Uppsatsen behandlar hur de globala frösystemen kan ses som en typ av kolonisering av fröer. Uppsatsen utgår från Sarah Radcliffes definition av kolonialismen och menar att man inte endast kan se kolonialismen som en enskild händelse i tiden, utan att det är en pågående händelse som fortfarande äger rum och påverkar den värld vi lever i. Uppsatsen undersöker främst hur koloniseringen pågår i kunskapsproduktionen. Den gör sig tydligt i de globala frösystemen som är starkt påverkade av diskursen om modernitet som definierar vetenskaplig kunskap som modern och därför önskvärd, medan traditionella kunskaper ses som bakåtsträvande och därmed icke önskvärda. Detta visar sig i de globala frösystemen där allt fler stater övergår till ett jordbruk som är exportinriktat och där ”moderna” jordbruksmetoder används, på bekostnad av traditionella jordbruksmetoder som är anpassade till det lokala klimatet. Det gör att bönder hamnar i en utsatt situation då de ”moderna” jordbruksmetoderna kräver dyra resurser för att upprätthållas, samt att miljön degraderas då metoderna som nämndes inte är anpassade till den lokala miljön. Uppsatsen använder sig av kontraktsteori för att belysa hur frösystemen innebär en maktassymetri genom att de kontrakt som skrivs inom de globala frösystemen endast skrivs av en minoritet som sedan påverkar majoriteten som måste följa kontraktet. Därför krävs det att kontrakten inom de globala frösystemen skrivs om med en större inkludering och därmed ge utrymme för andra typer av kunskaper än endast den vetenskapliga. / This essay will discuss how the global seed systems can be viewed as a form of colonization of seeds. It will be based on Sarah Radcliffe’s definition of colonialism and suggests that you cannot only view colonialism as a separate event in time, but an on-going process still taking place, affecting the world we live in. The essay will mainly examine how the colonization is at work in the knowledge production. This is evident in the global seed systems that are strongly affected by the discourse of modernity that defines scientific knowledge as modern and therefore desired, while traditional knowledge is viewed as backwards and therefore non-desirable. This is showcased in the global seed systems where an increasing number of states move from an agriculture that is export-oriented and where “modern” agricultural methods are used, at the expense of traditional agricultural methods that are adapted to the local climate. This exposes the farmers to a situation where the “modern” agricultural methods demand expensive resources to maintain, while the environment suffers since the methods mentioned are not adapted to the local climate. The essay will make use of contract theory toilluminate how the seed systems means a power asymmetry through the contracts written within the global seed systems that are only written by a minority, which then affects the majority that must follow the contract. Therefore it is necessary for the contracts within the global seed systems to be rewritten, with a larger inclusion, and hence grant space for other forms of knowledge than merely the scientific.

This dissertation examines how simultaneous social-ecological transformations including environmental change, climate uncertainty and urbanization affect low income residents in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Low income residents often reside in informal settlements which themselves inhabit marginal spaces in the city including roof tops, riverbanks, and land on the urban periphery. In Phnom Penh, many communities in the peri-urban zone depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Yet, this way of life is being compromised by changes to weather patterns, water quality and most pressingly urban expansion, as the wetlands they use to farm are being filled with sand to create new land on which to build luxury condos and expansive shopping malls. This thesis focuses on how low income residents, in particular urban farmers on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, live with and influence the ongoing social-ecological transformations that are shaping the city. I employ a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology, including interviews, focus groups and a household survey to examine how patterns of urbanization in the past 25 years have created situations of both social and ecological marginalization in Phnom Penh. I show how the changing legal framework of land ownership has influenced access to land and housing while analysing how urban farmers have responded to these changes. The following research questions underpinned the study: 1. How are low-income residents of Phnom Penh affected by the process of environmental change (including climate change)? How do other forms of socio-economic marginalization influence this? 2. What are the historical conditions that have shaped the present reality for low-income residents of Phnom Penh in terms of their vulnerability to environmental change? 3. How are low-income residents responding, individually and collectively, to the changes they are experiencing as a result of urbanization and environmental change? What are the outcomes of these actions? 4. How is the concept of ‘resilience’ being employed as a policy objective in Cambodia? Does the presence of a resilience agenda improve conditions for low-income residents facing challenges related to environmental change in urban areas? I combined the theoretical fields of resilience and political ecology, to take advantage of their complementary understandings of the interaction between humans and nature. This theoretical combination highlights the importance of scale, focusing on the loss of agricultural livelihoods at the village level while also acknowledging the role of national policy and politics in shaping the priorities of urban development. My use of political ecology focuses on issues of agency to show how farmers are actively employing strategies to sustain their failing crops, such as increasing the use of chemical inputs, which tragically further undermines their precarious finances as well as the ecosystem they depend on. Farmers deploy short term strategies in an effort to retain a foothold in the city in the hopes that their children will be able to leverage their education to pursue opportunities outside of farming. I further draw on discourse analysis to show how the term resilience is employed in policy and by government officials at the national level to frame climate change as a managerial problem which can be solved with technical solutions and external funding. I argue this obscures how problematic decisions such as the in-filling of urban lakes are caused, not by failures of capacity but by political priorities, aligned to the interests of wealth creation for a small elite. While resilience has been embraced as a policy priority in Cambodia, it has not translated into practices which protect urban ecosystems or lessen social inequalities.

The history of California is in many ways a story about water, and the outsized effect that droughts, floods, and seasonal precipitation rates have had on the political and economic development of the state over the past 170 years.  This thesis uses discourse analysis of historical and ongoing negotiations that have been presented in federal and state reports, narratives, case laws and legislation to explore how the discourse around water politics has been shaped in the state.  From this, an antiessentialist environmental history develops around the relationship between overdrafted groundwater basins in the Central Valley and the agriculture industry located there.  Finally, this thesis explores what the future of a waterscape built during the capitalization of modern society may look like as we move towards a new regime of nature.

The outbreak of ebola 2014 and the outbreak of covid-19 2019 affected our societies in a lot of ways, and some of the consequences were more unexpected than others. One of these consequences is the appearance of stigmatization and racism against ethnic groups.   The purpose of this thesis is to describe how the swedish news media (Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet) construct and maintain the image of the ebolavirus and the coronavirus. Our goal is to explain how the media can have the power to influence society’s general perception on the ethnic groups that live in the geographic areas where the virus outbreaks occurred. We will explain how general perceptions based on the construction of discourses can lead to racism and racialization, which will be explained by the field of political ecology.  Our critical discourse analysis applied on the news media, concluded that the media mainly follows a discourse that tend to create a distinction between “us” in the west and “them” in the Third World (Africa and Asia) by blaming them and their ways of living as a cause of the viruses. This, together with a general way of creating fear and speculation, make prejudice and racialization occur. By applying the theory of political ecology which lay focus on the social injustice based on geographical location; we could draw the conclusion that virus outbreaks occur due to human exploitation of the nature. The exploitation leads to changes in the nature’s metabolism, which take form in crises such as virus outbreaks.

The spatial categorisations of urban and rural are still used in academia, lay terminology and policy formation in spite of a postmodern obsession with the deconstruction of binaries. Hitherto, the urban rural dichotomy has been exposed to little scrutiny, and the critiques that have been made come from the epistemological standpoint of total urbanisation which assumes the rural will be effaced by a perennial urban sprawl. The rural urban dichotomy is a derivative of the larger ideological dualism of nature and society and it has long been postulated, particularly from the standpoint of political ecology, that in the Anthropocene, nature does not exist beyond human influence. This would, in theory, support the theory that rural space is becoming effaced. Previous studies have, however, demonstrated that this subjugation of the rural to the urban works to stigmatise rural populations and engender disenfranchisement that has led to a resurgence in far-right nationalism across much of Europe. This subjugation has been enforced through  this very urban norm in which both technocrats and academics favour the urban as a field for policy formation and research. When attempting to define the urban and the rural, it was found that the terms (a) are confused and confusing, evading any useful definition; (b) perpetuate a false neutrality that assumes a linear progression from rural to urban and (c) fail to recognise the complexities of space which resists binary distinctions. As such, I used Lefebvre’s spatial trifecta which suggests space is produced by three complimentary and contradictory processes: of perceived space (the material space of what we can actually see and touch, altered by seemingly banal everyday practices), conceived space (the (re)representations of space that are circulated by planners and technocrats) and lived space (the affectual space of emotion, memory and meanings) in order to think through the problems of the binary.  As such, this thesis aimed to explore whether the urban and the rural still function as legitimate spatial categories and, in doing so, used an emplaced, embodied and mobile exploration of five case studies within Stockholms län in order to explore the phenomena. This was appropriate as it mirrored the affectual potential believed to be induced through rural and natural landscapes. Indeed, by developing a methodology that can better account for lived space, we can attempt to dislodge perceived and conceived spaces as the more easily accessible conceptual framework for thinking through space. The findings showed that there were many different species of urban and rural spaces, many spaces that were both urban and rural and many that were neither. Indeed, an acquiescence of purportedly rural and urban features within purportedly urban spaces, and vice versa, was the most telling result in terms of disrupting the idea that the urban and rural are stable but antipodal spatial categories. I also found the rural to be a coterminous process that produces space with and against urban landscapes, and thus should not be subjugated.

As we find ourselves in the midst of a planetary trend towards urbanisation, we must acknowledge that urban spaces are linked in a network of metabolic consumption and production that impact not only those recognised as ‘urban dwellers’, but are incorporated into a global structure. Ireland is no exception, with development centred around Dublin, a ‘primate city’ with a vastly larger population than others in the region. Dublin’s Inner City areas have in recent decades been marked by a series of large-scale interventions aimed at reconstituting a new vision of Ireland as a global, modern city home to a tech-savvy workforce. Yet as Dublin explores its post-recession identity as a hub for investment in tech and finance, its urban population continues to grow in ways that are seen to disenfranchise existing Inner City communities. This study explores the perceptions of residents of Inner City Dublin engaged in urban planning processes, in the hopes of making manifest the goals and desires driving participation through various channels, both formal and ‘radical’. A case is made for the city as a site of a post-political condition by questioning the role and efficacy of official consultatory channels, as well as in contrasting held imaginaries presented by interviewees and those presented by official planning documents. Attempts by Dublin City Council to market Dublin as a ‘creative’ city, intent on monetising aspects of cultural identity as a global competitor intent on drawing investment and foreign talent is considered representative of post-politics, contrasted by urban residents’ desires to safeguard the existence of vibrant communities within the Inner City who now risk exclusion.

Wild Sky, a proposed wilderness in Washington State, has been a source of local contention since its inception. Drawing on the theories of political ecology, international conservation, and actor-based politics, this research seeks to understand the process of public participation in wilderness designation, the arguments both for and against Wild Sky, and how the wilderness proposal process could be improved. The paper begins with an outline of local and public participation in Wild Sky legislation, a discussion of “community,” and an account of how the 1964 Wilderness Act has been applied nationally and locally. This is followed by an analysis of interviews conducted with Forest Service employees and many of Wild Sky’s proponents and opponents. Advocates hope Wild Sky will boost the local economy, rehabilitate salmon runs, provide increased recreational access, and preserve an ecosystem typically excluded from wilderness – lowland forests and streams. Opponents see the proposal as an elite land grab that would exclude motorized recreation and prohibit the resource extraction historically important in the area. They argue that the land, logged a century ago, does not qualify as wilderness. Ultimately, the Forest Service will be charged with managing the land, but the Wild Sky legislation creates management expectations that will be difficult to achieve due to recent budget cuts and environmental regulations. My research demonstrates that the lead actors in the wilderness debate have changed, with the voice of the timber industry replaced by more diverse opposition from motorized recreation. Although the Washington Congressional delegation strove to accommodate these various interests through public meetings and negotiations, the process could have been improved. Currently, the 1964 Wilderness Act does not outline a format for public involvement regarding Congressional additions to the National Wilderness Preservation System. However, this legislation should offer specific opportunities for public and local participation. Most importantly, in collaboration with the Forest Service and local communities, wilderness advocates and the federal government must be prepared to offer long-term support for wilderness through budget allocations and volunteer hours in order to ensure that Wild Sky’s long-term ecological and economic benefits are achieved.

One of the major problems that characterizes the Colombian countryside is the extreme concentration of land. When addressing the question of how land has been concentrated in Colombia, often the emphasis is placed on phenomena such as armed violence and drug-trafficking. While they have contributed, often the point that these factors have been embedded in broader dynamics of exploitation is missed. Through a case study of the Meta region and drawing on the analysis of policy documents, news reports, interviews and the review of literature, this study explores the problematic of land concentration in Colombia, and how it has evolved over the last decades, and in the context of the peace process. This research shows that land accumulation in Colombia has been generated through a continuous process of dispossession in which peasants have been disassociated from their land and means of production. This process has taken two main pathways: a gunpoint dispossession, characterized by the use of force and coercion, and a homogeneity dispossession, also violent but with less visible expressions. Both forms of dispossession have been facilitated by what has been called as inequality regime – i.e. the articulation of political and economic mechanisms that, together with powerful narratives, have favoured the accumulation of private capital. This configuration has been adjusting to the new post-agreement context. Today, capitalist exploitation projects in Colombia are justified not only in the name of development and security, but now also in the name of peace. This study shows the need of paying greater attention to everyday processes of accumulation in order to strategically address sustainability and development issues. In particular, the understanding of land concentration dynamics is crucial for discussing strategies and policies to effectively promote a more sustainable and just agri-food system in Colombia.

Retention forestry is a key measure in Swedish forestry policy to combine a clearcutting regime and sustainability goals regarding forest biodiversity. The aims of increasing industrial production from forestry and to protect the environment is equally prioritized in the Swedish forestry legislation. Freedom for landowners is a cornerstone in Swedish forestry policy. This position is heavily debated among activists and scholars and is politically questioned, especially from the European Commission which challenges the Swedish position. This study investigates how Swedish landowners interpret and practice retention in forestry, discussed through a theoretical framework of political ecology. Logged areas from 2020 in Trosa municipality in Sweden was investigated through field work and remote sensing through NDVI-analysis. Retention was practiced in all the logged areas, but the measures and level of retention varied greatly. The method can be used for different purposes at different seasons. If production and environment is equally prioritized as the legislation requires is questioned.

Handlingsplanen för Agenda 2030 är ett viktigt dokument eftersom det lägger fram visionen för Sveriges framtida arbete med hållbar utveckling. Sverige vill visa omvärlden att tillväxt och välfärd är fullt möjliga samtidigt som vi värnar om miljön. Som Regeringskansliet (2018) betonar flera gånger så är det viktigt att balans råder mellan de olika aspekterna för hållbarhet (Regeringskansliet, 2018). Den här insikten återspeglar sig tydligt i handlingsplanens text. Däremot finns det samtidigt mycket som pekar på att den ekonomiska aspekten av hållbarhet prioriteras framför ekologiska och sociala aspekter.  Syftet bakom uppsatsen var att undersöka hur tillväxt värderas i förhållande till de andra aspekterna av hållbar utveckling. Samtidigt vill undersökningen belysa hur Sverige ser på sin roll i implementeringen av Agenda 2030 globalt, samt hur den svenska modellen för hållbarhet värderas. För att svara på de frågor som ställts har handlingsplanen för Agenda 2030 analyserats med hjälp av metoden tematisk analys. Resultatet från analysen har sedan granskats genom det teoretiska ramverket baserat på politisk ekologi och ekologisk modernisering. I studien framkom det att de tre aspekterna av hållbarhet ofta förekommer tillsammans, men att det maskerar en obalans i värderingarna. Studien visade också att Sverige har ambitionen att bli ett världsledande land när det kommer till hållbarhet och på vis ska föregå med gott exempel. / The policy for Agenda 2030 is an important document because it sets the course for Sweden's work with sustainable development. Sweden is clear with their intention of showing the world that it is possible to achieve economic growth, prosperity and care for the environment simultaneously. According to Regeringskansliet (2018) it is important to recognize that there is balance between the different aspects of sustainability. However, there are a lot of signs that point towards the economic aspect being prioritized rather than the social and ecological aspects.  The main purpose behind this essay is to examine how economic growth is valued in comparison to the other aspects of sustainable development. It is also important to examine how Sweden views itself when it comes to implementing Agenda 2030 globally, and how the Swedish model for sustainable development is valued. In order to answer the questions set forth in this essay the policy document for Agenda 2030 was analyzed with the help of a method called thematic analysis. The results then came under further analysis with the help of a theoretical framework based upon political ecology and ecological modernization. The results indicated that the three main aspects of sustainable development were often mentioned together, however this tended to cover up an imbalance in how the aspects were valued. The study also showed that Sweden has the ambition to become one of the world's leading countries when it comes to sustainable development. This in turn should inspire other countries to follow in Sweden’s footsteps.