subjectivation processes produced by both ontologies: a Cartesian conceptual framework in the case of the State's political geography, and the Secoya's phenomenological ecology. Since the Secoya include a management plan for the protected area in their petition, it would seem they have internalized the State's rule regarding the principle of sustainability within conservation. We argue that sustainability is incompatible with the presence of a phenomenological ecology that makes them political subjects, and therefore it is a strategic inclusion that does not respond to their socio-ecological reality. Keywords: Ecuadorian Amazon, legal request, territory, Amerindian graphism, subjectivation, ontology
Copyright (c) 2020 Julián García Labrador, José Ochoa http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Claiming and re-claiming the Ayeyarwady Delta, time and again: the case of Nyaungdone Island, Myanmar
Since 2011 and the transition to civilian government, Myanmar and the Ayeyarwady Delta in particular are witnessing swift and dramatic changes in the modalities of access and use of natural resources. Drawing from political ecology, and on the basis of ethnographic work conducted in Yeinek village tract in the Nyaungdone Township of the Ayeyarwady Delta, this article places recent resources dynamics in a historical perspective. Rather than seeing natural resources as a 'given', we see them as resulting from socially embedded strategies of resource-making. These strategies contribute to a constant redefinition of the "resource-frontier" the delta has historically been for multiple actors. Notably, we show how land for rice cultivation, and water for capture fisheries and aquaculture, have been made into key resources over time, often in an exclusionary way. Post-2011 land and fishery reforms are the most recent examples of resource-making dynamics; they have certainly triggered significant resource re-allocation, but existing cross-scale patronage networks still largely shape how this takes place in practice. Finally, in this deltaic environment where resources are part water, part land, part rice, part fish, and the legitimacy of one's claims often hinges on proving prior use of a specific resource, it is the nature of the resource to be reallocated that is contested. In the newly politicized context of Myanmar, resources and institutional fluidity is in itself a frontier to navigate. Keywords: Ayeyarwady Delta; Myanmar; fisheries; land; resource making; frontier; exclusion
Copyright (c) 2020 Benoit Ivars, Jean-Philippe Venot http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Large intact forest landscapes and inclusive conservation: a political ecological perspective
Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) are global conservation units that aim to combat fragmentation, alteration, degradation, and loss of global forests. ILFs are typically recognized for their biodiversity, carbon storage, protection of hydroecological systems and other ecosystem services. However, IFLs are distinctive among other conservation efforts because they do not immediately prioritize conservation approaches that have goals of alleviating human poverty or improving well-being. The prevailing view is that IFL conservation should engage with ecocentric models of conservation. In this article, we leverage political ecology's analytical attention to power, institutions, identities, and scales to make suggestions on ways in which to integrate biocentric conservation considerations into IFL practices. From a scoping literature review, we found the following areas are especially critical for the future of IFL conservation: (1) prioritizing Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) as actors and beneficiaries of conservation; (2) identifying the value of knowledge integration and co-production for conservation; (3) addressing heterogenous communities and equity impacts, and (4) the need for procedural mechanisms in conservation initiatives that support nesting Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities management and governance in polycentric systems. Furthermore, the development of diagnostic questions of scaling community-based conservation and adaptive strategies beyond their original scope in terms of community definitions, landscape and political context may be beneficial for addressing multi-stakeholder needs, identifying more equitable approaches, sharing strategies and obtaining successful outcomes in IFL conservation. Keywords: Indigenous peoples and local communities, large intact landscapes, forests, conservation
Copyright (c) 2020 Laura Zanotti, Natalie Knowles http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Combined and uneven energy transitions: reactive decarbonization in Cuba and Venezuela
Mounting impacts of climate change have increased calls for a planetary energy transition, usually understood as the decarbonization of the global economy. All too often, however, these calls rely on technological or legislative measures, betraying an apolitical understanding of climate change and insufficient appreciation for the uneven global distribution of safety, risk, and power. Through an examination of recent events in Cuba and Venezuela, this article asks how prevailing calls for energy transitions to post-carbon futures reflect the combined and uneven present, replicating the inequalities of late carbon capitalism. By considering the 'Special Period in Times of Peace' in Cuba, as the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union was known, and Venezuela's overlapping crises since 2014 as energy transitions, this article highlights difficulties along the path to more sustainable and just futures. It also calls to attention the intensely social, but potentially incomplete and reversible, nature of energy transitions. Keywords: Energy transitions, Cuba, Venezuela, Special Period, extractivism, decarbonization
Copyright (c) 2020 Donald Kingsbury http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Landscape enclaves: wine capitalism and luxury tourism in Mendoza, Argentina
Rural territories in the province of Mendoza, Argentina, particularly those located in the Uco Valley, have been affected by severe transformations connected to two key factors: first, the national state's (de)regulation of water use and, second, the dramatic expansion of capital into winemaking and tourism. These activities have been developed on former livestock farming areas, turning them into fresh produce lands where food production is carried out in a "natural landscape" of unquestionable beauty: the iconic scenery of Mendoza. This article deploys the concept of extractivism to analyze "enclaves of commodity landscapes" associated with high-end wine tourism. Its purpose is to show the extent to which high-end wine tourism requires a sleek and highly aestheticized enclave landscape in order to enable the commodification of singular experiences. This article suggests that: 1) The development of tourism enclaves commodifies the landscape so as to provide the sense of a unique touristic experience; 2) the development of these enclaves is underpinned by the extraction of common, collectively-constructed goods. Keywords: Landscape; enclave; tourism; commodity; extractivism; wine
Copyright (c) 2020 Gabriela Claudia Pastor, Laura María Torres, Lucio Marinsalda Pastor http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The geopolitical ecology of New Caledonia: territorial re-ordering, mining, and Indigenous economic development
In the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia, conflict and difference between Indigenous Kanak people and European settlers has existed at least since the 1850s. We interrogate the geopolitical ecology of these islands, which is deeply wedded to natural resource extraction, is instrumentalized in political debate, power struggles, conflict, and the mining sector. Territoriality, including changes to political borders and access to land, has promoted the interests of the key actors in shaping the future of the islands. Violence in the 1980s was followed by the Matignon Accords (1988) and three provinces were established (North, South, Loyalty Islands). The South Province is governed by a party loyal to France, and the others are in the hands of the Indigenous Kanak independence movement seeking full decolonization and independence. The strengthened regional autonomy that emerged from the creation of provinces has permitted the Kanak-dominated ones to control certain political competencies as well as to guide economic development much more strongly than in other settler states, notably through a large nickel mining project in the North Province. Provincialization has not diminished ethnic divisions as French interests hoped, as signaled by voting in the close-run but unsuccessful 2018 referendum on independence from France. We explore the ironies of these efforts at territorial re-ordering, which are layered on significant spatial and racial disparities. Re-bordering has enabled resurgence of Kanak power in ways unanticipated by the architects of the Accords, but without a guarantee of eventual success. Key Words: New Caledonia, geopolitical ecology, politics of mining, decolonization, Kanak identity
Copyright (c) 2020 Simon P.J. Batterbury, tthias Kowasch, Séverine Bouard http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cultivating urban conviviality: urban farming in the shadows of Copenhagen's neoliberalisms
In this article I explore how the possibilities for commoning and conviviality through small-scale urban farming initiatives intertwine with neoliberal trends. I do this by recounting the trajectory of a small rooftop garden in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. Drawing on ethnographic research in and around this garden, I show how such communal, anti-capitalist, eco-social endeavors are thoroughly entangled in the city's neoliberal turn over recent decades. Various manifestations of neoliberalism, ranging from formalization processes to austerity pressures, articulate with convivial urban farming initiatives in contradictory and recursive relationships that both nurture and endanger these local initiatives. I describe for example how formalization engenders legitimacy but also homogenization and how green initiatives are celebrated while undermined by austerity measures. This happens within a broader context of neoliberal labor, food systems, and housing policies and politics that subvert convivial urban farming efforts in multiple and often unacknowledged ways. Finally, I forward the view that attending to such contradictory and complex realities of and surrounding urban farming is essential to illuminating the iterative relations between context and practice, and the actions required at multiple scales to nurture and expand the possibilities for urban commoning and conviviality, including through farming. Key words: the commons, urban farming, neoliberalism, Copenhagen
Copyright (c) 2020 Rebecca L Rutt http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Virocene Epoch: the vulnerability nexus of viruses, capitalism and racism
COVID-19 has ushered in a new planetary epoch—the Virocene. In doing so, it has laid bare the limits of humanity's power over nature, exposing the vulnerability of 'normal' ways of living and their moral and pragmatic bankruptcy in coping with those vulnerabilities. 'Normal' is powerless against the virus and has not worked for a majority of the world's human and non-human population. Whatever new normal humanity fashions depends on the socio-ecological change set in motion by mutations between human and non-human species. The outcomes of society's responses to the pandemic depend on how human agency, as an embodiment of social, ecological, and metaphysical relations, transforms the relations now shaped by capitalism and racism—the two mutually reinforcing processes at the root of the Virocene's social and ecological vulnerabilities. A deeper understanding of vulnerabilities is necessary to avoid recreating a 'new normal' that normalizes the current oppressive and vulnerable social order, while inhibiting our ability to transform the world. At the same time, the sweeping possibilities of alternative ways of organizing humanity's mutual wellbeing and nature lie at our fingertips. The emancipatory political consciousness, rationalities, and strategies inherent in such intuitively sensible and counter-hegemonic approaches, first and foremost, are matters of justice, embodied in the power that shapes human-nature metabolism. The Virocene is thus a battleground for social and ecological justice. To be effective partners in these struggles for justice, political ecology needs a universal perspective of social and ecological justice that functions both as a form of critical inquiry—that is, as a way to understand how social and ecological inequalities and justices arise and function—and as a form of critical praxis—that is, as a way to reclaim and transform capitalism and racism's power in valuing and organizing social and ecological wellbeing. Key Words: Virocene; political economy of health; capitalism; racism, vulnerability, pandemic
Copyright (c) 2020 Jude L Fernando http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From the Virocene to the Lovecene epoch: multispecies justice as critical praxis for Virocene disruptions and vulnerabilities
In the Virocene epoch, global pandemics such as COVID-19 disrupt the world order organized by capitalism and racial privilege, making clear the unsustainability of 'normal' ways of organizing society and nature. Despite its failure to address these disruptions, the existing capitalist-racist system attempts to reproduce itself, posing greater risks of disease, inequalities, and injustice to the most vulnerable human and nonhuman populations. The Virocene epoch makes these workings visible, and challenges both hegemonic and counterhegemonic ways of organizing human–nature relations. Political ecology requires new emancipatory theoretical-political strategies firmly grounded in a theory of justice that embodies social and ecological rights in order to imaginatively produce new ways to counter such social and ecological crises arising from the global process of capitalism and viral activities. To this end, political ecology must develop a universal perspective on the justice-rights-power nexus with an explicit moral basis to enhance its emancipatory praxis against the globalizing challenges of the Virocene, without reproducing existing vulnerabilities and without dismissing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives in the name of otherness, difference, universalism or sameness. In this article, I reconfigure the justice-rights-power nexus to dismantle oppression and injustice in pursuit of regenerative solutions. I chart an alternate 'multispecies theory of justice' building upon love as an embodiment of the moral foundations for critical multispecies justice praxis, which produces another world of diverse, interconnected communities committed to social and ecological wellbeing. The 'Lovecene' is an aspirational planetary-order shaped by multispecies (human and non-human) equality and justice that transcends the anthropocentricism of current periodizations of planetary-level social and economic change. It attempts to overcome the limitations of many political-ecological theories of justice centered on notions of 'right order', 'fairness', 'distribution', and 'opportunities and capabilities', thereby successfully addressing the sociological and ecological vulnerabilities of the Virocene. Key Words: Virocene; political economy of health; capitalism; racism, vulnerability, pandemic
An urban political ecology of Bangkok's awful traffic congestion
Urban political ecology (UPE) can contribute important insights to examine traffic congestion, a significant social and environmental problem underexplored in UPE. Specifically, by attending to power relations, the production of urban space, and cultural practices, UPE can help explain why traffic congestions arises and persists but also creates inequalities in terms of environmental impacts and mobility. Based on qualitative research conducted in 2018, the article applies a UPE framework to Bangkok, Thailand, which has some of the world's worst congestion in one of the world's most unequal countries. The city's largely unplanned and uneven development has made congestion worse in a number of ways. Further, the neglect of public transport, particularly the bus system, and the highest priority given to cars has exacerbated congestion but also reflects class interests as well as unequal power relations. Governance shortcomings, including fragmentation, institutional inertia, corruption, and frequent changes in leadership, have also severely hindered state actors to address congestion. However, due to the poor's limited power, solutions to congestion, are post-political and shaped by elite interests. Analyses of congestion need to consider how socio-political relations, discourses, and a city's materiality shape outcomes. Key Words: urban transport governance, Bangkok traffic congestion, urban political ecology, Thailand political economy, Bangkok's bus system
Copyright (c) 2020 Danny Marks http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sympathy for Cecil: gender, trophy hunting, and the western environmental imaginary
This article draws from political ecology and ecofeminism to examine sympathy, expressed by record-breaking donations from North Americans, for the death of Cecil the Lion. The overlapping normative critique offered by these two perspectives together demonstrates how sympathy is disclosive of power relations. Sympathy reveals, relies upon, and reinforces different forms of gender, racial, and neocolonial domination; especially when western sympathy remains ignorant of the power relations, including their politics and histories, that shape attitudes toward non-human animals and grant them status as members of the (western) moral community. Keywords: sympathy, ecofeminism, trophy hunting, wildlife conservation, Cecil the Lion
Copyright (c) 2020 Eric S Godoy http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In the shadows of power: the infrastructural violence of thermal power generation in Ghana's coastal commodity frontier
This research adopts Jason Moore's concept of the commodity frontier, which portrays the socio-ecological impacts of capitalist expansion, to analyze the spread of Independent Power Provision in Sub-Saharan Africa. This form of power provision has thus far been under-theorized, especially its impacts on local communities, which must be addressed considering its contemporary popularity in the region. The article uses the concept of 'infrastructural violence' as an analytical lens, drawing upon its language and theories that describe the ways in which physical infrastructures often deemed benign can inflict violence on specific regions and social groups. Using a case study of the Takoradi Thermal Power Station in the Western Region of Ghana, the ethnographic research depicts the subtle yet highly deleterious forms of violence that occur within Aboadze, the small-scale fishing community the power station is embedded in, reducing access to vital resources including food, water and land, as well as the various exclusions that impact the livelihoods of a community already suffering from marginalization and poverty. Keywords: Commodity frontiers, infrastructural violence, power station, Sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana
Copyright (c) 2020 Callum Nolan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
'Where's the map?': integrating ethnography with maps to understand the complementarity between pastoral mobility and border formation
The resettlement of herders in pastoral zones is often criticized for hindering pastoral mobility, which is essential to survival. We integrate narratives of conflict and environmental change with maps to demonstrate the complementarity between pastoral mobility – porous borders – and border demarcation – rigid borders. We use evidence from the Sondré-Est Pastoral Zone in southern Burkina Faso, where herders were voluntarily resettled near agricultural villages following the droughts of the 1970s. Over time, however, farmers encroached on the borders of the pastoral zone and surrounding grazing areas declined. This increased land-use disputes. Tensions were exacerbated by the fact that these communities kept maps as community secrets. We re-created the administrative boundaries of the pastoral zone to map land-use/land-cover changes and conflict hot spots. The maps show that conflicts happened along porous borders where agricultural fields encroached. Herders called for a clear demarcation of the border of the pastoral zone to preserve exclusive access to resources within it. Simultaneously, they also wanted to maintain shared access to other resources outside the pastoral zone. The herders' desire for both border clarity and some form of flexibility underlines the complementary between both processes, especially in times of resource scarcity and land-use conflict. The mystery around the maps helps sustain ambiguity that is key for pursuing both goals. Keywords: GIS, land-use and land-cover change, farmer-herder border conflicts, pastoral mobility, Sahel, Burkina Faso
Copyright (c) 2020 Elisabeth Kago Ilboudo Nébié, Colin Thor West, Todd Andrew Crane http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Unfolding nomadism? A feminist political ecology of sedentarization in the Attappady Hills, Kerala
The landscape of the Attappady Hills in the Nilgiri range of Kerala, South India, is home to several Adivasis or indigenous peoples and settler communities, and has had intermittent cycles of agrarian crisis and sufficiency, according to colonial accounts from the early 20th century. Since the 1970s, rapid sedentarization of hunting-gathering communities, expanding capitalist markets, conservation projects, and sizable development interventions have contributed to agrarian and nutritional distress. There is a simultaneous process of adopting capitalist market forms and holding on to communal structures, along with manifestations of patriarchy, and resistance through gender struggles within the household and through community mobilization. Adivasis in the region seem to be undergoing processes of being simultaneously alienated from the forest and rediscovering connections to their land and the non-human world. By highlighting the material aspects with relational ecological ties and patriarchal manifestations with rural women's movements, this article proposes the relevance of nomadic movement in interpreting gender and environment subjectivities that have a bearing on these communities' future foodscapes and the rest of their landscape. We point to a continuous process of becoming, a 'feminist politics of the earth' in this landscape and extend the gender-nature debate beyond dualisms and liminality by highlighting fluid dialectical processes within a feminist political ecology framework. Keywords: Agrarian transitions; sedentarization; feminist political ecology; nomadic theory
Copyright (c) 2020 Deepa Kozhisseri, Sudhir Chella Rajan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Doing feminist collaborative event ethnography
Feminist political ecologists have transformed mainstream political ecology since its inception. The foundational and current work of feminist political ecologists indicate that their field is attentive to the epistemological foundations of power, inequities, and inequalities that cut across intersectional identities and hierarchies of difference and at the sites of environmental conflict and governance. Feminist political ecologists have made important theoretical interventions in the interdisciplinary community of political ecologists, but the use of feminist methodologies and 'team-based environmental science' can be expanded. We argue that revisiting feminist methodological commitments is critical for furthering how feminist political ecology examines how, and in what way, power and privilege operate in the contexts where environmental knowledge is produced. We make our argument by drawing upon a multi-year, multi-sited project to describe how collaborative event ethnography (CEE) offers many possibilities to reassess feminist political ecology research designs. We show how the recognition of diverse and plural epistemologies are foundational preconditions to integrating feminist principles in feminist political ecology research. We find that integrating reflexivity, responsibility, and co-production in research designs create opportunities for, and challenges to, carrying out feminist political ecological practice. In so doing, the integration of feminist methodologies are critical to disrupting knowledge hegemonies and providing new modes of practicing feminist political ecologies. Keywords: Collaborative event ethnography, feminist political ecology, feminist methodologies, global environmental governance
Copyright (c) 2020 Laura Zanotti, Kimberly Marion-Suiseeya http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The direction of ecological insurrections: political ecology comes to daggers with Fukuoka
This article proposes a political ecology of resistance. This is done by putting forward insurrectionary political ecology as a lens of research and struggle, through the confluence of the complementary "political" practice of insurrectionary anarchism and the "ecological" method of "no-till natural farming." While seemingly different, the article argues that these practices are compatible, animating a political ecology of resistance around anti-authoritarian political and ecological lifeways. This direction, or compass, of insurrectionary political ecology is discussed in relation to other autonomous tendencies, as it complements and strengthens existing critical schools of thought heavily influenced by political ecology, such as (decolonial) degrowth, environmental justice and post-development. Insurrectionary political ecology deepens connections with scholarly rebels in political and ecological struggles outside—and rejecting—the university system. The article includes discussions of research ethics, various conceptions of "activism", autonomous tendencies and existing differences between the concepts of "revolution" and "insurrection", in order to debate notions of "counter-hegemony" and "duel-power." The overall purpose here is to offer a theoretical ethos for a political ecology of resistance that invigorates political praxis to subvert the ongoing socio-ecological catastrophes. Keywords: Resistance; insurrectionary political ecology; post-development; decolonization; degrowth; insurrectionary ecology; environmental justice
Copyright (c) 2020 Alexander Dunlap http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The strategy of shifting cultivators in West Kalimantan in adapting to the market economy: empirical evidence behind gaps in interdisciplinary communication
Issues of climate change and expansion of large-scale land acquisition for industrial plantations continue to ravage the shifting cultivation system that 300–500 million subsistence farmer households depend on. In Indonesia, particularly in Kalimantan and Sumatera, village communities continue to practice shifting cultivation amidst the conversion of lands into industrial plantations. The rampant conversion of farmer's land by large scale companies based in the market economy has resulted in the decline of the shifting cultivation system, and compelled them to enter commercial production. I employed qualitative methods, conducting in-depth interviews and observations in West Kalimantan in 2018. Shifting cultivation today is not just for subsistence, but it is also a strategy to maintain claims to land that has been handed over to companies. Concurrently, people have been developing community plantations using industrial commodities such as rubber and oil palm, which still incorporate subsistence features. The changes occurring in villages have led to conflict since land availability has reduced, while the alternative of working for forestry and plantation companies is hampered by their lack of skills and knowledge. Theoretically, this study indicates the need for communication and synergy between the perspectives of political ecology and cultural ecology in order to understand the socio-politico-economic complexities haunting the village community's alterations in subsistence strategies. The practical implications are that land-based village development should open up communication among stakeholders and position village communities as the key beneficiary in the long run. Keywords: Shifting cultivation, land conversion, adaptation strategy, market economy, political ecology, Kalimantan, Indonesia
Copyright (c) 2020 Prudensius Maring http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Democratizar la bioseguridad en territorios con diversidad biocultural: la apuesta por una alianza de saberes en México
El siguiente artículo trata sobre las limitaciones al control ciudadano y comunitario impuestas por el gobierno mexicano sobre la bioseguridad y las políticas de biotecnología, así como las resistencias y propuestas creativas emprendidas por campesinos, indígenas, científicos y activistas preocupados por la expansión de los cultivos de soya y maíz genéticamente modificados. Lejos de retomar una perspectiva que opone saberes locales no -académicos a conocimiento científico, nuestra perspectiva enfatiza la alianza de saberes y aprendizajes entre múltiples actores que conforman la sociedad civil que abogan por un bio-control más democrático y anclado, a nivel local, en aquellos territorios caracterizados por su variedad y riqueza en flora, fauna y modos de vida. A partir de información etnográfica recabada durante la realización de biomonitoreos en Oaxaca y Campeche entre el 2000 y el 2018, se destacan las contribuciones que campesinos e indígenas pueden hacer, desde su saber territorial, a la democratización de la bioseguridad concebida, esta última, en términos más amplios que los meramente establecidos por ley. Se reflexiona además sobre los retos y oportunidades que suponen los biomonitoreos ciudadanos y las controversias que estos suscitan. Palabras clave: Bioseguridad, alianza de saberes, territorios biodiversos, biomonitoreos ciudadanos, transgénicos, resistencia social
Copyright (c) 2020 Gabriela Torres-Mazuera, Eric Vides Borrell, Flor Rivera López http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sustainable development frictions: lifestyle migration on the coast of Jalisco, Mexico
Abstract The concept of sustainability is materialized differently in luxury ecotourism development and in locally-directed community development initiatives. I examine the diverse environmental ideologies at play in these two distinct incarnations of "sustainable development" on the southern Jalisco, Mexico coast; first, in La Manzanilla, a community inhabited by a proportionately large population of leisure consumption-driven lifestyle migrants, then to the north, in elite ecotourism enclaves and a community displaced by a wealthy developer. I suggest these divergent development incarnations may be understood by expanding the concept of lifestyle migration to include a broader range of enactments of home, from different class perspectives. Global environmental ideologies and lifestyle migrant capital play a fundamental but not the only role in local sustainable development. I suggest global influences and local initiatives are creating a productive friction, reassembling global environmental knowledge and tourism imaginaries to suit local agendas. While there is no consensus on what sustainable development should look like in La Manzanilla, the intersection of initiatives is producing locally-directed development that contrasts with the erasure of local agendas happening in elite costal developments nearby. Keywords: sustainable development, friction, environmental ideology, tourism, lifestyle migration
Copyright (c) 2020 Jennifer Cardinal http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
How do environmental impact assessments fail to prevent social conflict? Government technologies in a dam project in Colombia
We analyze environmental impact assessment (EIA) for infrastructure development projects in Latin America through the case of the "El Cercado" dam on the Rancheria river in La Guajira Province of northern Colombia. We argue that social and environmental conflicts regarding development projects are not only the result of deficient EIA implementation but also of historically established power relations and deep-rooted beliefs concerning the economy and socio-spatial relations, of which EIAs are a constituting and enabling element. We focus on governmentality practices from an ethnographic political ecology perspective to trace how the EIA uses the concept of "areas of influence" as a standardized inclusion/exclusion technique, limited by its static nature and functioning as a legitimizing device for governmental interest to expand neoliberal economies in natural resource-strategic regions. Our analysis aims to understand how EIAs used for infrastructure development projects in Latin America have failed to prevent socio-environmental conflicts. At the same time, we question the notions of "space", "influence", and "affected population" behind EIA practices. We conclude that EIAs are a government technology of neoliberal environmental governance that has the potential to exclude the socio-spatial dynamics of local populations while depoliticizing the interests behind the project. With this article, we contribute to the ethnographic approach to governmentality in the context of infrastructure development projects in Latin America and to the understanding of the role of expert knowledge and technologies of government in neoliberal hydro-politics. Keywords: Environmental Impact Assessment, dam, hydro-politics, government technologies, social conflict
Copyright (c) 2020 Susana Carmona Castillo, Claudia Puerta Silva http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Seeing like the people: a history of territory and resistance in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon
The Cordillera del Condor in the Ecuadorian Amazon has been analyzed frequently in the literature of extractivism in Latin America, due to the current mining pressure on this territory. Mining is, however, the most recent in a long history of territorial transformations in the region. The production of territory in the Cordillera del Condor is the result of a complex historical accumulation of events, motivated by the political economy of the country that has transformed the people and its land. By studying the main events of state deterritorialization, this article examines multiple socio-spatial relations that occurred in the Cordillera del Condor. This article identifies three main events of state deterritorialization: (1) colonization and evangelization, (2) the Ecuador-Peru war and (3) large-scale mining. The analysis illustrates how territory is constantly integrated into the economic and political rationality of the nation-state and discusses these transformations in line with the institutionalization of new forms of organization, legibility, commodification of nature and subjectification of people. In contrast, the study also illustrates how people inhabiting this space counteract state deterritorialization by deploying the same strategies as the state; reinforcing reterritorialization in their own terms. The article concludes by highlighting the agency of people to reshape state mechanisms in the struggle of defining a territory. Keywords: state deterritorialization, reterritorialization, political ecology, Cordillera del Condor, Ecuador
Copyright (c) 2020 Diana Vela-Almeida http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From paper to practice? Assembling a rights-based conservation approach
Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to draw legitimacy from the United Nations system—from its declarations to its special rapporteurs—and to build transnational strategic alliances in ways they could not with participatory discourses. Using it, they have brought attention to biodiversity as a basic human right and to the struggle to use, access, and own it as a human rights struggle. In this article, we show how the 2016 WCC provided a platform for building and reinforcing these alliances, advancing diverse procedural and substantive rights, redefining key principles and standards for a rights-based conservation approach, and leveraging international support for enforcement mechanisms on-the-ground. We argue that, as advocates staked out physical and discursive space at the venue, they secured the authority to shape conservation politics, shifting the terrain of struggle between strict conservationists and community activists and creating new conditions of possibility for advancing the human rights agenda in international conservation politics. Nonetheless, while RBAs have been politically successful at reconfiguring global discourse, numerous obstacles remain in translating that progress to secure human rights to resources "on the ground", and it is vital that the international conservation community finance the implementation of RBA in specific locales, demand that nation states create monitoring and grievance systems, and decolonize the ways in which they interact with IPLCs. Finally, we reflect on the value of the Collaborative Event Ethnography methodology, with its emphasis on capturing the mundane, meaningful and processual aspects of policymaking, in illuminating the on-going labor entailed in bringing together and aligning the disparate elements in dynamic assemblages. Keywords: Human rights, global conservation governance, collaborative event ethnography, Indigenous peoples
Copyright (c) 2020 Catherine Corson, Julia Worcester, Sabine Rogers, Isabel Flores-Ganley http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Entangled alternatives: political-economic conditions constructing farmer training programs as solutions to the farming crisis
This article contributes to debates about the potential of alternative food networks and their contradictions using sustainability-oriented farmer training programs as a case study. I provide an empirical account of the political-economic structures at play in the construction of farmer trainings as a solution to the farming crisis, as well as the possibilities and tensions herein. I argue that that the main rationale framing the farming problem in the public-institutional discourse – namely the apolitical production of a scarcity of farmers – and its discursive usage in popular and institutional circles directs the solution towards the urgent production of more farmers who will farm sustainably and independently of the current structural conditions in which farming is embedded. On the ground, this apolitical ecology is sustained by philanthropism and consumption elitism. In addition, the making of FTPs as an intervention to solve the farming crisis is determined by neoliberal governance structures that promote the devolution of power into the NGO sector and responsibilization of individuals. I finally call for a broader and non-binary vision to alternatives, in which political ecology perspectives bring relevant tools and insights. The case of FTPs throws light into the particular governmentalities, forms of governing at-a-distance, and whiteness associated with sustainable farming and agriculture, and the way society thinks of it. Keywords: farmer training programs, emergent farmers, sustainable agriculture, alternatives, alternative food networks, NGOization of farming, power, privilege, California
Copyright (c) 2020 Lucia Arguelles http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Contested extractivism: impact assessment, public engagement, and environmental knowledge production in Alaska's Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta
For large extractive mineral projects, Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) processes function in part as a procedural tool to adjudicate the legitimacy of divergent environmental truth claims. Successful anti-extraction movements work to litigate divergent knowledge claims in the public arena, but few anti-extraction communities have access to a broad public audience. This article examines the proposed Donlin Gold mine in southwestern Alaska, a locally divisive yet publicly invisible extraction controversy, to understand how communities contest the boundaries of knowledge production and legitimacy set out by EIS procedures without the benefit of broad public awareness. Through a multi-method analysis of the public engagement segment of Donlin's Draft EIS, we find that anti-Donlin activists worked to construct environmental knowledge that drew jointly on claims to local knowledge and scientific expertise through a temporary assemblage of local activists and external consultants. The contested epistemic understandings of residents, expert consultants, and state and federal regulators further reveal the role of regulatory processes in constructing and maintaining boundaries of epistemic legitimacy, while also pointing to emergent possibilities for social action based in locally-situated environmental truth claims. Key Words: Environmental Impact Statement, mining, truth claims, Donlin Gold mine, Alaska
Copyright (c) 2020 Jonathan Tollefson, Bindu Panikkar http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Gendered geographies of violence: a multiple case study analysis of murdered women environmental defenders
This study illustrates how, despite the diversity of women environmental defenders and their movements around the world, there are near-universal patterns of violence threatening their survival. Violence against women environmental defenders, often perpetrated by government-backed corporations, remains overlooked. Research on this issue importantly contributes to discussions about environmental justice because women defenders make up a large proportion of those at the frontlines of ecological distribution conflicts. Through comparative political ecology, this research analyzes cases from the Environmental Justice Atlas, an online open-access inventory of environmental distribution conflicts, in which one or more women were assassinated while fighting a diverse array of extractive and polluting projects. Although the stories showcase a breadth of places, conflicts, social-class backgrounds, and other circumstances between women defenders, most cases featured multinational large-scale extractive companies supported by governments violently targeting women defenders with impunity. Keywords: Violence, murder, women environmental defenders, EJAtlas, comparative political ecology
Copyright (c) 2020 Dalena Le Tran http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Policy persistence: REDD+ between stabilization and contestation
At this time of rapid global environmental change and demands for sweeping societal transformation, we call for greater scrutiny of the persistence of particular policies and ideas. In this Special Section we focus on REDD+, which for long has enjoyed remarkable global support in spite of poor outcomes and widespread criticisms. The central policy proposition of REDD+, that is, forest-based emissions reduction through market-based instruments and non-market means, are now carried forth under the new banner of Natural Climate Solutions. We examine REDD+ to understand how and why some environmental policies and ideas persist despite dubious impacts. We conceptualize policy persistence by drawing on three strands of political ecology literature - critical policy studies, assemblage studies, and political economy - that illuminate the dynamics of policy persistence in different yet complementary ways. We argue that the persistence of policies and policy ideas rests in a tentative balance of the counteracting processes of stabilization and contestation, which precipitate both intended and unintended outcomes. We show how the stabilization of REDD+ itself lends stability to broader ideas of forest-based climate change mitigation. We suggest that policy persistence is an area of political ecological research, which now calls for renewed engagement. Keywords: Policy persistence, REDD+, climate change mitigation, Natural Climate Solutions, political ecology
Copyright (c) 2020 Adeniyi Asiyanbi, Jens Friis Lund http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reducing deforestation in Colombia while building peace and pursuing business as usual extractivism?
In this article, I examine the contradictions and tensions in Colombia's simultaneous embrace of REDD+ and a peace-building process premised on continued extractivism. Colombia is emerging from an internal conflict that lasted more than 50 years. In this process rural land-use is being transformed, generating new conflicts over land use and control with detrimental effects on Colombia's forests. Based on official documents, reports, existing scholarly work, interviews and observations collected during fieldwork in the Colombian Amazon, I analyze the ways in which peace-building and post-conflict transition have precipitated factors which have aggravated land conflicts and led to the escalation of deforestation in Colombia. I argue that Colombia's current REDD+ efforts mainly serve to attract international funding and legitimize the status quo since they remain disconnected from the structural processes that directly and indirectly drive deforestation. As such, REDD+ in Colombia contributes to a contradictory neoliberal approach to development, which promises to safeguard the environment, while supporting large-scale extractive industries, mining, cattle ranching and intensive agriculture, resulting in the increase in deforestation and forest degradation. Key Words: Colombia, post-conflict, peace-building, extractivism, deforestation, REDD+
Copyright (c) 2020 Torsten Krause http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Can the subaltern protect forests? REDD+ compliance, depoliticization and Indigenous subjectivities
REDD+ regimes are accompanied by capacity-building and educational practices, which play an important role in REDD+ governance. These practices address subaltern local and indigenous actors, seek their compliance and thereby contribute to the stabilization of otherwise all-too-fragile global carbon governance systems. In this article I analyze the governing effects of such practices by drawing on Robert Fletcher's concept of "multiple environmentalities" and Tania Murray Li's "analytic of assemblage." Empirically I focus on educational materials that have been designed for REDD+ projects in cooperation with one of the world's largest REDD+ funds, Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative. I identify several strategies that aim at aligning diverse actors, seek to de- or re-politicize REDD+ concepts, authorize knowledge, and, most significantly, address local actors as responsible ecological stewards, who contribute to stabilizing REDD+ regimes on the ground. In total, these strategies promote programmatic subjectivities among indigenous 'stakeholders' and contribute to a new, 'glocal' understanding of nature-society relations. Keywords: global environmental governance, REDD+, governmentality, environmentality, capacity-building
Copyright (c) 2020 Franziska Müller http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
REDD+ policy translation and storylines in Laos
This article examines the (re)production of discourses and storylines in the process of policy translation of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) in Laos. Applying the concepts of policy discourses and policy translation, we first identify the prominent storylines at the various governance levels in Laos. Second, we compare and contrast these storylines with the global REDD+ discourses. Further, we discuss how different actors' capacities and political agendas shape REDD+ storylines at different levels of governance. We find that national and sub-national storylines portray REDD+ mainly as a tool for supporting Laos' forestry strategy and sustainable forest management; for capacity-building and donor funding; and for village forest management and education of villagers. At the village level, many see REDD+ as a project for various political elites and external actors to control forests and cheat villagers. We conclude that, while globally there is increasing attention to civic-environmentalism in REDD+, neoliberalist and techno-managerial discourses still dominate. At the village level, however, civic-environmentalist ideas, such as social safeguards, benefit sharing, and equity largely disappear and two opposing discourses emerge representing anti-civic ideas and REDD+ resentment. Furthermore, while techno-managerial ideas permeate all levels in Laos, neoliberalist ideas in terms of carbon trading are almost absent. During policy translation, REDD+ thus transforms into "just another" top-down development project. This serves the interest of Laos's techno-managerial elite well, but has little positive prospect for local people and forests. In this perspective, the lack of alternative discourse-coalitions promoting non-carbon benefits, social safeguards, and equity is striking. Key Words: REDD+, Laos, policy translation, environmental discourses, neoliberalism, civic environmentalism
Copyright (c) 2020 Sabaheta Ramcilovik-Suominen; Iben Nathan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Governing the ungovernable: contesting and reworking REDD+ in Indonesia
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation plus the role of conservation, sustainable forest management, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries (REDD+) has rapidly become a dominant approach in mitigating climate change. Building on the Foucauldian governmentality literature and drawing on a case study of Ulu Masen Project in Aceh, Indonesia, this article examines the practices of subject making through which REDD+ seeks to enroll local actors, a research area that remains relatively underexplored. It interrogates the ways in which local actors react, resist or maneuver within these efforts, as they negotiate multiple subject positions. Interviews and focus group discussions combined with an analysis of documents show that the subject making processes proceed at a complex conjuncture constituted and shaped by political, economic and ecological conditions within the context of Aceh. The findings also suggest that the agency of communities in engaging, negotiating and even contesting the REDD+ initiative is closely linked to the history of their prior engagement in conservation and development initiatives. Communities are empowered by their participation in REDD+, although not always in the ways expected by project implementers and conservation and development actors. Furthermore, communities' political agency cannot be understood by simply examining their resistance toward the initiative; these communities have also been skillful in playing multiple roles and negotiating different subjectivities depending on the situations they encounter. Keywords: REDD+, subject-making, agency, resistance, Indonesia, Aceh
Copyright (c) 2020 Abidah B. Setyowati http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Transformation is what you expect, models are what you get: REDD+ and models in conservation and development
Models increasingly pervade conservation and development practice – model policies, model countries, model regions, model states, model projects, model villages, model communities and so on. These are idealized, bounded, miniature entities that seek to demonstrate the efficacy of a more substantive policy, scheme or intervention. Although political ecologists and critical scholars have analyzed models in specific interventions, there has been relatively little reflection on the common logics central to models more generally. Drawing on critical conservation and development literature and in-depth case studies of REDD+ in Tanzania and Nigeria, we identify and elaborate three core model logics: 1) problematization of the field of intervention and valorization of microcosms within it; 2) isolation and bounding which seek to order complexity and etch microcosms in space and time; 3) enrolment of actors. Although ambitious and transformational in its claims and aspirations, REDD+ has thus far manifested as an extensive network of models across socio-political scales. We argue that idealized REDD+ models enable proponents to demonstrate and 'sell' REDD+ as a 'successful' intervention, thereby allowing the scheme to persist in policy circles in spite of its failures on the ground and its lack of viability at scale. We therefore argue that models often become an end in themselves, paradoxically failing to herald the transformational intervention they were originally meant to epitomize. Keywords: Conservation, development, models, Nigeria, Tanzania, REDD+
Copyright (c) 2020 Adeniyi Asiyanbi, Kate Massarella http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Political ecologies of time and temporality in resource extraction
This article introduces a Special Section on time and temporality in natural resource extraction. The Special Section illuminates the importance of both resource temporalities and temporal strategies around resource extraction, including nostalgia and identity, political strategies to delay projects, and contested attempts at predicting and managing the future. In addressing these themes, contributors highlight divergent spatio-temporalities and memories of extractive landscapes, local people's anticipation of future effects from mining, and governmental and corporate practices to speed up project implementation. We suggest that various temporal aspects – such as history, memory, velocity, delay, and epistemologies of time – play a central role in how struggles and controversies over extractive development manifest in particular places. We also offer additional avenues for research on contested understandings of time and temporality in political ecology. Keywords: natural resources, extractive industry, temporality, political ecology
Copyright (c) 2020 Ashley Fent, Erik Kojola http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"Anishinaabe time": temporalities and impact assessment in pipeline reviews
Indigenous ways of living that embrace multiple temporalities have been largely supplanted by a single, linear colonial temporality. Drawing on theoretical insights from Indigenous geographies and political ecology, this article considers how pipeline reviews come into being through contested temporalities and how dominant modes of time dispossess Indigenous peoples of self-determination in energy decision-making. In particular, Anishinaabe clan governance – a form of kinship that provides both social identity and function based on relations to animal nations – is undermined in colonial decision-making processes. Through analysis of documents from Canada's National Energy Board and interviews with Anishinaabe pipeline opponents, I explore tensions between Anishinaabe and settler temporalities reflected in the 2012-2017 Line 9 pipeline dispute in the Great Lakes region. These include divergent understandings of periodicities, timeframes, kinship relations, and the role of nonhuman temporalities in decision-making. Colonial temporal modes that have been imposed on Indigenous communities foreshorten timescales, depoliticize kinship relations, and discount nonhumans in decision-making – resulting in narrower and more short-sighted project reviews than Anishinaabe temporalities would support. I argue that the rich concepts of kinship, queerness, continuity, and prophecy embedded in Anishinaabe temporalities can inform strategies for decolonizing energy review processes and open possibilities for Indigenous self-determination in energy decision-making. Keywords: Anishinaabe studies, Two-Spirit, Indigenous geographies, temporalities, Indigenous knowledge, energy governance, pipeline, National Energy Board
Copyright (c) 2020 Sakihitowin Awasis http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Lesotho's white gold: the political ecology of temporality and the economy of anticipation in resource extraction and large dam infrastructural projects
The construction phases of large dam and infrastructural projects often extend over long periods of time, creating social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic consequences in the proximate communities and landscapes. The temporality of the phases of the project – from planning to construction to post-construction – reveal more layered and wide-ranging consequences from the social and environmental changes that result, sharpened by greater attention to how these changes unfold across multiple timescales and sites of the project. Using the case study of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), I draw on a political ecology approach that uses longitudinal data, including interviews, document analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lesotho since 1997, to illustrate how active project narratives draw from and promulgate an affective economy of anticipation in ways that aim to both sustain the hope of people affected by the project and contain their criticism of the project amidst a continued investment by the state in the expansion of the LHWP. As people directly affected experience disjunctures between the promises and the realities of the project over time, subsequent phases of the project are simultaneously renewed and recast through a logic of improvement that emphasizes changes in the implementation of the project while continuing to invest in the future imaginary of development that requires going forward with project plans. A logic of continuity and improvement structures this continued commitment to the capital intensive LHWP through the strategic mobilization of phases that scaffold both the material and physical dimensions of the project, but also the affective and anticipatory hopes of prosperity that the project represents. In this case, it also reveals how project authorities weave these dimensions – the material and the aspirational – into specific planned changes and improvements to address previous and ongoing concerns as projects progress over time. This longitudinal approach demonstrates the importance of temporal and affective dimensions to our understanding of the complex, multi-faceted consequences of resource extractive mega-dam projects such as the LHWP, particularly as they further rationalize the resource extractive approach to economic development in the region. Keywords: development, dams, infrastructure, political ecology, temporality, affect, resource extraction, economy of anticipation, displacement, construction, Lesotho, Southern Africa
Copyright (c) 2020 Yvonne Braun http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The anticipatory politics of dispossession in a Senegalese mining negotiation
The concept of accumulation by dispossession is often mobilized in political ecological and geographical literature, to explain the ways that capitalist accumulation depends on the violent and extra-economic seizure of land and resources. Yet dispossession is also mobilized as a fear about the future, as a way of articulating historical and non-capitalist motivations for land expropriation, and as an avenue for political action. Amid negotiations for a heavy mineral sands mine in the Casamance region of Senegal, narratives of dispossession circulated frequently, even though no mining had yet taken place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, this article examines the contentious politics around the proposed mine, which mobilize multiple timescales. In this context, activists and village residents have engaged in an anticipatory politics that is influenced by past and present processes of land occupancy, environmental change, and state disinvestment, and is aimed at contesting potential dispossessions to come, making claims to resources, and securing a place in the imagined future. At the same time, state and corporate actors have engaged in their own anticipatory actions, through environmental impact assessments and other technologies of prediction that minimize, invalidate, or circumvent anti-dispossession movements. This article argues that experiences of and resistances to dispossession are mediated by the folding together of temporal frames and diverse displacements. In particular, it attends to anticipation as a key temporal mechanism through which dispossession is both enacted and contested. As such, it contributes to political ecology by combining materialist conceptions of dispossession and displacement with theorizations of anticipation and the future. Keywords: accumulation by dispossession, anticipatory politics, mining, Senegal
Copyright (c) 2020 Ashley Fent http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Divergent memories and visions of the future in conflicts over mining development
Conflicts over extractive development often center around predicting future profits and economic growth, and estimating industrial pollution. How these projections are understood and seen as legitimate and trustworthy depends on social actors' environmental imaginaries and timescapes. Thus, I examine the temporal and cultural dynamics of natural resource politics, particularly how affective connections to the past and future mobilize support and opposition to new mining. I use the case of proposed copper mines in the rural Minnesota Iron Range region to explore the different environmental imaginaries and timescapes that mining opponents and proponents use to understand the potential socio-environmental impacts, and to legitimate their positions. Proponents, including long-time and working class Iron Range residents and mining corporations, view the region as an industrial landscape built by mining and hope new proposals will renew the past to create a prosperous future. Meanwhile, environmental groups who oppose mining view the region through an environmental imaginary based on outdoor recreation, and draw on collective memories of family and youth trips to understand new extractive projects as a rupture to their vision of the future. I show that resource extraction is understood through temporalities that differ across intersections of class and region, and that emotional meanings of the past and visions of the future animate contemporary political action. Keywords: Resource extraction, mining, environmental imaginaries, timescapes, collective memory, environmental politics, emotions
Copyright (c) 2020 Erik Kojola http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Comunalidad, Guendaliza'a and anti-mine mobilizations in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
How do grassroots strategies for the defense of territory inter-relate with the "politics of time" in the early phases of socio-environmental struggles? This article addresses this question via ethnographic research and in-depth interviews in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Opponents of mines and a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in this region invoke comunalidad and Guendaliza'a— indigenous ways of life associated with mutual aid and territorial sovereignty. These values are enacted by networks of activists seeking to protect the land and livelihoods of future generations against global capitalism's drive for cheap raw materials. By rejecting dualist distinctions between Society and Nature, indigenous cosmovisions can help defensive movements forge alternatives to socio-environmental violence. Engaging with this case brings separate theoretical frameworks of defensive resistance, cheap nature, ecological-distribution conflicts, and indigenous cosmovisions into dialogue with one another. Key words: social movements, indigenous peoples, global capitalism, ethnography, anti-mining
Copyright (c) 2020 Alessandro Morosin http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Review of Giorgos Kallis. 2019. Limits: why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care
Copyright (c) 2020 Jéssica Malinalli Coyotecatl Contreras http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Review of Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher. 2020. The Conservation Revolution: radical ideas for saving nature beyond the Anthropocene. New York: Verso
Review of Daggett, Cara New. 2019. The Birth of Energy: fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work.
Copyright (c) 2020 Gustav Cederlöf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Review of Andrew Flachs. 2019. Cultivating Knowledge: biotechnology, sustainability, and the human cost of cotton capitalism in India
Copyright (c) 2020 Muhammad Ahsan Rana http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Review of Gibbs, J. (dir.). 2020. Planet of the Humans. Documentary film.
Copyright (c) 2020 Gabriela Cabaña, Brototi Roy http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Review of Li and Shapiro. 2020. China goes Green: coercive environmentalism for a troubled planet.
This review critiques Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro’s China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet (2020). The authors explore what it means for the world’s longest-lasting authoritarian state to pursue “ecological civilization.” This is an important work that recasts the trade-offs of tackling catastrophic climate change.
Copyright (c) 2020 Kofi Gunu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0