Chapter 39
Political Ecology/Economy1
Political Ecology as Economic Geography
Political ecology has expanded rapidly in recent years to become a major subfield within geography and related disciplines. Indeed, by many measures this approach to the analysis of human-environment relationships is one of the fastest-growing areas within geography, as indicated by the publication of books and articles identifying themselves as such, the growth of the Cultural and Political Ecology specialty group of the AAG, job descriptions, and the declared interests of new graduate students in the field (see Kepe, Bissonnette, and Roberts 2008). The question of what exactly political ecology is, and why it is so popular, is a recurring one. The field’s eclectic and contested nature prompts, on the one hand, periodic efforts at imposing some coherence on it (see for example Robbins 2004; Neumann 2005), and, on the other, laments over its diffuse nature and other alleged flaws (see for example Vayda and Walters 1999; Peet and Watts 2004), while also contributing to an odd dynamic in which even prominent contributors to the field sometimes distance themselves from the term (Robbins and Bishop 2008). And yet political ecology continues to grow. I think there are several reasons for this: “political ecology” has come to signify a very open and creative space for theoretically informed and politically committed nature-society work, allowing scholars to situate their work while retaining tremendous latitude; it immediately conveys a critical stance with respect to dominant power relations; and there is probably some positive feedback, as many people new to the discipline discover that the work they wish to engage is described as “political ecology.”
While such efforts at defining political ecology’s core and boundaries are typically futile and at least sometimes at odds with the creative spirit that animates much work in the field, I do believe that political ecology has, if not a core, a set of key analytical and political commitments and approaches that distinguish it from many other approaches to the same set of concerns, and that make it attractive to many: a direct critique of capitalism and dominant power relations as central causal factors in contemporary environmental problems; a variable but generally “weak” constructivist approach to ecology and environmental science; and methodological commitments to understanding human-environment relations through intensive research that enables the identification and articulation of relevant dynamics in ways not visible from greater physical or social distances. Moreover, I believe that those foundational commitments can be traced directly to political ecology’s strong roots in particular variants of Marxian political economy and directly subsequent conversations in human geography. In other words, it is precisely a particular focus on and understanding of the geographies of economic activity that, at root, distinguishes political ecology from most other ways of thinking about human-environment relations in geography and many cognate fields. In fact, my argument in this essay is that political ecology has itself been an important site for the application and development of economic geography, as well as an important portal between geography and other conversations important to contemporary economic geography, such as a growing focus on institutions and governance (e.g. Young, King, and Schroeder 2008; Dietz, Ostrom, and Stern 2003; Ostrom 1990). In other words, while political ecology has imported much of its theory from economic geography, it has also contributed to theories regarding such central economic concepts as economic rationality, households, commodity chains, property regimes, and more. This shared lineage and concern with how societies organize themselves for purposes of production and reproduction within the contexts of highly variegated physical environments explains why questions regarding stability, regulation, and reproduction; dynamism, change, and limits to growth; and scale and spatial interaction are so central to both political ecology and economic geography. In this essay, I take a very selective and partial cut through the active and heterogeneous domain that is political ecology: rather than offering a comprehensive account of the field or even of economic concepts within it, I pick a few central themes in political ecology and attempt to show how they are themselves part of the development of economic geography.
Foundational Themes in Political Ecology
The origins of political ecology in the early 1970s are an oft-told tale (see Peet and Watts 2004; Robbins 2004; Neumann 2005). For now, suffice it to say that many accounts, including one by Watts in a previous version of this companion (2000), locate the origins of political ecology in the confluence of several developments in the early 1970s: the critique and reformulation of both cultural ecology and natural hazards research from the perspective of Marxian political economy, particularly the Third World Marxisms so central to that period; the radical politicization of environmental issues in the context of and in opposition to a cresting wave of neo-Malthusian environmentalism; and the increasing, but increasingly contested, application of ideas from ecology, cybernetics, and systems theory to the analysis of human-environment relations. What matters here is that three intellectual and political steps taken during this formative period unite political ecology with contemporary economic geography and distinguish both from more mainstream analyses: a belief in the importance of political-economic structures and spatial interdependence; a commitment to understanding those structures and relations and any of their specific outcomes dialectically; and a belief in the profound embeddedness of economic relationships and, consequently, the inescapability and possibilities of politics. I illustrate these three themes below using examples from the foundational period of political ecology, as well as examples of their enduring relevance to both political ecology and economic geography, particularly as the latter begins to engage more directly and critically with the roles environmental resources, dynamics, and governance play in economic geographies (Bakker this volume; Bridge 2010; Robertson this volume).
Political Economic Structures and Spatial Interdependence
For many, precisely what distinguished political ecology from cultural ecology was its insistence on analyzing the same “local” instances of human-environment interactions central to cultural and human ecology as occurring in the context of a highly dynamic and unequal global capitalist economy. A focus on finding and explaining presumed mechanisms of adaptation and equilibrium, typically in rural areas of non-industrialized countries, became instead a focus on examining how incorporation into the global capitalist economy, often through force and nearly always on unfavorable terms, disrupted those same relations and led to increasing disequilibrium, economic and ecological marginalization, and class differentiation. Those articulations were understood primarily through the analytical lenses of world systems theory, theories of uneven development, and related concepts from Third World Marxisms (for example, regarding the systemic significance of peasants and agrarian transformations). Conceptually, the subjects of political ecology came to be understood not as individual “bearers” of cultures that “knew” how to live in equilibrium with specific local environments, but as individual “land managers” making rational decisions regarding the allocation of productive resources within highly constrained circumstances, often requiring them to engage in economically and ecologically marginal production as part of a cycle of deepening marginalization (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). In short, they became rational peasants, a variant of “economic man,” albeit one explicitly situated relative to the class structures and processes of capitalist societies. They were linked to the rest of the globe through commodity chains of mostly exported primary commodities on the one hand, and the impositions of colonial or postcolonial states on the other. Thus, the most important causal relationships transforming local human-environment relations might well be found in national capitals, overseas markets, or the offices of global lending organizations. That insight often translated into research on commodity chains. Finally, with individuals and their relations to the rest of the world understood in these newly and explicitly economic terms, the relations they described were then evaluated within the framework of Marxian value theory, allowing claims to be made regarding unequal exchange, surplus appropriation, exploitation, and class differentiation. The focus on commodity chains, globalization, the roles geographic differentiation and connectivity played in the global economy, and intensive, empirically grounded research rather than abstract formalisms were all recognizable hallmarks of economic geography.
A strong and explicit focus on scale, and especially on the mutually constitutive relationships among scales, was also part of this conceptual reordering of the field, as was a profound shift in how regions were conceptualized: political ecology parted ways with antecedent cultural ecology in large part by moving to think about regions less in terms of their climate or many other aspects of physical geography, and more in terms of, essentially, a core-periphery model of economic geography (Wallerstein 1979). The focus on economic relations in the active creation of scales and regions was salutary; the resultant relative inattention to ecology, to the actual materiality of nature, was probably not (Neumann 2009; 2010; Robertson this volume; Bakker this volume). Clearly, though, a good part of what created and defined political ecology was the direct incorporation of ideas from economic geography to understand how the places political ecologists studied were shaped by their relationships to a highly structured global capitalist economy, including the fact that scales and regions were produced (Storper and Walker 1989). Indeed, political ecology and development studies were to a considerable extent simply the names under which the economic geography of the developing world was analyzed, as “economic geography” as such came to focus on industrialized economies.
But this new vocabulary and framework had severe limitations alongside its considerable explanatory purchase. Political ecology in the 1980s and 1990s grappled with, and grew through, the familiar critiques of these concepts: that world systems theory was far too general and static as a theory of economic geography (see McCarthy 2002; Neumann 2009); that the economism and sexism of structural Marxism underestimated agency and the importance of many different types of difference, identity, exploitation, and motivation; that gender relations in particular demanded breaking open the “black box” of the household and not treating members of households or societies as in any way equivalent or interchangeable; and more. Insights and methods from feminism, post-structuralism, postcolonial theory, and other bodies of thought directly engaged with political economy powerfully transformed political ecology over these decades, leading towards an increasing focus on potentially non-economic motivations for many of the relationships examined in the field and a growing sense of the complexity and multiplicity of dynamics and the indeterminacy of outcomes. These conversations paralleled and overlapped with the exact same critiques and trends in economic geography as such during this period, as the latter moved from a strong embrace of structural Marxism to a broadly post- or neoMarxist pluralism (see Barnes 1996; Gibson-Graham 1996). My point is simply that a very considerable part of this broadening of the discipline’s thinking about economic geographies over the past few decades has occurred in and through work in political ecology.
Alongside these evolutions, however, political ecology’s commitment to examining political-economic structures and spatial interdependence continued, and continued to differentiate its analyses from many more mainstream examinations of the same cases. This commitment pervades the field so thoroughly it is difficult to single out a single stream of work as an example, but recent work by geographers on the political ecologies of oil production and consumption certainly demonstrates its enduring salience. Work by political ecologists such as Michael Watts, Phillippe Le Billon, and Matt Huber has emphasized the totality of the global oil complex, rejecting the methodological nationalism or corporation-specific framings of many popular and academic accounts to emphasize instead how various production sites and relations are all situated within a global complex strategically structured and regulated by a handful of the most powerful countries and multinational corporations in this sector (e.g. Le Billon 2005; Watts 2005; 2009). This approach also insists on attention to the imperial, colonial, and postcolonial relationships of force and domination so central to the creation and formation of many current oil-producing countries, in contrast to the many, dominant approaches that simply blame the current holders of state power in the national territory in question for any negative effects of a heavy focus on oil production and export. In keeping with theories of uneven development, political ecologists working on the oil complex have emphasized the simultaneity of development and underdevelopment, demonstrating that all of the usual indicators of “underdevelopment” have often been integral and essential elements of the dynamics of oil production in many countries, rather than a set of “problems” that could potentially be fixed by increasing oil revenues. Work in this vein is far from a simple reprise of world systems theory, though. Current work in political ecology on oil typically pays careful attention to how the motivations, interests, and outcomes of various groups and individuals are differentiated not only by class, but also by gender, ethnicity, and geography, among other variables; to the discursive construction of the resource and its scarcity as well as to its material commodity chain; and indeed to the material characteristics of oil and how they matter for its social life (see for example Watts 2005; 2009; Watts and Kashi 2008). In short, the critical debates discussed in the preceding paragraph have greatly strengthened political ecology’s analyses of economic geographies. As a result, this work offers vastly richer and more rigorous explanations of the political-ecological, and political economic, relationships between “nature” and “society” in oil-producing regions than most competing accounts, including those from other academic approaches, such as the more mainstream literatures on “environmental security,” or the alleged “resource course.” Finally, work on oil from a political ecology perspective has raised more fundamental theoretical questions for economic geography about fossil fuels, such as whether they need to be understood as not simply “primary commodities,” among others, but as the metabolic lifeblood of the contemporary global economy, and perhaps even a necessary element of what we understand as capitalism (Huber 2009). In sum, then, this work exemplifies why political ecology’s defining focus on political-economic structures remains essential to the analysis of nature-society relations in the contemporary world, in ways that merge seamlessly with economic geography’s resurgent interest in natural resources (see Bridge 2010; Hayter, Barnes, and Bradshaw 2003).
Dialectical Understandings of Environmental “Problems”
Political ecology has been equally defined by its commitment, also drawn from Marxian political economy, to understanding its objects of concern in dialectal terms – meaning, at a minimum, in relational, processual terms, and as parts of a larger whole (see Harvey 1974; 1996). This aspect of political ecology was spurred by, and developed in explicit opposition to, the ascendance and dominance of neo-Malthusian environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s (exemplified by The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968), and The Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin 1968)). Inasmuch as neo-Malthusian environmentalism’s framings of human-environment relations were drawn substantially from work in natural resource economics, and fed into the development of the field of environmental economics, political ecology has functioned here as an important, if contentious, pathway of engagement between geographers and other disciplinary approaches to theorizing the economic geographies of contemporary human-environment relationships.
Political ecology was sparked in large part by a political and analytical reaction against neo-Malthusian environmentalism, even while sharing its substantive concern with the sustainability of contemporary human-environment relationships. Rather than seeing human-environment relationships in terms of absolute, quantifiable, and discrete variables and limits, whether for population, resources, or economic growth, early work in what became political ecology examined the same relationships in holistic, relational, and political terms. Thus, population growth was recast as a function of endogenous dynamics of capitalism, an effect of specific social structures and processes (increased agricultural productivity, the demand for cheap labor power, etc.) rather than an exogenous, biologically determined driver of them; scarcity was recast as socially created through economic inequality, the disruption of moral economies and other existing social arrangements, and the socially constructed need for particular materials and commodities (for example, demand for gasoline is inseparable from the prior production of particular sorts of landscapes and technologies), rather than a direct result of absolute scarcity of particular substances; and so on. This line of argument drew directly from economic geography’s turn towards more dialectical understandings of the dynamics of economic geographies – for example through the articulation of concepts such as uneven development, the spatial fix, and the ways in which capital effectively creates over time such “factors of production” as labor and resource endowments (Harvey 1982; Storper and Walker 1989) – and indeed some works were central to both fields (e.g. Smith 1984).
This line of thinking forced Marxist theory to grapple with environmental considerations as central to contemporary political economy in ways that went well beyond much older debates about the natural origins of wealth or the particular role of agriculture in capitalist development. Economic geographers and others struggled to incorporate environmental and geographic considerations into the body of Marxist theory in ways that remained consistent with, but also went well beyond, Marx’s own thinking, and that spoke directly to contemporary concerns mostly absent from Marx’s own writings. David Harvey’s 1982 book, The Limits to Capital, remains the single greatest contribution to such efforts, and it shaped the subsequent generation of economic geography. Meanwhile, two other such engagements became central resources for political ecology: Harvey’s 1974 article, “Population, Resources, and the Ideology of Science” (published, notably, in Economic Geography), and James O’Connor’s argument, first published in 1988 in Capitalism Nature Socialism, positing a potential “second contradiction” of capitalism.
In his 1974 article, Harvey argues that the dominant neo-Malthusian thinking of the day is deficient precisely because it is not dialectical and therefore treats concepts such as “population” and “resources” as objective variables to be measured, rather than as relational categories that are part of what is being examined and that must, consequently, be constantly interrogated and reformulated. The centrality of this critique and alternative mode of analysis to political ecology can scarcely be overstated; indeed, while structural Marxism often served as a foil for later work in political ecology that drew strongly from theories of post-structuralism and cultural politics, all emphasized the critique and destabilization of dominant terms of analysis.
O’Connor’s theory of the “second contradiction” was in the same vein inasmuch as it attempted to place environmental considerations within a structuralist and dialectical understanding of the dynamics of capitalist societies. In a nutshell, O’Connor suggests that alongside the “first” contradiction of capitalism central to Marx’s theory, in which crises occur, basically, because workers cannot afford to buy all of the commodities they have produced, there may be a second contradiction, in which capitalist production degrades its own necessary conditions of production so much that either production either cannot continue at all or it becomes too expensive to be profitable. O’Connor – working in the tradition of theorizing capitalist states, and building on Polanyi – sees conditions of production as both social and environmental: for example, infrastructure, sufficiently clean water for industrial inputs, a labor force healthy enough to work, and so on, and he sees the state as central to providing and maintaining these conditions for capitalists within its territory, despite the efforts of individual capitalists to externalize as many of the associated costs as possible (for example, by paying nothing to pollute, even as pollution imposes additional costs on individuals and the state). The tension between accumulation and legitimacy is thus central to O’Connor’s thinking, as those competing imperatives play out in fights over taxes, regulation, levels and types of state spending, entitlements, the demands of social movements, and so on – much of which is currently discussed under the rubric, “governance” (see Robertson this volume). O’Connor’s work was highly significant for political ecology, and for environmental and economic geography more broadly, because it was one of the earliest and most compelling articulations of just how and why environmental considerations might play a central role in the totality of the political economy of contemporary capitalism, a premise that has become increasingly central to work in environmental and economic geography from a variety of approaches (see Bakker this volume; Robertson this volume; Bridge 2010).
The above pieces by Harvey and O’Connor are only examples from a large, rich body of work that proceeds from the same or similar premises and commitments. I highlight them here because to me they illustrate most clearly what it means to view specific environmental “problems” in dialectal terms, and because it is precisely that way of viewing things that continues to distinguish political ecology and much contemporary economic geography from dominant understandings (academic and non-academic) of human-environment relations.
Contemporary discussions regarding limiting anthropogenic carbon emissions in the context of climate change illustrate the ongoing salience of this difference. The dominant approach (see Robertson this volume) focuses on setting various quantified targets for carbon emissions and achieving them via some combination of state mandates and market mechanisms, emphasizing the latter. The many specific plans currently in use or under debate all fit that general description. Most, however, treat atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and its equivalents, associated temperature increases, and reduction mechanisms as discrete variables or topics, and then focus on what the optimal target level or mechanism would be. While mechanisms for reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are both necessary and desirable, the problem with dominant approaches is that they typically fail to analyze such levels, targets, and mechanisms as provisional and relational products of and contributors to an ever-evolving global capitalist economy.
Recent articles by Liverman (2009) and Prudham (2009) offer first-rate examples of what a dialectical critique of the emergent carbon economy, shaped by political ecology, looks like instead. First, a focus on carbon emissions is arguably at some level a focus on an effect rather than a cause. That is, while anthropogenic climate change due to growing greenhouse gases is a real and urgent problem that should be addressed, it is also a direct byproduct of the ceaseless accumulation for accumulation’s sake, concomitant technological innovation and environmental transformation, and deference to the interests of capitalists over those of other people and non-human beings that characterize capitalism as a mode of production. Those underlying conditions have produced many other environmental tragedies and injustices, and even if climate change is somehow successfully addressed, they will surely produce more if left unchanged. Second, it is quite possible that many of the “solutions” proposed in the new carbon economy, particularly the increasing commodification of carbon emissions and their reduction, could ultimately exacerbate even the narrowly defined problems they attempt to solve. These mechanisms aim, by and large, to allow economic growth to continue even as carbon emissions are reduced (in absolute or relative terms). Indeed, they explicitly frame carbon mitigation projects and technologies as opportunities for investment, new sites of accumulation. It is thus easy to imagine that increased carbon efficiency or even sequestration could simply open the door to the burning of yet more fossil fuels. Third, many discussions of climate change, even while insisting on its anthropogenic origins, largely frame it as a biophysical process that will have social impacts to which various groups around the world will have to respond; such framings often verge on reproducing nature-society dualisms and formulations of environmental determinism – in which societies must act within and react to biophysical environments external to society – with deep roots in geography. Fourth, and in sharp contrast to such framings, Liverman and others insist that target levels of carbon dioxide equivalents, target temperatures, and carbon control mechanisms cannot be purely objective or scientific; in a world of tremendous social and physical heterogeneity, any level of emissions, concomitant temperature increase, or governance mechanism will have widely varying, unequal impacts; there is simply no objectively correct or acceptable level or approach. Such targets and mechanisms are the products of politics and power relations, and therefore cannot be fully analyzed without an adequate analysis of all of the relevant power relations and politics. Finally, such an analysis must pay careful attention to the actual historical geographies of both anthropogenic climate change and its nascent governance – a project that ultimately demands an ability to theorize the evolution of capitalism itself. In sum, political ecology and much economic geography continue to be defined by a focus on, and dialectical understanding of, underlying political-economic processes all too often absent from many competing analyses of the same phenomena.
Anti-Determinism and the Potential of Politics
A third line of argument was as central to political ecology as the two above, and interwoven with them. It centered on a critical response to Garrett Hardin’s (1968) articulation of, “The tragedy of the commons.” Hardin’s pessimistic and enormously influential assessment of the prospects for communal management of natural resources was of course one of the central texts of neo-Malthusian environmentalism, and it was not actually about the pasture or other renewable natural resources at the center of Hardin’s abstract model, but rather about global population, with Hardin advocating strict controls on human reproductive rights as the only viable way to limit pressure on resources. Hardin’s argument, in a nutshell, was that uncontrolled access to a resource would lead inevitably to the ruin of both the resource and its users, as each individual user followed the inescapable economic logic of receiving all of the gain from each additional unit they took from the resource while bearing a fraction of any associated costs, and assuming that any unit they left behind, another would take. The argument, which found a ready audience in part because it was compelling in its simplicity and intuitively compatible with dominant neoclassical theories of economic rationality and behavior (in fact, it was essentially an application of an argument developed much earlier by the fisheries economist H. Scott Gordon (1954)), was easily and quickly applied to local and global resources, to any place around the world, and to resource sinks as well as sources. Hardin’s two proposed solutions – privatizing nature, or subjecting it to strict state control – became the default policy recommendations of most environmentalists, resource economists, NGOs, and international lending agencies, with the former being by far the more popular in recent decades.
This is familiar ground. I revisit it here because repudiating Hardin’s argument and attempting to counter its influence among policy makers became central to political ecology, and doing so entailed empirical falsification and theoretical critique of core tenets of neoclassical economic theory (see McCarthy 2009). As soon as Hardin’s article was published, geographers, anthropologists, rural sociologists, and others with extensive familiarity with resource management regimes around the world began pointing out that many societies have successfully managed common-pool resources over long periods, seemingly sustainably, without resorting to either privatization or strong centralized bureaucratic control, in part because many people did not behave as homo economicus. The theoretical argument was equally easy to criticize: Hardin’s scenario relied on a number of unstated but unrealistic assumptions, such as a complete lack of communication or self-organization among users as a shared and essential resource was degraded. Developing this critique, and distilling and articulating the conditions for successful management of common-pool resources and operation of common-property regimes, generated an entire interdisciplinary community with its own journals and conferences, one that overlapped heavily with political ecology (see for example Ostrom 1990; Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker 1994; see also McCay and Acheson 1987; Dietz, Ostrom, and Stern 2003). Critically, the findings of this body of work turned on the potential for politics of multiple sorts – informal norms and communications, mechanisms of exclusion and management, trust in other actors, belief in the equity and fairness of the management regime, and much more – to avert the sorts of deterministic and dismal economic and ecological dynamics and outcomes predicted by Hardin. I return to this point in the conclusion.
Inasmuch as this body of work remained in closer conversation with mainstream economics and political science, environmental economics, and policy makers than did critical geography, political ecology’s engagement with it provided an important point of connection between political ecology and economic geography on the one hand, and dominant approaches to thinking about human-environment relationships on the other. For instance, Elinor Ostrom is currently the best-known contributor to the study of common property, and her recent receipt of the Nobel Prize in economics was a rare recognition and affirmation in hegemonic arenas of insights drawn in part from research in political ecology. At the same time, political ecology has gone well beyond the approach taken by Ostrom and others working in the same institutionalist vein. While many institutionalists continue to theorize people as rational, utility-maximizing economic individuals, and focus on designing frameworks in which such actors will find it in their self-interest to act in ways that produce better collective outcomes, political ecology has developed a far richer and more complex sense of the “political” in relationship to the environment, one that encompasses meanings, identities, multiple and conflicting forms of rationality, attention to cultural politics and micropolitics, and more. Indeed, much of this work questions and dissolves the very parameters of “the economic” or “the economy” as discrete domains within society (Mitchell 2005; Bakker this volume; Robertson this volume).
Conclusions: Political Ecology and Alternatives to Capitalism
I want to conclude by exploring a last major theme in political ecology, that of the possibility of non-capitalist human-environment relationships. My argument is that one of political ecology’s most important contributions to the larger project of critical political economy – in which I include economic geography – has been to document, analyze, advocate, and facilitate such alternative relationships, in the face of enormous ideological and policy efforts to squelch non-capitalist alternatives in thought and practice.
Finding and understanding non-capitalist (or, more problematically, “pre-modern”) patterns of human-environment interactions was a central impulse not only in early political ecology, but in the cultural ecology that preceded it. This impulse came, in part, from a sense that the capitalist world-system was rapidly expanding, absorbing, and remaking in its image every society it encountered, and that it was thus crucial to find and document what was “outside” of that system, whether spatially or temporally, before it was too late – both as an end in itself and to inform a critique of capitalism by showing that other forms of interaction were viable and indeed superior in many respects (for example by doing a better job of keeping people from starving during droughts (Watts 1983)). This impulse – which arguably considerably underestimated the complexities and indeterminacies of capitalism, of articulation, and of hybridity of many sorts – was at least part of the reason for political ecology’s long-standing focus on rural areas of the global South (see McCarthy 2002). It was also an important incentive for much work on actual historical commons and other attempts to craft patterns of nature-society interactions that were either non-capitalist or critical of capitalism in important respects (see for example Prudham (2007) on the history of radical politics articulated through proposals for the forest products industry in British Columbia).
“The commons” occupy an especially central role here, inasmuch as the ideological and operational destruction of actual commons played a central role in the origins of capitalism (see McCarthy 2009; Glassman 2006; DeAngelis 2006), and the ongoing enclosure and delegitimation of commons of many sorts continue to play a central role in its ongoing development (Harvey 2003; McCarthy 2005). Thus, the empirical and theoretical critique of Hardin detailed above was very far from a purely academic matter: by demonstrating that commons have worked and can work, political ecologists in the 1970s and after were attempting to prevent the hegemony of circumscribed capitalist visions of what effective environmental governance must look like, and to maintain space for alternative visions.
Such a project become more urgent, but also far more difficult, as neoliberal ideology and policies were widely adopted as “common sense” and techniques of governance in the 1970s, and particularly from the 1980s on, with the claim that, “there is no alternative” being central to their ascendance. Neoliberal policies and techniques proliferated rapidly in the domain of environmental governance, as in countless other sectors, with familiar arguments about the inefficiency of state regulations and bureaucracies, the advantages and virtues of voluntary, flexible markets and strong private property protections, and the ability of communities and civil society to redress market failures better than states could working their way through the domain of environmental governance in countless ways and places. Tracing the trajectories of these “neoliberalizations” of environmental governance and evaluating their effects became a major line of work in political ecology over the past decade – not because environmental governance had not been neoliberalized until then but because it was only from 2004 or so on that political ecologists began to theorize the cases they were studying explicitly in terms of neoliberalism.
Here we see one of the strongest, most direct, and most theoretically explicit engagements between political ecology and economic geography in recent years: political ecologists attempting to theorize the neoliberalization of environmental governance drew strongly, directly, and explicitly from economic geography for concepts and frameworks. They also spoke back to economic geography more directly than many earlier political ecologists had, perhaps, both by making significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the analysis and critique of “neoliberalization,” and by insisting that a full and adequate genealogy of neoliberalism was impossible without coming to grips with its “environmental” dimensions, such as the centrality of biotechnology industries to its regime of accumulation, the importance of environmental regulation as a proving ground for techniques such as cost-benefit analysis and cap-and-trade programs, and the extraordinary number and variety of “environmental” goods and services commodified during the neoliberal era (for reviews of the relevant work in political ecology, see McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Heynen et al. 2007; Castree 2008a; 2008b; Bakker 2009; Bakker this volume, Robertson this volume; on the larger debates in geography regarding “neoliberalism,” see Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2010; Ferguson 2010). One of the ways this engagement between political ecology and economic geography could be productively extended is around the recently much-discussed question of what “post” neoliberal trajectories might look like, if the current crisis does indeed prove to be a significant inflection point for neoliberalism, understood as a regime of accumulation within the history of capitalism. Specifically, a number of recent authors (e.g. Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2010) have suggested that neoliberalism may well survive the current crisis as the dominant ideology and set of techniques of rule in large part because there are no equally well-developed and articulated alternative frameworks struggling to replace it, as neoliberalism itself was ready when the crisis of Fordism and Keynesianism occurred in the 1970s.
Political ecologists can contribute to the development of such viable alternative visions in multiple ways. Looking back, we can continue to produce specific, detailed genealogies of the variegated, hybrid neoliberalization of environmental governance, partly in order to map out more precisely the terrain of struggle. In short, any progressive “de-neoliberalization” of environmental governance will have to build upon precisely the sorts of concrete, place- and policy-specific research that has been one of the hallmarks and strengths of political ecology, including recent case-based research on neoliberal environmental governance.
Looking forward, we can actively contribute to the formation of “alternative” economic relationships, with “alternative” in this sense nearly always taken to mean non-capitalist. Some of the most significant work in contemporary political ecology involves the active facilitation of such alternative political-economic approaches and political-ecological relationships. Most directly, many political ecologists, inspired by Gibson-Graham’s work (1996) – itself a major engagement with and contribution to economic geography – have actively and explicitly sought to use their research to foster and facilitate non-capitalist human-environment relationships (e.g. Kevin St. Martin’s 2007 and 2001 work with New England fishing communities). In a related vein, many political ecologists have sought to refine and advance efforts to craft “alternative” or “ethical” commodity chains. While much of this work has rightly been critical of facile suggestions that such approaches can simply avoid or overturn the many problematic dynamics associated with commodification (see Mutersbaugh and Lyon 2010), most contributors to it seem to be engaged in quite sympathetic critique that aims to improve rather than reject such projects and the impulses behind them. Through these and other projects, political ecologists can contribute to the formation of new economic geographies, grounded in specific places and projects but analytically and politically oriented towards linking up with others elsewhere in, essentially, a multifront war of position redefining what is possible.
Note
1 My thanks to Karen Bakker, Morgan Robertson, Michael Watts, and the editors for incisive comments.
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