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Abstract
Political ecology is an epistemologically plural field of social scientific research. This article seeks to contribute to mapping out the terrain, with emphasis on contributions from Latin America. This is done by sketching out two prototypical forms of political ecology: materialist and poststructuralist, and by exploring the degree to which they can be reconciled in a third form which seeks to avoid the extremes of structural determinism and absolute relativism, by taking recourse to either eclecticism or dialectics. The underlying argument is that, on the basis of ontological materialism and dialectical reasoning, a third form of political ecology can provide the epistemological foundation for illuminating research on why social environmental movements and conflicts emerge at certain historical conjunctures and in specific geographical and cultural contexts, and of how resistance movements against dispossession and the destruction of natural resources are organized and sustained.
INTRODUCTION
What is political ecology? Since the 1970s, the term has been used to refer to multiple and diverse critical approaches to studying the nexus between human societies and the natural environment. To be sure, definitions abound, but they are not entirely consistent and they have tended to become broader and somewhat more ambiguous with time (See Table 1).1 As we will see, this tendency reflects efforts to accommodate the development of two epistemologically distinct forms of research in the field: a materialist one associated with Marxist political economy; and a poststructuralist one, focused on discourse analysis and the social construction of environmental issues.
Brosius (1999) put his finger on this dichotomy and it has been recognized by Alimonda (2006), Martínez-Alier (2011), and others. Without denying the heuristic utility of seeing these two currents as distinct and mutually exclusive, the argument developed in this paper is that there is a third form of political ecology that seeks to transcend binomials materialism/idealism, structure/agency and objectivity/subjectivity. Along these lines, a number of researchers who locate their work in the field of political ecology have resorted to one form or another of eclecticism (for example, Blaikie 1999, Bebbington 2011, Delgado Ramos 2015); while others, in an overlapping area with ecological Marxism, apply dialectical reasoning (for example, Peluso and Watts 2001, Harvey 1996) in an effort to articulate an analysis of both the subjective/discursive and...