bettina.engels@fu-berlin.de

1. Struggling with nature?Analysing conflicts over nature from a social and conflict theory perspectiveBettina Engels Workshop » Conflict, Genocide and Climate Change «Hamburg, 16 September 2013 bettina.engels@fu-berlin.de

2. Analytical approaches to conflicts over nature are theoretically and conceptually flawed: Environmental conflict research lacks a theoretical concept of nature-society relations Political Ecology lacks a theoretically funded understanding of conflict as such ➱ Develop a perspective that can capture conflicts over nature conceptually, building upon conflict theory and social theory Struggling with nature

3. Structure • Concepts • Conflict over nature • Nature and society • Research strands: • Environmental conflict research • Political Ecology • Theoretical foundations • Nature-society relations • Conflict theory • Analytical implications and links to feminist analyses

4. Conflicts over nature • Not conflicts over nature “as such” but • Conflicts on how nature is used or not used • Conflicts on political procedures, decision making processes, inclusion and exclusion, etc. • Conceptual ambiguieties: environmental conflicts, socio-ecological conflicts… ➱ Missing debate on theoretical foundations

5. Nature-society relations • Nature is socially mediated ➱ Nature is subjected to social construction • But: Construction processes are not random ➱ Nature has an autonomous materiality (e.g. articulated in ecological crisis phenomena)

6. Whether and how environmental change causes, triggers or influences violent conflict Scholars agree that environmental change is socially and politically mediated Studies however stick to upholding, for instance, a correlation between rainfall patterns and violent conflict Main argument: Environmental change and natural resource scarcity cause or trigger violent conflicts Environmental conflict studies

7. Environmental change and conflict: the Malthusian argument Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) An essay on the principle of population (1798)

8. Environmental change and conflict: the Malthusian argument

9. Neo-Malthusian approaches Thomas Homer Dixon (* 1956) University of Toronto Environmental Change and Acute Conflict Project (ECACP, "Toronoto Group" ) Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton 1999)

10. Critique Dominant neo-Malthusian and eco-centric arguments: some essential weaknesses Few empirical evidence of a direct causal relationship between resource scarcity and (violent) conflict “Environmental conflicts” are spatially fixed in the Global South ➱ Euro-centrism Conceptualization of environmental/climate change as exogenous influence ➱ Failure to capture society-nature relationships

11. Political Ecology • Conflict-relevant: not bio-physical conditions, resource quantity as such but the social appropriation of nature ➱ conflicts over distribution and use of nature, interwoven with other social and political struggles • Conflicts emerge from relationships of power and domination which are already inscribed in nature ➱ Access to resources and rights of use are structured by social categories (gender, class, ethnicity, race…)

12. Political Ecology • Structuralist approaches (e.g. Blaikie 1985) ➱ Struggles over nature = Class struggles • Actor-oriented approaches (e.g. Bryant/Bailey 1997) ➱ Interests, aims, and strategies of actors in conflicts • Post-structuralist approaches (e.g. Escobar 1996) ➱ Struggles over interpretations and representation • Feminist approaches (Agarwal 1988; Rochelau et al. 1996) ➱ conflicts over nature reflect social gender structure

13. Nature-society relations • Dialectic perspective on nature-society relations: dissolution of dichotomous perspectives • Social power relations are inscribed in nature through transformative material practices and symbolic representations • Environment as arena of contested entitlements and cultural meanings • Conflicts over nature are social conflicts, are economic conflicts, are political and are cultural conflicts

14. Conflict • Social action with at least two conflict parties involved • Integral part of social interaction/structures • Emerges on the basis of meaning that actors involved attach to an action, a change or a transformative process • Features a general structuring: interests ➱ aim structure power ➱ means structure

15. Analytical implications • Searching for general explanations conflicts over nature – without assuming in advance that material scarcity is causally relevant • Instead of new models, new variables: new questions • Linking the analysis of conflict as social action to ist structural conditions and social relations (e.g. gender relations)

16. Links to feminist analyses • Focus on social power relations • ➱open up the “black box” of the nation-state society • Analysing struggles over nature from a Political Ecology perspective informed by feminist theory: studying the intersections of gender, race, class, etc. • Actor-centred concept of conflict • ➱ rendering agents and agency visible • ➱ gender as a category of structures and agency

17. Thank you for your attention!