The study of the relationships between nature and society: how political, economic, and social factors affect, and are affected by, environmental issues. These issues may address: ‘mutually causal’ interactions between society and land-based resources, for example that poverty is brought about by poor management, which leads to environmental degradation, which, in its turn, deepens poverty. However ‘it cannot be assumed that the poor have an intrinsic propensity to degrade environmental resources’ (International Fund for Agricultural Development); the influence of political, cultural, or economic systems; for example, the cultural eutrophication of Lake Erie (D. Kaufman and C. Franz 1993); the role of external structures; for example, the deepening poverty of Masai herders when blocked from traditional grazing (P. Blaikie 1985); the reinforcement and misrepresentation of existing economic, gender, and racial inequalities: see Moore (2000) Jour. Political Ecol. 7 for an analysis of ‘law’s patriarchy’ confronting global inequalities; see King (2010) PPG 34, 1, 38–55 on political ecologies of health, and Jewitt (2008) Asia Pac. Viewpt 49, 1 on the political ecology of the Jharkhand region of India.
Walker (2005) PHG 29, 73 notes that ‘while political ecology has thrived, its coherence as a field of study and its central intellectual contributions remain the subject of sometimes contentious debate’. One of the recurrent, and unresolved, questions has been ‘Where is the ecology in political ecology?’ Vayda and Walters (1999) Hum. Ecol. 27 argue that ‘some political ecologists do not even deal with literally the influence of politics in effecting environmental change but rather deal only with politics’. Global political ecology concerns itself with the globalization of environmental problems and responses through processes of financialization, generalized environmental collapse, and the mobility of expertise.
http://www.iisd.org/publications/pub.aspx?pno=705 An overview of the potential violent conflict in pastoral communities.