Category: News

We share two new CfPs for the POLLEN24 Conference ( 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden) on “Political Epistemologies and Ontologies” and “Interrogating ontologies and epistemologies of the ‘green transition’: Political ecology meets political ontology in the North”. More information below.

Political Epistemologies and Ontologies

Organisers: Fabio Gatti (fabio.gatti@wur.nl), David Ludwig (david.ludwig@wur.nl)- Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group (KTI), Wageningen University

Keywords: Political ecology, Political epistemology, Political ontology, Ontological conflicts

From its inception, political ecology has focused on issues surrounding the (unequal) access to, distribution of, and power relations associated with the management of natural resources. While a considerable body of literature has delved into the idea of “values of nature,” recognizing that diverse valuations of nature are sometimes incompatible, this exploration has predominantly occurred through the lens of political economy.

In recent times, however, a growing body of scholarly interventions has suggested that environmental conflicts extend beyond mere disputes over the material allocation of resources. Relying solely on political economic considerations many times proves inadequate to address conflicts that encompass “things like mountains and forests that emerge as resources through some practices but also as persons through other practices” (de la Cadena and Blaser 2018:5). In essence, material conflicts are frequently entwined with epistemological disputes concerning the production and use of knowledge, as well as ontological clashes regarding heterogeneous ways of representing and relating to the world.

Taking these epistemic and ontological dimensions of environmental conflicts seriously would enrich the analytical depth of political ecology studies, transforming it into a forum where diverse perspectives on understanding the world, creating knowledge, and being into the world converge. As part of the Global Epistemologies and Ontologies (GEOS) research initiative, this panel aims at facilitating this process by building connections between political ecology and the emerging fields of political epistemology and political ontology.

Simultaneously, many post-structuralist and “ontological turn” accounts often neglect the materiality inherent in conflicts over the management of the natural environment. While “forests [might] think” (Kohn, 2013), they remain embedded in a complex web of (inter-)dependencies, constrained within global political economy forces, deeply material power dynamics, and embodied ecologies. 

We aim at navigating this intellectual material-ideational battlefield and exploring the more middle-ground positions that rigorously bring together and analyze the economies, ecologies, epistemologies, and ontologies of the different actors involved in socio-environmental contestations. 

We welcome contributions from scholars with diverse academic backgrounds, spanning from philosophical to empirical social sciences (philosophy, human geography, cultural anthropology, environmental history), addressing the economic and ecological dimensions of epistemological and ontological conflicts or the epistemic and ontological dimensions of economic and ecological conflicts.

Please submit your 250-300 word proposal, including title, contact information, and three/four keywords to fabio.gatti@wur.nl no later than January 12, 2024. Acceptance notifications will be sent by January 14. Please note that the final submission deadline to the conference organizers is January 15, 2024, so no extension to that date will be possible.

You can also find this CfP here.

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Interrogating ontologies and epistemologies of the ‘green transition’: Political ecology meets political ontology in the North

POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden

Organised by: Tatiana Sokolova (Södertörn University), Juliana Porsani (Linköping University)

The hallmark of modern ontology is that it reduces nature and people to resources to be extracted, promoting capital accumulation and colonial exploitation. To critique modernity from the ontological position, political ontology was developed as an analytical framework concerned with the status of the non-modern (Blaser 2009). The history of political ontology as a field of study is intricately connected to political ecology, insofar as both explicate the relationships between nature and society through attention to power (Escobar 2017), seeing territorial struggles as ontological. Burman (2017) suggests that political ontology is concerned with ‘uneven distribution of … ontological weight’ in the same way as political ecology is concerned with the ‘uneven distribution of environmental burdens and privileges’ (p. 935). The materiality of unsustainability is linked to political ontology through commodification of reality, which, in turn, is engendered by coloniality of reality. Epistemology is indispensable in this critique as, according to Escobar (2017), ontological struggles produce knowledges central to the quest for transitions towards a pluriverse of sustainable ways of living. Similarly, Bacchi (2012) sees research as a political practice of shaping different realities – and thus an exercise of power.

Although Blaser’s philosophical project is intimately linked with the critique of coloniality, engaging with green transitions in the Global North through the political ontology framework is a salient theoretical proposition.  It helps to reshape the discussions on the green transitions (Ehrnström-Fuentes forthcoming) to include questions ‘beyond technical fixes’ (Nightingale et al. 2020): the meaning of a good life, well-being, and the reconnection between land and those who live on it. Understanding and critiquing political ontology of modernity is as relevant in the societies of the Global North, where modernity was brought forth, as in those to which it was exported, as both are subject to its contradictions.

This session seeks to explore ontologies and epistemologies of ‘green transitions’ in the Global North, as well as their ripple effects in the Global South. The session welcomes contributions dealing with green transition and decoloniality through the lenses of political ecology and/or political ontology.

Please submit proposals no later than 12 January 2023, to allow for final submission to the conference organisers by 15 January. Please send a 250-300 word proposal, with title, contact information, and three keywords as a Word attachment to tatiana.sokolova@sh.se 

Bacchi, Carol. 2012. ‘Strategic Interventions and Ontological Politics: Research as Political Practice’. In Engaging with Carol Bacchi, edited by Angelique Bletsas and Chris Beasley, 1st ed., 141–57. University of Adelaide Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9780987171856.012.

Blaser, Mario. 2009. ‘POLITICAL ONTOLOGY: Cultural Studies without “Cultures”?’ Cultural Studies 23 (5–6): 873–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380903208023.

Burman, Anders. 2017. ‘The Political Ontology of Climate Change: Moral Meteorology, Climate Justice, and the Coloniality of Reality in the Bolivian Andes’. Journal of Political Ecology 24 (1). https://doi.org/10.2458/v24i1.20974.

Ehrnström-Fuentes, Maria. forthcoming. ‘Energy Transitions and the Ontological Politics of the Pluriverse’.

Escobar, Arturo. 2017. ‘Sustaining the Pluriverse: The Political Ontology of Territorial Struggles in Latin America’. In The Anthropology of Sustainability, edited by Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis, 237–56. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56636-2_14.

Nightingale, Andrea Joslyn, Siri Eriksen, Marcus Taylor, Timothy Forsyth, Mark Pelling, Andrew Newsham, Emily Boyd, et al. 2020. ‘Beyond Technical Fixes: Climate Solutions and the Great Derangement’. Climate and Development 12 (4): 343–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2019.1624495.

Several Norwegian POLLEN NODE members are organizing a PhD Course on the political ecology of education – Oslo 18-21 June 2024. More information below.

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Application deadline: 15 January, 2024

5 ECTS credits

The course will critically examine the state of the art of current mainstream as well as critical approaches to education about sustainability, climate crisis and environmental conflicts. Based on their own research topics, course participants will be encouraged to discuss ways of combining insights from the cross-disciplinary field of political ecology, various other relevant traditions of critical empirical research, as well as critical education traditions.

Target groups: We welcome PhD students from various countries and academic specialisations, such as:

· participants doing a PhD project with empirical work concerning questions about sustainability, climate change or environmental conflicts, and who might want to use this opportunity to look at educational dimensions of their projects,

· participants who come from the broad field of education and/or do their PhD project within an education department.

· The course is relevant to education in a broad scope of settings, including contexts and levels from pre-school to university, as well as various types of education outside of formal education institutions.

The intensive course will be based on lectures with critical examinations of education contents on political ecology issues in various education contexts and ways to research this. In break out groups, PhD students and senior scholars will discuss submitted draft papers.

Lecturers include: · Prof. Stuart Tannock, University College London (author of Educating for Radical Social Transformation in the Climate Crisis. Palgrave 2021), · Prof. David Meek, University of Oregon (author of The Political Ecology of Education: Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement and the Politics of Knowledge. West Virginia University Press 2020), · Prof. Farhana Sultana, Syracuse University (topic to be added). · Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow Alfredo Jornet, University of Girona, will discuss school research methods relevant for PE of education. · Profs Tom G. Griffiths and Hanne Svarstad, Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet).

Applications for the course must include:

· A brief summary in English of your PhD project (about ½ – 1 page).

· A text of 250 – 500 words in English (+ references) about your motivation and background for taking part in this course, and how you see the connection between the course and your PhD project.

Course requirements: Full attendance is required during this intensive course, all participants must complete the following activities prior to the course:

· Read the course syllabus of about 300 pp.

· Submit a draft course exam paper of 2000 – 2500 words plus references.

· Read and prepare comments on the drafts by about three colleagues in the assigned group for breakout sessions.

Exam paper: After the course, the students must meet the deadline for handing in a revision of their course paper of 3500 – 5000 words plus reference list. Deadline for submission of the exam paper is 3 September.

The course is free of charge (including lunches and a dinner). Participants must organise and pay for their own travel and accommodation.

Course context: This is the last instalment in a series of four Research Council of Norway-funded PhD courses, organized in conjunction with several Norwegian ‘nodes’ or member institutions in the international Political Ecology Network (POLLEN). Past courses in the series include Political Ecology of Pandemics (SUM/University of Oslo, 2021), Political Ecology of Scarcity, Limits, and Degrowth (Noragric/Norwegian University of Life Sciences, 2022), Political Ecology of Land and Food Systems (Department of Geography/University of Bergen, May-June 2023).

The course is held at Faculty of Education and International Studies, Oslo Metropolitian University, Pilestredet 46, centrally located in Oslo.

More information about the course – and a link to the application form: Political Ecology of Education (PHUV9490) – OsloMet

Contact: hanne.svarstad@oslomet.no
Hanne Svarstad

You can find this information also here

We share a CfP on “Political Ecologies of War and Conflict in the Great Lakes Region of Africa” (Dodoma, Tanzania). More information below:

Political Ecologies of War and Conflict in the Great Lakes Region of Africa

#POLLEN 24 – Dodoma, Tanzania 10-12 June 2024 (will also aim to organise a parallel session in Lund, Sweden)

Convenors: Dr. Esther Marijnen (Wageningen University and Research), Prof. David Mwambari (KU Leuven), Prof. An Ansoms (Université Catholique de Louvain, UCL)

Scholars in the political ecology network (POLLEN) working in, and on, “Africa”, focus mostly on Southern and Eastern Africa, and also, yet, to a more limited extent West Africa. Overall, Central Africa, and also the Great Lakes Region, has been less central to topical debates in Political Ecology. This is surprising, as the region is experiencing many of the main challenges interrogated by Political Ecology; devastating impact of climate change (drought and fast floods), increasing deforestation in one of the most forested regions in the world, polluting and violent extractive industries, high degrees of biodiversity, and a history of war and conflict that bounds the region together. Its hills, lakes, forests and rivers, are not only connecting people – but also cross-border histories of colonialism, wars and violence.

Yet there are regional differences. While there is a lot of research conducted in Uganda, specifically on forestry and conservation – very few political ecology research focuses upon Burundi or Rwanda. Eastern Congo, on the other hand, is home to a rapidly expanding network of scholars identifying themselves as political ecologists. Yet, these researchers often navigate in francophone research networks, and their work is not frequently picked up in anglophone environment. Moreover, most of the researchers working on war and conflict in the region – often stay within the disciplinary boundaries of political science, conflict, and area studies. Whilst, many of these studies do interact with issues of land and resources, they are not often consulted by political ecologists.  

At this POLLEN conference, we want to create a platform for this research – moving across disciplinary boundaries – which will allow the Great Lakes region to become more central to debates in Political Ecology. We are inviting contributions in either English, French or Swahili.  

We also have a little bit of funding available for people from the region to attend the conference in Dodoma, Tanzania. Based on the submissions we receive, we will be in touch with applicants that we could assist in attending the conference (travel and accommodation). 

List of possible topics (but not exclusive)

–       Conservation in violent environments 

–       Political Ecology of memory

–       The conservation-extraction nexus

–       Environmental histories of war and conflict in the region 

–       Forced displacement and the environment 

–       Environmental change and armed conflict

–       Nature-Society relations in times of war 

–       Western interventions and their (mis)understanding of political ecologies of conflict in the region 

–       Charcoal trade and military geographies 

–       Climate change and conflict nexus

–       Forestry, colonialism and extraction

–       Coloniality of conservation and environmental interventions 

–       Militarization and the environment

Please send us a 250 word abstract before the 10^th of January, 2024. We will submit the panel proposal to POLLEN on the 15^th of January. Please send abstracts to; esther.marijnen@wur.nl,david.mwambari@kuleuven.be and an.ansoms@uclouvain.be

We share two new Call for Papers for #POLLEN24 Lund-Sweden and Lima-Peru. More information is below.

Call for Papers – What are safeguards for? Evidence to promote a transition in safeguards from ‘doing no harm’ to ‘doing better’ for community rights

POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lima-Peru

In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness, though not fully mainstreamed, of the imperative to recognize and respect the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendants (IP, LC, ADs) in global discussions on development and conservation within their ancestral territories. There is growing evidence that this recognition is central to the effectiveness of a range of projects, including those related to carbon markets (Schneider et al. 2019), natural protected areas (Larson et al. 2022), ecotourism, and hydrocarbon extraction.

A wide scope of safeguard standards, encompassing voluntary and mandatory measures, has been introduced to mitigate the potential impact of these projects on community rights, livelihoods, and perceptions of well-being (Lofts et al., 2021). However, these standards tend to aim at a low bar of ‘doing no harm’(or ‘doing no net harm’) to communities and tend to be fixed to national legal contexts rather than the wider scope of collective rights recognized under international agreements and declarations (e.g. the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, International Labour Organization c169) (Sarmiento Barletti et al. 2021).

Given the highly unequal history of access for IP, LC, and ADs to land and resources, political participation, and public services in the landscapes of the Global South where different actions are implemented, ‘doing no harm’ (or respecting the pre-project status quo) is insufficient (Larson et al. 2021). Interventions that do not follow stringent, transparent, and clear rights-responsive safeguards may inadvertently exacerbate historical experiences of exclusion.

This session aims to present lessons and potential ways out of this context through presentations that may address, but not be limited to, the following questions:

• How might voluntary safeguards contribute to enhancing the ambition of national legal frameworks for community rights?
• What are the limits or limitations of safeguards in promoting the recognition and respect of collective rights?
• What lessons can we take from the different sectors (e.g., hydrocarbons,  conservation areas, carbon markets) applying safeguards in their community engagement? What common pitfalls and strengths do they share across activities and landscapes?
• Is a rights-based approach under a community-based leadership compatible with safeguards? How have safeguards supported/challenged local, self-determined well-being pathways?
• What local experiences (e.g., women, youth) have been silenced in how different industries have designed safeguards?
• What different strategies have/can community organizations use to monitor compliance with safeguards or to design their own?

We invite researchers, practitioners, and activists to contribute to this session. Please send an abstract of up to 250 words along with your name, affiliation, presentation title (max. 20 words), and 3 keywords to Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti (j.sarmiento@cifor-icraf.org) and Deborah Delgado Pugley (deborah.delgado@pucp.pe) by January 10th with “CfP Pollen 2024” in the subject line.

We encourage abstracts from colleagues who will be present in Lima for the conference.

References:

Larson AM, JP Sarmiento Barletti and N Heise. 2022. A place at the table is not enough: Accountability for indigenous peoples and local communities in multi-stakeholder forums. World Development 155.

Larson, AM, et al. 2021. Hot topics in governance for forests and trees: Towards a (just) transformative research agenda. Forest Policy and Economics 131.

Lofts, K., Sarmiento Barletti, J. P., & Larson, A. M. (2021). Lessons towards rights-responsive REDD+ safeguards from a literature review.

Sarmiento Barletti JP, AM Larson, K Lofts and A Frechette. 2021. Safeguards at a glance: Supporting the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in REDD+ and other forest-based initiatives. Bogor: CIFOR-ICRAF.

Schneider, L., & La Hoz Theuer, S. (2019). Environmental integrity of international carbon market mechanisms under the Paris Agreement. Climate Policy, 19(3), 386-400.

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Call for Papers – Co-creating diverse knowledges through decolonial and feminist political ecology and science and technology studies

POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden

Organised by: Juliana Porsani (Linköping University), Tatiana Sokolova and Bartira Fortes (Södertörn University)

Despite a growing body of co-production and decolonial methodologies, little attention has been devoted to complex and non-dualistic positionalities of researchers as they engage with non- (often anti-)Western-centric epistemologies. Theoretical work addressing the problematic of the politics of knowledge in post-colonial contexts and the contexts of marginalisation is comprised, among others, of the works of decolonial and feminist scholars (Tuhiwai-Smith, Harding, Longino, Alcoff, Oreskes), including those inspired by Paulo Freire (bell hooks) and science and technology studies (Haraway), and more recently scholars bridging the decolonial and STS strands (Subramaniam, Khandekar). However, critical methodological reflections on the practicalities of working between and across epistemologies remains scarce.

This session seeks to explore the various methodologies of engaging, from various positionalities, with non-academic actors: local communities, Indigenous peoples, artists, social movements, and other-than-human entities – in the co-production of research. We invite presentations of experiences and reflections attentive to the challenges of epistemic power as they play out in the context of sustainability transitions and transformations, post-colonialism, and decoloniality.  We especially welcome scholars working with decolonial, feminist and STS perspectives, political ecology and political ontology.  

Please submit proposals no later than 12 January 2023, to allow for final submission to the conference organisers by 15 January. Please send a 250-300 word proposal, with title, contact information, and three keywords as a Word attachment to tatiana.sokolova@sh.se 

We share one new Call for Papers for #POLLEN24 Lund-Sweden. More information is below.

Call for Papers – Political ecology of nature-based value chains

Proposed by: Judith Krauss, University of York (corresponding convenor: judith.krauss@york.ac.uk); Rosaleen Duffy, University of Sheffield; Aarti Krishnan, Alliance Manchester Business School (all UK).

This panel seeks submissions that help understand the political ecology of nature-based value chains, i.e. value chains which work with nature to address societal challenges. The political ecology of nature-based value chains begins a long-overdue conversation between two literatures to fill a key gap in knowledge: political ecology’s emphasis on ecological change and social justice can help transcend value chains’ standard emphasis on lead firms and lacking attention to environmental matters. Conversely, it will also enrich political ecology with value chains’ local-global, systematic, sequential focus on stakeholders and processes generating specific goods or services, and thus benefit both, while adding an important emphasis on power to the debate on nature-based solutions (Woroniecki et al., 2021).

In the past, diverse research has investigated the cross-border production processes for specific goods or services, often referred to as ‘value chains’. Although many value chains rely on natural resources e.g. through agriculture, forestry or wildlife trade, it has been pointed out that most value-chain research does not systematically account for the environment, nor environment-economy-society interactions at different junctures of the value chain (Krishnan, 2022; Lanari & Bek, 2021; Ponte, 2020).

Equally, research has investigated various development opportunities and constraints which value chains entail for rural communities through concepts such as governance or upgrading, i.e. improving the social or environmental circumstances of production (Barrientos et al., 2016). However, much of the current value-chain literature directs its chief focus to lead firms’ roles in value chains in the Global North. This fails to utilise political ecology’s emphasis on the lives and livelihoods of those producing or trading in value chains, and also blinds us to the ways in which entrenched power asymmetries serve to conceal and reproduce structural inequalities (Duffy, 2010; Krauss et al., 2023; Rocheleau, 2015; Resurreccion, 2017; Sultana, 2022).

Consequently, this panel invites contributions that engage with these themes and questions:

• How can nature-based solutions, political ecology and value or commodity chains intersect meaningfully?
• How differently are considerations around risk and security viewed across political ecology and value chains?
• How could a political ecology of nature-based value chains help understand and govern recent dynamics in wildlife trade, agriculture and forestry?
• How can a political ecology of nature-based value chains engage with more-than-human perspectives?
• How does a political ecology of nature-based value chains help cope with the current polycrisis across all dimensions of sustainability?

Please submit an abstract of 250 words maximum with your name, affiliation, and contact e-mail address to Judith Krauss (judith.krauss@york.ac.uk) by Friday, 5 January 2024, 5pm. Please also confirm that you will be able to attend the Lund hub in person for POLLEN2024.

Contributions for POLLEN24 are rolling in and we are excited to see so many excellent abstracts among the early submissions.

We are currently mostly receiving submissions to present in Lund, so we would like to take this opportunity to stress the decentralized nature of the conference. To really make this work in the way intended, we count on you to give equal weight to all three conference hubs. If you haven’t submitted your abstract yet, we want to encourage you to consider participating in Dodoma and Lima, especially if your work is focused on those regions, if these are the hubs physically closest to you, or if you can combine a visit with other activities in the region.

Together, we hope we can work to break the global North dominance in our field!

The POLLEN24 conference team

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Las contribuciones para POLLEN24 siguen llegando y estamos encantados de ver tantos excelentes resúmenes entre las primeras propuestas.

Actualmente estamos recibiendo sobre todo propuestas para presentar en Lund, por lo que nos gustaría aprovechar esta oportunidad para subrayar la naturaleza descentralizada de la conferencia. Para que funcione como esta planeado, contamos con usted para que provea la misma importancia a los tres centros de la conferencia. Si aún no ha presentado su resumen, queremos animarla/o a que considere la posibilidad de participar en Dodoma y Lima, especialmente si su trabajo se centra en esas regiones, si son los centros físicamente más cercanos a usted, o si puede combinar una visita con otras actividades en la región.

Juntos, esperamos trabajar para romper el dominio del Norte global en nuestro campo!

El equipo de la conferencia POLLEN24

We share two new Calls for Papers for #POLLEN24 Lund-Sweden. More information is below.

Call for Papers – Urban Frontiers. From Illegal Land Occupation to Legalized Property

Theme:  Political ecologies of interconnected crises

Organizers: Kasper Hoffmann and Christian Lund, University of Copenhagen

Urban property development in the Global South often starts out in illegality and only subsequently becomes legal. It happens when people code and re-code access to land and then conjure up legality for facts already existing on the ground. The panel explores how this happens.

The issue is urgent. The world’s population is increasingly urban. Across the globe, cities struggle to accommodate the growing demand for land, housing, and public services. Yet, mainstream research on land and urbanization in the Global South is characterized by two shortcomings. First, questions on rural and urban land and property seem to live separate lives. Rural land is seen as a productive resource, and competition and land grabs as foundational conflicts in human development (White et al. 2014). Urban land, by contrast, is seen in technical terms of rapid urbanization, and the challenges of providing sufficient housing, infrastructure, and service (Fox and Goodfellow 2016, Ghertner and Lake 2021).

Yet, if we fail to understand the significance of the institutional transformation of urban land, we will not understand the future political landscape in the Global South, as landed property is a key pivot around which government and citizenship turn. With this panel, we seek to bring these important analyses on the institutional dynamics of rural property to town. Second, the work on urban land has an unfortunate focus on the distinction between formal/informal, and legal/illegal (Amankwaa and Gough 2022, Banks et al. 2020, McFarlane 2012, Storey 2021). These distinctions are diversions and conceal more than they reveal. They create a simplistic dichotomy where the urban poor are confined to informality and reproduce colonial categories. Yet, these categories are not fixed or stable, and they are not created by governments. Instead, when people attribute the qualities of law and legal to decisions, settlements are understood to be legal and have that effect. Consequently, by imitating and emulating law as they imagine it to be, people effectively contribute to its construction and become law makers in the process alongside government. In other words, law is being made from below as well as from above. Over time, non-legal settlements may become ‘established facts,’ too difficult and expensive to undo. This creates a paradox: Much of urban development does not follow official legal plans. Instead, real urban development is made to appear legal when land users and public authorities dress up mere access and possession as property. In other words, it becomes legalized. Such processes are contentious to the hilt because key questions of property, identity, and public authority ride on them. Hence, the image of the law as a source of universal justice and order obscures its actual operations. Rather than a source of universal justice, the law legitimates the actual distribution of rights, resources, and privileges.

We invite scholars, activists, journalists, and artists from across the Globe to send their contributions on this key subject to facilitate mutual learning. The call welcomes contribution that examines how different actors create law, fragment by fragment, constructing what they believe to be already there and the consequences of these processes. Moreover, they are but the latest episodes of long-term historical processes. Therefore, we invite contributions that explore the legacy of colonial processes of legalization on contemporary processes of rulemaking.

In short, we are interested in:

• How different spontaneous urban settlements legalize, i.e., become legal in the eyes of the population and government?
• How landholders and public authorities institutionalize access to land?
• How does legalization of urban land affect social and environmental justice?

If you are interested, please send an abstract between 150 and 200 words to kh@ifro.ku.dk or clund@ifro.ku.dk. Deadline for the submission of abstracts: January 15th, 2024.

References

Amankwaa, E.F. and K. Gough, 2022, ‘Everyday contours and politics of infrastructure. Informal governance of electricity access in urban Accra.’ Urban Studies 59(12). Pp. 2468-88

Banks, N., M. Lombard, and D. Mitlin, 2020, ‘Urban informality as a site of critical analysis.’ The Journal of Development Studies 56(2). Pp. 223-38

Fox, S., and T. Goodfellow, 2016, Cities and Development. London, Routledge.

Ghertner, A.D., and R.W. Lake (eds), 2021, Land Fictions. The Commodification of Land in City and Country. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

McFarlane, C., 2012, ‘Rethinking informality. Politics, crisis, and the city.’ Planning Theory and Practice 13(1). Pp. 89-108

Storey, A. D., 2021, ‘“It’s a long walk to development.” Navigating capacity and time in Cape Town’s informal settlements.’ Human Organization 80 (2):152-161.

White, B., S. M. Borras Jr., R. Hall, I. Scoones, and W. Wolford (eds), 2013, The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals. London, Routledge.

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Call for Papers – Exploring the Pluriverse: Experiments in radical alternatives from eco-swaraj to degrowthure

Keywords: pluriverse; radical alternatives; global tapestry of alternatives; prefigurative politics

This call for papers seeks to explore the work of prefigurative politics in creating a pluriverse – a world where many worlds fit in. We invite submissions working on what we define as radical alternatives to the destructive hegemonic system. The session is hosted by the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, a process that has been working to create spaces of collaboration and exchange, in order to learn about and from each other, critically but constructively challenge each other, offer active solidarity to each other. It seeks to facilitate people seeking transformative change, hopefully eventually converging into a critical mass of alternative ways that can support the conditions for the radical systemic changes we need.

We invite both theories of radical transformation as well as papers grounded in community and activist articulations of what radical alternatives and a pluriverse are. We consider the pluriverse as an on-going experimental and organically developing process and the session offers the opportunity to co-develop an inclusive and dynamic knowledge and praxis of progressive alternatives. We also seek contributions that highlight the struggle of pluriversal transition from, for example, different cosmologies or understandings of alternatives to the mundane and practical elements of language and time zones.

Experiments in the majority and minority world are welcome including discussions of philosophies such as uBuntu, Buen Vivir, Eco Swaraj; Degrowth; and commoning. We are also interested in experiements to do with solidarity economies; health and healing; radical democracy; emancipatory pedagogy amongst others.

This panel is envisioned as a single-site, 90-minute panel in Lund (Sweden) with 3-4 presentations, but depending on received abstracts it could take on a hybrid form. Please send your proposed title and abstract (max. 200 words) to vasna.ramasar@hek.lu.se by the 05^th January 2024, and we will respond shortly.

References

Dinerstein, A. C. (2022). Decolonizing Prefiguration: Ernst Bloch’s Philosophy of Hope and the Multiversum. In The Future is Now (pp. 47-64). Bristol University Press.

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.

Gills, B. K., & Hosseini, S. H. (2022). Pluriversality and beyond: consolidating radical alternatives to (mal-) development as a commonist project. Sustainability Science, 17(4), 1183-1194.

Kothari, A. (2020). Earth vikalp sangam: proposal for a global tapestry of alternatives. Globalizations, 17(2), 245-249.

Kothari, A., Demaria, F., & Acosta, A. (2014). Buen Vivir, degrowth and ecological Swaraj: Alternatives to sustainable development and the green economy. Development, 57(3-4), 362-375.

We share three new Calls for Papers for #POLLEN24 . More information is below.

Call for Papers – Combining and Contrasting Community Economies and Convivial Conservation Programmes

POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden (with possibility for online contributions tbc)

Organizers: Louise Carver, Elizabeth Barron, Ella Hubbard, Kevin St. Martin, Dhruv Gangadharan

Theorizing eco-social transformation is an active area of geographical scholarship across varying sub-disciplines (Lave et al. 2014, Braun 2015, Hawkins et al. 2015), which includes working through the reunification of nature and society conceptually and materially. Acts of world-making and re-making of human and more-than-human relations, agency, commons, power and knowledge (Roelvink et al 2015, Miller 2019) are at play with debates on environmental governance, conservation, economy, and community (Büscher and Fletcher 2020, Barron 2023). Political ecology is increasingly becoming a site of research and activism that affirmatively prefigures (Sirviö and Alhojärvi 2019) the axial and substantive transformations widely called for in myriad environmental governance frameworks, natural resource arrangements and economic relations. 

The fields of diverse economies (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski 2020) and convivial conservation (Büscher and Fletcher 2020) focus on extant and emerging forms of economy that foreground ethical interactions among humans and nature, thus contributing to eco-social transformation. Diverse economies emerged from the feminist critique of political economy as “capitalocentric” (Gibson-Graham 1996) and an assertion that economy should be seen instead as a diverse field and a site for political engagement, transformation, and the liberation of economic agency “here and now” (Gibson-Graham 2006). Scholarship in the field has been increasingly attentive to the relationality between economies, nature and the effects of climate, biodiversity and ecological crises (Barron 2015, Gibson-Graham, Hill and Law 2016, Miller 2019, Barron 2023). Convivial conservation centres on liberating conservation from capitalocentrism (Büscher and Fletcher 2020), building on an expansive political ecology literature that traces neoliberal, and at times neo-colonial dynamics, of a conservation sector increasingly shaped by capitalist relations, mechanisms and logics (St. Martin 2005, Bakker 2010, Büscher, Dressler & Fletcher 2014). It proposes a transformative agenda for “convivial conservation” characterised by two broad principles: the spatial reintegration of people and nature and the development of alternatives to the unsustainable and unequal capitalist growth economy. Diverse economies and convivial conservation potentially converge on a shared desire to locate and foster alternative and emancipatory ecologies/economies. 

This panel will explore the possibilities and challenges of a research agenda at the intersection of Diverse Economies and Convivial Conservation. We aim to create a space for thinking collectively about the possibilities and problematics (both diverse and convivial) which can be drawn between these two areas of scholarship, practice and activism. We invite paper abstracts and creative, artistic and interdisciplinary outlines, that place these fields in dialogue with reference to topics including (but not limited to):  

• Treatment of economy and ecology in relation to each other
• Ontological and epistemological starting points and framings 
• Diverse post-capitalist economic experiments within environmental governance
• Novel theorizations of ecology informed by diverse and community economies 
• Novel theorizations of economy informed by convivial conservation 
• Non-capitalocentric interventions to address biodiversity conservation challenges
• Non-capitalocentric economic performativity
• Commons, commoning and community

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Louise Carver (l.carver@lancaster.ac.uk) and Elizabeth Barron (elizabeth.barron@ntnu.no) by 8^th December 2023. Upon acceptance, applicants will still have to register through the POLLEN website. We intend to build on this panel to produce a special issue focusing on the opportunities and divergences of interlinking diverse economies traditions with convivial conservation, empirically, conceptually or theoretically. If you are interested in participating in the special issue, but cannot attend the conference, please do get in touch.

You can also find this CfP here.

References

Alhojärvi, T., & Sirviö, H. (2019). Affirming political ecology: seeds, hatchets and situated entanglements. Nordia Geographical Publications, 47(5), 1–6.

Bakker, K. (2010) The limits of ‘neoliberal natures’: Debating green neoliberalism. Progress in Human Geography, 34, 715-735.

Barron, E. S. 2015. Situating wild product gathering in a diverse economy: Negotiating ethical interactions with natural resources. In Making other worlds possible, eds. G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin & J. K. Gibson-Graham, 173-193. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Barron, E. S. (2023) Conservation of abundance: How fungi can contribute to rethinking conservation. Conservation and Society, 21, 99-109.

Büscher, B. & R. Fletcher. 2020. The conservation revolution: Radical ideas for saving nature beyond the Anthropocene. Brooklyn, NY, USA: Verso.

Büscher, B., W. Dressler & R. Fletcher. 2014. Nature Inc.: Environmental conservation in the neoliberal age. Tuscon, AZ: The University of Arizona Press.

Braun, B. (2015) Futures: Imagining socioecological transformation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105, 239-243.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. 1996. The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. and Dombroski, K. eds., 2020. The handbook of diverse economies. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Gibson-Graham, J. K., A. Hill & L. Law (2016) Re-embedding economies in ecologies: resilience building in more than human communities. Building Research and Information, 44, 703-716.

Hawkins, H., S. A. Marston, M. Ingram & E. Straughan (2015) The art of socioecological transformation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105, 331-341.

Lave, R., M. W. Wilson, E. S. Barron, C. Biermann, M. A. Carey, C. S. Duvall, L. Johnson, K. M. Lane, N. McClintock, D. Munroe, R. Pain, J. Proctor, B. L. Rhoads, M. M. Robertson, J. Rossi, N. F. Sayre, G. Simon, M. Tadaki & C. V. Dyke (2014) Intervention: Critical Physical Geography. Canadian Geographer, 58, 1-10.

Miller, E. 2019. Reimagining livelihoods: Life beyond economy, society, and environment. U of Minnesota Press.

Roelvink, G., K. S. Martin & J. K. Gibson-Graham. 2015. Making other worlds possible: Performing diverse economies. U of Minnesota Press.

St.Martin, K. (2005) Mapping Economic Diversity in the First World: The Case of Fisheries. Environment and Planning A, 37, 959 – 979.

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Call for Papers – Religion and religious knowledge in conservation and development: Past, present, and future

POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Dodoma, Tanzania

Organized Paper Session

Convener: Peter Rowe, University of Edinburgh

Scholarship focusing on intersections with gender, race, class, as well as other axes of positionality and injustice, are commonplace in political ecology. However, one aspect that has remained conspicuously absent from the vast majority of political ecology scholarship is religion. Indeed, since the publication of Wilkins’ (2021) article ‘Where is religion in political ecology?’, little, if any, substantive work has been published. This is particularly grievous given the faith positionalities of the vast majority of people across the Global South where ‘conservation’ and ‘development’ happens. If political ecology and political ecologists are concerned with ‘creating pluriversal and just futures’, the inclusion of, and engagement with, religious actors and knowledge is crucial. With this in mind, this session is envisioned as an early conversation in the desecularisaiton of political ecology (Schulz 2017), drawing concerted attention to the role of religion and religious knowledge in conservation and development. Specifically, this session seeks to critically explore how religion and religious knowledge (broadly conceived) has shaped, and is shaping, conservation and development theory and practise in the past, present, and future, for better or for worse. From visions of an ‘Edenic Africa’ implicated in the colonial creation of national parks, including Tanzania’s own Serengeti (Neumann 1996; 1998), to present day Islamic inspired conservation and development initiatives in Zanzibar (IFEES 2023), religion has long been linked to conservation and development in both theory and practise. Thus, this call for papers seeks responses from political ecologists, geographers, and others, who, like Wilkins (2021), are asking: where is religion in political ecology? While an East African focus lends itself particularly well to this session, contributions from a diverse range of geographies are welcome.

The following themes, though certainly not exhaustive, could be useful inroads for this session:

• The intersection of colonialism and religion with regard to conservation and development knowledge and practise
• The role of religious knowledge in conservation and development practise in the contemporary moment
• What does desecularising conservation and development, and furthermore political ecology, look like in practise? Case studies welcome.
• Overlaps between the decolonisation of religion (particularly Christianity) and the decolonisation of conservation in East Africa and beyond
• Plural theologies and epistemologies of conservation and development
• Faith and researcher positionality
• Explaining the absence- why has political ecology neglected religion? And what can be learned from this?

If you would like to present a paper in this session, please email with your: Name, affiliation, presentation title (maximum 20 words), abstract (maximum 250 words), and 3 keywords. Submissions from a diversity of speakers from the Global South/North/Beyond, and along intersectional lines, are welcome. African scholars are strongly encouraged. The inclusion of some information on your positionality is welcomed, as you deem appropriate. We particularly welcome submissions from a plurality of faith-informed perspectives. To submit, please email: peter.rowe@ed.ac.uk 

Deadline: 12^th December 2023, 12 noon GMT (you will know the outcome of your submission by 14^th December, one day before the deadline for session proposals to the conference organisers).

You can also find this CfP here.

References:

Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Studies (IFEES), 2023. ‘The application of Islamic environmental ethics to promote marine conservation in Zanzibar’. Available from: https://www.ifees.org.uk/projects/islam-biodiversity/zanzibar/. [Accessed 17 November 2023]

Neumann, R., 1996. Dukes, earls, and ersatz Edens: aristocratic nature preservationists in colonial Africa. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14(1), pp.79-98.

Neumann, R., 1998. Imposing wilderness: struggles over livelihood and nature preservation in Africa. University of California Press.

Schulz, K.A., 2017. Decolonizing political ecology: ontology, technology and ‘critical’ enchantment. Journal of Political Ecology, 24(1), pp.125-143.Wilkins, D., 2021. Where is religion in political ecology?. Progress in human geography, 45(2), pp.276-297.

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Call for Papers – Towards a Political Ecology of Roma Environmental Vulnerability in Europe

POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden

Organised by: George Iordachescu (University of Sibiu), and Anwesha Dutta (Chr. Michelsen Institute).

Throughout Europe, Roma communities are increasingly affected by environmental degradation, extreme weather phenomena and climate change. Often pushed to the systemic edge, the livelihoods of Roma groups have been, in recent decades, negatively impacted by land alienation and land tenure disputes, which unsettled their socio-ecological lives (Filčák 2012). Many recent policy attempts to address environmental crime on the continent, such as illegal logging and poaching, target predominantly poor Roma groups who are highly dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods (Iordachescu & Vasile 2023). Often, they are labelled as scapegoats for a range of environmental crimes (Dorondel 2016) and are disproportionately affected by criminalisation attempts and environmental law enforcement (Neag 2022). Moreover, recent urban restructuring processes have pushed Roma communities to the margins (Vincze & Zamfir 2019), usually near wastelands (Heidegger & Wise 2020), depriving these people of essential services such as sanitation and clean water (Harper et al. 2009), and limiting their access to jobs, education and healthcare (Anghel & Alexandrescu 2022). Scholarship in environmental justice or urban studies shows that evictions (Lancione 2019) and environmental racism make Roma even more vulnerable to climate change (Alexandrescu et al. 2021). Moreover, throughout the European continent, ongoing and planned projects to expand protected areas are progressively impacting Roma communities (Iordachescu 2021), depriving or limiting their access to timber and non-timber forest products, which have often constituted the basis of their livelihoods (Dorondel 2009). 

Despite being increasingly affected by these socio-environmental conflicts, Roma people and their struggles have received little attention from political ecology and human geography research looking at European contexts and processes. This panel aims to advance discussions on the mechanisms of invisibilisation which intensify the vulnerability of Roma communities to climate change, to unpack the environmental racism associated with criminalisation and environmental law enforcement, and finally, to explore pathways towards just conservation and restoration planning in Europe.

The panel will be hosted at POLLEN 2024 in Lund, but we will accommodate remote presentations. Please submit your proposal to George Iordachescu (g.a.iordachescu@sheffield.ac.uk) and Anwesha Dutta (anwesha.dutta@cmi.no) no later than December 12. It should include a title, max. 250 words abstract, name and your institutional affiliation (if any).

We will inform you by 14 December if your abstract is selected, and we will submit the panel proposal to POLLEN on 15 December. 

References:

Anghel, I.M. and Alexandrescu, F. (2022). ‘We lurk in the hidden places’: the (un)stable spatialisation of Roma poverty in Romania. Urban Studies, 60(10):1875-1893.

Alexandrescu, F. et al. (2021). On the path of evictions and invisibilisation: Poor Roma facing climate vulnerability. Cities, 114:103201.

Dorondel, S. (2009). ‘They should be killed’: Forest restitution, ethnic groups and patronage in postsocialist Romania. In Derick. F. & James, D. (eds).The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution (pp.43-65). London: Routledge.

Dorondel. S. (2016). Disrupted Landscapes. State, peasants and the politics of land in postsocialist Romania. New York: Berghahn. 

Filčák, R. 2012. Environmental Justice and the Roma Settlements of Eastern Slovakia: Entitlements, Land and the Environmental Risks. Czech Sociological Review, 48(3): 537-562.

Harper, K. et al. (2009). Environmental justice and Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe. Environmental Policy and Governance, 19(4):251-268.

Heidegger, P. and Wiese, K. (2020). Pushed to the wastelands: Environmental racism against the Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe. Brussels: European Environmental Bureau.

Iordachescu, G. (2021). The shifting geopolitical ecologies of wild nature conservation in Romania. In: Politics and Environment in Eastern Europe (ed. Kovacs, E.K.). Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.

Iordachescu, G and Vasile. M. (2023). Forests of Fear: illegal logging, criminalisation and violence in the Carpathian Mountains. The Annals of the American Association of Geographers. online 20 Jun 2023

Lancione, M. (2019). The politics of embodied urban precarity: Roma people and the fight for housing in Bucharest, Romania. Geoforum, 101:182-191.

Vincze, E. and Zamfir, G. (2019). Racialised housing unevenness in Cluj-Napoca under capitalist redevelopment. City, 23(5): 1-22. ipants can take part in either of the three hubs of the conference (Lima, Dodoma, or Lund).

We share four new Calls for Papers for #POLLEN24 . More information is below.

Call for Papers – Political Ecology, Geopolitics, and the International

POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden

Organised by: Jan Selby (University of Leeds) and Rosaleen Duffy (University of Sheffield) 

This panel will explore the intersection between political ecology and International Relations (IR). Political ecology as a field and approach typically combines a ‘place-based’ approach to socio-ecological  relations (Blaikie 1985) with analysis of how these locally specific relations are shaped by global resources, financial and epistemic structures and flows, thus operating with what might be called a ‘global-to-local’ ontology (Selby, Daoust & Hoffmann 2022). By contrast, political ecologists have traditionally not paid great attention either to the ways in which inter-state, inter-societal and geopolitical dynamics shape patterns of environmental degradation and environment-related vulnerabilities and inequalities, or to the theoretical or normative implications thereof; political ecologists often speak of ‘global political ecology’ (Peet, Robbins & Watts, 2011) but only rarely of an ‘international’ or ‘geopolitical’ equivalent. Yet recent research on ‘geopolitical ecology’ (Bigger & Neimark 2017; Masse & Margulies 2020) and ‘international political ecology’ (Selby, Daoust & Hoffmann 2022) suggests that fuller consideration of international and geopolitical dynamics is crucial both to understanding contemporary environmental crises and vulnerabilities, and to thinking through how they might be addressed, especially in an era of renewed geopolitical rivalries and ailing multilateralism. This panel will build upon this recent work, as well as on intersecting work within international environmental politics and critical geopolitics (Dalby 2020,; O’Lear, 2018; Dickinson, 2022), and on ‘environmental multiplicity’ (Corry 2020), to examine substantive, theoretical, methodological and normative issues at the intersection of political ecology and IR. The panel will ask a series of key questions including, but not limited to:

– What alternative or additional substantive insights on environmental crises and insecurities are generated by adopting a ‘geopolitical’ or ‘international’ approach to political ecology?

– What, in theoretical terms, might such an approach involve? How should we simultaneously theorise global capitalist and inter-state political ecology dynamics? 

– What methodological strategies are appropriate to analysing the geopolitical or international dimensions of political ecology?

– What are the normative implications of taking geopolitics and the international seriously, for instance for the idea and possibility of degrowth? 

– What are the limits to or limitations of a geopolitical or international approach to political ecology?

Please submit proposals no later than 12 December 2023, to allow for final submission to the conference organisers by 15 December. Please send a 250-300 word proposal, with title, contact information, and three keywords as a Word attachment to j.selby@leeds.ac.uk 

References

Bigger, P. & B. Neimark (2017), ‘Weaponizing nature: the geopolitical ecology of the US Navy’s biofuels program’, Political Geography, 60, 13-22.

Blaikie, P. (1985), The Political Ecology of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (Longman).

Corry, O. (2020), ‘Nature and the international: towards a materialist understanding of societal multiplicity’, Globalizations, 17: 3, 419-35.

Dalby, S. (2020), Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (University of Ottawa Press). 

Dickinson, H. (2022), ‘Caviar matter(s): the material politics of the European caviar grey market’, Political Geography, 99, 102737.

Masse, F. & J. Margulies (2020), ‘The geopolitical ecology of conservation: the emergence of illegal wildlife trade as national security interest and the re-shaping of US foreign conservation assistance’, World Development, 132, 104958.

O’Lear, S. (2018), Environmental Geopolitics (Roman and Littlefield).

Peet, R., P. Robbins & M. Watts, eds. (2011), Global Political Ecology (Routledge).

Selby, J., G. Daoust & C. Hoffmann (2022), Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security (Cambridge University Press). 

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Call for Papers – Politics of (in)visibility in conservation and environmental governance

POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden

Organisers: Paul Thung and Rosa Deen

Paper panel, 90 minutes 

key words: conservation, environmental justice, (in)visibility, conservation regimes

This panel wishes to explore the politics of (in)visibility in conservation and other socio-ecological landscapes. Conservation often relies on raising awareness and putting a spotlight on a certain species, ecosystem or even plight of peoples, but this framing always obscures other realities. Conservation ‘crisis’ narratives, for example, can obscure histories of colonial dispossession and enduring relationships of inequality and exploitation. Or, within situations referred to as ‘Human-Wildlife Conflict,’ a focus on ‘problematic’ wildlife precludes a broader understanding of dynamic relations between people and protected areas (e.g. Pooley, 2020), partly due to the visibility of predators. 

While political ecologists have produced many insightful studies on the omissions and limitations of conservationist representations (e.g. Igoe, 2021; Wahlén, 2014; West, 2006), such accounts tend to focus on media with large or faraway audiences. It is rarer to find detailed analyses of how different actors in conservation contexts manage their positions and relationships by hiding and revealing aspects of reality to each other, even though this is an important aspect for understanding the production of (in)visibility and its effects.

This panel therefore asks: what is made visible or invisible within the practices of nature conservation and environmental governance, and which consequences does this have for relations between different communities, organisations and authorities? The panel welcomes primary research as well as theoretical contributions on the politics of (in)visibility, including analyses of dominant narratives and visual tropes, epistemic injustices, and performativity in conservation, and how these are embedded in broader histories, relationships, and inequalities. The panel further hopes to spark transdisciplinary discussion on decolonising knowledges and the role of different traditions of political ecology in this. 

The deadline is fast approaching! This panel is envisioned as a single-site, 90-minute panel in Lund (Sweden) with 3-4 presentations, but depending on received abstracts it could take on a hybrid form. Please send your proposed title and abstract (max. 200 words) to paul.thung@brunel.ac.uk and rd425@kent.ac.uk by the 12^th of December, and we will respond shortly.

References:

Igoe, J. (2021). The Nature of the Spectacle: On Images, Money, and Conserving Capitalism. University of Arizona Press. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/48462

Pooley, Simon, Saloni Bhatia, and Anirudhkumar Vasava (2021). “Rethinking the study of human–wildlife coexistence” Conservation Biology 35 (3), 784-793.

Wahlén, C. B. (2014). Constructing Conservation Impact: Understanding Monitoring and Evaluation in Conservation NGOs. Conservation and Society, 12(1), 77. https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-4923.132133

West, P. (2006). Conservation is our government now: The politics of ecology in Papua New Guinea. Duke University Press.

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Call for Papers – Biodiversity conservation and the value turn

Organised by: Marco Immovilli and Bram Büscher (Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University)

Over the last decade, debates around values of nature have gained great traction in the field of conservation. Besides important work from political ecology (Allen, 2018; Büscher & Fletcher, 2020; James & Broome, 2023), this received impetus through the work of the 2022 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessment of the diverse ways people value nature. In this assessment, IPBES (2022) criticizes the fetishization of economic values of nature as one of the structural causes of the current global environmental predicament. In response, IPBES and others (Pascual, 2023) have suggested an agenda of pluralism and diversity of values to create space for diverse ways of giving value to nature to co/exist. This position has created room among mainstream institutions to think of post-growth and post-capitalist pathways for biodiversity conservation (leading the IPBES assessment to list degrowth as one possible transformative trajectory for the first time).

These developments present a salient opportunity for political ecologists to contribute to these debates. We see two avenues, in particular, that deserve urgent attention. The first is to build on these development to further push a deeper understanding and more practical application of post-growth and alternative values of nature. The second is to discuss the limits of these approaches and how they are rolled out in more mainstream debates. Most importantly, these debates fail to incorporate critical discussions of value, especially those that understand value as a central component of capitalism and that are critical of a ‘diversity of values agenda’ that eschews capital’s ultimate drive towards the valorisation of value. A critical take on value can fill these gaps and push discussions on radical transformations forward.

In this panel, we aim to bridge the gap between critical thought and mainstream debates on biodiversity conservation and value. We hope to do so by collecting contributions that critically reflect on the concept of diversity of values of nature (and more generally on the idea of diversity within capitalism) and on different ways value can be used to reflect on the relation between capitalism and the protection of nature. We believe that new understandings of value can enlighten us on the functioning of biodiversity conservation within late capitalism. Hence we also welcome contributions that use value as an emancipatory concept to study alternative ways of living with nature. We believe that calls for post-growth and post-capitalist ways of living with nature could profit from an engagement with value as a way to explore their modes of operation, organization and reproduction. 

In sum, we welcome contributions that, among others, touch upon the following topics:

• Critical histories of value theories and approaches within biodiversity conservation;
• Critical reflections on the diversity of values of nature agenda within biodiversity conservation;
• Reflections on new interlinkages between conservation, capitalism and value;
• Theoretical and empirical work using value to explore: a) alternative ways of living with nature, b) struggles and conflicts within conservation;
• General reflections on current debates on value and nature to think about protection and living with nature.

Please submit your paper proposal no later than 12th December 2023. We will let you know of acceptance by the 14th December. Final submission to the conference organizers is on 15th December. Please send a 250-300 word proposal, with title, contact information, and three keywords as a Word attachment to marco.immovilli@wur.nl.

You can also access to this CfP here.

References:

Allen, K. (2018). Why exchange values are not environmental values: Explaining the problem with neoliberal conservation. Conservation and Society, 16(3), 243-256.

Büscher, B., & Fletcher, R. (2020). The conservation revolution: radical ideas for saving nature beyond the Anthropocene. Verso Books.

IPBES (2022). Methodological Assessment Report on the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Balvanera, P., Pascual, U., Christie, M., Baptiste, B., and González-Jiménez, D. (eds.). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6522522 

James, A., & Broome, N. P. (2023). A Fine Balance? Value-relations, Post-capitalism and Forest Conservation—A Case from India. Conservation and Society, 21(3), 188-199.Pascual, U., Adams, W. M., Díaz, S., Lele, S., Mace, G. M., & Turnhout, E. (2021). Biodiversity and the challenge of pluralism. Nature Sustainability, 4(7), 567-572.

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Call for Papers – Diverse Ways of Knowing the Climate: Towards Epistemic Climate Justice

Climate knowledge – knowledge of the actual and predicted effects of global warming, of the causes and responsibilities for climate change and of possible pathways for transformation – strongly influences politics and policies on climate change. Reliable climate knowledge plays a crucial role for domestic and international mitigation and adaptation strategies, but it also builds the basis for climate activism, contestations of existing socio-economic structures and claims of climate justice, in the UNFCCC system, in cases of climate litigation or in debates on the historical responsibility of the major carbon emitters.

Over the last years, the different forms of ‘knowing’ related to climate change have increasingly become politicized while the many dimensions of injustice related to climate change have been brought to attention. Global warming affects people in the Global North and Global South very unequally, with those groups that contributed least to global warming most affected (Adger et al. 2006; Roberts and Parks 2007, Bettini 2017; Bond and Dorsey 2010). Environmental justice scholars have demonstrated how the consequences of global warming interact with existing inequalities along lines of gender, race or class, among others (Kaijser and Kronsell 2014; Malin and Ryder 2018). Meanwhile, scholars working from postcolonial and political ecology perspectives have shown how mitigation and adaptation schemes often obfuscate historic responsibility for climate change (Okereke 2010; Morchain 2018) and reproduce uneven North-South power relations, leading to accusations of “carbon colonialism” (Billet 2010), “climate colonialism” (Sultana 2021, Newell and Paterson 2010) and “colonial déjá vu” (Whyte 2016). Environmental anthropologists and sociologists have pointed to a diverse array of knowledges that exist on climatic changes and climate adaptation, especially in indigenous cultures (Nakashima et al. 2018, Zuma-Netshiukhwi et al. 2013).

The dominant mode of climate knowledge production, however, has for the most part neglected issues of epistemic climate justice and ways of knowing beyond the scientific tradition of the West. Most climate knowledge is produced in rather narrow technocratic and managerial settings (Knox-Hayes and Hayes 2016, Machen and Nost 2021, Hastrup and Skrydstrup 2013). Research on climate change usually does not ask which forms of knowledge, which actors and which practices are included and excluded from the institutionalized climate discourse and how this relates to power dynamics and colonial histories (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020). Critical feminist or non-western approaches to knowledge are rarely debated in relation to the production of climate futures through a specific form of climate knowledge, and where insights from STS inform analysis of climate knowledge, they rather take an apolitical or technopolitical stance than asking about inequalities and socio-economic conditions of marginalized knowledge production (Mahony and Hulme, 2018).

This session aims to address these issues. Based on the premise that diverse ways of knowing and knowledge-making are important for a debate on climate justice and pathways for transformation, this session seeks to critically evaluate current forms of climate knowledge production and to advance the debate on more diverse, inclusive and decolonial forms of climate and transformation knowledge. We welcome presentations that reflect on potentials, limitations and problems of current approaches to knowledge about climate change and socio-ecological transformation, to identify the structural and epistemic injustices related to them, and to discuss alternative forms of meaning-making and knowledge production. Potential contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• What is considered legitimate knowledge about climate change and socio-ecological transformation?
• By whom and how is legitimate knowledge on climate change and transformation produced, and to which power relations, discourses and policies on various scales does it relate?
• Which types of knowledge are silenced or discredited within current approaches to climate change and transformation?
• How can subaltern knowledge contribute to decentering or decolonizing hegemonic knowledge production and contribute to a deep just transition?
• What would a decolonial and transformative climate science look like? What is the role of researchers and the contributions they can make?

We invite activist, practitioners and researchers from the social and natural sciences to contribute to this session. If you are interested, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words along with your name, affiliation, presentation title (max. 20 words) and 3 keywords to Juliane Schumacher (juliane.schumacher@zmo.de) and Johanna Tunn (johanna.tunn@uni-hamburg.de) by December 10th with “CfP Pollen 2024” in the subject line. The session will be held in a hybrid format, and participants can take part in either of the three hubs of the conference (Lima, Dodoma, or Lund).

We share a CfP for #POLLEN24 Lund (10-12 June 2014 Lund-Sweden). More information is below.

Call for Papers – Political ecologies of islands in the Anthropocene

Panel organizers:

Matthias Kowasch, University College of Teacher Education Styria, Austria; Inland Norway University
of Applied Sciences
Heide K. Bruckner, University of Graz, Austria

While small island developing states generally produce low levels of greenhouse gas emissions, they are on the frontline of climate and environmental changes—facing rising sea levels, and more frequent cyclones or hurricanes. These occur concurrently to a rise in extractive industries, including mining activities (on land and deep-sea) and logging. While older Western narratives considered islands as backward, remote and irrelevant places, within Anthropocene scholarship, islands have become salient in conceptualizing both the uneven impacts of climate change and for imagining possibilities for climate-resilient futures (Chandler and Pugh, 2021). As opposed to passive sinking places in need of ‘saving’ (DeLoughrey, 2019), islands and island thinking (diverse epistemologies and relational forms of human-nature entanglements) are being productively re-centered in scholarship on the Anthropocene (Haraway, 2016; Tsing et al., 2019). For example, research on traditional knowledge and community-based adaptation to the climate crisis have gained significant international attention (e.g. Clarke et al., 2019; Granderson, 2017). Referring to the concept of island metabolism, Bahers et al. (2020) showed how the political economy in small extractive island industries reinforce social, environmental, and economic vulnerabilities. Nonetheless, political ecology has been largely absent from island scholarship, and islands themselves are infrequently centered as such in political ecology literature (Brown et al. 2021; Manglou et al. 2022).

In this panel, we therefore ask how thinking with and across islands can complicate and enrich existing discussions on political ecology related to territory, natural resource management and mining governance (including of marine ‘commons’), climate justice and carbon colonialism, indigenous knowledge systems and epistemologies, and a ‘more-than-wet’ ontologies (Steinberg and Peters, 2019) that emerge when thinking through land/sea intersections in changing environments. We welcome diverse contributions on conceptual or empirical work on political ecologies of islands in the Anthropocene. Potential topics include:

• Uneven impacts/experiences of climate change in island nations
• Carbon coloniality and development in small island developing states
• Movements for climate justice in island nations
• Sovereignty and governance of island ecologies
• Mining governance and the ‘commons’ in terrestrial and marine environments
• Indigenous epistemologies and island thinking for decolonization
• Agri-food and marine environments for island food sovereignty

If interested, please send your abstract (max. 200 words) to Dr. Heide K. Bruckner (heide.bruckner@uni-graz.at) and Prof Matthias Kowasch (matthias.kowasch@phst.at) by Sunday, December 10th, 2023. Please include your name and affiliation in the abstract and which of the three conference locations you will preferably be presenting from. The panel will be hosted in Lund, but we welcome papers from Dodoma and Lima to create a hybrid panel. By December 13th, 2023 we will inform you whether your paper is accepted as part of the panel.

You can also access this CfP here

References:

Bahers, J.-B., Higuera, P., Ventura, A. & Antheaume, N. (2020). The “Metal-Energy-Construction Mineral” Nexus in the Island Metabolism: The Case of the Extractive Economy of New Caledonia. Sustainability 12(6), 2191. doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12062191.

Brown, H., Tompkins, E.L., Hudson, M., Schreckenberg, K. & Corbett, J. (2021). Climate and Development Research in Small Island Developing States: The Benefits of a Political Ecology Approach. In: Moncada, S., Briguglio, L., Bambrick, H., Kelman, I., Iorns, C., Nurse, L. (eds), Small Island Developing States. The World of Small States, vol 9. Springer, Cham. doi:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82774-8_3.

Chandler, D. and Pugh, J. (2021). Anthropocene islands: there are only islands after the end of the world. Dialogues in Human Geography. Vol 11(3), 395-415.

Clarke, T., McNamara, K. E., Clissold, R. & Nunn, P. D. (2019). Community-based Adaptation to Climate Change: Lessons From Tanna Island, Vanuatu. Island Studies Journal, 14(1), 59-80. doi: https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.80.

DeLoughrey, E. M. (2019). Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Granderson, A.A. (2017). The Role of Traditional Knowledge in Building Adaptive Capacity for Climate Change: Perspectives from Vanuatu. American Meteorological Society journal, 545–561, doi: 10.1175/WCAS-D-16-0094.1.

Haraway D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Manglou, M., Rocher, L. & Bahers, J. (2022). Waste colonialism and metabolic flows in island territories, Journal of Political Ecology 29(1), 1-19. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2836.

Peters, K. and Steinberg, P. (2019). The ocean in excess: Towards a more-than-wet ontology Dialogues in Human Geography, 9(3), 293-307. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820619872886.

Tsing A. L., Mathews A. S. & Bubandt N. (2019) Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape structure, multispecies history, and the retooling of anthropology: An introduction to supplement 20.Current Anthropology, 60(20), 186-197.