stimulating rapid growth on the comparative advantages of developing countries (Holden, 2005).
Scheyvens (2002) suggests that the role of tourism as an export industry and as a way of earning foreign exchange is powerfully supported by multinationals as they continue to try to secure new markets for their products.
communities in the developing world (Kontogeorgopoulos, 2005). Zimmerer and Bassett (2003) refer to how protected areas become arenas of conflict that result in contested patterns of resource management which is a classical theme in political ecology. Some political ecologists refer to capitalist forces or oppressive State policies and their impact on local people and resources (Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Stonich, 1993). Forsyth (2008: 758) states that the political ecology approach focuses on two key questions: “How do we understand environmental crisis? And how do we identify social vulnerability?” It is for this reason that this study focuses on both environmental management challenges as well as concerns relating to rural communities.
Gossling (2003) proposes that political ecology can be used as a powerful tool to investigate the role and interests of different actors in the process of environmental change. Some political ecologists refer to capitalist forces or oppressive State policies and their impact on local people and resources (Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Stonich, 1993). There is a belief that environmental problems cannot properly be understood without considering their economic and political context (Gossling, 2003). Logan and Moseley (2002) refer to political ecology as broadly referring to the political economy of human-environment interactions. Belsky (2002) refers to political ecology as building essential bridges across human ecology and political economy, place- and non-place-based analyses, social construction and realism (materialism), Western science and local knowledge, and theory and practice among others. Greenberg and Park (1994) express that political ecology does not amount to a new programme for intellectual criticism, rather it is a historical outgrowth of the central questions referred to by the social sciences concerning relations between human societies, analysed in its bio-cultural-political complexity and in a significantly humanised nature where various disciplines intersect.
Bryant and Bailey (1997) note that political ecology assists in situating the findings of local level empirical research in theoretical and comparative perspectives. Neumann (1998) describes political ecology research as having illustrated that historical and geographical specificity are fundamental starting points for new conservation initiatives. Democratising expertise and relying on local knowledge is a messy enterprise as well as institutionalising democratic conservation in the current political climate of many African countries in the 1990s undermines local community cohesiveness (Bryant and Bailey, 1997).
Logan and Moseley (2002) identify unequal relations between actors as a key factor in understanding patterns of human-environment interaction and related environmental problems.
Lohman (1998) describes that political ecology focuses on individual meaning in the context of political processes and unequal interests. Furthermore, Lohman (1998) states that political ecology is very attentive to the hazard of an uncritical pluralism that constructs all actors and their meanings and stakes as equal from ancestral claims, cultural survival and local livelihood to aesthetic and landscape concerns. Some political ecologists use the politics of environmental change, by adopting structuralist explanations of land degradation and environmental change, and others use poststructuralist approaches, thereby focusing more on environmental change and degradation as linguistic and political forces in their own right (Escobar, 1996; Leach and Mearns, 1996; Zingerli, 2005). For example, Neumann (1998) refers to donor-driven, externally financed programmes of community-based environmental management which have been a success in mainland Tanzania. Moore (1993: 381) states that a political ecological approach allows us to appreciate “the nuances of social actors’ livelihood struggles and their uses of cultural idioms in the charged context of local politics”.
Political ecology has a broad interdisciplinary emphasis. It is possible to demarcate two major theoretical thrusts that have most influenced its formation: political economy with its insistence on the need to link the distribution of power with productive activity; and ecological analysis with its broader vision of bio-environmental relationships (Greenberg and Park, 1994). Berkes (1999) proposes that political ecology discusses the residents’ viewpoints, experiential knowledge as well as stressing the significance of political struggles between a hegemonic Western science and alternative knowledge systems. Martinez-Alder (2002) mentions that political ecology applied methods of political economy in ecological contexts can be best understood as the study of the ecological distribution of conflicts.
Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) refer to a vital text introducing regional political ecology which was co-authored by geographers with a political economy and human ecology orientation, respectively. Political ecology builds on ecological concepts to respond to this inclusion of cultural and political activity within an analysis of ecosystems that are not always entirely socially constructed (Greenberg and Park, 1994). Mullins (2004) suggests that by looking at unequal power relations between actors, this theoretical framework attempts to assess uneven
distribution of access to environmental resources since power is an important focus. However, the accumulation of power by different actors presently is mostly through the possession of knowledge, technology and assets such as land (Mullins, 2004). Sterk et al. (2009) discuss that the basis for decision-makers whether farmers, policy-makers or other stakeholders struggle with the complexity and uncertainty inherent in land use systems and welcome access to technologies which lessen this burden. Western scientific knowledge has been heavily utilised to justify and legitimate actions to address land degradation (Marcussen, 2002) yet, it is only recently that the politicised nature of the use of science has been acknowledged as well as other interpretations, for example, local and indigenous of what constitutes degradation have received wider recognition (Forsyth, 2003). Land use policy needs to be firmly grounded in the latest empirical assessments of the state of environment and understandings of how and why that state came about (Stringer, 2009).
Belsky (2002) mentions that while recognising the limited value of a solely place or non-place- based analysis they tried to connect the two through a nested, multiple-scales approach, using a bottom-up research methodology. Linkages are sought across time and spatial scales. Similarly, they also recognised the limitations of a strongly actor-oriented/ behaviourist or a structuralist approach (Belsky, 2002). Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) state that as an alternative their goal was to direct analytical attention to the usual concerns of political economy, that is to say that State dynamics, colonial history, class formation, market transactions and processes of capitalist incorporation and marginalisation as well as simultaneously maintaining a social actor-focused orientation set within local or regional ecologies. A classical theme in political ecology is how protected areas become arenas of conflict which will result in contested patterns of resource management (Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003). Land tenure plays a critical mediating role in the inter-relationship between humans and the environment (Barnes, 2009). Sterk et al. (2009) state that in a multi-stakeholder context it becomes essential to mediate different perceptions of the problem and possible solutions that can integrate multiple knowledge sources.
Bryant and Bailey’s (1997) analysis of political ecology added the usefulness of concepts such as marginality, vulnerability, risk, resistance, protest and popular distrust of experts as well as the roles that States, grassroots actors, businesses, corporations, multilateral institutions and environmental NGOs play at different scales during their engagement with the environment and
each other. The personal interest of stakeholders determines human-environment relations (Mullins, 2004). The process of examining different stakeholders (detailed in the next section) provides the mechanisms of resource access that lies behind the scene. By gaining access to the media NGOs are also able to express their environmental agendas and interests to the public (Mullins, 2004). Rocheleau et al. (1996) suggests that feminist political ecology has been mainly useful in helping to situate material and discursive struggles over resource distribution, power, knowledge and ideology in the context of gendered knowledge, gendered patterns of resource control, access and utilisation and gendered forms of grassroots activism.
Mullins (2004) points out that politics is about the interaction of actors over environmental resources and even weak actors possess some power to act in pursuit of their interests. Besides politics, political ecologists focus on the economic, social and cultural aspects of life and the global system of production owing to the incorporation of Third World economies into the First World dominated global economy (Mullins, 2004). However, Zingerli (2005) suggests that a commonality of many political ecology studies is that they are premised on a sense of social justice for environmental explanation and development. In addition, many scholars recognise that political ecology lacks coherence particularly in that it has become all things to all people as well as a modality for uninformed academic hitchhiking (Blaikie, 1999; Brosius, 1999; Peet and Watts, 1996).
Attempts are made to contextualise ecotourism within a socio-political context. Where Bauer et al. (2007) provide an outlook on the social relations of power and the production of ecologies and landscapes, Blaikie (1995), Bryant (1997) and Gossling (2003) mention that central to this approach is the insight that economic and political contexts need to be understood to encompass the complexity of human-environment interactions linked to alteration of the environment.
Greenberg and Park (1994) suggest that nature and society are both socially constructed to certain degrees. However, both are determined to some extent by what may be glossed over as system-like constraints that are neither the deliberate nor inadvertent products of human purposive activity. Belsky (2002) suggests that political ecology provides a useful framework for understanding how language and values are connected to interests. Furthermore, Belsky (2002) states that one can discuss values and multiple meanings alongside material interests and physical nature and how one must make interconnections across these factors.
Anthropological attempts to integrate humans with environmental processes led to an introduction of human-environment interactions in the social sciences which recognised that humans are producers of environmental phenomena (Butzer, 1982; Rappaport, 1968). Bauer et al. (2007) and Greenberg and Park (1994) mention that advocates for a political ecology approach argue that human-environment relationships are socially mediated and analyses of such interaction must consider material constraints and possibilities within the social and political fields in which they are constituted. Belsky (2002) states that in spite of its heuristic appeal as a synthetic framework, it is important to understand that political ecology as currently theorised and practiced has yet to recognise its integrative potential. Blaikie (1999) suggests that political ecology is able to emphasise new contradictions and paradoxes that are brought together from different networks of scholars, activists and other actors. Belsky (2002) affirms that political ecology stems from its hybridity and its capacity to disintegrate boundaries among multiple paradigms and disciplines. Practically, political ecological studies require incorporating a dynamic, non-equilibrium-based ecology, a criticism directed to all of the ecological social sciences (Scoones, 1999). Other criticism of using the political ecology approach includes:
As with environmental sociology, political ecology has been criticised as long on critique, and short on establishing goals (even plural and/ or provisional ones), and especially the technical and political means of achieving them. Consistent with environmental sociology, early works in political ecology portrayed the environment monolithically and, though no longer examined through theories emphasising adaptation and homeostasis, viewed change and disruption as largely attributed to market intrusion, commercialisation, and the dislocation of customary forms of resource management. While avoiding the pitfalls of adaptation-based and systems approaches, much of political ecology still accepts that balanced, harmonious and traditional ecosystems existed until they were disrupted by the forces of modernity.
(Belsky, 2002: 275)
Forsyth (2008: 758) states that “much research within political ecology since the 1980s has focused on how and why institutionalised beliefs about environmental change came into place, and on finding alternative, more inclusive ways of addressing environmental problems”.
Furthermore, adopting a political ecology approach implies ensuring that differing interests and concerns are integrated into attempts to conserve the environment and protect economic and social development. Jones (2006: 51) shows that there has been “a historical progression from
‘conservation or development’ (fortress conservation) to ‘conservation and development’
(integrated conservation and development) to …. ‘conservation through development’
(community based strategies)”. The earlier exclusionary approaches to conservation (fortress conservation) were embedded in the assumption that conservation was a threat to human well- being and humans were a threat to biodiversity conservation. This approach alienated local people from protected areas and denied their rights to resources thereby undermining local livelihoods through “locked-in” patterns of resource use (Adger et al., 2005: 9). Brown (2002: 7) underscores that “this assumes a conflict between livelihood activities and biodiversity strategy”.
Adams and Hutton (2007) argue that the changes in the relationship between people and nature over the years are highly political, embracing issues of rights and access to land and resources, the centrality of the role of the State, the emergence of non-State actors (NGOs and the private sector), and the power of scientific and other understandings of nature.
Bryant and Bailey (1997: 6 cited in Foryth, 2008: 760) warn that the focus on social, economic and political aspects in relation to ecological/ environmental problems may result in a neglect of understanding environmental change in relation to natural and physical processes: “political ecologists tend to favour consideration of the political over the ecological…Yet greater attention by political ecologists to ecological processes does not alter the need for a basic focus on politics as part of the attempt to understand Third World environmental problems”. This position supports the adoption of an integrated, multidisciplinary approach discussed earlier and links, in part, to the stakeholder perspective discussed next which highlight the importance of focusing on differences.