Resilience, Political Ecology and Degrowth a critical review of three ‎main approaches in political geography and urban planning theory

Resilience, political ecology, and degrowth constitute three main approaches to address resource-society relationships in the context of the integrated energy-food-climate nexus and of its crisis. These diverge substantially, despite some common points, such as the idea of a non-equilibrium-ecology and of a more complex engagement of human-environment relations. Resilience has raised criticism for not taking into account how environmental injustice, power relations and the capitalist mode of production shape contemporary ecological issues, key concerns for political ecology scholars. After providing an overview of the main criticism addressed to the resilience paradigm, the chapter aims to introduce the political ecology approach, in order to move toward a more inclusive paradigm that is able to address the environmental question in relation to social justice concerns. The third section introduces the emergent debate on degrowth as an alternative paradigm to address socio-environmental sustainability and reframe global challenges such as austerity and deindustrialisation in urban areas. The chapter concludes in summarising the main aspects emerging from the critical review of these three notions, presented in the context of political geography and urban planning theory. It further argues for a greater integration of the ‘agency of nature’ and of the role of biological processes in the understanding of the way society functions.