Political ecology is loosely defined as the study of power relations in land and environmental management. It combines various scales and focuses on unequal costs and benefits, winners and losers, how history matters, and environmental conflicts. Current research topics include conservation areas, environmental change, commodification impacts, gender and power, land tenure, and conflicts. Political ecology is explicitly normative and aims to support marginalized groups, while apolitical ecology presents as objective but is still influenced by values and interests.

1. What is political ecology?

2. What is political ecology?
 Loosly defined as: The study of power
relations in land and environmental
management
 Combining various scales
 Power (unequal costs and benefits,
winners and losers)
 History matters
 Conflicts: Struggles over meanings as
well as over land and resources
 Explicitly normative and political (in
contrast to ’apolitical ecology’)
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3. Some current research topics
in political ecology
 Conservation areas (winners & losers)
 Environmental change (who defines how landscapes
ought to look like?)
 The environmental impacts of commodification
 Gender, power and the environment
 Land tenure
 Environmental conflicts
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4. Apolitical ecology
(two main types)
1. Ecoscarcity (Malthus)
2. Modernization and win-win approaches
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5. Political implications of
apolitical ecology
 Neo-malthusianism:
 ’Blaming the victim’
 Local/indigenous
knowledge is
underestimated
 The solutions are at
the national or
international level (with
’the experts’)
 Modernization:
 Solutions to environmental
problems are based on
technology diffusion,
establishment of markets,
establishment of clear and
exclusive property rights,
and the pricing of
environmental goods
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6.  Political ecology
 Explicitly normative
(values: justice, human
rights, pro-poor and
marginalized groups)
 Structure and actor-
oriented
 Focus on linking the
local to the global, on
conflicts and on
understanding actors’
rationality in political,
social, and
environmental context
 Apolitical ecology
 Presents itself as
’objective’ and
’neutral’, but still
strongly influenced by
values and interests
 Actor-less analysis
(’We’)
 Focus on population
growth (neo-
malthusianism) or win-
win solutions
(modernization)
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7. The hatchet: PE as critique
 Deconstruction of myths, narratives & discourses
linked to the quest for control over land and resources
 E.g. The idea of a ’pristine’ environment,
desertification, carrying capacity...
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8. The seed: PE as equity and
sustainability research
 Detailed analysis of local practices (knowledge,
perceptions), which can be used to point at
alternatives to current polices. As a result of some of
this research, new knowedge has been created on
issues of range management, deforestation, soil
fertility, agricultural development, land tenure,
biodiversity management etc.
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9. History of PE
1970s-1985: Neo-Marxism
 Reaction against neo-Malthusianism and
human/cultural ecology
 Influenced by dependency theory and other radical
development theories
 But only a handful of contributions within PE in this
period (field of marginal importance)
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10. 1985-1995: Eclectisism
 A range of theoretical sources and approaches used
 Combination of structure and agency appr.
 Blaikie (1985), Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) key
contributions
 Chain of explanation
 ’Degradation’ is a perceptual term
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11. 1995-present: Poststructuralism
 Postmodern influence
 Poststructuralism originated in language
philosophy and the study of language,
methaphors, myths, narratives, stories, and
discourses play an important role (discourse
analysis, Foucault)
 Ideas are never innocent, but either
challenge or reinforce existing social and
economic arrangements
 Contructionism vs realism
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12. Critique against PE
(Vayda and Walters 1999)
 PE starts with a priori judgments about
the primacy of political factors in
explaining environmental change (‘putting
politics first’)
 Concentrates on factors assumed in
advance to be important
 Tends to deal only with ‘politics’ and not
with ‘ecology’ (‘politics without ecology’)
 PE should instead be called ‘natural
resource politics’, ‘political anthropology’,
or simply ‘political science’
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13. Event ecology as an
alternative
 No prejudgment of the importance of individual
factors
 Begins with environmental events, and then works
backward in time and outward in space so as to
construct chains of causes and effects leading to
those events
 Research is guided by open questions
 By contrast, political ecologists are said to always
start with a political analysis and hence would end
up with political causes of events, despite the fact
that causes are sometimes natural. This will be
missed by political ecologists
 Political-economic factors are often key causes of
environmental change, but not always
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14. Two schools in PE (broadly speaking)
 Blaikie (UK based)
 Structure &
agency
 Empirically
oriented
 Eclectic
 Critique: lacks a
theory
(’atheoretical’)
 No politics
 Watts (US based)
 Structural
approach
 Theoretical
(Marxist)
 Political
 Critique: pre-made
explanations
(’structural
determinism’)
 No ecology
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15.  The Vayda and Walters critique is basically against the
Watts tradition.
 Event ecology appears similar to Blaikie’s chains of
explanation.
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