1st Edition
Environmental Governance in a Populist/Authoritarian Era
This volume explores the many and deep connections between the widespread rise of authoritarian leaders and populist politics in recent years, and the domain of environmental politics and governance – how environments are known, valued, and managed; for whose benefit; and with what outcomes.
The volume is explicitly international in scope and comparative in design, emphasizing both the differences and commonalties to be seen among contemporary authoritarian and populist political formations and their relations to environmental governance. Prominent themes include the historical roots of and precedents for environmental governance in authoritarian and populist contexts; the relationships between populism and authoritarianism and extractivism and resource nationalism; environmental politics as an arena for questions of security and citizenship; racialization and environmental politics; the politics of environmental science and knowledge; and progressive political alternatives. In each domain, using rich case studies, contributors analyse what differences it makes when environmental governance takes place in authoritarian and populist political contexts.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
1. Introduction: Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Environment: Comparative Experiences, Insights, and Perspectives
James McCarthy
Part I: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
2. Authoritarian Environmental Governance: Insights from the Past Century
Robert Wilson
3. Deadly Environmental Governance: Authoritarianism, Eco-populism, and the Repression of Environmental and Land Defenders
Nick Middeldorp and Philippe Le Billon
Part II: Extractivism, Populism, and Authoritarianism
4. Neoliberalizing Authoritarian Environmental Governance in (Post) Socialist Laos
Miles Kenney-Lazar
5. The Speculative Petro-State: Volatile Oil Prices and Resource Populism in Ecuador
Angus Lyall and Gabriela Valdivia
6. Contradictions of Populism and Resource Extraction: Examining the Intersection of Resource Nationalism and Accumulation by Dispossession in Mongolia
Orhon Myadar and Sara Jackson
7. Bringing Back the Mines and a Way of Life: Populism and the Politics of Extraction
Erik Kojola
8. Emotional Environments of Energy Extraction in Russia
Jessica K. Graybill
9. U.S. Farm Policy as Fraught Populism: Tracing the Scalar Tensions of Nationalist Agricultural Governance
Garrett Graddy-Lovelace
Part III: Environment as Political Proxy and Arena for Security and Citizenship
10. The State, Sewers, and Security: How Does the Egyptian State Reframe Environmental Disasters as Terrorist Threats?
Mohammed Rafi Arefin
11. Sequestering a River: The Political Ecology of the "Dead" Ergene River and Neoliberal Urbanization in Today’s Turkey
Eda Acara
12. "Return the Lake to the People": Populist Political Rhetoric and the Fate of a Resource Frontier in the Philippines
Kristian Saguin
13. Fishing for Power: Incursions of the Ugandan Authoritarian State
Anne J. Kantel
14. From the Heavens to the Markets: Governing Agricultural Drought under Chinese Fragmented Authoritarianism
Afton Clarke-Sather
15. Electricity-Centered Clientelism and the Contradictions of Private Solar Microgrids in India
Jonathan N. Balls and Harry W. Fischer
16. Dreams and Migration in South Korea’s Border Region: Landscape Change and Environmental Impacts
Heejun Chang, Sunhak Bae, and Kyunghyun Park
Part IV: Racialization and Environmental Politics
17. Afro-Brazilian Resistance to Extractivism in the Bay of Aratu
Adam Bledsoe
18. Infrastructure and Authoritarianism in the Land of Waters: A Genealogy of Flood Control in Guyana
Joshua Mullenite
19. Border Thinking, Borderland Diversity, and Trump’s Wall
Melissa W. Wright
20. Environmental Deregulation, Spectacular Racism, and White Nationalism in the Trump Era
Laura Pulido, Tianna Bruno, Cristina Faiver-Serna, and Cassandra Galentine
21. Reaction, Resilience, and the Trumpist Behemoth: Environmental Risk Management from "Hoax" to Technique of Domination
Matthew Sparke and Daniel Bessner
Part V: Politics of Environmental Science and Knowledge
22. Situating Data in a Trumpian Era: The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative
Lindsey Dillon, Rebecca Lave, Becky Mansfield, Sara Wylie, Nicholas Shapiro, Anita Say Chan, and Michelle Murphy
23. Rocket Wastelands in Kazakhstan: Scientific Authoritarianism and the Baikonur Cosmodrome
Robert A. Kopack
24. Avoiding Climate Change: "Agnostic Adaptation" and the Politics of Public Silence
Liz Koslov
25. The People Know Best: Situating the Counterexpertise of Populist Pipeline Opposition Movements
Kai Bosworth
26. Beyond Narratives: Civic Epistemologies and the Coproduction of Environmental Knowledge and Popular Environmentalism in Thailand
Tim Forsyth
27. Speaking Power to "Post-Truth": Critical Political Ecology and the New Authoritarianism
Benjamin Neimark, John Childs, Andrea J. Nightingale, Connor Joseph Cavanagh, Sian Sullivan, Tor A. Benjaminsen, Simon Batterbury, Stasja Koot, and Wendy Harcourt
Part VI: Progressive Alternatives
28. Populism, Emancipation, and Environmental Governance: Insights from Bolivia
Diego Andreucci
29. Whatever Happened to Green Collar Jobs? Populism and Clean Energy Transition
Sarah Knuth
30. Reparation Ecologies: Regimes of Repair in Populist Agroecology
Kirsten Valentine Cadieux, Stephen Carpenter, Alex Liebman, Renata Blumberg, and Bhaskar Upadhyay
31. Development and Sustainable Ethics in Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve, China
Stuart C. Aitken, Li An, and Shuang Yang
32. A Manifesto for a Progressive Land-Grant Mission in an Authoritarian Populist Era
Jenny E. Goldstein, Kasia Paprocki, and Tracey Osborne
Biography
James McCarthy is a Professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University, USA. His work analyses the interactions of political economy and environmental politics. He has published three major edited volumes and over 50 articles and chapters. His current research explores the relationships between climate change, renewable energy, and the future of capitalism.
