Political Ecology and Inequality

This chapter provides an overview of political ecology as a field of social scientific inquiry, highlighting points of interest to inequality studies. The field’s concern with the interrelation between social inequality and environmental degradation is of key importance also to inequality researchers, and especially so in times of an escalating global ecological crisis and its social ramifications. Political ecology puts marginalization centre stage and explores its socio-ecological dialectic. Questions of resource access and the distribution of costs and benefits from environmental degradation, looming large in political ecology, also speak to the core tenets of inequality research. As the chapter shows, the conceptual repertoire with which such questions are pursued draws from three main sources in accordance with the field’s development: Marxism, feminism and poststructuralism—as part of a research agenda committed to close attentiveness towards real-world complexities of environmental degradation, which is therefore methodologically pluralistic as well as activist and engaged. This outlook makes for a dynamic and vibrant milieu of conceptual innovation that is in touch with escalating crisis dynamics. However, in terms of inequality research, shortcomings might be seen in (partly) “sociologically amorphous” notions of power and agency, and perhaps relatedly, a certain lack of conceptual integration and synthesis. If an all too rigid integration appears unwarranted in light of the field’s defining inclusivity and multiplicity, the chapter suggests as potential point of conceptual convergence “eco-Marxist” theories of capitalist value and recently “ecologized” notions of class, such as the “biotariat”.