Environmental Conflict

Going through Robbins’s first chapter of his book of “Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction,” I could have a picture of what the political ecology is of which explains that political ecology is a study of the relationship between the political, economic and social sectors with in environmental issue and changes (2004).

Robbins also shared that in political ecology people mostly discuss about four main theses namely “degradation and marginalization, environmental conflict, conservation and control, and environmental identity and social movement” (2004, p. 14).

In environmental conflict thesis, people struggle for the possibility to access to natural resources, while some are trying to take control over the resources. Since the natural resources become scarcity from day to day, and the demand of the resources utility increases its number, the conflict among the users within society is now a problem of which needs to deal with. There has been foreseeably the conflict between the government, or private sector with the local community over the accessibility to natural resources. In Cambodia, we would frequently hear about the land confiscation of local community owned land by the Royal Government of Cambodia to a specific private company to invest over that piece of land for plantation or other economic activities. These happen because of the greed of benefit and interest the government official gains from those companies, or in some cases some company owners are political elites themselves. On the other hand, there are also because of the need of land for cultivation, some farmers start planting their crop on the state owned forest land, and as a result create the conflict between the local people with the government over the need of the resource. Moreover, there are cases of some farmers stealing over other farmers pieces of land. These disputes not only bring the problems to the society of which leads to social conflict, but also cause other environmental problems, for instance, land degradation, deforestation and other form of environmental issues.

Because of our own interest, people start fighting each other over the control of resource ownership. In this situation, a good set of environmental policy the government should set to avoid all these problems, meanwhile to secure the sustainability of natural resources, and to help reduce environmental problems in the future. Again, any environmental policy the government plans to make, should also involve the participation of local community as so to avoid dispute or misunderstanding with the local people.