Political ecology
Anthropologist Eric R. Wolf gave it a second life in 1972 in an article entitled "Ownership and Political Ecology", in which he discusses how local rules of ownership and inheritance "mediate between the pressures emanating from the larger society and the exigencies of the local ecosystem", but did not develop the concept further.
[4] Other origins include other early works of Eric R. Wolf, Michael J. Watts, Susanna Hecht, and others in the 1970s and 1980s.
While the broad scope and interdisciplinary nature of political ecology lends itself to multiple definitions and understandings, common assumptions across the field hace given the term relevance.
Paul Robbins asserts that the discipline has a "normative understanding that there are very likely better, less coercive, less exploitative, and more sustainable ways of doing things".
Early and prominent examples of this were Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria by Michael Watts in 1983, which traced the famine in northern Nigeria during the 1970s to the effects of colonialism, rather than an inevitable consequence of the drought in the Sahel, and The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries by Piers Blaikie in 1985, which traced land degradation in Africa to colonial policies of land appropriation, rather than over-exploitation by African farmers.
[13][14] It tended toward overly structural explanations, focusing on the role of individual economic relationships in the maintenance of social order.
[18][19][20][21][22][23][24] PE focuses on issues of power, recognizing the importance of explaining environmental impacts on cultural processes without separating out political and economic contexts.
AS Walker[26] points out, though, it has failed to offer “compelling counter-narratives” to “widely influential and popular yet deeply flawed and unapologetic neo-Malthusian rants such as Robert Kaplan's (1994) 'The coming anarchy' and Jared Diamond's (2005) Collapse (385).
Ultimately, Walker holds, applying political ecology to policy decisions – especially in the US and Western Europe – will prove difficult as long there is resistance to Marxist and neo-Marxist thinking.
As Dove and Carpenter state, "indigenous people have important environmental knowledge which could contribute to conservation".
In a few cases, perhaps especially tragic local groups have been displaced to create national parks and reserves to ‘conserve’ the forest.
[32] In the view of Robbins, political ecology is a term for empirical explorations that show changes occurring in an environment in clear connection to power.
Fredrick Engelstad, a Norwegian sociologist explained the concept of power as the combination of relationality, causality, and intentionality.
Svarstad, Benjaminsen, and Overå held that the theory of actor-oriented power help in providing conceptual distinctions with useful insight into the theoretical elements that are vital in studying political ecology.
Actors exercising environmental interventions include corporate organizations, governmental and non-governmental organizations[38][39][40] while actors that resist them include groups such as peasants, fishermen, or pastoralists, by exercising counter-power using various kinds of resistance, or active involvement.
[46] The poststructuralist power perspective is the domain of Michel Foucault’s work with its application in political ecology.
Therefore, bio-power aim in terms of governance and knowledge is to ascertain environmental issues as core concerns.
Political ecology emphasized that understanding how power works in environmental governance follows Foucault’s notion of “governmentality”.
Unlike in other fields, in political ecology, discourses are studied in line with a critical realist epistemology.
[53][54][55][37] There are instances where the formation of discursive power is traced to a state’s colonial era when efforts are made in the appropriation of new territories.
