Politická ekologie Goldman M., Nadasdy P., Turner M. (2011): Knowing Nature. Chicago&London, The Chicago University Press, 367 pp. Isbn-13: 978-0-226-30140-2 * Knowing nature is a complex, multiple, and highly political process - diverse meanings to different people and institutions. * Actually, the conduct and outcome of these politics depends heavily on the knowledge claims about past and future changes to the land. Like many environmental questions, there is significant uncertainty about the land’s past and future * Valid understandings of the environment shapes contestations and outcomes * These politics influence what could be seen as the production, application, and circulation of environmental knowledge * Management approaches (i.e., the “application” of environmental knowledge) are constructed from a mix of common understandings about human societies and the environment, scientific findings and technologies, standard (accepted) management approaches, political and economic prerogatives, and location- specific understandings. * Environmental knowledge production is framed, funded, and publicized in widely different social arenas. * The mix of complex systems,limited research funding, and crisis mentality leads to the common practice of findings/impressions/common knowledges developed in one locality strongly influencing environmental research and management in “analogous systems” around the world (i.e., the circulation of knowledge) * Divisions of production, application, and circulation of knowledge, need to be addressed for us to understand the politics surrounding most environmentaln questions. * How do we make sense of these politics? Conventional treatments of environmental science, policy, and management implicitly or explicitly treat production, application, and circulation of scientifi c knowledge as loosely articulated spheres of activity and discourse. * Focus on the practices of multiple actors involved in the inseparable nexus of production, application, and circulation of environmental knowledge. * Environmental knowledge is seen as embodied in local contexts and contested in debates not only about science policy or resource politics but about expertise— about how knowledge claims regarding the environment are generated, packaged, promoted, and accepted by the diversity of actors involved in environmental management, conservation, and development. * Political ecology and science and technology studies (STS) are relatively new fields of interdisciplinary academic inquiry * Political ecology has focused primarily on the politics that surround environmental change, conservation interventions, and natural resource economies * Political ecology is a cross- disciplinary fi eld of study concerned broadly with the politics surrounding o (1) the use and control of natural resources and o (2) environmental change and its representations. * Early political ecology - the recognition that the prospect for land degradation was not predictable simply from the level of human demand on natural resources (human population, livestock population, consumption, wealth, etc.). * Ecological response to resource extraction exhibits spatial heterogeneity, nonlinearities, and threshold effects, which require the political ecologist to engage seriously with ecological dynamics in order to understand society- nature relations. * Ecological processes are shaped by geographic and historical context. * Focused more on science- based arguments by policy makers, conservationists, and developers and less on environmental scientific practices themselves * Proliferation of institutions involved in environmental governance at local levels across the world. * There has long been an emphasis on treating social movements as motivated not solely by “environmental” concerns but by social justice * Political ecology shares with cultural ecology an attention to the politics surrounding what is often referred to as “indigenous knowledge” * To understand society- environment relations, one must understand biophysical/natural processes in place has led political ecologists to perform or collaborate with those performing ecological research. * In so doing, political ecologists have found themselves in social, discursive, and methodological positions that fall between the multiple knowledges about the local environment held by local people, state- sponsored managers, international NGOs, and the broker environmental scientifi c community. * Such knowledge interfaces are power- laden and have potential for significant material impact on the environment (human and nonhuman). * to engage critically with multiple knowledge claims in order to come closer to underlying truths or to seek cross- knowledge accommodations (critical realism). * the recognition that to fully understandenvironmental politics, a focus on the exercise of power at the places and moments where competing knowledge claims are debated publicly (application) is insuffi cient. Social power that shapes on- the- ground impacts operates in the realms of knowledge production and circulation * STS is a growing cross- disciplinary field of study concerned with the production of scientific knowledge and technologies within a social (cultural, political) context * Scientifi c knowledge, once recognized as an objective refl ection of reality (nature), is exposed in STS work as the outcome of messy and situated practices: practices that are shaped by particular historical, socioeconomic, political, and cultural contexts. * In other words, “scientific knowledge and technologies do not evolve in a vacuum. Rather they participate in the social world, being shaped by it, and simultaneously shaping it” * actor- network theory (ANT), hybrids (cyborgs), boundary objects, standardized packages, black- boxing, natureculture, work objects, bandwagons, and co- production. * ANT provides a framework for analyzing the production of knowledge as occurring through relational networks, where objects (e.g., people, animals, microbes, tools, institutions) contribute equally as agents (actants) to the configurations and reconfigurations of the network itself. * All knowledge is “local” and culturally/socially contextual, which means that scientific knowledge is situated (cultural) practice. * Expertise is awarded, challenged, and contested differently in different contexts. * Knowledge travels (circulates) through translations, packaging, and networks. * Science and society are co- produced. * Knowledge is inherently political.