







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 6(2): 113-120, July 2023 

COMMENTARY 

Emancipatory Political Ecology Pedagogy In and Out 
of the Classroom 

Simon Batterbury* and Denisse Rodríguez 

Abstract: In this brief commentary, we reflect on two aspects of contemporary 
political ecology scholarship: The first is a reflexive assessment of socio-political 
relational positionalities as a necessary condition, not only to challenge but also to 
act upon socio-ecological injustices. Second, we examine the effective delivery of 
cross-cultural pedagogies of care that inform the development of self-reliant 
political ecology (PE) scholars and/or activists within the constraints of neoliberal 
education. We argue that both issues are relevant to position PE as an 
emancipatory pedagogy and praxis in a decolonizing world. 

 

1. INTRODUCTION 

As this special issue of Ecology, Economy and Society notes, political ecology 
(PE) has sustained interest from students and critical scholars as a 
framework to interrogate intersecting injustices resulting from unequal 
access to resources, that is, the “relationships between environmental 
change and political, economic, and social processes” (Meek and Lloro-
Bidart 2017, 213). Political ecology today has a much broader geographical 
and linguistic spread than in previous decades; it circles the globe—
including South Asia and Latin America—and intermingles with other 
progressive frameworks and scholarly approaches that were not envisaged 
30 years ago. It is an interdisciplinary field by nature, with roots in Marxism 
and critical thinking in the social sciences. Despite this, it does not ignore 
environmental processes.  It tackles the injustices and power inequalities 
that lead to ecological and social inequities, along with challenging 

 

* Associate Professor, SGEAS and Melbourne Climate Futures, University of Melbourne, 
Australia. simonpjb@unimelb.edu.au 

 Lecturer in Development Studies, SSPS, University of Melbourne, Australia. 
denisse.rodriguezquinonez@unim elb.edu.au  

Copyright © Batterbury & Rodríguez 2023. Released under Creative Commons Attribution 
© NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of  Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581–6152 (print); 2581–6101 (web).  

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v6i2.1011  

 

mailto:simonpjb@unimelb.edu.au
mailto:denisse.rodriguezquinonez@unim%20elb.edu.au
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v6i2.1011


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [114] 

‘apolitical’ explanations. Political ecology has explanatory power, some of 
which is harnessed by social movements, critics of capitalism, and 
grassroots organizations. Speaking “truth to power” and exposing injustice 
does not always receive a warm reception in more mainstream scholarly and 
policy environments. Another challenge—especially in the search for 
adequate pedagogies—is that PE is difficult to pin down in terms of 
methodology. Political ecology entails critical praxis, but there is no 
standardized way of “doing political ecology” (Batterbury 2015).  

In this commentary, we discuss two issues that inspire us to think of the 
future of political ecology in a decolonizing world as a form of 
emancipatory pedagogy and praxis. We explore the relational positionalities 
emerging from practising political ecology, and the frictions unfolding from 
including political ecology pedagogies as decolonial praxis in a curriculum 
determined by the neoliberal university. We also discuss the affective labour 
of pedagogies of care that are capable of supporting students in this 
process. We conclude by highlighting how these PE pedagogies contribute 
to blurring the separation between teaching, research, and action through 
service or engagement, activism, advocacy, etc, as increasingly promoted by 
academic institutions or desired by scholars and students. 

We write as authors with different positionalities. Both of us are based at 
the University of Melbourne in Australia. Simon Batterbury experienced the 
excitement of thinking with PE to understand the multi-scalar driving 
forces of land degradation in the tropics, as a British graduate student in a 
radical PhD programme in the USA in the 1980s. He then conducted 
“classic” political ecology working with Mossi farmers and a Western 
development project in Burkina Faso, and later worked in Niger, Timor-
Leste, and New Caledonia-Kanaky (Batterbury 2018). He has been 
fortunate enough to have edited the Journal of Political Ecology for 20 years. 
Denisse Rodríguez, an Afro-Ecuadorian early career researcher and political 
ecologist interested in post-extractive futures, is committed in her 
pedagogical role to decolonial approaches to teaching, in order to overcome 
the cognitive injustices reproduced by Western and Westernized 
neoliberaluniversities (Grosfoguel 2013; Santos 2008, 2018).

2. SYNTHESIZING POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF THE NORTH 
AND SOUTH IN EMANCIPATORY PEDAGOGIES 

Rodríguez’s experience of learning and then teaching PE in two Australian 
universities contrasts greatly with her initial experience studying PE at 



[115] Batterbury & Rodríguez 

 

Instituto de Estudios Ecologistas del Tercer Mundo1 and assisting in the early 
stages of planning a new masters in Political Ecology and Alternatives to 
Development2 at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador. At the risk of 
generalizing, in Western education institutions, it is common for PE to 
sensitize students to the struggles and inequalities experienced in the Global 
South by exposing the prevailing power asymmetries that determine 
unequal access to resources, but the PE “from the South” is rather 
different, with an innate emancipatory purpose (Leff 2015). It offers 
grounds for local people afflicted or potentially affected by socio-ecological 
conflicts to diagnose their issues and to mobilize and resist processes of 
dispossession, their marginalization from the governance of resources, and 
neglect of ontological differences (Escobar 2016; Meek 2020). So, the focus, 
frameworks, and methodologies diverge, but the pedagogical objectives in 
both regions challenge students, scholars, and activists to reflect upon and 
assess their socio-political positionalities and ontologies, which will 
determine how they interpret and engage with the conflicts and issues 
identified. 

This leads us to recognize the potential of PE as emancipatory pedagogy 
and praxis because a commitment to doing PE as a teacher, student, or 
practitioner entails an awareness of the relational positionalities developed 
in the process of studying, researching, and/or acting politically on socio-
ecological injustices (Crossa 2012). This was largely missing in the early 
political ecology taught three decades ago in Western universities, where the 
focus was much more on scholarly analysis of complex problems, which 
was not guided by decolonial thinking. 

Political ecology—viewed as emancipatory pedagogy and praxis—also 
entails a transformation of the role of the pedagogue, who, instead of 
instructing, encourages critical thought and self-reliance—letting students 
run free, through a pedagogy of care in and out of the classroom. She or he 
“would seek a less rigid, less hierarchical, more convivial, and more 
embodied teaching style” (Dunlap et al. 2023, 11). The pedagogue also 
adopts an active role in subverting the geopolitics of knowledge (Lander 
2000; Walsh 2010) by introducing students to diverse epistemologies, 
ontologies, and knowledge-holders. The main constraint to this pedagogical 
challenge, however, is that it conflicts with the priorities of neoliberal 

 

1 An institute where ecological thought and praxis are developed by and for epistemologies 

of the South (Santos 2016) with a greater focus on supporting socio-ecological resistance 
movements and their defense of nature and territories, according to their stated mission and 
actions over the years (See https://www.estudiosecologistas.org/). 
2 The masters programme is currently running (See 
https://www.uasb.edu.ec/programa/ecologia-politica-y-alternativas-al-desarrollo/). 

https://www.estudiosecologistas.org/quienes-somos/
https://www.uasb.edu.ec/programa/ecologia-politica-y-alternativas-al-desarrollo/


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [116] 

universities and sometimes with the precarity of their academic staff 
(Pascoe et al. 2020). There is normally little incentive to guide students 
towards assuming a role in socio-ecological change themselves. On the one 
hand, universities “focus on immediately inserting into the labour market 
graduates who conform with the system, instead of aiming at transforming 
it” (Rodríguez 2022, 116). On the other, there is an inherent prioritization 
of knowledge that discourages an engagement with diverse knowledge 
systems that challenge “incontestable” notions of progress and 
development (Hall and Tandon 2017). This is despite being at the expense 
of plundering resources and territories, and further marginalizing certain 
communities and their lifeways (Rodríguez 2018). In consequence, a 
commitment to these PE pedagogies becomes a sort of unrecognized 
affective labour—as we will discuss in the following section—and shows a 
responsibility to decolonize education at the margins, subverting the 
marketization of graduates as individuals and the knowledge learned in a 
university environment. 

3. PEDAGOGIES OF CARE IN AND FOR A DECOLONIZING 
WORLD 

The divergent epistemologies and commitments behind PE pedagogy in 
Western institutions and PE in the Global South cannot easily be 
reconciled. Nevertheless, we have proposed “pedagogies of care” as a 
potential bridge between them. One approach to a general pedagogy of care 
is to treat the university classroom as a garden, but not as an assiduously 
curated and managed one. Political ecology students are nourished and 
encouraged to experiment, grow, and develop their symbiotic relationships 
based on mutual investigation and support. As a thought experiment, seeing 
a field of study like PE as a garden means helping its components to 
flourish interdependently. There are teams of gardeners for sure, diverse 
and with different positionalities, backgrounds, and experiences (Mintz 
2018). The “gardener”—the political ecologist or pedagogue—gains some 
satisfaction from the material and aesthetic qualities of a garden, but there is 
a commitment to see that the class of students continues to grow, evolve, 
and form its own networks. In parallel, the more common “seeding” 
metaphor in PE (Robbins 2019; Pitts et al 2022) has been used to refer to 
nourishing and supporting social movements and activism rather than 
pedagogical inquiry itself. To follow the analogy, we hope that “seeds” are 
cast well beyond the garden. Pitts et al. (2021), reporting on their 
participation in a political ecology class at the University of Alabama, say 
that “seed-work...can reveal pathways towards environmental justice and 
the dismantling of forms of structural oppression” (303), and they used 
their class to “imagine ways to create new spaces of resistance” (304).  



[117] Batterbury & Rodríguez 

 

The opposite of this approach to teaching is to preach, instruct, or fill 
students with knowledge in classic Western university mode—about the 
evils of capitalism, transnational corporations, mining pollution, and so on 
(Freire 2000). While an interrogative “hatchet” (Robbins 2019) should be 
part of our teaching, to explore these processes, using it for ideological 
control should not (Mintz, 2018). Political ecologists need to deliberate, 
explore, and help create better-decolonized worlds and environments. This 
normative commitment is a critical challenge for our century as we engage 
with planetary crises in post-pandemic times. 

More concretely, while the components, sequences, and foci of our syllabi 
might diverge when presenting an overview of PE themes or narratives in 
class (Robbins 2019), our main aim as “gardeners” is to encourage students 
to choose their own topic of interest and then explore it in greater depth 
through a research-based task. From our experience, open PE assignments 
like this balance “thinking” with engagement, as long as the pedagogical 
approach benefits from enough time and commitment on the part of the 
“gardener”. As a result, students are nurtured through the learning they 
obtain from independent study, but then they scatter, propagating new 
plants or forests autonomously or in collaboration with others. Students 
from the Global North and South leave the class and develop their own 
projects and ideas with better—but of course never complete—knowledge 
of the world they are stepping into, as evidenced in Batterbury’s list of 
research students going back to the 1990s. They illustrate diverse pathways 
into activism, advocacy, further study, and professional success.3 

4. CONCLUSION 

Political ecologists working in universities and colleges adopt a multifaceted 
role, commonly constrained by the neoliberal politics of education that 
prioritizes their personal research programmes over teaching and 
engagement activities. Therefore, they partition their professional lives, 
setting clear boundaries between them, and in Western universities, even 
belittling successes in activities other than research while measuring 
teaching by evaluation scoring, class numbers, and (in some systems) fee 
incomes. However, a commitment to doing political ecology in and out of 
academic institutions entails resisting these corporate practices (Dunlap et al 
2023). Inevitably, politics is enacted through pedagogies (Meek and Lloro-
Bidart 2017), and for PE scholars, it is fundamental to teach, engage, stay 
agile, and resist. 

 

3 See Batterbury’s list of postgraduate and honours students supervised here; 
https://www.simonbatterbury.net/simonbatterburystudents.pdf 

https://www.simonbatterbury.net/simonbatterburystudents.pdf


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [118] 

Our loose adoption of a gardening metaphor describes some ways in which 
teaching in PE may be envisaged, but there is of course more to do in order 
to defend against destructive resource governance and attacks on 
sustainable livelihoods and diverse lifeways. PE itself is a movement. It is 
lived and breathed. As one of us argued that we “...need to be participating 
in policy processes; keeping up our teaching; sharpening our media skills, 
and reaching out rather than inward. An affirmative political ecology 
requires agile activism; ethical scholarship; and partnership. Not just ‘telling 
it and thinking it’, but also ‘speaking it and breathing it’.”4 (Batterbury 2018, 
127). 

Ethics Statement: This study complies with requirements of ethical ap-
provals from the institutional ethics committee for the conduct of this re-
search.  

Conflict of Interest Statement: No potential conflict of interest was 
reported by the author. 

 
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4  Reference is to the words of an early Bob Dylan song: “And I’ll tell it and think it and 
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