Theorizing Public Participation and Local Governance in Urban Resilience: Reflections on the “Provincializing Urban Political Ecology” Thesis

Abstract

Urban political ecology (UPE) infuses Marxism with poststructuralism and constructivism to explore the dialectic relationship between nature and society in urban environments as well as the economic aspect of an urban socioecological system. Nevertheless, the literature on southern urbanism has urged UPE to become more “provincialized” to reflect the diffuse forms of power and everyday governance influencing the planning of cities in the Global South. This article reviews and reflects on this wave of debates raised by critics who have positioned postcolonial thinking as an alternative to Marxist political economy, in which UPE is rooted. It also identifies those works that might help provincialize UPE differently. Without rejecting the Marxism, another set of approaches draws influence from the strategic-relational approach (SRA) to examine environmental issues in ways that destabilize conventionally economic determinist UPE. In addition to involving corporate elites and city officials, a UPE framework incorporating the SRA is capable of bringing the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community leaders, and environmentalists in everyday governance to the front. The article contends that the latter framework adds weight on public participation and local governance in different geopolitical contexts without losing sight of the social inequalities caused by state-led or privatized programs in the quest for urban resilience.

Exploration of Community Governance Paths in Urban Ecosystems Based on KANO-IPA Modeling

“…The importance of community-led governance in environmental governance was also emphasized. Literature [22] discusses a set of scenarios influenced by strategic relationships to study environmental issues in a way that undermines the traditional economic determinism of UPE, and this scenario incorporates both the importance of public participation in local environmental governance and the social inequalities created by state domination in the pursuit of urban resilience into the framework of the scenario analysis. Literature [23] employed an agentbased approach and a mixed-methods approach encompassing community surveys and behavioral mapping to explore perceptions and behaviors around a public urban park near the Georges River in Sydney, Australia, and learned that even though users' perceptions of the environmental significance of the city's rivers differed, naturalistic (ecological), humanistic (recreational), and utilitarian (wellbeing) values all predominated, i.e., were not in conflict with each other.…”

The Political Analysis Utility of Post-structuralism

“…Jacobs proposed post-structuralist DT theory's unique analysis of the concept of hegemony and the interpretation of political action taking place in institutional contexts as an essential contribution to the study of institutional change and continuity and advocated DT as a paradigm of self-sufficiency [4]. Chiu proposed to apply the post-structuralism paradigm to the political ecology paradigm, enriching the themes and perspectives of political ecology, thus transcending the theoretical constraints of understanding ecological problems only from the perspective of ecological Marxism [5]. Although many post-structuralist scholars use their unique perspectives to explain problems and solve development problems in many political fields, however, neither providing a framework nor questioning traditional mainstream political science does not directly respond to the problems faced by post-structuralism but places the contribution of post-structuralism to political analysis in a "potential" position.…”