The New Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology

By Jess Hope

This year started with a bang, as copies of the New Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology landed on the doormats of authors around the world. This new handbook focuses on the politics of political ecology and explores the entanglements of environmental crises with systems of power, resistance, and competing visions of the future. It offers a state-of-the-art exploration of contemporary political ecology – one grounded in the field’s radical foundations and its longstanding ties to political activism. 

I was lucky enough to edit this handbook with Elia Apostolopoulou (Imperial College London) and Ariadne Collins (University of St Andrews), as one person in an all-female team. Our editorial strategy was grounded in a commitment to being inclusive and cross-disciplinary. As a result, the new handbook offers a gender-balanced and ethnically diverse range of authors, including contributions from scholars at various career stages. This not only challenged established hierarchies but has also proved intellectually enriching, resulting in a dynamic collection that broadens and deepens our understanding of what political ecology is and what it can achieve.

Although we worked together throughout the project, we each took responsibility for one of three sections. Ariadne Collins edited Part I:  Decolonizing Political Ecology, Elia Apostolopoulou edited Part II: Activism and Praxis, and I edited Part III: Making of Twenty-First Century Natures. In Part III, we include three spotlight sections – on Conservation, on Infrastructure and on More-than-Human Political Ecology. The result is exciting – 52 chapters that are bursting with the new directions that political ecologists are taking. In this brief blog, I draw from our editor’s introduction ‘Political Ecology in a Changing Climate’ to identify 5 changes to the field. 

First, political ecology remains firmly rooted in “critical social theory and a post-positivist understanding of nature and the production of knowledge about it, which views these as inseparable from social relations of power” (Perreault et al., 2015: 7). However, whilst political ecology remains “deeply shaped” by Marxism, this volume demonstrates a growing engagement with theories of colonialism and race. These theories and concepts inform how the field understands the production, destruction, and maintenance of environments (and environmental decline), extending beyond the dedicated section on decoloniality.

Second, the field continues to prioritize in-depth, predominantly qualitative methods as a means of resisting sweeping assumptions about environmental change and sustainability. However, this handbook reveals shifts in the scalar application of a political ecology lens, as well as related methods. Chapters on conservation data justice (Brockington et al.,2025), infrastructure (Gambino, 2025; Lawhon and Berhanu, 2025; Oliveira, 2025; Simpson, 2025), new state capitalism (Kovacs, 2025), atmosphere (Mostafanezhad and Dressler, 2025), the genome (Adams 2025), and geopolitical ecology (Bigger et al., 2025) demonstrate how the field is being advanced to widen the scales where political ecology offers its critique.

Third, political ecology remains intertwined with environmental and social movements revealing a strong need not only to provide rigorous critique but to also attend to our praxis. Contemporary radical research – from wetlands (Gearey, 2025), to urban gardening (Florea, 2025) to counter-mapping (Tozzi and Leonardelli, 2025), amongst others – reflect the field’s enduring commitment to transcend the confines of academia. This crucial and unique dynamic of the field reveals the complex origins of knowledge, the transformative possibilities of these relationships, and constitutes a crucial contribution of the field in the current global political climate. 

Fourth, Perreault et al. (2015: 7-8) identified a normative political commitment to social justice and structural change as a core defining principle of political ecology. This remains a central rationale of the field. However, how justice is theorised – and to whom it is attributed – has expanded significantly to encompass a growing concern for multi-species justice and more-than-human political. In this new handbook, political commitments to justice, alongside a critical focus on power and agency, extends beyond the human, incorporating attention to the liveliness and politics of animals, plants and materials (for example, Gambino; Hope and Mawdsley; Soliz, all 2025)

Fifth, and finally, our collective endeavour extends beyond scholarship; it encompasses a commitment to care for one another as we strive toward a radically different future – one that is equitable, just, and abundant. This is not only a way to define the intellectual mission of our field but also underscores the solidarity that binds us through challenging work in difficult circumstances.

To learn more, do take a look at the full volume. Please also join us this Summer at the 2026 Pollen Bi-annual Conference in Barcelona, where we will be holding an evening event to celebrate the publication of the book and the work within it.

References:

Hope, J., Apostolopoulou, E. and Collins, Y.A. eds., 2025. The New Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. Taylor & Francis.

Perreault, T.A., Bridge, G. and McCarthy, J.P. eds., 2015. The Routledge handbook of political ecology (p. 646). London: Routledge.