Room 221, Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Falmer, BN1 9RE, UK

‘Resource Politics: Future Directions’

Dianne Rocheleau and Kathleen McAfee

A critical resource politics can contribute to reframing conservation sciences to bring science into the service of social and ecological justice. To this end, many of us are challenging the fetish of economic growth and the market-centric logic that has come to dominate ‘pragmatic’ environmentalism.

But are better ways of knowing and acting possible? As political ecologists, we can explore the various expressions of ‘living well’/in harmony with the living world, to develop a useful response to the creative initiatives of social movements throughout the world. Resource politics can address ecological and cultural defense, and alternative visions of the future, from indigenous practices and politics to “degrowth” approaches.

An engaged resource politics can challenge the systematic oppression and the lethal inertia of global systems in the face of climate change, land and resource grabbing, and widespread contamination, while contributing to new repertoires of knowledge and practice.

About the speakers

Dianne Rocheleau is Professor of Geography and Director of the Global Environmental Studies program at Clark University. She has previously worked on forestry, farming and development alternatives with international, national and local organizations. She currently writes about and works with communities and movements who defend territory and complex human ecologies while building socially just and ecologically viable futures.

Kathleen McAfee (San Francisco State University, USA) has long experience in community and global-justice activism and policy analysis (Oxfam, UN agencies). Her academic work focuses on “selling nature to save it”, the political economy and ecology of ecosystem services and carbon markets, and alternatives to export-dependent, growth-based, market-centered development.