Search

To understand the broader epistemological and ontological politics of human dimensions of climate change, this review adopts a political ecology approach, informed by Science and Technology Studies concepts and research on multiple ontologies. We are particularly interested in assessing critical approaches to climate change knowledge as related to adaptation policies. The review addresses three specific areas where more critical engagement could help move debates about knowledge politics in human dimensions research forward in fruitful ways: first, discourse and a focus on the language used to talk about and reflect on human dimensions of climate change; second, co‐production and the troubling proliferation of depoliticized “instrumental” co‐productions of knowledge for adaptation; and third, the emerging literature on multiple ontologies exposing multiple enactments of climate change processes. We review each of these areas of literature, highlighting where more direct engagement with epistemological, ontological, and ethical questions is underway. In doing so, we subject the knowledge and practices that underlie dominant understandings of climate change to critical political ecology scrutiny. This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different intellectual strands within political ecology have analyzed changing forms of property institutions and the commons in particular. While engaging these topics from a number of different perspectives, they share common understandings of property rights as relational, contested, and shaped by broader political economies. What is less acknowledged is that political ecologists have, in different ways, studied the hybrid and mixed forms of property institutions that are often concealed or ignored in the tripartite division of private, common, and national properties that dominates institutionalist literatures. These theoretical commitments and research experiences are well-suited for understanding the proliferation of hybrid property institutions associated with neoliberal forms of governance. By briefly reviewing their synergies, this report seeks to bring these diverse strands in conversation. It concludes by highlighting useful avenues of political ecological research and practice that are raised by commoning scholarship and activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Mixed methods, multi-level study of recent increase in Trans-Saharan migration (TSH). • Family/individual migrant interviews performed in ten communities in southwest Niger. • Rainfall deviations nor perceptions of rainfall constraints explain timing of TSH. • TSH households are not more food insecure but are larger with more male adults. • TSH is explained less by triggers but personal histories of struggle and hopelessness. Increased Trans-Saharan migration over the past decade has spurred arguments that climate change or generic conditions of poverty drive West Africans to take this risky journey. These diagnoses are made with little empirical investigation of the conditions facing migrants and their families at home. This article reports on mixed-methods research conducted in southwestern Niger within ten communities where Trans-Saharan migration has recently begun, with interviews conducted at community, household and individual scales. Interviews were conducted within 331 households with or without members involved in Trans-Saharan migration. Individual interviews were also conducted with 67 returned Trans-Saharan migrants and 100 community youth who represent potential Trans-Saharan migrants. We find no evidence that new rainfall fluctuations influence the onset of Trans-Saharan migration. Study communities and migrant families within them are not poorer nor more food insecure than other communities or non-migrant families. The sole difference is that migrant families have more adult men. Interviews with returned Trans-Saharan migrants point to a mix of individual and family motivations for embarking on risky journeys north. A key factor is desperation – driven not by short-term scarcities but by a hopelessness due to life-long experiences of crushing poverty, past periods of recurrent drought, soil impoverishment, and political voicelessness. They go, despite knowing the grave abuses and risks they may face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report provides an update to Peter Walker’s 2005 report that questioned the degree to which political ecologists substantively incorporate ecology in their analyses. Since the publication of this article, a range of scholars have characterized political ecology as unengaged with ecology. This report documents a range of engagements with ecology (or the nonhuman biophysical world more generally) by work strongly influenced by or aligned with political ecology in the realms of environmental politics and the political economy of environmental change. This brief review demonstrates that, while representing a minority of political ecology scholarship, work variously engaging with ecology remains an active and fertile area. The report concludes with a cautionary note that portrayals of political ecology as inhospitable to ecological engagement could actually lead to an erosion of such scholarship. Such an erosion would have severe consequences for the human-and-environment field more generally since political ecology (along with cultural ecology) remains the field’s major place-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the involvement of Political Ecology in policy development and conservation. Topics discussed includes role of political ecologists in policy forums and their impact in formulation of policy, common conflation of participation and influence within the international development and conservation communities and problems faced by those political ecologists who seek to influence communities.

Resilience is an ecological term that has proven to be exceedingly malleable as it has grown in usage across a range of scholarly and policy communities. Despite its malleability, resilience does introduce particular ideas of society-nature relations into scholarly and policy discourse. In this political ecology progress report, I explore the relationship between political ecology and resilience thinking. I first explore common features of the intellectual histories of resilience thinking and political ecology. Despite parallel and common influences and reactions, the two fields diverge significantly along two dimensions: in their normative commitments and adherence to systems thinking. Given these divergences, I argue that intellectual engagement between these fields will prove to be most productive if circumscribed around land-use ecology – an area of inquiry important to both fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In dryland areas of the Africa, livestock play important economic roles as commodities, wealth stores, producers of products, and agents of environmental change. Conventional depictions of livestock economies in this region have focused (in support or against) on the need for greater engagement of livestock producers with markets supplying meat to urban areas. This paper argues this singular focus has led analysts to ignore two important aspects of livestock economies: livestock as a preferred store of wealth across a wide range of social groups and the need for specialized labor to manage these livestock across open pastures to maintain their productivity and limit their negative environmental impacts. In the West African Sahel, the capital-like nature of livestock wealth has become more clear with a growing fraction of the region’s livestock owned by investors with little connection to livestock husbandry. Livestock investments are maintained on a day-to-day basis by hired herders who facilitate access to ephemeral pastures and water. A particular concern is the changing geographies of livestock ownership and the herding labor in relationship to regional pastures (to economic and environmental ends). This relationship will be explored using the case study of the Maasina region of central Mali – a historically important livestock region, which is now undergoing significant labor emigration. Building from a long-term ethnographic engagement with local livestock owners and herders, the results of ownership surveys of livestock herds across a 14-year period and interviews of urban-based emigrants from the study area about investment decisions will be used to analyze the changing geographies of livestock investment and herding labor in the Maasina. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Conflicts associated with natural resource use are common in rural areas of Africa. Political ecology''s analytical and methodological foci on these conflicts is shared by other quite different schools of thought that strongly influence policies on environment and development. The influential “environmental security” and “common property management” perspectives generally conceptualize resource-related conflicts as scarcity-driven while political ecologists have made major contributions toward more multidimensional, complex views about the genesis of resource-related conflict. This paper explores two moral dimensions of resource conflict. First, it continues the tradition within political ecology of questioning popular notions of resource conflict. It does so by analyzing farmer–herder conflict in the Sahel—a type of resource-related conflict that seemingly fits the view that conflict is generated from increased competition over a dwindling pool of resources. By seriously engaging with the materiality of agropastoral production, this paper illuminates the complex relationships between political interests, moralities, and resource access that underlie these conflicts. Second, this paper considers the ethics of how we portray resource conflict. In the present policy context in Africa, overly-simplistic treatments of resource conflict by political ecologists or others may unintentionally support programs that are likely to negatively impact the human subjects of research, conservation or development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In dryland Africa, development attention has shifted toward community resource management projects. The concurrence of environmental degradation, resource conflict, and "weak" resource management institutions is seen by project managers as evidence for the failure of local institutions to govern resource use. This article demonstrates that such diagnoses are error prone and are often logically reducible to the simple advocation of the formalization of resource access. "Community based" projects, such as those following the Gestion de Terroirs approach in Sudano - Sahelian West Africa, often attempt to improve resource management by spatially delimiting appropriate land uses, strengthening the community's exclusionary powers, and clarifying specific claims to village resources. Based on research within agropastoral areas in Mali and Niger, this article argues that rigid adherence to such development templates runs the risk of increasing local ecological and economic vulnerabilities. Multiscaled, comanagement approaches that better utilize informal networks and political institutions to mediate resource access are proposed as alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]