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Despite recent attention to “frontier” green economies and the governance of emerging ecosystem services, the specific division of labour in these economies has been little studied. As many such initiatives are in the global South, labour’s marginality potentially contributes to the existing precariousness of those who are more often identified as “participants”. This article examines the roles and vulnerabilities of these actors: the carbon counters, species identifiers, GIS mappers, tree planters and others operating in the shadows. We draw on current understandings of labour and precarity to examine the geographical contours of an apparent and emerging “eco‐precariat”: a socio‐economically diverse group of labourers that address the volatile demands of an ever‐expanding environmental service‐based economy. We illustrate our analysis drawing on examples from a Blue Carbon project in Kenya, ecosystem services project in the Philippines, and REDD+ scheme in Cambodia. We use these examples to theorise the nature of labour in these frontier economies and put forward a framework for analysing the eco‐precariat. We highlight the need to understand the precarity and marginalisation potentially created by this green division of labour in the provision of new ecosystem products and services. This framework contributes to ongoing analyses of labour as a central part of the green economy discourse and to larger discussions in the geographies of labour literature around the future of work in the global South and beyond.

Pesticide exposure in Ecuador's banana industry reflects political economic and ecological processes that interact across scales to affect human health. We use this case study to illustrate opportunities for applying political ecology of health scholarship in the burgeoning field of global health. Drawing on an historical literature review and ethnographic data collected in Ecuador's El Oro province, we present three main areas where a political ecological approach can enrich global health scholarship: perceptive characterization of multi-scalar and ecologically entangled pathways to health outcomes; critical analysis of discursive dynamics such as competing scalar narratives; and appreciation of the environment-linked subjectivities and emotions of people experiencing globalized health impacts. Rapprochement between these fields may also provide political ecologists with access to valuable empirical data on health outcomes, venues for engaged scholarship, and opportunities to synthesize numerous insightful case studies and discern broader patterns.La exposición a agroquímicos en la industria bananera del Ecuador evidencia procesos de ecología y economía política interactuando en diferentes escalas y que terminan afectando a la salud humana. Este estudio de caso ilustra como la ecología política de la salud puede aportar al creciente campo de la salud global. A partir de una revisión histórica de literatura y de datos etnográficos recopilados en la provincia de El Oro, Ecuador, presentamos tres áreas principales donde la perspectiva de ecología política puede enriquecer el campo de la salud global: caracterización perspicaz de trayectorias multi‐escalares y ecológicamente relacionadas que afectan a la salud; valoración crítica de dinámicas discursivas tales como las narrativas escalares contrapuestas; y apreciación de subjetividades y emociones relacionadas con el ambiente entre personas que viven impactos de salud global. El acercamiento entre estos dos campos también puede proporcionar a los ecólogos políticos acceso a valiosos datos empíricos sobre salud, espacios para la praxis y oportunidades para sintetizar numerosos estudios de casos perspicaces para discernir patrones más amplios.

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Ciências do Ambiente, pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia Environmental conflicts have traditionally been approached from several scientific fields. However, the different theoretical and empirical developments have proceeded in parallel, with often competing descriptive languages. Furthermore, they tend to focus on resolution, while neglecting the role of conflicts as an expression of groups facing social and ecological injustices perpetrated by the hegemony. This research attempted to build a politically useful understanding of why and how environmental conflicts appear, through interdisciplinary bridging and the avoidance of the post-political hegemony. By focusing on an ex-post historical analysis of the conflicts against eucalyptus plantations in Portugal in the late 1980s, it attempted to identify patterns and dynamics that relate to conflicts. Theories were anchored along the concepts of social metabolism and, more particularly, the framework of multiple scale integrated assessment of societal and ecological metabolism (MuSIASEM). An adaptation of MuSIASEM for conflict analysis was iteratively developed with the empirical analysis of the political ecology of the case study. During the pre-analytical phase, an open information space is developed, comprising environmental conflicts literature, as well as the environmental history and institutional analysis of the case study. The information space is subjected to successive compressions before reaching a relevant structure of the problem. A storyteller is defined according to the relative power imbalances of the conflict situation. Theoretical pathways are created to serve as auxiliaries for the formalization process and for structuring the analysis. The analysis process navigates through the formalizations within each theoretical pathway. Impredicative loop analysis (ILA) is used to expose tensions and constraints generated by emerging hypercycles or clashing metabolic profiles. Finally, the results are subjected to a dialectical discussion, allowing the communication between different pathways. Dialectical discussion along the pathways is particularly useful for promoting interdisciplinary dialogue. The political ecology analysis of the case study has revealed that the higher intensity of conflicts in the late 1980s was due to a series of factors. The immediate cause was resource xii scarcity, which led to a speculative race for lands that included land grabbing strategies. The growing environmental movement in Portugal has provided the rural and peasant identities (the storytellers), with new languages that empowered their struggles. Institutional changes contributed to conflicts attenuation in the 1990s. However, a growing global consumption of paper continues to push the frontiers of industrial forestry around the world. Latin America and Eastern Europe have increased their peripheral position in the world-system of the paper industry, as suppliers of cheap pulp and land for fast-growth tree plantations. Packaging, as a main end-use of paper, can be used to hide from the consumer the impacts of production. This end-use of paper might intensify unequal ecological exchange in different areas and commodities, while being reinforced by it. In this context, conflicts might lead to a relocation of impacts, leaving the hegemony untouched.