Third World Political Ecology

An Introduction

Sinead Bailey, Raymond Bryant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134798032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

An effective response to contemporary environmental problems demands an approach that integrates political, economic and ecological issues.
Third World Political Ecology provides an introduction to an exciting new research field that aims to develop an integrated understanding of the political economy of environmental change in the Third World. The authors review the historical development of the field, explain what is distinctive about Third World political ecology, and suggest areas for future development. Clarifying the essentially politicised condition of environmental change today, the authors explore the role of various actors - states, multilateral institutions, businesses, environmental non-governmental organisations, poverty-stricken farmers, shifting cultivators and other 'grassroots' actors - in the development of the Third World's politicised environment.
Third World Political Ecology is the first major attempt to explain the development and characteristics of environmental problems that plague parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Drawing on examples from throughout the Third World, the book will be of interest to all those who wish to understand the political and economic bases of the Third World's current predicament.

1
AN EMERGING RESEARCH FIELD

For all its ‘extraordinary vitality’ (Peet and Watts, 1993:242), the origins and development of Third World political ecology remain poorly understood. Scholars adopting a political ecology perspective have rarely paused to consider the history of the field or its disciplinary location. Rather, the emphasis has been on the empirical application of a broadly defined political economy to the political and ecological problems of the Third World. Yet to understand the significance of research in any field of inquiry is partly to appreciate the development of that field. This chapter presents an overview of the origins and development, disciplinary location and approaches to Third World political ecology.

ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT

The field of Third World political ecology originated in the early 1970s at a time when human—environmental interaction was coming under close public and scholarly scrutiny, especially in the First World. A paper by Wolf (1972) is seen as one of the earliest works in what would eventually become Third World political ecology, but no ‘classic’ work marked the advent of the field. Rather, it developed slowly in light of research developments in other fields, especially cultural ecology and radical development geography. Indeed, until the publication of Watts (1983a), Blaikie (1985), Bunker (1985) and Hecht (1985) the field could scarcely be said to have existed at all.

There are several reasons for the slow development of Third World political ecology in the 1970s. To begin with, the term ‘political ecology’ had strong negative connotations for many on the political left during that decade as a result of its association with the work of Ehrlich (1968), Hardin (1968), Heilbroner (1974) and Ophuls (1977). These ‘eco-doomsayers’ predicted that the world faced imminent social and environmental catastrophe due to runaway population growth (Third World) and consumption levels (First World). They argued that an authoritarian global state or ‘Leviathan’ was needed to enforce ‘limits to growth’ (Meadows et al., 1972; Ophuls, 1977; see also Chapter 3). Although this school of thought has been usually known under the name ‘neo-Malthusianism’ (for its anxiety over the population question), its penchant for drastic political prescriptions to solve the world’s environmental crisis led to its work also being described from time to time as political ecology. The critique of such ‘political ecology’ was mounted on the left by Enzensberger (1974) and Harvey (1974), but occurred right across the political spectrum (e.g. Beckerman, 1974). By the late 1970s, the work of this ‘political ecology school’ had been largely discredited, and attention thereafter turned—via a ‘red-green’ debate (Weston, 1986; Ryle, 1988)—to the possibility of a convergence between a ‘radicalised’ political ecology and socialism. The convergence issue has yet to be sorted out in First World political ecology (Atkinson, 1991; Pepper, 1993; Dobson, 1995). However, what is important to this book’s discussion of the development of Third World political ecology is the association of Ehrlich and company with the term ‘political ecology’ in the 1970s. In effect, this association decreased the likelihood during that decade at least that radical environmental scholarship dealing with the Third World would pass under the political ecology label.

And yet, ironically, the work of Ehrlich et al. indirectly influenced the development of a distinctly ‘Third World’ and radical political ecology. To begin with, work in the field was shaped by the reaction to the simplistic claims about population growth and environmental degradation in the Third World that were at the heart of neo-Malthusianism. The latter was in effect a boon to serious scholarship on Third World environmental change because, however misguided it may have been intellectually, the neo-Malthusian argument nonetheless publicised the importance of such change, thereby prompting questions about causation left unanswered in their work.

That work also prompted a growing interest in the connections between politics and environmental change that is at the core of Third World political ecology today. An important criticism of the neo-Malthusians was that, notwithstanding their association with the term ‘political ecology’, there was little that was truly ‘political’ in their analysis (Walker, 1988; Adams, 1990). Ehrlich et al. stood accused of ignoring the political obstacles to, and implications of, the global authoritarian state that they argued was needed to solve the world’s environmental crisis. It was only a small step from this critique to a recognition of the need to understand environmental change in the Third World itself as a political process (cf. Cockburn and Ridgeway, 1979; Yapa, 1979).

Neo-Malthusianism also facilitated the emergence of radical development geography, a sub-discipline of geography that has been particularly influential in the development of Third World political ecology. Although radical development geography was part of a larger revision of geography beginning in the late 1960s, it gained momentum in the 1970s partly as a result of its long-running campaign against neo-Malthusianism. For example, work by Buchanan (1973), Darden (1975), Lowe and Worboys (1978), and Wisner et al. (1982) published in the journal Antipode attacked diverse aspects of the neo-Malthusian viewpoint, and was part of a broader assault on mainstream environmental research for its neglect of questions derived from political economy (Corbridge, 1986; Adams, 1990).

A sense of what such questions might mean for research was embodied notably in work by radical geographers on ‘natural’ hazards and disasters. O’Keefe (1975) and Wisner (1976, 1978) initiated a process of inquiry into the interaction of political-economic structures with ecological processes that culminated in alternative research agenda published on the subject of disasters and hazards in the early 1980s (Susman et al., 1983; Watts, 1983b). These agenda were focused on disasters and hazards, but were simultaneously a wider comment about the need for work on the political economy of environmental change in the Third World. As such, they were an influential strand in the development of Third World political ecology, a point acknowledged in key political-ecology texts (e.g. Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987).

A separate strand in the evolution of Third World political ecology relates to work on environmental topics in anthropology during the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural ecology (or ecological anthropology) sought to explain the links between cultural form and environmental management practices in terms of adaptive behaviour within a closed ecosystem (Bennett, 1976; Hardesty, 1977; Orlove, 1980; Ellen, 1982). However, the emphasis on energy flow modelling and systems analysis resulted in a general unwillingness or inability to see that the local-level cultural and ecological communities being studied formed part of (and were influenced by) a much wider set of political and economic structures (Peet and Watts, 1993; Simmonds, 1993). This work used ‘ecology’ to emphasise the homeostatic and apolitical nature of human—environmental interaction (Adams, 1990).

However, cultural ecology had become the subject of growing criticism by the early 1980s. Hjort (1982) and Grossman (1984), for example, emphasised the need to couch anthropological insights about human— environmental interaction in the context of an appreciation of the wider political and economic structures that influence activity in any given locality —what Vayda (1983) termed ‘progressive contextualization’. The integration of anthropological-style local research with political-economic structural analysis thereafter became a key concern of political ecologists (e.g. Hecht, 1985; Little and Horowitz, 1987; Bassett, 1988).

Political ecologists seeking to integrate place- and non-place-based analysis turned mainly to neo-Marxism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The latter was heterogeneous in nature and encompassed dependency theory (e.g. Frank, Cardoso, Faletta), world-systems theory (e.g. Wallerstein) and modes of production theory (e.g. Rey, Meillassoux). This work has been reviewed extensively elsewhere (Taylor, 1979; Peet, 1991; Hettne, 1995), but what is important to note here is that neo-Marxism was at its most influential in the social sciences at a time when many political ecologists sought a radical theory to inform their contextual analyses. To be sure, resource depletion had long been a theme in Marxist scholarship, even in a Third World context (Frank, 1967; Caldwell, 1977). However, Redclift (1984:13) rightly notes that ‘Marxist writing about the development process has accorded a secondary role to the natural environment’—a point explored subsequently in debates about ecology and Marxism (O’Connor, 1988; Benton, 1989; Grundemann, 1991; Castree, 1995). Yet, for many political ecologists writing on the Third World in the first half of the 1980s, neo-Marxism offered a means to link local social oppression and environmental degradation to wider political and economic concerns relating to production questions (Blaikie, 1985; Bunker, 1985).

During the first phase of Third World political ecology, which can be said to have run from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s, scholars resorted to neo-Marxism as a way of avoiding the perceived apoliticism of work by many cultural ecologists and neo-Malthusian writers (Table 1.1). Watts (1983a), Blaikie (1985) and Bunker (1985), for example, situated their studies on northern Nigeria, soil erosion, and the Amazon, respectively, in a structural framework informed by neo-Marxist ideas. Although these studies provided rich empirical insights, the emphasis on structure tended at times to downplay the ability of politically or economically weaker grassroots actors, such as small-scale farmers or shifting cultivators, to resist their marginal status. However, the neo-Marxist basis of Third World political ecology at this time was nowhere more evident than in work by Cliffe and Moorsom (1979), Hedlund (1979) and O’Brien (1985) published in the Review of African Political Economy which explained local environmental conflicts in terms of class relations and surplus extraction linked to global capitalist production. The role of local politics in mediating resource access and conflict was thereby often largely neglected, and discussion of different actors (i.e. states, businesses, farmers) verged at times on the simplistic (Moore, 1993). The state, for example, was typically seen as being little more than an agent of capital, thereby obscuring both the potential autonomy of this actor vis-à-vis capital, and the diversity of bureaucratic interests that the state often encompasses (see Chapter 3).

Concerns over the influence of deterministic neo-Marxism on the field’s development led in the late 1980s to the start of a second phase in Third World political ecology that has drawn on a more eclectic range of theoretical sources. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), Hecht and Cockburn (1989) and Guha (1989) initiated this process with work on land degradation, the Amazon and India, respectively, but were soon followed by a flood of studies by other scholars (e.g. Peluso, 1992; Neumann, 1992; various articles in Watts and Peet, 1993 {revised and updated as Peet and Watts, 1996a}, and in Neumann and Schroeder, 1995) all of which sought to demonstrate a more complex understanding of how power relations mediate human—environmental interaction than was hitherto the case. In doing so, political ecologists have linked their research to a diversity of theoretical literatures that defy easy classification. Thus, scholars have drawn on neo-Weberian theorising in political sociology (Skocpol, 1985; Mann, 1986) to explore the implications for environmental conflict of the potentially autonomous state (Peluso, 1992; Bryant, 1997a). The potential power of grassroots actors such as poor farmers and shifting cultivators in environmental conflicts has been emphasised with reference to the concepts of avoidance

behaviour (Adas, 1981) and everyday resistance (Scott, 1985), as part of an attempt to link political ecology to developments in social movements theorising (Guha, 1989; Peluso, 1992). Scholars influenced by household studies (Guyer and Peters, 1987; Berry, 1989) and ecofeminist writings (Agarwal, 1992; Jackson, 1993) have examined how power relations within the household influence the control of land, natural resources, labour and capital (Carney, 1993; Schroeder, 1993). Finally, and more recently, work has started to draw upon ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘discourse theory’ (Said, 1978; Bhabha, 1994; Escobar, 1995) to map the ways in which knowledge and power may interrelate so as to mediate political-ecological outcomes (Fairhead and Leach, 1995; Fortmann, 1995; Jewitt, 1995; Peet and Watts, 1996b).

Table 1.1 Phases of Third World political ecology

By the mid-1990s, scholars seemed largely content to explore the politics of the locality as the field moved away from ‘political ecology’s structural legacy’ (Moore, 1993:381). Yet we would argue that this trend represents an over-reaction to earlier developments. Instead, we suggest that, in an era of ‘globalisation’, Third World political ecology must develop ‘rigorous analyses which link local level production processes and decision making with the larger political economy to explain these different experiences’ (Bassett, 1988:469)— keeping in mind, all the while, the need for contingency and flexibility in explanation (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987).

The preceding overview has explored briefly the origins and development of Third World political ecology. However, to appreciate fully the development trajectory of the field, and its potential for future growth, it is necessary to consider next how the field relates to contiguous environmental research fields.

MAPPING ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH

The development of Third World political ecology is part of a wider process of change that has witnessed the emergence of various environmental research fields in the social sciences and humanities since the 1960s. These fields reflect diverse disciplinary interests and concerns, a detailed discussion of which is beyond the remit of this book. Rather, it is instructive here to map selectively this environmental research so as better to appreciate the disciplinary location and significance of Third World political ecology. The point is not to suggest in doing so that environmental research necessarily falls neatly into one disciplinary category or another. Instead, it is simply an attempt to clarify key traits of Third World political ecology through comparative discussion.

Table 1.2 sets out the key characteristics of selected environmental research fields in relation to Third World political ecology. Four aspects to the information contained in this table merit comment here. First, Table 1.2 illustrates the uneven treatment of issues of Third World environmental change by the different research fields. The prominence of cultural ecology (and ecological anthropology) is to be expected given anthropology’s traditional Third World focus (Croll and Parkin, 1992). Human ecology, with long-standing links to geography (e.g. Eyre and Jones, 1967; Whyte, 1986), is also relatively strong in terms of Third World research. More surprising, perhaps, is the relative neglect of Third World issues by the other major research fields. Environmental history, to be sure, provides coverage of the Third World, but its primary focus is still on human— environmental interaction in North America and Europe (Worster, 1988). Environmental economics also tends to privilege First World environmental problems over those of the Third World (Pearce et al., 1989). Environmental management has also been largely concerned with First World problems (O’Riordan, 1995), as has environmental politics (Young, 1992; Garner, 1996).

The virtual absence of environmental politics from Third World research has been especially significant in light of the traditionally apolitical nature of much Third World research. In effect, what little research that has been conducted on environment and politics in the Third World has tended to pass uncritically as political-ecology research. However, this situation is now beginning to change as political scientists turn in growing numbers to Third World environmental topics (e.g. Guimaraes, 1991; Hurrell, 1992).

The question thereby raised relates to the difference between Third World political ecology and environmental politics. We would suggest that the main difference between the two resides in the contrasting theoretical and empirical concerns that arise from their different disciplinary ‘homes’. Environmental politics is a research field within political science that applies traditional political questions to environmental matters. It thus examines green political theory, the impact of green issues on the formal political process, the state’s role in environmental management, and global environmental politics (Young, 1992;

Notes: (1) Third World=TW; First World=FW; Political Ecology=PE (2) Approximate date for emergence of the field

Dobson, 1995; Vogler and Imber, 1996). In contrast, Third World political ecology today resides primarily within geography (see below), and explores the political dimensions of human—environmental interaction. Such an exploration overlaps to some extent with selected concerns in environmental politics, notably with regard to a shared interest in state environmental management practices (see also Conclusion). Nonetheless, political ecology encompasses a wider understanding of ‘politics’ than is traditionally found in environmental politics. In effect, the former addresses a diversity of non-state political interests and activities in ‘civil society’ that tend to be neglected by the latter. A concern with the spatial aspects of human—environmental interaction also tends to set political ecology apart from environmental politics. Above all, political ecology assesses the implications of a ‘politicised environment’ (elaborated in Chapter 2), while environmental politics only considers the environment in so far as it intrudes on the formal political process.

Table 1.2 Key characteristics of selected environmental research fields (in relation to Third World political ecology)

Second, Table 1.2 suggests that Third World political ecology falls predominantly within geography, but it has as yet to set down firm roots in that discipline. This chapter has already noted the strong influence of radical development geography on Third World political ecology, and the field also resonates well with the sub-disciplines of political geography (Dalby, 1992) and industrial geography (Muldavin, 1996). Not surprisingly, therefore, many political ecologists are trained and/or based in this discipline (e.g. Adams, Bailey, Bassett, Bebbington, Blaikie, Brookfield, Bryant, Carney, Grossman, Hirsch, Jewitt, Jarosz, Muldavin, Rangan, Rigg, Schroeder, Stott, Swyngedouw, Watts, Zimmerer). However, we have also highlighted the influence of anthropology (via cultural ecology) on Third World political ecology. That influence is reflected in the fact that a number of political ecologists have had links to anthropology (e.g. Colchester, Hecht, Horowitz, Little, Moore, Schmink) or the contiguous discipline of sociology (e.g. Bunker, Guha, Peluso, Redclift). Thus, Third World political ecology can be characterised as being a geography-based research field that nonetheless maintains strong links to anthropology and sociology. The field’s links to the latter two disciplines have undoubtedly sharpened the empirical insights of Third World political ecology. However, these links may also have delayed recognition of Third World political ecology as an emerging field within geography itself by a geography profession unsure as to whether it is ‘bona fide geography’. In this regard, Third World political ecology’s disciplinary status is somewhat akin to that of environmental management, human ecology and global ecology—all affiliated to geography to a greater or lesser extent, but with important li...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• THIRD WORLD POLITICAL ECOLOGY
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: AN EMERGING RESEARCH FIELD
• 2: A POLITICISED ENVIRONMENT
• 3: THE STATE
• 4: MULTILATERAL INSTITUTIONS
• 5: BUSINESS
• 6: ENVIRONMENTAL NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANISATIONS
• 7: GRASSROOTS ACTORS
• CONCLUSION
• A GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
• BIBLIOGRAPHY