Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (2nd Edition)

Political EcologyA Critical Introduction

Book Review Essay

December 11, 2012

Matthew Retallack

Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (2nd Edition)

Paul Robbins

Wiley-Blackwell

ISBN 978-0-470-65732-4

It is a compelling scene. People at the margins of an already poor and developing nation, eking out a living on undesirable and indeed dangerous terms, processing all the various devices we cycle through as the next best product hits the shelf, without any of the safety equipment we would consider standard in the developed world. Paul Robbins begins this book with a first person account of the lived realities of slum dwellers in the Agbogbloshie neighbourhood of Accra in Ghana. Mountains of electronic waste are pulled apart, sorted and either sent off for reuse or melted down over open fires to recover valuable metals, such as copper and lead, housed within rubber tubing and plastic casings, with thick noxious plumes hanging in the air all around as children play nearby. The violent ecologies on display here speak to the soul of political ecology as Robbins presents it. Environmental issues are not apolitical outcomes but are in fact inherently and unavoidably political in their constitution. They are about norms and choices, and political ecology is presented as an instrument through which the embedded power structures that give rise to such realities may be laid bare. Most would agree that such inequalities are a deplorable fact of current times, all the more so for their apparent persistence. The outstanding questions thenare whether political ecology can make a contribution, and how.Although the term was first coined in Frank Thones 1935 Nature Ramblings: We Fight for Grass, and employed very much in the same way as contemporary usage, it faded out of favour and was only brought back into the critical discourse by Eric Wolf in 1972. However Paul Robbins traces the roots of the approach back even further to Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin, a Russian geographer and aristocrat in the nineteenth century who made repeated expeditions into remote regions of the Russian Far East. There he studied the plants, people and animals that made a living off the land and concluded that, the survival and evolution of species is propelled by collective mutual aid, cooperation, and organisation between individuals. The common thread is that humans and non-humans co-create one another and their shared ecology. Robbins himself is a comparatively recent arrival, but his work continues in this tradition. Currently a professor and Director of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, the same university that has housed the Journal of Political Ecology since its inception in 1994, Robbins research has revolved around landscapes and local populations, different forms of knowledge, institutions and authority since his doctoral work in India in the mid-1990s.

The range of subject matter and approach within his own work point to a common critique of political ecology that Robbins himself raises; that it is many things to many people, coming from a broad spectrum of academic backgrounds and using all manner of approaches, but that in this diversity, and perhaps because of it, political ecology has become a random affair. Academics from anthropology and environmental sociology, to geographers, biologists and hydrologists, to name a few, have joined forces with journalists and representatives from international agencies and state bureaucracies, as well as local, regional, and international non-governmental organisations, to reframe the politics of environmental challenges. To do this they employ a range of techniques and theoretical bases from hazard research and cultural ecology to common property theory, Marxism and peasant studies.

In this way Robbins argues that political ecology is not a theory or a method, nor is it defined by a community of practice. Rather, the common tie between the variety in disciplinary background, theoretical and methodological approach and working capacity, is a certain kind of text. This, for Robbins, comprises the largest shift in his own understanding of the subject between the initial pressing of this book and its second edition.

These texts comprise books and articles, but also other more symbolic content and media that can tell the stories, such as maps, videos, audio logs, blogs, and other artefacts of communication The stories that they tell parse out who is winning and who is losing; are narrated using human non-human dialectics, illuminate the presence of contradictions and inconsistency in outcome between tightly analogous scenarios; and develop constructivist interpretations of how environmental conditions come to be understood.

The chief targets in this endeavour are apolitical ecologies and environmental accounts that revolve around eco-scarcity and modernisation narratives, where the former finds environmental limits, population pressures, and a sort of environmental determinism to be central causal factors of localised environmental degradation, while the later sees as a failure to adopt modern approaches to resource management, exploitation and conservation as causal. Robbins asserts that these apolitical ecologies in fact have deep normative and political currents, but that because these factors go unrecognised the scope of their inquiry is necessarily limited and misdirected. They tend to focus down on local actors downgrading their knowledge and approaches while understating the influence or broader structural factors on local conditions. Political ecology seeks to push back, make explicit the political and normative dimensions, and reorient environmental narratives accordingly. At a moment when urgent problems appeared to be proliferating around the globe, a sophisticated mode of explanation was forming to explore the roots of such phenomena. The devastation long characterised as either natural or inevitable phenomena or the product of ignorant and overpopulated land managers, might now succumb to new kinds of explanation.

Although proponents decry political ecology texts as urgent and vital, critics question whether political ecology offers anything new. The central interest in formal and informal institutions and historical context suggests elements of institutionalism. Focused on formal institutions, and looking from societal change into an analysis of institutions and their effectiveness, historical institutionalism is more concerned with large scale societal change driven by institutional structures both at a national level and in terms of cross-national differences. While there could exist some overlap in terms of an interest in critical junctures and feedback effects that lead to a sense of path dependency, political ecology sees formal institutions as only one part a larger global puzzle when untangling socio-environmental contradictions involving winners and losers. In this way political ecology more in common with the society-centred explanations Skocpol and others were reacting against during the formative early days of historical institutionalism. Any similarity between political ecology and rational choice institutionalism in terms of the role of special interests and strategic circumstances is undermined by a divergence of opinion on the possibility of equilibrium, with political ecology insisting that global power structures are engaged in ongoing processes that continuously reproduce and shift existing circumstances, rather than existing in some quasi-static state of equilibrium.

Although employing similar techniques such as case studies, participant observation and surveys, as well as archival research and interpretative techniques, the similarities between political ecology and political economy are deeper and more substantive than the merely methodological. Fundamentally critical of pluralism, they both focus on structures of power that run through the state and society. Although encompassing institutions, they share a concern with the larger forces of class and political struggle. Current intersectional approaches in political economy have expanded the categories for the analysis of oppression and exclusion. However the logic and objectives of political ecology suggest that political economy needs to open wider still, and include ecology not just as another category of oppression, but rather embrace it as another dimension through which power is exercised on the oppressed. Incorporating this dimension into a Marxist approach to theorising society would present certain challenges, however if political economy were to follow this direction, one could again question, what exactly does political ecology have to offer. A likely place to look for response would be in its use of social (de)construction and dialectics. From a political ecology perspective, a fuller explanation of the facts requires not only discovery of the social relations of power that reproduce themselves, but also how the actual terms within which they are reproduced come to be understood. Kant argued that our ideas do not conform to the objects of the world but rather that objects of the world are constituted by our ideas. Perceptions matter, but more importantly it is the manner in which power and norms intermingle, affecting one another and conditioning our perceptions of the world that matters. As a largely materialist undertaking political ecology faces a bit of a conundrum here, however there also appear unique and promising possibilities.

Robbins identifies two future directions for political ecology: reaching up to bridge ecologically linked but politically isolated discrete communities worldwide, and reaching down to develop a highly local and fully immersed practice that uses environment as a living lens to better and broadly reveal how social ecologies changing, such that the process is the outcome and the participants are the medium. We can question whether there might also there be a third option and suggest that political ecology should pull back and observe its theoretical surroundings.

Robbins book presents political ecology as a complex and multifaceted multidisciplinary approach with a long history. He does this in an organised manner with abundant helpful visuals and illustrative anecdotes; all hallmarks of a craftsman at the trade. However his expertise is also what holds this book back. The new directions he identifies are those of an insiders perspective, and not those that might leverage what political ecology has to offer to better effect. Sale pointed to an inability to abstract from the urgency of action as holding back Canadian Political Economy. The strength of political ecology is telling the structural story of scenarios and sites of action. It needs to turn this critical eye on its own structural setting to see how it fits in, does and does not overlap, conflict, and find synergies with other traditions, all as a means to better do what it fundamentally seeks to do and make explicit the political in the ecological.As Walker asks, where is the policy? Explanation is important but political ecology needs to better embrace policy and to identify alternatives, as well as explain and critique existing conditions. In another moment of constructive contradiction the theoretical maturation of political ecology in a co-dependent manner with the other schools of thought with which it regularly interacts, could become the motor of its greatest success.

Encyclopaedia of Global Justice, Springer, 2011, pp. 863-865.

P. Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, 2nd Edition, Wiley Blackwell, 2012, p 26.

Ibid., p. 5.

Ibid., p 86.

Ibid., p 81.

K. A. Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp .25-27.

P. Robbins, 2012, p123.

D Sale, Canadian Political Economy and the Theory of the Contemporary State: Critical Perspectives on the Sociological Imagination, Journal of Canadian Studies Winter 1996-97, p. 4.

A. W. Walker, Political Ecology: Where is the Policy?, Progress in Human Geography, 30, 3 (2006) pp. 382395.

PAGE 1