This session considers current political ecology engagements with the state and how “the state” is now understood as a (settler) colonial manifestation of political, cultural, and social domination. Political ecologists have made strides in grappling with how colonialism and the racialization of nature structure eco-social relationships in ways that reinforce the state itself (Ranganathan 2015; Roane 2022). These scholars locate how settler state institutions maintain a racialized cultural and political hegemony over nature (Curley 2021; Van Lier 2023) and co-opt the politics of recognition in environmental justice (McCreary and Milligan 2021). For example, they identify how the burden of environmental harm becomes fixed in communities through the over reliance of state institutions and on the quantification of harm that ignores the complex relations between people and nature (Liboiron 2021; Vasudevan 2021). Grassroots organizations play a critical role in the expansion of local knowledge and community action against these forms of environmental racism, which transcend narrow conceptualizations of environmental justice achievable by the settler state (Milligan et al. 2021; Pulido and De Lara 2018). As such, this session follows the recent call from Massé (2022) to understand “how, where, and through what practices and institutions states exercise power over socio-ecological relations”. We extend this further in recognition that these relations cannot be disentangled from the colonial historical, geographical, and temporal contexts in which they occur.

Thus, this session asks:
How does the (settler colonial) state structure eco-social relationships in political spaces and beyond?
What new forms of environmental governance are possible beyond the constraints of the (settler colonial) state?
How does (scientific) expertise create geographies of dispossession? What are the pathways forward?
How do environmental regulatory frameworks (e.g., CWA, ESA, NEPA) produce geographies of difference and/or provide mechanisms for environmental justice? 

Organizers: Rachel Arney & Thérèse Kelly

Please submit your abstracts to Rachel Arney at rachel.arney@uga.edu by 15 December 2023.

Modality: In-person