Conclusion

Abstract

This concluding chapter comes back to the questions raised in the introduction, and draws together the ideas that have emerged for approach and methodology. Political ecology debates over rural resources and livelihoods are often pursued at perhaps too general a level. Social scientists may see them as discourse between alternative systems of knowledge, and condemn as naïve any positivist search for ‘the facts’. Natural scientists are more likely to see them as conflicts that pit objective management, founded on western science, against less rational alternatives. In their documentation and analysis of ‘hard’ quantitative outcomes, natural sciences may lose sight of the real socio-cultural, historical and political forces driving events.