Paper short abstract:

How framing the environment as a socio-natural assemblage does not bring back politics

Paper long abstract:

Bruno Latour's notion of a 'parliament of all things' seeks to re-frame political ecology as a way of attending to human and non-human agents as equivalents. This new ecological approach does not rest on any a priori claims to social or natural domains: everything is contested and so everything is political. After a long struggle to have the impurity of socio-natural assemblages accepted as the basis for a new political ecology I argue that Latour's 'political' approach is being realised in new strategies of environmental management. However, rather than augmenting the political I suggest that this shift is characterised by a depoliticising of socio-natural assemblages and the fostering of a consensual, post-political situation. My paper will draw on the political theory of Jacques Ranciere and Erik Swyngedouw, and empirical work on the management of the fisheries in Ireland.