Political ecology II

This report provides an update to Peter Walker’s 2005 report that questioned the degree to which political ecologists substantively incorporate ecology in their analyses. Since the publication of this article, a range of scholars have characterized political ecology as unengaged with ecology. This report documents a range of engagements with ecology (or the nonhuman biophysical world more generally) by work strongly influenced by or aligned with political ecology in the realms of environmental politics and the political economy of environmental change. This brief review demonstrates that, while representing a minority of political ecology scholarship, work variously engaging with ecology remains an active and fertile area. The report concludes with a cautionary note that portrayals of political ecology as inhospitable to ecological engagement could actually lead to an erosion of such scholarship. Such an erosion would have severe consequences for the human-and-environment field more generally since political ecology (along with cultural ecology) remains the field’s major place-based approach.