María Jesús Beltrán

The agricultural sector is challenged to meet the global food needs of mankind and reduce its environmental impacts. It is well known that the industrialisation of agriculture has led to negative effects such as water pollution, increased erosion, loss of biodiversity, increased zoonotic diseases, high water consumption to the detriment of ecosystem needs and other users, and greenhouse gas emissions, among others.However, the proposition and implementation of adequate solutions for these environmental issues are still limited by the epistemological challenge posed by the complexity of socio-ecological processes associated with food production at different spatial and temporal scales. To that respect, different approaches have emerged such as social metabolism, the water-energy-food nexus, coupled social-natural or socio-environmental systems analysis, socio-ecohydrology, hydro-social and socio-hydrological approaches, life cycle assessment, ecological footprint (water footprint and virtual water), energy and matter flow analysis, extended environmental input-output analysis, among others. However, in our opinion, such approaches usually do not address the complex relations between agricultural production and the water cycle, nor the effects of the socio-economic and political context on the biogeochemical cycles, although they are fundamental in the processes occurring in agroecosystems, and their environmental impacts. The present methodological proposal makes a novel integration of approaches from the social sciences (social metabolism) with those from the earth sciences (socioecohydrology) to incorporate such cycles in the analysis of historical metabolic patterns and possible future trajectories of agroecosystems.We start with the Agrarian Metabolism approach developed and tested for the metabolic analysis of agriculture in Spain in contemporary history. This methodological core is enriched, including estimations of blue, green, grey and virtual water, estimated through hydrological spatiotemporal-explicit modelling. From this integration, progress is made in the tailoring of new metabolic indicators that account for the thermodynamic cost of landscape alteration over time, as well as the energy efficiency of agroecosystems.Southern Spanish (Andalusian) is an important agrarian region, accounting for ~17% of the cultivated area of Spain, presenting different types of agriculture, such as olive orchards (main Spanish producer), greenhouse vegetables, paddy rice, and berries, and also exemplifying diverse water-related environmental problems´ associated to the agricultural production. Thus, the industrialization process of Andalusian agriculture, in the period 1951-2018, is taken as a case study. For the analysis of possible future trajectories, climate change scenarios modelled for the Spanish territory as well as different agroecological management scenarios will be analysed. Hence, this proposal is useful for understanding the effects of agriculture in contemporary history, particularly in its industrialisation phase and, also, the expected results will serve as a scientific basis for decision-making on future actions in the territory and as a tool for analysing different types of scenarios and their comparison with patterns already observed in the recent past.

This special issue presents findings and reflections of scholars who participated in the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE). By mobilising conceptual frameworks from several strands of Marxist and post-structuralist theory—and empirically engaging with a range of historico-geographical processes—the articles in this issue contribute to debates in political ecology in two main ways. First, they critically analyse the political economy and ecology of contemporary capitalism, with an emphasis on accumulation strategies associated with the uneven expansion and crisis of neoliberalism. Specifically, they unpack and critically extend the frameworks of “accumulation by dispossession” and “nature's neoliberalisation” to engage with, among other cases, the political ecology of “austerity” in Southern Europe; historical and contemporary cases of “capital-driven disasters”; and political ecological dynamics taking place around relationships of “rent”. Second, the authors of this special issue analyse new and re-emerging forms of socio-ecological resistance and contestation, including both distributional struggles and movements against “commons' enclosures”. Moreover, they focus on how struggles can (and do) move from contesting capitalist forms of dispossession towards creating alternative “hegemonic” projects and blocs, by critiquing received “common sense” and constructing and performing alternative political ecological imaginaries informed by principles of solidarity and “commoning”. Taken together, the articles in this special issue present new ways of thinking and enacting political and ecological struggles outside established scholarly traditions and conventional disciplines.

Questions of dam safety and hazard potential most often do not take center-stage in contestations and articulations concerning large dams. Through a comparative study of two of Europe’s most emblematic dam disasters – Vajont (Italy) and Ribadelago (Spain) – and the ongoing conflict over the safety of the Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project in Northeast India, this article argues that the damage caused by dam disasters is often not unavoidable or unforeseen but instead allowed to happen. Our cases show that power relations, economic pressures and profit influence “risky” dam management decisions, often disregarding the vernacular knowledge of concerned communities and silencing critical voices that do not fit dominant narratives of modernization and progress. We posit that an essential requirement for re-politicizing the question of dam safety is to unpack the apolitical notion of “socially constructed disasters,” thinking instead about “capital-driven destructions.” By emphasizing resistance against dam projects and against dominant risk discourses across space and time, this article seeks to underline the legitimacy of past and ongoing struggles surrounding the construction of large dams.

Cet article s’appuie sur le cas des marais saumâtres, ou marismas, de l’estuaire du Guadalquivir pour étudier, sur le temps long, les interactions entre natures et sociétés, les dynamiques d’appropriation de l’espace par la gestion de l’eau et de la terre. Il analyse plus particulièrement les dispositifs matériels et discursifs, les tensions et les contingences historiques qui ont fabriqué la vocation rizicole irriguée d’une partie des marismas. Il étudie les relations, depuis le xix^e siècle, de concurrence et de compromis entre trois projets de gestion de l’eau et/ou de la terre pour la navigation, l’irrigation et la protection de la faune et de la flore, ainsi que leurs effets.

What does virtual water conceal? This article synthesizes political ecology with ecological economics to question the understanding of the scientific concept of virtual water as part of an independent objective reality, rather than as a construction supported by pre‐existing ideas. The discourse promoting both the concept of virtual water and the methodologies used to estimate virtual water flows is structured according to some underlying ideas that are framed within market logic and the rationality of international trade. Consequently, it produces a representation of water as a factor of production that does not challenge the hegemonic construction of water scarcity in nature, and proposes a water management system the main purpose of which is to maximize efficiency in the use of the resource. We reveal the ideas underlying the virtual water concept to show how a critical approach to ecological economics can be complemented by political ecology theories. In this article, we use epistemological reflection as a starting point, with the specific objective of contrasting this reflection with the reality of water in the horticultural sector of Almería (southern Spain), in order to bring to light those aspects made invisible through the use of the virtual water indicator in a concrete case study.