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Project title

Defending the local: a political ecology approach to the study of repression of environmental rights defenders

Primary Funding Agency

Irish Research Council

Co-Funding Organisation(s)

n/a

Lead Organisation

University College Dublin (UCD)

Lead Applicant

n/a

Project Abstract

This study will focus on the increasingly intense wave of repression that activists struggling to defend the environment against large scale development projects are facing, as reported last year by the organization Global Witness in its second study of violence against environmental defenders on a global scale. Indigenous activists and women are overrepresented in this grim record. Academic literature around the topic is scant, and has either adopted a normative framework to analyse the causes of the phenomena, or a positivist-economicistic paradigm whereas the claims of defenders have been reduced to materialistic valuation of the environment or demands for distributional justice. This research aims at expanding the interpretative repertoire for understanding why these conflicts are increasing in frequency and scale and why they are often intractable. It will turn to that branch of political ecology that has stretched the analytical framework available in neo-Marxist political economy by adopting insights from post-structuralism � such as the potential of discourse theory to disclose issues of power and knowledge � and from cultural anthropology � in the suggestion that non-Cartesian conceptualizations of the interface between humans and the environment can assist in explaining the incommensurability of the issues at stake. By analyzing discursively how demands of environmental defenders based on local constructions of nature, clash with modern rationalist visions of development, I will open a debate on how developmental actors and institutions could accommodate non-dominant cultural forms in the formulations of sustainability, economic and development policies.

Grant Approved

�72,000.00

Research Hub

n/a

Research Theme

Climate Solutions, Transition Management and Opportunities

Start Date

01/09/2019

Initial Projected Completion Date

31/08/2022