The socioenvironmental state:

Invitation to Guest Lecture

The socioenvironmental state: Towards a political ecology of state formation and environmental change

Thursday 27 February 2014, 13.15-15.00.
Venue: De Geersalen, Geovetenskapens hus, Stockholm University.

Dr Andrea Nightingale, School of Global Studies, Univ. Gothenburg

In her presentation, Andrea Nightingale develops the idea of the ‘socio-environmental state’ to understand how ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ is an active agent in state formation. She begins with the question what is ‘the state’? How does it operate, and most importantly, how do resources and their ‘nature’ shape the possibilities of state transformation not only ecologically but also politically? The presentation takes the case of forests in Nepal to probe how environmental governance is bound up in state ambitions of conflicting groups. The kinds of relationships believed to be required for good environmental management are absolutely fundamental to how states and state-like actors seek to promote particular ideas of citizenship and to unite and control their populations. The argument builds from four core literatures: work on state formation in geography and anthropology; new work in development studies on property, authority and citizenship; political ecology; and feminist theory. This theoretical synthesis helps capture the emergence of political subjectivities, imaginaries and biophysical-ecological transformations from projects intended to improve the material base of the state. As such, these projects serve to quite literally build the state, offering important insights into processes of state transformation.

Convenor: Kulturgeografiska institutionen, Stockholms universitet. www.humangeo.su.se

Dr. Andrea Nightingale is an Associate Professor in the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She was previously the Director of the MSc in Environment and Development and a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography at the University of Edinburgh (2002-2012). Her PhD from the University of Minnesota in Geography was based on work done in Nepal since 1987 on questions of development, natural resource management, community forestry, gender, social inequalities and governance.