Second Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN)

POLLEN18: Political Ecology, the Green Economy, and Alternative Sustainabilities

When: 20-22 June 2018
Where: Oslo and Akershus University College, Oslo, Norway
Organised by: The Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) Secretariat; Oslo and Akershus University College; Centre for Environment and Development (SUM), University of Oslo; Noragric, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
Paper/Panel Submission Deadline: 15 December 2017
Conference Website: https://politicalecologynetwork.com/pollen-biannual-conference/

Over the past two decades, political ecologists have provided extensive critiques of the privatization, commodification, and marketization of nature, including of the new forms of accumulation and appropriation that these might facilitate under the more recent guise of the so-called green economy. These critiques have often demonstrated that such approaches can retain deleterious implications for certain vulnerable populations across the developing world and beyond, including in urban centres and within the interstices of the ‘Global North’. With few exceptions, however, political ecologists have paid decidedly less attention to exploring, critically engaging, and ‘planting the seed’ of alternative initiatives for pursuing both sustainability and socio-environmental justice. Surely, many scholars have begun to both support and study movements pursuing alternative socio-ecological relations rooted in critical traditions such as degrowth, postcolonialism, feminism, anarchism, and eco-Marxism. Yet much more could be done to understand and illuminate the prospects for these movements, as well as potential sources of tension and synergy between and amongst them.

Accordingly, this second biennial conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) aims to engage the emergence of the green economy or green growth in their various iterations explicitly as a terrain of struggle. In doing so, we invite empirical, conceptual, political, and methodological contributions appraising the ways in which there are many potential ‘alternative sustainabilities’ for pursuing human and non-human well-being in the context of global economic and ecological crises. Each of these reflects often quite variable constellations of social, political, and economic relations. However, there are also diverse efforts underway to pre-empt or to foreclose upon these alternatives – as well as tensions, contradictions, and fissions within movements aiming to actualize or enact them – highlighting an implicit politics of precisely whose conception of sustainability is deemed to be possible or desirable in any given time and place.