Political Ecology and Environmental Conflicts: The Struggle Over Natural Resources
In the last 30 years, there has been a fundamental reassessment of natural resource management. Academics debate passionately the role of new paradigms that aim to balance the economy, environment, and human wellbeing. Despite this, it is often overlooked that the field of political ecology — basically, the interplay of power, nature, and society — is an essential approach to analyzing conflicts that arise from grievances related to natural resources. This is particularly important when discussing sustainable production, which emphasizes the need to ensure the supply of raw materials without overexploitation.
Among various environmental management strategies based on sustainable development, the movement toward greener economies stands out for its innovation, resource reuse, adaptability, and commitment to agreements among countries. However, it is important to recognize that most models of sustainable development are subject to power struggles, vested interests, and territorial dominance, often driven by the self-interested desires of various actors to safeguard resources available exclusively to them.
This article addresses the following questions: Beyond the basic definition above, what exactly is political ecology? And how is power understood in relation to natural resources, and why does it lead to conflicts? Examining these questions is crucial to reaching a better understanding of the reasons and mechanisms behind inequity, vulnerability, and social injustice that often result from the disconnect between power dynamics and natural resources.
To understand the relationship among politics, power, and environmental conflicts, it is helpful to consider the evolution of humanity. Nature drives and promotes competitiveness, leading us to ask, who dominates and who is dominated. In 1859, Charles Darwin wrote that “man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends” (On the Origin of Species, Chapter IV). The same dominant-submissive relationship is formed regarding natural resources; in fact, it is the main cause of most conflicts. From competition in wild game to merchant capital and imperialist wars over precious minerals, natural resources have motivated or financed the violent activities of many warring groups (Westing, 1986). Environmental conflicts have long been part of human history. The association of wars with resources is as old as war itself (Le Billón, 2014).
Managing natural resources sustainably and adapting to environmental challenges has caused conflicts that are increasingly frequent in those countries that are moving towards sustainability. Power, one of the main pillars of political ecology, is an influential factor in the development of societies; for this reason, political ecology is a fundamental part of economic and social development. Political ecology focuses on establishing solutions to environmental conflicts caused by disputes related to inequality, poverty, degradation, and competing interests over natural resources and the environment.
The increase in environmental conflicts has given rise to innumerable questions related to the authority that political actors have to manage the distribution and conservation of natural resources. Power relationships evolve influenced by their origin, motivation, and desired final result. Humans work in response to applicable incentives or sanctions (Nozick, 1974), which makes them more likely to have a malleable will in circumstances where power allows them to assert or accept their role as a dominant or submissive actor. Therefore, using this approach, we must first ask: Where is the power and why does it trigger environmental conflicts?
"[P]olitical ecology tries to provide solutions to questions related to human society, its biocultural-political complexity, and the perception of a significantly humanized nature" (Greenberg & Park, 1994). Stated otherwise, political ecology allows investigation of the causes and consequences of environmental change, to make possible sustainable development through the reconstruction of social and political systems (Atkinson, 1991; Bryant, 1991). The behavior and dynamics of political ecology often concern disputes and conflicts related to the extraction or contamination of natural resources; movements that seek distributive equity of environmental benefits and harms; or discursive debates, especially in developing countries, over competing proposals about laws and policies for the regulation of the use of natural resources (Bryant, 1998).
Political ecology requires the assessment of two specific situations, the scarcity or abundance of natural resources (whether renewable or non-renewable). Both situations are equally likely to generate environmental conflicts, making it attractive for government elites to take power over them. Paul Robbins identifies five paired aspects of political ecology: degradation and marginalization; conservation and control; environmental conflict and exclusion; environmental subjects and identity; and political objects and actors (Robbins, 2012). This conceptualization refers in part to Darwin's approach of dominant and submissive actors (those who carry out environmental interventions and those who resist), power and power relations, and the inequality of power in environmental problems.
Power imbalances often accompany the financing of projects in countries that have little economic, political, and social control, enabling those with financial power to establish project roadmaps that allow them to manage in a controlled manner their extractive processes, the management of natural resources, and how they can be developed with a putative goal of avoiding environmental conflicts in a manner to preserve ecosystems for the future. This approach can be controversial because it typically does not establish boundaries around the scope of power of a person who exercises it.
It is evident that a dominant actor’s traditional power over natural resources manifest in economic means or authority, which promote political tendencies influencing the formulation of policies and governance that insufficiently limit their actions, often resulting in degradation, subjugation, or coercion to restrict any type of resistance or adaptation. The study of environmental conflicts frequently highlights the reality that the figures with the greatest power control and allocate environmental benefits and burdens, including issues of distribution, access rights, and division of labor (Robbins, 2012).
Power is the primary tool used to promote what critics label “New Colonialism” in the most vulnerable countries, such as many of those in Africa and Asia. Geographical limits on the exercise of power have lessened over time; power is ever more transnational. Instances of international land grabbing have evolved from foreign investments that are granted power over the exploitation, production, and distribution of goods and services. African countries have become a key target for natural resource investments, taking advantage of their political, economic, and social vulnerability. This has led to processes of foreignization of the territory and ideology (Zoomers, 2010).
The dispossession of lands and resources constitutes a level of power manipulation that manages to eliminate the autonomy of its inhabitants and achieves the hoarding and accumulation of capital by actors with power. For example, Kenya is a center for coffee and tea cultivation for export to developed countries they have led to increasingly widespread use of land to increase its productivity (Sredl, 2023). Uganda, a country with one of the highest poverty rates in the world, is used by large philanthropists to finance research that promotes the production of genetically modified crops, causing the displacement of traditional crops (Akampuriria, 2023; Greenpeace, 2016). These examples show the importance of sovereignty to empowerment and control over productive resources.
Under-developed countries with abundant natural wealth whose states are weakly governed often have actors who compete for control and seek income and wealth from their natural resources for development, tending towards patterns of appropriation, control, and exploitation of natural resources. The privatization and commodification of public goods and resources has led to the displacement and marginalization of vulnerable populations (Harvey, 2003), resulting in further concentration of control by dominant actors over natural resources and the markets and political systems affecting them.
The question then arises whether such disadvantaged countries can exercise a counterpower of resistance. The actor-oriented theory of power presented by Max Weber defines power as the ability of individuals to carry out their wills, despite the resistance that others may have (Weber, 1964). Robert Alan Dahl in 1957 proposed an example of actor-oriented power theory in which actor A exerts power over actor B, causing B to do something he would never do. On this basis, it can be seen that in the environmental context, the exercise of power has two types of actors in particular: the actor who has the power to carry out environmental interventions and those actors who, despite not having relevant power, try to resist (Bergius et al., 2017; Büscher & Ramutsindela, 2016). As observed today, the actors that have power are government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and private companies (Bergius et al., 2018; Neumann, 1998), however, those who have to submit to the will of these actors are workers, peasants, farmers, ranchers or miners (Gingembre, 2015; Moore, 1998).
Today, discursive power (basically, the logic of knowledge, debate on concepts, methodological approaches and ideas to influence issues and outcomes) has become a potent tool used by dominant actors, including governments, other prominent authorities and corporations in controlling information through the media or through structures that include education, reducing the ability to discern and generate critical thoughts (in a word, "indoctrinate") often with the effect of exacerbating critical environmental situations (Herman & Chomsky, 2008).
But the analysis of political ecology, power, and environmental conflict justifies and compels the use of such power by submissive actors as well to influence public opinion and resist the power of the dominant actor. Given the fragile state of many of the world’s critical environmental systems and the resulting threat to human wellbeing, discursive power must be better deployed by submissive actors in efforts to further better management of natural resources.
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About the Author:
Michelle A. Urrea Vivas is a PhD candidate in Environmental Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalunya. She also has a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalunya, Industrial Engineering degree from the Agraria University of Colombia, and Law degree from the Republicana University. Currently Michelle works as a consultant and researcher on environmental and sustainability issues, focused on climate change, circular economy, renewable energy, economic policy and project management for the regeneration and reuse of wastewater.