We share four new Calls for Papers for #POLLEN24 . More information is below. Call for Papers – Political Ecology, Geopolitics, and the International POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden…
We share four new Calls for Papers for #POLLEN24 . More information is below.
Call for Papers – Political Ecology, Geopolitics, and the International
POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden
Organised by: Jan Selby (University of Leeds) and Rosaleen Duffy (University of Sheffield)
This panel will explore the intersection between political ecology and International Relations (IR). Political ecology as a field and approach typically combines a ‘place-based’ approach to socio-ecological relations (Blaikie 1985) with analysis of how these locally specific relations are shaped by global resources, financial and epistemic structures and flows, thus operating with what might be called a ‘global-to-local’ ontology (Selby, Daoust & Hoffmann 2022). By contrast, political ecologists have traditionally not paid great attention either to the ways in which inter-state, inter-societal and geopolitical dynamics shape patterns of environmental degradation and environment-related vulnerabilities and inequalities, or to the theoretical or normative implications thereof; political ecologists often speak of ‘global political ecology’ (Peet, Robbins & Watts, 2011) but only rarely of an ‘international’ or ‘geopolitical’ equivalent. Yet recent research on ‘geopolitical ecology’ (Bigger & Neimark 2017; Masse & Margulies 2020) and ‘international political ecology’ (Selby, Daoust & Hoffmann 2022) suggests that fuller consideration of international and geopolitical dynamics is crucial both to understanding contemporary environmental crises and vulnerabilities, and to thinking through how they might be addressed, especially in an era of renewed geopolitical rivalries and ailing multilateralism. This panel will build upon this recent work, as well as on intersecting work within international environmental politics and critical geopolitics (Dalby 2020,; O’Lear, 2018; Dickinson, 2022), and on ‘environmental multiplicity’ (Corry 2020), to examine substantive, theoretical, methodological and normative issues at the intersection of political ecology and IR. The panel will ask a series of key questions including, but not limited to:
– What alternative or additional substantive insights on environmental crises and insecurities are generated by adopting a ‘geopolitical’ or ‘international’ approach to political ecology?
– What, in theoretical terms, might such an approach involve? How should we simultaneously theorise global capitalist and inter-state political ecology dynamics?
– What methodological strategies are appropriate to analysing the geopolitical or international dimensions of political ecology?
– What are the normative implications of taking geopolitics and the international seriously, for instance for the idea and possibility of degrowth?
– What are the limits to or limitations of a geopolitical or international approach to political ecology?
Please submit proposals no later than 12 December 2023, to allow for final submission to the conference organisers by 15 December. Please send a 250-300 word proposal, with title, contact information, and three keywords as a Word attachment to j.selby@leeds.ac.uk
References
Bigger, P. & B. Neimark (2017), ‘Weaponizing nature: the geopolitical ecology of the US Navy’s biofuels program’, Political Geography, 60, 13-22.
Blaikie, P. (1985), The Political Ecology of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (Longman).
Corry, O. (2020), ‘Nature and the international: towards a materialist understanding of societal multiplicity’, Globalizations, 17: 3, 419-35.
Dalby, S. (2020), Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (University of Ottawa Press).
Dickinson, H. (2022), ‘Caviar matter(s): the material politics of the European caviar grey market’, Political Geography, 99, 102737.
Masse, F. & J. Margulies (2020), ‘The geopolitical ecology of conservation: the emergence of illegal wildlife trade as national security interest and the re-shaping of US foreign conservation assistance’, World Development, 132, 104958.
O’Lear, S. (2018), Environmental Geopolitics (Roman and Littlefield).
Peet, R., P. Robbins & M. Watts, eds. (2011), Global Political Ecology (Routledge).
Selby, J., G. Daoust & C. Hoffmann (2022), Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security (Cambridge University Press).
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Call for Papers – Politics of (in)visibility in conservation and environmental governance
POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden
Organisers: Paul Thung and Rosa Deen
Paper panel, 90 minutes
key words: conservation, environmental justice, (in)visibility, conservation regimes
This panel wishes to explore the politics of (in)visibility in conservation and other socio-ecological landscapes. Conservation often relies on raising awareness and putting a spotlight on a certain species, ecosystem or even plight of peoples, but this framing always obscures other realities. Conservation ‘crisis’ narratives, for example, can obscure histories of colonial dispossession and enduring relationships of inequality and exploitation. Or, within situations referred to as ‘Human-Wildlife Conflict,’ a focus on ‘problematic’ wildlife precludes a broader understanding of dynamic relations between people and protected areas (e.g. Pooley, 2020), partly due to the visibility of predators.
While political ecologists have produced many insightful studies on the omissions and limitations of conservationist representations (e.g. Igoe, 2021; Wahlén, 2014; West, 2006), such accounts tend to focus on media with large or faraway audiences. It is rarer to find detailed analyses of how different actors in conservation contexts manage their positions and relationships by hiding and revealing aspects of reality to each other, even though this is an important aspect for understanding the production of (in)visibility and its effects.
This panel therefore asks: what is made visible or invisible within the practices of nature conservation and environmental governance, and which consequences does this have for relations between different communities, organisations and authorities? The panel welcomes primary research as well as theoretical contributions on the politics of (in)visibility, including analyses of dominant narratives and visual tropes, epistemic injustices, and performativity in conservation, and how these are embedded in broader histories, relationships, and inequalities. The panel further hopes to spark transdisciplinary discussion on decolonising knowledges and the role of different traditions of political ecology in this.
The deadline is fast approaching! This panel is envisioned as a single-site, 90-minute panel in Lund (Sweden) with 3-4 presentations, but depending on received abstracts it could take on a hybrid form. Please send your proposed title and abstract (max. 200 words) to paul.thung@brunel.ac.uk and rd425@kent.ac.uk by the 12th of December, and we will respond shortly.
References:
Igoe, J. (2021). The Nature of the Spectacle: On Images, Money, and Conserving Capitalism. University of Arizona Press. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/48462
Pooley, Simon, Saloni Bhatia, and Anirudhkumar Vasava (2021). “Rethinking the study of human–wildlife coexistence” Conservation Biology 35 (3), 784-793.
Wahlén, C. B. (2014). Constructing Conservation Impact: Understanding Monitoring and Evaluation in Conservation NGOs. Conservation and Society, 12(1), 77. https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-4923.132133
West, P. (2006). Conservation is our government now: The politics of ecology in Papua New Guinea. Duke University Press.
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Call for Papers – Biodiversity conservation and the value turn
Organised by: Marco Immovilli and Bram Büscher (Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University)
Over the last decade, debates around values of nature have gained great traction in the field of conservation. Besides important work from political ecology (Allen, 2018; Büscher & Fletcher, 2020; James & Broome, 2023), this received impetus through the work of the 2022 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessment of the diverse ways people value nature. In this assessment, IPBES (2022) criticizes the fetishization of economic values of nature as one of the structural causes of the current global environmental predicament. In response, IPBES and others (Pascual, 2023) have suggested an agenda of pluralism and diversity of values to create space for diverse ways of giving value to nature to co/exist. This position has created room among mainstream institutions to think of post-growth and post-capitalist pathways for biodiversity conservation (leading the IPBES assessment to list degrowth as one possible transformative trajectory for the first time).
These developments present a salient opportunity for political ecologists to contribute to these debates. We see two avenues, in particular, that deserve urgent attention. The first is to build on these development to further push a deeper understanding and more practical application of post-growth and alternative values of nature. The second is to discuss the limits of these approaches and how they are rolled out in more mainstream debates. Most importantly, these debates fail to incorporate critical discussions of value, especially those that understand value as a central component of capitalism and that are critical of a ‘diversity of values agenda’ that eschews capital’s ultimate drive towards the valorisation of value. A critical take on value can fill these gaps and push discussions on radical transformations forward.
In this panel, we aim to bridge the gap between critical thought and mainstream debates on biodiversity conservation and value. We hope to do so by collecting contributions that critically reflect on the concept of diversity of values of nature (and more generally on the idea of diversity within capitalism) and on different ways value can be used to reflect on the relation between capitalism and the protection of nature. We believe that new understandings of value can enlighten us on the functioning of biodiversity conservation within late capitalism. Hence we also welcome contributions that use value as an emancipatory concept to study alternative ways of living with nature. We believe that calls for post-growth and post-capitalist ways of living with nature could profit from an engagement with value as a way to explore their modes of operation, organization and reproduction.
In sum, we welcome contributions that, among others, touch upon the following topics:
Please submit your paper proposal no later than 12th December 2023. We will let you know of acceptance by the 14th December. Final submission to the conference organizers is on 15th December. Please send a 250-300 word proposal, with title, contact information, and three keywords as a Word attachment to marco.immovilli@wur.nl.
You can also access to this CfP here.
References:
Allen, K. (2018). Why exchange values are not environmental values: Explaining the problem with neoliberal conservation. Conservation and Society, 16(3), 243-256.
Büscher, B., & Fletcher, R. (2020). The conservation revolution: radical ideas for saving nature beyond the Anthropocene. Verso Books.
IPBES (2022). Methodological Assessment Report on the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Balvanera, P., Pascual, U., Christie, M., Baptiste, B., and González-Jiménez, D. (eds.). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6522522
James, A., & Broome, N. P. (2023). A Fine Balance? Value-relations, Post-capitalism and Forest Conservation—A Case from India. Conservation and Society, 21(3), 188-199.Pascual, U., Adams, W. M., Díaz, S., Lele, S., Mace, G. M., & Turnhout, E. (2021). Biodiversity and the challenge of pluralism. Nature Sustainability, 4(7), 567-572.
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Call for Papers – Diverse Ways of Knowing the Climate: Towards Epistemic Climate Justice
Climate knowledge – knowledge of the actual and predicted effects of global warming, of the causes and responsibilities for climate change and of possible pathways for transformation – strongly influences politics and policies on climate change. Reliable climate knowledge plays a crucial role for domestic and international mitigation and adaptation strategies, but it also builds the basis for climate activism, contestations of existing socio-economic structures and claims of climate justice, in the UNFCCC system, in cases of climate litigation or in debates on the historical responsibility of the major carbon emitters.
Over the last years, the different forms of ‘knowing’ related to climate change have increasingly become politicized while the many dimensions of injustice related to climate change have been brought to attention. Global warming affects people in the Global North and Global South very unequally, with those groups that contributed least to global warming most affected (Adger et al. 2006; Roberts and Parks 2007, Bettini 2017; Bond and Dorsey 2010). Environmental justice scholars have demonstrated how the consequences of global warming interact with existing inequalities along lines of gender, race or class, among others (Kaijser and Kronsell 2014; Malin and Ryder 2018). Meanwhile, scholars working from postcolonial and political ecology perspectives have shown how mitigation and adaptation schemes often obfuscate historic responsibility for climate change (Okereke 2010; Morchain 2018) and reproduce uneven North-South power relations, leading to accusations of “carbon colonialism” (Billet 2010), “climate colonialism” (Sultana 2021, Newell and Paterson 2010) and “colonial déjá vu” (Whyte 2016). Environmental anthropologists and sociologists have pointed to a diverse array of knowledges that exist on climatic changes and climate adaptation, especially in indigenous cultures (Nakashima et al. 2018, Zuma-Netshiukhwi et al. 2013).
The dominant mode of climate knowledge production, however, has for the most part neglected issues of epistemic climate justice and ways of knowing beyond the scientific tradition of the West. Most climate knowledge is produced in rather narrow technocratic and managerial settings (Knox-Hayes and Hayes 2016, Machen and Nost 2021, Hastrup and Skrydstrup 2013). Research on climate change usually does not ask which forms of knowledge, which actors and which practices are included and excluded from the institutionalized climate discourse and how this relates to power dynamics and colonial histories (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020). Critical feminist or non-western approaches to knowledge are rarely debated in relation to the production of climate futures through a specific form of climate knowledge, and where insights from STS inform analysis of climate knowledge, they rather take an apolitical or technopolitical stance than asking about inequalities and socio-economic conditions of marginalized knowledge production (Mahony and Hulme, 2018).
This session aims to address these issues. Based on the premise that diverse ways of knowing and knowledge-making are important for a debate on climate justice and pathways for transformation, this session seeks to critically evaluate current forms of climate knowledge production and to advance the debate on more diverse, inclusive and decolonial forms of climate and transformation knowledge. We welcome presentations that reflect on potentials, limitations and problems of current approaches to knowledge about climate change and socio-ecological transformation, to identify the structural and epistemic injustices related to them, and to discuss alternative forms of meaning-making and knowledge production. Potential contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following questions:
We invite activist, practitioners and researchers from the social and natural sciences to contribute to this session. If you are interested, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words along with your name, affiliation, presentation title (max. 20 words) and 3 keywords to Juliane Schumacher (juliane.schumacher@zmo.de) and Johanna Tunn (johanna.tunn@uni-hamburg.de) by December 10th with “CfP Pollen 2024” in the subject line. The session will be held in a hybrid format, and participants can take part in either of the three hubs of the conference (Lima, Dodoma, or Lund).