Political Geography 58 (2017) 90e92

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

Political ecologies of the state: Recent interventions and questions

going forward
Leila M. Harris a, b, *
a
IRES and GRSJ, University of British Columbia, 2202 Main Mall, UBC, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4 Canada
b
STIAS, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, Stellenbosch University, 7600, South Africa

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history: rich case studies, the book nonetheless lacked focused analytical
Received 10 February 2017 attention to some of the core political geographic concepts central
Received in revised form to the analysisdincluding the very categories and functions of
14 March 2017 ‘states’, ‘territories’ and ‘nature/resources.’ A decade later, Paul
Accepted 14 March 2017
Available online 27 March 2017
Robbins (2008) furnished a provocation related to the need for
closer engagement between insights and concepts in political ge-
ography with the ongoing concerns of a burgeoning interdisci-
plinary field of political ecology. While political ecology had long
been concerned with political economic analysis, and frequently
engaged themes of scale, inequality, power and even the state,
Readers of Political Geography will be attuned to questions of Robbins offered an entreaty for more careful attention to state
state authority and power, ranging from analyses based on classic theory and other core political geographic concerns. As he notes,
political economic discussions of the ‘social contract,’ distributed closer attention to political geographic discussions of scale, terri-
and capillary power associated with governmentality studies, or tory, and power are likely fruitful bases for ongoing work in political
analyses of security and violence associated with geopolitics, ecology. With respect to state theory in particular, he reaffirms the
border studies, or policing. What might be less familiar to some are need to recognize and acknowledge that states are not coherent,
the connections between questions of state-making and state stable or monolithic, but contested and fractured. Emphasizing the
consolidation and power in relation to manifold and contested two-way learning that such exchange might afford, he also notes
‘natures’, including attention to resource management, in- the considerable potential to bring nature, and related epistemol-
frastructures, or changes. Concepts and research trajectories asso- ogies or governance practices, more fully into studies of state in-
ciated with political ecologies of the state have gained momentum stitutions, power, and scalar dynamics.
over the past several decades, precisely attuned to these linkages. Fast-forward nearly another decade, and this special section
Indeed, the editors of Political Geography recently affirmed open- offers a point of entry into the state of knowledge on this exchange.
ness to work on the environment and political ecology Researchers continue to find generative intellectual terrain around
(Benjaminsen et al., 2017). This special section includes several a suite of questions of relevance for ‘political ecologies of the state.’
recent additions to these debatesdoffering emergent insights and Among them, as natures continue to undergo important changes,
highlighting focal themes of this subfield. what opportunities are there for new governance possibilities, and
Nearly twenty years ago, James Scott published the influential what are their implications for refashioning and contesting states?
book Seeing Like a State (1998), which directly addressed the in- How are state territories or power intimately bound up with con-
tersections of state power and expertise, territory, and control and trol over, knowledges of, or transformations of nature? How are
management of ‘natures.’ The work clearly struck a chord, accruing resources, objects, and related infrastructures central to refa-
over 12,000 citations to date (according to Google Scholar). Among shioning state-society relations, or the crucial boundary work
other concerns, Scott highlighted state tendencies towards required to delineate what we refer to as the ‘state’ and its evolving
ecological simplification and legibility, as well as the complex dy- capacities (Harris, 2012; Meehan, 2014)?
namics whereby state expertise often overrides other knowledges, In terms of some of the general insights regarding political
frequently resulting in policy failure. While offering detailed and ecologies of the state, researchers have cautioned against taking the
‘state’ as an ontological given, instead suggesting that the state
must be understood as an outcome or accomplishment fashioned
* IRES and GRSJ, University of British Columbia, 2202 Main Mall, UBC, Vancouver, through iterative politics, exclusions, and contestations. This point
BC, V6T 1Z4 Canada.
was made clearly with an analysis that questions the very category
E-mail address: [email protected].

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.03.006
0962-6298/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 L.M. Harris / Political Geography 58 (2017) 90e92 91

of ‘Minnesota’ as a territorial state invested with power relations, crucial means of exercising state powerdin his examples, the state
and contested histories, in ways that erase indigenous claims to is interested in distributing risk related to ongoing scarcity of food
territory and resources (Wainwright & Robertson, 2003). Other (scarcity dearness) in order to limit risk associated with acute food
works have been centrally concerned with the consolidation of the scarcity that might lead to starvation (scarcity scourge). Applying
state-society boundary (per Mitchell, 1991), for instance tracing the these insights to water scarcity and technologies in the context of
ways that uses or knowledges of and control over ‘natures’ can China, Clarke-Sather shows that state promotion of rainwater har-
serve to fashion and consolidate the appearance and seeming fixity vesting helps to improve citizen capacities to manage drought in a
of state-society boundaries, giving the appearance of the ‘state’ as a decentralized fashion. Enabling water storage in cellars at the
discrete entity (Harris, 2012). Studies in this vein have also household level led to decentralized power/knowledge, and with it
emphasized the ways that access to, and control over, particular a shifting configuration of riskdhouseholds now manage their own
resources (or natures) is often a preoccupation of state institutions, water to overcome shortages. Clarke-Sather's analysis shows that
territorial expansion or discourses (Whitehead, Jones and Jones, water distribution/management technologies have different out-
2007). For instance, oil, natural gas, or forestry control and comes for power, at times with power invested more centrally with
knowledges are often crucial to state power, and territorial control the state (centrifugal power) and other times more distributed
might often be asserted precisely to extend or maintain control among households (centripetal power). In this example, a focus on
over these key resources. Recent contributions have similarly the aleatory provides a useful lens to think through the different
stressed that basic service infrastructures (e.g. water or sanitation) configurations of power/knowledge in the context of water scarcity,
are crucial for maintaining state legitimacy, or at times become key and with it shifting state-society relations.
foci for citizen politics and movements to contest the authority and Building on the growing traditions of ‘more than human’ ge-
validity of state institutions or leadership (Chatterjee, 2004; ographies as well as allied debates related to multiple ontologies
Meehan, 2014; McLoughlin, 2015). from anthropology, geography, and indigenous studies/scholars,
All told, the growing work on political ecologies of the state and Theriault’s (2017) contribution provides a different lens through
the resource-state nexus has led to a mushrooming of research which to approach shifting socio-natural assemblages. With a case
keen to address the historic and geographic specificities, in addition study of forestry in the Philippines, Theriault describes the influ-
to general conceptual innovations to consider the myriad ways that ence of more than human ‘beings’ in conditioning human land use
resources and the environment are central objects and interests of and transformation of the forest. Specifically, illnesses are at times
the state apparatus (Bridge, 2014). Material conditions (topography, attributed to overharvesting, while other forest ‘spirits’ make
conditions of particular resources) and infrastructural formations themselves known through dreams to punish or ward off certain
are seen as being crucial to map and speak to the uneven geography behaviors. Failing to take these invisible beings and dream spirits
of state power (e.g. Meehan, 2014; Grundy-Warr and Sithirith, seriously in our analyses, Theriault suggests, would miss an
2015), as well as to the ways that nature necessarily offers challenge important basis for many Palawan land and resource decisions. For
to the very idea and function of states (e.g. porosity of state power political ecology in particular, and state theory more generally,
and challenges to state authority from inability to control nature, failure to attend to these ontological multiplicities, including the
Robbins, 2008). As a key example, contributions by Alatout (e.g. supernatural and associated more-than-human assemblages, may
Alatout, 2008) informed by science and technology studies have miss crucial socio-ecological and management dynamics. These
highlighted the science and governance of water as crucial to the pathways might also be critical to understand why certain
history of state formation and legitimation in Palestine/Israel. bureaucratic interventions in resource management fail. More
While many analyses focus on the state, ‘society’ and ‘citizenship’ fundamentally, engaging with multiple ontologies and their diverse
are also necessarily correlates of interestdwith contributions that associated worldings is fundamental to a broadened understanding
highlight shifts related to citizen subjectivity (Evered and Evered, of politics, and with it, the broader project of decolonizing
2012) and green governmentalities (Birkenholtz, 2009), or the knowledges in general, and political ecologies in particular. As such,
emergence of new ‘environmental subjects’ as a function of Theirault makes clear that it is of crucial importance to engage with
devolved environmental governance (Agrawal, 2005). Interest in more-than-human realities and multiple ontologies. Not doing so
state epistemologies also remains central, for instance, with con- risks naturalizing colonial knowledges/ontologies, and further
tributions that have stressed how state categorization of forests sidelining and ignoring complex factors that underpin Palawan
fundamentally reconditions the character and composition of those socio-natural relations.
landscapes (Robbins, 2008), how the state is implicated in erasing Finally, the contribution by Kelly-Richards and Banister (2017) is
and producing particular ecological knowledges (Robbins, 2008), or interested in spaces of informality not as sites of state control and
ways that performance of irrigation expertise among state agents is power (as other theorists have offered) but rather as spaces where
tied to complex negotiations of gender, class, and power state power is ambiguous and contested. Their account of water
(Zwarteveen and Liebrand, 2014). Fusing these interests with an access and infrastructures in the colonias of Nogales proceeds with
abiding concern for scale (both in political geography and in po- attention to specific material conditions, such as topography and
litical ecology), a recurrent theme of these works also traces state infrastructure, to emphasize the manifold ways that these informal
recalibration of scales, how socio-ecological processes might spaces and relations are uneven and unpredictable. As a result, the
fundamentally reconfigure scales (Neumann, 2009), or similarly, relations of power are partial and ambiguous. As they summarize,
how scalar politics around resources might serve state and nation the unevenness of the urban grid, the waiting for water and
building goals (Harris & Alatout, 2010; see also; Norman, Cook, & drainage, and the frequent deferral of services are all constitutive of
Cohen, 2014). daily life in the colonias. Arguably these are precisely the same
The contribution in this special section by Clarke-Sather (2017) relations that constitute the state (rather than simply being effects
is an example of how closer engagement with social theory lends of the state). As their narrative traces, the complex relations of
nuance to work on political ecologies of the state. As he elaborates, flows, forces, and containment that are manifest in an uneven
engaging Foucault's understanding of aleatory power, state power landscape of pipes and services are also what lend the practice and
and modern state formation are at times tightly coupled with substance of statecraft the same characteristicsdthe state is always
questions of risk. Following Foucault, the aleatory draws attention uneven, ambiguous and partial. Just as residents in the colonias are
to the fact that the management and distribution of risk is at times a often left waiting, the state itself is never completed, but always in a
92 L.M. Harris / Political Geography 58 (2017) 90e92

state of becoming and deferrald‘as an emergent effect of the Political geography and the environment. Political Geography, 56, A1eA2.
Birkenholtz, T. (2009). Groundwater governmentality: Hegemony and technologies
processes of inclusion and exclusion, an effect constantly destabi-
of resistance in Rajasthan's (India) groundwater governance. Geographical
lized by Nogales's precarious physical geography and uneven urban Journal, 175(3), 208e220.
services grid’ (Kelly-Richards & Banister, 2017). Bridge, G. (2014). Resource geographies II: The resource-state nexus. Progress in
All three articles deal centrally with the nature and substance of Human Geography, 38(1), 118e130.
Chatterjee, P. (2004). The politics of the Governed: Reflections on popular politics in
(state) power and contested knowledges, while also giving due most of the world. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
attention to the materiality/biophysicality of resource conditions. Clarke-Sather, A. (2017). State power and domestic water provision in semi-arid
To questions of power, Clarke-Sather offers new analytics associated Northwest China: Towards an aleatory political ecology. Political Geography,
58, 93e103.
with the aleatory, highlighting the centrality of risk to complex Evered, K. T., & Evered, E.O. € (2012). State, peasant, mosquito: The biopolitics of
renegotiations around power/knowledges (in this case, with public health education and malaria in early Republican Turkey. Political Ge-
different interventions and water related infrastructures and ography, 31(5), 311e323.
Grundy-Warr, C. M., & Sithirith, M. Yong (2015). Volumes, fluidity and flows:
technologies constituting state power as centripetal or centrifugal). Rethinking the ‘nature’ of. Political Geography, 45, 93e95.
Theriault offers compelling evidence that failure to attend to mul- Harris, L. (2012). State as socio-natural Effect: Variable and emergent geographies of
tiple ontologies in our work necessarily reaffirms colonial power- the state in Southeastern Turkey. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and
the Middle East, 32(1), 25e39.
knowledges and relations, resulting in further marginalization of Harris, L., & Alatout, S. (2010). Negotiating hydro-scales, forging states: Comparison
Palawan people, knowledges and natures. His provocation invites of the upper Tigris-Euphrates and Jordan River basins. Political Geography, 29,
us to consider what it would mean to acknowledge spirits and 148e156.
Kelly-Richards, S., & Banister, J. (2017). A state of suspended animation: Urban
invisible entities more fully in our frameworks and understandings
sanitation and water access in Nogales, Sonora. Political Geography, 58, 104e113.
and to consider natures not just in terms of the materiality of what Mcloughlin, C. (2015). When does service delivery improve the legitimacy of a
we can see and touch, but also to highlight those natures that are Fragile or Conflict Affected State? Governance, 28(3), 341e356.
dreamt, felt, or otherwise experienced (echoing some related Meehan, K. (2014). Tool-power: Water infrastructure as wellsprings of state power.
Geoforum, 57, 215e224.
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Sultana, 2015, pp. 633e645). Finally, all three contributions turn to critics. American Political Science Review, 85(1), 77e96.
questions of materiality and biophysicality that have long been a Neumann, R. (2009). Political Ecology: Theorizing scale. Progress in Human Geog-
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hallmark of work in political ecology. This theme is centrally Norman, E. S., Cook, C., & Cohen, A. (2014). Negotiating water Governance: Why the
highlighted by Theriault and Kelly-Richards and Banister but it is politics of scale matter. Surrey, England: Ashgate.
also highlighted in relation to infrastructural networks and risk in Robbins, P. (2008). The state in political ecology: A postcard to political geography
from the field. In Cox, Low, & Robinson (Eds.), Handbook of political geography
China in the piece by Clarke-Sather. Undoubtedly, the next decade (pp. 251e268). London, UK: Sage Publications.
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Wainwright, J., & Robertson, M. (2003). Territorialization, science and the colonial
state: The case of highway 55 in Minnesota. Cultural Geographies, 10, 196e217.
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