- Convenors:
-
Danjuma Saidu
(Federal University Lokoja)
Fatima Momohjimoh (University of Nigeria, Nsukka)
Nneka Oseji (Federal University Lokoja)
Njideka Nwawih Charlotte Ojukwu (University of Zululand)
Format/Structure
Interactive panel with short presentations (10 mins each), followed by open discussion and audience engagement to explore diverse perspectives.
Long Abstract
As green transitions accelerate globally, environmental information management plays a pivotal role in shaping policy, practice, and public understanding of sustainability. However, the production, control, and dissemination of environmental data are deeply political acts that influence whose knowledge is valued, whose voices are heard, and ultimately, who benefits from “green” initiatives. This panel explores the political ecology of environmental information management in the context of green transitions, critically examining the power dynamics embedded in data infrastructures, valuation tools, and information regimes.
We ask: Whose knowledge informs green growth and sustainability agendas? How do environmental information systems mediate between scientific expertise, policy frameworks, and local or Indigenous knowledge? In what ways do data collection, monitoring, and reporting reinforce or challenge existing inequalities and exclusions? And how might alternative information practices contribute to more inclusive and just environmental governance?
Bringing together interdisciplinary research, activism, and practice, this panel invites contributions that investigate the intersections of environmental information, power, and resistance within green economy projects, ecosystem service commodification, and sustainable development efforts. Case studies may highlight the marginalization of community knowledge by technocratic data, participatory mapping as a form of political contestation, or the dual potential of open environmental data as both democratizing and co-optive.
Through short presentations and a moderated discussion, the panel aims to unpack the complexities of environmental information management as a contested terrain, one that shapes narratives, legitimizes policies, and frames possibilities for alternative, more equitable futures. Ultimately, this panel seeks to foreground the question of “knowledge for whom?” as central to understanding and transforming the political ecology of green transitions.
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
This paper explores how the Bakolori Dam project in Sokoto State, Nigeria, illustrates the silencing of local knowledge in technocratic sustainability efforts. It reveals how expert-led “green” interventions marginalize community wisdom and reproduce social and environmental inequalities.
Presentation long abstract
This paper examines the tensions between technocratic approaches to sustainability and the marginalization of local knowledge through the case of the Bakolori Dam project in Sokoto State, Nigeria. Conceived in the late 1970s as a modern irrigation and development initiative, the Bakolori Dam was designed to enhance agricultural productivity and promote rural transformation. However, the project’s implementation largely ignored the ecological wisdom and traditional practices of local farming communities who had long adapted to the region’s seasonal flooding cycles. The dam’s construction disrupted these systems, leading to displacement, reduced soil fertility, and social unrest. Drawing on political ecology, this study interrogates how state-led “green” interventions, framed as sustainable modernization, can silence the very voices they claim to empower. It explores how knowledge hierarchies, privileging engineering expertise over indigenous experience produce environmental and social inequities. Using historical accounts, community testimonies, and secondary data, the paper reveals how technocratic sustainability often masks power dynamics that exclude local agency. Ultimately, it argues for the recognition of local ecological knowledge as a vital component of truly inclusive and just environmental governance, highlighting the Bakolori Dam as a cautionary example of how “green” development can reproduce old patterns of marginalization under the guise of progress.
Presentation long abstract
Green transitions increasingly rely on technocratic environmental data to guide policy and justify conservation interventions. In the Buxa Tiger Reserve, India, the creation of human-free core zones for tiger protection has relied on state-generated ecological monitoring that frames forest-dependent communities as threats to biodiversity. This paper interrogates the politics of knowledge production in conservation, asking whose expertise is prioritized, whose voices are silenced, and how information systems shape access to resources. Using a mixed-methods approach combining livelihood surveys of relocated households and semi-structured interviews with women and men, this study documents how conservation-induced displacement and relocation disrupts subsistent livelihoods, alters social hierarchies, and constrains gendered agency. Findings reveal that official knowledge regimes reinforce patriarchal authority and marginalize local understandings of forest management. Women’s contributions to household economies and ecological stewardship are systematically overlooked in both planning and policy discourse. By contrasting state-generated environmental information with lived experiences of displacement, this research illustrates how technocratic knowledge functions as a tool of exclusion, legitimizing dispossession under the guise of ecological protection. The paper argues for alternative knowledge practices that integrate local and Indigenous expertise, emphasizing participatory, socially grounded approaches that can advance both ecological goals and environmental justice. Ultimately, it situates the Buxa case within the broader political ecology of green transitions, highlighting how inclusive knowledge governance is essential to equitable and just conservation.
Presentation short abstract
This paper examines how different types of environmental knowledge is contested within Development Economics Vice President (DEC) in the World Bank. Drawing on interviews and document analysis it shows how certain knowledge forms are prioritised in shaping environmental governance and policies.
Presentation long abstract
This paper investigates how environmental knowledge contestation unfolds within the World Bank’s Development Economics Vice Presidency (DEC), the institution’s main research agency and epistemic community. One of the most important parts of the Bank for understanding knowledge production and use in its policymaking process is epistemic communities. These are networks of knowledge-based experts from various disciplines, including natural and social sciences, recognised for their expertise in specific policy-related issues (Haas, 1992). By engaging with debates on knowledge types and their uses, the analysis highlights how disciplinary expertise from economics, natural sciences, and social sciences contest and converges in shaping environmental governance. DEC plays a central role in steering the Bank’s strategy, translating complex issues—particularly environmental concerns—into standardised forms of data and expertise that can be measured, aggregated, and analysed. This process not only determines which problems are accepted policy-relevant but also privileges certain forms of knowledge while marginalising others. This paper adopts a qualitative research design and data collection included 16 semi-structured elite interviews and reviews of different types of World Bank documents. The collected data was analysed thematically. The paper argues that understanding how knowledge is produced, disseminated, and selectively used within DEC is crucial for grasping the Bank’s environmental policymaking practices and its global influence.
Presentation short abstract
This paper examines how coastal wetland science has been reshaped by policy and market demands for carbon data, revealing how information regimes privilege commodified carbon while marginalizing broader socioecological considerations.
Presentation long abstract
Blue carbon has mobilized scientific, policy, and conservation efforts to manage coastal wetlands as nature-based climate solutions. This paper examines how coastal wetland science has been reshaped through the informational demands of blue carbon policy and market pressures, arguing that these pressures constitute a powerful information regime that structures what kinds of knowledge are produced and valued. Using a mixed-methods analysis of coastal wetland research from 1970–2024 that combines publication trends, semantic analysis, and interviews with scientists, the paper shows both quantitative and qualitative shifts in knowledge production. Quantitatively, carbon-focused research has become increasingly central, rising sharply in the last five years. Qualitatively, scientific attention has narrowed toward soil carbon stocks, accumulation rates, and other metrics aligned with carbon-neutrality commitments and carbon credit methodologies. These shifts reflect a broader process of market legibility, in which coastal wetlands become governable primarily through standardized carbon data, revealing how scientific expertise contributes to making nature legible to capital in the green transition. Interviews highlight tensions between scientists, economists, and policymakers over socioecological priorities and epistemic assumptions. Although many scientists express skepticism toward carbon credits and market-oriented policy, they remain professionally committed to supplying the data needed to “improve” these instruments, further reifying them. By tracing how coastal wetland science has shifted alongside the rise of blue carbon, this paper illuminates how policy and market pressures shape environmental knowledge and raises broader questions about the role of science in contemporary green transitions.
Presentation short abstract
In an era of climate crisis, various policy propositions that range from market-based to more critical approaches have been put forward in Southeast Asia. The paper seeks to unpack how environmental justice principles are embedded in just energy transition policies in countries in this subregion.
Presentation long abstract
Using the framework of environmental justice (Schlosberg, 2007) which sets the paradigm that environmental issues must involve principles of distributive justice (who benefits/who bears burdens), procedural justice (participation and decision‑making), recognition justice (whose values, identities and rights are acknowledged), and restorative justice (addressing past harms), the proposed paper problematizes on how environmental justice principles are incorporated to Just Energy Transition plans and frameworks across countries in Southeast Asia, namely the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. Using political ecology as a lens and through content and thematic analysis of national legislation on renewable energy, energy transition roadmaps from ministries or departments, and national energy program documents, the study will provide an overview of dominant frames as well as overlapping and competing narratives. Two dominant views are apparent in contestations surrounding energy transition in Southeast Asia. The first view is primarily an economic perspective where narratives of the just energy transition are fueled by investment opportunity and the economic gains of renewables. The other view is the environmental justice perspective where rights-based approaches are prioritized, and the transition is seen as a means to further equitable and sustainable access to energy. The study argues for reframing energy transition policies and proposal to more explicitly embed environmental justice principles — via inclusive decision‑making, rights recognition, targeted compensation and benefit sharing, and mechanisms to remediate historical environmental damage. This reframing will improve policy legitimacy and ensure transitions are both low‑carbon and socially just and equitable, especially in contexts like Southeast Asia.
Presentation short abstract
Through subsidies, government has promoted micro-irrigation to combat drought in Southern India. But, adopting the narrative of Equality, political class has succeeded promoting "Productive Irrigation' at the cost of 'Protective Irrigation'.
Presentation long abstract
How the narrative of 'Equality' became a political tool in making agricultural drought a perpetual phenomenon
The state of Karnataka in southern India has 30 districts. About 12 blocks in its northern region are located in the semi-arid climatic zone with rainfed agriculture and prone to droughts, and have low human development indices. Contrary to this, the southern region is well endowed with water resources, and water-guzzling crops have brought prosperity.
Technical investigations in the northern region by the Central Ground Water Commission of the Government of India have indicated that adoption of micro-irrigation (Drip/Sprinklers) can, to a large extent, enhance water use efficiency in agriculture and thus combat drought, as has been proved elsewhere in India.
To encourage the adoption micro-irrigation, the Government has made budgetary allocations in the form of a subsidy. They vary from 90 to 55 per cent depending on the size of land holdings, and the rest was to be borne by the farmer to purchase the drip and sprinkler instruments. Accordingly, on average, about 5 million US$ annually was sanctioned.
It was during the disbursement of subsidies, the political forces from the prosperous southern region demanded 'Equality' for all regions and succeeded in getting their share of subsidies. Consequently, southern blocks have used subsidies for 'Productive Irrigation' and northern blocks have used it for 'Protective Irrigation'. Ultimately, a large part of the northern districts remains drought-prone.
A narrative by political forces from that of 'Equity' to 'Equality' has continued the legacy of agricultural drought.
Presentation short abstract
The study investigated the environmental information needs and seeking behaviour of public library users at the Kwara State Library Board, Ilorin. The study showed the environment-related information needed by library users and behaviour regarding the environment-related information search.
Presentation long abstract
The study investigated the environmental information needs and seeking behaviour of public library users at the Kwara State Library Board, Ilorin. The research adopted a descriptive survey design, which allowed the collection of data from a representative sample of 292 registered library users, including students, researchers, professionals, and other members of the public. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire titled Environmental Information Needs and Seeking Behaviour Questionnaire (EINSBQ), validated by experts in Library and Information Science, and analysed using descriptive statistics such as frequency counts, percentages, and means.The findings revealed that library users require information on diverse environmental issues, including climate change, waste management, flood and erosion control, pollution, environmental health and sanitation, renewable energy sources, biodiversity and wildlife preservation, and environmental laws and policies. The study also identified primary sources of environmental information as books, newspapers/magazines, government publications, and community leaders. Users employed various techniques to search for information, such as keyword searches on Google and other search engines, browsing library shelves, consulting librarians, using academic online databases, and referencing textbooks. However, challenges such as limited access to current materials, inconsistent electricity supply, and low awareness of available resources were observed. Based on these findings, the study recommended that the library prioritize updating its collections, subscribe to relevant journals, organize environmental-themed workshops, enhance electricity supply through renewable sources, and collaborate with environmental agencies and community leaders to improve access to timely and relevant environmental information.
Presentation short abstract
This presentation unpacks how One Health’s epistemic underpinnings shape global environmental health research and policy, and argues that healthy green transitions cannot be just if the knowledge guiding them is not diverse.
Presentation long abstract
Knowledge shapes how environmental public health challenges are understood and addressed, yet not all knowledge is treated equally. Using the One Health framework, which links human, animal, and ecosystem health, this presentation examines how these dynamics unfold and the consequences they hold for shaping research agendas and policies.
One Health is guided by epistemic foundations that show a WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) domination. This influences which evidence is valued, and which health solutions are pursued, risking the marginalization of “other(ed)” knowledge and according practices.
Through analysis of research procedures, policy developments, and decision-making narratives, the presentation highlights how epistemic hierarchies within the framework produce environmental injustices, limiting the effectiveness of green transition strategies.
It is argued that diversifying the epistemic basis of One Health is essential for targeting the most pressing challenges of healthy green transitions, such as climate change. While incorporating multiple ways of knowing and being makes solution-finding more complex, it can also produce more nuanced and context-sensitive approaches that are necessary for a healthy, green, and just transition.
Presentation short abstract
This paper examines how World Bank climate assessments and municipal information systems in Karachi construct informal settlements as environmental risks, enabling green-transition projects that legitimize eviction under the guise of climate adaptation.
Presentation long abstract
As climate adaptation and green transition agendas accelerate across the Global South, environmental information systems, like risk maps and resilience diagnostics, are mobilized to justify large-scale urban interventions. These information regimes actively participate in producing informal settlements as hazardous, illegible, and ultimately displaceable. This paper places displacement as a systematic effect of how environmental knowledge is generated, circulated, and operationalized across scales.
Using Karachi as the primary empirical site, it traces the circulation of environmental information through three interconnected arenas. First, it examines how the World Bank, a key development actor in Pakistan’s urban and climate sectors, constructs narratives of environmental vulnerability and resilience in its climate adaptation assessments and city development frameworks. These documents frame informality as both cause and consequence of ecological degradation, establishing a discursive logic in which “green growth” requires spatial reordering.
Second, the paper analyzes how municipal authorities in Karachi reinterpret, simplify, and strategically deploy these World Bank frameworks. Tender documents and implementation guidelines reveal a bureaucratic politics of translation: broad categories such as “risk reduction,” “resilience upgrading,” and “environmental performance” are operationalized in ways that disproportionately target informal settlements, regardless of differentiated exposure or residents’ ecological practices.
Third, the paper shows how these translated information regimes materialize on the ground through flood-risk mapping around stormwater nullahs and anti-encroachment drives, recasting long-standing informal neighborhoods as obstacles to green infrastructure.
By foregrounding informality as a category produced through information practices, the paper demonstrates how technocratic environmental knowledge infrastructures entrench socio-spatial hierarchies.
Presentation short abstract
Drawing on the holistic framework of Sacred Ecology, we examine how European modernity fragmented and delegitimized local ecological knowledge systems. We apply and extend Berkes’ approach to revalue communal, landscape-based, and popular practices in climate transitions.
Presentation long abstract
This presentation draws on the conceptual framework developed by Berkes (2018), particularly his understanding of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) as an “integrated body of knowledge, practice and belief, evolving through adaptive processes and handed down through cultural transmission, concerning the relationships of living beings with one another and with their environment.” We use this framework to analyze contexts in which TEK has been systematically invisibilized or delegitimized. This erosion is evident across numerous rural territories where urban expansion, the Green Revolution, or their treatment as sacrifice zones—alongside broader processes of neoliberal commodification—have pushed TEK to the brink of disappearance.
Berkes’ holistic perspective reveals how European modernity fragmented these systems, at times preserving or technifying their practical components (reflecting a scientistic orientation in Western knowledge since the sixteenth century) while eroding their ethical, communal, and cosmological dimensions. We structure our analysis around three axes. The first, invisibilized communalities and local governance, examines transhumance, irrigation commons, and communal forests as systems of knowledge-practice-belief relegated to mere “customs” by technocratic policies. The second axis, landscapes and climate resilience, explores traditional fire management, Mediterranean terraces, and peri-urban horticulture as adaptive landscapes whose ecological meaning has been reduced to cultural heritage. The third axis, marginalized popular epistemologies, analyzes artisanal fishing and weather lore as empirical observational knowledge displaced by abstract scientific models.
Berkes’ framework reveals TEK in Europe as eroded, not absent. Revitalizing it can reinforce environmental knowledge and enable more grounded climate transitions.
Presentation short abstract
We critique Western-centric histories and knowledges around organic farming, showing how they largely sideline Indigenous and peasant organic traditions. Using decolonial lens, it offers a broader genealogy and exposes how Western standards may reproduce inequities in the rest of the world.
Presentation long abstract
In the context of accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and declining agricultural land, organic farming has become a widely promoted solution. Yet current interpretations of “organic” are largely governed by certification regimes and strict rule-based standards that delineate which practices qualify and which do not. Moreover, the genealogy of organic farming is commonly traced to intellectual developments in German and Anglo-American contexts, obscuring its broader historical roots. We argue that this framing produces a narrow and incomplete conception of organic agriculture, its origins, purposes, and potential contributions to ecological futures. It marginalises the long-standing practices of peasant and agrarian communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, whose farming traditions have long embodied principles of care, ecological balance, and reciprocity, well before “organic” became formalised and institutionalised in the West. Adopting a decolonial approach informed by Indigenous and peasant ontologies, the paper proposes an expanded and plural understanding of organic farming that challenges the hierarchies through which Western definitions maintain epistemic dominance. This perspective foregrounds grassroots knowledge and Indigenous know-how that are typically rendered invisible within colonial modernity. We therefore reconstruct a genealogy of organic agriculture rooted in these alternative knowledge systems, while critically assessing how Western institutionalisation of “organic” reproduces neocolonial dynamics, shaping what counts as organic, who participates in it, and whose livelihoods it serves. In doing so, the paper contributes to broader calls from peasant movements to recognise diverse local and Indigenous practices as integral to truly organic agricultural futures.
Presentation short abstract
The study finds that Mediterranean NetZeroCities plans include few substantive energy-poverty measures, revealing a major gap between global ambitions and local action. This gap shows how technocratic transitions overlook vulnerable groups and reinforce inequalities.
Presentation long abstract
International agreements on ecological transition have accelerated global green transitions, yet they frequently produce limited—if any—meaningful improvements for the most vulnerable populations, illustrating how power dynamics embedded in environmental information management fail to prioritize equitable outcomes. Energy poverty (EP) disproportionately affects marginalized groups in Mediterranean cities—including economically disadvantaged, migrants from the Global South, elder adults, and children—and exposes how planning systems often reinforce existing inequalities and exclusions rather than challenge them.
This study examined the extent to which the concept of EP has been incorporated into, and operationalized through, local policies emerging from NetZeroCities plans in Mediterranean cities, namely Climate City Contracts (CCC). First, we consulted experts to map how intersecting vulnerabilities relate to EP factors and corresponding policy types. Second, we developed an assessment framework to qualitatively evaluate the efficacy of these policies against the identified factors. Third, we applied the latter to eleven selected CCC.
The overall low introduction of substantive EP reduction measures reveals a significant implementation gap between global ambitions and local action. This forces a critical re-evaluation of the true interests driving these green transition agreements and the knowledge systems used to design them. This research contributes to understanding how environmental information systems mediate science and policy in ways that undermine efforts toward inclusive and just governance for tackling EP holistically.