Political ecology: the critical study of how
power shapes environmental change
Christos Zografos
czografos@gmail.com
Political Ecology and Environmental Change Lectures
Geography Department, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Tuesday, 8 November 2016
The mini-course
• TITLE: Political Ecology and Environmental Change
• The two lectures
– Lecture 1: Political ecology: the critical study of how power
shapes environmental change
– Lecture 2: A critical study of the relation between climate
change and insecurity: the CLICO project
• 1 credit: the essay
– To obtain the credit, you must attend both lectures, read a
text and answer a question (see below) in a short essay of
no more than 1,000 words.
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Lecture 1: Introduce field of political ecology
• Explain its key characteristic: power relations
shape environmental transformations
• Use examples from case studies in PE to
illustrate how various understandings of how
power works are used in political ecology
2
Some basics
• Academic field
• A basic claim: winners and losers
• Themes, subjects of study
• Methods: varied and mixed
• Drivers of change and conflict
3
Environmental change is political
• Let’s take a classic issue:
environmental
degradation
• Classic political ecology
study of degradation:
Piers Blaikie (1985)
Political Economy of Soil
Erosion in Developing
Countries
4
Political economy of soil erosion: questions
What Blaikie tries to explain?
• Why, although half a century of policies and
(int’l) programmes to deal with soil erosion
(reduced productivity of soil), these have
failed?
• Usually: it’s the farmers to blame
5
Political economy of soil erosion: findings
What he finds?
• Root causes of soil erosion: not at site where
land degradation occurs (Hertford, 1985)
• Capitalist production encourages mining of
soils (Robbins, 2012)
6
Political economy of soil erosion: politics
• Politics = central for understanding soil erosion
(understand why policies to deal with it are unsuccessful)
– “a major determinant of the response to soil erosion is the
degree of economically-derived political power of the
classes and groups involved” (Hertford 1985)
• “Solution”: effectively deal with erosion (Hertford 1985)
– Only if threat to accumulation possibilities of powerful is
substantial, soil conservation practices may be successful
(implemented)
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Politics in Political Ecology
• Politics as power relations
– Power (Hornborg, 2001): “social relation built on
an asymmetrical distribution of resources &risks”
• How power operates? Paulson et al. (2003)
1. Pressing from the outside
– Study: how power circulates among and between
different social groups, resources, and spaces
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Power pressing from outside
Political Economy of Soil Erosion (Blaikie, 1985)
• Who presses?
– Multi-nat’l corporations, state, local (nat’l) elites,
agricultural extension workers and programmes, etc.
• How do they put pressure?
– Specific practices: price-setting power (nat’l and multinat’l
intermediaries), state policies for transforming into
cash crops, colonial enforced (even violent) modernisation
of agriculture, etc.
9
How power operates? Paulson et al. (2003)
1. Pressing from the outside
2. But power does not only function as external
coercion or force
– Power can work “from the inside”
10
Another classic
• Arturo Escobar.
1996.
Encountering
Development
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Motivation: the question
• Why development is unquestionably the desired
pathway for “Third World” nations?
– magic formula for nations in Latin America, Africa and Asia
for catching up with industrialised nations of North
America and Europe
• More so (paradox):
– Development has failed in those nations: socioeconomically
(e.g. poverty still there); environmentally
– Increasing opposition to development by popular groups in
the Third World (presumably: those who would benefit
from it/ those it seeks to benefit)
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A note
• When Escobar did his study, he did not
explicitly call it “political ecology”
– It was more of an anthropological study of
development
• Nevertheless,
– Escobar himself claims to work on political
ecology (and collaborates with political ecologists)
– His study has inspired subsequent work in PE and
is integrated as a crucial reading in the field
13
The argument: Escobar’s finding
• The “Third World” did not exist before mid-
20th century
• It has been produced by the discourses and
practices of development since their inception
in the early post–World War II period
– Third World poor populations (poverty) and
environments (degradation) have been produced
by those discourses and practices
14
Historical emergence
• The emergence and consolidation of that
discourse can be traced historically
• Truman’s inaugural speech (1949)
– A “fair deal” for whole world
– US and world should solve problems of
“underdeveloped areas”
– Envisage “a program of development based on
concepts of democratic fair dealing”
– “Greater production is the key to prosperity and
peace”
15
Reasons for invention of development
Historical conditions: finding new markets
• WWII: neutrality of Latin America
– production geared towards US market
• 1945: US in economic and military prominence (Brit Empire before)
• 1945-1955: consolidation of US hegemony; need to
– expand market for US products
– find new sites to invest US surplus capital
– Access cheap raw materials to support growing capacity of US industry
(esp. nascent multi-nat’l corporations)
• Rivarly with USSR
– Int’l development: grand strategy to extend political and cultural
influence (to secure resources)
– “Development” to combat communism: If poor countries are not
rescued from their poverty they would succumb to communism
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Poverty as a problem
• Development = solution to a problem: poverty
• Emergence of 3rd World poverty: post WWII
• Before 1940s (colonial times)
– Although “natives” could be enlightened by
colonisers, not much could be done about their
poverty because their economic development is
pointless
– Their capacity at science and technology (= basis
for economic progress) was zero
17
The globalization of poverty
• The construction of 2/3 of the world as poor
• Almost by fiat, two-thirds of the world’s peoples
were transformed into poor subjects in 1948 when
the World Bank defined as poor those countries
with an annual per capita income below US$100
• And if the problem was one of insufficient income,
the solution was clearly economic growth
• Development would be constructed as the best way
to achieve growth for those who lagged behind
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Why development?
• Because it is strategy best placed to deliver:
– Modernisation: only force capable of destroying
archaic superstitions and relations at any cultural,
political, social cost
– Industrialization and urbanization: inevitable and
necessarily routes to modernization
– Social, cultural, and political progress can be
achieved only through material advancement
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Development: how?
• Capital investment = the most important ingredient
in economic growth and development
• Underdeveloped countries:
– trapped in a “vicious circle” of poverty and lack of capital
– good part of “badly needed” capital must be from abroad
• Absolutely necessary that governments and
international organizations take active role in
promoting and orchestrating necessary efforts to
overcome general backwardness and economic
underdevelopment
– States and int’l orgs: active agents for development
20
Development: how? Practices
Professionalisation of dvpt.
• Developed world major
universities
– “Development Studies”
programmes
– Research on int’l development)
• A will to know everything
about the Third World
– Experts landing to measure,
investigate, theorise about
Third World societies
Institutionalisation of dvpt.
• Starting in mid-1940s:
– Int’l organisations (e.g. WB),
nat’l planning agencies, int’l aid
agencies (DFID), local
development agencies,
community development
committees, private voluntary
agencies, NGOs
– Conferences, international
consultant services, local
extension practices, etc.
• Development business:
– poverty, illiteracy, hunger
– basis of a lucrative industry for
planners, experts, civil servants
21
Development: results
• All those orgs + business sometimes benefit poor
• But: failed to solve the basic problems of
underdevelopment
• Success:
– create a type of underdevelopment that is politically and
technically manageable
• Popular groups:
– Discord between institutionalised development vs.
situation (conditions) of Third World popular groups
22
Development: results
• Without claiming that
development has only
done harm
• Some major harm has
been done in the name of
development
• E.g. environmental harm
– Big dams: e.g. the
Narmada Dam, India
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Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
Discourses: tools of power
• What does it mean to say development has functioned as a
discourse:
– Created a space in which only certain things could be said or even
imagined
• Discourse has made possible that development has become
an one-way solution
– To deal with poverty (low GDP)
– Achieve progress and modernisation
– With capital from abroad
– With int’l orgs, agencies and governments facilitating it
– With developed world unis providing knowledge for making it achieve
– With businesses delivering it
– Even though poor may not always escape the poverty trap
– Even though environmental impacts may be tremendous
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Power in political ecology
2. Power from the inside:
power as forming subject
(Butler, 1997): desire
– “We are used to thinking about
power as what presses on the
subject from the outside, as
what subordinates.... This is
surely a fair description of what
power does. But if, following
Foucault, we understand power
as forming the subject as well,
as providing the very condition
of its existence and the
trajectory of its desire, then
power is not simply what we
oppose but also, in a strong
sense, what we depend on for
our existence”.
• So, development =
– Desire: what is desirable for
and by Third World countries
– Forming spaces: interventions
in the name of development
– What we depend for our
existence: without
development there is no
existence
• Those types of PE studies
investigate how natural
resources, people, and
places are constituted
(Paulson et al., 2005) 25
INTERNALISED POWER
A related but slightly different illustration of how power works from within to
achieve the results desired by those powerful without them having to apply force
and through voluntary compliance of those victims from environmental change
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A more recent work
• Paul Robbins.
2007. Lawn People
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The US Lawn (Robbins, 2007)
• Total area roughly the size of state of 1920s Czechoslovakia, the
lawn is one of largest and fastest growing landscapes in the USA.
• The lawn also receives more care, time, and attention from
individuals and households than any other natural space.
• Inputs into the lawn—in time, labor, money, and chemicals—have
never been higher
• U.S. home- owners spent a total of 1.2 billion dollars just on
outdoor insecticides in 1999.
• Total U.S. consumer sales on lawn care (separate from gardening
and other outdoor investments) topped US$ 9 billion (1999)
28
US Lawn: urban ecological problem on a
vast scale (Robbins, 2007)
• Chemicals of lawn maintenance: significant
contributors to nonpoint source water quality
problems that continue to elude solution (almost 30
years after passage of Clean Water Act)
• Lawn pesticides are applied on a scale to rival
agricultural toxins
• Actual care, feeding, and reproduction of this vast
expanse of greenery is the business of countless,
independent, individual people
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The question (Robbins, 2007)
• Why lawn managers who are more aware of
the environmental impacts of chemicals, and
are more socially involved and concerned
about their communities, are those who apply
more intensively chemicals on their lawns
– Why do they do this to themselves and their
environment?
30
The answer (study findings)
• Middle-class lawn mainteners (“lawn people”)
end up using chemicals which they know that
are harmful not only for the environment but
also to their own health, because:
– Hectic lives: no free time
– Economic/ instrumental logics: housing values
– The good citizen: moral responsibility to the
community
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Beyond instrumentalism: community
• Despite risks, using chemicals
– Sign of a good character
– Sign of social responsibility
• Ecological character of lawn
problems: if you eliminate plague it
can move next door, so next door
needs to apply same level of care
– Disregard for lawn care: freeriding
and moral neglect
• Most important driver for lawn
chemical use:
– Sense there is a “neighborhood
norm” (rule) to maintain an
aesthetically pleasing lawn
• Decisions about lawn chemical use in
terms of something that they owed
to their neighbors
– “I wouldn’t insult my
neighbors by not keeping my
house up”
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Lawn people: power shaping subjects
The argument (Robbins, 2007):
• Maintenance of lawn yard landscapes through
environmentally harmful lawn chemicals: internalized
environmental practice…
• …which is:
– Rooted on socially enforced environmental aesthetic
– That associates good citizenship with environmentally
harmful activities (use of chemicals)
3333
Lawn people: power shaping subjects
• Such behaviors benefit the corporate entities that produce,
package, and market the goods and services that maintain
such an aesthetic
• But it cannot be said that these companies forced anyone, in
any simple way, to act as they do
• Rather, the exercise of power is enacted internally
• Through production of a certain kind of “subject,” whose
identity as a good citizen is associated with a set of specific
environmental activities
 The LAWN PEOPLE
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Bibliography: main studies
• Blaikie, P., 1985. The political economy of soil erosion
in developing countries. Longman.
• Escobar, A., 1995. Encountering development: The
making and unmaking of development. Princeton
University Press.
• Robbins, P., 2012. Lawn people: How grasses, weeds,
and chemicals make us who we are. Temple
University Press.
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