Format/Structure

We imagine this to be a fairly conventional paper session but will work with discussion formats to break up the typical audience-presenter dynamic.

Long Abstract

As global society enters the second quarter of the 21st Century, anticipating and managing environmental change are hot on the agenda of planners worldwide. Yet what if such efforts are imperfect at best and often fail spectacularly due to the inherent unruliness of the world? Unruliness signals the refusal of both humans and non-humans to be controlled and managed. Political ecologists have long spotlighted local people’s creative and often unexpected modalities of resistance and protest of environmental governance efforts. Similarly, non-humans and ecosystem dynamics rarely fit their models, leading to unexpected and sometimes catastrophic outcomes of management efforts. Recent examples include the creative forms of protest emerging within the Degrowth movement, the catastrophic wildfires in the USA that originated as prescribed burns, and the tragic loss of life and productive land from a glacial outburst flood that caused a hydroelectric dam to fail in India. This panel invites contributions that explore how unruliness presents new challenges for a changing future. In particular, we are interested in new forms of storytelling that draw out the spaces of hope and emancipation that arise from unruliness. We postulate that it is precisely in the moments when anticipation and management fail that possibilities lie to reframe subjectivities, to reimagine the relationships that require governance and care, and to reclaim power and authority.

We welcome contributions that engage unruliness in relation to a wide range of political ecology topics not limited to:

Climate change and mitigation and adaptation

Disasters, extreme events and recovery efforts

Extractivism

Conservation and other forms of environmental governance

Zoonotic diseases or other public health issues

Environmental protest and activist movements

Green energy and energy transitions

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
Propose paper