Rethinking Socio-Ecological Relations from Inclusion and Exclusion: A New Approach to Socio-Environmental Conflicts

This article aims to explore how to extrapolate and integrate the conceptual frame of inclusion/exclusion in a socioeconomic sense to the study of socio-ecological conflicts. It emerges from the similarities between both studies and the major contribution that these concepts have made in the socioeconomic understanding of poverty and deprivation. Poverty and deprivation are fait accompli, but the same deprivations can be the result of a great variety of exclusionary processes; to truly attend to it, it’s necessary to understand the relational aspects that led to those outcomes (exclusion/inclusion). The analysis of socio-ecological conflicts follows a similar culminating bias: analyzing results without deepening the relational aspects of the process that leads to them; therefore, it’s proposed to use these concepts to enhance its analysis. To achieve it, a profound literature review was carried out regarding the frameworks used to address socio-ecological issues and inclusion/exclusion. Finding that not only the concepts are satisfactory to this analysis, but that they even permit making joint analyses between socioeconomic exclusion/inclusion and socio-ecological inclusion/exclusion. This also enables a new focus for environmental policy from the study on new inequalities.