This paper examines the complex governance landscape of public health service delivery in the informal urban settlements of Dhaka, Bangladesh, through the application of Hybrid Governance and Urban Political Ecology (UPE) frameworks. Rapid urbanization and insufficient state capacity have led to the development of informal settlements, where conventional governance structures are absent. In this context, hybrid governance systems emerge, which are characterized by collaborations and conflicts among formal authorities, non-state and informal actors, and local community members. In-depth empirical data were drawn from multi-method qualitative research applying community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches, conducted between 2021 and 2023, in two informal urban settlements in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This paper introduces a "Multi-layered Hybrid Governance" (MHG) framework that explains the complex governance arrangements of public health service delivery in informal urban settlements. The MHG framework features the fragile yet resilient nature of collaborations between formal authorities (state-level governing bodies), formal governance actors (elected local government representatives) and their informal representatives (community leaders, local elites), private service providers (including NGOs), and community members, revealing how public health services are negotiated and legitimized within these informal contexts. The findings suggest that hybrid governance is a form of community resilience that can enhance service delivery in the absence of effective state intervention. However, it can also reinforce existing inequalities and introduce new challenges to residents, especially to those without political connection or strong social networks. This paper urges policymakers and researchers to look beyond conventional health governance models and recognize the limitations of the existing systems. By presenting the MHG framework as an analytical tool for learning health systems from the perspectives of those on the margins, we advocate for more inclusive, resilient governance approaches for promoting justice and ensuring sustainability within fragmented urban health systems.

ABSTRACT A growing body of research has revealed a trend towards the securitisation of conservation in the past several decades worldwide and explored the forms of accumulation enabled by such securitisation. This article builds on the idea of accumulation by securitisation in conservation to explore specifically how tourism enables and even drives this process. We examine more than 25 years of world heritage and global biodiversity conservation in the Maya Biosphere Reserve of Guatemala to identify four types of accumulation by securitisation through tourism in a globally prized conservation area. These include: (1) accumulation by securitisation of territory, (2) touristic securitisation of heritage, patrimony and culture, (3) accumulation by securitisation through ‘sustainable development’, and (4) practices of touristic securitisation that ‘fix’ identities and produce commodifiable, vulnerable and/or threatening subjects. Each of these forms of securitisation provide an additional frontier for accumulation related to tourism, with clear implications for spatial relations, mobility, resource management, heritage claims, and relations of governance. Drawn from more than ten years of combined ethnographic and collaborative research in northern Guatemala and building from literatures across tourism studies, security studies, and political ecology, this article ultimately suggests that tourism in many cases may depend on accumulation by securitisation, which then plays a key role in further processes of tourism expansion. We contend that this analytic may be useful to explain observed dispossession, violence, and exclusion related to touristic development.

The experiences and contributions of indigenous women have not been accommodated in legislative policies, despite their strategic role in maintaining living space and community sustainability. This study uses a qualitative method with a descriptive approach through literature review and analysis of various documents, utilizing intersectional feminism and feminist political ecology perspectives. The research findings indicate that the Indigenous Peoples Bill does not adequately regulate and protect indigenous women. The Indigenous Peoples Bill does not implement CEDAW GR 39. The absence of explicit regulations regarding indigenous women in the Indigenous Peoples Bill could lead to harm for indigenous women, indigenous communities, the nation, and the state. Indigenous women are at the forefront of preserving traditional knowledge, especially regarding medicine, natural resources, economic sources, food sources, water sources, culture, and traditions. Therefore, it is crucial to recognize and protect indigenous women in the Indigenous Communities Bill.

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the persistent discourse of the ‘feminisation of vulnerability’ by focusing on chars (unstable river islands) of Assam, Northeast India. Building on growing feminist political ecology literature and through ethnographic analysis, it highlights how mainstream policy and development frameworks often homogenise women and their vulnerability. Instead of viewing women as passively burdened, the paper sees vulnerability as co-produced by class struggles and global agricultural practices – shaped by household and reproductive roles, and intertwined with religious and moral discipline. Bringing the concept of social reproduction to the centre, the study shows that the ecological crisis not only increases hardship but also redesigns gender norms and power relations for both women and men, reshaping the daily work of sustaining life, meaning, and relationships under conditions of systemic breakdown. Overall, the paper advocates for situating women within intersectional realities, shifting the focus from passive vulnerability to relational power, agency, and situated knowledge amidst socio-ecological change.

"The fear of violence is always there": Gender-based violence, water and sanitation insecurity in Ghana.

Climate change is intensifying environmental stressors—rising temperatures, erratic precipitation, sea-level rise, and more frequent extreme events—with profound consequences for livelihoods and human mobility. In India, where large rural populations depend on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, fisheries, and forestry, recurring droughts, floods, cyclones, heatwaves, and irregular monsoons increasingly erode livelihood security and contribute to displacement and rural-to-urban migration, notably in the Sundarbans, coastal Odisha, flood-prone Bihar, and Uttarakhand. This study aims to elucidate the link between climate change and rural–urban migration in India by examining livelihood disruptions, associated socio-economic vulnerabilities, challenges encountered by migrants in urban destinations, and policy options to strengthen resilience and protect vulnerable groups. Using a qualitative, descriptive design based primarily on secondary sources (including government and international agency reports, census and policy documents, and peer-reviewed literature), the study synthesizes evidence through thematic analysis guided by the Sustainable Livelihood Framework, complemented by Political Ecology, Environmental Migration Theory, and Climate Justice Theory. Findings indicate that climate hazards undermine natural, physical, financial, human, and social capital, reducing agricultural productivity, damaging infrastructure, degrading ecosystems, and deepening debt, food insecurity, and poverty; migration thus emerges as a seasonal, circular, temporary, or permanent coping and adaptation strategy, shaped by ecological pressures interacting with inequality, limited livelihood diversification, and governance constraints. Vulnerability is uneven, disproportionately affecting small and marginal farmers, landless workers, women, indigenous communities, and lower caste groups; gendered impacts include feminization of agriculture and heightened risks for women migrants in informal urban labor markets. Urban destinations often reproduce or intensify vulnerability through insecure employment, inadequate housing, barriers to welfare and services, exposure to heat and flooding, and social marginalization, as starkly revealed during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The study concludes that climate-induced migration should be recognized as both adaptation and a symptom of structural vulnerability, requiring integrated policies that build climate-resilient rural livelihoods, mainstream migration in adaptation planning, ensure portability of social protection, strengthen labor and housing, develop climate-resilient cities, and advance climate justice through inclusive governance and targeted support for vulnerable populations

This article offers a historical political ecology analysis of Ghana’s mining sector, tracing its development trajectories, key actors, environmental impacts, and state interventions. Although previous studies have examined the economic, policy, and ecological dimensions of mining, much of it remains temporally fragmented, offering limited insight into long-term trends. This study bridges that gap by situating current challenges within a broader historical context to inform sustainable policy pathways, particularly as Ghana moves into critical mineral extraction. Drawing on secondary sources, this article highlights how neoliberal reforms since the 1980s have shaped Ghana’s mining policies, with significant environmental implications. The findings reveal how ecological concerns were largely neglected until degradation reached critical levels, prompting reactive and often inadequate policy interventions. As Ghana’s mining frontier expands to include strategic resources like lithium and graphite, this article calls for historically informed, ecologically sensitive policy frameworks to prevent the repetition of past environmental and social injustices.

ABSTRACT Extractivism produces material and social fractures that deepen when industries enter into crisis. This article examines the collapse of the coal industry in Lebu (coastal Chile) and the productive transitions that followed, showing how they reconfigured, without overcoming, the region’s longstanding socioeconomic marginalization. Drawing on a critical analysis of the local press (1994–2008), treated as a cultural text that reveals community narratives of risk, abandonment, and resistance, the study reconstructs the situated experience of the crisis and its subsequent mutation toward new forms of extractivism. Combining Mbembe’s framework of brutalism with political ecology offers a novel reading of how dynamics of fracture and fissure are reterritorialized in post-coal economies, while communities develop practices of suturing and repair in the face of structural precarity. The findings show that the shift from coal to fishing, tourism, and – above all – the forestry industry did not constitute a just diversification, but rather the continuation of extractive metabolism under new forms of dispossession. The Lebu case illustrates how local discourses illuminate the materialities of slow violence and persistent inequalities in Global South territories, contributing a situated perspective for critically analyzing energy transitions and their socio-ecological impacts.

ABSTRACT Industrialized mining and oil drilling have engendered profound infrastructural and environmental violence throughout Africa in the twentieth century. Rapacious resource extraction has resulted in toxic wastelands, land dispossession, and jeopardized well-being. As ways of resisting extractive violence and longstanding environmental dispossession, some communities have made attempts to repossess and ‘legitimize’ the natural resources in their localities through practices of artisanal extraction. Drawing from examples of jerabos mining waste dumps on the Zambian Copperbelt and kpo fire crude oil refining in the Niger Delta, this article conceptualizes these artisanal practices as a form of environmental resistance to pervasive extractive violence. Through ethnographic, archival, and newspaper sources, we analyze the politics of environmental resistance in extractive geographies, focusing on how communities interact with, respond to, and resist infrastructural violence. Adopting an historical approach, the article shows the interdependencies and tensions between industrial and artisanal forms of resource extraction. While artisanal extraction emerged as a form of environmental resistance, it ultimately deepens the environmental crisis in these localities. We contribute to debates in political ecology and the environmental humanities by deconstructing artisanal mining and oil drilling as forms of environmental resistance to global capitalist extractivism.

This study examined the relationship between land governance, security dynamics, and food security in rural Niger South (Zone A), Niger State, Nigeria. The study investigated how land tenure ambiguity, farmer–herder conflicts, communal violence, judicial delays, and weak institutional coordination undermine agricultural productivity and rural livelihoods. A qualitative exploratory research design was adopted using secondary data derived from court records, policy documents, conflict databases, media reports, and scholarly literature. Key data sources included reports from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), World Bank, and Nigerian government publications. The study was anchored on Human Security Theory and Political Ecology of Conflict, while the FAO’s four dimensions of food security availability, access, utilisation, and stability provided the analytical framework. Findings revealed that weak land governance systems, prolonged litigation, overlapping customary and statutory land tenure structures, and insecurity have contributed to farmland abandonment, destruction of irrigation facilities, displacement of farming households, and disruption of local food markets. The study further established that food insecurity in Niger South is driven more by governance failures and institutional insecurity than by insufficient agricultural potential. The interaction between insecurity, weak judicial processes, and poor land administration has significantly reduced agricultural productivity and increased rural vulnerability. The study concludes that sustainable food security and rural development in Niger South require integrated reforms in land governance, judicial administration, rural security, and agricultural infrastructure. It recommends digitisation of land records, accelerated dispute resolution mechanisms, strengthening of community-based peacebuilding structures, rehabilitation of rural infrastructure, and improved institutional coordination to enhance agricultural sustainability and rural livelihoods.

Environmental emotions and wellbeing research in Africa: A rapid review.

Despite growing knowledge on informal e-waste economies in the Global South, thorough understanding is lacking of how power structures operate across different urban contexts and what this means for livelihood sustainability. Drawing on dyadic power theory and political ecology, this study examines informal governance in two contrasting e-waste communities in Ghana’s Greater Accra Region: Sodom-Agbogbloshie and Ashaiman. A mixed-methods analysis involving 325 structured interviews, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews, reveals two key insights. First, power asymmetries manifest differently depending on spatial configurations: Agbogbloshie’s residential-commercial overlap produces community-centered, oligarchic leadership marked by intense tribal-political conflicts (95% report power struggles), while Ashaiman’s commuter-based workforce generates market-driven, distributed authority with relatively stable trader networks (27% report struggles). Second, these governance structures shape livelihood outcomes distinctly: Agbogbloshie’s conflicts simultaneously undermine collective action yet foster adaptation and resilience, whereas Ashaiman’s market competition enables operational efficiency but concentrates vulnerability among marginal actors. Regression analyses confirm that site-level governance structures, rather than individual characteristics, predict power struggle experiences and livelihood effects. The study advances conceptual understanding of “rurban governance” by showing how informal authority emerges at the intersection of tribal affiliations, demolition-driven displacement, and value chain financing. We argue for context-sensitive policies that engage with – rather than bypass – informal power structures as avenues of potential governance innovation.

Since its inception, conservation science has considered wildlife trade a problem. In focusing on conservation outcomes, conservationists almost completely ignore the welfare of traded animals and plants and the harms they endure. We developed a political ecology approach that incorporates the interconnectedness of people with animals and natural habitats (more than human) to study the Indonesian bird trade, which is deeply culturally embedded, monetized, and speciose. We used marketplace observations of harm, one-on-one interviews with experts, and focus groups with law enforcement to examine the trade flow of birds and the interactions and power dynamics in the Indonesian bird trade. We considered human perspectives and recognized birds as active participants in their own experiences. We examined previously unconsidered harms experienced by birds, such as feather plucking, dismemberment, sinus infections, overcrowding, suffocation, and death. Different forms of harm occurred to birds in different parts of the supply chain, and the harm depended on the human actors the birds interacted with. Loss of freedom occurred at harvest, and physical and physiological harm occurred during transit and at the point of trade. However, highly sought-after species were subject to fewer harms. These species are difficult to source and are well cared for by affluent collectors, but more harms came to these species when demand was high, and supply-side factors lead to broad harvesting and less consideration of welfare. Men of different classes engaged with birds for various reasons, such as socialization, investment, and connecting with Javan traditions. Our results highlight the harms birds experience in the wildlife trade, relating to the five domains welfare model. Critical to understanding the harms traded wildlife endure are issues of class, gender, and culture in Indonesia.

While the majority in the Global North have enjoyed modern drinking water systems for nearly a century, powerful actors including the World Bank and the OECD are pushing for innovations aimed at addressing access gaps in the world’s poorest communities. These efforts seek to revive private sector involvement in the water sector, which has declined significantly over the past two decades. This paper situates the drive for innovation within a broader restructuring of international development cooperation that positions private finance and technological innovation as central to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6). I conceptualize this restructuring as part of a climate-sustainable-development industrial complex (CSDIC): an assemblage of state institutions, multilateral agencies, and financial actors mobilizing sustainability discourses to open new frontiers for capital accumulation. Drawing on political ecology, water justice scholarship, and theories of racial capitalism, I examine how Africa has been constructed as both a site of humanitarian crisis and a frontier for investment, and how techno-financial reforms rescale water governance, discipline public provision, and convert racialized precarity into opportunities for private investment. The analysis combines a critical document review of global water policy interventions with solidarity-based research in Cape Town, South Africa. I show how innovations advanced under the banner of climate resilience and sustainable development contribute to ’water apartheid’, disproportionately burdening Black working-class communities while consolidating new financial claims over water infrastructure in the Global South. Drawing from a case study of grassroots resistance in Cape Town, the paper also highlights pathways for solidarity and underscores the need to reassert collective, public, and anti-colonial approaches to water governance.

From Orchard to Development Project: Landscape Transformation and Ecological Politics in Tash Aw’s The South

Fabricated ancestrality: The Sonoran Desert toad, psychedelic globalization, and the ecological politics of 5-MeO-DMT

Critical minerals as a Trojan Horse: The political ecology of green extractivism in climate governance

ABSTRACT The world is facing climate change‐driven disruptions such as extreme weather events, which affect nature as well as firms and their supply chains. Nonetheless, little is known about how supply chain players shape their socioecological resilience, including from a power perspective. Grounded in political ecology, this interdisciplinary study investigates power dynamics in the waterway supply chain. We conduct a real‐time case study involving various supply chain players in Amazonia and analyze data from interviews, observations, and secondary sources. From an actor‐oriented power perspective, we identify actions taken to mitigate historical droughts affecting the Amazonia region and rivers. To explain the reactions to supply chain disruptions, our results, rather than revealing coercive power, map power shifts from multiple sources linked to specific mechanisms. For instance, expert power (e.g., Indigenous knowledge) led to epistemic shifts related to knowledge use and value. Dependence on nature to adapt to water variations reveals evidence of socioecological resilience. We contribute to the literature by first extending the use of power dynamics to explain supply chain resilience from a during‐a‐disruption analysis. We show that resilience is a power‐laden construct and central for supply chain relationships. Second, we introduce the concept of the detachment effect , illustrating how socioecological capabilities are crucial for supply chain resilience. Our study appeals to scholars and practitioners because it stresses the relevance of firms being more sensitive to the local context and elaborates on how firms can build socioecological supply chain resilience to climate disruptions.

In this article, we situate the emergence of a global regulatory regime for marine genetic resources within broader tendencies towards uneven development and expanding extractivist practices. We examine the global distribution of intellectual property assets derived from marine genetic prospecting, how that distribution aligns with diplomatic positions during negotiations for the BBNJ Agreement, and how those strategies shaped the epistemological framework of the final text. Our empirical analysis identifies three interrelated dynamics. First, a marked concentration of patent assets derived from marine genetic prospecting, producing uneven global geographies in which a small IP core controls the overwhelming majority of assets, a limited semi-periphery holds modest portfolios, and a large periphery remains virtually assetless. Second, a geopolitical cleavage between IP core states and peripheral states, each advancing contrasting conceptions of whether marine genetic resources constitute the ‘common heritage of humankind’ or are governed by the freedom of the seas. Third, the consolidation of a resource-centric framework, coupled with codified access and benefit-sharing frameworks. To interpret the results, we mobilise conceptual frameworks and interpretative angles from critical political economy, science and technology studies (STS), and political ecology. This analysis suggests that the BBNJ Agreement underpins a regime of ‘genetic extractivism,’ which renders living organisms as reservoirs of ‘genetic resources’ to be extracted, abstracted into genomic data, and capitalised as IP assets. This analysis foregrounds how technoscientific innovation is embedded within existing political–economic structures, and interrogates the limits of resource-based conservation.

ABSTRACT This article compares differential adaptive responses to flood and erosion among two marginal communities of Majuli, the world’s largest river island in the Brahmaputra, Assam. Grounded in qualitative methods, it explores how the intersection of deep-rooted traditions and differential institutional support shapes resilience among the Kaivarttas (a marginalised caste) and the Misings (a tribe). Drawing on feminist political ecology (FPE) and intersectionality, it analyses the often-overlooked role of women in disaster recovery within a patriarchal society. It further examines how spatial marginalisation and the gradual decline of traditional livelihood practices exacerbate their socio-economic vulnerabilities. Findings reveal that while Mising women leverage cultural flexibility, political support, and NGO intervention to sustain resilience, Kaivartta women face compounded marginalisation due to caste norms, limited mobility, and weaker institutional support. The study acknowledges the significance of traditional ecological knowledge and the urgency of culturally grounded gender-responsive policies for disaster governance in Majuli’s evolving fluvial geography.