ABSTRACT
In the name of industrializing the countryside, the government not only takes away the resources including the land, water, forest and minerals but also destroys the livelihood means of the people for, what Madhav Gadgil and Sumit Guha say, a political economy of profit. As a direct rebuttal of James Scott’s moral economy, Samuel L. Popkin presents his political economy approach in his book, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. Popkin’s political economy approach holds that peasants are rational, self-interested agents that act to maximize their own benefit. The political ecology that emerged as a research agenda only in 1980s attempts to understand the political sources, conditions and ramifications of environment change. The policy content is also influenced by the powerful economic and political elites. The clash between the moral economy of survival and the political economy of profit has resulted in bloodshed and killings.
