Abstract: This chapter lays out many foundational concepts in environmental politics and governance by focusing on the topics of power, scale, and inequality. Through its extended engagement with water politics, the chapter demonstrate the critical roles that formal and informal institutions play in environmental decision-making, as well as the critical need to foreground ontological questions and knowledge claims in environmental management. The chapter has a strong engagement with water, and will be of interest to scholars of water, as well as those interested in environmental governance and government more generally.
Cohen, A., Harris, L.M. (2024). Governing nature: political ecology and the knotty tangle of environmental governance. In G.L. Simon and K. Kay (Eds.), Doing Political Ecology (pp.46-61). Routledge.
The chapter is available with institutional access via this link.