Abstract

Within political ecology, an important and timely critique has emerged which questions ontology and the nature of reality. This turn to ontology has been expressed in a new and influential paradigm, Political Ontology. In this article, I interrogate the politics of three tenets that seem central to this ontological turn within a political ecology of conservation context: (a) the insistence on the local, Indigenous and homogeneous subject and its corollary, the homogeneous Modern, Western subject; (b) the hegemony of the (green) neoliberal project, and (c) the incommensurability of non-modern and Western ontologies. I base my arguments on two case studies of resistance and/or struggle against green and un-green grabbing, the Skouries gold mine in Greece and the Lodge Hill development in England.

Keywords: political ontology, neoliberal nature, conservation, Indigenous, Greece, England

How to Cite:

Bormpoudakis, D., (2019) “Three implications of political ontology for the political ecology of conservation”, Journal of Political Ecology 26(1), 545-566. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/v26i1.22014