Given the growth of political ecology and critical infrastructure studies within the social humanities across the first two decades of the 21st Century, it is important to bring the two fields into conversation to highlight fruitful avenues for future research. Political ecology, as it is classically conceived by the founding editors of the journal dedicated to its study, is the common ground to understand the link between “political economy, with its insistence on the need to link the distribution of power with productive activity and ecological analysis, with its broader vision of bio-environmental relationships” (p. 1). Much as political ecology attunes itself to the inextricable link between humans and non-humans in the political management of the environment, critical infrastructure studies understand that human populations can never be removed from the material assemblages they form with and within the built infrastructure of the contemporary world. Both fields attune themselves quite directly and effectively to the study of power relations, sociopolitical contexts, and economic inequalities extant in this contemporary era of extractive capitalism and commodification. Thus, it should not be surprising that the two fields may often find themselves in direct conversation. 

Political ecology provides a critical lens with which to understand how infrastructure is not merely a technical or economic issue, but also a deeply political one grounded in environmental change and extraction. Political ecology can help examine how decisions about infrastructure are made, who gets to participate in these decisions, and who ultimately bears the socioecological consequences of infrastructure’s enactment and evolution. This includes a vast array of infrastructure types—from the traditionally considered forms of physical infrastructure to knowledge and digital infrastructures that are increasingly the subject of academic inquiry.  Meanwhile, critical infrastructure studies lends its expertise to political ecology to understand how inequalities (and the spaces, places, and ways of thinking that uphold them) are classified, constructed, maintained, and ruined. Furthermore, critical infrastructure studies reveal methods with which to render these inequalities visible. From identifying how knowledge infrastructure excludes local and folk knowledge to how the literal geography of broadband cables can significantly change access to technological resources, critical infrastructure studies’ contributions to political ecology cannot be overlooked.

Thus, let’s take a brief scholastic adventure through four works that—while diverse in their approaches—epitomize and exemplify the symbiotic relationship that I hope will continue to mark political ecology and critical infrastructure studies scholarship.

In an article for Progress in Human Geography, Sara H. Nelson and Patrick Bigger set the stage for combining political ecology and critical infrastructure studies scholarship by introducing the term “infrastructural nature.” While thinking of ecosystems as infrastructure is not new, Nelson and Bigger broadly “describe policy approaches, scientific practices, discourses, and investment strategies that make ecosystems legible, governable, and investable as systems of critical functions that sustain and secure (certain forms of) human life” (p. 87). In this way, they frame nature as an infrastructure that “takes work to make it function that way and to govern it as such” (p. 87). Through this creation of an investable infrastructure, ecosystems are effectively territorialized and made visible to other forms of infrastructure investment and creation—allowing for the sustenance of capitalist reproduction. These infrastructural natures promote the instrumentalization of ecosystems and anthropocentric values over ecosystem health. The implications for both political ecology and critical infrastructure studies of this approach are crucial: (1) the fields must contend with how the creation of infrastructural natures devalues the work to reproduce social and ecological life to extract value and (2) given that infrastructural development of other types has privileged some through state violence and displacement, scholars must attune themselves to how the production of infrastructural natures from watershed restoration to oyster reef restoration to protect oil infrastructure privilege some and displace others.

Andrew Curley’s article entitled “Infrastructures as colonial beachheads: The Central Arizona Project and the taking of Navajo resources” uses the case study of water settlements between the state government and the Navajo Nation to expand the overlap between infrastructure and political ecology. While Nelson and Bigger primarily remained focused on infrastructure as physical sites and structures, Curley expands the definition of infrastructure to include the “legal and political infrastructures that followed physical ones” and “became the basis for future colonial advancements and enclosures” (p. 390). As such, critical scholars in this academic nexus between political ecology and critical infrastructure must not only attune themselves to physical infrastructures such as rail and energy production, but also to the politico-legal frameworks that continue projects of dispossession in the name of settler colonialism, extractive capitalism, and the Western one-world world. This includes epistemic violence directed at Indigenous and local ecological practices, inequitable legal-political mechanisms aimed at resource appropriation and exploitation, the continued territorialization of land and space through colonial political structures, and other mechanisms that “compel” Indigenous and local communities into capitalist development. Fundamentally, Curley reminds researchers that especially because infrastructures are both material and political, “Without infrastructure, colonialism is made difficult, if not impossible. Infrastructures are part of the process of colonial entanglement” (p. 400). If political ecology is oriented toward understanding inequities and critical infrastructure studies engage with how people are simultaneously shaping and shaped by infrastructure itself, understanding these dynamics of settler colonial power in both material and political infrastructure is crucial to both fields. 

Next we turn to digital infrastructures and technologies to understand the economic practices that allow for a glut of consumption, extraction, energy use, and waste. Stefan Laser, in collaboration with a number of other scholars in the EASST Review, poignantly argues that “the seamlessness of the user experience is illusionary, as it covers violent infrastructural practices of material extraction at the very foundation of technological infrastructure and its sustained maintenance” (para. 3). To do so, they highlight the material infrastructural investments to support the social media platform Mastodon to make visible the waste and environmental impact of data center management. For example, they note that while data centers are routinely focused on efficiency, such efforts often require hardware replacement and targeted advertising—both of which interact to contribute to e-waste, carbon emissions, and computing demands. Or take the massive waste associated with the mining waste generated during the production of mineral and metallic components for physical hardware. The authors argue that scholars interested in the environmental impacts of digital infrastructure need to approach local resources with care and advocate for digital infrastructure that takes into account environmental impact throughout the digital lifecycle: from technology replacement to moderation requirements to the division of labor within tech companies. Especially given the continued rise in computing power required for cutting-edge technologies such as large language models, generative artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and mobile data networks, scholarship that illuminates the continued and growing extractivisms, energy usage, and waste necessary to sustain digital and information infrastructures.

However, simply considering the local waste and environmental footprint of digital infrastructure is not sufficient. Anne Pasek reminds us through an article on data flows, carbon management, and cloud computing that the growth of digital technologies can often make critiques of infrastructure from a place-based perspective difficult. While traditional critiques of cloud data centers emphasize their material and energy demands at a given site (such as Laser et al.), their ‘fungibility’ given the growth of fiber-optic networks allows them to be “built and provisioned with high bandwidth centers from a vast range of possible regions” (p. 3). Similarly, current models of carbon accounting allow for fungible offsets and sequestration projects that can be located nearly anywhere in the globe—”without regard to the specificities of place” (p. 5). What Pasek’s work fundamentally teaches us is that critical infrastructure studies need to move beyond simply attending to the externalities of the cloud and digital infrastructure, to fundamentally understand how “management strategies [are] common to externalities and data alike” (p. 9). The insights of political ecology are well-suited to aid in this academic mission, given their ability to dissect, analyze, and understand ‘green’ capitalism, the interaction of global forces of circulation and localized political realities, and the overlapping interactions of data and environmental management. Pasek’s approach is especially critical as organizations ranging from the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change to the vast array of environmental non-governmental organizations that seek out technocratic, globalized, and market-based climate solutions. 

In sum, even this brief look into the synergistic capabilities of political ecology and critical infrastructure studies demonstrates the growth of complementary and transdisciplinary insights found in work straddling these two fields. One only needs to look at the energy, environment, waste, and policy tags on CIStudies.org to get a sense of the many further such collaborations—from topics as diverse as steel production to speculative futures of solar energy production. I hope this blog post serves to demonstrate the power a continued marriage of these critical fields could provide and encourages scholars primarily housed within both academic approaches to develop this interdisciplinary field of study further. For if nothing else, we will always be embedded and enmeshed within our environments and infrastructures—built, natural, or otherwise. 

On the Southernmost tip of the Baja California Peninsula, the Gulf of California meets the Pacific Ocean. Were you to travel there, you would be met with a Spring Break catered aesthetic in the downtowns of the two major cities of the Los Cabos municipality: Cabo San Lucas and San Josė del Cabo. Once a relatively unpopulated region predominantly engaged in small-scale fishing, this area has become dominated by a tourism economy focused primarily on parties, clubs, beaches, so-called ‘ecotourism,’ sex work, and art walks. The large sandy beaches, desert landscape, and cerulean waters mix with the fluorescent outlines of massive hotels and the reflections of strobe lights in an experiential potpourri that caters to the white middle and upper-middle classes of the Global North. And while the colonial aesthetic of the streets of downtown San Josė del Cabo provides some respite from the modern hustle and bustle of Cabo San Lucas—the town still clearly arranges itself (and its infrastructure) with specific subjects in mind: tourists ready to let loose and leave their troubles back home behind.

As is common in the critical academic literature on tourism, a much darker underside is visible when one looks past the sunshine of the cape—leakage in tourism profits, spikes in local prices, environmental degradation, and overcrowding to name just a few. While the over 3 million tourists that visit Los Cabos every year enjoy golf courses, sprawling resorts, and seemingly unlimited water consumption, residents of Los Cabos often work for foreign-owned tourism businesses and face daily reminders to conserve water for the collective good. With the introduction of further ex-pats to the area and a rapidly increasing residential population overall, Cabo’s water crisis is unlikely to resolve soon. This discrepancy in water usage and regulation reveals a stark inequality in how tourism infrastructure is prioritized and managed for the leisure of the Global North, often at the expense of local residents. Through an exploration of tourism's biopolitical influence, governmentality, and water management advertisements in Los Cabos, this blog post seeks to highlight how tourists enjoy "spaces of aquatic exception."

Tourism does not just shape economies—it reshapes physical spaces, physical infrastructure. Dominic Lapointe, a Professor in the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal, notes exactly why: large-scale tourism necessarily must transform places in such a way that it comes “to dictate the parameters, activities and types of experience (and therefore of subjectivity) to be deployed there, at various scales, in order to meet the imperatives of economic growth, but also of notoriety.” This placemaking process is not just about building infrastructure; it's about creating spaces where tourists feel encouraged to spend, consume, and behave in ways not necessarily afforded in their everyday lives. This production of space responds not only to the gaze of the tourist contingent upon material conditions, but also seeks to market destinations as desirable in the tourist imaginary. However, the biopolitical dimensions of placemaking are not just attuned to attracting visitors; as Lapointe and others have explored, they also work to keep tourists in specific places that are created and performed through collective practices. 

Tourist zones like downtown Cabo San Lucas cater to affluent foreign visitors, with streets lined with high-end brands like Cartier under armed guard and luxury hotels perched against pristine beaches. But just a stone's-throw away? You pass a series of graffiti-covered, half-built buildings that hint at the uneven development that characterizes the region. While tourists are immersed in a tourist infrastructure that encourages them to relax and indulge, local populations must continue to contend with the daily realities of water shortfalls amidst constant reminders to conserve water for the ‘good’ of the larger community. To cultivate such images (and maintain such spaces), sovereignty over lives and the subjectivity of tourists, residents, and workers is differentially exercised. As Lapointe further elaborates in his previous 2022 review of the biopolitics of tourism, “The fabrication of such tourist images gives meaning to the promulgation of differentiated rights for different categories of people for different purposes in the same space” (para. 8). 

Nowhere might this differential promulgation of rights be more clear than in the realm of water. Los Cabos is located in an arid region, meaning that water is already a scarce resource. The municipality primarily relies on groundwater from aquifers for its water supply, but these aquifers are overexploited. Compounding this issue is the fact that Los Cabos' tourism industry consumes a disproportionate amount of water, with golf courses alone using over 7 million cubic meters of water annually according to the estimations of Baja-based surface water modeller Jobst Wurl. This is more water than is used for all agricultural purposes in the region. And while providing a concise estimate for the total water consumption by the tourist industry collectively speaking utilizes proves difficult, it is clear that it is significant—and by extension a significant strain on an already tenuous water system.

To differentially promulgate rights in tourism spaces, locales and infrastructure must be zoned with respect to these various and differential exercises of sovereignty. Aiwha Ong has previously argued in their excellent monograph that governments in many neoliberal economic zones of Asia have employed zoning technologies to provide variegated citizenship that parcels out distinct advantages to certain local groups—providing either economic benefits or differential freedoms. Tourist zones of Mexico are increasingly facing such parceling through zones. Ronen Palan has also discussed the juridical invention of the ‘off shore’ realm, where conventional regulations of the state are withheld in practice in certain enclaves of financial activity. However, in direct regard to tourism we need to complicate these ideas further. Tim Simpson notes “the tourist city is a fundamentally different type of exception than those studied by Ong and Palan” because instead of production “the tourist city is an exceptional space of consumption… a respite that assembles a diverse array of visitors and biopolitical resources” (p. 32). Thus, it is not that citizens in certain enclaves of the tourist city can behave differently, but that visitors in specific enclaves are allowed and expected to behave differently. Further, it is not that local or residential concerns and infrastructure will be prioritized in these enclaves of consumption, rather the desires of the visitors will be in the name of economic development. 

The differential management of water in Los Cabos is a perfect example of how biopolitics operates in tourist cities within an infrastructural reading. While tourists in visitor zones are encouraged to enjoy water-intensive activities like swimming pools, golf games, and spa treatments, locals are bombarded with messages in neighborhoods and on park walls urging them to conserve water (check the images in this blog post for a few examples). As with many government initiatives to promote sustainability, local water conservation campaigns in Los Cabos focus on regulating individual behavior. Residents are urged to become what Magnus Boström et al. have labeled "reflexive citizen-consumers": consumers who make conscientious choices to save water for the collective good. In this sense, the local government is engaging in governmentality, exerting power over individuals' conduct through education and persuasion rather than outright coercion. Michel Foucault famously referred to this as "the conduct of conduct," a form of power that seeks to manage individuals' behavior in ways that benefit society. In Los Cabos, water management policies are designed to optimize water resources by encouraging residents to cut back on their consumption, while tourists are allowed—and even encouraged—to use water freely in hotels, golf courses, and resorts. This creates a dual system where tourists are given free rein over resources, and locals are left to pick up the slack.

In Los Cabos, golf courses, resorts, and tourist attractions have become "spaces of aquatic exception." This term, through which this blog post and my ongoing scholarly reflections in my graduate school coursework have helped conceptualize, are areas where water consumption is allowed to exceed the limits placed on residential areas. These spaces are not only designed to cater to the desires of tourists but are also protected from the consequences of water scarcity that locals face daily. Indeed as Graciano et al. note, "a process of accumulation by dispossession conceals the appropriation of land and water in Los Cabos." However, I hope to continue to flesh out this larger argument that something even more damaging and insidious is taking place. This process of accumulation is reliant on zoning, influence over the residential conduct of conduct, and the organization of resources to create a system where tourist infrastructure (and in conjunction tourist lives, rights and sovereignty) takes precedence over local needs.