The relevance of Regional Political Ecology for agriculture and food systems

Ryan Galt

doi:10.2458/v23i1.20184

Abstract

The region as a concept continues to hold promise as a way of breaking through the many binaries that often divide political ecology. Operationalizing a regional political ecology approach allows the researcher to generate a large number of insights and conclusions that a more narrow disciplinary (disciplined) focus and non-scalar approach would miss; this is because important biophysical and social processes intersect with each another and work together to produce and/or mediate important outcomes for human and environmental well-being. The article draws on a number of cases to examine what comparison of political ecological research between regions could look like. I argue for a reinvigorated relationship between regional political ecology as an approach and agrifood systems as the object of study, and pose questions that can help shape this endeavor.Keywords: regional political ecology, regional comparisons, network political ecology, agriculture, food systems, agroecology

Highlights

Regional political ecology grew out of efforts to understand largely peasant societies and the ways in which capital and the state created political economic structures for surplus extraction that were incompatible with long-term conservation and sustainability (Blaikie 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987)
In comparing the photos of the region to my birth region of the San Joaquin Valley of California, a Mediterranean-climate region largely dedicated to agriculture but one with an incredibly different landscape, I saw that regions matter because, on the one hand, biophysical environments provide dramatically different conditions for the possibilities of human habitation and use of the land, and, on the other, human modifications iteratively shape these possibilities
A regional political ecology approach expressed through my fieldwork allowed me to generate a large number of insights and conclusions that a more narrow disciplinary focus and non-scalar approach would have missed, since the all-too-common blinders of narrow disciplines would not have allowed to me to look at the ways that important biophysical and social processes intersected with each another and worked together to produce and/or mediate important outcomes for human and environmental well-being within the region (Galt 2014)

Summary

Introduction

Regional political ecology grew out of efforts to understand largely peasant societies and the ways in which capital and the state created political economic structures for surplus extraction that were incompatible with long-term conservation and sustainability (Blaikie 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). Despite the various binaries that have structured political ecological imaginaries since I agree with Walker (2003) and McKinnon and Hiner (2016) that the region endures as a way of productively working through the false binaries. This article serves to set regional political ecology within my own experience and explore the ways it has been useful and can be made even more useful through a networked political ecology approach

The region in political ecology: some personal experiences

Why regional approaches matter

Generalizing across cases to gain insights into regional processes

Findings

Future regional approaches for political ecology of agrifood systems