The Political Economy of Nature

Abstract

This article explores the dialectics of land use and livelihoods to formulate a political economy of nature approach to studying the production of nature. Rather than solely postulate “drivers” and “feedbacks” between changes in land use and livelihoods as change=population+affluence+technology (or some closely related variant) as is so often done in the mainstream land use literature, it is argued here that change is co-produced as households/agents negotiate axes of contradictions in their attempts to reproduce themselves and produce nature for exchange. I examine this relationship by mobilizing a non-deterministic variant of dialectics to generate a parallel epistemology for studying land use that explores change in the context of two recent trends in the agrarian change literature, namely depeasantaization and deproletarianization. As both of these processes entail a reconfiguration of rural production (manifest in changing land use and livelihoods), the approach taken here will provide insight and clarity to those debates. I examine the moment of sublation as a source of change in the landscape, both physical and economic. I intentionally consider this approach as parallel and complimentary to positivist studies on land use and land cover change, rather than as a alternative framework, for reasons that are made explicit within the article. The findings from this research help to link land use changes to broader societal changes in ways that will be helpful to understanding linked climate and human change from a critical perspective.