As the aquifers beneath the San Luis Valley hit new lows, farmers and ranchers in this agricultural hub of southern Colorado are being encouraged to fallow their fields. With water scarcity as a push factor and renewable energy mandates as a pull factor, the Valley seems poised for a major transition toward solar energy production—but it is not yet clear whether or how it might happen. The lack of transmission in and out of the Valley has been identified by some analysts as the most salient factor shaping the Valley’s renewable energy future, but interview data reveals additional factors working against the transition: high prices for agricultural commodities that discourage land use conversion, experiences of previous solar energy development that stalled or left landowners disappointed, contractual limits on utilities' ability to generate power in the Valley, and incoherence of policy and regulatory tools. Still, across the Valley, residents are articulating what sorts of guarantees they need from utilities in order to greenlight further development; exploring how to stack different policies, incentives, and grants together in order to optimize the sequencing of the transition to fit the Valley's unique climate and ecology; and calling for practical experiments on multifunctional land use. This article seeks to synthesize conversations about so-called "barriers" to renewable energy development with insights from political ecology about the ways in which local histories of development, forces beyond the Valley, the uneven distribution of burdens and benefits, and policy and regulatory (in)coherence shape energy trajectories here, as elsewhere.
This article analyzes Argentina's Law 26.639 on Minimum Standards for the Protection of Glaciers and the Periglacial Environment as a landmark case of pioneering environmental legislation and a result of socio-ecological mobilization. Through a political ecology approach that incorporates ecological, cultural, and intergenerational justice dimensions, this study combines documentary analysis, jurisprudential review, and management experience to explore the implementation of this policy within the context of Argentine federalism. It highlights: 1. the role of the National Glacier Inventory as a scientific-legal tool; 2. the tensions between provincial autonomy and national standards; 3. resistance against regressive interpretations; and 4. the emergence of alliances between scientists, social movements, and state institutions. We argue that the law represents a significant advance in environmental governance by establishing universal protection for all ice bodies, regardless of their immediate economic value. The conclusions highlight lessons for Latin America regarding the articulation between scientific knowledge, environmental activism, and regulatory frameworks in contexts of intense land use pressure and accelerated climate change.
Dam-associated violence has shaped villagers' lives since the launch of Thailand's Pak Mun Dam project 35 years ago. This slow violence—manifesting through ecological degradation, livelihood loss, and cultural disruption—has prompted equally enduring forms of resistance. Affected communities have challenged state power through subtle and overt resistance, sustained over decades. This article uses a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) approach to explore how the gendered experiences of slow violence give rise to equally gendered forms of slow resistance. We examine how women protestors assert their leadership and legitimacy within the anti-dam movement. In a context of enduring gender inequalities in society, women must navigate complex social expectations and power dynamics to participate meaningfully in collective advocacy.
Political ontology research has highlighted how the dominance of the Euro-modern ontology over other ontologies renders other-than-scientific knowledges as subordinate or untrue. Despite the commitment to base conservation efforts on Indigenous and local ecological knowledge, epistemic injustice—understood as the marginalization of more-than-scientific knowledge holders and society's inability to make sense of more-than-scientific knowledges—has persisted. Through the analysis of two place-based conservation initiatives in Indigenous territories in Finland and Colombia—the Landscape Rewilding Program (LRP) and the Rights of River Ranchería (RRR) initiative—this article asks whether and, if so, how these two initiatives challenge the Euro-modern ontology and make space for Indigenous ways of being and knowing. The results show that these two initiatives use distinct strategies to challenge Euro-modern ontology and promote epistemic justice. The LRP builds on Skolt Sámi governance and knowledge traditions to reject the hegemony of science and institutions upholding the hegemony of the Euro-modern ontology while achieving ecological objectives crucial to the continuation of the Skolt Sámi world. The RRR initiative tackles ontologically violent and unjust legal and policy framings by fighting to declare the Ranchería River as having rights, and with Indigenous communities as its guardians. These findings provide insights into how to inch towards the pluriverse. They further contribute to bridging contemporary scholarly debates on political ontology, epistemic justice, and Indigenous and local ecological knowledge grounded in concrete place-based cases.
This article analyses territorialization 'from-above' and 'from-below' in Kamoethway, Tanintharyi Region in relation to the public authorities of the Karen National Union (KNU) and changing Myanmar governments. Fieldwork in Karen villages of the Kamoethway area details how community-based organizations and community leaders organized a social movement, documented situated knowledge, and claimed rights to govern territory locally including resources and land, which we term 'territorialization-from-below'. We analyze how strategies of resistance, consent and co-option empowered Kamoethway communities after the 2012 ceasefire. However, following the 2021 coup, while KNU's public authority expanded, community-based activism reduced due to the ongoing conflict, KNU security policies, and restrictions on civil freedoms.
This article examines how land relations are reconfigured in Klerlweehtu District (KNU-administered territory) in Bago Region, Myanmar, where Karen communities face episodic ruptures amid armed conflicts between the State Administration Council (SAC) and Karen National Union (KNU) or People's Defense Force (PDF). We extend Rasmussen and Lund's (2018) framework on the co-constitutive relationship between frontiers and territorialization to examine the long-standing territorial contestations driven by competing claims to political sovereignty. During the counter-insurgency campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s, the Myanmar military forcibly relocated Karen villages, creating "frontier moments" that suspended existing land relations, access to resources, and customary practices. Based on fieldwork in Htee Hee village (March-April 2023), we demonstrate how competing armed territorializations create "cyclical frontier dynamics" as governance systems are repeatedly suspended and reimposed as authority changes. Using a political ecology lens highlights how decades of territorial contestation have fundamentally transformed community-environment relations, disrupting agricultural practices and eroding ecosystems that sustained Karen livelihoods. In response, Karen communities actively navigate these recurring dynamics by crafting new forms of territorial control and reestablishing their land rights, access, and socio-ecological relationships amid state-insurgent contestation.
This article examines Latin America's critical contributions to global political ecology through concepts such as extractivism, ecological debt, ecologically unequal exchange, epistemic equity, body-territory, and political ontology. Drawing on decades of grassroots struggle and political and intellectual production, it traces how movements across the region have reframed environmental conflicts as ecological and ontological distribution conflicts and defended territories of life against extractivist and sacrificial logics. Examples – including Yasuní-ITT in Ecuador – illustrate the grounded practices of autonomy, care, and re-existence that challenge capitalist valuation systems. The article does not claim to be an exhaustive meta-analysis or an official genealogy of Latin American political ecology, rather it offers a selective review of contributions from different intellectual, activist, feminist, Indigenous, and environmental justice traditions in order to show how Latin American debates have expanded global political ecology conceptually, politically, and methodologically. The article proposes a renewed research agenda for political ecology centered on the growth and changes in social metabolism, ontological plurality, epistemic justice, and the co-production of knowledge. The article argues that Latin American political ecology offers concrete pathways for socio-ecological transformations in other territories of the Global South that demands that alliances across North and South – as geographical designations– be built on mutual recognition, historical accountability, and pluriversal horizons.
Nuclear waste disposal is a technological project that produce uneven geographies—a longstanding concern of environmental justice scholars and activists. This article explores the scalar politics of nuclear waste governance in Switzerland by focusing on the activist group LoTi (Lägern ohne Tiefenlager) in the region recently proposed as the site of a deep geological nuclear waste repository (Nördlich Lägern). Drawing on geographical scholarship on environmental justice, the article analyzes LoTi's formation and evolution, focusing on how activists have framed and reframed their agenda and strategies in response to nuclear waste siting developments at different scales. It examines how LoTi has pursued these efforts both within and beyond participatory arrangements intended to facilitate local involvement and has strategically navigated shifting spaces of governance for strategic ends. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and document analysis, this article argues that site-specific opposition to repository siting is not simply a local response to a technological project of national significance, but is entangled in broader histories and geographies of nuclear energy and waste across multiple scales. By centering activists' perspectives and tracing their multi-scalar approach, the article offers a counter-narrative to dominant official accounts of nuclear waste governance, highlighting the importance of activism, particularly in highly technocratic domains.
This article explores the more-than-human political ecology of human-elephant conflict in North Bengal, India, by emphasizing Asian elephants' (Elephas maximus) agency within a complex conservation landscape. Through a combination of ethnographic fieldwork, environmental history analysis, and camera traps, this article examines the dynamic and often contentious relationships between elephants and humans throughout precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods to comprehend the current complexities. We challenge the dominant conservation narratives that represent elephants as mere victims or as symbolic species, and instead frame them as political actors who adapt to, co-create, and subvert the socio-ecological realities of this shared space. Elephants in North Bengal intentionally adapt to human activities of 'weak' retaliation, modify local agricultural practices, and strategically breach electric fences to access better nutrition—behaviors reflecting cultural learning, adaptive intelligence, and interspecies negotiation. Their heightened status under the contemporary conservation regime has contributed to uneven political geographies, wherein the less-than-human local communities experience increased crop depredation, property damage, and human fatalities, frequented with unfair compensation or poor representation in decision-making. This article highlights the historical intertwining and mutual constitution of elephant and human agencies, shaped by their shared experiences of subordination, displacement, resistance, and protection. It advocates for a shift in the conservation framework—from human exceptionalism and spatial binaries to models that balance power asymmetries, relational ontologies, and multispecies justice. Recognizing the elephant's subjective agency is crucial for developing more empathetic human-elephant conflict strategies and for restoring socio-ecological balance in a landscape that is becoming increasingly politicized against the local residents.
