NIFK15004U Political Ecology

Environmental sustainability challenges such as land degradation, deforestation and climate changes are complex processes and often cannot be understood in isolation from broader dynamics of economic and social development, struggles over access and rights to resources, or conflicts originating from historical grievances. Yet, their complexity is not always acknowledged by researchers, governments, and development practitioners seeking to identify, measure, and correct or alleviate them. Scientific measurements of the extent of environmental degradation are often inaccurate and/or highly uncertain, and knowledge of the underlying drivers is framed in ways that direct blame toward some actors, for instance farmers practicing subsistence farming, while leaving others out, such as large-scale investments in mining.

Political Ecology is a broad analytical and methodological approach which asserts that the way we know environmental problems affects the solutions we identify. This implies that Political Ecology sees science and knowledge of environmental problems as inherently political and intrinsically linked to economic and social context. Further, Political Ecology is keenly invested in understanding how local processes of environmental change are linked to past and present wider regulatory frameworks and market processes. It provides conceptual lenses that help unpack the entwined economic and political processes that drive environmental and social change.

Political Ecology draws on various disciplines to frame studies on resource and management challenges in fields such as environment and development, climate change, land-use, and conservation. This course invites students to explore how Political Ecology is used to understand processes of natural resource management, use, and contestations around these. Participants in this course will be challenged to re-think and reconsider mainstream understandings of environmental problems and how they are produced.

The course is primarily (but not exclusively) concerned with and draws its examples and cases of sustainability issues and struggles in low-income countries in the Global South. Cases cover forests, agricultural lands, water, wildlife and range lands.

The course is structured around an opening and closing week and three conceptually driven modules each lasting two weeks. The three modules are briefly described below. During the course you will be presented with critiques of much of mainstream practice in development and environmental sustainability policy. In the last week of the course, we will engage with what alternatives to the mainstream could look like.

Introduction week

During the course introduction week, we will introduce to political ecology – outlining the main characteristics of the field. We will situate the emergence of political ecology in its historical context. By pointing to colonial legacies in the relationship between the Global North and the Global South we discuss how it is a critique of a business as usual in the development world which too often served to sustain and deepen existing inequalities.

Environmental knowledge

This module concerns the role of knowledge of environmental change and its drivers. We will look into questions such as: By whom and how is environmental degradation defined? How can we know/ascertain/measure environmental change? How is environmental knowledge produced and used? Who drives degradation? How and why have environmental crisis narratives emerged and persisted? What functions have they served? And what are the environmental and socio-economic consequences? We will also examine how the reproduction of crisis narratives has been furthered by the authority afforded to science through the lens of science and technology studies. Finally, we will look at how feminist and decolonial perspectives help us unpack and situate the production and circulation of environmental knowledge.

The political economy of natural resource management and use

Political ecology may be defined as “the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy” (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, p. 17). In this module we will discuss, among other, Marxist political economy which has formed a central element in political ecology as a critique of capitalism and neo-liberalism. We also broaden the view to other orientations of political economy. Focus throughout the module is on the analysis of cases and situations in relation to use of natural resources and conservation, on questions such as “who gains?”, “who loses?”, “how?” and “why?”

Politics and power

In this module we will build an understanding of how politics and power shape and is shaped by environments and how they are known, used, and managed by society. We will engage fundamental theory of power, and see how it has inspired classic concerns in political ecology. This includes an emphasis on hidden and open forms of resistance to perceived unjust or oppressive policies. It also includes an emphasis on understanding how power operates through the various forms of governance approaches that infuse environmental conservation.

Closing week

In this last week of the course, we will reflect on the implications of the insights into and critiques of much of mainstream environmental and development policy that we have gone through during the course. We will use these reflections to consider alternatives – other ways of thinking nature-society relations that are potentially more sustainable, more equitable, and more empowering of ordinary citizens. We end with a summary of the course learning and course evaluations.