Political Ecology

Political ecology is an analytic lens which tries to understand and explain environmental change and its effect upon people.

A central premise is that ecological change cannot be understood without consideration of the political and economic structures and social-political institutions within which it is embedded. However, in political ecology there is no agreement about what counts as an environmental problem. ‘The environment’ may relate to the issue of disease in urban settings, through the questions of property rights to wildlife conservation or climate mitigation. Political ecologists also say that there is nothing unnatural about produced environments like cities, GMOs or dams and that human activity cannot be seen as something external to the biosphere. Political ecologists also show how we construct the environment through discourses and meaning. Political ecologists pay attention to the discourses of nature being promoted in policies and in scientific expertise and ask of them what is being ‘naturalised’ in their orthodoxies? Is it a sense of progress? Or is it dominance of the market perhaps?

However, political ecology it is not a coherent ‘grand’ theory; indeed there are lots of diverse strands within it from orthodox Marxist to post-structuralism and feminism. Rather it is lens through which one can examine interactions between nature and society and how they are mutually produced. At its heart, political ecology can be a powerful way to try to explain how socio-environmental change is shaped by power relations and is never politically neutral. It tries to identify who benefits and who loses out from particular initiatives, projects or policies in specific cases.

Political ecology can thus be thought of as an analytical lens (i.e. a set of critical questions) used to document and analyse case studies concerning attempts to achieve sustainability. Case studies are also be useful because they can tell us about wider process going on – in other words, we can extrapolate from the case in order to better understand socio-environmental change more generally.