‘Understanding the World in Order to Change It’: What Might Food Sovereignty Look Like? Or, a Normative Political Ecology as Livelihood Sovereignty

Abstract

This chapter brings this book to a conclusion by attempting to outline a normative political ecology, or a political ecology of praxis, the integration of the political and ecological lessons and principles drawn from the preceding chapters into a programme of counter-hegemonic transformation—the great socio-ecological transformation of the twenty-first century. This concluding chapter aligns with one of the three main commitments that Bridge et al. (Editors’ introduction. In: Perreault T, Bridge G, McCarthy J (eds) The Routledge handbook of political ecology. Routledge, London, pp 3–18, 2015, 8) suggest are defining characteristics of political ecology: that is, a normative political commitment to social justice and structural political change. Thus, ‘political ecology is an explicitly normative intellectual project, which has from its beginning highlighted the struggles, interests, and plight of marginalized populations: peasants, indigenous peoples, ethnic…minorities, women, the poor…Political ecologists thus seek not just to explain social and environmental processes, but to construct an alternative understanding of them, with an orientation towards social justice and radical politics’.