Political ecology

Political ecology is an interdisciplinary field that examines the relationships between environmental change and political, economic, and social factors. It challenges apolitical or purely ecological interpretations of environmental issues by foregrounding power, inequality, and historical context. Political ecology integrates methods and theories from the ecological sciences, geography, anthropology, political economy, and development studies to analyse how environmental processes are shaped by human institutions and how, in turn, environmental change influences social and political dynamics.

Origins

The term political ecology first appeared in 1935 in Frank Thone’s article “Nature Rambling: We Fight for Grass,” although it remained loosely defined for several decades. The modern field began to crystallise in the 1970s and 1980s through the work of scholars including Eric R. Wolf, Michael Watts, Susanna Hecht, and Piers Blaikie. Wolf’s 1972 article “Ownership and Political Ecology” reframed local ecological practices within wider systems of power, while Blaikie’s 1985 study on soil erosion located environmental degradation in political and economic structures rather than in the behaviour of small-scale farmers.
Distinct intellectual traditions contributed to the field’s development. Anglo-American political ecology emerged from development geography and cultural ecology, while Latin American ecología política and French écologie politique brought critical political-economic and historical perspectives. Early political ecology typically focused on the Global South, examining how colonialism, development policies, and economic restructuring shaped environmental conditions and resource access.

Core assumptions and approaches

Despite its broad scope, political ecology rests on several commonly accepted assumptions, articulated by Raymond L. Bryant and Sinéad Bailey:

• Environmental change is not socially neutral: its impacts are unevenly distributed due to political, economic, and social inequalities.
• Environmental change reshapes power relations: alterations in resource availability and access affect existing political and economic structures.
• Environmental governance and conflict reflect broader inequalities: environmental issues often reveal and reinforce structural marginalisation.

The field is simultaneously analytical and normative. Beyond explaining how inequalities shape environmental outcomes, political ecology seeks to highlight alternatives that are less coercive, less exploitative, and more sustainable.
Its studies therefore contribute to policy debates by revealing how decisions about resource use intersect with local livelihoods, governance systems, and socio-economic pressures.

Scope and influences

Political ecology has evolved significantly since its emergence. Early scholarship drew heavily on ecological sciences and systems theory, examining how political forces influenced environmental outcomes. Through the 1980s and 1990s, structuralist political-economy approaches—often inspired by neo-Marxist analyses—dominated the field.
From the 1990s onward, post-structuralist influences broadened its scope. Scholars began to focus more on discourse, identity, and the politics of knowledge, analysing how environmental narratives are constructed and mobilised. This expanded focus at times blurred the boundary between political ecology and environmental politics, but it also enriched the field’s capacity to address environmental issues as cultural and ideological as well as material.
Political ecology draws extensively from cultural ecology while critiquing its earlier emphasis on equilibrium and adaptation. By contrast, political ecology foregrounds the destabilising effects of political economy, emphasising how power asymmetries create vulnerability and maladaptation.

Political ecology and political economy

Political ecology is closely linked to political economy, which historically analysed how economic systems shape social and political order. Thinkers such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Thomas Malthus influenced its foundations. Political ecology extends political economy by demonstrating how environmental processes influence and are influenced by economic and political structures.
Eric Wolf’s work situated local cultures within global capitalist networks, challenging the notion of isolated or static societies. Yet earlier political economy tended to overlook environmental constraints. Conversely, cultural ecology emphasised ecological adaptation but underplayed political-economic forces. Political ecology bridges this divide by analysing both ecological processes and power relations.

Areas of study and methodological orientations

Political ecology covers a wide array of topics, including:

• land degradation and marginalisation
• environmental conflict and resource struggles
• conservation politics and protected-area governance
• climate vulnerability and adaptation
• environmental identities and social movements
• the political dimensions of agriculture, forestry, and extractive industries

Some researchers foreground political-economic structures, such as Michael Watts’s analysis of famines in northern Nigeria, which highlighted colonial legacies and market constraints rather than drought alone. Others focus on access and control, exploring how institutions and discourses shape who benefits from environments.

Relationship to anthropology and geography

Political ecology is strongly rooted in both anthropology and geography. It aligns with anthropology through its ethnographic attention to local everyday practices and cultural meanings, while geography contributes spatial analysis and concern for landscapes, regions, and environmental processes.
Applications differ between the disciplines. Geographers often emphasise how institutions, markets, and states influence access to resources, whereas anthropologists may foreground cultural meanings, local resistance, and lived experiences. Both approaches, however, rely on the premise that environmental issues cannot be understood in isolation from power and inequality.

Critiques and alternative perspectives

Several critiques have shaped debates within political ecology:

• Neo-Malthusian counter-narratives: Andrew S. Walker argues the field has struggled to articulate compelling alternatives to popular narratives that attribute environmental crises to population growth rather than political-economic inequality.
• Presupposing political explanations: Andrew Vayda and Bradley Walters contend that political ecologists sometimes assume political causation prematurely. They advocate event ecology, which analyses environmental events first before identifying drivers. This critique, although noted, has not significantly displaced mainstream approaches.
• Challenges in policy application: Translating political-ecological critiques into policy can be difficult, particularly in contexts resistant to structural or Marxist analyses.