Theoretical foundation
What is political ecology?
A more complex preoccupation with human-nature interaction centered around power.
What fundamentally distinguishes political ecology from cultural ecology in explaining environmental changes?
Political ecology is centered around power relations and not just cultural adaptation as a driver of environmental change.
Politcial ecology can be rather describes as epistemology than as a theory.
TRUE
What standpoint do Eco-centric critiques take?
They critique the high focus of politics and power dynamics in political ecology and urge for a bigger focus on ecological analysis.
Give an example of what gendered entitlements from a feminist political ecology standpoint could look like.
Example - After a conservation project, women's traditional resource-gathering rights disappear while men get formal employment in the reserve. This favors and entitles men while destroying more traditional structures.
Which idea describes that resource shortage arises from a rise in population?
Malthusianism
Why does asking "who bears the cost of degradation" matter more, analytically, than asking "how much degradation is occurring"?
Shift the focus from an ecological question to a distributive/environmental justice question.
The entitlement approach argues that famine is caused primarily by an absolute scarcity of food in a region.
FALSE - it is caused by unequal access to food, different entitlements.
What is the positivist/post-positivst debate within political ecology?
Can human-nature interactions be studied objectively (positivist), or are they inevitably shaped by social power, discourse, and context, which are subjective and constructed through framing (post-positivist)?
During a drought, one village avoids famine, while a neighboring village with the same rainfall and crop growth does not. What are the important points of analysis that help in understanding the issue?
What is the difference in institutional access? - Labor opportunities, markets, aid, social networks.
Which theory describes underdevelopment as required for the modern capitalist system?
Dependency theory/World-system theory
Political ecology studies not only the power relations between human actors but also between human and non-human actors. What does that mean?
The analysis of power relations is extended beyond social relationships, but includes non-human elements as active participants (through an actor-network approach).
The concept of "agency" in poststructuralist political ecology implies that global capitalism and the state are dominant and unchangeable by local actors.
FALSE - agency emphasizes that local actors can resist, negotiate and engage with these structures.
What is the difference in the foundation that Ecofeminism and Woman in Development (WED) build their argumentation on?
WED build on the idea of integration through authority, while Ecofeminism focusses sets an ideological basis, seeing woman as a category of humanity.
A displaced community is told that permanent settlement and education will solve their problems, but they experience this as a loss of autonomy and identity. What framework from the lecture can help explain this, and how?
Freire's anti-dialogical theory of dominance. Dominant groups impose cultural narratives on marginalized groups.