Kalliopi Sapountzaki

About us

Entitle
Maria Kaika

ENTITLE is an EU-funded Initial Training Network under the Marie Curie action of FP7. It is coordinated by ICTA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona with the collaboration of 8 Universities, 2 Non-governmental organizations and 1 Environmental consultancy. ENTITLE will train 18 researchers in the emerging inter-disciplinary field of Political Ecology.

On this website you will find more information about our training activities, the curricula of our courses, the research of our fellows and their mentors, and a useful library with links to important scholars and publications of political ecology. In addition, audiovisual material from our project and from the presentations of members in the network will be updated periodically.

But what is political ecology and how will ENTITLE contribute to it?

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Political ecology studies the roots of social conflicts over access and use of the environment. Environmental issues are approached from the lens of social, distribution and knowledge conflicts. The focus is on the power structures that determine resource access. The premise of political ecology is that there are always costs and benefits in environmental change and these are unevenly distributed along lines of class, race, ethnicity or gender.

Environmental problems are in essence political problems involving clashes over alternative futures and clashes between alternative values and imaginaries. Political ecology criticizes a-political explanations of environmental problems and seeks to re-politicize social debate over the appropriate responses to environmental problems.

Anthropologist Eric Wolf was the first to coin the term "political ecology" in 1972, while Blaikie's and Brookfield's "Land Degradation and Society" in 1987 is considered a landmark of contemporary political ecology. Political ecologists come from a variety of fields, most notably geography, anthropology, sociology, environmental history and ecological economics. Political ecology features strongly in rural, urban and development studies. It is a theoretically eclectic field mobilizing insights from political economy, Marxian and critical theory, post-structuralism and social constructivism.

Political ecologists use a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodological tools, including ethnography, material flows analysis and cartography. Whereas early political ecology focussed mostly on rural areas and on non-Western countries, more recent political ecology also covers the Global North, and increasingly so processes of urbanization. ENTITLE is the first attempt to build a European network of research and training of political ecology that brings together scholars and fellows from a variety of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds.

Image for the Blog Entitle blog is a collaborative writing effort that looks at the world through the lens of political ecology. For us, Political Ecology is a perspective that seeks to understand who is involved in, and who benefits or loses from, how our environment is produced and reproduced. The blog was started in 2014 by the fellows of the ENTITLE FP7 (Marie Curie Action) project as an outlet to share, reflect on and discuss research and activist experiences, observations, methodologies, news, events, publications, art, music and other themes and objects related to political ecology.

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