Pedagogy of Hope: Teaching Political Ecology in the Twilight of the Global Polycrisis#
A reflection toward POLLEN 2026

For most of this semester, I was not in the classroom. Health issues kept me away from the lecture hall, and I followed the course from a distance — through emails, recorded sessions, and the quiet guilt that creeps in when your body refuses the rhythm your work demands. Only today, near the end of term, was I able to return and deliver my lecture in person again.

And then, just after class, two students stayed behind. They wanted to ask if I might supervise their MSc theses. They were nervous in the way students are when something matters to them. They asked me, in slightly different words, the same question: how do I take the science I have been trained in, and learn to see the politics that runs through it?
I want to write about that question, because I think it is one of the most important pedagogical questions political ecology faces right now — and because I am increasingly convinced that how we answer it is itself a political act.

An add-on that became a question##

When I first started teaching the social and political dimensions of biodiversity and conservation at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution, the session was an add-on. Of course it was. What is a political ecologist doing in an institute of ecology and evolution? The course belonged to colleagues whose training, methods, and intellectual lineage were rooted in the natural sciences. I was a guest invited to bring a small slice of something else — a few lectures on power, governance, communities, and the political economies behind biodiversity loss. It felt, in the beginning, like a hospitable gesture from the department rather than a structural commitment.

Then the student evaluations came back.##

In the first year, the social–political dimension was rated as the most interesting part of the course. I assumed it was a one-off curiosity. In the second year, when I was on maternity leave, the students' comments asked for that session to be retained and expanded; they wanted more, not less, of the political dimension. This year — this difficult year — two students came to ask me to supervise their MSc theses on questions that sit squarely in political ecology.

I do not want to over-read the data of a single course. But three years of consistent signals from students trained in the natural sciences, in one of Europe's most well-established conservation-oriented institutes, is itself a small empirical finding. It tells me that the demand for political ecology inside natural science programmes is not marginal. It is arriving, and it is arriving from below — from students who have intuited that the science they have been trained in is no longer enough on its own.

The students who are arriving##

Every year, more students come to this course not from the social sciences but from conservation biology, ecology, environmental science, and adjacent natural science programmes. They arrive already caring deeply about biodiversity loss, climate breakdown, and the futures of the species and landscapes they study. What they often lack — and what they have started to actively seek — is a vocabulary for the social and political worlds those crises are embedded in.

This is, in itself, a quiet shift. Conservation biology and political ecology have historically not talked to each other much. Conservation biology emerged in the 1980s as a "mission-driven" natural science (Soulé, 1985), oriented toward biodiversity protection through ecological and population biology methods. Political ecology, in roughly the same period, emerged from critical geography and development studies, foregrounding power, dispossession, political economy, and the structural drivers of environmental change (Blaikie & Brookfield, 1987; Robbins, 2020). The two fields have lived in different journals, different conferences, different epistemological worlds — and where they have met, it has often been in conflict, particularly around critiques of fortress conservation, neoliberal conservation, and the apolitical framing of biodiversity loss (Brockington, Duffy & Igoe, 2008; Büscher & Fletcher, 2020).

So when a student trained in conservation biology walks into a political ecology classroom and asks how to engage seriously with social science from where they stand — that is not a small thing. It is a generational signal. And as a teacher, I think we have a responsibility to meet that signal with something more than a reading list.

The polycrisis and the limits of what we were trained to do##

The students arriving today are entering a world their disciplines were not built for. The framing of polycrisis — the interlocking crises of climate, biodiversity, inequality, democratic erosion, displacement, and care — has moved quickly from the margins to the mainstream of environmental thought (Tooze, 2022; Lawrence et al., 2024). For students trained to count species, model ecosystems, or measure carbon, the polycrisis is disorienting in a specific way. Their tools were designed for systems they could bound; the polycrisis refuses to be bounded.

In my experience, this is where political ecology becomes pedagogically powerful — not because it offers a tidier toolkit, but because it offers a grammar for the unboundedness. It gives students language for the political economies behind a deforestation frontier, the colonial histories behind a conservation enclosure, the gendered labour behind a household's adaptation to drought, the racialised distribution of toxic exposure. It teaches them that the things they have been measuring are also things that are being done — by actors, through institutions, under particular regimes of value.

For a natural science student, this can be both liberating and destabilising. Liberating, because so much of what they have intuitively sensed but could not name — the gap between what their science says and what actually happens — suddenly has a literature. Destabilising, because political ecology refuses the neutrality their training has often promised them. There is no view from nowhere. There is no apolitical conservation.

On being too local for global##

I should say something here that I do not usually say in writing. When I started teaching this course, I doubted whether I had any business doing it.
I am Vietnamese. English is not my first language, and neither is German. My deep empirical grounding is in Southeast Asia — in the messy, layered, intimate politics of land, forests, and communities I have walked through for years. And I was being asked to teach political ecology at the University of Bern, in one of Europe's most conservative academic environments, to students whose intellectual inheritance is European critical theory translated through European institutions. It would have been very easy to read myself as too local for global. Too specific. Too far from the canon. Too foreign to the rooms I had been invited into.

What has slowly shifted — partly through the students, partly through the work itself — is the recognition that this reading was already a colonial reading. The assumption that the global is European and the local is everywhere else is precisely what decolonial scholars have been asking us to dismantle (Mignolo, 2011; Sundberg, 2014; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). Southeast Asian political ecology is not a regional case study. It is one of the places from which political ecology can be re-grounded — closer to the actual sites of biodiversity, of extraction, of resistance, of the everyday governance work that global frameworks claim to be about.

Teaching from this position has, I think, slowly changed what I teach and how. I bring cases from the Mekong, from Vietnamese coastal communities, from the civil society networks I work with in Cambodia and Kenya, into a curriculum that would otherwise default to North American and European examples. I let students hear that political ecology is being practised, written, and lived in many languages — and that some of the most generative work in the field is coming from scholars who do not write from the centres of the discipline (Escobar, 2018; Sultana, 2022). I name, when it is useful, that my accent and my biography are part of what I bring, not despite my scholarship but inside it.
This is, I have come to think, also pedagogy — a small contribution to what decolonial scholars have called transformative change in higher education itself (Bhambra, Gebrial & Nişancıoğlu, 2018). Not a grand restructuring, but a daily insistence that whose knowledge counts is itself a political ecology question.

On becoming a knowledge broker (and what it costs)##

Somewhere along the way, I realised that what I had been doing in this course was not only teaching. It was brokering.

The literature on knowledge brokers describes them as actors who move between communities of practice, translating concepts, methods, and questions across boundaries (Meyer, 2010; Star & Griesemer, 1989). In science–policy studies the figure is usually associated with bridging research and decision-making; in political ecology it has been less explicitly named, but the work is everywhere — in collaborations with Indigenous and local knowledge holders, in interdisciplinary research teams, in the slow craft of writing for audiences who do not share your vocabulary. To broker is to inhabit the boundary itself, and to make a working life out of translation.

I came to this slowly. At first, I noticed that I was reading differently. I was downloading more conservation biology papers, sitting with population viability models and meta-analyses of protected area effectiveness, learning a vocabulary I had been trained to critique rather than to inhabit. I read because my students were reading these papers. I read because the colleagues I was teaching alongside used these methods, and if I wanted to translate between us I needed to know what their evidence actually looked like — not as a caricature, but on its own terms. I am still not a conservation biologist, and I never will be. But I have learned that brokering well requires a serious epistemic humility on both sides of the bridge: enough fluency in the other discipline to translate without distorting, and enough confidence in your own to translate without dissolving.

The same brokering, I realised, was happening between geographies. I was moving between what is usually called the Global North and the Global South — between the conference rooms of European universities and the village halls of the Mekong Delta, between IPBES drafting sessions and civil society workshops in Nairobi. Much has been written about the asymmetries of this kind of work (de Sousa Santos, 2014; Sultana, 2022). The North–South bridge is rarely a level one. Knowledge produced in the South often arrives in Northern academic spaces only after being filtered, translated, and validated by Northern co-authors. As a broker, you can either reproduce that filtering or quietly refuse it — by citing differently, by foregrounding Southern interlocutors as theorists rather than informants, by insisting that a case study from Southeast Asia is not less generalisable than one from the Alps.

What surprised me, and what I think is still under-theorised in political ecology, is how much of my brokering work is also South–South. The conversations I have between Vietnamese civil society actors and Kenyan civil society actors — between Cambodian forest communities and Tanzanian community conservancies — do not need to pass through Bern or Geneva to be meaningful. South–South knowledge exchange has its own genealogies and infrastructures (Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement, more recently the IPBES Indigenous and Local Knowledge dialogues), and the lessons that travel along those lines often arrive without the colonial baggage that weighs down North–South translation (Mawdsley, 2012; Gray & Gills, 2016). Brokering across South–South is, in my experience, where some of the most generative political ecology of the next decade will happen — and where European institutions like mine still have a great deal to learn rather than to teach.

I want to be honest about what brokering costs. It is invisible work in most academic reward systems. It is slower than disciplinary writing. It produces fewer publications in the journals that matter to hiring committees, and the ones it does produce are often categorised as "applied" or "policy" rather than as theory. It can leave you feeling not-quite-at-home in any of the rooms you move between. And it is, in the most literal sense, embodied — the brokering happens in my accent, in my biography, in the way I switch registers between a Mekong fishing village and a Bern seminar, in the way my body has told me this year that the pace is unsustainable.

But brokering is also where I think political ecology becomes most useful, and most political. The discipline has always insisted that knowledge is situated. To broker well is to take that insistence seriously in one's own practice — to keep moving between situations rather than collapsing them, and to refuse the comfort of a single intellectual home.

What I have learned to do in the classroom##

Teaching political ecology to natural science students is not the same as teaching it to students who arrive already disciplined in critical theory. It requires what I have come to think of as translational pedagogy — a deliberate practice of building bridges between epistemologies without dissolving either. A few principles have started to guide my own teaching:

Start where they are, not where we wish they were. I have stopped beginning my course with theoretical lineages and started beginning with empirical puzzles — a protected area that displaced a community, a carbon offset that failed, a species recovery that ignored the people who had stewarded it for generations. The theory enters later, as an answer to a question the students are already asking.

Take their science seriously, including its limits. Political ecology in a natural science classroom does not work if it arrives as a critique that dismisses what students have already learned. It works when it arrives as an extension — a set of questions that their methods alone cannot answer, but which their methods can contribute to answering. I have learned to say, often: your ecology is necessary; it is also not sufficient.
Name the discomfort. Many of my students experience their first political ecology readings as a kind of grief. They are being asked to see, often for the first time, that the conservation they were trained to do is implicated in histories of dispossession and ongoing structures of inequality. Naming that grief in the classroom — and giving it space — is, I have come to believe, part of the pedagogy. We cannot teach students into political ecology if we do not also teach them how to stay in it.

Hold space for hope without flinching from the diagnosis. This is where Freire becomes useful. In Pedagogy of Hope (Freire, 1992), hope is not optimism; it is a refusal to accept that the present is the only possible world. For students confronting the polycrisis, hope cannot be cheap. But it can be earned — through encountering examples of justice-oriented conservation, community-led governance, transformative change, the slow work of repair. Part of my course, increasingly, is a deliberate curation of those examples, not as decoration but as evidence that the world is being made and remade by people who refuse the script.

Why the two students mattered
The two students who stayed after class today were, in a small way, an answer to a question I have been carrying through this difficult semester — and through the longer arc of these three years of teaching: does this kind of teaching matter, given everything?
I think the honest answer is that I do not know how to measure it. There is no clean indicator for whether a young scientist will carry political ecology into their career, into their fieldwork, into the policy rooms they may eventually find themselves in. But I do know that every cohort of conservation biologists, ecologists, and environmental scientists who learns to ask political questions about their own science is a cohort that will be harder to enlist into projects of harm. And I know that the add-on session I was once invited to teach is no longer, in any meaningful sense, an add-on. The students have made it central.
Pedagogy, in that sense, is one of the quiet sites where political ecology becomes practice. Not only a critique of how the world is made, but an ongoing intervention into who gets to make it next — and from where.

A note toward POLLEN##
I want to bring this conversation into our session at POLLEN 2026 because I suspect many of us are doing this work — translating across disciplinary divides, brokering between knowledge systems and geographies, teaching from positions that the discipline still codes as marginal — without enough of a collective vocabulary for what we are doing. Teaching is often the most invisible part of our scholarly lives. Brokering is often the most invisible part of our research lives. I would like for both to be a little less invisible.
If we are serious about political ecology as a transformative project, then how we train the next generation of natural science students to ask political questions, from whose vantage points we train them, and how we move knowledge across the bridges we ourselves embody, are not side matters. They are part of how the field renews itself, and part of how it earns its place in the larger work of getting through what is coming.
The two students who stayed after class today did not know they were doing political ecology yet. But they will be, soon. And that, today, is enough.