Political ecology: where is the politics?

Abstract

To political ecologists today, it might seem odd – ridiculous perhaps – to ask whether political ecology is sufficiently political. It has been the better part of two decades since Michael Watts complained that the dominant expressions of political ecology of the 1980s displayed ‘a remarkable lack of politics . . . There is almost no sense of contest, struggle, and conflict and how the rough and tumble of everyday life’ shapes human relations with the environment (Watts, 1990: 128–29). Since then, there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship (far too numerous to cite) in political ecology that has taken up the challenge to deal in a more sophisticated way with the role of politics in shaping humanenvironment relations. In comparing political ecology to other intellectual traditions that attempt to explain environmental problems (such as ecoscarcity and environmental modernization), Robbins (2004) notes that the defining characteristic of the field today is ‘the difference between a political and an apolitical ecology’. So central has politics become in the field that serious critiques have been made that political ecology has become ‘politics without ecology’ (Vayda and Walters, 1999). Yet, it is possible to question whether, by its own definitions of the word ‘politics’, political ecology fully lives up to its promise to take politics seriously. In their article ‘Locating the political in political ecology’, Paulson et al. (2003: 209, emphasis added), define politics as ‘the practices and processes through which power, in its multiple forms, is wielded and negotiated’. The authors observe that one of the key challenges of political ecology is ‘to develop ways to apply the methods and findings [from political ecology research] in addressing social-environmental concerns’ (p. 208). Indeed, this concern to make politics not only a research subject but a practice has long been an explicit and central goal of political ecology. Peet and Watts (1996: xi), for example, state that political ecology ‘is driven naturally in our case by a normative and political commitment to the liberatory potential of environmental concerns’. Similarly, Robbins (2004: 13) observes that political ecology is explicitly and unapologetically normative, seeking ‘to plant the seeds for reclaiming and asserting alternative ways of managing [resources] . . . The goal . . . is preserving Progress reports