Political Ecology Research Articles

Subterranean eco-dystopia in Istanbul: the concreted segregation of Tarlabaşı

ABSTRACT The underground layers of cities are constantly concreted with urban transformation projects. The studies on built environment mainly focus on the morphological changes, related dispossessions and observable aspects of urban landscape. However, the environmental costs of transformations are not limited to the impacts of above-ground interventions. In Istanbul, the major impact of subterranean interventions is the destruction of water and soil ecosystems as well as its multi-layered heritage as the large-scale urban transformation decisions are primarily applied to historic neighbourhoods where the existing building stock was appropriated by the urban precariat. The urban transformation projects in historic neighbourhoods of Istanbul come into question with socio-economic dispossessions rather than environmental justice. In this manuscript, the main aim is to address the socio-ecological impacts of planning and architectural design decisions disregarding subterranean construction density, through the case of Tarlabaşı in Istanbul. Tarlabaşı represents one of the most emblematic case in Istanbul’s urban resistance history and evokes eco-dystopias, which may be attributed to the decisions that justify stigmatisation. With the context, conceptual frame and scope set by these problem definitions, while considering urban inequality a pre-condition of environmental justice, this manuscript examines the correlation between environmental policies, social stigmatisation and flexed environmental values in planning and architecture culture via local political ecology. The methodology employed in the study is based on qualitative analysis of the stages and legal decisions involved. Archival documents on the study area were used to identify the local variables contributing to the deterioration of socio-ecological unity for future discussions.

Beyond Urban Hinterlands. Political Ecology, Urban Metabolism and Extended Urbanization in Medieval England

Drawing on insights from contemporary urban theory, this contribution questions where medieval urbanization took place. It is proposed that urbanization is a process which extends beyond towns and cities, which are merely a representation of a more expansive and transformative process. Through discussion of building stone, grain production, salt extraction, woodland management and mineral exploitation, it is argued that medieval urbanization was generative of political ecological relations which challenge prevailing understandings of the rural/urban divide and re-frame urbanization as a metabolic process. The discussion utilizes contemporary concepts of ‘extended urbanization’, ‘urban metabolism’ and ‘political ecology’ to re-frame perceptions of medieval–urban relations and the notion of urban hinterland.

Organised abandonment in Lebanon's Litani River Basin

This paper is a historical political ecology of the organised abandonment of Lebanon's rural margins. It argues that the present ecological catastrophe in the Litani River basin derives from the historical constitution of Lebanon's environmental regulatory apparatus as mediators of flows of capital that generate ecological fragility, or “capitalogenic flows.” In 2021, a massive fish kill brought the Litani River basin's spectacular ecological degradation to global attention. In response, the Litani River Authority (LRA), the Lebanese agency that manages the basin, launched a campaign against “environmental crimes” that concentrated on displacing thousands of Syrian refugees and demolishing their homes. This reflects a rebranding of the LRA, which was founded in 1955 to coordinate a World Bank loan for hydroelectric infrastructure on the Litani. Rather than commodify the water itself for irrigation or drinking—which might entail pollution controls—the Bank monopolised the basin landscape as an energy resource. Prevented from accessing the river, Litani communities have repeatedly reasserted popular sovereignty. The paper situates that history in the context of the institutional formation of Lebanon's environmental regulatory apparatus. Unlike postcolonial countries subjected to neoliberal dispossession after 1980, decades of contested institution-building from Lebanon's origins arrayed the state and its regulatory capacities around capitalogenic flows and the organised abandonment of the country's rural surplus population.

Transnational corporate counterinsurgency in the Colombian conflict and its legacies today

ABSTRACT This study challenges common-sense thinking on internal violent conflicts in two ways: that they are merely domestic, with limited influence from external actors; and that doing business in conflict-ridden places is detrimental to profits. Drawing on empirical research and theoretical lenses from critical security studies and the political ecology of counterinsurgency, the paper explores the transnational dimensions of Colombia’s violent conflict in relation to the extractive sector. Conceptualising two overall generations of counterinsurgency, the article shows how, during the conflict, several transnational corporations, especially those in the extractive and agro-industrial sector, not only established themselves in Colombia and expanded, they also developed their corporate security schemes. Given that energy projects were strategic targets in the guerrilla war, the protection of corporate infrastructure by the state was justified. The paper argues that the internal conflict not only facilitated corporate extractivism, it also provided innovative ways of ensuring corporate security. This ‘social warfare’ approach includes strategic efforts to win hearts and minds, which continue to be pursued today through practices known as ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR). The paper relates this to the current challenges to hold economic actors accountable in transitional justice.

Amorphous infrastructure: Contesting the proposed Yuam River water diversion project in the Salween River Basin

Recent studies in human geography and political ecology have examined the anticipatory politics of proposed infrastructure and their effects. Less work analyses how speculation and rumour are mobilised to promote or resist such infrastructures. In this paper, I examine how speculative ideas about long-proposed hydropower dams and transbasin water diversions in the Salween River Basin are strategically deployed by differently placed actors working towards project development or demise. I draw on empirical research on the proposed Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand and near the Thai–Myanmar border. I develop a conceptualisation of proposed infrastructures as amorphous as they constantly change form and enrol a shifting network of actors, and development plans and imaginaries. The Yuam diversion becomes amorphous through the contested ‘facts’ of the case and over time. I illustrate this using two longitudinal examples. First, infrastructure is made amorphous through protracted development processes for the Yuam diversion and earlier iterations. Second, I examine speculative ideas about how the Yuam diversion is intertwined with proposed dams in the Basin including the Hatgyi Dam in Myanmar. In this case, the lack of confirmed project developers and financiers for the Yuam diversion, and rumours of Chinese actors’ involvement under the Belt and Road Initiative, creates strategic space for project promotion and resistance. What is at stake is not just theorising proposed infrastructures as speculative ideas but how the ‘amorphous’ qualities of infrastructure are deployed strategically, by whom, and to what effect.

Drifting Away from the Roots: Genderfluidity as Diola’s Mangrove Fishing Strategies in Three Island-Villages of Northern Guinea-Bissau

AbstractBiodiversity loss, habitat degradation, globalization, and societal transformations are challenging rural, and especially coastal communities in Guinea-Bissau where mangrove-dependent livelihoods are exposed to increased vulnerability. The Diola, traditional farmer-fishermen of the northern island-villages, have witnessed swift societal changes following the country’s economic liberalization, climate change, and youth migration from rural areas. Despite historically being a secondary subsistence activity with more predefined gender roles rooted in tradition, mangrove fishing has become a major source of cash income. Yet, women’s mangrove fishing contributions are still overlooked, resulting in general assumptions of static female fishing identities with limited control over their income. We present three case studies of Diola women’s involvement in mangrove fishing through a mixed method approach that combines qualitative techniques and household surveys conducted between 2017 and 2023. Specifically, we explore: (1) diverging societal coping strategies and livelihood developments in three Diola villages; (2) the primary drivers behind village-specific societal transformations; (3) social dynamics and female roles in mangrove fishing-related activities and village decision-making; and (4) the political ecology of interventions. Our findings underscore the complexity of gender-fluid small-scale fishing strategies as female roles beyond fish trade defy cultural generalizations. Contemporary Diola women make autonomous personal and work choices that meet their current needs and add to their household budget to face new welfare demands. Inclusive resource governance needs more gender-specific data for meaningfully implemented interventions adapted to local circumstances, enabling an active participation of all genders in conservation practices and development.

Exploring Complexities of Political Ecology in the Research and Practice of Environmental Education

Abstract This paper explores educational fallout from the realisation that the world system has planetary boundaries as limits that are real and that require different thinking and governance concerning how human beings ought to inhabit the planet. It will be difficult to have billions of people think about global concerns when they are focused on their own well-being. And so it comes to governance, locally, with bigger things in mind. Environmental education rhetoric has already begun to expand thinking to engage world systems as groundings for the politics that underpins decision-making above and beyond levels of theory/praxis. The educational challenge will be to lay out background theory and guidelines as we find ways to engage politically the problems amidst the power and control of the people that we elect as “leaders” at each level of educational and political systems. However, the challenge has been taken up and environmental education has created openings for exploring complexities of political ecology within environmental education.

Eutrophicated: Tracking colonial histories of phosphate matter and the Plantationocene inheritances of the River Wye

This article examines the River Wye in the southwest UK as a political ecology marked by relations of colonial inheritance. A controversial case of contemporary British river pollution, the Wye is suffering from increasingly dramatic eutrophication events, with nutrient pollution from mineral phosphate fertilisers used in industrial agriculture causing algal blooms that destroy the river's ecology. This paper complicates dominant framings of the Wye's eutrophication as a local event and future crisis, instead arguing that eutrophication is structured by over a century of colonial histories of phosphate. Motivated by recent debates in geography and other cognate disciplines on decolonial ecology and the Plantationocene that point to the colonial origins of ecological crisis, this paper develops a theoretical framework of inheritance/transmission to articulate the situated histories of violence and dispossession shaping phosphate matter. It then empirically tracks the phosphate inheritances of the Wye by analysing the archives of the British Phosphate Commissioners (1873–1983), a 20th century governmental company that procured fertiliser for the British Empire by intensively mining phosphates on the Pacific Islands of Nauru and Banaba. Through this archive emerges a history in which, on a national and local level, the Wye is connected to the people, corporations, and institutions responsible for the emergence of the mineral phosphates industry that has spread ecological devastation across the globe. Through theoretically and empirically examining the Wye's phosphate inheritances, this paper foregrounds ethical obligations to think systematically and historically about phosphates as a prerequisite for bringing about deep structural changes needed to repair phosphate's harms.

Exploring the Political Ecology of Environmental Education and Where We Go From Here

Exploring the Political Ecology of Environmental Education and Where We Go From Here

Introduction: Political Ecologies of Paper in Early Modern Art, 1500–1800

Abstract This special issue examines paper as it became the definitive material for both artistic practice and jurisprudence. European paper made from pulped rags and linens to create the mythic white empty grounds for design was foundational to early modern European ideas about both sovereignty and the creative act. The materiality of paper—as a surface created from refuse—also introduced a form of ecological thinking into both artistic practice and political theory that recognised the value and revolutionary potential of the material world to create from the detritus of failed projects and revolutions. Surveying artistic production across the European continent and into the Ottoman empire, this series of essays examines paper as both a material force that redefined the limits of the creative act while also being inseparable from the consolidation of new political regimes emerging from the rise of early modern colonialism. Paper was both the tool of dispossession and also the grounds on which the potential of artistic practice was reimagined.

Critically analyzing nature-based solutions: A political ecology framework of planning for the Yamuna River floodplains, Delhi

ABSTRACT “Novel” nature-based solutions, implemented through urban spatial plans and rezoning policies, paint an apolitical picture of the rejuvenation of the floodplains of Delhi. This paper uncovers the socio-ecological injustice rooted in these decisions that lead to the eviction of small-scale farms. This is discussed through the political ecology framework and examined as an approach of bourgeois environmentalism. The spatial policies in the Draft Master Plan for Delhi 2041 are traced through previous master plans, specifically for Zone O (river zone) of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. This allows for the unpacking of a larger urban socio-ecological imaginary being produced. In this paper, we find that, first, the river zone plan erases the marginalized, and, second, it potentially makes the way clear for the ecologically sensitive floodplains to be used for developing recreational activities targeting the elite. Therefore, like previous plans, this plan leads to the marginalization of both the river and the marginalized by ontologically separating them.

On the political ontology of making things up in political ecology critique: Responding to Bormpoudakis (2019) and Knudsen (2023)

I engage with two recent articles published in the Journal of Political Ecology, both of which critique political ecology engagements with ontological and epistemological complexities. These complexities might be distilled into the idea that how 'the world' is socially known also shapes how the world is known to be. I explore three key issues worked through in these papers, partly with reference to work of mine, namely: 1) conservation struggles around biodiversity offsetting; 2) debates regarding plural and relational ontologies, particularly representations of 'flatness' and 'depth' in ontological considerations; and 3) critical realism, specifically distinctions between perspectives on transitive and intransitive dimensions in qualifying understandings of reality. I highlight a pernicious problem of dismissive approaches towards analysts trying to ask difficult and subtle questions about 'onto-epistemology.' This situation seems surprising given the effort in political ecology towards recognising and respecting plural knowledges, particularly knowledges often overridden by discourses emboldened by structures of power. My overall aim is towards clarity in ongoing political ecology debate on these issues, alongside the pursuit of respectful praxis in this burgeoning area of engagement.

Écologie et démocratie (2022) de Joëlle Zask : un compte rendu critique

This essay is a review of Joëlle Zask’s book titled Écologie et démocratie, published in 2022 by Premier Parallèle. Its goal is to first summarize the main arguments of the book, highlight its originality, and finally propose some of its potentials. The relevance of this book lies particularly in the fact that it conceptualizes democracy not merely as a type of “political machinery”, but as a “way of life”, which is intimately connected to an ecological culture. Zask thus demonstrates that a pragmatist perspective of democracy allows it to be concretely linked to political ecology. However, a sociological or ethnographic investigation based on this theory could further nuance and refine its principles.

The future is only the beginning

Recent advancements in genome editing have captured the attention of scientists and policymakers, who contend that the technology has a large role to play in advancing food and climate security on the African continent. However, the modest results of earlier generations of biotechnology—such as genetically modified (GM) crops—raise questions about the sustainability of new technological interventions. This special feature examines lessons learned from previous generations of GM crops and other agricultural technologies, using them to analyze the portfolio of gene edited crops being developed for African farmers today. In this article, we introduce the 6 papers that make up the special feature by way of examining future-oriented discourses around the advancement of genome editing. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, political ecology, and critical development studies, this introduction highlights the crucial factors that shape technology development, agricultural practice, and the politics of knowing and emphasizes the need to look toward multiple, diverse futures.

Geography and climate vulnerabilities

AbstractGeography and geographers have a long and influential history of research on climate change, with a significant impact on scholarship, international assessments and public policy. In this commentary, I focus on geographic work on climate vulnerability, arguing that geographers have been fundamental to our understanding of the impacts of climate variability and climate hazards and to the assessments of Working Group 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Geographic work on climate vulnerability is traced to pioneering work in hazards and cultural ecology and to the rise of critical perspectives on the political economy and political ecology of hazards and then climate change. I discuss the role of geographers in the IPCC from 1990 to present and the importance of concepts originating in geography such as vulnerability mapping, double exposure, borderless climate risks, discourses, intersectionality, climate‐resilient development, labour vulnerabilities and maladaptation.

Integration of Circular Economy and Urban Metabolism for a Resilient Waste-Based Sustainable Urban Environment

An unsustainable rate of resource production and consumption is evident in urban environments. The absence of innovative approaches in conjunction with the exponential urbanization and expansion of the global population will inevitably result in substantial environmental consequences. There are two emerging alternatives: circular economy (CE) and urban metabolism (UM). The integration of these principles into novel methodology casts doubt on the linear model of contemporary economic and urban systems, which includes extraction, production, utilization, and disposal. In the development of a distinctive urban framework known as circular urban metabolism, the current study has illustrated the application of these principles. We design this study to motivate urban planners and decision-makers to investigate, develop, and supervise ecologically sustainable cities. Scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, intrigued by the intricacies of urban planning, design, and administration, can foster interdisciplinary collaboration in the circular urban metabolism (CUM) region. To address the research question, we implemented a bibliometric analysis, which involved the examination of 627 pertinent research papers, utilizing the R (R 3.6.0+) statistical programming language. The results emphasize the fundamental characteristics and significance of CUM in the management of refuse. In addition, the findings underscore the importance of creating a novel framework that incorporates the principles of urban political ecology, CUM, sustainability, and the novel dimension of waste metabolism. It is the goal of this framework to emphasize the significance of recycling in the informal sector as a waste management strategy in low- and medium-income countries (LMICs).

Compensation landscapes

In this contribution, I explore compensation landscapes as a concept through which we can question the nature of ecological urbanism today, as an alliance of environmental degradation, urban development and landscape design. In urbanism and landscape studies, there is currently almost no debate on the spatial dynamics created by the compensation of environmental harm. This is remarkable, as green urban landscapes are increasingly developed through biodiversity offsetting, i.e. the process where open space assets that have been destroyed through urban development are replaced elsewhere. While the literature on these topics is booming in critical geography and political ecology, I explore three scopes in which biodiversity offsetting can be studied as part of urbanism and landscape studies. Through the spatialization of compensation, the linking of offsetting to planning research, and by giving attention to landscape design, this paper frames compensation as a socio-spatial urbanisation project.

On Vegetal Geography: Perspectives on Critical Plant Studies, Placism, and Resilience

Abstract This study contributes to the emerging subdiscipline of geography, defined as vegetal geography, expanding beyond Critical Plant Studies’ focus on place-based interactions with and adaptations to human systems and ecologies. In this sense, vegetal geography covers political and cultural ecologies and psychogeography of events, highlighted by the recent pandemic, the ongoing threat of anthropogenic climate change, and the re-emergence of global diseases in recent years amid unrestrained consumerism and human niche constructions. These so-called Anthropocene proliferations tend to ramify the relation of place to organic entanglement with the non-organic, human with the nonhuman, which implicates species trade-offs, uncanny alliances, and affinities, via a series of differential synthesis, borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, amid increasing climate anomalies. In the process, they engender emergent ecologies where vegetal life, a key Deleuzean concept, provides a critical pivot to interspecies relations in times of crisis and emergency.

Black-necked crane as border object: interspecies politics in Himalayan borderlands

ABSTRACT Legacies of imperial frontier-making, ongoing border conflicts between nuclear armed nations, changing livelihoods, and the impact of anthropogenic climate change have created complicated claims on Himalayan borderland areas in the name of conservation, security, ethnic identity and development. Combining historical research with ethnography, this article traces the role of the Black-necked crane (grus nigricollis) in the formation of mid-nineteenth century imperial frontiers in the Himalayas and, subsequently, its present-day position in the political ecology of two Himalayan regions along the Sino-India border – Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. We introduce the concept of ‘border object’ and demonstrate how it can serve as a useful concept to understand how non-humans become participants in changing configurations of territoriality, biopolitics and science, which underpin both a past imperial frontier and present-day border regimes.

Modes of existence, capitalism, and lived socio-ecological struggles: Whither actor-network theory in a world in crisis?

In response to the forum article ‘What Next for Actor-Network Theory?’, this piece takes up the suggestion that a fruitful way forward for actor-network theory (ANT) would be to engage with ideas ‘originating from elsewhere’, such as from other theoretical traditions. Examining this, I suggest that the version of ANT brought into such dialogue matters, and that – contrary to the suggestion of the forum article – Latour's late ‘modes of existence’ project is not the most conducive for this purpose. I then assess the prospects for a productive cross-fertilisation between a less meta-ontological articulation of ANT and other theoretical repertoires, identifying an obstacle to this in the tendency of ANT to use other traditions of social thought largely as a foil against which to define itself, which mitigates against proper engagement with the strengths of those traditions. Taking a lead from the examples discussed in the forum article, I flesh this out by highlighting some of the shortcomings of ANT, relative to political ecology for instance, as a way of understanding socio-ecological relations and conflicts, in part because of its habitual disdain for certain sorts of ‘grand abstractions’, in particular, ‘capitalism’. I argue conversely that such abstractions not only speak to the lived realities of historically embedded structural violence and dispossession at the heart of socio-ecological struggles, but are crucial for situating people's lives in the context of wider relations and processes, something one might well deem a key purpose of sociology.