Environmental Governance in a Populist/Authoritarian Era

This volume explores the many and deep connections between the widespread rise of authoritarian leaders and populist politics in recent years, and the domain of environmental politics and governance ? how environments are known, valued, and managed; for whose benefit; and with what outcomes.

The volume is explicitly international in scope and comparative in design, emphasizing both the differences and commonalties to be seen among contemporary authoritarian and populist political formations and their relations to environmental governance. Prominent themes include the historical roots of and precedents for environmental governance in authoritarian and populist contexts; the relationships between populism and authoritarianism and extractivism and resource nationalism; environmental politics as an arena for questions of security and citizenship; racialization and environmental politics; the politics of environmental science and knowledge; and progressive political alternatives. In each domain, using rich case studies, contributors analyse what differences it makes when environmental governance takes place in authoritarian and populist political contexts.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

1. Introduction: Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Environment: Comparative Experiences, Insights, and Perspectives Part I: Historical and Comparative Perspectives 2. Authoritarian Environmental Governance: Insights from the Past Century 3. Deadly Environmental Governance: Authoritarianism, Eco-populism, and the Repression of Environmental and Land Defenders Part II: Extractivism, Populism, and Authoritarianism 4. Neoliberalizing Authoritarian Environmental Governance in (Post) Socialist Laos 5. The Speculative Petro-State: Volatile Oil Prices and Resource Populism in Ecuador 6. Contradictions of Populism and Resource Extraction: Examining the Intersection of Resource Nationalism and Accumulation by Dispossession in Mongolia 7. Bringing Back the Mines and a Way of Life: Populism and the Politics of Extraction 8. Emotional Environments of Energy Extraction in Russia 9. U.S. Farm Policy as Fraught Populism: Tracing the Scalar Tensions of Nationalist Agricultural Governance Part III: Environment as Political Proxy and Arena for Security and Citizenship 10. The State, Sewers, and Security: How Does the Egyptian State Reframe Environmental Disasters as Terrorist Threats? 11. Sequestering a River: The Political Ecology of the "Dead" Ergene River and Neoliberal Urbanization in Today’s Turkey 12. "Return the Lake to the People": Populist Political Rhetoric and the Fate of a Resource Frontier in the Philippines 13. Fishing for Power: Incursions of the Ugandan Authoritarian State 14. From the Heavens to the Markets: Governing Agricultural Drought under Chinese Fragmented Authoritarianism 15. Electricity-Centered Clientelism and the Contradictions of Private Solar Microgrids in India 16. Dreams and Migration in South Korea’s Border Region: Landscape Change and Environmental Impacts Part IV: Racialization and Environmental Politics 17. Afro-Brazilian Resistance to Extractivism in the Bay of Aratu 18. Infrastructure and Authoritarianism in the Land of Waters: A Genealogy of Flood Control in Guyana 19. Border Thinking, Borderland Diversity, and Trump’s Wall 20. Environmental Deregulation, Spectacular Racism, and White Nationalism in the Trump Era 21. Reaction, Resilience, and the Trumpist Behemoth: Environmental Risk Management from "Hoax" to Technique of Domination Part V: Politics of Environmental Science and Knowledge 22. Situating Data in a Trumpian Era: The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative 23. Rocket Wastelands in Kazakhstan: Scientific Authoritarianism and the Baikonur Cosmodrome 24. Avoiding Climate Change: "Agnostic Adaptation" and the Politics of Public Silence 25. The People Know Best: Situating the Counterexpertise of Populist Pipeline Opposition Movements 26. Beyond Narratives: Civic Epistemologies and the Coproduction of Environmental Knowledge and Popular Environmentalism in Thailand 27. Speaking Power to "Post-Truth": Critical Political Ecology and the New Authoritarianism Part VI: Progressive Alternatives 28. Populism, Emancipation, and Environmental Governance: Insights from Bolivia 29. Whatever Happened to Green Collar Jobs? Populism and Clean Energy Transition 30. Reparation Ecologies: Regimes of Repair in Populist Agroecology 31. Development and Sustainable Ethics in Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve, China 32. A Manifesto for a Progressive Land-Grant Mission in an Authoritarian Populist Era

James McCarthy is a Professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University, USA. His work analyses the interactions of political economy and environmental politics. He has published three major edited volumes and over 50 articles and chapters. His current research explores the relationships between climate change, renewable energy, and the future of capitalism.