Responding to an Epochal Climate Crisis: Introducing a framework of Strategic Socio-Ecological Relational analysis (SSER) to position planetary, capital and hegemonic relations through state ensembles in Australia

Abstract

Historical and contemporary strategic projects and capital accumulation regimes have eroded critical planetary processes, escalating the risk of systemic tipping points and frequent global crises. This dissertation proposes that by understanding the varying state ensembles as the shifting, contested peaks of spatially-specific socio-ecological relations, there lies an opportunity to utilise a Strategic Socio-Ecological Relational (SSER) framework. As a proposed critical approach, the SSER framework is grounded in Jason Moore's World-Ecology approach and, in particular, the concept of the oikeios, the relational web of life on Earth. This work identifies an opportunity to augment Moore’s approach with Bob Jessop’s approach to the state, the Strategic-Relational Approach, to further enhance the complexity and scope of critical relational assessments.

Through the examination of unique socio-ecological relations, accumulation regimes and hegemonic projects, the SSER framework shows that Australia’s key strategic axes are highly capitalised and globally significant, from the North-West shelf through to the Murray-Darling Water Basin. The SSER assessment highlights a variety of specific points of exhaustion across Australia’s neoliberal, market-dominated critical axes of water, energy and terrestrial biocarbon. This work finds that the risk of exhaustion is amplified by state projects that ostensibly intend to ‘restore nature’ but in fact continue the capitalisation of recovery mechanisms, violent abstraction of natures, and the exhaustion of key planetary processes through the state ensemble. The adoption of this interdisciplinary approach to the assessment of socio-ecological relational bundles is vital in successfully reorienting a coherent socio-ecological response to the challenges of impending epochal collapse.