Resource extraction and conflicts over natural resources are a global phenomenon, including in India. This book explores the process of state formation through developmental intervention in the resource-rich areas of Jharkhand in eastern India which are inhabited by the indigenous Ho community. The cultural practices and livelihoods of Indigenous tribes, like the Ho community in Jharkhand, are deeply linked with the local ecology. The conflict in Jharkhand is intertwined with state development projects and capitalist interventions. This book examines the history of these projects and the issues of territorialisation, dispossession, accumulation, and marginalization which communities have been fighting against for many decades. It examines the process of development policies and projects shaping and restructuring the resource-rich ecology in the region and addresses the interrelated issues of development-induced dispossession, resistance, ecological transformation, governance, illegalities, and state-building. It focuses on the questions: what do development projects bring to the Ho community; what induces them to resist and negotiate; and how state decentralization schemes and local governance in resource conflict areas strengthen State capacities? The book highlights the consequences on the livelihoods and cultural practices of the local people because of ecological transformation and everyday resistance. Comprehensive and important, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of anthropology, sociology, political ecology, social work, development studies, ecology, developmental sociology, indigenous studies, law, and economic anthropology.

The contemporary state is not only the main force behind environmental change, but the reactions to environmental problems have played a crucial role in the modernisation of the state apparatus, especially because of its mediatory role. The Political Ecology of the State is the first book to critically assess the philosophical basis of environmental statehood and regulation, addressing the emergence and evolution of environmental regulation from the early twentieth century to the more recent phase of ecological modernisation and the neoliberalisation of nature. The state is understood as the result of permanent socionatural interactions and multiple forms of contestation, from a critical politico-ecological approach. This book examines the tension between pro- and anti-commons tendencies that have permeated the organisation and failures of the environmental responses put forward by the state. It provides a reinterpretation of the achievements and failures of mainstream environmental policies and regulation, and offers a review of the main philosophical influences behind different periods of environmental statehood and regulation. It sets out an agenda for going beyond conventional state regulation and grassroots dealings with the state, and as such redefines the environmental apparatus of the state.

Bringing together a multidisciplinary set of scholars and diverse case studies from across the globe, this book explores the management, governance, and understandings around water, a key element in the assemblage of hydrosocial territories. Hydrosocial territories are spatial configurations of people, institutions, water flows, hydraulic technology and the biophysical environment that revolve around the control of water. Territorial politics finds expression in encounters of diverse actors with divergent spatial and political–geographical interests; as a result, water (in)justice and (in)equity are embedded in these socio-ecological contexts. The territory-building projections and strategies compete, superimpose and align to strengthen specific water-control claims of various interests. As a result, actors continuously recompose the territory’s hydraulic grid, cultural reference frames, and political–economic relationships. Using a political ecology focus, the different contributions to this book explore territorial struggles, demonstrating that these contestations are not merely skirmishes over natural resources, but battles over meaning, norms, knowledge, identity, authority and discourses. The articles in this book were originally published in the journal Water International.

Liberation Ecologies elaborates a political-economic explanation of environmental crisis, drawing from the most recent advances in social theory.

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.

The Political Ecology of Austerity explores the environmental dimension of austerity that has thus far escaped academic, policy, and media attention. Offering a better comprehension of the full socio-environmental impact of austerity measures, the book highlights the importance of considering environmental issues when designing responses to economic crisis in the future. Mobilising detailed case studies from across the world, the volume documents the ways in which austerity impacts global and local ecologies, shapes environmental conflicts and gives rise to new forms and practices of social moblisation and resistance. Bringing together theoretical debates and rigorous case studies, the book proposes ‘the political ecology of austerity’ as an appropriate method of analysis that can inform our understanding of the shift in environmental protection policies and the intensification of growth practices (green or otherwise) that followed the 2008 global economic crisis. The Political Ecology of Austerity discloses austerity to be a globalised set of tools not only for budgetary discipline, but also for socio-environmental discipline that justifies the continuation of capital accumulation at the expense of further global environmental degradation. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of social and political sciences, environmental studies, urban studies, and political ecology.

Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, practice theory, and cultural studies. As these essays illustrate, contemporary political ecology moves beyond binary thinking, focusing instead on the interchanges between nature and culture, the symbolic and the material, and the local and the global. Aletta Biersack’s introduction takes stock of where political ecology has been, assesses the field’s strengths, and sets forth a bold research agenda for the future. Two essays offer wide-ranging critiques of modernist ecology, with its artificial dichotomy between nature and culture, faith in the scientific management of nature, and related tendency to dismiss local knowledge. The remaining eight essays are case studies of particular constructions and appropriations of nature and the complex politics that come into play regionally, nationally, and internationally when nature is brought within the human sphere. Written by some of the leading thinkers in environmental anthropology, these rich ethnographies are based in locales around the world: in Belize, Papua New Guinea, the Gulf of California, Iceland, Finland, the Peruvian Amazon, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Collectively, they demonstrate that political ecology speaks to concerns shared by geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and anthropologists alike. And they model the kind of work that this volume identifies as the future of political ecology: place-based “ethnographies of nature” keenly attuned to the conjunctural effects of globalization. Contributors. Eeva Berglund, Aletta Biersack, J. Peter Brosius, Michael R. Dove, James B. Greenberg, Søren Hvalkof, J. Stephen Lansing, Gísli Pálsson, Joel Robbins, Vernon L. Scarborough, John W. Schoenfelder, Richard Wilk

This book introduces new conceptual tools for studying local agency and international-local dynamics in post-conflict statebuilding.

What is nature? What is humanity's place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world? In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of momentous importance for our everyday lives and for the future that we and other life-forms face. In the essays of The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin confronts these questions head on: invoking the ideas of mutualism, self-organization, and unity in diversity, in the service of ever expanding freedom. Refreshingly polemical and deeply philosophical, they take issue with technocratic and mechanistic ways of understanding and relating to, and within, nature. More importantly, they develop a solid, historically and politically based ethical foundation for social ecology, the field that Bookchin himself created and that offers us hope in the midst of our climate catastrophe.

This book asks how we are to understand the relationship between capitalism and the environment, capitalism and food, and capitalism and social resistance. These questions come together to form a study of food regimes and the means by which capitalism organises both the environment and people to provision its distinctive system of ever-expanding consumption with food. Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty explores whether there are environmental limits to capitalism and its economic growth by addressing the ongoing and inter-linked crises of food, fossil fuels, and finance. It also considers its political limits, as the globally burgeoning ‘precariat’, peasants and indigenous people resist the further commodification of their livelihoods. This book draws from the field of Political Ecology to approach new ways of analysing capitalism, the environment and resistance, and also to propose new solutions to the current agro-ecological-economic crisis. It will be of particular interest to students and academics of Environmental Sociology, Human Geography, and Environmental Geography.