Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Environment: Comparative Experiences, Insights, and Perspectives

Abstract

Recent years have seen the widespread rise of authoritarian leaders and populist politics around the world, a development of intense political concern. This special issue of the Annals explores the many and deep connections between this authoritarian and populist turn and environmental politics and governance, through a range of rich case studies that provide wide geographic, thematic, and theoretical coverage and perspectives. This introduction first summarizes major commonalities among many contemporary authoritarian and populist regimes and reviews debates regarding their relationships to neoliberalism, fascism, and more progressive forms of populism. It then reviews three major connections to environmental politics they all share as common contexts: roots in decades of neoliberal environmental governance, climate change and integrally related issues of energy development and agricultural change, and complex conflations of nation and nature. Next, it introduces the six sections in the special issue: (1) historical and comparative perspectives (two articles); (2) extractivism, populism, and authoritarianism (six articles); (3) the environment and its governance as a political proxy or arena for questions of security and citizenship (seven articles); (4) racialization and environmental politics (five articles); (5) politics of environmental science and knowledge (six articles); and (6) progressive alternatives (five articles). It concludes with the suggestion that environmental issues, movements, and politics can and must be central to resistance against authoritarian and reactionary populist politics and to visions of progressive alternatives to them. Key Words: authoritarianism, environmental governance, environmental politics, populism.

近年来，全球见证了威权领导人和民粹政治的广泛兴起，该趋势并带来了极度的政治忧虑。本刊特辑通过一系列在地理、主题和理论上涵盖广泛范围与视角的丰富案例研究，探讨威权主义与民粹政治转向和环境政治及治理之间众多且深刻的关联。本引文首先摘要诸多当代威权和民粹主义政体的主要共通处，并回顾有关其与新自由主义、法西斯主义以及更为激进的民粹主义形式的关系之辩论。本文接着回顾其所共享的与环境政治的三大连结作为共通脉络：数十年来新自由主义环境治理的根源、气候变迁和能源发展与农业变迁之整体相关议题，以及国族与自然的复杂结合。再者，本文引介本特辑的六大部分：（1）历史与比较性的视角（两篇文章);（2）资源榨取主义、民粹主义，以及威权主义（六篇文章);（3）环境及其治理作为政治代理或安全与公民权的问题场域（七篇文章);（4）种族化与环境政治（五篇文章);（5）环境科学与知识的政治（六篇文章);（6）激进的另类方案（五篇文章)。本文于结论中主张，环境议题、运动与政治，能够且必须作为抵抗威权和反动的民粹政治、以及替代该政治的激进另类愿景之核心。关键词：威权主义，环境治理，环境政治，民粹主义。

Los años recientes han sido testigos de la recurrente aparición de líderes autoritarios y política populista alrededor del mundo, un desarrollo de seria preocupación política. Este número especial de Annals explora las numerosas y profundas conexiones entre ese giro autoritario y populista, y la política y la gobernanza ambiental, con una gama de ricos estudios de caso que suministran amplia cobertura y perspectivas geográficas, temáticas y teóricas. Esta introducción resume primero las principales características compartidas entre muchos de los regímenes autoritarios y populistas contemporáneos, y reseña los debates que abocan sus relaciones con el liberalismo, el fascismo y las formas más progresistas de populismo. Se hace luego la revisión de las tres principales conexiones con las políticas ambientales, compartidas por todos como contextos comunes: sus raíces en décadas de gobernanza ambiental neoliberal, cambio climático y cuestiones integralmente relacionadas de desarrollo energético y cambio agrícola, y complejas combinaciones de nación y naturaleza. Luego, se presentan las seis secciones de que consta el número especial: (1) perspectivas históricas y comparadas (dos artículos); (2) extractivismo, populismo y autoritarismo (seis artículos); (3) el medio ambiente y su gobernanza como una proxy política o arena para cuestiones de seguridad y ciudadanía (siete artículos); (4) racialización y política ambiental (cinco artículos); (5) políticas sobre ciencia y conocimiento ambiental (seis artículos); y (6) alternativas de progreso (cinco artículos). Se concluye con la sugerencia de que las cuestiones ambientales, movimientos y políticas pueden y deben ser centrales en la resistencia contra la política populista autoritaria y reaccionaria, y a las visiones de alternativas progresistas.

Palabras clave:

• autoritarismo
• gobernanza ambiental
• política ambiental
• populismo

The rise of authoritarian leaders and populist politics around the world and the multiple configurations in which those associated yet distinct political developments manifest have been the subjects of intense concern and analysis over the past several years. The spatial and temporal extent of this tide is terrifying: Authoritarian and populist political configurations have emerged and either taken control of the state or come increasingly close to doing so in a very large and growing number of polities around the world over the past decade, including many of the world’s largest, most powerful, and most iconic democratic countries. Although the specific trajectories and genealogies of these political formations are always unique at some level, they also share many general features: nationalism articulated and justified in the name of frighteningly exclusive and often racialized iterations of “the people”; the demonization of alleged enemies internal and external; support for and selection of authoritarian leaders who rise to power by exciting such fears and promising simple, direct, often brutal action to protect and strengthen the nation; and contempt for and direct assaults on democratic norms and institutions. At the same time, though, genuinely progressive movements, leaders, and parties have seen increased support over the same period in many countries. Although we hear largely about alleged polarization, what those superficially opposed movements have in common is a rejection of neoliberal hegemony and the articulation of genuine alternatives. That suggests that this could be a moment of hope and opportunity as well, if the left is able to articulate positive radical alternatives that are broad, inclusive, and sustainable.

So much has been widely discussed. What has received far less analytical attention are the myriad connections between authoritarianism, populism, and environmental politics and governance, the topic of this special issue of the Annals, “Environmental Governance in a Populist/Authoritarian Era.” An immediate list would include the ways in which populist and authoritarian politics and regimes often arise directly from tensions between rural and urban areas; assert “blood and soil” claims of indissoluble links between the nation and the biological and physical environment; deploy resurgent tropes of territorialized bodies politic, contagion, and disease; exploit national natural resources to buy political support and underwrite their political agenda; attack environmental protections and activists to give extractive capital free reign; eliminate or attack environmental data and science in a “posttruth” era; and are especially dysfunctional political responses to the security threats, fears, and divisions associated with climate change. On the positive side, environmental movements and politics remain both a critical front of resistance to authoritarian and populist politics in many places and one of the chief sources of visions of progressive alternatives to them. These and other actual and potential relationships between authoritarianism, populism, and environmental politics and governance are explored in this special issue’s six sections, detailed here: (1) historical and comparative perspectives (two articles); (2) extractivism, populism, and authoritarianism (six articles); (3) the environment and its governance as a political proxy or arena for questions of security and citizenship (seven articles); (4) racialization and environmental politics (five articles); (5) politics of environmental science and knowledge (six articles); and (6) progressive alternatives (five articles). First, though, a slightly more in-depth discussion of the origins and contours of the contemporary turn toward authoritarian and populist politics and their relevance to environmental politics and governance is warranted, to put the articles in a common context.

The Rise of Authoritarianism and Populism

Bolsonaro in Brazil. Battulga in Mongolia. Duterte in the Philippines. Erdog˘an in Turkey. Putin in Russia. Modi in India. Xi in China. Trump in the United States. The list of authoritarian leaders who have recently won or consolidated power over their country’s central state, often by deploying or harnessing some variant of populism, is soberingly long and appears to still be growing. In many other countries, perhaps most clearly in Europe, populist and authoritarian parties, leaders, and movements have had growing electoral success and political effect (e.g., Brexit), even if they have not yet been elected to the highest offices. Several things about this trend are noteworthy. First, it spans many usual divides, encompassing countries in every major world region and category. Second, it includes many of the world’s largest and most powerful countries. Third, it includes many of the world’s largest and most regionally symbolic democracies. Fourth, as that implies, this trend has widespread popular support: Although many elections have had some questionable aspects (e.g., in the United States, gerrymandering and voter suppression preclude truly democratic elections), in many instances it is clear that these leaders and their parties really were chosen by at least very large portions of their electorates.

Authoritarianism and populism can each take many forms, be allied with nominally right or left politics, and articulate with each other in multiple ways (Hall 1980, 1985; Bello 2018; Borras 2018). In the wave of authoritarian and populist politics we are currently experiencing, each national instance, of course, has vitally important specificities and a trajectory that is unique at a sufficient level of resolution. Yet, the political figures and regimes mentioned share a great many common features, as many have noted (Bessner and Sparke 2017; Fraser 2017; Snyder 2017; Albright 2018; Bello 2018; Bigger and Dempsey 2018; Collard et al. 2018; Scoones et al. 2018). They advance militant, often economically protectionist forms of nationalism, insisting on the precedence of national self-interest and sovereignty over shared global interests and institutions. They use bellicose rhetoric and gestures in theatrical efforts to project strength. They promise to take quick and decisive action on highlighted issues, in contrast to liberal democratic administrations portrayed as weak, passive, and indecisive. They make the central populist move of claiming to speak and act in the name of and with the support of “the people,” who are typically identified in nativist, xenophobic, and often explicitly racialized terms. Following closely from that, they often identify internal enemies—ethnic or religious minorities, immigrants, refugees, drug users—as scapegoats and targets for public anger. They use populist rhetorical tropes of resentful antielitism, suspicion of experts and complexity, and celebration of direct action to promise simple, immediate solutions to complex, long-term problems. They present themselves as being, and often truly are, willing and even eager to use violence against opponents internal and external. They engage in direct and indirect assaults on the norms and institutions of democratic societies, including the rule of law, freedom of the press, and opponents’ rights of speech and assembly—directly through the centralization and consolidation of power in the executive branch, efforts to test or even actively subvert resistant institutions, and punishment of political critics or opponents and indirectly through the contempt that they exhibit for norms, institutions, and people who oppose them. Moreover, they claim and celebrate a direct connection with “the people” that purportedly bypasses just such potential obstacles. Alongside these many commonalties, they exhibit one last, somewhat ironic common feature: an opportunistic lack of ideological coherence or consistency.

This tide of authoritarian populism has prompted much soul-searching on the left and a few key analytical debates. What is the relationship between the authoritarian populist turn and decades of neoliberalism? Is the turn we are seeing more accurately labeled as fascism or as a clear step in that direction? Finally, is populism inherently conservative or are genuinely progressive populisms possible? A brief sketch of these debates is necessary before considering how each relates to questions of environmental politics and governance.

The politics and political economy of the relationships between neoliberalism and the turn toward authoritarian and populist regimes are clearly complex: Many of these regimes came to power on a platform of reversing major elements of neoliberal globalization, yet they are often continuing to pursue and deepen neoliberal policies in many areas. A number of articles in this special issue examine precisely that tension. Whether such contradictions reflect a coherent underlying strategy or constellation of interests remains unclear in many cases (see Bessner and Sparke 2017; Scoones et al. 2018), although an argument can be made that maximizing capitalists’ flexibility and accumulation appears to be a consistent principle through these trajectories, one pursued through different scalar strategies at different moments in time. Most analysts agree, though, that the turn toward authoritarian and populist politics is directly rooted in the failures and successes of neoliberal globalization. Starting as far back as the 1970s but with pronounced acceleration in the 1990s, decades of increasing economic and institutional integration failed to deliver the promised broad-based economic growth, producing instead wrenching economic restructuring, deindustrialization, intensified competition, and accelerating economic inequality that left many workers, sectors, and regions behind. These trends were dramatically intensified during and after the financial crisis beginning in 2008 and the increased volatility and imposition of austerity that followed it. It is entirely understandable that many people felt betrayed and sought leadership that would clearly prioritize their self-interests over some promised-yet-never-realized greater good whose fruits seemed in practice to accrue entirely to the already wealthy. At the same time, however, it became clear how deeply neoliberal ideology’s delegitimation of the state as a potentially legitimate or competent owner, manager, or representative of public goods and interests had taken hold: Even as people demanded recognition of their needs and desires, many took for granted that the state could never truly represent “the people” or even their interests and so turned instead to charismatic leaders promising to repudiate elites, including those currently in power. In a widely cited piece, Fraser (2017) diagnosed this conjuncture as representing the failures of what she termed “progressive neoliberalism,” which she defined as a Gramscian hegemonic bloc centered on an alliance between certain fractions of capital (notably finance capital but also other technology- and information-centered industries) and cosmopolitan elites, who used a superficial commitment to the politics of recognition and meritocracy to mask neglect of or direct assaults on the interests of the industrial working class and many rural populations, a position further justified by the cultural denigration of the latter groups as backward and reactionary. Fraser argued that perhaps the key feature of the current moment is that protest and resentment against these decades-long trends are now producing electoral effects, through the replacement or dramatic realignment of major political leaders and parties.

The electoral successes of authoritarian and populist leaders, parties, and movements, most but not all strongly right wing, bring us to another major debate: What, if any, are the inherent politics and trajectories of such formations? In a nutshell, would these current political developments be more precisely or accurately characterized as fascism or steps on a clear road toward fascism or can populism, at least, ever be genuinely progressive? These questions turn out to be tightly linked, inasmuch as both turn on what is at stake in shaping political identities, claims, and agendas in terms of some polity understood as “the people.” On the strongly cautionary side, Albright (2018) and Snyder (2017) both drew explicit parallels between the 1930s and the present, particularly between the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy and the trajectories of many contemporary authoritarian leaders who trade in the politics of populism. Albright argued that the three key conditions that paved the way for fascism in the 1930s were economic and political decline and uncertainty; the failures of existing administrations to effectively govern and address key problems; and the collaboration of conservatives who believed that fascist leaders would serve them rather than the other way around. She contended that we see quite similar conditions today in many countries. Snyder, meanwhile, dug deeply into the cultural politics—of identification, fear, scapegoating, demonization, spectacle, and more—through which fascist leaders either actively enrolled people in their movements or at least led them to remain quiescent (see also Arendt [1951] 1973) and drew chillingly precise analogies to specific utterances and actions by President Trump and his administration in particular. For both, the essence of fascism lies in its division of the world into us versus them, with the us articulated in extremely nationalist, xenophobic, and often explicitly racialized terms. It is alleged existential threats to that us that require and justify the extreme political centralization and repression that form fascism’s other essential elements. Others offer a somewhat different and more analytically cautious view. Bessner and Sparke (2017) suggested that comparisons between support for Trump and perhaps other contemporary populists and Nazism are perhaps too facile and decontextualized and that they miss something vitally important: The historical experiences of mid-century fascism led to an elite suspicion of public involvement in politics and policymaking, a sentiment that in turn directly shaped the establishment of the elite international institutions, from the Bretton Woods framework onward, which provided the foundations of the neoliberal global order against which many contemporary populist movements are now rebelling. In other words, many people are not wrong in thinking that economic and foreign policy have been shaped by elites rather than the voices and interests of the majority: That was precisely true, by design. To dismiss the resulting resentment, however marred by other political admixtures, as simply and only fascism is both unjust and a missed political opportunity. The convergence with Fraser’s (2017) argument is clear.

Turning to populism, many authors contend that its core logic is entirely too close to that of fascism for any version of populism ever to be truly progressive. Claiming to speak for and from “the people” is a move that, ultimately, requires the drawing of a political boundary between those who are included in that group and those who are not. For precisely that reason, Swyngedouw (2010), Rancière (2016), Hofstadter (1960), Müller (2016) and many others reject arguments that there can be truly left or progressive populisms, suggesting instead that in the end, populism is always necessarily antidemocratic, usually constructed and deployed by and for elites despite its superficial opposition to them and all too often enacted along lines of racialized identities. Yet a substantial and growing body of theorists (e.g., Laclau 1977, 2005; Hardt and Negri 2005; Badiou 2016; Grattan 2016; Mouffe 2016; Gerbaudo 2017) have argued that truly progressive, democratic, and inclusive versions of populism are both possible and politically promising. The core of these arguments comes from Laclau (1977, 2005), who emphasized populism as a political activity and process that can symbolically and affectively link disparate groups in a society into a common counterhegemonic struggle. In short, and in direct counterpoint to the preceding critiques, the emphasis is on alliances and inclusion rather than on exclusion, and the organizing principle and goal is the subversion of the dominant order in the name of genuinely greater democracy. This perspective has been most strongly developed in Latin America, where examples of left-leaning populist movements, leaders, and administrations are perhaps most abundant. An argument can also be made that, in a political moment entirely too characterized by nihilism and dystopic visions, populism’s powerful affective and emotional elements might be useful or even critical in catalyzing or sustaining political engagement. These questions, along with many others, turn out to be central to the multiple ways in which the rise of authoritarian and populist politics articulate with the environmental politics and governance.

Connections to Environmental Politics and Governance

As Gramsci (1971; see also Ekers, Loftus, and Mann 2009) and Williams (1980) each argued in different registers, hegemony over society cannot be separated from hegemony over nature: They function through the same political formations. Yet the ways in which they do so can be far from transparent. The connections between the widespread rise of authoritarian and populist leaders, administrations, and movements on the one hand and destructive trends in environmental politics and governance on the other are legion. Some are obvious—the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord and approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline against the wishes and territorial claims of Indigenous people, the use of revenues from extractive industries to fulfill populist pledges throughout Latin America, the repression and murder of environmental activists—and others are perhaps less so, such as the ways in which emphasizing the credentialed expertise underpinning environmental science might fuel populist resentments in politically counterproductive ways.

Several themes stand out as deeply relevant to this special issue as a whole and to nearly the full breadth of relationships between contemporary authoritarianism and populism and environmental politics and governance. Although some are highlighted in particular articles, all three form inescapable and consequential contexts for all of the cases examined in the issue. Therefore, rather than use them as section headings applying to only some articles, I discuss them here briefly as structuring contexts for the entire issue.

The first is the continued salience of neoliberal capitalism in relationship to the environment to these political developments (see McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Heynen et al. 2007; Bigger and Dempsey 2018). A strong case can be made that deepening rural–urban disparities in the neoliberal era were central to the emergence of the recent populist wave, as many rural areas reacted against the particular burdens increasingly mechanized resource extraction, globalization of primary commodity markets, volatility, austerity, and declining prosperity have imposed on them over the past several decades (for in-depth explorations of this thesis, see Bello 2018; Scoones et al. 2018; see more generally the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative at www.iss.nl/erpi). From this perspective, it is striking and telling that in the United States, “four hundred and eighty-nine of the wealthiest counties in the country voted for Clinton; the remaining two thousand six hundred and twenty-three counties, largely made up of small towns, suburbs, and rural areas, voted for Trump” (Remnick [2017]. Equally telling and more hopeful, however, is that many of those rural Trump voters had voted for the socialist Bernie Sanders in the primaries just months earlier; Kojola, this issue.) This argument, which overlaps with Fraser’s (2017) presented earlier, is centrally about political contestation over how and for whose benefit particular environments and natural resources have been used and governed. Likewise, many—including a number of authors in this special issue—have argued that many contemporary authoritarian regimes are pursuing and deepening long-standing neoliberal goals with respect to the environment, removing restrictions on capitalist production by withdrawing from constraining international agreements and standards, rolling back domestic environmental protections, and appointing heads of polluting corporations to head the very agencies that are supposed to regulate those corporations (see, e.g., Monbiot 2017; Mansfield 2018). There is a superficial tension in this set of arguments—withdrawals from the European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization, and other iconic institutions of the era of trade liberalization are interpreted at different points as both a reaction against neoliberalism and as a way to further and deepen neoliberalism; globalization is interpreted at different points as both a way to increase flexibility for capitalists and a way of imposing constraints on them—but that tension is resolvable if we focus on the fact that the consistent goal of capitalists is to maximize their flexibility and accumulation. That goal is best pursued through different scalar strategies at different moments in time: Withdrawing from the EU or from NAFTA does not mean that the United Kingdom or United States will go back to the union membership levels, labor protections, taxation levels, or social protections of the 1970s or 1980s that preceded those agreements.

The second is climate change, and integrally related issues of energy development and agricultural change (see Zimmerer 2011). Much current work on climate change (a bit too much of it uncritically neo-Malthusian) emphasizes the chances that it will create or exacerbate conflicts and lead to political destabilization—via conflicts over scarce resources, due to climate-induced migration across national borders, or through direct conflict over responsibility for climate change itself. More recently, the potential for conflicts over proposed geoengineering actions has been added to this list (Surprise 2018). Work focused on more explicitly theorizing the potential political trajectories that could follow from climate change (e.g., Mann and Wainwright 2018) considers the possibility that balancing demands for continued economic growth with responses to the security threats associated with climate change could present genuine, existential threats to democratic liberalism and smooth the way toward authoritarian political responses and formations. The continued legitimacy of states might rest on their ability to respond effectively to the threats associated with a changing climate and energy transitions, and authoritarian regimes might promise to take strong action and address the critical issues at which democracy has failed. Indeed, many authors suggest that such trends are already evident (e.g., Beeson 2010; Fritsche et al. 2012; Gilley 2012). Even before such overt junctures, mounting awareness of climate change, even when the latter is consciously denied, might contribute to a generalized sense of insecurity and instability that can find expression in populist and nationalist sentiments (McCarthy et al. 2014). At the very same time, authoritarian discourses, state violence, and state-sanctioned private violence are increasingly evident in efforts to keep fossil fuels flowing, exacerbating the problem.

The third is, broadly, the conflation of nature and nation: the multiple ways in which physical and biological environments and resources become politically understood as inextricably linked to national identities, fortunes, and prospects (Koch and Perrault 2018). Very old and very dangerous links between ideas about the environment and ideas about governance are resurfacing in the authoritarian and populist turn around the globe. Current politics of nativism, masculinism, white supremacy, and the hardening of borders are deeply intertwined with ideas linking racialized, gendered, and national identities to specific environments, territories, and the alleged existential struggle for scarce resources. Likewise, metaphors of the nation as an organism that can be healthy or diseased, contaminated or cleansed, are closely linked to particular imaginaries of national environments. In a more straightforwardly economic register, natural resources within indigenous or otherwise contested territories are being claimed as assets both critical for, and rightly belonging to, the “nation” to be used for purposes of national development. Among the many problems with such frameworks, the intense impulse to recode “nature” as “national”—the national territory, national resources, national self-sufficiency in energy or food, and so on—tends to obscures global and transboundary connections and processes.

Articles and Organization of the Special Issue

The articles in this special issue analyze these and many other topics and dynamics linking authoritarianism and populism to environmental politics and governance. They examine a truly global range of cases of complex socionatures, from a diverse set of theoretical and political positions. No set of organizing categories could do justice to their richness and complexities, and some themes, such as those already presented, run through nearly all of the articles to one degree or another. Still, some quite distinct and more specific themes emerged as well, and they are used to organize and introduce the articles in the issue next.

The first has to do with the need for historical and comparative perspectives. Although geography often excels at producing detailed, intensive case studies, there is also great value in explicitly comparative studies and frameworks that look across larger stretches of space and time. Two articles in the special issue take such an approach. The first article in the section, by Wilson, takes an explicitly comparative historical approach, examining how environmental governance of key sectors functioned under authoritarian regimes in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Nazi Germany to see what history can tell us about environmental governance under authoritarian regimes. Several other articles, although in other sections, also offer much longer term historical perspectives, although typically with respect to only one country or location. The second article in this section, by Middeldorp and Le Billon, provides a comparative perspective across a large number of cases in the present, examining the widespread violent, often deadly, repression of environmental activism and dissent by authoritarian regimes. Although Middeldorp and Le Billon focus in particular on one case in Honduras that also speaks to dynamics around extractives examined in the next section, they emphasize the broader pattern into which that case fits, including the complex ways in which populist and authoritarian politics can interact around questions of environmental governance. Comparative perspectives can be useful, but the article by Arefin in the third section cautions against the temptation of simplistic typologies and the importation and application of Western analytical categories onto states in other regions and political cultures. By contrast, the article by Clarke-Sather in the same section argues that Foucault’s characterization of the relationship between liberalization and security does in fact offer sharp insights into the trajectory of agricultural policy under China’s authoritarian government.

The six articles in the second section on extractivism, populism, and authoritarianism demonstrate how complex and polyvalent the relations among those categories can be (see also Koch and Perrault 2018). The first article in the section, by Kenney-Lazar, examines rapid economic growth in Laos over the past decade as a case of “neoliberal authoritarianism,” arguing that authoritarian rule has been essential to the commodification of rural lands and resources—from mining to industrial tree plantations—that has fueled neoliberal accumulation, yet also fostered populist resistance in the countryside. By contrast, the second article, by Lyall and Valdivia, argues that “petro-populism” in Ecuador has turned on a populist regime gaining and maintaining power precisely by promising to reverse neoliberal policies but in ways that hinge on not only maintaining the flow of oil but actively speculating its price in international markets. The third article, by Myadar and Jackson, likewise examines the interplay of populism and resource nationalism with the legacies of neoliberalism, in their case taking the recent election of a populist strongman as president in Mongolia as an entry point. They argue that populist claims to resource nationalism—or resource sovereignty—in relation to Mongolia’s mineral resources, particularly copper and gold, are, in context, an articulation of a critique of neoliberal inequality and structural dispossession, whereas dismissals of such frameworks amount to defenses of neoliberal structures of production and distribution. The fourth article, by Kojola, picks up the thread of the interweaving of mining, authoritarian populism, and resource nationalism. Kojola uses the concept of a moral economy to link political ecology and analyses of populism, arguing that the sense of crisis felt by displaced and marginalized mine workers and their communities is the key to understanding both their attachment to identities that are deeply racialized, gendered, nationalist, and nostalgic but also very place and resource based and their responsiveness to the promise of hope they heard in Trump’s rhetoric couched in precisely those terms. Related questions are central to the fifth article, by Graybill, on the relationships among extractive industries, governance, and emotions in Russia. Graybill explicitly links the literatures on affect and emotion with those on authoritarianism and extractive industries and economies, arguing that Russia’s authoritarian government actively crafts emotional nationalist narratives in support of extractive development and that the resulting desires and emotions contribute to popular support for extractive industries and activities in the country. Finally, in the sixth article in the section, Graddy-Lovelace takes a longer perspective on the relationships between populism and extractivism by tracing the history of U.S. agricultural policy over the past century, including the fact that extreme populist and nationalist narratives have consistently been used to justify policies whose substance, which supported accumulation and overproduction, contradicted and undermined their professed populist goals.

The seven articles in the third section, on environment as political proxy and arena for security and citizenship, all examine ways in which environmental politics can be ways of advancing or contesting politics around these other fundamental political concerns and categories in modern societies. Such dynamics are, of course, deeply connected to those around populism and nationalism in the previous section and those around racialization in the following section, but at the center of these pieces are cases in which questions of security and citizenship are particularly close to the surface of environmental politics and management. In the first article in this section, as part of a larger argument about how we should theorize political ecologies of the state, Arefin analyzes how the Egyptian state attempted to blame recent urban floods on terrorism rather than climate change or decaying infrastructure, as the former could be used to justify increased repression, whereas the latter would imply failures of the state to fulfill its core functions. The second article in the section, by Acara, examines water management in Turkey in the context of neoliberal authoritarianism and urbanization. Acara argues that the goal of exploiting and degrading water and other natural resources in the name of urban growth has been pursued in part through the centralization but also obfuscation of decisive aspects of water governance and that such centralization and mystification of control over a vital natural resource has functioned to help normalize authoritarian and arbitrary governance in the country more generally. The third article in the section, by Saguin, examines the management and elite capture of fisheries in Laguna Lake in the Philippines under two authoritarian governments, that of Marcos in the 1970s and 1980s and Duterte in the present. Saguin argues that both leaders fell into the same pattern of politicizing the problem, using populist narratives that emphasized conflict and social justice, but depoliticizing the solution by relying on technocratic management frameworks and techniques that elide fundamental social conflicts and goals. The fourth article, by Kantel, likewise links the management of lakes and fisheries directly to efforts to win national elections and consolidate power. Kantel argues that the Ugandan government recently dissolved community-based, more democratic fisheries management bodies as part of a direct effort to consolidate the ruling elite’s increasingly authoritarian hold on power. By using discourses of security and citizenship to cast some, more artisanal, fishers as suspect citizens and potential threats to state security, state officials justified the reallocation of resources and the direction of control and wealth to the country’s elite. As in Kenney-Lazar’s case, though, Kantel suggests that such strategies might ultimately backfire by fueling opposition. The fifth article, by Clarke-Sather, examines a shift in northwest China from irrigated, subsistence-oriented agriculture to drought-resistant, market-oriented agricultural production, all within the context of what has been termed China’s “fragmented authoritarianism,” in which many actors within an overall authoritarian state are relatively isolated and set to compete with one another. Clarke-Sather argues that Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and security apparatuses can help us to understand the particular combination of liberal market mechanisms and authoritarian governance evident in contemporary Chinese agricultural and environmental policy. A key question in that framework, shared with the next article, is what a central state undertaking a broader developmental strategy takes on itself to provide to citizens in the way of environmental entitlements versus what it devolves to or demands of citizens or local governments. The sixth article, by Balls and Fischer, takes up related questions by examining the ways in which electricity provision, development, and democratic politics have been linked in modern India, producing clientelist politics in which promises of cheap or free electricity have been linked to electoral support, perhaps at the expense of more broad-based and inclusive development. Balls and Fischer examine how private solar microgrids—a superficially apolitical and environmentally progressive means of producing and distributing electricity—are disrupting such politics, yet often producing new forms of economic and political exclusion in the process. In the seventh and final article in this section, Chang, Bae, and Park compare the spatial and environmental effects of liberal (1997–2007) versus conservative (2007–2017) South Korean administrations on the landscape near South Korea’s border with North Korea. Undertaking the difficult and perhaps too rarely attempted task of empirically documenting and analyzing the environmental outcomes of different governance regimes, they demonstrate that the effects are complex, contingent, and highly variable across space and scale, with notably different dynamics and trajectories in the two areas they analyze.

The five articles in the fourth section, on racialization and environmental politics, take up many of the previous questions about citizenship, security, neoliberalism, and authoritarianism in relationship to environmental politics but with a strong and explicit focus on how racial ideologies and the racialization of particular groups of people figure in those dynamics. The first, by Bledsoe, uses the example of three Afro-Brazilian communities in Brazil’s Bay of Aratu to argue that, despite what are commonly perceived as major differences, putatively progressive populist and conservative administrations and political formations in Brazil over the past two decades have in fact shared a reliance on and commitment to extractivism and racialized violence. The second, by Mullenite, analyzes the politics of infrastructure to unearth how targeted flood control and irrigation measures have been used to help build and maintain an authoritarian and racialized state in Guyana, by selectively directing wealth and protections to some while increasing the tax burdens and vulnerability of others. Taking a long historical perspective, Mullenite argues that these infrastructure measures were used to divide laborers along ethnic lines in the colonial era in ways that undermined anticolonial sentiment and enabled authoritarian rule, whereas in the postcolonial period selective neglect of the same infrastructure was used to marginalize groups who might otherwise have resisted an authoritarian administration. The third article in the section, by Wright, analyzes politics around Trump’s promised wall on the Mexico–U.S. border to understand both its visceral appeal to a certain kind of nativist, isolationist imaginary and the rising opposition to the wall on ecological, practical, economic, and political grounds. Wright argues that these contrasting views of the proposed wall represent contrasting understandings of the border: one of the border as the clear, visible, and hardened edge of a discrete, territorialized, and deeply racialized white supremacist national space and identity and the other of the border as a zone of diverse social and natural life, connection, and exchange. The fourth article, by Pulido, Bruno, Faiver-Serna, and Galentine, takes up the theme of the extreme racism of the Trump era and administration and connects it to the wave of environmental deregulation the administration has undertaken. Pulido et al. argue that the highly visible, public, and controversial racism and white nationalism of Trump and many of his supporters—what they term “spectacular racism”—helps to obscure the often more mundane, concrete actions that the administration has taken as part of an enormous wave of environmental deregulation. Both are part of the ongoing unfolding of environmental racism in the United States but in new and complex forms. In the fifth and final article in this section, Sparke and Bessner, building from critiques of Nazi logics of governance, suggest that the Trump administration is not only rolling back environmental regulation but also very selectively reworking neoliberal notions of resilience through a hypernationalist and racially exclusionary framework in which the security of a wealthy elite in an exclusionary homeland is pursued through the market mechanisms of disaster capitalism as other racialized people and places are abandoned to the mounting impacts of climate change. The result, they argue, is an odd, exceptionalist, and dangerous hybrid of the discourses and imaginaries of resilience thinking and “America First.”

The six articles in the fifth section explore the politics of environmental science and knowledge in populist and authoritarian contexts: from the difficulties of making scientific knowledge claims in a “posttruth” era dominated by easily and endlessly manipulated digital and social media (MacDonald 2016), to those of asking particular questions in severely repressive and dangerous authoritarian countries, to investigations of the active production of doubt or ignorance regarding environmental quality or change (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008; Oreskes and Conway 2010). The first article in the section, by Dillon et al., follows particularly from the lattermost point. It details the efforts of a group of environmental justice and science and technology studies researchers in the United States and Canada to respond to the Trump administration’s active removal of environmental data from federal Web sites and purging or constraining of federal agencies with environmental governance responsibilities. The group, working collectively as the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, has responded by archiving environmental data, interviewing agency personnel, and monitoring changes to Web pages and environmental policy. In connection with these efforts, Dillon et al. develop and articulate a concept of environmental data justice. Continuing with the theme of the active suppression of environmental data, the second article in the section, by Kopack, examines the difficulties of getting and analyzing data about toxic pollution from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a legacy of the Soviet space program located in what is now Kazakhstan but still run by the Russian space program. Multiple rocket explosions have contaminated the area with toxic debris, but the Russian government’s continuing tight control over both the immediate territory and all directly relevant research and data, as well as active suppression and intimidation of activists by the authoritarian Russian and Kazakh governments, dramatically demonstrates how secrecy can be territorialized in ways that render organizing and dissent both difficult and dangerous. (On this note, it is important to mention that one prospective contributor to this issue dropped out after deciding that publishing the results of recent research on environmental politics in another severely repressive country would be directly and significantly dangerous to the author and interview subjects alike.) The third article in the section, by Koslov, examines “agnostic adaptation” in response to Hurricane Sandy in New York’s Staten Island. Koslov notes that this relatively conservative community has in fact taken significant steps to adapt to future effects of climate change in the aftermath of the storm, yet it has done so with almost no explicit reference to or discussion of climate change because of the charged and polarized politics around that term in the United States: Strategic decisions to not frame adaptive actions as responses to climate change specifically allowed for community agreement and action around them that might not have occurred otherwise. Koslov argues that this dynamic reverses the formulation of the relationship between the postpolitical and action on climate change posited by Swyngedouw (2010): Whereas Swyngedouw argued that focusing on technocratic and practical steps stands in the way of genuine responses to climate change, Koslov suggests that focusing on precisely such steps allowed for meaningful actions, and politics of a sort, that would have been precluded by an insistence on explicit discussions of climate change and climate science. The fourth article in this section, by Bosworth, examines the production of expertise among movements opposing the new Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines in the north-central United States. Bosworth argues that the construction and public deployment of environmental expertise by activists in these movements, as a counter to the forms and sources of expertise deployed against them, was itself a progressive form of populist politics that helped to constitute and strengthen the movements themselves. The fifth article, by Forsyth, examines the coproduction of environmental knowledge and narratives, environmental movements, and political power and authority in Thailand. Countering simplistic claims that environmentalism tends on the whole to contribute to the democratization of authoritarian regimes, Forsyth notes that environmental narratives can in fact be deeply conservative and contribute to the reproduction of existing social arrangements rather than substantive democratization and argues that it is essential to analyze specific narratives within the framework of civic epistemologies, which seeks to analyze the broader dimensions a given political order within which particular narratives retain political and epistemic authority. In the sixth and last article in this section, Neimark et al. explore the potential tensions between political ecology as an approach that has often emphasized the social construction and political nature of scientific environmental knowledge claims and political ecology as a field in which many practitioners presumably want to hold on to many central tenets of environmental science in the face of their dismissal or outright denial by many contemporary authoritarian regimes. The keys to resolving this tension, they argue, lie in recognizing the blatant power relations and agendas at work in many contemporary denials of scientific knowledge and distinguishing between the politically motivated production of posttruth and the genuine recognition of sincerely held diverse epistemologies and ontologies.

The sixth and final section of the special issue ends on a positive note: The five articles in the section explore and advocate progressive alternatives to authoritarian and reactionary populist environmental politics and governance. The first, by Andreucci, makes an explicit, grounded argument for the possibility and potential of a genuinely progressive, indeed Gramscian, version of populism in relation to environmental politics in Bolivia. Echoing Bosworth’s affirmation of the possibility of a progressive populism, Andreucci builds on Laclau’s (1977, 2005) and Fraser’s (2017) visions of populism as a potential strategy to enable the construction of a broad counterhegemonic bloc out of disparate particular struggles. Continuing with the theme of left and progressive populisms, the second article in the section, by Knuth, examines the past and potential contributions of populist movements to clean energy transitions in the United States and elsewhere. Knuth argues that left populist movements have already helped to shape clean energy programs in California and in the United States as a whole, in the context of calls for “green jobs” and a “green New Deal” in the wake of the financial crisis. At the same time, Knuth insists that more fully realizing the potential of populist contributions to just transitions will require engagement with the populist politics of grievance and reparation as well and a strategy that engages with the full breadth of the economy, not just niche sectors. The third article in the section, by Cadieux et al., likewise emphasizes the progressive potential of populism, in their case through comparing major 1930s agrarian populist initiatives in the Midwestern United States to highly diverse and inclusive contemporary urban agriculture movements in the same region. Cadieux et al. use these examples to argue that focusing agroecological social movements on the repair of social and ecological relationships offers opportunities to use their power to counter capitalism and authoritarianism, avoiding many of populism’s potentially more reactionary elements. The fourth article in this section, by Aitken, An, and Yang, examines how environmental governance of and around the Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve in China has changed following the election of President Xi, as an authoritarian government has professed a greater commitment to sustainability even as rapid development proceeds apace. Contrasting the trajectories of two development projects, one inside the park and one outside, Aitken et al. express cautious optimism regarding the potential of approaches rooted in increasing local capacities and sustainable ethics to produce real improvements in people’s lives even under challenging circumstances. Finally, the fifth article in the section, and the last in the issue, by Goldstein, Paprocki, and Osborne, suggests that inasmuch as the attraction of authoritarian populism in the contemporary United States and beyond often appears to be strongest in areas hit hard by deindustrialization, agrarian dispossession, and climate change, scholars at public land grant universities have distinctive organizational affordances and obligations to respond to those forces. They respond by articulating a manifesto for a progressive mission for land grant institutions.

Looking Ahead

The current conjuncture is grim, but it also contains significant grounds for hope. The articles in this special issue demonstrate widespread rejection of major elements of neoliberal capitalism and deep desires for true alternatives. Although those sentiments have gone, or been taken, in deeply reactionary directions in many instances, they are also suggestive of a window of opportunity for truly broad-based, inclusive, and progressive coalitions and alternatives, along the lines called for by Fraser (2017), Scoones et al. (2018), and many others. Indeed, such movements are having significant success in many places around the world, often although certainly not necessarily through the use of populist frameworks and strategies. Geographers have much to offer efforts to create a truly broad-based, inclusive, historically and geographically aware progressive politics, as we see in the kinds of work highlighted in this special issue. We are adept at analyzing and explaining how any environmental project is always also a social one and vice versa and, more particularly, at understanding how particular sorts of socioenvironmental projects—the liberalization and globalization of agricultural production, for example—relate to broad social tensions and trends. We are especially well equipped, and indeed have an obligation given our disciplinary history, to continue to remind publics of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy and consequences of conflating physical environments and social identities. We can advocate as well as analyze and add our voices and knowledge to the many others attempting to create realistic, grounded, yet ambitious visions of more just, equitable, and sustainable futures (see Braun 2015). In short, environmental issues, movements, and politics can and indeed must be central both to resistance against authoritarian and reactionary populist politics and to visions of progressive alternatives to them. The articles in this issue provide many promising starting points for such visions.

Acknowledgments

My deep and sincere thanks to Jennifer Cassidento and Lea Cutler at the Annals for the prodigious amount of excellent work they put into keeping this issue on track; to members of the editorial board for sharing their suggestions, expertise, and labor in relation to the special issue; to Bruce Braun, Nik Heynen, and Karl Zimmerer for generous and incisive comments on this introduction and the issue as a whole; to Ned Resnikoff for compelling me to articulate and justify taken for granted academic frameworks; and to the great many reviewers who reviewed first, second, and in some cases third versions of all of the articles in the issue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James McCarthy

JAMES McCARTHY is a Professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include environmental politics, political economy, and political ecology.