The International Handbook of Political Ecology features chapters by leading scholars from around the world in a unique collection exploring the multi-disciplinary field of political ecology. This landmark volume canvasses key developments, topics, iss
C.O.OKIDl1 I welcome the opportunity to prepare a Foreword to the book on Environmental Policy and Law in Africa, edited by Kevin R. Gray and Beatrice Chaytor. It is a pleasure to do that because the book is a contribution to the cause of capacity building for development and implementation of environmental law in Africa, a goal towards which I have had an undivided focus over the last two decades. There is still some belief in and outside Africa that for developing countries in general, and Africa in particular, development and implementation of environmental law is not a priority. This belief prevails strongly in many quarters of the industrialised countries. In fact, the view is held either out of blatant ignorance or by some renegade industrialists who fail to appreciate Michael Royston's 1979 thesis that Pollution Prevention Pays.2 That group, for obvious reasons, must have their correspondent counterparts in Africa to provide hope that industries rejected as derelict in the West or inoperable due to rigorous environmental regulation, can find homes to which they can escape and dump their polluting industries.
This Handbook provides an essential guide to the study of resources and their role in socio-environmental change. With original contributions from more than 60 authors with expertise in a wide range of resource types and world regions, it offers a toolkit of conceptual and methodological approaches for documenting, analyzing, and reimagining resources and the worlds with which they are entangled. The volume has an introduction and four thematic sections. The introductory chapter outlines key trajectories for thinking critically with and about resources. Chapters in Section I, "(Un)knowing resources," offer distinct epistemological entry points and approaches for studying resources. Chapters in Section II, "(Un)knowing resource systems," examine the components and logics of the capitalist systems through which resources are made, circulated, consumed, and disposed of, while chapters in Section III, "Doing critical resource geography: Methods, advocacy, and teaching," focus on the practices of critical resource scholarship, exploring the opportunities and challenges of carrying out engaged forms of research and pedagogy. Chapters in Section IV, "Resource-making/world-making," use case studies to illustrate how things are made into resources and how these processes of resource-making transform socio-environmental life. This vibrant and diverse critical resource scholarship provides an indispensable reference point for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in understanding how resources matter to the world and to the systems, conflicts, and debates that make and remake it.
Political ecology has developed as an academic discipline in reaction to the increased concern of nations and individuals about humanity's adverse impact on the environment and the ways international bodies have moved to counter this impact. This new text draws together international experts at the cutting edge of this new field to focus on real world examples of problems and the tension between developed and developing states.
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