Presentation Abstract

The analysis of environmental conflicts is a growing field also in Political Ecology. The studies focus on struggles between social, economic, and political actors about nature, but nature does not have an effect on the course of the conflict. However, several authors explored the effect of non-human entities on the emergence and development of conflicts. We want to contribute to this new line of inquiry with a conceptual approach. To bring non-human entities and societal actors together in the analysis we base our conceptual approach on the web of interrelations between non-human entities and societal actors, which is the research focus of Social Ecology. We conceptualize the web of interrelations as a hybrid sphere of the natural and societal sphere in a coupled social-ecological system. Non-human entities are for example animals, plants, rivers and mountains. They can form complex entities such as landscapes and ecosystems. Conflicts emerge from disturbances in the web of interrelations between non-human entities and societal actors, in case that confrontations or competition between social actors and non-human entities arise. For example, the competition between crops, pests and weeds lead to a human intervention with pesticides, what can provoke a confrontation between farmers, neighbors harmed by pesticide spraying, and environmentalists. An interspecies alliance for example between neighbors, environmentalists, weeds, pests can occur. The motivations of societal actors (values, interests) and non-human entities (needs) are key to understand conflicts. We propose a common vocabulary to describe these motivations. The conceptual approach is based on an extensive literature review.

Author biography

Markus Rauchecker received his doctorate in political science from the Free University of Berlin on conflicts over pesticide use in transgenic agriculture in Argentina.

Since 2020, he is working in the research unit Water Resources and Land Use at ISOE – Institute for Social-Ecological Research. His research focuses on environmental governance and environmental conflicts between stakeholders with regard to the subject areas (transgenic) agriculture, land use and biodiversity. His analyses are based on concepts of policy analysis, political geography and political ecology. Recently with Fanny Frick-Trzebitzky and other colleagues at ISOE he started working on the role of non-humans in environmental conflicts.

Presentation Abstract

My contribution is exploring how the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand can transition to more just and sustainable dairying futures. Dairy in Aotearoa is one of the nations most prized commodities and contributes a significant share to world dairy production and trade. Dairy milk from Aotearoa is enmeshed in extensive global trade networks, such as supplying powdered milk to major industrial food producers such as Nestle. One of my key research questions explores the opportunities for Aotearoa’s food production systems to transition away from animal farming towards alternative protein production with a focus on plant-based milk (such as Oat milk) and synthetic/cultured proteins. The research questions are set against the backdrop of the environmental impacts of livestock industries which are unprecedented in terms of the scale and effects from GHG emissions, pollution of waterways and biodiversity loss. To explore these issues, my paper will draw on theoretical perspectives from sustainability transitions, just transitions and multispecies justice to conceptualize alternative pathways of environmental and social sustainability for human and non-human others. Bringing non-human entities into the analysis is a key part of my project, particularly as existing transitions studies literature tends to focus on human interests (social, economic and environmental justice) with limited focus on how justice can be applied towards non-human others. The aim of my research is to identify possible policy interventions that can facilitate moving beyond intensive animal agricultural food production amidst the imminent challenges of our uncertain environmental future.

Author Biography

Milena Bojovic is a PhD candidate in the Discipline of Geography and Planning, in the School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research focuses on the future of the dairy industry in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing from transition studies, she is investigating how Aotearoa can transition away from intensive dairy production in just and sustainable ways for humans, non-humans and environments.

Presentation Abstract

This research respectfully involves Indigenous communities

Fresh water floodplains are subjected to various pressures, where the coexistence between different human activities and conservation can be complex or even conflictual. This research aims to analyze the influence of a non-human entity on collective action in a conservation conflict related to the reconciliation of land uses in a floodplain. To do so, we mobilized the frame analysis literature to investigate the processes involved with the conservation and restoration of natural habitats under pressure. We looked at how discursive diagnostic and strategies (both based on a non-human entity needs) evolved in time in order to bring more resonance (salience and credibility) among local stakeholders. Our findings are based on a case study located in lac Saint-Pierre (Québec, Canada), a UNESCO biosphere reserve and a RAMSAR conservation site, part of the St-Lawrence River Basin. In recent decades, lac Saint-Pierre has undergone many changes in its floodplain, notably through the conversion of perennial crops to intensive annual crops considered incompatible with yellow perch (Perca flavescens) ecological needs. Acting like a canary in a coal mine, yellow perch populations have suffered a pronounced decline since the 1990s to the point where Québec wildlife authorities instituted a moratorium in 2012 to maintain stocks. This moratorium generated economic and cultural impacts in the area. On the one hand, it fuelled a desire in the community to restore its wildlife habitats and increase water quality. On the other hand, conservation actions generated tensions between agriculture activities and conservation effort to restore yellow perch habitats. Using data gathered from interviews (2018 and 2021) as well reports and fact sheets from NGO, farmer union and government bodies, this research characterize lac Saint-Pierre social-ecological system. Based on framing analysis, we highlight the influence of yellow perch in the structuration of collective action and public decision-making geared toward the resolution of lac Saint-Pierre agriculture-wildlife conflict. In addition, results raised some blind spots that hinder farmers mobilization and the acceptability of certain strategies within local stakeholders.

Author Biography

Ann Lévesque is a PhD candidate at the University of Quebec in Outaouais (UQO). Based on the theoretical approaches of environmental justice and collective action, she seeks to highlight the different socio-ecological perspectives surrounding the cohabitation of agricultural land uses and those intended for the conservation and restoration of natural resources. Her presentation will focus on the preliminary results of her last chapter of the thesis.

Presentation Abstract 

In October 2013, around 200 protestors from the rural settlement Maidan in Kyrgyzstan clashed violently with the representatives of the exploration company as they brought in the first excavator to construct the mining infrastructure for the ‘Shambesai’ gold deposit. This paper is an attempt to understand the processes and practices that have led to this escalation and that continue to sustain Maidan’s rejection of the gold mine to date. Motivated by state and corporate assertions that attribute such actions primarily to material interests, we engage this resistance to gold extractivism in sociomaterial terms trying to understand more deeply the dynamics of ordinary citizens’ activism. Based on multi-stage interdisciplinary research, we trace and reconstruct the socionatural conditions and practices that have culminated in Maidan’s decade-long struggle to unmake gold as a resource on their territory. Focusing on resource materialities, their valuations and governance, we present an historico-geographical analysis of making and unmaking of a resource frontier. Against the backdrop of the extractive order that has prevailed in Kyrgyzstan over the last three decades, we understand Maidan’s struggle to be a form of situated institutional experimentation for shaping meaningful and just more-than-human socionatures.

Author biography

Beril Ocaklı is a critical geographer and institutional economist. She is a research associate at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) and an affiliated researcher at IRI THESys of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In her interdisciplinary and multi-methodological research, Beril Ocaklı follows discourses and practices of modernity, governance and development through extractive infrastructure projects, above and below ground, along corridors and roads, in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. She is currently leading the BMBF-funded project China, the EU and Economic Development in Eastern Europe and Eurasia at ZOiS.

Presentation Abstract

Which role plays ecology in shaping the possibilities for contentious actions and politics? We discuss this question through a review of social movement theory, agrarian studies, and com-mons management, as well as through empirical cases of protest found to be significantly shaped by more-than-human-natures. We identify (at least) seven ecological characteristics that may co-produce opportunities for contentious action and politics: (i) vulnerabilities in ecological cycles, enabling the sabotage of unjust environments, (ii) ecological potentials, permitting the creation of alternatives, (iii) interspecies relationships, facilitating resilience and autonomy, (iv) ecological invisibility, allowing for covert actions and everyday forms of protests, (v) ecological visibility, facilitating overt claim-making, (vi) ecological resources to support and finance mobilizations, and (vii) ecological connectivity among non-human forces and natures, creating needs and opportunities for alliances among humans. Possibilities for change arising from these characteristics of more-than-human natures are not static, but co-produced and depend upon how people perceive, experience, and ultimately interact with them in specific contexts. In the context of global agrarian and environmental change, we argue that further examination of the dynamic interactions between human and more-than-human processes may provide us with a more complete and rich understanding of political ecological opportunities shaping contentious actions and politics.

Author  Biography

Arnim Scheidel is a research fellow at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), and a member of the Coordination Group of the global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), a platform that documents environmental conflicts and resistance movements worldwide. He has an interdisciplinary background with a bachelor’s in biology, a master’s in social ecology, and a PhD in ecological economics. His research focuses on the political ecology of development, environmental justice, and agrarian and environmental change.

Presentation Abstract

Wildlife conservation in northern Kenya is caught up in several conflicts. The war on poaching, conflicting visions about how wildlife should be conserved, and conservancies get caught up in existing conflict dynamics. Rapid response teams of the Northern Rangelands Trust, for example, not only patrol to prevent poaching, but also respond in case of cattle theft, inter-communal violence, and road banditry. A large number of rangers are enrolled as Police Reservists, allowing them to carry arms while filling a law enforcement vacuum created by low police presence.

This paper explores the role of this non-human entity, the gun, by studying its circulation. Circu-lation is not just the physical movement of a gun from A to B, but also refers to transformation: guns as things do not have agential capacity like humans, acting with intent, but Science and Technology Studies and anthropologists have shown how guns do things to the societies and places they circulate through, changing social relations and the purpose and meaning of “guns” themselves. Apart from spatial, a circulation analysis is also temporal, allowing me to connect different times into one analysis. How do colonial and end of Cold War dynamics for example relate to how contemporary conservation is organised?

Finally, the circulation of guns shows how they change the security landscape in northern Kenya through conservation. Moreover, this paper argues for a conceptual understanding of the “weaponisation of conservancies”, illustrating how conservancies themselves become weapons in security provision.

Author Biography

Sara van der Hoeven is a PhD Candidate in Peace and Development at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. For her project, she researches how wildlife conservation is used to address issues beyond conservation. In particular (national) security issues, such as livestock theft.

Presentation Abstract

Peace theory and those who work in conflict resolution embrace well-managed conflicts and conflict creation as a healthy process for conflict transformation. Hence, peace is defined not by the presence or absence of conflict, but by violence. More specifically, the pursuit of negative peace is the cessation of direct, physical violence, while positive peace is freedom from physical, structural, and cultural violence (Galtung 1969). In a more-than-human world, peace theory provides a framing through which to understand the violence of human and non-human interactions that may or may not constitute socio-ecological conflicts. This invites us to contemplate the value of defining socio-ecological conflicts, to re-evaluate approaches to managing human-wildlife conflict (the predominant framing for conflicts integrating human and non-human species), and the integration of non-human species in the analysis of environmental conflicts (typically perceived as social conflicts over the environment or natural resources). It also challenges us to consider whether peace theory, developed primarily to understand conflicts between people and states, is appropriate for more-than-human relations.

Author Biography

Dr. Elaine (Lan Yin) Hsiao is an Assistant Professor in the School of Peace and Conflict Studies at Kent State University and Chairs the Theme on Environment and Peace of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Commission on Environment, Economics and Social Policy (CEESP). Much of her work seeks to address conflicts in conservation (e.g., human-protected area conflicts, human-wildlife conflicts), conservation in places of conflict (i.e., conflict-sensitive and conflict-resilient conservation), and conflict resolution through conservation (environmental peacebuilding).