Submissions

This page is designed to help you ensure your submission is ready for and fits the scope of the journal.

Before submitting please read over the Author Guidelines and the information below. Then register an account (or login if you have an existing account).

Remember that we only publish political ecology articles (see below)!

If you have not been invited to a 'special issue or section' please submit only to 'articles'

About

The Journal of Political Ecology (JPE) is a peer reviewed, platinum Open Access journal in the social sciences. It began in 1994 and welcomes submissions in English, French and Spanish. JPE publishes research into the linkages between political economy and human environmental impacts, across different locations and academic disciplines. Articles must be situated in, or contribute to, political ecology.

JPE was established at the University of Arizona, where it remains, hosted by the UA Libraries. This is a "DIY" journal, with the work done by volunteer editors and referees from academic institutions. Over the years, the JPE has published several important contributions to the field of political ecology, and spanned several disciplines, while remaining free of charge. It is cited more often per article than many commercial journals charging libraries and individuals for access. Articles are archived by Portico.

A description of the journal can be found in Spanish and in English (at the end of an argument for academic-controlled OA journals).

In 2022, we began publishing a new section called Grassroots publishing short articles engaging trans-local environmental realities and questions with authors drawn from activists and scholars from the Global South. It is a platform for those movements concerned with the politics of sustainability, natural resources access and related social inequalities in both rural and urban settings. We are interested in grassroots’ initiatives that envision sustainable ways of inhabiting the planet as well as critical reflections on political ecology and the environmental effects of globalisation for local communities. Questions may be directed to grassrootsjpe@gmail.com. https://www.grassrootsjpe.org/

Submission Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word [preferred], or RTF document file format.
Where available, URLs for permanent full text references and DOIs for clickable full text articles have been provided.
Authors are responsible for the accuracy of references and quotations. Authors should make sure they are correct, in substance and style.
The text is double-spaced; uses Times New Roman 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review (below) have been followed.
Remember that we only publish political ecology articles! Articles will be rejected if they do not contribute to, or use, this approach.

Ensuring a Blind Review

To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this press, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:

The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc.
With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file (see under File in Word), by clicking on the following, beginning with File on the main menu of the Microsoft application: File > Save As > Tools (or Options with a Mac) > Security > Remove personal information from file properties on save > Save.
With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.
Do add 'line numbers' to the document if you know how. It helps the referees enormously. Thanks

Copyright Notice

Submissions must be the author's(s') original work and not previously published. An article based on a section from a completed graduate dissertation may be published in JPE, but only if this is allowed by your university rules.

The Journal of Political Ecology (JPE) publishes its content under a Creative Commons CC BY license for journal articles. Copyright remains with the author, but JPE is licensed to publish the paper, and the author agrees to make the article available with the CC BY license. This operates from 2014; prior to this, authors assigned JPE the copyright for material they published in JPE, but JPE granted its authors a license as the original source.

This means that authors can include their JPE articles in dissertations and in edited books later (with full citation to the original JPE article). Reproduction as another journal article in whole or in part, unacknowledged, would be plagiarism.

JPE reserves all rights except those granted in this copyright notice.

Peer Review

Articles are double-blind refereed, which can take up to 3 months. but please realize we occasionally receive an article that is harder to review in a timely way. We are all volunteers, too.

Publication Ethics: i) Authorship means you contributed the article in a substantive way. ii) Complaints and appeals go to the two editors, then to the Board if required, then to PESO. Note: we have not had a case since 1994. iii) Conflicts of interest / competing interests should be specified in footnote 1 iv) As a social science journal, we do not require datasets to be submitted, unless the author wishes. v) Ethical oversight: as in ii. vi) Intellectual property - see CC-BY copyright, which resides with authors. and vii) Post-publication corrections are allowed but should be minimized, largely to factual issues. We do not publish these separately as errata.

Publication malpractice: Previously copyrighted material will not be published unless there is permission. This generally includes work in translation (something we have done in a few cases with agreement in place). However, material with CC-BY or other forms of author copyright could be incorporated in an article, with permission from the holder, referenced, and in discussion with the editors.

Use of AI: We do not accept articles written wholly or partly by AI software, with only light editing. As of 2024, it is easy to distinguish this, becase we require critical writing, and the majority of work we publish also has substantial empirical material, often new, that can only come from a human author. We do accept that AI and grammar packages may be used to improve the text or the reference list [but be really careful: again as of 2024, AI like ChatGPT thows up bogus references or otherwise gets them wrong]

Licences

Journal of Political Ecology allows the following licences for submission:

CC BY 4.0
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Publication Fees

There are no charges for author submissions or publication. The journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. For the philosophy behind this, see https://freejournals.org/.

Publication Cycle

JPE is published yearly: articles are added to the current volume when they become ready.

Sections

Section or article type	Public Submissions	Peer Reviewed	Indexed
Articles
Grassroots
Special Section: Understanding political ecologies of wildlife conservation through non-human lives. Eds. S Banerjee, J. Margulies, P. Velasco Santos
Book Reviews
Special Section: Indigenous Voices: Self-determination in mine site transitions and mine closure governance across nations, edited by Sarah Holcombe, Rebecca Hall and Arn Keeling
Grassroots Special Section: 'Anthroposcenes in Africa: lived experiences of planetary transformation'. Edited by Timothy Makori, Ismay Milford, Joseph Mujere, Iva Peša & Sara de Wit
Grassroots Special Section: 'Post-growth food systems for a Just social-ecological transition within planetary boundaries'. Edited by CE Nedelciu, M Oostdijk, LG Elsler, JB Hinton, K Benabderrazik
Grassroots Special Section: 'Colonialities of climate change and action' edited by N. De la Hoz, D. Silva-Garzón, N. Hernández-Vidal, L. Gutiérrez-Escobar, M. Hasenfratz, & B. Fladvad
Special Section: Water in short supply, edited by Kathleen Sullivan and Sayd Randle
Special Section: Toxic dispossession and environmental violence in Latin America edited by Swistun, D., Lugo-Vivas, D. A. & Vélez-Torres, I.
Special Section: Political ecology of professional practice: plurality and possibilities in environmental governance, edited by Sam Staddon, Floriane Clement and Bimbika Sijapati Basnett
Special Section: Experimental and speculative political ecologies edited by Dylan M. Harris and Dan Santos
Special Section: 'The political ecology of green extractivism' (Part 1) edited by Alexander Dunlap and Judith Verweijen
Special Section: 'The political ecology of green extractivism' (Part 2) edited by Alexander Dunlap and Judith Verweijen
Special Section: The challenges of decolonizing conservation, edited by Dan Brockington, Esteve Corbera and Sara Maestre-Andrés