POLITICAL ECOLOGY & RESILIENCE

COMPETING INTERDISCIPLINARITIES?

Christian A. KULL & Haripriya RANGAN

This is an author-archived version of a paper published in the book

Interdisciplinarités entre Natures et Sociétés, edited by B. Hubert and N. Mathieu
and published by PIE Peter Lang.

Citation: Kull, Christian A. and Haripriya Rangan (2016) “Political ecology and
resilience: competing interdisciplinarities?” Pp. 71-87 in Bernard Hubert and
Nicole Mathieu (eds.) Interdisciplinarités entre Natures et Sociétés. (Brussels: PIE
Peter Lang).

ISBN 978-2-87574-347-3

Paper first presented at International Colloquium Interdisciplinarités entre Natures

et Sociétés, Cerisy, France, 2013.

I. Introduction

Today, calls for interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research and teaching have
become the norm (Kinzig 2001; Miller et al. 2008; Schoolman et al. 2012).
University administrators, research funding agencies, and various multilateral
organisations ceaselessly promote interdisciplinarity or ‘cross-disciplinary’
collaboration for solving pressing global problems related, for example, to health,
the environment, or the delivery of advanced technology to poor regions of the
world. The plea for interdisciplinarity is particularly loud in the disciplinary areas
dealing with questions of the environment, where researchers routinely invoke the
need to develop approaches that bring together the social and natural sciences.

However, amidst all the appeals for crossing boundaries and breaking barriers
between disciplines, two simple questions often remain unasked: first, what is the
nature of ‘disciplinary’ practice in knowledge areas that require simultaneous
consideration of interactions between environment and society? Second, what are
the processes that lead these inherently ‘inter-disciplinary’ fields to become new
dogmas and erect boundaries that subsequently need transcending? The answers to
these questions can be simple or complex, depending on the perspective used for
explaining the histories and changing nature of knowledge production. A Kuhnian
response would potentially centre on the increased specialisation that often occurs
in disciplines under a given ‘normal’ paradigm over a period of time (Kuhn 1962),
resulting in a situation where the overall ‘interdisciplinarity’ of the paradigm is
compromised by the narrowed focus and problem-solving developed through
specialisation. Alternatively, a Latourian response to the questions would centre on
the methods by which the knowledge of each interdisciplinary discipline is ‘made’
in ways that give them power and legitimacy within and beyond academic
environments (Latour 1987).

In this essay, we draw on both perspectives to analyse the evolution of political

ecology and the resilience approach, two interdisciplinary fields that focus on
nature-society relationships for understanding and tackling diverse environmental
problems. Political ecology emerged during the 1980s from geography,
anthropology, and development studies, driven by calls to jettison ideological and
disciplinary turf battles and develop interdisciplinary approaches with a critical and
integrative framework for addressing social and environmental change. Resilience
emerged a decade or two later, principally out of ecology, with a keen agenda to
solve environmental problems by understanding their interlinked social and
ecological components using a systems approach. Both ‘interdisciplines’ are
currently dominant in academic study of society-environment interactions, with
sizeable communities of students and scholars drawn from a range of traditional
disciplines, including geography, biology, anthropology, rural sociology, political
economy, and natural resource management.

In what follows, we sketch the origins and outcomes of each approach and compare
how they bring different disciplines together to address issues at the interface of
nature and society. What does interdisciplinarity mean in this context – is it about
combining multiple epistemologies and methods; or about defining new ‘socio-
natural’ environments; or is it about bringing different ideological commitments to
tackling environmental problems? We conclude with reflections on the extent to
which these ‘interdisciplines’ of science-nature-society can thrive without creating
new boundaries and disciplinary dogmas.

II. Political ecology

Political ecology is an approach to research on society-environment interactions

that synthesizes political-economic and ecological explanations of environmental
change. It often emphasizes a historical approach to studies of land degradation,
natural resource exploitation, environmental management, forest and agricultural
transformations. It is particularly concerned with questions of struggles over social
control of natural resources and how these are shaped by ideologies, institutions,
global economic forces, ideas of nature, and by the natural properties and ecology
of the resources concerned. Building on a variety of antecedents in geography and
anthropology, the label took hold in the late 1980s and blossomed in the 1990s
(Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Robbins 2004; Gautier and Benjaminsen 2012).

Both the inspiration for the approach and its rise in popularity were related to its
transgression of epistemological or paradigmatic boundaries. In the 1970s and
1980s, Anglophone universities experienced a period of unprecedented intellectual
ferment in the social sciences. Scholars in the discipline of geography, for instance,
advocated a plethora of new “-isms” and “-ologies” – feminism, phenomenology,
systems theory, structuralism, post-structuralism, structuration, and political
economy to name a few – challenging the prevailing paradigms for studying place,
space, and society-environment relations (similar arguments emerged in the
discipline of anthropology and the field of development studies). By the 1980s and

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1990s, these diverse perspectives had become ideological camps with their own
sub-disciplinary theory and history. For students who were drawn to geography or
development studies by a burning interest in the problems of the period – poverty
and underdevelopment, land degradation, rainforest loss, world hunger, global
environmental change – the ideological camps, their theoretical jostling and turf
battles were confusing and paralysing. What they wanted was to bring these
theoretical insights to critical analysis and action for solving these problems.

It was against this background that political ecology rapidly gained popularity in
the 1990s. The approach offered a path leading beyond the divisive ideological
battles of the previous decades. Rather than creating another new –ism or –ology, it
sought connections between them that could generate new ways of solving
contemporary problems at the interface of nature and society. In Land Degradation
and Society, a book that appeared in 1987, Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield
made these assertions explicit:

We set out initially to write this book from position papers which adopted respectively
Marxist and behavioural approaches…. What happened instead was something
unforeseen: large areas of agreement emerged... There is something to be said for
declaring a truce on the more abstract structural differences in the interpretations of
social change, however important these differences may be, if it allows cross-
fertilization of approaches.
There are certainly fundamental contradictions between the 'human adaptation', neo-
classical, and various Marxist approaches, to take these three only. However, they share
the objectives of understanding and problem solving, and of bringing about change in
the situation, albeit in different degrees and in different ways. While there are
epistemological reasons why Marxists have not been too interested in decision-making
models, there is nothing inherently revisionist in building them. Likewise….
There is an extraordinary schism between two self-perceived epistemological camps,
the one which measures, creates its own data and uses others' in model building, and the
other which calls itself 'critical' and eschews analysis of this sort as positivist, and the
data as ideologically tainted and reductionist. Whilst this book amply shows that data
do not simply exist but rather are constructed, it also argues strongly for technically
better and more ideologically aware measurement of process, costs and benefits.
Quantitative modelling of resources-in-use and land managers themselves need not be
mindless number crunching. Nor need a central concern for the social meaning of
degradation and for conscious ideological choice in explanation be dismissed as biased
and not 'real' science. (Blaikie & Brookfield 1987, pp. 24-25)

We quote this discussion at length because it directly addresses the frustration with
earlier ideological and disciplinary rivalries, and because it shows that the approach
proposed by Blaikie and Brookfield was interdisciplinary in multiple ways. It was
both about building bridges between ideological camps and between disciplines.
Both authors were geographers, but with different epistemological perspectives.
Blaikie brought a Marxist political economy perspective from his engagement as a
scholar-practitioner in international development, while Brookfield brought
behaviorist perspectives to the study of cultural ecology. Other contributors to
Land Degradation and Society broadened the scope of political ecology to include
other disciplines such as soil science, neo-classical economics, and sociology.
Reviewers characterized the book as representing a new “ideological pluralism”
and “multi-disciplinarity” (Chambers 1988, p. 144), and being “post-paradigmatic”
(Pickles and Watts 1992, p. 303).

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In their attempt to bring together the diverse ideological and disciplinary
perspectives presented in the volume, Blaikie and Brookfield proposed a “regional
political ecology” that, in a phrase quoted frequently since, “combines the concerns
of ecology and a broadly defined political economy.” (p. 17). The focus on ecology
and political economy emphasized the two key disciplinary and ideological gulfs
that were being bridged. Their gambit worked – the book became an inspirational
rallying point for a generation of scholars seeking a new approach to crucial
problems related to environment-development issues.

Despite becoming a ‘classic’ foundational reference for this interdisciplinary

approach, Blaikie and Brookfield’s Land Degradation and Society was only one
view of political ecology. Brookfield (2004, p. 40) commented that the ideological
“truce” between him and Piers Blaikie “ended once the book was published and we
did not succeed in working together on a revised text”. Anthropologists
approached political ecology from a different set of concerns arising from critiques
of development and its effects on indigenous and peasant cultures in the non-
western world (e.g., Escobar 1995). Their calls for a post-development era and
critical understanding of power relations and politics of representation in fieldwork
and textual interpretation opened the door to new social and cultural theories in
political ecology. The approach became an amalgam of all that its self-professed
practitioners did under that label (Robbins 2004). As individual researchers,
practitioners, and schools have shaped political ecology according to their own
priorities with varying degrees of adherence to ideological pluralism and
interdisciplinarity, various tensions have emerged.

First, there is the tension arising from differing emphases on ecological science and
positivistic methods of enquiry at one end of a spectrum, and social analyses of the
construction and representations of nature, power relations and institutional
practices at the other end. Works at the two ends of the spectrum often make a
acknowledgement of the interdisciplinarity of political ecology but show little
evidence of an integrative framework of socio-environmental analysis. For
instance, there are remote sensing studies of land use change that invoke political
ecology as their approach but rarely go beyond reference to a few political factors
influencing the process. Similarly, there are studies of agrarian change that claim to
use political-ecology frameworks, but ‘ecology’ is merely a backdrop to their
analysis of social power relations and resource management institutions.

Second, despite addressing similar concerns regarding transformations at the

nature-society interface, interactions between geographers and anthropologists have
been fairly limited. The political ecology performed by anthropologists differs in
both scale and scope compared with that performed by geographers. Until recently
very few geographical political ecologists cited articles from or published in the
Journal of Political Ecology that was initiated in 1994 by two anthropologists. And
while Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) is the most commonly cited text by geographer
political ecologists, anthropological political ecologists invoke different
foundational references such as Wolf (1972). In essence, the researchers and
practitioners from each of these disciplines perform ‘interdisciplinary’ political
ecology for their respective disciplinary audiences.

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Third, and more specifically, the political ecology practised by geographers has
been drawn in different epistemological directions and theoretical perspectives.
The most prominent of these is the post-structuralist turn, with emphasis on social
constructionism and discourse analysis (Peet and Watts 1996; Castree and Braun
2001; Forsyth 2003), along with new versions of feminism (Rocheleau 2008), actor
network theory (Robbins 2004; Birkenholtz 2012), human/non-human relations
(Whatmore 2002), and science and technology studies (Forsyth 2003; Bouleau
2013). The diversification of the post-structuralist turn has, in turn, resulted in a
reassertion of the importance of political economy and the material and ecological
relations shaping productive forces and social movements (Peet et al. 2011). Others
have moved in different directions to expand the scope of political ecology to
encompass broader spatio-temporal scales (Rangan and Kull 2009) and or the
material and ecological relations of applied conservation biology (Campbell 2007).
This diversification may appear, on the one hand, as a positive spirit of expanding
interdisciplinary exploration and richness within political ecology (Pickles and
Watts 1992) or, as Blaikie (1999, p. 131) noted, “all things to all people”, and thus
lacking clarity as either an approach or a distinctive interdisciplinary field. He
suggested that political ecology had become an “emblem and discursive device
through which diverse networks of scholars and other concerned groups may
communicate”.

III. The resilience approach

In contrast to political ecology’s geographical and anthropological roots, the

resilience approach has its origins in the field of ecology. Taking inspiration from
general systems theory, C. S. Holling argued in 1973 that instead of being
inherently stable or at equilibrium, ecosystems are in a perpetually transient state.
He introduced “resilience” as a property of such a system, defining it as “the
persistence of relationships within a system and is a measure of the ability of these
systems to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and
still persist” (Holling 1973, p. 17).

The resilience concept took wings outside its strictly ecological modelling aspects
in the 1990s, first through interest generated by meetings of the Beijer Institute of
Ecological Economics, and then promoted through a tight group of scholars
including Holling (Parker and Hackett 2012). The publication of Fikret Berkes and
Carl Folke’s (1998) edited volume Linking Social and Ecological Systems:
Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience, signalled a
conscious attempt by the scholars to move the concept beyond ecology’s
disciplinary boundaries and present it as an approach that integrated social and
ecological systems. Bibliometric analyses demonstrate the meteoric rise of the
resilience approach (Parker and Hackett 2012; Xu and Marinova 2013), with high
citation rates for publications emanating from a central core of scholars (e.g.
Gunderson and Holling 2002; Folke et al. 2002, 2010; Walker and Salt 2006; 2012;
Young et al. 2006; Gunderson et al. 2009). Its practitioners attribute its attractive
strengths to a genuine commitment to holistic approach that integrates diverse
disciplines; a forward-looking orientation as shown in the central position of
adaptive capacity in its analyses; and an acceptance of unpredictability and
complexity (Cote and Nightingale 2012).

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Berkes and Folke outlined the central claims of the resilience approach as follows
(1998, excerpts pp. 1-4):

[p.1] “The volume seeks to integrate two streams of resource management thought that
fundamentally differ from the classic utilitarian approach. The first is the use of
systems approach and adaptive management, with their emphasis on linkages and
feedback controls…. The second stream of thought is that improving the performance
of natural resource systems requires an emphasis on institutions and property rights….
the importance of a social science of resource management has not generally been
recognized.”

[p.4] “Only a few studies… have explicitly analysed linkages between social systems
and ecological systems. The present volume addresses this issue of linkage through its
objective to relate management practices based on ecological understanding, to the
social mechanisms behind these practices, in a variety of geographical settings, cultures,
and ecosystems.

“We hold the view that social and ecological systems are in fact linked, and that the
delineation between social and natural systems is artificial and arbitrary. Such views,
however, are not yet accepted in conventional ecology and social science. When we
wish to emphasize the integrated concept of humans-in-nature, we use the terms social-
ecological system and social-ecological linkages.”

The resilience approach claims – like political ecology – to cross disciplinary

boundaries, to integrate treatment of social and ecological systems (Folke et al.
2002; Gunderson and Holling 2002). This is stated explicitly on the Resilience
Alliance website1 and in the statement of purpose of the Alliance’s journal, Ecology
and Society.2 Often, the message comes across in a way that suggests that linking
the social and the ecological is a novel idea, though in a follow-up book, Berkes et
al. (2003, p.13) mention a number of other antecedents and inspirations, including
political ecology as well as environmental ethics, environmental history, ecological
economics, common property, and traditional ecological knowledge.

The antecedents of the resilience approach give it its flavour. The ecological side is
strongly based in systems theory and conservation biology (the flagship journal
Ecology and Society used to be titled Conservation Ecology). The social side is
largely based on a relatively specific understanding of ‘social’ as institutions and
property rights based on a broadly ‘economic’ perspective inherited from common
property theory, neoclassical and ecological economics (Cote and Nightingale
2012; Turner 2014). The goal is to get people to ‘see’ the systemic links between
ecology and society (primarily as economy) and make the right institutional and
management decisions. According to Gunderson and Holling (2002, p. 10), only a
shift in mindset to this kind of systems thinking and worldview will allow people to
understand and manage socio-ecological systems.

The systems concepts in the resilience approach have evolved (moving from
adaptation to co-adaptation, or towards ‘transformability’ - Walker et al. 2004)
through application to hundreds of case studies aimed at tackling ‘wicked’ socio-
ecological problems. The pages of Ecology and Society are filled with articles

1
http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/about_ra, accessed 1 Aug. 2013.
2
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/about/policies.php#focus, accessed 1 Aug. 2013.

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touching on governance, participatory resource management, stakeholder
perceptions, adaptation and vulnerability, planning. In that journal and elsewhere,
self-appointed stewards of the resilience approach have exercised a strong editorial
hand in shaping and refining these concepts. (e.g. Carpenter et al. 2001; Folke et al
2010). More recently a number of scholars have sought to address the under-
theorization of the social system in resilience approaches (Brown 2014), and to
bring resilience into discussion with existing literatures on cultural landscapes
(Plieninger and Bieling 2012), and development theories of livelihood
diversification and social capital formation (Goulden et al. 2013).

IV. Disciplines, or different interdisciplinary sieves?

In the previous sections, we described the interdisciplinary claims of political

ecology and resilience and their respective evolutionary pathways. How do such
competing ‘interdisciplines’ survive and grow in a world of ‘disciplines’? If we
apply Kuhn’s description of how a paradigm shift takes place, then
‘interdisciplines’ need to go through a process of becoming ‘disciplined’ through
increased specialization and normalisation of a limited range of research questions,
methods, and practices of knowledge validation. If we add the insights of a
Latourian approach to ‘science in the making’, it becomes necessary to understand
the networks and institutions that are mobilised in order to establish the legitimacy
of these ‘interdisciplines’ among those who wield power and authority. Below, we
use Latour’s ideas to illustrate how political ecology and resilience mobilise
networks and establish their legitimacy and authority as interdisciplines and then go
on to propose a model of how these environment-society ‘interdisciplines’ (and
potentially others) resist becoming fully disciplined.

To begin with, both political ecology and resilience clearly have their central
dogmas and favourite citations. In political ecology, hardly an article passes
without the obligatory cap-doffing citation of Blaikie and Brookfield’s edited
volume, and those by subsequent writers of political ecology ‘text-books’ (like Peet
and Watts 1996; Robbins 2004; Peet et al. 2011). Likewise, in resilience
approaches, one or more of the Gunderson-Holling-Folke-Berkes articles will be
cited without fail. Both interdisciplines have a core group of individuals that serve
as inspirations, advocates, gatekeepers and adjudicators (for resolving differences
within their approaches). The resilience approach however, has a more centralized
and well-defined presence in the form of the ‘Resilience Alliance’ (founded in
1999), a tight group of prominent, well-networked senior researchers coordinating a
flagship journal (the open access Ecology and Society), publishing a series of books
all with a single imprint (Island Press – the leading American environmental
publisher), and organizing resilience workshops, retreats, and conferences (Parker
and Hacket 2012; Brown 2014). These practices are clearly the marks of
‘disciplining’, in all senses of the word – authors are disciplining themselves into
certain forms of discussion, certain sets of ideas, building traditions, and keeping
discussions internal despite overtures to the outside world. In Kuhnian terms, these
practitioners are committed to making the resilience approach the ‘normal
paradigm’ of social-environmental analysis and problem-solving.

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Generally, once they are normalised, disciplines are often regarded as well-bounded
realms and often referred to as silos or fortresses. But in the case of
‘interdisciplines’, such analogies would work against their claims to
interdisciplinarity. We suggest that normalised interdisciplines can instead be
thought of as ‘sieves’. Sieves separate materials that are mixed together – sand and
gravel grain and chaff, and so on. The mesh of a sieve is a barrier of interlaced
strands, and varies in the size and shape of its openings. It only lets through
material that is finer than its gauge. Different interdisciplines function,
metaphorically speaking, as sieves, in that they try to define the gauge, or qualities,
of the mesh through which nature-society relationships are sifted (analysed and
translated) to produce knowledge and inform action. To put it crudely, the finer the
mesh, the more an interdiscipline will become ‘disciplined’ and appear coherent
and uniform; the coarser the mesh, the less it will be disciplined, and will appear as
a medley of methods and concerns around nature-society relationships. A finer
mesh succeeds in establishing something akin to a new discipline with specific
methods, associations, and journals. A coarser mesh may not establish a new
discipline, but may function as a syncretic symbol for articulating diverse concerns
associated with environment-society relationships. In the case of resilience and
political ecology, we would suggest that the former tends towards a finer mesh and
the latter to a coarser one.

While political ecology and resilience both seek to understand human-environment

relationships with a view to improving social and environmental outcomes, their
interdisciplinary sieves differ not just in terms of the gauge, or coarseness, of the
mesh, but also in the material the sieve is made of – its ideology and epistemology.
To begin with, the two approaches differ in ideological tenor (Cote and Nightingale
2012; Turner 2014). Political ecology tends towards a more ‘radical’ stance that
challenges institutional and political status quo whereas resilience tends more
towards a ‘reformist’ approach that works with existing institutional and power
structures to guide policy and management. Political ecology, by and large, has an
explicit commitment to issues of social and environmental justice; the resilience
approach tends to emphasise environmental sustainability in economic and
institutional terms. The former tends to be seen as a critical voice and is thus less
visible in policy-making (Blaikie 2012); the latter uses the language of economics
and governance and nearly always targets policy-making in terms of ‘systems’,
‘management’, ‘stakeholders’ and the like (Walker and Salt 2012).

Taking this further, when political ecologists adopt a critical approach to a socio-
ecological issue, their attention is directed first and foremost to the social processes
for explanations and levers of change: economic exploitation, institutional
functioning, power relations, and ideological constraints. In contrast, the resilience
approach emphasizes the lack of ‘resilience thinking’, which draws attention to the
interlinked, complex, dynamic, co-evolving socio-ecological systems. Resilience
promotes itself as a very normative and coherent systemic approach that truly
reflects the workings of nature and thereby produces better solutions for managing
environments and natural resources. For instance, in the preface to Resilience
Thinking (Walker and Salt 2006, p. xi), Stanford University’s Walter Reid wrote,
“In other words, we need to apply ‘resilience thinking’…. Unfortunately, resilience
thinking is a concept that is virtually absent from academic and management
institutions that dominate large-scale resource management practices today… One

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notable exception is a group of ecologists and social scientists who began working
on these issues more than fifteen years ago through a network they named the
Resilience Alliance.” In other words, resilience thinking is presented as the
ideology that needs to be espoused for adapting and managing socio-ecological
systems.

From an epistemological perspective, although both approaches combine different

analytical methods, political ecology leans towards the ideographic, resilience
towards the nomothetic. The positionality of researchers vis-à-vis their subjects
tends to matter more in political ecology than in resilience. Resilience tends to
follow normal science conventions in assuming that its subject matter is
independent of its observation and that, however complex and unpredictable, it can
be understood and explained through qualitative or quantitative models. In
contrast, political ecology often begins with the assumption that epistemology is
unstable: it simultaneously considers empirical evidence of environmental change
as well as showing how those pieces of evidence are socially constructed.

The underlying models in political ecology are ones of complex social interactions
– power, discourse, exchange, institutions, and the production, construction, and
exploitation of nature – which trace their roots to diverse thinkers (such as
Humboldt, Marx, Weber, Sauer, Geertz, Wolf, Foucault…). In contrast, the
underlying models in resilience are ecological systems and complex or adaptive
systems theory (which build on, though the link is rarely acknowledged, the
systems theories of Bertalanffy, Boulding, Rapopport…) and rational-choice based
social science. It tends to treat socio-ecological systems as ontologies – things that
can be known and studied – rather than focusing on systemic practice of knowing
them (Ison 2010), though it has expanded, particularly through the role of Fikret
Berkes one presumes, to incorporate ideas about multiple knowledge systems,
particularly ‘indigenous knowledge’ or ‘traditional ecological knowledge’. The
resilience approach relies heavily on abstract systemic analytical metaphors –
boundaries, thresholds, emergent properties – and particularly on the idea of an
adaptive cycle, represented in an iconic figure-eight loop of growth [r],
conservation [K], release [Ω], and reorganization [α].

These epistemological differences reflect different roots, with resilience arising

mostly out of natural and social science and political ecology drawing more on
critical and interpretive social theory. For example, the list of inspirations listed by
Gunderson and Holling (2002, p.22) demonstrates a certain kind of
interdisciplinarity: “…our approach… draws on theories of adaptive change in
biological and ecological systems, of self-organization in complex systems, of
rational actor models in economics, and of cultural evolution.” In contrast, political
ecology builds on common property theory, political economy, peasant studies,
feminist development, post-colonialism and post-structuralism (Robbins 2004, p.
41).

So, returning to the sieve metaphor, the above examples show that the two
approaches clearly differ in the character of the mesh through which the multitude
of factors, ideas, evidence, and theories relevant to addressing nature-society
interactions are sifted and selected for inclusion within each interdiscipline. .
Political ecology’s mesh favours the passage of critical ideas; resilience’s mesh in

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turn favours elements that fit into systems thinking. As far as the size of the mesh,
as we suggested earlier, the latter approach is arguably a finer mesh, which
facilitates the establishment of a tighter, more coherent ‘discipline’. Political
ecology, in contrast, has a coarser mesh that favours a somewhat more diverse,
syncretic approach.

V. Clash, debate, and cross-fertilization

The ideological and epistemological differences between political ecology and

resilience have generated vigorous debate. The debate is largely one-sided, with
social scientists launching critiques (Walker and Cooper 2011) but little response
from resilience. Political ecologists typically accuse resilience for being
technocratic and ‘apolitical’ (Beymer-Ferris et al. 2012; Cote and Nightingale
2012; Widgren 2012; Turner 2014). Michael Watts (2011, p. 87-88) attacks a
UNEP, WRI, and World Bank document called The Roots of Resilience that
applies, as he says, “Holling’s and related ideas to the global development
community.” His rhetoric sets the tone:

“…what is on offer … is a bland and bloodless shopping list of ‘conditions’ for

adaptive governance including ‘policy will’, ‘coordination of stakeholders’, ‘science’,
‘common goals’ and ‘creativity’. …..Ecological resiliency is the calculative metric
for a brave new world of turbulent capitalism and the global economic order, and a
new ecology of rule…. . To return to Foucault and his notion of an expanded sense of
eco-security, resiliency is an apparatus of security that will determine the process of
‘letting die’. Africa, once again, is the testing ground for a vision of security and care
in which life is nothing more than permanent readiness and flexible adaptiveness.”

In more measured critical tones, Trevor Birkenholtz (2012, p. 5) argues:

“Resiliency … abstract[s] social-ecological systems from the political-economic relations in
which they are embedded….. This is a rationalist view of institutions… that leads to a focus
on social capital and its derivative ‘adaptive capacity building’, which can be indexed and
then addressed in technical and managerial terms … rather than leading to the questioning of
the structure of resource allocation or issues of social justice, human security, and equity.”

These debates echo those of the late 1970s between critical social scientists and
proponents of ‘systems theory’. Derek Gregory (1980), for instance, drew on the
theories of Habermas and Giddens to critique the systems approach despite the fact
that it was “supposed to provide a means of dealing with the interactions and
interfacings between man and nature, and so to offer the prospect of healing the
breach between human geography and physical geography” (p. 329). He argued
that systems approaches revolve around an ideology of ‘control’, of being able to
see, master, and reduce complex systems into manageable components, and that
this obscures historical and geographical specificity and reproduces structures of
domination.

Both political ecology and resilience have clearly become their own epistemic
communities. Yet there appear to be some overtures and crossovers between the
two interdisciplines. It should not be forgotten, for example, that Blaikie and
Brookfield (1987, p. 10) sought inspiration from Holling’s idea of resilience, and
that Berkes et al. (2003) describe political ecology as a type of socio-ecological
system approach. Holling’s student Garry Peterson (2000) explicitly sought to build
bridges between the approaches, applying systems concepts like resilience, adaptive

10
cycle, and scale to the dynamics of political power in the management of the
Columbia River. Others such as Neil Adger and Arun Agrawal move comfortably
across both approaches.

More recently, some scholars have attempted to reconcile resilience and political
ecology. Betsy Beymer-Ferris and colleagues (2012) detail the specific challenges
of a resilience approach to the sustainability of prawn farming and mangrove
management in Tanzania. Using the language of resilience, they point to ‘slow-
moving variables’ (like marginalisation and pauperisation of villagers) and ‘fast-
moving variables’ (like deaths, protests, shifts in party preferences) that can cause
‘regime shifts’. They then provide a sympathetic critique of adaptive management
approaches as promoted under resilience thinking, arguing that these approaches
struggle to incorporate “the multiple and competing views and politics of desirable
states of the social-ecological system” (p. 295). They show that people respond
constantly to transformations in how resources are controlled and managed, just as
the ecological situation continues evolving, and suggest that the ‘rigidity trap’ may
not be appropriate. They go on to demonstrate that industrial prawn farming causes
degradation and injustices, despite global certifications and national regulations
ostensibly put in place as tools of adaptive management.

VII. Conclusion

The study of environment-society interactions is a terrain where silo-like

disciplinary practice is likely to fall flat. The simultaneous consideration of
interactions between environment and society requires inter-disciplinary knowledge
production. Yet, as we have seen with political ecology and resilience, there are
multiple ways of being interdisciplinary. Gaps between disciplines, or more
accurately, between Marxist and behavioural ideological outlooks, inspired the
insights and collaborations that led to political ecology, an approach that took on
many more inspirations from post-structuralism, disturbance ecology, and more.
Similarly, the need to link social and ecological systems led to resilience
approaches’ calls for interdisciplinarity – an interdisciplinarity held together by
recourse to systems theory and the kinds of ecological and social science that fit
into that vision.

Interdisciplinarity seeks to facilitate the kinds boundary crossings that are crucial at
the interface of nature and society, leading to new insights and knowledge, and to
solving problems that are not contained within the boundaries. Yet there are
inevitably pressures to ‘discipline’ the new ‘interdisciplines’. The new
interdisciplinary paradigms may eventually become Kuhnian ‘normal’ disciplines,
following a Latourian process of disciplining through the mobilisation of networks
of scholars, institutions, publications, and conferences. The resulting outcome is
multiple interdisciplinarities that use sieves of finer or coarser grain meshes within
different ideological and epistemological frames to sift understandings of the
complexities of environment-society interactions.

Should we be concerned that interdisciplinary ‘sieves’ may become new dogmas, or

can we expect that they will maintain a spirit of renewal and boundary crossing?
Work at the nature-society interface is enriched by multiple powerful

11
interdisciplinary analytical approaches that sometimes complement and sometimes
compete with each other. While some scholars may attempt to build bridges and
cross-fertilize between fields like political ecology and resilience, some
fundamental differences in purpose, in epistemology, in explanatory tools, and in
ideology will always persist or re-assert themselves. Despite the zealousness of
some proponents of either approach, there will always be different ways of
thinking, interpreting, and understanding the complexities of human-environment
interactions

Acknowledgements
We thank Bernard Hubert, NSS Dialogues, and the CCIC for inviting Christian
Kull to present an earlier version of this paper. We also thank Wolfram Dressler
and Libby Porter, as well as all the participants at Cerisy (especially Ray Ison,
Olivier Barreteau, François Bousquet, Gabrielle Boulot, Xavier Arnaud de Sartre,
and Monica Castro) for useful advice, comments, and suggestions.

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