Nordic political ecologies

Abstract

Benjaminsen, T.A. & Robbins, P. 2015. Nordic political ecologies. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 00, 00–00. ISSN 0029-1951.

The purpose of this special issue is to demonstrate the relevance of political ecology for the study of Nordic environmental governance. As political ecology has gained a leading position in international environmental geography, Nordic geographers have increasingly been attracted to this approach. Although many have carried out political ecology research in the Global South, there has been little Nordic political ecology research at ‘home’. The contributions to this special issue demonstrate that the themes emerging in Nordic political ecology are familiar from research in developing countries, whether discussing tensions between rural or indigenous people and the state, contested environmental knowledge and how the state relates to such contestations, or prevailing discourses of sustainable land use. The Nordic context also represents a unique potential for political ecology scholarship, for at least two reasons. First, the Nordic landscape tradition suggests a potentially useful bridge between political ecology and land change science. Second, the emergence of the Arctic as a resource frontier and a geopolitical target area represents a potential comparative advantage of Nordic political ecology. This frontier is just as dynamic, environmentally and politically, as any other frontier of resource exploitation.

Keywords:

• environmental geography
• land change science
• Nordic political ecology
• political ecology
• the Arctic

Introduction

Political ecology is an approach to socio-environmental analysis that has gained momentum during recent decades, especially within Anglo-American geography, but also within the fields of anthropology, development studies, and environmental history. It consists of a broad literature with several dimensions, making it difficult to characterise succinctly, although this diversity is united by a common focus on power in environmental governance and the co-production of environment and society within a wider political economy (Benjaminsen & Svarstad 2010; Robbins 2012; Robbins et al. 2014). Political ecologists study power both in struggles over material resources (e.g. conflicts over control of land) and in struggles over meaning (e.g. conflicts over the understanding of concepts such as ‘wilderness’, ‘degradation’ or ‘participation’). Often these two perspectives on power are united in research that explores the way power over the definition of problems holds implications for the disposition and control of resources.

Therefore, a frequent focus in political ecology is on the behaviour of powerful actors in environmental governance, the interests they defend, and the established discourses they promulgate to secure and maintain control. These discourses are commonly studied in terms of dominant tropes, categories and narratives, and the social impacts and policy outcomes of dominant discourses (Adger et al. 2001). In addition, there is an increasing focus on resistance, stressing the way subaltern and marginalised groups respond to power exercised by the state, elites or corporate actors (e.g. Cavanagh & Benjaminsen 2015; Hall et al. 2015).

Political ecology emerged in the 1970s as a result of two confluent trends. First, the field developed as a Marxist critique of Malthusian ideas in environmental thinking. In this case research demonstrated and argued that the contributions of population-centred scholarship by ecologists, such as Ehrlich (1968) and Hardin (1968), were inherently political. The critique maintained that studies of human ecology are never neutral or apolitical, but involve interests, norms, and power. While Marxist critics tended to accept the environmental impacts of human production described by various neo-Malthusian thinkers, they pointed to the inherent lack of social and political analysis in such studies, arguing that Malthusian thinking invariably leads to policies of ‘blaming the victims’. For example, Enzensberger (1974) points out that ecologists and other natural scientists may claim to be ‘objective’ and ‘apolitical’, but they become political actors when engaging in environmental debates, because they inform political choices with winners and losers, and because their analyses, questions, and categories are inevitably informed by normative assumptions (taken up by Dahlberg 2015, this issue). The presumed neutrality of ecology as a science is therefore illusory. Enzensberger referred to fields of science with political implications but apolitical pretensions as ‘political ecology’, although later political ecologists would refer to these same fields using the term ‘apolitical ecology’. This shift in terminology stresses the distinction between fields that admit and openly engage with their inevitable, normative assumptions (political ecologies) and those that do not (apolitical ecologies) (Robbins 2012). For instance, in the case of the Sahelian famine of the 1970s and 1980s, Neo-Malthusian presentations depicted this human disaster as a result of overpopulation and environmental mismanagement causing widespread desertification (e.g. Eckholm & Brown 1977; Timberlake 1985). Such descriptions of alleged serious environmental degradation and its causes, although misguided, have informed the views of Sahelian governments as well as of international aid donors, environmental organisations, and the public at large (Benjaminsen 2015).

The second trend that contributed to the emergence of political ecology was the evolution of several fields in environment and society research, including human ecology, cultural ecology, and environment and development research. Researchers in these fields, notably including anthropologists Bernhard Nietschmann (1973) and Roy Rappaport (1968), had long employed ecological methods and metaphors to explain human behaviour, practices, and traditions. As their research led them into communities whose livelihoods and societies were increasingly impacted by regional and national governments, global economics, international trade, capital investment, and complex markets, the explanatory limits of such metaphors became increasingly clear, and subsequent researchers began to seek more powerful conceptual and theoretical tools, especially tools from political economy (Watts 1983a; 1983b).

From the late 1980s, a second phase in the short history of political ecology started, drawing on a wide range of theoretical and methodological resources. Piers Blaikie's book, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (Blaikie 1985), paved the way for an approach to political ecology that employs the lens of political economy, while explicitly engaging with rigorous natural science. The book provides a critique of environmental conservation policies in the Global South and presents three central arguments (Neumann 2008). First, there is often lack of sound scientific data on soil erosion and other environmental processes, which leads to a high level of uncertainty. Second, actors have varying perceptions of environmental change depending on their ‘ideology’. Blaikie (1985, 149) argues ‘that all approaches to soil erosion and conservation are ideological – they are underpinned by a definite set of assumptions, both normative and empirical, about social change’. Third, environmental policies always hold implications for control over resources and rights to land. A critical question that political ecology asks, therefore, is: Who wins and who loses from resource and conservation policies? This leads to the study of ‘where power lies and how it is used’ (Blaikie 1985, 6). Blaikie proposed an approach to understanding environmental problems by, on the one hand, problematising the quality and uncertainty of scientific data and, on the other hand, insisting that the production, interpretation and use of environmental data are inherently political. A process such as soil erosion could therefore only be fully understood with the help of the tools of political economy (Rigg 2006; Simon 2008).

These ideas are further discussed in Blaikie's later work, co-authored with Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (Blaikie & Brookfield 1987), in which ‘land degradation’ is presented as a perceptual term, stressing that environmental changes are perceived in differing ways by the various actors involved. Hence, ‘degradation’ is not simply a physical process that can be measured with natural science methods, but instead one in which physical processes interact with human perception, biases, and interests. Whether processes such as deforestation or soil erosion are perceived as ‘degradation’ depends on the position of observers engaged in inevitably political contests over what should be done with land and over the authority to control land change outcomes.

Our understanding and interpretation of environmental change are thus guided by our norms, interests, and values. However, while environmental data are constructed and subject to ideological interpretations, Blaikie & Brookfield (1987, 16) still insist on the necessity of improving scientific techniques of measurement in order to obtain ‘those data which are beset with least uncertainty’.

From the mid-1990s, political ecology evolved further to reflect post-structural influences (e.g. Peet & Watts 1996), in which the norms, interests, and values governing human understanding of environments and environmental change are themselves the product of political processes that determine control over what ideas are taken-for-granted or ‘true’. This perspective was notably brought to bear on a range of critical environmental issues in the Global South, including scarcity, overpopulation, soil degradation, and carrying capacity. Research in political ecology sought not only to show that such concepts were faulty and inapplicable, but also sought to explain how, despite their imprecision, they became assumed to be true. Political ecology in this vein is hence typically critical of received wisdom, especially as dominant and powerful stories and ideas often support dominant and powerful interests. In this way, such ‘deconstructive’ lines of research combined the study of environments with the study of narratives about environments (e.g. Forsyth 1996; Leach & Mearns 1996; Kull 2004; Benjaminsen et al. 2006; Mehta 2011).

As a result, epistemological disagreements within the field are necessarily complex. Blaikie (1999) points out that political ecological critiques of claims of ‘degradation’ owe more to realist science than to postmodern deconstruction. Hence, critical political ecology has to a large extent been based on realist investigations of environmental change to construct counter-narratives or alternative narratives to those dominating policies or academic debates. In addition to being critical of dominating environmental narratives, a ‘critical political ecology’ is distinguished from mainstream political ecology by also being amenable to empirical adjudication of contentious questions. Critical political ecology empirically investigates – rather than assumes – ‘the essentialist link between capitalism and environmental degradation’ that one often finds in the critical development literature (Forsyth (2003, 7).

While political ecology emerged from research on rural environmental issues in the Global South, since about the mid-2000s there have been a number of attempts to bring political ecology ‘home’ (Wainright 2005), to North America (Schroeder et al. 2006) or to ‘make First World political ecology’ (McCarthy 2005; Castree 2007). Such studies have demonstrated the relevance and continuity of a Third World political ecology to environmental governance in the North, but mainly in a North American context (Robbins 2007).

While a number of Nordic geographers have carried out political ecology studies in the South, there has been comparatively little Nordic political ecology research at ‘home’ (although see Benjaminsen & Svarstad (2008; 2010); Vik et al. (2010); Aasetre & Vik (2013); and Christiansen (2013) for Norway; Beach (2004), Dahlberg et al. (2010) and Alarcón (2015) for Sweden; Pálsson (1998) for Iceland; and Robbins & Heikinnen (2006) for a discussion of political ecology in a Nordic context). In part, as has been the case in Anglo-American research, this is a result of a historical link between critical environmental research on the one hand and international development and intervention on the other. Research in the field has historically been funded by agencies and organisations interested in supporting activities in underdeveloped contexts, on topics including soil management, agriculture, and water management. This emphasis has only recently begun to shift ‘inwards’.

In Norway, an additional main reason for this apparent lack of critical research on environmental governance seems to be linked to the structure of research funding in the country. The Research Council of Norway (RCN), which dominates funding for research in Norway, has for long been criticised for funding applied ‘programmes’ designed for the needs of ‘users’ at the expense of basic research.¹ The fact that ‘users’ (i.e. government ministries) are represented on the programme boards tends to discipline researchers away from explicit critiques of government policies. For instance, research on Sámi reindeer pastoralism in Norway has been funded heavily both by the RCN and directly by the ministries dealing with agricultural and environmental issues, and the results of this research have not been particularly critical of state policies or practices (Benjaminsen et al. 2015, this issue).

However, an increasing interest has emerged among scholars in a range of fields in applying political ecological concepts, methods, and insights to Nordic contexts. This special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography on Nordic political ecologies contains articles based on papers presented at a workshop in Trondheim in December 2013, titled ‘Bringing Political Ecology “Home”’.² The workshop was organised by the Department of Geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in cooperation with the National Research Network on Political Ecology and Environmental Policy. This network had just been established as a result of a national evaluation of geography that recommended more national collaboration in the field of political ecology, among other themes (Widgren et al. 2011).

In this introductory article, we review what we have learned through this new collaboration to explore and answer two questions: What themes in political ecology are familiar in the Nordic context? What could make Nordic political ecology distinctive and interesting to a wider scholarship?

Familiar themes in Nordic political ecology

Although political ecology emerged in a development context, there is nothing in the themes discussed that is unique to developing countries (McCarthy 2005). Hence, while,

political ecologists working in the First World are certainly developing a range of new insights and evidence, they are for the most part building upon and extending the themes of Third World political ecology rather than making major new departures in their work. (Schroeder et al. 2006, 164)

This continuity is reflected in this special issue in several linked themes: the role of concepts, categories and discourses in creating accepted environmental accounts; the struggle over knowledge and the political acceptance or marginalisation of various forms of knowledge; and the reach and implications of a neocolonial state for indigenous livelihoods and resource practices.

For example, conflicts over control of resources and development in the Nordic countries hinge on perceptions of state actors as well as understandings of environmental problems. Notably, there is in general a high level of trust or social capital in the Nordic countries (Skirbekk & Grimen 2012). This trust relates to both fellow citizens and the state, and it facilitates state governance, which in turn depends on public perceptions of the bureaucratic and political system as relatively unbiased and incorrupt. However, there are exceptions to this trust in the state. For example, in rural Norway there is a certain amount of opposition to what is perceived as the ‘environmentalisation’ of local politics and management (Benjaminsen & Svarstad 2008). Increasing restrictions on local land use due to pressure principally from urban-based environmentalists are viewed as a form of centralisation of power away from local institutions to the institutions of the state (Daugstad et al. 2000). This process of environmentalisation has taken place since the 1980s, in particular through the establishment of new protected areas in Norway (Daugstad et al. 2006) and through the protection of species, leading to the growth of carnivore populations (Skogen et al. 2013). Through this new protection of land and species, many rural inhabitants feel that rural traditions and customary land use are threatened. They relate this to central decision-making, and they tend to see themselves as powerless victims of decisions made by society at large (Skogen & Krange 2003).

Carnivore opponents often refer to an alliance of ‘enemies’ of rural and farming interests. This alliance is said to consist of urban carnivore romantics, environmental authorities, scientists, and the Oslo press. Similarly, the establishment of new protected areas has been met with perceptions that ‘society at large’ is taking over control and making decisions contrary to the interests of rural dwellers (Benjaminsen & Svarstad 2008). This divide is seen as a rural–urban divide in which many rural inhabitants associate the state with urban interests. Lack of trust in the state may extend to lack of trust in local bureaucracies. In a study of a mountain conflict in Southern Norway by Benjaminsen & Svarstad (2008, 56), one interviewee who was in opposition to the municipal administration stated: ‘We call it comradeship, but in the South they call it corruption’.³

This sense of marginalisation and powerlessness is even stronger in the far north of Norway where indigenous Sámi reindeer pastoralism is practised (Johnsen et al. 2015, this issue). There, a dominant state and outsider discourse supports a narrative that reindeer-herding as currently practised in Sámi pastoralism is economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. In Norway, the dominant narrative holds that overstocking is the main challenge to sustainable reindeer herding, and that destocking fails because herders do not co-operate or participate in state management when invited, while their own pasture management is subject to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin 1968). This narrative dominates public debates in Norway and is supported by many politicians, government officials, environmentalists, and scientists, and given prominence in the media. The counter-narrative of many herders argues that their participation in management decisions is only nominal, and that there is a lack of opportunities to participate politically and lack of transparency in state governance; however, this counter-narrative remains marginalised (Johnsen et al. 2015, this issue). These contrasting narratives in reindeer management are also to some extent present in Sweden and Finland, but perhaps with less tension.

However, the dominating narrative may be viewed as glossing over scientific uncertainties and to be based on a misreading of the Arctic pastoral landscape (Benjaminsen et al. 2015, this issue). This misreading is caused on the one hand by the state's needs to simplify the complexity of Sámi reindeer pastoralism in order to and make it ‘legible’ (Scott 1998) and to ‘render it technical’ (Li 2007). On the other hand, it is associated with a particular type of knowledge production, mainly performed by a handful of leading biologists in the field, and which is co-produced in tandem with agricultural and environmental bureaucracies.

While the reindeer herding industry in Norway is relatively small in economic terms, salmon farming has grown tremendously since the 1960s to become Norway's most important export industry after oil and gas. However, salmon farming is contested on environmental grounds because of genetic pollution of wild salmon by escaped farmed fish, problems with salmon lice spreading to rivers and infecting wild salmon, and the impact of organic waste. Movik & Stokke (2015, this issue) discuss how this environmental dispute is framed and handled by relevant agencies and how these agencies relate to and use scientific knowledge.

Power and knowledge is also a theme that emerges in the contribution by Dahlberg (2015, this issue) in relation to the use of environmental categories in knowledge production as well as in policy implementation related to landscape conservation in Sweden. States need simplified categories to make landscapes legible and manageable, but at the same time such simplifications limit possibilities for sustainable and just solutions to the problems. These are some of the tensions in state governance that have been at the core of political ecological research interests since the inception of this field.

Whether in examining rural tensions with state actors, discourses of local land use, the environmental impacts of salmon farming, or the treatment of reindeer herding practices, many of the themes that emerge from Nordic political ecology are familiar from contexts as far flung as Africa, India, or Latin America (e.g. Basset & Koli Bi 2000; Blaikie & Muldavin 2004; Benjaminsen et al. 2006; Bebbington 2009; Robbins et al. 2015; Zimmerer in press).

Distinctive themes in Nordic political ecology

The Nordic context presents some unique aspects and puzzles for political ecology. The first of these is the unique intellectual context in which political ecology is emerging in the Nordic countries. These countries and their academic traditions straddle the porous boundary between the continental and Anglo-American research traditions. For political ecology, the implications of this fact are most notable in the value, insights, and methodological approaches of the Nordic landscape geography tradition.

As surveyed by Widgren (2015, this issue), this tradition, like political ecology, has historically focused on producer-scale decision-making, the economic context of communities, and the land transformations that emerge from the combination of the two. This tradition, linked to German continental post-World War II research, into which political ecology merges or collides, has differed from political ecology in its historical adherence to a positivist epistemology and a lack of interest in questions of power. The landscape tradition includes a strong emphasis on landscape-scale analysis, albeit in the sense that it takes as its empirical object those landscape conditions and changes evidenced through mapped spatial patterns and remote sensing or aerial photography. Landscape-scale analysis therefore offers a more explicit dedication to pattern and process relationships and thus suggests a potentially useful bridge between political ecology and land change science, which has been a focus of ongoing discussion and debate (Turner & Robbins 2008; Brannstrom & Vadjunec 2013).

However, the Nordic landscape tradition offers a recent strong focus on discourses and materialities of post-productivist landscapes. As historical agricultural land uses give way to consumptive ones worldwide, the theme of post-productivist landscape (only now emerging in ‘First World’ political ecologies of the Americas and the United Kingdom) is one to which ongoing Nordic research can make significant contributions. The intellectual traditions of Nordic landscape research therefore offer intriguing and unique potential contributions to discussions and debates within political ecology.

A further reason why Nordic political ecology may provide a valuable input is the emergence of the Arctic as a resource frontier and geopolitical target area. Currently, attention is being paid to the Arctic because of its position in providing a new shipping lane and an expanding area for resource development, especially in oil and natural gas. Chief among the driving factors for the emergence of the region has been climate change, which has rapidly impacted the polar ice pack, transformed the terrestrial ecology of the tundra, and heavily influenced resources used by native communities (Arctic Council 2013).

This leads to a number of empirical questions in the political ecology of the global circumpolar region: How are indigenous communities adapting to changes in renewable resources, transportation, and snow and ice conditions? What land and sea rights are being contested in connection with new opportunities for off-shore drilling and shipping? How will global interests in energy and transportation invest in and transform coastal landscapes, and in what configuration of relationships to state and local actors? How do the geopolitical reconfigurations of off-shore access and development rights impact regional and local ecologies, institutions, and economies? These questions, of global significance, are ones for which the Nordic context becomes a critical laboratory for socio-environmental research. Given the depth of knowledge and experience of the Arctic zone among Nordic scholars, the existing expertise and ongoing research in the region can profitably be brought to bear on political ecological problems facing other world regions, including the northern reaches of North America and Russia, as well as other parts of the world.

As globalisation speeds up, the impact of global commodity chains and economies on regional socio-ecologies is a theme that is becoming increasingly important to political ecologies around the world. These impacts are especially complex and acute in extractive industries, but we also see them in primary production. For example, Norwegian salmon farming and diary production depend on imported soya from Brazil, while Norwegian oil and gas receipts depend both on the politics of hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) in natural gas production in the United States and on the slowing rate of growth in China.

Regarding the downside of global ecological economies, we would urge further engagement with consumption, an area of growing interest in political ecologies. Such investigations range from consumer landscaping (Robbins 2007) to obesity (Guthman 2011), and to the politics of both fresh food (Freidberg 2009) and French fries (Robbins et al. 2014). In the Nordic context, this would entail a range of studies from the consumption of international foods to the politics of household energy use. The frontiers and opportunities for Nordic political ecologies are ever-expanding.

Conclusions

As political ecology has gained a leading position in international environmental geography, Nordic geographers have increasingly been attracted to this approach. However, although many have carried out political ecology research in the Global South, there has been little Nordic political ecology research at ‘home’.

The purpose of this special issue is to present and demonstrate the relevance of political ecology for the study of Nordic environmental governance. The focus on power and on the linkage between materiality and meaning is just as important in, for example, Norway as it is in Namibia. The contributions to this special issue demonstrate that the themes emerging in Nordic political ecology are familiar from research in developing countries, whether discussing tensions between rural or indigenous people and the state, contested environmental knowledge and how the state relates to such contestations, or prevailing discourses of sustainable land use.

The Nordic context represents a unique potential for political ecology scholarship for at least two reasons. First, the Nordic landscape tradition, which includes a strong emphasis on landscape-scale analysis, suggests a potentially useful bridge between political ecology and land change science. Scholars of Nordic political ecologies, drawing on analysis of regional-scale changes in agricultural development, settlement dynamics, and shifting impacts of land investment and abandonment, stand to make wide ranging contributions to the wider field of political ecology by scaling up the lens of analysis and the scope of theory. In particular, Nordic landscape geography and its recent strong focus on the discourses and materialities of post-productivist landscapes offer insights that might be relevant in similar contexts around the globe, especially where agricultural production, forestry, and mining have given way to tourism, recreational development, and real estate speculation, as they have in the American West (Robbins et al. 2009). The intellectual tradition of Nordic landscape geography therefore offers intriguing and unique potential contributions to political ecological discussions and debates.

In addition, the emergence of the Arctic as a resource frontier and a geopolitical target area represents the second potential comparative advantage of Nordic political ecology. This frontier is just as dynamic, environmentally and politically, as any other frontier of resource exploitation, whether in the rainforest of Amazonas or the drylands of Africa.

Notes

1. This debate has taken place in Norwegian media (e.g. newspapers, blogs, and social media) (e.g. Svarstad & Benjaminsen 2010). A recent evaluation of the Research Council of Norway concluded that the council should make much more of its funds available for untied proposals driven by ideas from the researchers themselves, rather than by narrowly defined ‘needs’ in society (Technopolis Group 2012).

2. We use the plural form ‘political ecologies’ to stress that this is a diverse field with several possible directions, and the singular form ‘political ecology’ when we refer to the whole field.

3. The Norwegian term used was Syden, which literally means ‘the South’, but it is a common term used for countries with a warm climate and beaches, which are used as holiday destinations by Norwegians (e.g. the Mediterranean countries, the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, and Thailand).