Volume 62, No. 3, Fall 2003
Introduction to Special Issue: Locating the Political in Political Ecology
Susan Paulson, Lisa L. Gezon, and Michael Watts
Recent debates within political ecology have motivated serious reflection about key concepts and methods in this relatively new field. In the introduction to this special issue, we briefly chart the intellectual genealogy of political ecology, identify vital challenges faced today, and present a new set of studies that respond to these concerns. We conceptualize power as a social relation built on the asymmetrical distribution of resources and risks and locate power in the interactions among, and the processes that constitute, people, places, and resources. Politics, then, are found in the practices and mechanisms through which such power is circulated. The focus here is on politics related to the environment, understood as biophysical phenomena, together with human knowledge and practice. To apply these concepts, we promote multiscale research models that articulate selected ecological phenomena and local social processes, together with regional and global forces and ideas. We also advocate methods for research and practice that are sensitive to relations of difference and power among and within social groups. Rather than dilute ecological dimensions of study, this approach aims to strengthen our ability to account for the dialectical processes through which humans appropriate, contest, and manipulate the world around them.
Key words: political ecology, politics, power, methodology, environment, practice
Contract Drillers and Causal Histories along the Gulf of Mexico
Thomas R. McGuire and Andrew Gardner
Corporate mergers in the oil and gas industry in the late 1990s were accompanied by reduced spending for exploration and drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf of the Gulf of Mexico, even though oil prices were skyrocketing. This lack of response to a favorable price environment is an anomaly for product market theories and can better be understood within a framework of causal history. This approach begins with significant events and traces specific causes and consequences. One significant consequence of the mergers is a redefinition of loyalty among a workforce exposed to increasing employment insecurity.
Key words: corporate behavior, occupational change, global economies, anthropology of events, oil industry, Louisiana
Bitter Shade: Throwing Light on Politics and Ecology in Contemporary Pakistan
Michael R. Dove
Farmers in the rainfed tracts of Pakistan’s Punjab and North-West Frontier Provinces interpret the on-farm interaction between annual crops and trees in terms of sayah, “tree shade.” Tree shade is conceived as an emission that is thought to have density, temperature, taste, and size (which itself is thought to have length, width, height, and duration). Farmers believe the character of shade and its impact upon their crops varies by tree species and also by season and land type. This complex system of beliefs attests to the commitment of farmers to on-farm tree cultivation and contradicts government foresters’ beliefs that farmers are hostile to the presence of trees on farms. The farmers’ belief system collapses a dichotomy between tree and crop, forest and farm, forest department and farmer, and indeed nature and culture, that serves the interests of the Forest Department. This analysis suggests that the most mundane, quotidian resource practices may have profound political implications, that environmental knowledge is often (if not always) partisan knowledge, and that cultural meaning is not divorced from political-economic dynamics.
Key words: agroforestry, tree shade, indigenous environmental knowledge, political ecology, Pakistan
Gendered Practices and Landscapes in the Andes: The Shape of Asymmetrical Exchanges
Susan Paulson
This article describes practices and relations of farming, herding, and cooking that produce and reproduce people and places in culture-specific ways in one region of the central Andes. It also explores how these practices have been changing in relation to regional and global processes surrounding agricultural modernization. The study begins with a look at the degradation of steep slopes and the reduced productivity and social value of women who manage these slopes for small livestock grazing and fuel wood collection. Starting with an ethnographic exploration of local practices and relations of difference, the scope widens to encompass asymmetrical relations of exchange at play in markets, migrations, and development projects, and to consider political decisions and policies that contribute to the uneven terrain on which these exchanges take place. Implications for environmental management and conservation include methodological options for approaching environmental problems as integrally social and ecological and for considering these problems in multiscale frames of reference that allow us to examine links among local phenomena and regional or global processes.
Key words: gender, agricultural modernization, environmental management, Andes, Boliva
Land Tenure and Biodiversity: An Exploration in the Political Ecology of Murang’a District, Kenya
A. Fiona D. Mackenzie
This paper situates the relationship between biodiversity and land tenure in the complex interrelationships between the local and the global. Through a case study of Murang’a District, Kenya, it explores how power is exercised through struggles to define rights to land in highly complex situations of legal plurality and how these struggles in turn interrelate with issues of land management, including biodiversity. Gender, cross-cut by class, is a deeply contested arena of social differentiation, and the outcome of struggles for land, labor, and the product of labor have significant implications for the maintenance of biodiversity.
Key words: land tenure, biodiversity, gender, political ecology, local knowledge, Kenya
The New Calculus of Bedouin Pastoralism in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Andrew Gardner
Recent debates have challenged the very foundation of political ecology. One important critique, stemming from the work of Vayda and his associates, promotes a problem-specific, ecological, and positivistic approach to the analysis of the causes of environmental change. Their focus on the “event,” however, is seemingly at odds with earlier concerns with process. Utilizing a case study of the Bedouin people in Saudi Arabia, I argue that the key ecological events upon which this research focuses, the Kuwaiti oil fires and the ongoing process of desertification, provide poor isolates of the human-environment relationship. If we accept the Kuwaiti oil fires as an environmental event, or better, as a point of departure for working backward in time and outward in space, it becomes evident that these events are best comprehended as nodes in a complex web of determination, or nodes in a web of interlinked processes. It is a web that reaches outward to the ebb and flow of the global economy, one that remains inseparable from the nuances of national politics and policy, one that reaches inward to the core cultural values of Bedouin society, and one that reaches backward in time to a series of historic conjunctures and processes.
Keywords: political ecology, modernization, processualism, Bedouin nomads, Saudi Arabia
Value of Water: Political Ecology and Water Reform in Southern Africa
Bill Derman and Anne Ferguson
Our study draws attention to the multiple ways water is “valued” in international, national, and local discourses and how these different dialogues are used by actors to position themselves and their interests in Zimbabwe’s water reform process. It raises questions concerning the liberatory nature of Zimbabwe’s supposed populist political agenda in land and water reform. Water reform in Zimbabwe serves as a means of demonstrating the grounded, decentered, and engaged approach of political ecology. Focusing only on one pervasive discourse, such as neoliberal economic policy or the growing scarcity of water, and studying its effects on people and the environment, misses much of the complexity embodied in the reform. Our emphasis draws attention to the role of multiple actors, history, ambiguities, and contestations. We have found that the old systems for managing water are no longer functioning while the new systems are not in place. This means that the years of careful planning and implementation of water reform are now in jeopardy due to unforeseen events and processes.
Key words: political ecology, water reform, Southern Africa, Zimbabwe
The Fight for the West: A Political Ecology of Land Use Conflicts in Arizona
Mette J. Brogden and James B. Greenberg
The commoditization of natural resources in a global economic system and the territorialization practices of nation-states present formidable challenges to the sustainable use of natural resources. Likewise, certain environmental problems such as growth management and residential sprawl have proved intractable to our existing political processes. This case study of grazing and growth conflicts in Arizona demonstrates that intractable environmental problems may actually be emergent properties of complex systems, requiring new political approaches that foster collaboration and knowledge sharing between disputing stakeholders. One such collaboration in Arizona revealed that attempts to remove grazing from Arizona landscapes could actually be to the detriment of biodiversity, contrary to the expectations of grazing critics.
Key words: grazing, environmental conflict, land tenure, politics, sprawl, Arizona
