Format/Structure

Paper presentations + roundtable discussions

Long Abstract

Over recent decades, China’s accelerated urban and rural transformations have not only profoundly reshaped its internal social-ecological landscapes, but have also exerted significant influence on ecosystems, infrastructures, and political economies transnationally. These sweeping changes have unfolded under political, institutional, and ideological conditions that diverge from the neoliberal or capitalist engagement typically analyzed within the field of political ecology. Notwithstanding China’s escalating prominence in global environmental and developmental politics, the empirical dynamics and theoretical implications of these transformations remain underexplored through a lens of political ecology.

This panel invites critical, empirically grounded contributions that examine the political ecology of China’s domestic transformations and global engagements, with particular focus on how political ecology frameworks can be mobilized, revised, or extended to account for:

• The distinctive political-economic (re)configurations of China’s state-led yet market-integrated governance model, including its implications for resource allocation, environmental regulation, and socio-ecological outcomes.

• The social-ecological transformations of urban and rural ecologies driven by large-scale infrastructure projects, land tenure reforms, industrial restructuring, and evolving livelihoods strategies.

• The co-production and remaking of socio-natures under dominant discourses such as “ecological civilization”, “modernization”, and “development”, including their materializations, contestations, and alternative visions.

• The transnational manifestation of Chinese ecological and economic practices, particularly through infrastructure finance (e.g. Belt and Road Initiative), resource extraction, conservation partnerships, and overseas development projects, under the rubric of “Global China.”

We particularly welcome contributions that critically transcend normative or technocratic approaches to environmental governance. We seek analyses that are context-sensitive, empirically situated, dialectical, and relational, exploring how socio-natures are (re)produced, contested, and governed both within and beyond China. Through this panel, we aim to reflect on how research on China and “Global China” challenges, refines and enriches political ecology as a transnational and evolving field of inquiry.

This Panel has 11 pending paper proposals.
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