Political Ecology in the Anthropocene: A Case Study of Irrigation Management in the Blue Nile Basin

Abstract

The study of human-environment relations and the focus on resource management practices have a long tradition in anthropological research. Early accounts that explain societies by means of their natural surroundings were based on a conceptual dichotomy between nature and society. Focusing on differences between societies (a) and the environment (b) was framed as the explanatory variable. The explanation of their connection was mostly one of a simple cause-effect relationship (a◊b), a framework that dominated the field far into the nineteenth century (Dove and Carpenter 2008, 1).In the twentieth century, environmental determinism started to be increasingly contested within anthropology, and a more complex understanding of the relationship between societies and the environment developed. The focus shifted "to the asking of the reverse question, not how does the environment affect society but how, over time, does human activity affect, and especially degrade, the environment" (Dove and Carpenter 2008, 2). Further, with increasing globalization, the focus on local-level analyses alone became insufficient, and it was acknowledged that cultural as well as ecological processes on the local level were part of a broader set of both political and economic factors (Peet and Watts 1993, 1996; Bryant and Bailey 1997).The paradigm shift to "the reverse question, " how humans affect the environment, has largely been a story of degradation. The narrative of the 1960s proposed that population growth coupled with mismanagement of natural resources by local communities was the primary cause of environmental degradation in the so-called Third World (Neumann 2005, 26 f.). 1 Closely linked with such neoMalthusian thinking was the notion that the needs of a growing population could