ABSTRACT
As its name suggests, UPE emphasizes political dimensions of socioecological change. Many accounts, for example, skillfully trace the dynamics of hegemonic projects for socioenvironmental transformation, often highlighting deployments of electoral, legislative, deliberative, and administrative processes within institutions of government and the state (e.g., Njeru 2010; Loftus 2012; Perkins 2013). These and other studies also attend to political dimensions of change beyond such institutions: actions of resistance, inequalities of power, or the normalization of socioecological processes and subjects (e.g., Veron 2006). But UPE has begun wrestling with the argument that the “properly political” lies not in the familiar institutional domains of politics or in power relations of all varieties but specifically in egalitarian demands that interrupt and disrupt established orders (e.g., Swyngedouw 2009). Currently, there appears to be no consensus on what the “political” or the “democratic” means for a UPE analysis. Should the political in UPE pertain exclusively to occasional moments of egalitarian disruption? Or should UPE address both the “properly political” and conventional, institutionalized “politics as usual”?
