The Dictionary of Human Geography (148 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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Poisson regression models
These models belong to the family of techniques for cat egoricaL data anaLysis. They are used when the response variable in a regression like for mat is a count (e.g. the number of crimes in an area) and the researcher wants to relate this to other area characteristics. The nature of this response variable, which cannot be negative, means that the standard regression model should not be used. Instead, the natural log of the count is modelled and its random part takes on a Poisson distribution so that the sto chastic variation (see stochastic process) around the underlying relationship has a vari ance constrained to be equal to the mean. The Poisson distribution is also used in Log Linear modeLLing for the analysis of multiway cross tabulations. If the distribution of the count (having taken account of the predictor vari ables) has marked positive skew so that the variance of the residuals exceeds the mean, an overdispersed Poisson or Negative Binomial model is needed. An example of such a model is when hospital length of stay is the response; while the typical stay is a few days, some indi viduals may experience a stay of several months. The muLti LeveL Poisson modeL can accommodate spatial random effects. (NEW PARAGRAPH) An important use of Poisson regression is as part of a model based approach to disease mapping, as the Standardized Mortality Ratio is the ratio of observed count to an expected count. In the model, the log of the observed count is regressed on the log of the expected count and other predictor variables, with the coefficient associated with the expected count being treated as an offset, constrained to (NEW PARAGRAPH) Another important area of application is the calibration of spatiaL interaction models in which the response is the log of the number of fLows between areas. Guy (1987) shows how the Poisson model can be used to estimate quite complex models, including attraction and destination constraints. kj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Griffith (2006); Griffith and Haining (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
policing
At the most general level, policing refers to practices aimed at the regulation and control of a society and its members, especially with respect to matters of heaLth, order, Law and safety. More specifically, policing refers to the actions of those agents of the government equipped with coercive power to enforce law and maintain order. Amongst the key expect ations of police officers is that they will work to reduce the incidence and severity of crime through surveiLLance and arrest. Policing is thus the first stage in a criminal process that can lead to conviction and punishment. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Most research on policing in geography focuses on the legal, bureaucratic and cultural structures that shape the geographical imagin ations (see also geographical imagination) and tactics of police officers. This work is largely ethnographic, and emphasizes the geographical routines through which the police engage their work (Fyfe, 1992) and their interest in securing territorial control (Herbert, 1997; see territory). This research shows that the nature of such territorial actions by officers is strongly conditioned by their prior definition of the spaces in which they are operating. For instance, police con struct ?no go areas? (Keith, 1993) or ?anti police areas? (Herbert, 1997), places where histories of conflict with minorities cause officers to engage in either avoidance or heavy handed tactics. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In recent years, police agencies have embraced geographical techniques to isolate and target specific locations of ongoing crim inal activity, so called ?hot spots?. Through reli ance on geographic information systems, police departments seek to determine where crime is perpetuated and to mobilize intensive enforcement to reduce it. Evidence suggests that these tactics can be successful in reducing crime at particular places. However, such oper ations are expensive to conduct, and may serve merely to displace crime to other locales. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Other research on policing seeks to situate it within broader power structures of the state and state society relations. Notable here is work on community policing, a contemporary reform movement meant to increase co operation between officers and citizens. Observations of community policing in action demonstrates how officers retain authority in defining problems and constructing solutions (Saunders, 1999; Herbert, 2006). Research also focuses on the blurring of the lines between military and police in the growth of the ?security forces?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Analyses of policing outside the specific context of uniformed agents of coercive state power largely occur in the context of discus sions of governmentality. This refers to the processes through which individuals and groups are encouraged to assume responsibil ity for their own welfare and control. Such ?self help? actions as creating defensible spaces, forming neighbourhood watch groups, and employing private security represent instances where policing is presumed to extend beyond the sole province of the state. This devolution of police authority is often criticized for exacerbating class based differ ences; wealthier individuals and communities can more easily protect themselves and their (NEW PARAGRAPH) property, and thereby preserve their social standing. skh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Fyfe (1992); Herbert (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
political ecology
An approach to, but far from a coherent theory of, the complex metab olism between nature and society (see Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987). The expression itself emerged in the 1970s in a var iety of intellectual contexts employed by the journalist Alex Cockburn, the anthropologist Eric Wolf and the environmental scientist Graheme Beakhurst as a somewhat inchoate covering term for the panoply of ways in which environmental concerns were politicized in the wake of the environmentalist wave that broke in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see environ mental movement). In its academic, and spe cifically geographical, usage, political ecology has a longer and more complex provenance which both hearkens back to human and cul tural ecology, and to an earlier history of rela tions between Anthropology and geography in the 1940s and 1950s, and incorporates a more recent synthetic and analytical deployment in the early 1980s associated with the work of Piers Blaikie (1985), Michael Watts (1983a, 1986), and Suzanna Hecht (1985). In the 1990s the core empirical concerns of political ecology largely rural, agrarian and third world were properly expanded, and the the oretical horizons have deepened the original concerns with the dynamics of resource management (see Peluso, 1992; Zimmerer, 1997; Neumann, 1999). Political ecology has also splintered into a more complex field of political ecologies, which embraces environ mental history (Grove, 1995), science studies (Demeritt, 1998), actor network the ory (Braun and Castree, 1998), gender theory (Agrawal, 1998: cf. feminist geographies; gen der; gender and development), discourse analysis (Escobar, 1995) and a reinvigorated marxism (O?Connor, 1998; Leff, 1995; cf. Marxist geography). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Two geographical monographs The polit ical economy of soil erosion (1985) by Piers Blaikie and Land degradation and society (1987), edited by Harold Brookfield and Piers Blaikie provided the intellectual and theoretical foundation stones for the formal ization of political ecology as such. What Blaikie achieved in The political economy of soil erosion was to systematize the growing conflu ence between three theoretical approaches: cultural ecology (Nietschmann, 1973) in geography, rooted in ecosystems approaches to human behaviour; ecological anthropology, grounded in cybernetics and the adaptive qualities of living systems (see Rappaport, 1968); and the high tide of Marxist inspired poLiticaL economy, and peasant studies in particular, of the 1970s. A number of people contributed to this intersection of ideas Richards' (1985) work on peasant science, Hecht's (1985) analysis of eastern Amazonia, Grossman (1984) on subsistence in Papua New Guinea, and Watts (1983) on the simple reproduction squeeze and drought in Nigeria but Blaikie pulled a number of disparate themes and ideas together, drawing in large measure on his own South Asian experiences. In rejecting the coLoniaL model of soil erosion that framed the problem around environmen tal constraints, mismanagement, overpopuLa tion and mArKet failure, Blaikie started from the resource manager, and specifically house holds from whom surpluses are extracted, ?who then in turn are forced to extract ??surpluses?? from the environment ... [lead ing] to degradation? (1985, p. 124). The ana lytical scaffolding was provided by a number of key middle range concepts marginalization, proletarianization and incorporation that permitted geographers to see the failure of soil conservation schemes in cLass or social terms; namely, the power of classes affected by soil erosion in relation to state power, the class specific perception of soil problems and solu tions, and the class basis of soil erosion as a political issue. Blaikie was able to drive home the point that poverty could, in a dialectical way, cause degradation ?peasants destroy their own environment in attempts to delay their own destruction' (1985, p. 29) and that poverty had to be understood not as a thing or a condition, but as the social relations of pro duction, which are realms of possibility and constraint. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In this work, political ecology came to mean a combination of ?the concerns of ecoLogy and a broadly defined political economy' (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987, p. 17), the lat ter understood as a concern with effects ?on people, as well as on their productive activ ities, of on going changes within society at local and global levels' (1987, p. 21). This is a broad definition an approach rather than a theory which was adopted by the editors in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Political Ecology in 1995. Political ecology has three essential foci. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The first is interactive, contradictory and diaLecticaL: society and land based resources are mutually causal in such a way that poverty, via poor management, can induce environmen tal degradation that itselfdeepens poverty. Less a problem of poor management, inevitable nat ural decay or demographic growth (see de mography), land degradation is seen as social in origin and definition. Analytically, the cen trepoint of any nature society study must be the ?land manager?, whose relationship to nature must be considered in a historical, pol itical and economic context. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Second, political ecology argues for regional or spatial accounts of degradation that link, through ?chains ofexplanation', local decision makers to spatial variations in environmental structure (stability and resilience as traits of particular ecosystems in particular). LocaLity studies are, thus, subsumed within multi layered analyses pitched at a variety of regional scaLes. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Third, land management is framed by ?external structures', which for Blaikie meant the role of the state and the core periphery model. (NEW PARAGRAPH) If early political ecology was not exactly clear what political economy implied, beyond a sort of 1970s dependency theory, it did provide a number of principles and mid range concepts. The first is a refined concept of marginality in which its political, ecological and economic aspects may be mutually reinforcing: land deg radation is both a result and a cause of social marginalization. Second, pressure of produc tion on resources is transmitted through social relations, which impose excessive demands on the environment (i.e. surplus extraction). And third, the inadequacy of environmental data of historical depth linked to a chain of expLan ation analysis compels a plural approach. Rather than unicausal theories one must, in short, accept ?plural perceptions, plural defin itions . . . and plural rationalities' (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987, p. 16). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Political ecology had the advantage of see ing land management and environmental deg radation (or sustainaBiLity) in terms of how political economy shapes the ability to manage resources (through forms of access and con trol, of exploitation), and through the lens of cognition (one person's accumuLation is another person's degradation). But in other respects political ecology was demonstrably weak: it often had an outdated notion of ecol ogy and ecological dynamics (including an incomplete understanding of ecological agency: Zimmerer, 1994b); it was often remark ably silent on the politics of political ecology; it had a somewhat voluntarist notion of human perception; and, not least, it did not provide a theoretically derived set of concepts to explore particular environmental outcomes or trans formations. These weaknesses, coupled with the almost indeterminate and open ended nature of political ecology, not unexpectedly produced both a deepening and a proliferation of political ecologies in the 1990s (see Hecht and Cockburn, 1989; Peet and Watts, 2003 (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; Bryant and Bailey, 1997). A number of studies address the question of politics, focusing especially on patterns of resistance and struggles over access to and control over the environment, and how politics as policy is discursively constructed (Moore, 1996; Leach and Mearns, 1996; Pulido, 1996; Neumann, 1998; see environmentaL justice). Others have taken the political economy approach in somewhat differing directions: one takes the poverty degradation connection and explores outcomes with the tools of institutional eco nomics (Das Gupta, 1993) and entitlements, whereas another returns to Marx to derive concepts from the second contradiction of capitalism (O?Connor, 1998). Much work has addressed the original silence of political ecology on questions of gender (Agrawal, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . And still others, often drawing upon discourse theory and social studies of science, examine environmental problems and policies often outside the third worLd in terms of ecological modernization, risk and govern mentality (see Leach and Mearns, 1996; Braun and Castree, 1998; Keil, Bell, Penz and Fawcett, 1998; Forsyth, 2003; Li, 2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Political ecology has in a sense almost dis solved itself over the past two decades as scholars have sought to extend its reach. At the same time, it has met up with the prolifera tions of forms of environmental studies, science studies, post structuraLism and new sociaL movemeNTs. Some of the most interesting work now speaks to the political ecology of cities (see urban nature), commodities and of forms of green rule and subject formation (Agrawal, 2005; Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2006; Swyngedouw, 2004b) and violence (Peluso and Watts, 2001). Much of this work continues to struggle with the dialectical relations between nature and society that the early political ecol ogy identified (see Harvey, 1996), however, and which continues to provide the central conun drum for what is now a hugely expanded and polyglot landscape of political ecology. mw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Adam (1998); Demeritt (1998); Faber (1998); Fairchild and Leach (1998); Forysth (2003); (NEW PARAGRAPH) Guha and Martinez Alier (1997); Hajer (1995); Kuletz (1998); Moore (1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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