at once: critically explaining what is wrong with dominant accounts of environmental change, while at the same time exploring alternatives, adaptations, and creative human action in the face of mismanagement and exploitation, offering both a “hatchet” to take apart flawed, dangerous, and politically problematic accounts, and a “seed,” to grow into new socio‐ecologies (see Chapter 4).
Five Dominant Narratives in Political Ecology
In this sense, political ecology characterizes a kind of argument, text, or narrative, born of research efforts to expose the forces at work in ecological struggle and document alternatives in the face of change. This does not mean that political ecology is something that people must write and think about all the time. Much of this work is carried out by people who might never refer to themselves as political ecologists, who count writing, researching, or arguing as only one part of their job, or who might do so in only one sphere of their work. Neither is political ecology restricted to academics from the “first world.” Indeed, the critical ideas and arguments of political ecology are produced through the research and writing, blogging, filming, and advocacy of countless NGOs or activist groups around the world. This may actually comprise the largest share of work in political ecology. Published only in local meeting and development reports, or uploaded as short documentary videos or slide presentations, this work is as much a part of the field as the well‐circulated books or refereed journal articles of formal science.
Big questions and theses
What unites the diverse work in these many locations is a general interest in five big themes. Over‐simply, political ecology research has demonstrated (or attempted to demonstrate) the theses shown in Table 1.3, each of which receives a chapter later in this book.
Table 1.3 Five theses of political ecology and the things they attempt to explain.
| Thesis | What is explained? | Relevance |
| Degradation and marginalization | Environmental conditions (especially degradation) and the reasons for their change | Environmental degradation, long blamed on marginal people, is shown in its larger political and economic context. |
| Conservation and control | Conservation outcomes (especially failures) | Usually viewed as benign, efforts at environmental conservation are shown to have pernicious effects, and sometimes fail as a result. |
| Environmental conflict and exclusion | Access to the environment and conflicts over exclusion from it (especially natural resources) | Environmental conflicts are shown to be part of larger gendered, classed, and raced struggles and vice versa. |
| Environmental subjects and identity | Identities of people and social groups (especially new or emerging ones) | Political identities and social struggles are shown to be linked to basic issues of livelihood and environmental activity. |
| Political objects and actors | Socio‐political conditions (especially deeply structured ones) | Political and economic systems are shown to be underpinned and affected by the non‐human actors with which they are intertwined. |
The degradation and marginalization thesis
Otherwise environmentally innocuous production systems undergo transition to overexploitation of natural resources on which they depend as a response to state development intervention and/or increasing integration in regional and global markets. This may lead to increasing poverty and, cyclically, increasing overexploitation. Similarly, sustainable community management is hypothesized to become unsustainable as a result of efforts by state authorities or outside firms to enclose traditional collective property or impose new/foreign institutions. Related assertions posit that modernist development efforts to improve production systems of local people have led contradictorily to decreased sustainability of local practice and a linked decrease in the equity of resource distribution.
The conservation and control thesis
Control of resources and landscapes has been wrested from producers or producer groups (associated by class, gender, or ethnicity) through the implementation of efforts to preserve “sustainability,” “community,” or “nature.” In the process, local systems of livelihood, production, and socio‐political organization have been disabled by officials and global interests seeking to preserve the “environment.” Related work in this area has further demonstrated that where local production practices have historically been productive and relatively benign, they have been characterized as unsustainable by state authorities or other players in the struggle to control resources.
The environmental conflict and exclusion thesis
Increasing scarcities produced through resource enclosure or appropriation by state authorities, private firms, or social elites accelerate conflict among groups (gender, class, or ethnicity). Similarly, environmental problems become “socialized” when such groups secure control of collective resources at the expense of others by leveraging management interventions by development authorities, state agents, or private firms. So too, existing and long‐term conflicts within and between communities are “ecologized” by changes in conservation or resource development policy.
The environmental subjects and identity thesis
Institutionalized and power‐laden environmental management regimes have led to the emergence of new kinds of people, with their own emerging self‐definitions, understandings of the world, and ecological ideologies and behaviors. More firmly: people's beliefs and attitudes do not lead to new environmental actions, behaviors, or rules systems; instead, new environmental actions, behaviors, or rules systems lead to new kinds of people. Correlatively, new environmental regimes and conditions have created opportunities or imperatives for local groups to secure and represent themselves politically. Such movements often represent a new form of political action, since their ecological strands can connect disparate groups, across class, ethnicity, and gender.
Political objects and actors thesis
Material characteristics of non‐human nature and its components (dung, climate, refrigerators, bacteria, lawn grass, road salt, goats, and tropical soils) impinge upon the world of human struggles and are entwined within them, and so are inevitably political. Yet as these characteristics and agents assume new roles and take on new importance, they are also transformed by these interactions. People, institutions, communities, and nations assemble and participate in the networks that emerge, leveraging power and influence, just as non‐human organisms and communities do. In recent history, hegemonic institutions and individuals (environmental ministries, multinational corporations, corrupt foresters) have gained disproportionate influence by controlling and directing new connections and transformations, leading to unintended consequences
