Political Ecologies of Drylands: New Frontiers

Conveners: Miri Lavi-Neeman, Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and Tel Aviv University, and Na’ama Teschner, BGU

This session seeks to explore the evolving intellectual landscapes of political ecology within various arid regions of the world. Political ecology, a field that interrogates critically the power dynamics shaping human-environment interactions, provides a theoretical critical lens to scholarship of environmental, social, economic and political challenges of dryland social ecologies.

In recent decades climate changes becoming salient, resource allocation, and socio-political instabilities exacerbate the vulnerability of these regions in different ways. Political ecology offers a framework to the complex and changing relationships between local communities, state actors, and the global forces driving environmental changes.

Drylands, which cover more than 40% of the Earth’s surface and are home to over two billion people, have always faced unique social and ecological challenges. From a climate change perspective, they can be seen as ecological, governance and intellectual “climate frontiers” (Preston, 2013; Markoff, 1997; Moore, 2000; Lavi-Neeman et all 2024). This session will emphasize the importance of looking at the ways drylands ecological challenges such as changes in precipitation dynamics, rising temperatures, floods, and soil degradation are articulated pressures– interwoven with issues of governance, unequal access to resources, and historical legacies of uneven development, colonialism and marginalization. It will highlight how political ecology can help understand tensions and relationships between environmental conservation, social – climate justice, and economic development for better understanding the prospect of sustainability in these fragile ecosystems.

Key areas of interest for this session include but are not limited to:
• The political economy of resource management in drylands, focusing on water, land, energy, and biodiversity.
• The role of climate change in reshaping dryland “social ecologies” -how socio-political dynamics are shaped by climate changes and the socio-political responses to these transformations.
• Indigenous knowledge systems and their role in shaping sustainable dryland management practices.
• Rising ethnic and racial conflicts, new mobilities, migration, and displacement processes related to environmental changes and their governance in arid regions.
• The intersections of gender, class and environmental governance in drylands
• Deconstructing “drylands”: what can commonly be learned about drylands and examples of their incredible social ecological differentiation.

By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines, this session aims to blur the lines between social and ecological sciences and deepen our understanding of the political, social, and ecological dimensions of dryland environments and open up new frontiers for research in political ecology.