The Political Ecology of Jurisdiction

Recent scholarship has forged exciting connections across legal geography and political ecology, examining for instance how ecological processes are key to understanding how law and place co-constitute one another. In this presentation, we focus on an understudied aspect of these relations – the concept of jurisdiction – to build a political ecology of jurisdiction. We understand jurisdiction as the power to make decisions over defined spaces and more broadly the space of legal power. We draw from this and our work on rhino protection in Southern Africa, Tribal and state buffalo conservation in North America, and tuna and turtle management in the oceans to advance this new line of study.