Political ecology, territoriality and scale

Network political ecology

“…Therefore, advancements drawing on network theories seek to move beyond unidirectional notions of scale to illuminate the shifting spatial and temporal character of driving processes (see also Rocheleau, 2008; Rocheleau and Roth, 2007). Indeed, they have directed our attention to the ‘relational and networked quality of the spatial configurations’ of socio-ecological dynamics, where ‘networks of actors (human and non-human) transcend single spatial scales to produce new relational [socio-ecological] spatialities’ (Neumann, 2009: 403; see also Natter and Zierhofer, 2002; Sneddon, 2003; Swyngedouw, 2007; Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003; cited in Neumann, 2009). In advocating this approach for the investigation of nature-society relations, Rocheleau and Roth (2007) highlight the power of network approaches to bridge disciplinary divides, to illuminate the ever complex connections between local and transnational social-ecological change and to understand complexity.…”

“…So, too, adaptive capacity building is essentially an apolitical concept stemming from Putnam’s (1995) work on ‘social capital’, where all ‘social connection’ is seen as positive. Several have problematized the notion that social connection is always positive (Li, 2005; Natter and Zierhofer, 2002; Rocheleau and Roth, 2007; Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003), while others have drawn on the more theoretically elegant, but difficult to index, version from Bourdieu (1977) (see also Jeffrey, 2001) or perhaps Sen (1990) 4 (see also Blaikie et al, 1994). In this way extensive approaches may be either spatially extensive or local in character but of extensive methods (e.g.…”

Technonatural revolutions: the scalar politics of Franco's hydro‐social dream for Spain, 1939–1975

“…In other words, socio‐spatial relations have a ‘scalar’ constitution as relational networks are forged that produce spatial geometries that are more or less long, more or less extensive. Yet, at the same time, these relational scalar networks articulate with produced territorial or geographical configurations that also exhibit scalar dimensions (Zimmerer 2000a 2000b; Natter and Zierhofer 2002; Sneddon 2003; Swyngedouw 2004b). In the Spanish post‐war context, the remaking of Spain's hydrosocial landscape was part of an effort to create a socio‐culturally, politically and physically integrated national territorial scale and to obliterate earlier regionalist desires.…”

Cultural ecology: at the interface with political ecology - the new geographies of environmental conservation and globalization

“…A second chief idea is that the interaction ofconservation and globalization is leading to new scales of importance to environmental management and ideas of nature-society interactions (Brunckhorst and Rollings, 1999;Turner, 1999b;Natter and Zierhofer, 2002;Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003;Berkes, 2004;Brown and Purcell, 2005). To cultural ecology the idea of scale, and the processes of scaling, refers especially to the spatial patterning of human-environment interaction (such as the scales of certified, shade-grown organic coffee habitats, the procurement networks of the seed of food plants, and the areas inscribed through pastoralists' use of range resources, which are topics examined in the fourth section ofthis article).…”