ACTUALIZING THE POTENTIAL OF POLITICAL ECOLOGY IN TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE I: DISMANTLING POWER
Session organizers: Josephine Chambers, Utrecht University, and Sierra Deutsch, University of Zürich
Session Abstract
As a “fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values” (IPBES 2019), transformative change is deeply political, and political ecology thus particularly well-suited for enabling such change. Various actors have interpreted transformative change from multiple perspectives. While some of these perspectives incorporate ideas of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, many lack a deeper analysis of power and continue to operate under apolitical assumptions that privilege technocratic approaches to transformative change. As a result, certain voices and perspectives are often muted or completely absent in the operationalization of such transformations. Political ecology encourages us to ask questions about what a fundamental, system-wide transformation of society looks like in theory and practice and it invites us to interrogate whose paradigms, goals, and values must be reorganized and how. However, political ecology is often critiqued for focusing more on illuminating dominant power relations than on offering concrete pathways for action to transform them.
In our two interlinked sessions, we will reflect on the theories and practices of transformative change within the space of political ecology, bringing perspectives from the North, South, and beyond together. We will examine political ecology’s (potential) role in actively repoliticizing spaces of technocratic power and in working with marginalized actors and knowledge systems to elevate their perspectives and more fully pluralize transformational roles, debates, and solutions. In this first session, we focus on how political ecology might better position itself to dismantle existing power structures in transformative change theories and processes.
(Note that our second session is part of the live proceedings in Durban and live session participants are thus not included here)
PRESENTATIONS
Presentation Abstract
Political ecology is a field of inquiry that intervenes in the social and biophysical processes that shape ecological relationships by revealing how uneven access to power stabilizes and transforms environments. While political ecology contributes valuable and sorely needed perspectives to re-focus attention to justice for otherwise sanitized classifications of “nature” or “greening”, these contributions need to be accompanied with greater self-reflection in terms of how exposure of uneven power relations is often itself inscribed into systems of neoliberal knowledge production. This enrollment includes the ways critique generates unintended material and cognitive enclosure of access within dominant structures. Questions arise as to the role political ecologists can play beyond the neoliberal institutions they work within, both through allyship and direct involvement in organizing against and beyond capital, but also in rejecting and dismantling the professionalization of critique into more inclusive and diverse forms of (neoliberal) hegemony. Effective transformation requires political ecologists to more closely examine the role that class divisions play in the production of knowledge, the ways that exposing power relations as critique becomes itself a valuable frontier or niche space in the global knowledge economy. How can attention to historical and ongoing racialized, gendered, and colonially extractive forms of environment-making be depoliticized to inadvertently perpetuate new forms of exclusion by left-liberal or progressive-leaning professional and managerial classes? In what ways and means do critiques of political ecologists contribute to such exclusion and how might this be dismantled? This paper raises important these and other self-reflective questions for transformational political ecology.
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Presentation Abstract
Rethinking the ways in which knowledge is generated and used is a central requirement for transformations toward sustainable food systems. The need to include diverse knowledges is increasingly recognised within and beyond academia. Nonetheless, policy decisions continue to be justified predominantly on the basis of scientific knowledge claims. Building on key insights from political ecology, this paper contributes to debates on transformations and the food systems science-policy interface by zooming-in on a Global South case – Brazil’s federal Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) – and by applying a leverage points perspective to understand the political ecology of agricultural R&D. Embrapa positions itself as a major contributor to technological advances that made Brazil into an agricultural powerhouse. Since its inception, it has gradually expanded its portfolio to include alternative agricultural approaches. Our analysis focuses on the framing of sustainable agriculture within Embrapa to identify the core values, goals, and worldviews forming deep leverage points for systems transformation. Our results show that, while on the surface Embrapa promotes regenerative farming practices, its deeper framing reflects the core assumptions driving dominant food systems. We identify three main framing elements that reinforce existing power structures: a logic of control, a logic of efficiency, and a logic of competition. We argue that a leverage points perspective provides a powerful heuristic to understand why apparently transformative solutions can ultimately reproduce dominant structures. It also provides a versatile and intuitive tool that encourages its users to question the power relations keeping dominant paradigms unchallenged and stymieing deep transformations.
Presentation Abstract
Water scarcity is a key aspect of global environmental sustainability. In the last few decades, there has been a surge of interest in the effects of resilience strategies in contexts of climate fluctuations like Chile. Like other extractive-driven economies of Latin American (Gómez-Barris, 2017), water scarcity is a main cause of socio-environmental conflicts (Vergara Cáceres, 2019) but there is a relative paucity of transformative change literature focused in this common extractive matrix (Massarella et al., 2021). From a decolonial perspective, few North-based research has examined the Latin American Political Ecology (LAPE) contribution to the sustainability debate (De la Cuadra & Elizalde Hevia, 2019). Research on socio-environmental conflicts by LAPE enables the identification of collective action which feature indigenous, socio-environmental, and women actors (Svampa, 2015). I here consider that the epistemological discussions motivated by Feminism from both the Global North and South (Parra, 2018) can be a contribution to Political Ecology since they help situate the tensions within the field (Elmhirst, 2011). This investigation uses existing data from the Human Rights Institute of Chile to assess socioenvironmental conflicts over water and against private mining activities. This study was exploratory, using qualitative content analysis to examine key environmental justice claims across cases dating from 1990 to 2015. This study is unable to encompass the entire Chilean socio-historical scenario, but if we are to assume that ‘transformations for sustainability’ is not just a metaphor (Bluwstein, 2021) then dismantling extractives economies is one of the fundamental challenges of the Anthropocene.
Author bio. Chilean Social Anthropologist, born in 1988. Currently located in Valparaíso and studying for my master ‘s degree on Cultural and Literature Studies in Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, with a state-funded scholarship (ANID Nº22220191). I am a Feminist mestiza with Mapuche heritage from my mother’s side. Since I graduated from the University of Chile, I have worked as an independent researcher, and been involved in grassroot human rights activism. My main research topic is Extractivism as a cultural phenomenon. My undergraduate thesis was part of the project “Reconfiguring hydro-social territories, disclosing socially constructed scarcities; an analysis of State responses to permanent and temporal water deficits in Chile” (CR)2 – FONDAP/ CONICYT 15110009.
Vijay and Gert: Many thanks for your critique of systems of neoliberal knowledge production with respect to political ecology. As I’m sure you know, many critiques of sociocultural markers of difference and exclusion have been tied back to capitalism (e.g. Roediger, Brodkin, Eisenstein, Escobar). To what extent do you see this in contemporary political ecology? Can you give the audience some good examples of (more) people who interrogate sociocultural material injustices through class-based analyses in political ecology?
Thanks Sierra for your reflections! I think to start, our main point of departure is about trying to make sense of what political ecology is and does, as it fits within the neoliberal academic institutions and processes by which it gets invariably embedded. A very concrete example, what does it mean for us as political ecologists to be publishing in (and essentially labouring for) Routledge and Elsevier? What are the contradictions here, and how can they be tackled collectively, as political ecologists – especially those working in university spaces? Here, we think a lot of the work of political ecology might require the internal processes of self-reflection and resistance within the institutions we do our work in, as much as looking ‘outwards’ to understand how power shapes and is shaped by dynamic ecological relationships. Can we ensure that our contributions break down capital, rather than sustain it? How is this possible within a neoliberal university? We make reference to some of the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, and how we need to build a collective capacity to crowd each other in, to prevent the fear of “failing” or falling back on class status within our jobs and professions. Recent work by Benjamin Neimark and colleagues on class and political ecology (and the rise of an ‘eco-precariat’) is part of a growing body of arguments, illustrating what happens when class-based analysis does *not* share the centre-stage in, say, the political ecology of ‘greening.’ But a similar lens has to turn inwards to ourselves as academic political ecologists of the knowledge economy. Is the work of university-based political ecology all too conveniently high-skilled and professionalized? What collective responsibility does this offer for political ecologists to break further class divisions and to ensure radical and liberatory knowledge remains a tool for resourcing the commons and does not get cherry-picked into a black hole of new knowledge products?
I think there are indeed political ecologists who are able to link socio-material injustice with a class analysis in their theoretical and everyday praxis, and perhaps in complete defiance of how the academy disciplines its workers. I am thinking here of scholars of the Black Radical tradition such as Ashanté Reese, Symone Johnson, Nathan Hare, Danielle Purifoy, and Justin Hosbey and others who connect theoretical work to organizing, mobilization and mutual aid outside the academy – especially by reclaiming the knowledge space of the university to analyze power asymmetries with the aim to build counter power in collaborative struggle with the communities they belong to.
Thanks for your reply and clarifications Vijay, and especially for the authors you suggest. This reminds me much of the ongoing debate in political ecology, but also other fields of academia dealing with the amplifying and persistent threats to the planet’s habitability, of whether scientists should shy away from activism in their professional capacities. However, I think you are adding a “get your own house in order” hue to this debate, which I think is important. I appreciate, and am here for, the idea of building a “collective capacity to crowd each other in.” At the same time, I am wondering how to account for the fact that people of a particular race and gender tend to hold the positions of power within academia and often seem to be the most disinterested in the kinds of reflection and collective responsibility you are calling for? Although I agree that a class-based analysis assists in interrogating the knowledge economy of political ecology, there is still apparently a hierarchy *within* this knowledge economy that I don’t think can be (solely) explained by class. And these are the (main) people who get to decide what PE is and does, within the greater context of who gets to decide what academia is and does.
How do we hold the “right” people accountable, with respect to self-reflection, so as to avoid siloing ourselves into an echo chamber that “leaks” out of the academic pipeline or fails to break the glass ceiling (here I am thinking of e.g. Sara Ahmed’s work on diversity in universities more generally)? Do you happen to know of a study that analyzes PE in terms of who holds what positions, with respect to race, gender, geographical origin etc., in addition to class (à la Dorceta Taylor’s work on environmental organizations or Mabele and colleagues’ recent analysis on “Inequalities in the production and dissemination of biodiversity conservation knowledge on Tanzania”)? Perhaps a clearer picture of this might assist with understanding who should be (more) encouraged to do some self-reflection?
Maira: Thanks a lot for this interesting analysis of Embrapa. Can you ‘talk’ a bit about how, and to what extent, you think Bolsonaro’s presidency affected the framing devices of Embrapa?
Thank you Sierra, this is indeed an interesting question and one we took into account in our analysis. From our data we did not identify a dramatic change in Embrapa’s framing in the period 2015-2020. There was a slight shift toward stronger emphasis on the existing sustainable technologies used in Brazilian agriculture, largely leaving out agriculture’s negative environmental impacts, but perhaps we would need to analyse changes along a longer timeframe to be able to tell whether this shift is attributable to the change in government. So what we see is continuity rather than change in terms of framing, which I would say reflects the compromises made by the Workers’ Party governments with agribusiness actors. I also think this is attributable to the almost mythical status of Embrapa’s history, which means that the same narrative has been repeated for decades and has become strongly embedded in the organization’s culture.
I should add, however, that my more recent empirical findings did show clear changes in management toward more Bolsonaro-backing management staff, but this varies from research unit to research unit (Embrapa is formed by some 30-40 research units across Brazil).
Thanks for your reply Maíra. I find the idea of continuity of organizational culture, regardless of (what I would call) extreme disruption of/change in “external” discourse, intriguing. At the same time, from what I understand, Embrapa had a vested interest in maintaining its “sustainability” image in the context of the global backlash of boycotts and petitions to end trade with Brazil. Still, I think it could be really interesting to compare the relative continuity of Embrapa culture with what happened within ICMBio and IBAMA, which, as I’m sure you know, were completely gutted during Bolsonaro’s presidency.
Constanza: Thanks so much for your fascinating contextually-embedded analysis of the political economy of mining and water conflicts in Chile. If I am understanding correctly, your presentation was on using a particular type of methodology to examine shared patterns in socioenvironmental conflicts in Chile? Can you tell us a bit about your findings using this methodology?