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1.
Tim Forsyth 《Geoforum》2008,39(2):756-764
Piers Blaikie’s writings on political ecology in the 1980s represented a turning point in the generation of environmental knowledge for social justice. His writings since the 1980s demonstrated a further transition in the identification of social justice by replacing a Marxist and eco-catastrophist epistemology with approaches influenced by critical realism, post-structuralism and participatory development. Together, these works demonstrated an important engagement with the politics of how environmental explanations are made, and the mutual dependency of social values and environmental knowledge. Yet, today, the lessons of Blaikie’s work are often missed by analysts who ask what is essentially political or ecological about political ecology, or by those who argue that a critical approach to environmental knowledge should mean deconstruction alone. This paper reviews Blaikie’s work since the 1980s and focuses especially on the meaning of ‘politics’ within his approach to political ecology. The paper argues that Blaikie’s key contribution is not just in linking environmental knowledge and politics, but also in showing ways that environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of socially vulnerable people. This pragmatic co-production of environmental knowledge and social values offers a more constructive means of building socially just environmental policy than insisting politics or ecology exist independently of each other, or believing environmental interventions are futile in a post-Latourian world.  相似文献   

2.
Harold A. Perkins   《Geoforum》2007,38(6):1152-1162
On September 16th, 2005 the United States began restricting the entry of commodities shipped from abroad in wood packaging materials that do not conform to phytosanitation measures meant to prevent the spread of pests and pathogens. This action results from expensive lessons learned as global commerce facilitates pandemics like Dutch elm disease. Marxist political ecology is well suited to investigate such scenarios with its emphasis on the social production of nature within accumulation regimes. Some scholars contend, however, that Marxist accounts of the contradictions that result from nature’s commodification relegate nonhuman organisms to an apolitical role in environmental transformation while reinforcing the nature/society dichotomy. Often viewed as antithetical to Marxism, actor-network theory or ANT emphasizes the ability of actants (both human and nonhuman) to enroll other actants into heterogeneous assemblages or networks. Thus, it is claimed that nonhuman organisms can be attributed ontological status in processes of environmental change, much like their human counterparts. Despite this apparent theoretical discord, political ecologists are increasingly integrating aspects of both Marx and ANT into their analyses. But a more explicit articulation of the ontological basis and epistemic import of theoretical synthesis is warranted. This paper therefore prioritizes and links the ontological status of labor in both of these theories in order to expand the definition of urban environmental politics to include the role of nonhuman organisms. By demonstrating the laboring capacity of Dutch elm disease within the networks of urban political economy, the epistemology of environmental politics is thus expanded.  相似文献   

3.
This purpose of this paper is to propose starting points for a critically informed understanding of the role of risk in contemporary environmental practice, and to flesh out some preliminary implications of the work risk does as a logic though which environment is managed. Taking cues from scholarship interrogating the production of capitalist natures (e.g., Smith, 1984/2008; Braun, 2000, Heynan et al., 2007). I ask what it means in environmental terms to put risk at the intersection of capital and rule--to conceive of it as something that to paraphrase Dillon (2008, p. 319) makes the combination of capital and rule possible, and to interpret risk as something which (as Martin (2007b, p. 67) has suggested) undertakes to create the very conditions that make new wealth possible. I argue that in order to understand the intersection of capital and rule in environmental terms, risk must be understood as an epistemic framework and political ontology consistent with the advent of capitalist political economy--not as an occasion of danger or geographical condition of insecurity. Using difference as a starting point to attempt to think through connections between risk and accumulation I suggest that risk is a knowledge practice instrumental to accumulation and the politics of rule that secure it, which obscures the functioning of difference and processes of differentiation.  相似文献   

4.
This paper engages with emergent conceptualizations of political–industrial ecology to understand the politics surrounding how the volume, composition, and material throughput of stormwater in Los Angeles is calculated and applied by experts. The intent is to examine the unfolding relationship between the volume and material flow of stormwater, and the social, political, and technical practices involved in identifying stormwater as a new and underutilized water resource. Specifically, it seeks to understand how the active processes of calculating the metabolic inflows and outflows of stormwater in Los Angeles serve as a way for the city to render value and meaning to the flows of stormwater. I suggest that the ways urban metabolisms are calculated reflect a volumetric approach to environmental governance that serves to achieve certain political goals. I refer to this type of governance as volume control—a way of organizing technopolitical interventions around overcoming problems related to the volume of resources flowing and circulating into, through, and out of cities and industrial systems. I argue that understanding this form of governance relies on taking a political–industrial ecology approach that accounts for both the social and material dimensions of resource flows. While the categories and motivations of stormwater governance remain contested over time and space, it is shown that stormwater in Los Angeles needs to be understood in relation to the ecological systems and scientific, political, and cultural practices designed to make it into a resource and align with existing patterns of growth and development.  相似文献   

5.
Kristin Asdal 《Geoforum》2008,39(1):123-132
In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and feminist studies of science to show how nature is done or enacted within politics and administration. In particular I show how it relates to the theories and practices of economics and accounting. I explore the process by which the ‘critical limits’ of nature under the impact of acidification was created as a part of the politics and negotiations about acid rain. I demonstrate that even though the outcome was not ‘Nature’ as such, understood as a form of moral high-ground, the effect of this process was to produce ‘a nature as a whole’, in a process of unification. This I argue can only be understood relationally: ‘Nature’ is taken into account by way of accounting. In doing this I engage with Latour’s work on the politics of Nature and argue that nature is not necessarily such a deadly tool to politics as is sometimes taken for granted. Before we throw Nature out with our empirical studies of sciences, natures and politics, in the plural, we need to look first at how Nature-wholes emerge, are enacted, and take part in politics.  相似文献   

6.
This paper examines how gender relations within rural communities in north-central Mexico affect women’s perceptions of and responses to environmental and social risks. Several studies currently exist which suggest various reasons as to how people especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change perceive their risks, and how this influences their responses. In this paper, I take a feminist approach to questions of social–environmental risks and adaptation to argue that risk perception is tightly linked to knowledge production, and knowledge production is a power-laden process involving the constant negotiation of resources, responsibilities and knowledge. I base this argument on the results of fieldwork conducted from September 2009 to May 2010 with women residents of two ejidos in northern Guanajuato, Mexico. In drawing from feminist political ecology studies, I intend to show how gender, environmental knowledge, risk perception and thus, adaptation are constituted by and embedded in social relations of power.  相似文献   

7.
8.
“Political-industrial ecology” has been proposed as an emerging subfield of nature-society geography. In mapping out the landscape of this subfield, this paper develops a typology of three approaches to connecting politics and industrial ecology: (1) Integrative research that incorporates social, political, policy, institutional, and/or spatial considerations into industrial ecology analyses (“politics in industrial ecology”); (2) Complementary research that couples findings or frameworks from industrial ecology with social and political research (“politics and industrial ecology”); and (3) Critical research that examine how values, norms, groups, political relations, or institutions shape the production, interpretation, and usage of industrial ecology knowledge (“politics of industrial ecology”). This broad framing of political-industrial ecology invites contributions from many social sciences, including political ecology, political geography, political economy, sociology, public policy, management, environmental history, and science and technology studies.  相似文献   

9.
Clive Barnett 《Geoforum》2012,43(4):677-686
Post-Marxist and poststructuralist ontologies of the political have been important reference points for recent discussions of democracy in critical human geography and related fields. This paper considers the conceptual placement of contestation in a strand of democratic theory often denigrated by these approaches, namely theories of deliberative democracy informed by post-Habermasian Critical Theory. It is argued that this concern with contestation derives from a focus on the relationships between different rationalities of action. It is proposed that this tradition of thought informs a distinctively phenomenological approach to understanding the situations out of which democratic energies emerge. In elaborating on this phenomenological understanding of the emergence of political space, the paper proceeds in three stages. First, it is argued that the strong affinities between ontological conceptualisations of ‘the political’ and the ontological register of canonical spatial theory squeezes out any serious consideration of the plural rationalities of ordinary political action. Second, debates between deliberative and agonistic theorists of democracy are relocated away from questions of ontology. These are centred instead on disputed understandings of ‘normativity’. This move opens up conceptual space for the analysis of phenomenologies of injustice. Third, using the example of debates about transnational democracy in which critical theorists of deliberative democracy explicitly address the reconfigurations of the space of ‘the political’, it is argued that this Critical Theory tradition can contribute to a distinctively ‘topological’ sense of political space which follows from thinking of political action as emerging from worldly situations of injustice. In bringing into focus this phenomenological approach to political action, the paper has lessons for both geographers and political theorists. Rather than continuing to resort to a priori models of what is properly political or authentically democratic, geographers would do well to acknowledge the ordinary dynamics and disappointments which shape political action. On the other hand, political theorists might do well to acknowledge the limits of the ‘methodological globalism’ that characterises so much recent work on the re-scaling of democracy.  相似文献   

10.
Feminist political ecology (fpe) is at a crossroads. Over the last 2 years, feminist political ecologists have begun to reflect on and debate the strengths of this subfield. In this article, we contribute by pointing to the limited theorization of race in this body of work. We argue that fpe must theorize a more complex and messier, notion of ‘gender’, one that accounts for race, racialization and racism more explicitly. Building on the work of feminist geography and critical race scholarship, we argue for a postcolonial intersectional analysis in fpe – putting this theory to work in an analysis of race, gender and whiteness in Honduras. With this intervention we demonstrate how theorizing race and gender as mutually constituted richly complicates our understanding of the politics of natural resource access and control in the Global South.  相似文献   

11.
The last decade has witnessed a surge of interest in ‘sustainable communities’ within the UK. This has stimulated a plethora of research aimed at acquiring a better understanding of what ‘sustainable communities’ might look like and how they can be achieved. However, this has not been accompanied by a reflection and interrogation of the actual processes, challenges and politics of doing ‘sustainable communities’ research. This paper addresses this gap by highlighting the importance of paying attention to the on-going process of negotiating access when carrying out sustainability research at the community level. We draw on a recent study of skills and knowledge for ‘sustainable communities’ in Stroud Gloucestershire, UK, to illustrate the importance of sensitivity to social relationships throughout and beyond the research trajectory within sustainability research. Our experience raises important questions about the politics of research practices when doing sustainability research ‘with’ communities and the challenges associated with participatory approaches as a means to demonstrate research impact. We argue that in developing a fuller understanding of why and how different types of community level initiatives can contribute to the ‘sustainable communities’ agenda, greater consideration needs to be given to how these community practices can be better supported through the process of doing academic research.  相似文献   

12.
This article debates the extent to which particular forums of the internet enable democratic discussions around social and political issues, developing the interest in cyber-geographies from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The paper investigates discussions around abortion in the UK media, and public response(s) to such discussions. The analysis originates from an article written for the Huffington post by political editor Medhi Hasan and deconstructs subsequent reactions to this through mainstream media and news sites, comments pages on these sites, and reactions on Twitter. We assess the democratic potential of these types of media, developing Habermasian notions of the public sphere by analyzing the extent to which specific forums within the internet sphere play a role in facilitating emotions in political discussions. We also discuss the impact of individual narrative and personal perspective and its role within this quasi-political space. In so doing, we question the extent to which these types of ‘new media’, as a forum for public discussion and interaction, enable democratic deliberation by assessing the engagement between users of this sphere, and the nature of those discussions. This presents an assessment of computer mediated communication as a new way of ‘doing’ politics through its absence and presence(s) and through ideas of distance, moral responsibility, and an understanding of ethics and care at-a-distance, presenting a holistic account of how we might envision these debates playing out.  相似文献   

13.
The idea of climate has both statistical and social foundations. Both of these dimensions of climate change over time: climate, as defined by meteorological statistics, changes for both natural and anthropogenic reasons; and our expectations of future climate also change, as cultures, societies and knowledge evolves. This paper explores the interactions between these different expressions of climate change by focusing on the idea of ‘normal’ climates defined by statistics. We show how this idea came into being in meteorological circles and then review how this idea of climatic normality gets entangled with cultural and psychological processes. Using data from historical and predicted climates in the UK, we illustrate the significance of choosing different baseline ‘normals’ for retrospective and prospective interpretations of climate change. Since the choice of these statistical ‘normals’ reflects cultural, political and psychological preferences and practices as much as scientific ones, we argue that expectations of the climatic future are influenced by social as well as statistical norms. Seeing climate as co-constructed between the psycho-cultural constraints of society and the physical constraints of the material world offers a different way of thinking about the instabilities of climate and the ways we adapt to them.  相似文献   

14.
What role does science play in shaping the political? This themed issue brings together scholars from political science, human geography, natural science and related fields with the common aim of exploring links between science/expertise and politics with a specific focus on security implications. The increasing attention to threats and risks related to issues such as climate change, migration, energy security, or emerging technologies creates a demand for new types of experts and expertise relevant for security politics. By looking at the actors who operate at the boundary between science, bureaucracy and security politics, this themed issue seeks to destabilize the notion of an apolitical sphere of science and expertise, while at the same time demonstrating how the politics of expertise shapes the authority and subjectivity of scientists and reconfigures the meanings and roles of scientific knowledge. In this editorial, we connect relevant literatures and introduce the individual articles that compose the themed issue.  相似文献   

15.
This work analyzes how acceptable risk levels are determined in political decisions and related policies in the field of civil protection, i.e., regarding disaster risks and their reduction at the national and supranational level. We examined why establishing the acceptable level of risk is a political decision, and why this decision is not an easy task. Some behavioral elements which can de facto impede such a decision were recognized. Among these, the anomalies inherent in intertemporal choices, availability heuristic and mental accounting play a primary role, because they interfere with preferences for selfish versus others’ interests and with the evaluation of individual versus community gains and losses. Due to these processes, the political decision-maker, unless she is a statesperson, will easily prefer not to decide. Political decision-making, however, could be induced by a change of mind in the voters’ community. This reorientation of the society’s values and interests can be stimulated taking advance from research on social norms, which underlines the role played by some people that drive innovation in a community, e.g., the trendsetters. The scientific, technical and professional communities have the knowledge needed, are aware of the work to be done on the disaster risk reduction and can establish a direct relationship with single trendsetters and statespersons to promote decision-making on disaster risk reduction. Within this relationship, they can build trust, give advice and participate in in-depth discussions. In this interaction and collaboration, behavioral sciences can provide a valuable support for a better reciprocal understanding.  相似文献   

16.
Anti-poverty politics in Toronto and Mexico City   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
Rianne Mahon 《Geoforum》2010,41(2):209-217
In recent years, governments at different scales in both North and South have been experimenting with alternative methods of alleviating poverty, and redesigning social welfare regimes. While these changes are not entirely congruent across regimes in North and South, there are interesting points of overlap and intersection. The article lays out three broad alternatives to “roll-back” neoliberalism: intrusive liberalism; inclusive liberalism, and a renewed version of social citizenship. It then lays out how these alternatives have played out in anti-poverty politics in Toronto and Mexico City, two sites where creative strategies contesting neoliberalism have been pursued. While both cities occupy a critical place within their respective political economies, they are not usually compared because of their very different positions in the North American division of labour. Yet, as we argue, they face similar challenges in the form of poverty reduction strategies at the national scale that are based on neoliberal principles that do little to meet the needs of their inhabitants. In response, both cities have provided a site for mobilising resources behind alternative anti-poverty policies, inspired by the principles of social citizenship.  相似文献   

17.
Kevin Grove 《Geoforum》2009,40(2):207-216
The growing field of urban political ecology (UPE) has greatly advanced understandings of the socio-ecological transformations through which urban economies and environments are produced. However, this field has thus far failed to fully consider subjective (and subject-forming) dimensions of urban environmental struggle. I argue that this can be overcome through bringing urban political ecology into conversation with both post-structural political ecology and critical geopolitics. Bridging these literatures focuses attention on practices of socio-ecological exclusion and attachment through which environmental subjectivities are formed. This argument is drawn out through a case study of the politics of local economic development and conservation within the watershed of the Big Darby Creek near Columbus, Ohio. This struggle was driven by a preservationist movement that coalesced around a shared understanding of socio-ecological hybridity as a source of metaphysical insecurity. Hybridity appears here as a site of political and ethical struggle over social and ecological exclusions produced in the pursuit of security. This case study demonstrates a paradox of environmental politics: the non-human is at once a site of constituent possibilities for identity and subjectivity as well as forces which seek to foreclose this radical openness. Recognizing the paradoxical nature of environmental struggle allows for a more complex and nuanced account of the multifarious forces that shape the formation of environmental subjectivities.  相似文献   

18.
Mustafa Dikeç 《Geoforum》2012,43(4):669-676
This article examines the relationship between space and politics though an exploration of the political theories of Arendt, Laclau, Mouffe and Rancière. It starts with an engagement with ideas about spatial metaphors and space, and argues that space may be considered as a mode of political thinking. It then provides an examination of the theories of these thinkers, paying close attention to the role space and spatiality plays in their conceptualisations of politics and the political. The article concludes with some observations on the relationship between space and politics.  相似文献   

19.
Leo Charles Zulu   《Geoforum》2009,40(4):686-699
This article uses insights from theory on the social production of scale and multiple social and natural science methods to interrogate village-scale community-based forest management (CBFM) in southern Malawi, focusing on boundary demarcation, rule formulation and scaling, and dynamics of external facilitation. Examination of political agendas of those who pursued, gained from, or protested particular scalar CBFM arrangements uncovered otherwise hidden scalar politics, whose outcomes impeded more than they advanced CBFM goals. I argue that clarifying the scalar politics and configuration of forest governance arrangements can lead to a more nuanced understanding of CBFM challenges and create new opportunities for addressing them. Containerized, single-level CBFM institutions mismatched interacting social, ecological and institutional scalar configurations and relations, and confounded CBFM. Unequal international-donor/national and national/community scalar relations were as important as intra-community dynamics in explaining performance of CBFM. They constructed CBFM on a shaky foundation that put institutional and personal agendas and short-term goals over long-term socioecological sustainability. The politics of rescaling forest rules from village to (broader) Traditional Authority level alienated them from communities and undermined enforcement. Diverse motivations behind a scale-related strategy that separated usufruct from territorial rights in allocating forests mostly undermined socioecological CBFM goals. While scale is not the key or only explanation of CBFM performance, negotiated scaling offered a proactive way to anticipate scale-related conflicts in particular settings, and for communities to create institutional forms that minimize such conflicts at local or intermediate scale levels. Findings support strong, well-resourced states and caution against donor-driven quick fixes.  相似文献   

20.
In the United States, contemporary anti-science education coalitions are increasingly linking climate change and evolution using “teach the controversy” campaigns. Awareness of this political phenomena raises questions about the extent to which portrayals of global warming predictions as mere knowledge claims undermine efforts to increase public understanding of scientific consensus about global warming. This paper uses a critical political ecology framework to explore the problematization of climate change consensus located and performed across discourses of secondary science teaching and learning. Theories of resistance are used to analyze teachers’ everyday experiences with classroom pushback about climate change. Data collection included key informant interviews with state science education stakeholders and on-line survey of 5th–12th grade science teachers in Oklahoma, USA. The article synthesizes the situated discourses of Oklahoma science teachers’ and their attitudes about teaching climate change in the face of public controversy. Our analysis demonstrates teachers marginalized by anti-science controversies but engaged in everyday acts of resistance to political, ideological, and religious norms. Most notably, science teachers re-purpose “teach the controversy” frames as a way to introduce climate change where it might not otherwise be included. We argue that, contextualized within a history of contestation over the teaching of evolution, the practice of teaching ‘both sides’ is an important boundary ordering device that bridges convinced and skeptical discourses in the classroom. This research informs new roles and possibilities for science education on global environmental change by reminding climate scientists, educators, and policy advocates that all climate change knowledge is coproduced.  相似文献   

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