Exploring Political Ecology in Environmental Governance

Why does a forest that one community calls home appear on a government map as “wasteland” ready for mining? Why do floods in one district get blamed on local farmers while a large dam upstream escapes scrutiny? Questions like these sit at the heart of political ecology, a field that refuses to treat environmental problems as purely natural or technical. It insists that every environmental issue is also a question of power: who controls land, water and forests, who decides what counts as “good science,” and who pays the price when ecosystems are damaged. For students of urban development and environmental governance, political ecology offers a sharp lens for understanding the conflicts unfolding around us.

Understanding political ecology 🔗

Political ecology studies the relationship between nature and society by focusing on power. It critically examines how political and economic forces shape access to natural resources, exposing the unequal distribution of environmental costs and benefits. The field emerged in the 1980s, when geographers Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield combined two earlier traditions, political economy and ecology, to explain land degradation in developing regions.

Their core argument was striking. Soil erosion, deforestation and declining land quality were not simply the result of bad weather or ignorant farmers. Instead, they showed that environmental degradation is both a result of and a cause of social marginalisation. A poor farmer pushed onto fragile, marginal land by unequal land ownership is forced to overuse that soil to survive, which degrades it further, which deepens poverty. The ecological and the social feed into each other.

This makes political ecology different from mainstream environmental science in one key way. Conventional approaches often ask “what is happening to the environment?” Political ecology adds a second question: “who benefits and who loses, and why?” It studies environmental change at multiple levels at once, tracing how decisions made by international agencies, national governments and local users connect together to shape a single patch of land.

Resource management as a political act 🔗

A central insight of the field is that managing resources is never neutral. Deciding to declare an area a protected forest, to divert a river for irrigation, or to classify grazing land as “degraded” always favours some groups over others. Political ecologists examine how unequal relations within and between societies affect the environment, especially in the context of government policy. The goal is to make these hidden choices visible so that governance can become fairer and better informed.

Historical context: capitalism, class and nature 🔗

To understand why political ecology became so concerned with power, it helps to look at its intellectual roots in Marxist thought. Long before the term “political ecology” existed, Marxist writers were debating the relationship between capitalism and the natural world.

One influential idea is the metabolic rift. Drawing on Karl Marx, scholars argued that capitalism breaks the natural cycles that link humans and the land. Marx saw the tension between use value and exchange value as central to both the internal contradictions of capitalism and its conflict with the natural environment. When nature is treated as a free gift to be turned into profit, soil nutrients, forests and water are extracted faster than they can regenerate, creating a “rift” in the relationship between society and nature.

A second important contribution came from the idea of the second contradiction of capitalism, developed by James O’Connor in 1991. The argument is that capitalism undermines the very conditions it depends on, polluting the air, exhausting the soil and depleting the resources that future production requires. In this view, environmental crisis is not an accident but a built-in feature of a system driven by endless accumulation.

Why class matters 🔗

These debates pushed analysts to see environmental problems through the lens of class. Pollution, displacement and resource scarcity rarely affect everyone equally. Industrial owners may profit from a factory while nearby residents breathe its emissions. A dam may generate electricity for distant cities while drowning the farms of those who live in the valley. Marxist political ecology argued that to understand environmental harm, you have to ask who holds economic power and who bears the consequences.

This class-focused perspective shaped early political ecology strongly. Blaikie and Brookfield’s regional method began with local land users, then traced their relationships outward to wider society, the state and global economic forces. It was a deliberate attempt to connect the small scale of a single field to the large scale of national policy and international trade.

The politics of environmental science 🔗

One of the most powerful arguments in the field is that environmental science itself is shaped by politics. This idea was developed most fully by Tim Forsyth, whose work argues that the need to understand the relationship between environmental science and politics grows as controversies multiply over the science behind environmental debates.

Forsyth’s point is not that science is fake. It is that the “facts” we accept about the environment often carry hidden assumptions that benefit some groups. Many widely repeated environmental claims, about desertification, soil erosion or deforestation, turn out to be environmental orthodoxies: stories that sound scientific but rest on shaky evidence and old colonial thinking.

The consequences are real. Forsyth argues that environmental analysis and policy can be reframed to address the problems of socially vulnerable people, by co-producing environmental knowledge together with their social values rather than treating science and politics as separate. Policies based on flawed orthodoxies have often restricted the livelihoods of the poor while failing to solve the actual problem. Branding traditional shifting cultivation as purely destructive, for example, ignored the knowledge of the communities who practised it for generations.

Whose knowledge counts? 🔗

This raises a question that runs through the entire field: when expert science and local knowledge disagree, whose account is treated as truth? Critical political ecology calls for greater public participation in producing environmental science, not merely access to it after the fact. For governance, this means consulting affected communities as knowledge-holders, not just as people to be informed of decisions already made.

Modern implications for environmental governance 🔗

Political ecology has become a key framework for analysing global environmental policy, resource distribution and social justice. It is especially relevant in a country with deep inequalities of caste, class and gender, where conflicts over forests, water and land are constant.

Environmental conflict in the Indian context 🔗

The work of Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha applied this thinking directly to South Asia. They argued that environmental conflict here is often a confrontation between the state and the working poor, whose livelihoods depend on access to natural resources, with environmentalism interpreted as resistance to state-sponsored development. Movements like Chipko and the Narmada Bachao Andolan fit this pattern, with communities defending the resources their survival depends on.

Gadgil and Guha also gave us a useful vocabulary for thinking about resource distribution. They distinguished between “ecosystem people”, the rural and urban poor who depend directly on local resources, and “omnivores”, a group that covers rich farmers, urban middle classes, industrialists and the bureaucracy, who are widely seen to control environmental policy and access to resources. This division helps explain why the benefits of development tend to flow to cities and elites while the environmental costs fall on those at the margins.

Their broader claim was that nature-based conflicts have grown in frequency and intensity, revolving around competing claims over forests, land, water and fisheries, and generating a movement for the rights of those harmed by ecological degradation. Reading the headlines today, from coastal disputes to mining in tribal areas, that observation still holds.

Linking ecology to social justice 🔗

Perhaps the most important modern lesson is that environmental protection and social justice cannot be separated. As Guha has put it, there is a deep interpenetration of society and nature, so one must remain aware of questions of social justice even when concerned with protecting nature. A conservation policy that evicts forest-dwellers to create a wildlife reserve may protect tigers while destroying the lives of some of the country’s poorest citizens. Political ecology asks governance to hold both concerns together.

What this means for urban development 🔗

These ideas matter for cities too. Decisions about where to locate landfills, which neighbourhoods get clean water, whether to protect urban wetlands or fill them for real estate, all distribute environmental benefits and burdens unequally. The expansion of cities often pushes ecological costs onto informal settlements and the urban poor. Applying a political ecology lens to urban governance means asking who shapes these decisions and who lives with their results, rather than treating the city as a neutral engineering problem.

What do you think? When a development project promises growth for the many but damages the environment of a few, how should governance weigh those competing claims? And in disputes where official science and local community knowledge disagree, whose understanding of the environment do you think should guide policy?

References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/political-ecology
2. https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/political-ecology
3. http://www.envjustice.org/2013/02/political-ecology/
4. https://greattransition.org/publication/marxism-and-ecology/
5. https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Political-Ecology-The-Politics-of-Environmental-Science/Forsyth/p/book/9780415185639
6. https://personal.lse.ac.uk/forsytht/forsyth_geoforum_blaikie%20paper.pdf
7. https://carnegiecouncil.org/education/006/forging_environmentalism/01/contents/part_1/5284
8. https://www.thebrokeronline.eu/article/bringing-politics-back-in-or-taking-politics-out/
9. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1994.tb00511.x
10. https://edgeeffects.net/ramachandra-guha/