Political Ecology: An Integrative Approach to Geography and Environment-Development Studies

This volume offers a unique, integrative perspective on the political and ecological processes shaping landscapes and resource use across the global North and South. Twelve carefully selected case studies demonstrate how contemporary geographical theories and methods can contribute to understanding key environment-and-development issues and working toward effective policies. Topics addressed include water and biodiversity resources, urban and national resource planning, scientific concepts of resource management, and ideas of nature and conservation in the context of globalization. Giving particular attention to evolving conceptions of nature-society interaction and geographical scale, an introduction and conclusion by the editors provide a clear analytical focus for the volume and summarize important developments and debates in the field.

CONTENTS

1. Approaching Political Ecology: Society, Nature, and Scale in Human--Environment Studies, Karl S. Zimmerer & Thomas J. Bassett

Part I. Protected Areas and Conservation

2. Balancing Conservation with Development in Marine-Dependent Communities: Is Ecotourism an Empty Promise?, Emily H. Young

3. Strategies for Authenticity and Space in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Peten, Guatemala, Juanita Sundberg


Part II. Urban and Industrial Environments

4. Toward a Political Ecology of Urban Environmental Risk: The Case of Guyana, Mark Pelling

5. Modernity and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890--1930, Erik Swyngedouw


Part III. Ecological Analysis and Theory in Resource Management and Conservation

6. The Ivorian Savannah: Global Narratives and Local Knowledge of Environmental Change, Thomas J. Bassett & Koli Bi Zueli

7. Environmental Zonation and Mountain Agriculture in Peru and Bolivia: Socioenvironmental Dynamics of Overlapping Patchworks and Agrobiodiversity Conservation, Karl S. Zimmerer

8. Environmental Science and Social Causation in the Analysis of Sahelian Pastoralism, Matthew Turner


Part IV. Geospatial Technologies and Knowledges

9. Fixed Categories in a Portable Landscape: The Causes and Consequences of Land Cover Categorization, Paul Robbins

10. GIS Representations of Nature, Political Ecology, and the Study of Land Use and Cover Change in South Africa, Brent McCusker & Daniel Weiner


Part V. North--South Environmental Histories

11. Material--Conceptual Landscape Transformation and the Emergence of the Pristine Myth in Early Colonial Mexico, Andrew Sluyter

12. The Production of Nature: Colonial Recasting of African Landscape in Serengeti National Park, Roderick P. Neumann

13. Agroenvironments and Slave Strategies in the Diffusion of Rice Culture to the Americas, Judith Carney


14. Future Directions in Political Ecology: Nature--Society Fusions and Scales of Interaction, Karl S. Zimmerer & Thomas J. Bassett

Index